The First King of Britain

Abstract

James VI and I built magnificent funerary monuments to the last sovereigns of the separate kingdoms of England and Scotland, Elizabeth and Mary. No one bothered to built a monument to the first king of Britain. The memorials to his reputation have been equally dismissive. That brilliant summary of English historical attitudes, 1066 And All That, characterised him as the king who ‘slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King’.¹ In what is called the Whig interpretation of history — the belief in the inexorable progress of the English state towards a mixed and democratic constitution — he is the first of the great Stuart villains; for his passionate commitment to the divine right of kings, the theory that kings were answerable only to God, brought him into direct conflict with those freeborn Englishmen who made up the House of Commons, and stood for the inalienable liberties and rights of the subject. His reign ushered in the period when that conflict was most bitterly fought out, and finally resolved; it was the seventeenth century, the Stuart century, which saw the ultimate victory of constitutionalism over the royal absolutism introduced into England by a foreign monarch, James VI and I.² The aura of inevitability which surrounds that victory — surely freeborn Englishmen, with their traditions going back to Magna Carta were bound to triumph — surrounds something else, the union of the crowns itself.