Professor Clare Jackson: ‘James VI & I and the Politics of British Union’

Abstract

March 2025 marks the 400^th anniversary of the death of King James VI & I at his Theobalds estate in Hertfordshire. The king after whom Great Britain’s national flag – the ‘Union Jack’ – is nicknamed, James was crowned as an infant king of Scotland in 1567 and ruled Scotland for nearly four decades before succeeding to Elizabeth I’s crown to become king of England in 1603. Although James’s cherished vision for a ‘united kingdom’ of Great Britain provoked a hostile reception in the Westminster Parliament, and was complicated by the Protestant settlement of Northern Ireland, it created the conceptual framework for eventual Anglo-Scottish union in 1707. At the same time James’s accession as king of England entailed absentee rule in Edinburgh, new forms of delegated authority, an asymmetrical balance of power, confessional tensions, overlapping and competing legal codes and a new ‘British’ cultural lexicon.

Today, rival constitutional visions range from the United Kingdom remaining a traditional unitary state with limited devolution of powers to a radically reshaped multilateral federalist structure to sovereign independence for different parts of the current polity. Published to coincide with the 400^th anniversary of his death, Clare Jackson’s forthcoming life of King James VI & I will consider his political and personal legacies at a time when the constitutional complexities attaching to the Stuart multiple monarchy inheritance remain acutely resonant and topical.

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