24
Nov

The View from Scotland

   Posted by: Win Tonkin   in Quotes

At our last general meeting we had the pleasure of listening to Win’s fascinating talk on aspects of Scottish history.  She used pictures from the 2003 Historic Scotland Calendar to illustrate her talk.  The calendar also contains for each month a quote from James VI of Scotland / James I of England, which we all found very interesting.

James was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburgh Castle.  After his mother Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in his favour when he was thirteen months old, on 24 July 1567, he became King James VI of Scots.  He gained full control of the government in 1581.

In 1603 he succeeded Elizabeth I, who died without issue, as King James I of England.  Both countries remained legally separate, but were ruled by the same monarch.

In the late 1590s James wrote two books, The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron (Royal Gift), outlining an ideological base for monarchy.

James died at Theobalds House, which as we have seen he had exchanged for Hatfield House, on 27 March 1625.

We would like to share some of the quotes from the calendar with you.  Here is his view of his reign in Scotland (the spelling has been modernised):

This I must say for Scotland, and I may truly vaunt [trumpet] it:  Here I sit and govern Scotland with my pen, I write and it is done, and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword. (Speech in English Parliament, 1607)

We all were sure that Richard III would have liked to have been able to say the same of his rule.

Note:
The above short intro to James is based on his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_I_of_England).

Tags:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 at 0:01 and is filed under Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a reply

Name (*)
Mail (will not be published) (*)
URI
Comment