Scotland the Brief

Part 1: The Community of the Realm
6 The Wisest Fool

Marys infant son, James VI, was thrown about like a ball between feuding nobles, interfering English and French. He was beaten by his tutor George Buchanan, Europes greatest classicist and a theoretical republican. But he was, through his grandmother Margaret, Elizabeths legitimate heir, in an age where English (if not Scots) monarchic theory made much of this. Shakespeare would in Macbeth (1604) furnish him with divine right and a dynastic claim.

On 24 March 1603 Elizabeth died. The Scottish king quickly posted south, attended by numerous ambitious aristos, hangers-on and the handsome young men he liked to have around him. He would not return for fourteen years. For the king, wrote an English courtier, every day will be Christmas.

No-one much liked James, though his admiration for himself was sincere, and to some degree deserved. He was a survivor and reigned until 1625. He managed to dismantle the power of the great nobles, and constrain that of the Kirk. He commissioned the monumental translation of the Bible (which effectively ended the career of Court Scots as a literary language) and prided himself that the government of Scotland ran smoothly under his nominated parliamentary executive 'the Lords of the Articles', while he signed the papers in London. He had much more trouble with the growing English Puritan force in the Westminster parliament, and those who had done well out of looting Spain and disliked his conciliatory policy.

James thought European. He encouraged his Danish wife Anne a grand patron of English culture at perhaps its zenith: Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Dowland, Thomas Tallis, John Milton to revert to Catholicism, in order to open a dialogue with Catholic Europe. But his daughter Elizabeth was married to Prince Frederick of Nassau, and he favoured his claim on the Kingdom of Bohemia as well. In 1618 this produced disaster. The Bohemians insulted the Catholic Habsburg who was Holy Roman Emperor, the Emperor destroyed them and the minor German rulers closed ranks and retaliated. For thirty years Germany would be devastated by Protestant and Catholic armies, which included many Scottish mercenaries, remitting money back to their wives and children in their tower houses, still built for defence in an age where good battlements and stout doors made for good neighbours.

This wasnt the only sort of enterprise on the go. With limited woodland, the Scots had exploited coal for centuries, and some Jacobean magnates, like the Bruces of Culross, whose Palace is conserved by the National Trust, were industrialists on a grand scale. Scots fisheries supplied all of Europe, Presbyterians being quite in favour of supplying fish to Catholic Friday diners, though the carrying trade was in Dutch hands. Edinburgh, its choc-a-bloc lands and wynds perched above the Lothian plain, was by far the largest town, handled three-quarters of Scots trade, and was a hotbed of Presbyterian enthusiasm, hosting the assembly and opening its municipal, Calvinist university. Elsewhere Calvinism was variable in impact, and there were vast rural areas where it made no impact at all.