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ENGLAND from JAMES to WILLIAM & MARY (1 of 5)

King James of Biblical version fame

King James, Catholics and Puritans

In the 1500s, England and the Netherlands had been progressing economically while Germany had been losing economically from the shift to trade carried by ships across seas. In England, serfdom was all but over. England had a free market in land and labor. Many of England's peasants had become successful farmers, joining with the nobility in advancing methods of growing crops.

A developing agriculture was the most significant element in economic progress, and more agriculture in England was aimed at trade rather than subsistence farming. In England, more money could be made raising sheep than growing grain, and more land was being fenced in and converted to sheep pasture to meet the growing demand for wool. England was exporting tin, lead and leather. Eighty percent of its exports was in undyed and unfinished woolen cloth, and in the wool industry, English merchants formed a free association called Merchants of the Staple. They shared a warehouse across the English Channel, in Calais, from which each merchant sold his goods abroad. Some of these merchants joined another association, called the Merchant Adventurers, which operated a warehouse in Antwerp, and in 1564 the Merchant Adventurers received a Royal Charter conferring on them a legal monopoly of cloth exports to the Netherlands and to Germany.

James VI, King of Scotland, the son of the beheaded Queen Mary of Scotland, succeeded his cousin, Elizabeth I of England in 1603, James becoming James I of England. With this, England and Scotland were united into what became known as Great Britain, while the English and Scots remained less than united in spirit.

James was a Calvinist, a devout Presbyterian, who had contempt for both Puritans and Catholics. Puritans were demanding that James "purify" the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, and James threatened to run them out of the country. Some Catholics, on the other hand, tried to assassinate James -- in what was called the Gun Powder Treason -- in order to establish a rule in Britain more friendly to Catholicism, with James believing that Jesuits had joined the plot.

James believed in making the Bible available to common folks, and so he commissioned a translation of the Bible into English, to be called the Authorized King James Bible -- in place of three other popular versions of the Bible:the Geneva Bible, the Great Bible (an English language translation authorized by Henry VIII) and the Bishop's Bible. Beginning in 1607, forty-seven translators worked daily, and they put together their work for publication in 1611, with the Catholic Church believing the work to be less than a triumph.

For the sake of clarity, the King James translation included italicized words not found in the Hebrew or Greek texts.

As a Presbyterian, James was opposed to bishops, while bishops remained in the Anglican Church (the Church of England). As King of England, James was head of the Church of England, and, in 1612, with the support of the Anglican clergy he borrowed from the French monarchy and justified his rule on the grounds of Divine Right. He held that the king was from God and law was from the king. He was opposed to any diminution of this God-given power in the form of any power belonging to parliament, and this upset those English aristocrats and bourgeoisie who believed that tradition had given them some powers through parliament. [note]

James tried to bridge the gap between Protestants and Catholics by marrying his son to a Spanish princess, which angered his Puritan subjects. James, also King of Ireland, tried to "tame" people there by sending them English and Scot Protestants, adding to what would be 200,000 settlers in northern Ireland, mostly Lowland Scots -- to be known as Ulster Scots or, in America, as Scots-Irish.

James founded the first successful British colonies on the American mainland -- in Virginia, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. He was hoping to bring the Christian religion "to such people as yet live in darkness" and to produce in America "settled and quiet government."

James survived more assassination attempts. He was handicapped physically and in speech. His drooling and otherwise unattractive appearance caused discomfort among some who tried to remove what they saw as a blight on the glory of English monarchy, by the only speedy and available means of removing a king -- assassination.