Alpha Book

In that day a mere
parliament was to become dominant in England.
[Sidenote: Accession of the Stuarts: James I, 1603-1625]
The death of Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and the accession
(1603) of her cousin James, the first of the Stuarts, marked the real
beginning of the struggle. When he was but a year old, this James had
acquired through the deposition of his unfortunate mother, Mary Stuart,
the crown of Scotland (1567), and had been proclaimed James VI in that
disorderly and distracted country. The boy who was whipped by his tutor
and kidnapped by his barons and browbeaten by Presbyterian divines
learned to rule Scotland with a rod of iron and incidentally acquired
such astonishing erudition, especially in theology, that the clever
King Henry IV of France called him "the wisest fool in Christendom." At
the age of thirty-seven, this Scotchman succeeded to the throne of
England as James I. "He was indeed," says Macaulay, "made up of two
men--a witty, well-read scholar who wrote, disputed, and harangued, and
a nervous, driveling idiot who acted.


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