With the reign of James L, whose coronation took place at Scone on the 21st May, may almost be said to begin the substitution in Scotland of constitutional sovereignty, regulated by definite principles and laws and modified by a regard to the opinions and interests of the subjects, for the indefinite authority of the king and the arbitrary rule of the nobles. It is true that after his death the lawless contests of the nobles broke out as fiercely as ever, but by his energetic repression of their violence during his lifetime, and more especially by the virtual creation of statute law modelled on that of England, and the additional importance assigned to parliament, the leaven was partly prepared which was to work towards the destruction of their unlicensed influence. During a session of the parliament held at Perth on the 12th March 1425, James suddenly arrested a large number of the nobles, including the duke of Albany and his two sons, whom along with the earl of Lennox he caused to be executed. With similar strategy he at a parliament held at Inverness in 1427 arrested Donald of the Isles and fifty of his chiefs. Donald, however, on making all due submission, received his liberty; but when, in violation of his oath he made an abortive attempt to assert his independence, the king, on his making unconditional surrender, confined him to Tantallon castle. As was natural, the energetic rule of the king, and especially his stringent coercion of the nobles, aroused a secret purpose of revenge; and, acting on the inspiration of the earl of Athole, uncle of the king, Sir Robert Graham and other accomplices, with a band of three hundred Highlanders, suddenly, on the evening of the 20th or morning of the 21st February 1437, entered the apartment of the king in the priory of the Dominicans at Perth, and stabbed him to death with their daggers.

Although the constitutional reforms introduced by James I., and the general tenor of his reign, showed that in him were united in a rare degree decision in action with far-sighted sagacity, his merits as a statesman have been cast in the shade by his achievements in literature. It is also worthy of mention that it was owing chiefly to his representations when in captivity that the pope was induced to grant a bull for the erection of a university at St Andrews. The Poetical Remains of James I. were first published in 1783, edited by William Tytler. The principal poems of which he is the reputed author are The King's fluair, Christis Kirk on the Grene, and Peblis to the Play, and he also wrote several minor pieces. A manuscript of the King's Q l uair formerly belonging to Selden is preserved in the Bodleian library at Oxford. The poem, which *is divided into seven cantos, and is written in the seven-lined stanzas of Chaucer, was composed during his captivity in England, to celebrate his love for the lady whom he afterwards married. It is allegorical in form and somewhat tedious in its minute description of details, but always preserves a smooth and harmonious versification, while it contains many finely imaginative passages inspired by true and tender feeling, and characterized by a charming simplicity and grace akin to those of his master Chaucer. One reason why many have doubted that James could be the author of Christis Kirk on the Grene is its entire dissimilarity in manner and style to the King's Quair. Pope’s line, “A Scot will fight for Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green” is sarcastic, but undoubtedly chronicles a fact. The poem is a humorous delineation of a phase of Scotch rustic life, and its spirit and graphic vigour are not unworthy of Burns, who indeed has received from it more than one suggestive hint, and in The Holy Fair and The Ordination has imitated its refrain. The oldest evidence for assigning it to James I. is that of the Bannatyne MS. collection made by George Bannatyne in 1568; and, if this evidence is not conclusive for James I., it is so against Janies V., the only other probable author. There is no printed edition earlier than 1663. Since then several separate editions have appeared, and it has also been printed along with The Gaberlunzie Man as the work of James V. That James I. was the author of the poem receives a certain amount of corroboration from its resemblance in subject and style to Peblis to the Play, the first words of which are quoted by John Major in describing a ballad which he attributes to James.

The contemporary authorities on the reign of James I. are principally Wyntoun’s Crοηykil, and Bower’s continuation of Fordun’s Scοtοchrοnicοn. To the succeeding century belong the histories of John Major, Hector Boece,, and Bishop Lesley. The modern histories of Pinkerton, Tytler, and Burton are of course well known. In regard to questions connected with his character as an author, see Sibbald’s Chronicles of Scottish Poetry, Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors·, Chalmers’s Historic Remains of Scottish Kings·, Tytier’s Scottish Worthies·, Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems·, Ritson’s Historical Essay on Scottish Song·, Washington Irving’s Sketch Book·, Prescott’s Miscellanies·, and David Irving’s History of Scottish Poetry. An account of the murder of James I., professedly translated from the Latin of John Shirley in 1440, has been published in an Appendix toPinkerton’s History; in vol. ii. of Miscellanea Scotica, Glasgow, 1818; and in Gait’s novel, The Spaewife.

JAMES I. (1566-1625), king of England. This sovereign, James VI. of Scotland, in whom the crowns of Scotland and England were united, was the son of Mary Queen of Scots and of Henry, Lord Darnley, and was born in the castle of Edinburgh 19th June 1566. His mother while in captivity having been forced to abdicate the sovereignty, James was crowned king at Stirling July 29, 1567. The regency was vested in the earl of Murray, who by his masterly political skill and force of character held the various factions in complete restraint until his assassination at Linlithgow in February 1570. The absence of his authoritative will at once allowed free scope to the various elements of disorder latent in the kingdom, and during the regency of Lennox, who was mortally wounded in a fray at Stirling with the adherents of Mary, September 1571, and of the earl of Mar his successor, who died in October 1572, strife and confusion held almost rampant sway. The earl of Morton, the next regent, being possessed, however, of some of the high qualities of his predecessor Murray, succeeded with assistance from Elizabeth of England in quelling the last embers of insurrection, and afterwards held in check the interested ambition of the nobles, until in 1578 they succeeded in discrediting his influence by the scheme of placing the government nominally in the hands of the boy monarch. In June 1581 Morton suffered death for his connexion with the murder of Darnley. James, to whom were thus early entrusted the functions of sovereignty, had spent his infancy under the care of the earl of Mar, on whose death he was taken charge of by the earl’s brother, Alexander Erskine. For his principal tutor he had George Buchanan, who inspired him with a genuine interest in learning and a strong ambition to excel in poetical composition; he was also so far influenced by the Reformed type of religion as to have imbibed a love for theological argument, although he always cherished a strong distaste towards both Calvinistic doctrine and the Presbyterian form of government. His character was indeed formed amidst moral and intellectual surroundings strangely mingled and inharmonious, in addition to which the nature he inherited was rather a medley of isolated capacities than a definite and distinct idiosyncracy. From the first compelled to adopt an attitude hostile to his mother, and, at the same time that he could not but resent her imprisonment by Elizabeth, unable to trust in her intentions towards himself, he seems to have regarded her death both as a relief and as a calamity and disgrace. As he knew that each party in the state, the Catholics, the nobles, the Presbyterians, wished to make him their tool, he resolved to act towards them as suited his convenience; but, although he possessed a certain sharp shrewdness and foresight as well as no small knowledge of character, his inability to take a comprehensive view of affairs, or to form a truly courageous resolution, made his policy often rash and reckless in regard to matters seemingly small, and always shifting and irresolute in regard to affairs of the highest moment. The moral courage he possessed was not inconsistent with physical cowardice; indeed the chief element in it was an overweening self-conceit, to which the consciousness of superior intellectual attainments gave the consummating touch; and thus it was that the very difficulties of his position gradually nourished within him the conviction of the divine right inherent in his office, and caused all his conduct, wavering and uncertain as it was, to be inspired by the one purpose of building up his kingly prerogative.

Taking advantage of the weakness of the royal authority during the king’s minority, the General Assembly of the Scottish Church resolved in 1581 to substitute Presbyterianism for Episcopacy, and James, being shortly afterwards seized by the nobles at the raid of Ruthven, was unable to put his veto on their procedure, until after the overthrow of those implicated in the conspiracy, when in 1584 the estates passed an act denouncing their assumption of legislative power. In 1585 James was, however, besieged in Stirling by the exiled lords, and compelled to pardon them and dismiss his favourite, Arran. As their influence was moreover backed by Elizabeth, and as the hopes of James were even thus early directed towards succeeding her on the English throne, he discovered it to be advantageous to disguise his sentiments towards the Presbyterians. The destruction in 1588 that overtook the Armada of the Catholic Philip of Spain deprived James of all anxiety regarding the effects of his mother’s testamentary disposal of her crown to that monarch, but it naturally inclined him for a time to a more close alliance with the Protestants, the result of which was seen, not only in his marriage in 1589 to the Protestant princess Anne of Denmark, but in an Act of the estates in 1592, which sanctioned the formal abolition of Episcopacy. In 1594 he also found it necessary to reduce the Catholic lords of the north of Scotland, but in 1597 he deemed it prudent to balance the influence of the Presbyterians, and also to flatter the hopes of the Catholics of England by securing the revocation of the forfeiture of the estates of the banished nobles, and permitting them to return. Previous to this his action against the preacher of a sermon in which Elizabeth was attacked as an atheist led to a “No Popery” riot in Edinburgh. The breach between him and the Presbyterians was still further widened by the statute of 1599, appointing a certain number of ministers to a seat in parliament with the title of bishop, and by his publication in the same year of his Basilicon Doron i in which he promulgated his views in regard to the divine right of kings. With the exception, however, of his peculiar experiences in connexion with the mysterious Gowrie conspiracy at Perth (August 5, 1600), the remainder of his reign in Scotland until his succession to the English throne in 1603 was quiet and uneventful; and the only fact of notable importance connected with his subsequent government of that kingdom is his suspension of the meetings of the General Assembly, until by the banishment and imprisonment of Melville and its principal leaders he was able in 1610 to convene an Assembly which agreed to the organization of a modified Episcopacy. The peculiar union of talents and defects which constituted the character of James made him perhaps the most unfit successor of Elizabeth that could have been chosen. His strutting pomposity was rendered strangely ludicrous by a personal appearance the several defects of which were heightened by their contrast with each other, and it was also constantly interfered with by his want of a proper sense of decorum. If he displayed great cleverness in avoiding immediate political difficulties and in gaining for the moment his own ends, he was incapable of adapting himself mentally to his new position as sovereign of England, and his fussy self-importance made it almost inevitable that he should mortally offend the political temperament then in England so peculiarly sensitive. Indeed, the traditional policy which the circumstances of Scotland had rendered almost a second nature to the Stuarts was repugnant to the susceptibilities of England, and utterly alien to her political constitution, and in the case of James all the worst defects of this policy were exaggerated. Thus his seeming shrewdness in small matters, and his witty and terse political axioms, only secured him the reputation of being the “wisest fool in Christendom;” and, while his absurd personality cast ridicule on his kingly pretensions, the general character of his political procedure estranged from him every party in the state, and called into action influences which in the subsequent reign wrought the overthrow of the monarchy whose prestige he had almost hopelessly tarnished. Having narrowly escaped a plot of the Catholics to seize his person shortly after his arrival in London, Janies resolved to flatter their hopes by granting them toleration, but his proclamation in February 1604 against the Jesuits revealed the hollowness of his professions and led to the futile gunpowder conspiracy of November 1605. Its discovery dissipated for the time the alienation already begun between him and the Commons on account of his imprudent assertion of his prerogative against the Puritans at the Hampton Court conference, and the subsequent disagreements in regard to ecclesiastical reform and a union with Scotland. Against the goodwill of the Commons, which showed itself iu the readiness with which a subsidy was granted for his debts, he, however, trespassed almost immediately by abusing the royal custom of placing impositions on merchandise. All attempts at a compromise on the subject having failed, James in February 1611 dissolved the parliament, and a second parliament which he summoned in 1614 proving equally recalcitrant was also dissolved, the fact that it was not allowed the opportunity of transacting business earning for it from the courtiers the name of the “addled parliament.” To help in filling the vacuum in his treasury, James had recourse with small success to the odious practice of demanding benevolences, and, in addition to various other misuses of his prerogative, to the excessive increase of monopolies, and to the virtual sale of peerages and other high offices. The administration of the affairs of the kingdom was at the same time gradually withdrawn from the council, and the whole executive authority entrusted to favourites. As the breach between him and his subjects gradually widened he became more anxious—both in order to supply himself with money, and to obtain the support of an influential external authority— for an alliance with Spain, and in 1617 negotiations were entered into for a marriage between the young prince Charles and the Spanish infanta. But on the part of Spain those proposals were never seriously entertained. Their only result was to impart such irresolution to the policy of James in reference to the Bohemian insurrection as to afford Spain the opportunity of seizing the Palatinate; and by continuing to dangle the possibility of the marriage before the eyes of James the emperor succeeded in delaying his interference till the Palatinate was lost. Still intent on his purpose of the Spanish marriage, to which he had ruthlessly sacrificed the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, James despatched his favourite Buckingham along with Charles to Madrid, and the return of the baffled and disappointed wooer in 1624 dissipated the last lingering sentiment of respect which the English nation may have cherished towards the king. Buckingham and Charles now virtually overrode the royal prerogative, and at their instance not only was war declared against Spain, but on the condition of granting toleration to the Catholics of England, a treaty of marriage between Charles and Henrietta Maria of France was signed at the close of 1624. James died on March 25,1625.

James inaugurated his literary career in 1584 by the publication of the Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poetry, and in 1591 he published Poetieall Exercises at Vacant Houres. His other compositions in verse include a paraphrase of the Revelation of St John and a version of the Psalms; As he deemed it necessary to give to the world his opinion on almost every subject of importance which then occupied public attention, his prose disquisitions are legion, but the best known are Demonologie, 1597; Basilicon Doron, 1599; and Counterblast to Tobacco, 1616. A collected edition of his prose writings was published in 1616, edited by the bishop of Winchester. Some of his poetical translations are not without merit, but both his prose and poetry, though displaying occasional wit and cleverness and some faculty of composition, are studded with absurdities, and but for the fact that their author was a monarch would scarcely deserve a reference.

The original authorities for the reign of James I. are the statepapers published in the series of the Master of the Rolls; the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (vol. ii. 1569-78, by Burton, 1878; vol iii,, 1578-85, by Masson, 1880); the Letters and State-Papers during the reign of James the Sixth, published by the Abbotsford Club; the Letters of the children and other relations of James, published by the Maitland Club, in facsimile form, from the originals in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh; the letters published under the title of the Court and Times of James I., 1846; his correspondence with Cecil, published by the Camden Society; the correspondence in the Cabala·, Camden’s Annals·, Goodman’s Court of James I., edited by J. S. Brewer, 1839; Calderwood’s History of the Church of Scotland ; Melville’s Diary; Historie and Life of James the Sext, 1566-96, with a short continuation to 1617, published by the Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh, 1825; the secret histories by Osborne, Weldon, Heylin, and Reston, edited by Sir Walter Scott; Arthur Wilson’s Life and Times of James I., London, 1653. See also, in addition to the histories of Burton, Tytler, Gardiner, Ranke, and others, Harris’s Historical and Criticcd Account of the Writings of James I., 1573; Irving’s History of Scottish Poetry ; and Disraeli’s Literary and Political Character of James I.

JAMES II. (1633-1701), king of England, and as king of Scotland James VII., second surviving son of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born at the palace of St James’s, October 15, 1633, and was created duke of York in January 1643. During the civil war he was taken prisoner by Fairfax at Oxford in 1646, but in 1648 he made his escape to Holland. After the second failure of the Stuart cause he served for some time in the French army under Turenne, but at the command of his brother he in 1656 accepted a military commission from Spain. At the Restoration in 1660 he was appointed lord high admiral and lord warden of the Cinque Ports. For the management of the civil administration of the navy he had the qualification of industry and careful regard to details; and if his victory over the Dutch in 1665 was principally a happy stroke of good luck, and his drawn battle with De Ruyter in 1672 was more to his antagonist’s credit than to his, still the fact that his career as an admiral was free from disaster shows that his seamanship must have been at least respectable. Outside, however, the sphere of practical routine, James was blind and insensate, and his whole political conduct—while it indicated that he could stoop to compromise and deception when he deemed these necessary—was marked by a heedlessness and perverse obstinacy possible only to a rigid and contracted understanding preoccupied with a single purpose. He possessed the vices of his race without its virtues and redeeming points, and in him the propensity to despotism developed itself in a form unmitigated by any mildness or amiable weakness of temper, unenlightened by any gift of foresight or practical wisdom, and unadorned by any personal accomplishment. Although at the Restoration his sympathies were so little Catholic that he supported the policy of Clarendon, whose daughter Anne he secretly married in September 1660, publicly acknowledging the union in the December following, he soon thereafter became a convert to Romanism, and in 1672, in opposition to the expostulations of his brother, openly avowed his change of faith. Anne Hyde having died in 1671, he also persuaded his brother to defy the wishes of both Houses of Parliament by permitting him in 1673 to marry the Catholic princess Mary of Modena. On account of the Test Act, passed in this year, he had been compelled to resign his office of admiral, and, although the marriage in 1677 of his daughter Mary to William, prince of Orange, somewhat allayed the distrust with which he was regarded, it was deemed advisable on the discovery of the Popish plot in 1679 that he should retire for a time to Brussels. Afterwards he was appointed lord high commissioner to Scotland, where his arbitrary bigotry found congenial employment in the persecution of the Covenanters; but in 1684 Charles ventured to dispense in his case with the Test Act, and restored him to his office of admiral.

The influence of the loyal enthusiasm which surrounded the last days of Charles in 1685 was felt in the calm acquiescence with which the nation witnessed James’s succession to the throne on February 6, and his coronation on April 23,1686. The trust awakened by his promise to preserve the Government both in church and state as by law established was indeed almost immediately rudely shaken by his public celebration of mass, by his prohibition of preaching against Catholicism, and by his appointment of Catholic officers to the army; but that the goodwill at least of the Commons was still strong was manifested by the grant of a revenue of two millions, and by the enactment of severer measures against treason. If the loyalty of the nation had begun to waver, it was also for the time strengthened by the premature and headstrong attempts at rebellion by Argyll in Scotland, and Monmouth in England. The renewal of the Covenanting persecutions had, however, branded the name of James with the hatred of the Scottish people, and the butchery of the Bloody Assizes, which in England followed the discomfiture of Monmouth, left behind it a widespread horror, the repression of which only wrought effects on the mind of the nation the deeper and more ineffaceable. But James was too intent on his one aim—the establishment of irresponsible despotism—to scrutinize or consider the indirect consequences of his acts. In that aim was necessarily involved the restoration of Popery, because James was a Papist, but happily the accidental prominence given to this secondary and subordinate aim made the other impossible of success. In his imprudent zeal to accomplish his purpose, James outran the wishes even of Rome, but that was because the purpose which to the one was secondary was to the other primary. James required both a large standing army and freedom from the control of parliament; but for these ends a foreign source of money supply was at first necessary, and this he could only obtain by an arrangement which, while it was unpalatable to himself and loathsome to the nation, was far from acceptable to the pope,—namely, by becoming the temporary vassal of Louis of France, whose ambitious designs, notwithstanding his intense and virulent Catholicism, had awakened the jealousy of Rome. Besides, many of the individual acts of James were prompted by the Jesuits, with whom the pope was then at feud. The progress of James’s ill-starred design was marked by clear and well-defined steps. While all England was shocked by the cruelties following the revocation by Louis of the edict of Nantes, James resolved to demand the repeal of the Test Act, and when this was refused by parliament he fabricated by means of corrupted judges a semblance of legal sanction for his disregard of its provisions, and not only encamped an army on Hounslow Heath, chiefly officered by Catholics, but manifested his determination that henceforth to be a Catholic should be a recommendation and not a bar to the highest offices of state, by creating Father Petre and five Catholic peers privy councillors. An appearance of liberality was indeed given to his policy by a declaration of indulgence to Protestant dissenters, but this only quickened suspicion as to his ultimate purpose. Moreover, while a commission was illegally appointed to restrain the discussion of political subjects by the clergy, the publication of Romanist sentiments was freely permitted, monasteries and Catholic schools were being rapidly augmented, and an attempt was made to swamp the Protestantism of the universities by conferring the principal dignities as they became vacant on Catholics. This final step, and a second declaration of indulgence of April 1688, which contained a provision for the prosecution of those clergymen who might refuse to read the declaration in their pulpits, dissipated the last atoms of veneration in the minds of the Tories for the divine right of the king; and after the birth of a son to James in May of the same year nearly every party in the state was prepared to support the invitation to William of Orange to aid in the restitution of the liberties of the country. The discussion of the motives which induced William to accept this invitation, and the results which followed his landing in England, belong properly to the article on William III. James, finding the bulwarks of despotism crumbling around him, after refusing the advice of a council of lay and temporal peers to open negotiations with William, made a pretence of yielding only to gain time to escape, and by his cowardly flight, which he persevered in even after being intercepted and brought back to London, rendered the coronation of Mary and William indispensable. All hope in England was for the time lost, and as by his action on the Test Act he had alienated the sycophantic estates of Scotland, the rising in the Highlands afforded no permanent benefit to his cause; but in Ireland it might be possible for him still to enjoy, though in diminished lustre, the glories of sovereignty until he should be restored to his wider dignities. If his policy towards Ireland had been dictated by the position in which he was now placed, it failed of its purpose, for even before the arrival of William he discovered that he had to fight his way to dominion, and finally, notwithstanding the aid of French troops, his craven irresolution in the face of danger lost him the battle of the Boyne, July 1, 1690, after which he made a hurried escape to France. An expedition to England in his favour was projected by Louis in 1692, but was frustrated by the defeat of the French fleet off Cape La Hogue on May 17, and another invasion planned to follow on the success of an assassination plot on February 10, 1696, was foiled by the discovery of the treachery. James died at St Germain, September 1701.

The principal contemporary authorities for the reign of James are the Dianes of Evelyn, Pepys, and Luttrell; Burnet’s History of His Own Times’, Sir William Temple’s Memoirs-, Life of James I I. , London, 1705; Bishop Kennet’s History of England; The Ellis Correspondence, London, 1829; and the Life of James II., collected out of Memoirs written by his own hand, by J. C. Clarke, 1816. See also the Life by C. J. Fox; C. T. Wilson, James II. and the Duke of Berwick, 1876; and the histories of Macaulay, Lingard, and Ranke.