When James VI was crowned King of Scotland on 24th July 1567, at the Church of the Holy Rood in Stirling, he was only one year old. His mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate the throne and would be executed for high treason twenty years later. Although John Knox had preached at his coronation, and George Buchanan, the scholar reformer, had tutored him, James grew up to be a king who would favour the episcopacy.
One of Knox’s professors at St Andrews was John Major, or Mair, of Haddington (1467-1550), a renowned scholar in Europe ‘whose word’, said Knox, ‘then was holden as an oracle in matters of religion.’ In his History of Greater Britain (1521) he championed a united Scotland and England because both nations shared a common heritage in their first people: the Britons. Although proudly Scottish, Major wrote that the two nations ‘would be united under one king’, but at the same time he opposed the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy. His thinking spread through the intellectuals of the day, influencing both George Buchanan and John Knox at St Andrews, who both espoused the idea that the two nations should be united through a reformed faith. Knox wrote to Sir William Cecil, the great statesman representing Queen Elizabeth I, that he hoped for a ‘confederacy, amity, and league’ between Scotland and England. Out of this ongoing discussion came the Union of Crowns, when upon the death of the childless Elizabeth I, James VI was crowned as King James I of England in 1603. He preferred to be known as the ‘King of Great Britain’, but politicians were nervous about such a title, preferring rather that he was King of both Scotland and England, showing both unity and distinction.
Although the Scots and English generally celebrated a king who would represent both nations together, the outcome of this position of power would be complex. King James promised, when he left Edinburgh for London, that he would be back every three years, yet in all of his long reign of 57 years he only returned to Scotland once, in 1617. It felt to the Scots that England had the better share, and that they were neglected. When he was accepted as Head of the Church of England another complication would emerge, for although his Presbyterian subjects honoured him as king, they could not accept him as Head of the Church of Scotland. To acquiesce to this would mean blatant disobedience to Christ. After all, with the ratification of Scottish Parliament in 1560, the Scots’ Confession had been accepted by the nation, and the wording was crystal clear: ‘Christ Jesus… [is] our only Head of His Kirk… in such honours and offices, if man or Angel presume to intrude themselves, we utterly detest and abhor them, as blasphemous to our Sovereign and Supreme Governor Christ Jesus.’ King James himself had signed the King’s Confession in 1581, declaring ‘Christ our head’ of God’s church. Time would tell whether freedom of conscience would be permitted, or bulldozed under monarchical tyranny.
‘… Christ is head of the church…’ (Ephesians 5:23, NKJV).
Image: King James VI of Scotland and I of England, Edinburgh Theological Seminary, photo by Paul James-Griffiths.