Book explores the events leading to James VI's reign
By DESMOND RYAN
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
In the winter of 1603, the aging Queen Elizabeth I was in rapidly declining health and knew death was near. She moved the court to her favorite palace in Richmond, where one of the most prized and celebrated items in the royal library was a vellum roll that traced the genealogy of the kings and queens of England all the way back to Adam and Eve.
The monarchs of England -- then and now -- were not reluctant to make extravagant claims. But the roll of vellum was a telling symbol of the looming political crisis that would come with the death of a childless ruler who had adamantly refused to name a successor. Ancestry could be inscribed, but the succession was a bitterly contested and highly uncertain matter.
In stressing this salient but all-too-often-ignored fact, Leanda De Lisle has come up with that rare entry in the over-plowed field of Tudor history: a fresh and original approach to a relatively unmined aspect of Elizabeth's long reign. The shelves are jammed with full-length biographies of Elizabeth and studies of her contentious and perilous rise to power, such as David Starkey's "Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne."
And there are, of course, many celebrations of her most triumphant hour, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 that kept England a Protestant nation.
Intriguing issues
In fusing Elizabeth's last years with the confluence of politics, self-interest and religious fervor that eventually crowned James VI of Scotland as the new king, De Lisle explores a story that is fascinating on its own terms and full of resonant echoes of some of the more fiercely debated issues of our own times.
Who confers power and how far can its holder go in sustaining his authority in the name of national security? Who decides how that power is transferred? What role does religious faith play in the writing and enforcement of secular laws? How are these issues decided when a nation is waging a seemingly unwinnable war (in this case, in the quagmire of Ireland) that is unpopular with many of its own citizens?
Elizabeth herself was increasingly unpopular, and the various factions around her engaged in a delicate balancing act, with one eye on retaining her favor and another on earning the gratitude of the next ruler. These twin tasks were often mutually exclusive and complicated by the fact that there were several claimants. A wrong bet could lead to a short walk to the scaffold.
Difficulties with narration
De Lisle charts the players but tends to get bogged down more than necessary in expository background and explanation. She is an Oxford-educated journalist here embarking on her first venture into history and lacks the narrative skill of a suave storyteller like Starkey.
Still, the story has an undeniable momentum of its own. Her best writing is fortunately devoted to the central figure of James. Without a Karl Rove to spin his image, James has come down to us as a pompous pedant with a taste for handsome young men and slovenly personal habits.
De Lisle gives us a more astute and subtle survivor. As the son of Mary Queen of Scots, James had to negotiate with Elizabeth -- the woman who executed his mother. From the primitive violence of his Scottish kingdom, he exploited the ambitions of various English noblemen quite shrewdly. He was even more cunning and circumspect on the crucial issue of how much -- if any -- tolerance he would extend to the Catholic minority persecuted with increasing vigor and venom by Elizabeth and the vocal and militant Puritans.
Far-reaching implications
James' ascent marked more than a change of dynasties from the house of Tudor to that of the Stuarts. It poses one of those tantalizing what-ifs of history and the conjecture on what might have happened if a different claimant had won.
If James and his even more pigheaded son Charles I had not believed so ardently that they ruled by divine right (skeptics could check the vellum roll), the course of English and American history could well have been radically altered. His intransigence created the wave of religious refugees who settled here, and the stubbornness of his son brought on civil war and the rise of parliamentary democracy.
De Lisle's worthwhile illumination reminds us how fragile the whole transition was and how things could have turned out differently.