James I

Despite their mutual loathing and suspicion, James I and his parliaments needed one another, as Andrew Thrush explains. The alternative, ultimately, was civil war.

A monarch’s divine ability to cure scrofula was an established ritual when James I came to the English throne in 1603. Initially sceptical of the Catholic characteristics of the ceremony, the king found ways to ‘Protestantise’ it and to reflect his own hands-on approach to kingship, writes Stephen Brogan.

John Spiller assesses James I’s impact on the Puritans and the Puritans’ impact on James I.

John Spiller examines interpretations of the role of Parliament in the reign of the first Stuart king.

Simon Thurley explains why the first Stuarts kept the great Tudor palace virtually intact.

Conrad Russell looks at the perks and pitfalls of public office-holding in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Jenny Wormald reviews the career of the man who was King of Scotland for fifty-seven years and King of England for twenty-two, and whose great dream was to create a unified kingdom of Great Britain.

Roger Lockyer takes a fresh look at the much-maligned James VI of Scotland, who became the first Stuart king of England.

In the third of our series of articles on faction, Kevin Sharpe shows how, in the early 17th century, the monopoly of patronage by a court favourite distorted the pattern of politics in council, court and parliament.

London must be transformed into a place 'safe from fire and beautiful and magnificent' decreed James I – and Patrick Youngblood finds it was only the wealthy who were to be entrusted with the privilege of building such a city.