James I

When England’s search for a Northwest Passage via sea failed, an audacious plan to forge a land route was hatched by the Muscovy Company.

The accusation that James I was murdered by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, may have been a false one but it was widely believed and helped to justify the execution of Charles I.

Alan Haynes describes the Flemish weavers imported to London in the reign of James I and how, throughout the seventeenth century, their work continued.

William Seymour describes how a large area of Dorset and Wiltshire, abounding in deer, was hunted by King John and granted to Robert Cecil by James I.

Cecil secured the peaceful accession of the Stuarts and strove with near success, Joel Hurstfield writes, to solve the vexatious problems that confronted the new dynasty in England and upon the European scene.

G.R. Batho introduces Henry Percy, the “Wizard Earl”, a man of great gifts and eccentric character who proved a quarrelsome husband and a difficult and unaccommodating parent.

Anthony Dent examines the lives of English foresters, parkers, warreners, and the preservation of deer and boar for hunting, all in the era of the Bard.

Motives of commerce and trade, Eric Robson suggests, carried just as much weight in the founding of the 13 American colonies as the desire of Puritan emigrants for liberty of conscience and a life of independence.

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.