The Reputation of James VI and I Revisited

The (in)capacity of the House of Stuart to provide competent royal government, in both Scotland and England, has been a staple topic in the historiography of the British Isles. Despite the increasing volume and sophistication of recent research in this area, the long shadow of past analytical habits of mind still colors modern approaches to the subject. This has been the case with King James VI and I, as with other Stuart sovereigns. Scholarly accounts of the Jacobean period have been affected by a persistent Anglocentricity in this field. Such attitudes have done little for the broader topic of post-Reformation politics and threaten to close several available avenues of research and interpretation. Here it is argued that accounts of Jacobean politics need to be located in their appropriate contexts in order to avoid presentist distortion in future research and publication on this topic and related issues of the period.