The Foreign Foreign Policy of James I

2015 ◽  
pp. 204-226
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
James I

James I and Henri IV: An Essay in English Foreign Policy 1603-1610

1971 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 147
Author(s):  
John P. Kenyon ◽  
Maurice Lee
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
James I

My Lord, the Ambassador

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Direct Instruction ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
James I ◽  
South West ◽  
European Diplomacy

Herbert’s embassy coincided with a particularly complex period of European diplomacy as Catholic and Protestant nations moved from negotiating to taking up arms in the Thirty Years War. Chapter 7 explores his diplomatic role, actions, and lifestyle. It considers the difficulties he encountered in serving an English monarch pursuing a pro-Spanish foreign policy unpopular with a majority of his subjects, while cultivating good relations with an inexperienced French monarch facing internal opposition from his politically ambitious mother, rebellious nobility, and a discontented Protestant minority. It looks at Herbert’s reinvigoration of his noble and princely contacts in France and other European states and his relations with princes, ministers, and fellow diplomats. It focuses upon his determination to maximize his status and dignity when representing James I in the renewal of the oath of alliance with France, his energetic but unofficial support for the elector and electress palatine when they accepted the Bohemian Crown and triggered European-wide war, and his robust defence of French Protestants. It emphasizes the quality of his diplomatic reports and the success of his diplomatic networking and intelligence gathering. It examines his controversial exchanges with Louis XIII, and the royal favourite, the duke of Luynes, when, on the direct instruction of James I, he criticized the French king’s use of military force to suppress French Protestantism in south-west France during 1620 to 1621.

Legislation, Foreign Policy, and the “Proper Business” of the Parliament of 1624

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Proper Functions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.

Writing the King’s Death

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-59
Author(s):  
Alastair Bellany
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
James I ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Public ◽  
Charles I ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

The writing produced around the succession of Charles I in 1625 was dominated by discussion of the life and death of his father, James I. Focusing on a range of texts about James I’s death and funeral—James Shirley’s poem on the king’s ritualized lying-in-state, John Williams’s funeral sermon for the king in Westminster Abbey, Abraham Darcie’s engraved memorial broadside, and George Eglisham’s infamous secret history of James’s murder—this chapter explores how panegyric succession writing was shaped and undermined by significant tensions within early Stuart political culture—about religion and monarchy, kings and court favourites, domestic and foreign policy, and royal authority and the public sphere.

The Foreign Policy Debate in the House of Commons in 1621

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conrad Russell
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
James I ◽  
King James I

On 3 December 1621 the House of Commons resolved to submit a petition to King James I, asking him for stricter enforcement of the laws against Catholic recusants, asking ‘that your Majesty would propose to yourself to manage this war with the best advantage, by a diversion or otherwise, as in your deep judgement shall be found fittest, and not to rest upon a war in these parts only, which will consume your treasure and discourage your people’, and that ‘our most noble prince may be timely and happily married to one of our own religion’.

The Anglo-Dutch Context for the Writing and Reception of Hugo Grotius’s De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra, 1617-1659

Grotiana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-161
Author(s):  
Marco Barducci
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
James I

As an illustration of the complexity of Anglo-Dutch intellectual connections in the seventeenth century, this essay focuses on the transnational context for the writing and reception of Grotius’s De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra. DI was composed by Grotius during the dispute between Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants, but it was addressed not solely to a Dutch audience, but also to an English one. DI was intended by Grotius and by his patron Oldenbarnevelt to win the favour of James I to the cause of the Remonstrants in the context of their struggle against the orthodox Calvinists, the Contra-Remonstrants. Grotius praised the control of James I over the state church, and expressed his admiration for the hierarchical organisation of Anglican episcopacy. In doing so, he expressly took the English civil and ecclesiastical government of James I as a blueprint for the solution of the Dutch religious troubles. This article argues that despite of Grotius’s attempt to gain the approval of James I’s entourage before sending DI to press, DI was criticized both by his English interlocutors and, consistently throughout the century, by English Anglican-Royalist readers. The first part of this article will sketch the Anglo-Dutch cultural and political context which formed the background of DI. Secondly, it will examine the English sources of this work and how Grotius bent them to his and Oldenbarnevelt’s internal and foreign policy. Finally, it will offer some brief considerations concerning the controversial reception of DI in mid-seventeenth century England with a special focus on the Anglican tradition.

Theological Polemics and James I’s Diplomacy, 1603–1617

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-539
Author(s):  
R. Malcolm Smuts
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
James I ◽  
Military Engagement

Historians have typically represented James I as a king whose foreign policy was driven by a principled commitment to peace, religious reconciliation, and royal legitimacy that led him to avoid military engagement in confessional conflicts, notably the Thirty Years’ War. But his published writings on topics related to international politics and less formal pronouncements of principle in verbal discussions of European affairs have never received close contextual analysis. This essay examines how James deployed theoretical arguments in conducting diplomacy with other European states, especially France, in the period before the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. It argues that rather than basing policy decisions on principled convictions, he often deployed ideas strategically in efforts to justify and advance his own interests, and sometimes to mislead other statesmen about his true intentions. He did have some deep convictions, especially his abhorrence of theological justifications for rebellion and regicide, but even his efforts to combat such arguments were shaped by practical political calculations as well as purely theoretical concerns. Although he took ideas seriously, a closer examination of his record reveals him as a shrewd, flexible, and sometimes duplicitous royal politician, adept at fashioning high-minded justifications for self-interested maneuvers, rather than an idealistic scholar-statesman.

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