THE MIRROR OF GREAT BRITAIN

A monarch for the ages.

James VI of Scotland, later also James I of England, was a “cradle king,” first crowned at the tender age of 13 months. His second coronation came in 1603, after the death of Elizabeth I. This new history presents the story of his 57 years and 246 days on the throne. The book’s title comes from a portrait of James wearing a “prominent hat jewel” known as “the Mirror of Great Britain,” containing three large diamonds and a ruby, representing “opulent symbolic endorsement” of James’ vision of a united kingdom. Making that concept work involved one monarch presiding over two countries, with different parliamentary forms of government and separate national churches, currencies, and legal systems. The jewel, to James, also represented transparency; “‘The more the people know of the reasons of my doings,’ the more royal power would be respected.” His royal legacy includes prowess as both a poet and an avid hunter; pioneering an anti-smoking campaign, raising tobacco taxes by 4,000% and banning domestic farming of tobacco; and making the Christian Bible accessible to millions by funding “one uniform translation” into English “undertaken by the best-learned” at Oxford and Cambridge and reviewed by “the Church of England’s bishops, Privy Councillors and James himself” before publication (and possibly some help from Shakespeare—for the iambic pentameter). He engineered a predominantly Protestant, Anglo-Scottish plantation in the northern Irish counties of Ulster to integrate Ireland into the United Kingdom, helped uncover and prevent the Gunpowder Plot to kill the king by blowing up Parliament in 1605, dissolved Parliament in 1621 in a dispute over royal authority, and created the first English settlement in North America by establishing the colony of Virginia. Jackson, a noted Cambridge historian and BBC presenter, shows her respect and affection for James in this highly readable history.

A robust history of the first—and “by far, its most interesting”—king of Great Britain.