Britain goes global

LAUREN WORKING applauds a kaleidoscopic exploration of how James VI & I fuelled Britain's global ambitions, paving the way for the future empire

- LAUREN WORKING

IIt was a raucous scene, as Jacobean banquets tended to be. Men and women of the court, one observer recalled, “rolled in intoxication”. Even the most temperate had collapsed into “brutish delights”, like satyrs and nymphs in a painting. An aristocratic lady who had played the part of Peace in the earlier entertainment swatted people with an olive branch.

At the centre of this image was a rather unlikely figure: a Scottish king, born of a Catholic queen who had been executed on the orders of his predecessor, Elizabeth I. When James VI ascended the English throne as James I in 1603, he sought to establish himself as a divinely appointed peacemaker, ushering in stability through a new dynasty. For over two decades, James was devoted to building an image of himself as a wise Solomon or a Phoebus, god of sun and light.

Yet his rule has long been seen as an in-glorious sequel to Elizabeth’s ‘golden age’. If it was the era of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, it was also the time of the gunpowder plot, plague, religious strife and the persecution of witches. Court gossip and scandalous satires described the king as lazy, uncivil and prone to drinking too much. The shockingly libel-lous Corona Regia (1615) celebrated the king's magnificence with cruel exaggeration. James kept a remarkably pious adherence to Christ's teachings, the anonymous author maintained, for had not Christ's saying been to “suffer the little children to come to Me”, and did not James “summon the prettiest little boys” to join him in bed? And was not the king's pro-lific publishing record impressive? Who knew a ruling monarch could have such “leisure for scribbling and publishing books yearly”?

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