The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I, Clare Jackson, Allen Lane, £32

A kinder light shines on James Stuart 400 years after his death. While it is unlikely to dispel the entrenched legend of James as a drooling, codpiece-fiddling, witch-hunter, it has at the very least eroded it. More attention is being paid to James’ political savvy, his promotion of peace, and his cultural endeavours, the latter of which receives particular attention in Clare Jackson’s new biography, The Mirror of Great Britain.

Jackson’s conclusion, that James was Britain’s most interesting monarch, might be quibbled at by partisans of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, James IV (of Scotland), or any of the Richards, but it is impossible to dismiss. Born at Edinburgh Castle in June 1566, he became king in July 1567 when a coup overthrew his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, who fled to England and her eventual death. Still in his cradle, James had already lost his father, Lord Darnley, to assassins. Like a political Murder on the Orient Express, there was an embarrassment of suspects, all with a motive. The murder of the universally unlamented Darnley remains an unsolved mystery.

James VI, as he was in Scotland, endured a childhood at Stirling Castle in which he was mocked and beaten by his chief tutor, and witnessed his grandfather’s assassination. He was repeatedly kidnapped but, at 18, had established himself as king in reality, not just name only. There was widespread speculation about James’ intimacy with various favourites, the last of whom, for the time being – Alexander Lindsay – retired from court when James belatedly did his duty by marrying the remarkable Anna of Denmark, with whom he fathered heirs, spares, and a daughter from whom descends the current royal family. In 1603, upon the death of his godmother, Elizabeth I, he inherited the thrones of England and Ireland as James I, ruling until his death, aged 58, in 1625. During his time in England, he quarrelled with Parliament, commissioned the revered King James Version of the Bible, had more favourites, survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, ordered the Plantation of Ulster, hosted Pocahontas, and negotiated a peace treaty with Spain.

For those unfamiliar with the narrative of James’ life, Jackson’s decision to structure her book thematically, rather than chronologically, may prove frustrating. His escape from an alleged killer in the Gowrie House conspiracy of 1600 gives way to a discussion on how James reacted to the news, in 1610, of King Henri IV’s assassination in France. However, for those who already know a little about the first man to rule the British Isles, The Mirror of Great Britain is fascinating.

There are one or two small missteps – such as a brief discussion in the first chapter about the Scottish referendum of 2014, Brexit, and the future likelihood of a united Ireland – which are not only of questionable relevance but may date a book that does not deserve to be.

What emerges most powerfully is James’ intelligence. He was a prolific author, even if the topics he defended – witch-hunting and divinely sanctioned monarchy – exist now on the other side of the intellectual Rubicon created by the Enlightenment. Jackson has an eye for a telling anecdote that shines new light on James’ writings, such as the fact that, when it came to poetry, James considered English to be an inferior language to Scots, or that some of his most famous reflections on monarchy, including those he addressed to his sons Prince Henry and the future Charles I, were inspired by brushes with mortality via illness.

Charles eventually exited life as dramatically as his grandmother, unlike his father, who died on his throne and in his bed. In explaining the road to civil war, many historians have attempted to paint James as the prologue to Carolean absolutism, yet one of the most surprising parts of this excellent book is its discussion of how James was posthumously wielded like a cudgel against his son. Despite, or perhaps because of, his own cyclical contretemps with Parliament, James was cited in the 1630s and 1640s as proof that it was possible for a king of England to argue with MPs rather than wage war against them. John Bastwick, the Puritan polemicist who had his ears lopped off on Charles I’s orders, proclaimed that James had ‘more policy in the paring of his nails’ than Charles or his ‘grollish politicians’ had in their whole bodies.

Not that James had an easy time of things, politically. He failed to secure the Union of Scotland and England, which did not become a legislative reality until the reign of his great-granddaughter. In James’ lifetime, English MPs audibly broke wind during parliamentary debates as their show-and-tell response of what they thought of the Union. Like the Lady of Shalott’s mirror, Jackson’s narrative is peopled with shadows of the Jacobean world – a man with the fantastic name Brice Christmas, who, in 1617, fought a duel proscribed by James; Mary, Queen of Scots’ loyalist Sir William Kircaldy, who, on New Year’s Day 1573, made it rain fish when he fired a cannon into Edinburgh market that resulted in ‘fish blown so high in the air that they were seen to fall on the tops of high houses’; or the Earl of Tyrone, the charismatic Irish noble, whose links to James, long before the latter succeeded Elizabeth as Ireland’s head of state, are among the most intriguing details of James’s role in his western-most kingdom.

The book never loses sight, however, of its chief reflection. Details of James’ personal life are used to give the sense of the man, such as his diarrhoea in times of stress, his temper, or his rigid self-discipline when it came to food, apart from fresh fruit, especially strawberries. The longest discussion of his private life is the chapter on the Overbury scandal (1615-16), which, with its involvement of James’ favourite Lord Somerset, alongside allegations of witchcraft, poison, murder, and blackmail, proved a devastating nexus of James’ private and political responsibilities. Above all, it is James as a genius, albeit a flawed one, who is reflected back in this exceptional and thought-provoking study.