The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of King James VI and I

“Beautifully written and supported by a treasure trove of new material” (Amanda Foreman), The Mirror of Great Britain is a major reassessment of King James, revealing the long origins of an uneasily united kingdom. History has not been kind to King James. A cradle king who was crowned in Scotland in 1567 and England and Ireland in 1603, James VI and I has long been eclipsed in fame and reputation by his predecessor and cousin, Elizabeth I, and his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

Yet James, if often overlooked or, more often, cruelly stereotyped, presents an equally fascinating figure: a diplomat whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas, “a passionate Protestant with a profound interest in witches and demons, a lover of young men and patron of both Shakespeare and the Bible that bears his name” (Fintan O’Toole). James identified himself with the “Mirror of Great Britain,” a spectacular jewel commissioned upon his accession to the English throne, which not only furnished him with one of his favorite metaphors—that of the mirror, with its limitless capacity to magnify, illuminate, and distort—but gave symbolic endorsement to his vision of British union.

Now, four hundred years after his death, Wolfson History Prize–winning historian Clare Jackson finally reappraises the life and legacy of the “first king of Great Britain.” Beginning with the surprise assassination of his father, Lord Darnley, and the subsequent beheading of his mother, Jackson contextualizes the tempest of James’s childhood as well as the many attempts on his life, from his teenage detention by the Ruthven Raiders to the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. So, too, does she consider the renewed creativity of the Jacobean era, culminating in the King James Bible, Macbeth, and King Lear, and demonstrates how the king’s keen interest in joining worlds old and new—establishing colonies overseas and, closer to home, uniting Scotland, England, and Ireland—set the geopolitical stage for centuries to come. In so doing, Jackson reveals King James as perhaps the most consequential monarch of the early modern era, whose impact, for better and for worse, still reverberates today.

Closely attentive to James’s own words in numerous publications, manuscript musings, verse, and private correspondence, The Mirror of Great Britain tells the story of this highly unusual, significant monarch with flair, insight, and, above all, empathy for the man who bore the crown.