"The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King!": The Accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England

近代早期英格兰的政治史往往是由统治年代决定的。1603年最能证明这一点，这一年几乎被普遍认为是伊丽莎白时代和詹姆士时代的决定性决裂。从简单的时间顺序来看，当然是这样。但是，人们可以在不考虑之后的情况下（或者在不考虑之前的情况下）对伊丽莎白时代后期的政治做出自信的断言，这种假设就不那么确定了。此外，这一时期的历史经常被人为地以不同的叙述方式讲述。有清教/新教叙事，天主教叙事，外交叙事，宫廷政治，地方政治和议会政治叙事。尽管政治历史学家的修正主义学派在方法论上宣称，他们通过重新审视资料来源，重建了宗教改革后的政治世界，但这些叙述大体上仍然是分开的。事实上，这一时期的关键事件并没有受到多极政治叙事的严格叙述。这个项目试图解决这些缺陷和失败。它试图找出一个连贯的子时期它超越了1603年的转折点。子时期被定义为一系列主题和问题围绕伊丽莎白一世去世的前景,未来君主的加入(事实证明,苏格兰王詹姆斯六世),然后通过在第一年的新统治期间的一系列紧张、焦虑和渴望激起和抑制在伊丽莎白统治的结束,然后释放,意识到在第一年的詹姆斯统治。虽然所有人都知道发生了什么，詹姆斯和平地、无对手地登上了王位，但在事件发生之前，同时代的人却无法确定这一切。1603年，那些像克里斯托弗·利弗（Christopher Lever）在1627年所说的那样，“在我们幸福的改变中”，“除了王子本人之外，什么都没有改变”，“政府保持着同样程度的幸福，其中女王伊丽莎白……离开它”，他们自己提出了一个极具争议的论点。因此，本书的目的是写一篇政治叙事，其核心是当下的悬疑感、焦虑、希望和潜在的绝望。这段叙述始于1590年代中期，当时关于王位继承的争论因耶稣会士罗伯特·珀森（Robert Persons）杰出、大胆、令人不安的小册子《关于英格兰王位继承的会议》（A Conference about Next succession of england）的出版而变得激进，该书定义了核心问题，并提出了看待未来几年主导事件的关键方法。详细的政治叙述囊括了1590年代中期苏格兰王权恢复的最后阶段（1593-1594年的天主教叛乱之后），然后是英格兰关于是否继续对西班牙战争的激烈辩论，然后是导致埃塞克斯在爱尔兰战役惨败的政治策略，伯爵的耻辱，然后是他的叛乱。事实上，王位继位引发了一系列阴谋，怀疑的和实际的，这些都是对王朝转折点的评论，王朝确实发生了转变，但并非所有同时代人都期望或想要的。这种说法认为，当时在英格兰和苏格兰发挥作用的力量，在很长一段时间内都在发挥作用，直到1605/ 1606年火药阴谋及其直接影响才结束。这里所采用的方法的绝对核心（见“影响摘要”）将是将相关的和非常大量的可用天主教材料重新整合到主流叙事中，我已经专门研究了这些材料；有人认为，这将使整个时期看起来完全不同。

The political history of early modern England is too often determined by regnal years. Nowhere is this truer than 1603, which is almost universally taken to be the decisive break between the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. In simple chronological terms, of course, it was. But the assumption that one can make confident assertions about later Elizabethan politics without thinking about what came after (or about Jacobean politics without the context of what came before) is much less certain. Furthermore, the history of this period is often told in artificially distinct narratives. There is a puritan/Protestant narrative, a Catholic one, a diplomatic narrative, a narrative of court politics and of local politics and of parliamentary politics. Despite the methodological claims of the revisionist school of political historians to have reconstructed the world of post-Reformation politics by revisiting the sources, these narratives are still, by and large, kept apart. Indeed the crucial events of the period are not subjected to the rigorous telling of multi-polar political narratives. This project is an attempt to address these deficits and failings. It seeks to identify a coherent sub period that transcends the point of transition in 1603. That sub period is defined by a series of topics and issues organised around the prospect of the death of Elizabeth I, the accession of the next monarch (as it turned out, of James VI of Scotland), and then the working through during the first years of the new reign of a series of tensions, anxieties and aspirations both stirred up and suppressed during the end of Elizabeth's reign, and then released and realised during the first years of James reign. While everyone knows what happened and that James came to the throne peacefully and unopposed, contemporaries, before the event, could be certain of no such thing. Those who said, as Christopher Lever did in 1627, that "in our happie alteration" in 1603 "nothing but the very person of the prince was altered" and "the government remained in like degrees of happiness wherein Queene Elizabeth...left it", were themselves making a deeply controversial polemical point. The aim here is, then, to write a political narrative with that sense of immediate contemporary suspense, of anxiety, hope and, potentially, despair at the centre of the story. That narrative will start in the mid 1590s, at the point when the succession debate had been radicalised by the publication of the Jesuit Robert Persons's brilliant, daring and disturbing tract entitled "A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland", a text which defined the central issues and laid out the crucial ways of looking at events that then dominated the next few years. The detailed political narrative takes in and integrates the final stages of the restoration of royal authority in Scotland in the mid 1590s (after the Catholic rebellion of 1593-1594) and moves through to the increasingly bitter debates in England about whether to continue the war against Spain, and then the political manoeuvres that led to the debacle of Essex's campaign in Ireland, the earl's disgrace and then his rebellion. Indeed, the accession produced a series of conspiracies, suspected and actual, which themselves served as commentaries on this crucial dynastic turning point, which had indeed turned but not necessarily in the ways that all contemporaries expected or wanted. The claim is that the forces in play then, both in England and in Scotland, worked themselves out over an extended period that only ended with the Gunpowder plot and its immediate effects in 1605/6. Absolutely central to the methodology employed here (see "Impact Summary") will be the reintegration of the relevant and very substantial available Catholic materials, in which I already specialise, into the mainstream narrative; and this, it is argued, will make the whole period look radically different.