"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。没有比1603年更真实的了，这几乎被普遍认为是拿破仑时代和拿破仑时代之间的决定性转折。当然，从简单的时间顺序上来说，确实如此。但是，人们可以对后来的拿破仑政治做出自信的断言，而不考虑后来发生的事情（或者不考虑以前发生的事情的背景下的拿破仑政治），这种假设就不那么确定了。此外，这一时期的历史往往是以人为的不同叙述来讲述的。有清教徒/新教的叙事，天主教的叙事，外交的叙事，宫廷政治的叙事，地方政治的叙事，议会政治的叙事。尽管政治历史学家的修正主义学派在方法论上声称，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讲述。这个项目就是试图解决这些缺陷和不足。它试图确定一个超越1603年过渡点的连贯子周期。这一时期是由一系列围绕伊丽莎白一世去世和下一任君主登基的前景而组织的主题和问题所定义的（事实证明，苏格兰的詹姆斯六世），然后在新统治的头几年里，伊丽莎白统治结束时，一系列的紧张局势，焦虑和愿望都被激起和压制，然后在詹姆斯统治的头几年被释放并实现。虽然每个人都知道发生了什么，詹姆斯和平地登上王位，没有人反对，但在事件发生之前，同时代的人可以肯定没有这样的事情。正如克里斯托弗·利弗（Christopher Lever）在1627年所说的那样，1603年“在我们的幸福变革中”，“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，女王伊丽莎白......”““我离开了它，“他们自己提出了一个极具争议的论点。因此，这里的目的是写一个政治叙事，在故事的中心有一种即时的当代悬念、焦虑、希望和潜在的绝望感。这一叙述将始于16世纪90年代中期，当时耶稣会士罗伯特·珀森斯（Robert Persons）发表了一篇题为《关于英格兰王位下一次继承的会议》（A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland）的精彩、大胆和令人不安的文章，这篇文章界定了中心问题，并提出了看待随后几年主导事件的关键方法。详细的政治叙事吸收并整合了16世纪90年代中期苏格兰恢复皇家权威的最后阶段（1593-1594年天主教叛乱后），并通过移动到越来越激烈的辩论，在英格兰是否继续对西班牙的战争，然后政治演习，导致失败的埃塞克斯的运动在爱尔兰，他的耻辱和他的反叛。事实上，继位产生了一系列阴谋，怀疑的和实际的，这些阴谋本身就是对这个关键的王朝转折点的评论，这个转折点确实发生了变化，但不一定是所有同时代人所期望或想要的。 这种说法是，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1605/6年的火药阴谋及其直接影响才结束。这里所采用的方法论的绝对核心（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，我已经专门从事这一工作;这一点，有人认为，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.