James VI and the Revival of Episcopacy in Scotland: 1596–1600

Abstract

King James VI and I had a taste for aphorisms, a circumstance which has occasionally misled the historians of his reign. James's deeply held and lifelong attachment to the doctrine of the divine right of kings is well known and unquestionable; so when, at the Hampton Court Conference, he said, “No bishop, no king”, it has perhaps been too readily assumed that his devotion to episcopacy as a system of church government was as unswerving and permanent as his belief in divine right. The king's admiration for the Church of England and its prelates, his threat at Hampton Court to harry the Puritans out of the land, his savage attack in Basilikon Doron on those “fiery spirited men in the ministry” who “fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis” but who were really “very pests in Church and Commonweal… breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies”—all this is so familiar as scarcely to require repeating. It is also well known that when he began to govern for himself in Scotland in the 1580s the position of the Scottish bishops was feeble. It continued to worsen for about a decade, as the king and his advisers found it desirable for political reasons to make concessions to the dominant presbyterian wing of the kirk, until the presbyterian historian David Calderwood could write of the year 1596, “The Kirk of Scotland was now come to her perfection.” Then, beginning in 1596, the tide began to run in the opposite direction.