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

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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.