Has history been harsh on James VI?

James was heir to two women. He had spent weeks of impatience awaiting news of the death of his kinswoman Queen Elizabeth of England. She took a long time about it. Suffering from deep depression, she was bidding farewell one by one to the men and women of her own, earlier world. The whole of her last month she stayed in bed at her favourite rural retreat of Richmond Palace near London. From time to time she murmured denials of any complicity in the execution 16 years before of Mary Queen of Scots – James’s mother.

Elizabeth died on March 24. The news reached Scotland three days later. James, well prepared, wasted little time to get on the road south. On the intervening Sunday, he went up to St Giles’ Church to address the congregation of townspeople for the last time.

It was a sort of secular sermon, much in character. James said he knew how they would miss him but they should be happy on his behalf. He would not forget them. He would still be their king. Every three years he would pay them a visit to learn at first hand if they were as content now as, under him, they always had been (this promise went unfulfilled).

Setting off for the Border, James still felt slightly nervous that the English might not accept him after all. He need not have worried. When he got to the gates of Berwick he found them open. Entering England, he continued in a more leisurely fashion, often halting at the great houses of high noblemen for a day or two of hunting, his favourite pastime.

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London was loyally awaiting him. Senior officials of the English state had made sure everything would be at peace and in order, as a good example for the rest of the reign. That made James happy and in many respects he would turn out to be worthy of a second crown.

But no history of James’s reputation can avoid the fact that he has always counted in too many ways as a “bad king” of England in particular and especially inferior to Elizabeth. She won and kept the hearts of English people but he never did. His powers he ascribed to the divine right of kings, with no constraints from his subjects. They did not like this.

Of course, James was going to meet opposition anyway. He shrewdly kept it in check. It helped that he fought no foreign wars during his reign, whereas Elizabeth had struggled constantly with Spain, conquered Ireland and indulged the derring-do of privateers on the high seas.

James’s original Scottish role in history had rested on the expansion of kingship. He subdued the nobility and drew it into a partnership, which also included the best of the rising literate laymen. He had fashioned a workable royal supremacy over the reformed Kirk (including the re-introduction of bishops). And he had sought to extend royal authority into the Highlands.

In the detail lies a Scots king not of quixotic ambition but with a vital sense of his claim to supreme authority in practical matters. This was sane and sensible, not abnormal. And it conformed with the claims of both his Stewart predecessors and his Tudor cousins.

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It is easier to understand James in his three kingdoms if we analyse his evolving kingship in Scotland, which was no less absolutist than anybody else’s and rather more successful than for most.

The contrast grew stronger, not weaker after James got to a more cosmopolitan London. He refined his peacemaker’s skills to build relationships with foreign monarchs and their ambassadors that would last all his life and exceed those owed to the Tudors’ friendships.

Through his life James got his way on the whole, even if it never made him a popular king. He did try to explain his policies and the good they were doing. Now with three kingdoms (Ireland as well) he had more need of this than a ruler of one. He went so far as to publish earnest tracts, not quite intellectual top flight, on such subjects as a king’s duties, free monarchies, demons, the oath of allegiance. He sought to communicate his ideas by print, pen and spoken word.

And James’s policies did have their successes. He maintained the crown’s role in spiritual as well as temporal power. In matters of religion, he was especially effective. He gave us the Authorised Version of the Bible. He made British churches episcopal (though in Scotland not permanently). He aimed to bring the sacred and the secular into harmony.

As for the three kingdoms, he did work at ruling them if he felt like it. While he could easily turn bored and distracted, especially as he grew older, this was not true for all business. Absolutism was the dominant political concept of the age, meaning the maximum power for any reigning monarch. James took it seriously. Unhappily for him, he had too many other less successful policies that paved the way for the decline of the monarchy after his death. But it is also a problem for historical judgment that today we value only one form of parliamentary government and disparage any other. James exhibited too many personal opinions for his own English contemporaries to take him seriously or for conventional historians to offer him many accolades.

Still, some re-assessment has been going on in the 21st century by a new generation of Scottish historians. Of James in person we know more than ever before, with articles on his education, on the politics of his minority and on evolving notions of kingship, all within a long struggle to translate political ideas into practice in the secular, religious and territorial realms.

Now James seems closer than before in his Scottish successes to his English troubles. The kindest of the historians was a Scot, the late Jenny Wormald of the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. Towards the end of her career she tended to focus on James as a more crucial figure of his age, with greater substance than anything ever revealed by his mother, Mary. Unfortunately Jenny never got round before her death in 2015 to finishing the biography of James that might have crowned her labours.

Still she left behind a seminal learned article that got to the nub of the problem, “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?” She challenged the hostility of existing works about him, pondering how it was that the Scots and English held such different views of one monarch.

She deconstructed the contemporary sources that had shaped academic hostility to the king. She stressed their inherent English xenophobia, designed to further a project of vilifying the

anti-parliamentary Stewarts. She called on us to seek out once again an authentic James.

I share the hope that in this century we might come to a balanced view. But it looks more like being an era when the Scots will see greater rather than lesser discord with the English. We can hardly expect the most Scottish of our kings to be a beneficiary.