Religious dissension reached a climax with the Gunpowder plot, the Papist attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament provoking a renewed anti-Catholic fervour in England. His entourage of Scottish court favourites and his bribes and lavish rewards, most infamous being the creation of his closest advisor George Villiers as Duke of Buckingham, were factors that kept the King and Parliament permanently at odds and allowed his rule to appear capricious and corrupt, whilst its exalted character grew more and more offensive to an age that had begun, almost instinctively, the progression towards parliamentary government. However he was the first Scottish King to act in his own right as a decisive player on the European political stage, and the last English monarch to enjoy at his accession the supreme, unquestioned authority of the Tudors and their medieval predecessors. The old conflicts between Scotland and England, religious tensions and James’s inability to respect Parliament, served only to exacerbate the situation during his somewhat unsuccessful reign. Witty, well-read and a staunch believer in the Divine Right of Kingship, the Scottish-born James I was not readily accepted by England on his accession to the throne in 1603. James was the son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and succeeded to the throne upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. (3) Though it remains uncertain whether our portrait was painted as a token of Saxe-Coburg loyalty to James, or received as a gift from the English King to the Court of Johann-Casimir, it remains an important symbol of the complex diplomacy that underpinned the Protestant resistance to the Catholic League. For James I, who had inherited Queen Elizabeth’s mantel as guardian of Protestantism in Europe, had by the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick Elector Palatine in 1619 acquired direct interest and influence in the German states. With its significant Saxe-Coburg provenance (2), our portrait may have been commissioned at a time when Protestant principalities, such as the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg under its then sovereign Duke Johann-Casimir (1564 – 1633), only recently independent from Saxony, would have had many reasons to seek friendship with the English Crown.
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