James VI and I

James arrived in England in 1603 to find a church settlement that satisfied nobody. Puritan clergy presented him with the Millenary Petition asking for further reform of ceremony and discipline, and he called a conference at Hampton Court in January 1604 to hear both sides. He gave the Puritans almost nothing on ceremony, and when presbyterian church government was raised he answered that no bishop meant no king, since a church without a hierarchy would not long tolerate a monarchy either. One request he did grant, almost in passing, was for a new translation of the Bible.

The scheme he approved was unusually well organized. Roughly fifty scholars worked in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, each taking a portion, and each company's draft was reviewed by the others before a final committee harmonized the whole. The rules of procedure required them to follow the Bishops' Bible where the original allowed, to keep familiar ecclesiastical words rather than replacing them, and to add no marginal notes except for cross references and difficulties of translation. That last rule was pointed. James disliked the Geneva Bible, then the most widely read English version, because its marginal notes told readers when a king might rightly be disobeyed.

The version appeared in 1611. It was not an immediate success and took decades to displace the Geneva Bible in private reading, but by the eighteenth century it was simply the Bible in English, and its cadences entered the language so completely that phrases from it are used daily by people who have never opened it. Its influence on English prose, hymnody and public oratory is broader than that of any other book, and its authorization was the incidental outcome of a conference called to settle something else.

In 1589 James sailed to Denmark to collect his bride, Anne, and the return voyage met storms severe enough that the fleet had to shelter in Norway. Danish officials blamed witchcraft, and the accusation crossed to Scotland. The North Berwick trials that followed, running from 1590 into 1591, produced confessions under torture that a coven had met in the kirkyard at North Berwick, sent a familiar to sea to raise the storms, and worked to kill the king because he was the greatest enemy the devil had in the world. James attended examinations in person and questioned suspects himself.

Out of that experience came Daemonologie, printed at Edinburgh in 1597. It is a short dialogue in three books arguing that witchcraft is real, that scripture and reason both establish it, that magistrates have a duty to punish it, and, against the sceptics he names, that denying its existence is itself an error. It distinguishes necromancy from witchcraft, discusses spirits and possession, and argues for the death penalty. Coming from a reigning monarch, it carried a weight no clerical treatise could.

The consequences were legal and cultural. Scotland saw one of the most intense witch prosecutions in Europe over the following century, and in England the first parliament of James's reign passed the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made invoking spirits a capital felony without benefit of clergy and which remained in force until 1736. Shakespeare, writing Macbeth for a company under royal patronage, drew on the demonology his new king had published, and the play's Scottish setting and its weird sisters are usually read as an address to that interest. Historians have noted that James's own scepticism grew in later life, and he exposed several fraudulent accusations personally.