Few kings have been more savagely caricatured or grossly misunderstood than England’s first Stuart. Yet, as this new biography demonstrates, the modern tendency to downplay his defects and minimize the longer term consequences of his reign has gone too far. For, in spite of genuine idealism and flashes of considerable resourcefulness, James I remains a perplexing figure. A flawed, if well-meaning, foreigner in a rapidly changing and divided kingdom, his passionate commitment to time-honoured principles of government would, ironically, prove his undoing, as England edged unconsciously towards the crossroads and the shadow of the Thirty Years War descended like a pall upon Europe.
