Brought up amidst much turmoil – his father and three regents murdered; his mother deposed when he was an infant and subsequently judicially murdered by her and his cousin – James VI somehow survived into adulthood as an “intelligent, resilient, idiosyncratic, guileful and witty” man, in the words of a new biography of him, The Mirror of Great Britain: A life of James VI and I, by Clare Jackson.
Readers of this periodical, however, are most likely to want to know about his attitude to Catholicism. But before we get to that, his was an adventurous life, though he died in his bed (only the second of the seven Stuarts to do so). He was the first ever King of Great Britain (and indeed King of Ireland too). With Europe riven by wars of religion, he was more successful than anyone else between 1541 and 1746 in holding the peace both at home and abroad.
