Abstract
The alliance forged between Elizabeth and James VI was one of the most significant in British political history: it saw the erosion of Scotland’s 800-year-old league with France and eventually brought about the unification of the British Isles into the United Kingdom. Although their correspondence officially began in 1572 (albeit carried out by James’s regents in his name), both monarchs began a regular holograph exchange from 1583, averaging three or four letters a year. Elizabeth and James used their epistolary conversations to reinforce bonds of amity between their two countries and to discuss issues relating to good governance.2 Yet the form and content of their correspondence was also strongly influenced by their genetic and spiritual kinship. J. E. Neale has described Elizabeth’s correspondence with James as “curiously maternal and tutorial,” and Susan Doran has noted how Elizabeth “frequently adopted the tone of a world-weary and exasperated parent forced to offer a way-ward child advice and issue him reprimands.”3 Both monarchs used their respective roles in this parent-child dynamic to further their political objectives: for Elizabeth, securing the Anglo-Scottish border against foreign assault; for James, securing confirmation of his place in the English succession.
[S]ince it is my goode fortune to be tyed in straite freindship with so uyse a prince, & trustie a freinde, I will hear after at all occasions wryte in this sorte pryuatelie, unto you without the knouledge of any of my counsaill, no not my owin secretarie, the ansoure quairof [whereof] maye euer be safelie & seacreatlie conuoyed by youre owin agent, in quhose paquette I will also sende my letters as I doe this.
—James VI to Elizabeth I, July 16021
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Notes
For more on Elizabeth’s letters of advice see Rayne Allinson, “Conversations on Kingship: The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I and King James VI,” in Liz Oakley-Brown and Louise Wilkinson (eds.), The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship; Medieval to Early Modern (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 131–44.
J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (London: Harmondsworth, [1934] 1973), p. 391;
Doran, “Loving and Affectionate Cousins? The Relationship Between Elizabeth I and James VI of Scotland, 1586–1603,” in Susan Doran and Glenn Richardson (eds.), Tudor England and Its Neighbours (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 205.
Lena Cowen Orlin, “The Fictional Families of Elizabeth I,” in Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan (eds.), Political Rhetoric, Power and Renaissance Women (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 98–102.
Janel Mueller, “To My Very Good Brother the King of Scots: Elizabeth I’s Correspondence with James VI and the Question of the Succession,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 115 (2000), pp. 1065–66.
Sir James Melville, The Memoirs of Sir James Melville of Halhill, ed. Gordon Donaldson (London: Folio Society, 1969), p. 297.
G. P. V Akrigg (ed.), Letters of King James VI & I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 25. See for example James to Elizabeth, March 1587, BL Additional MS 23240, art. 20, fols. 65r-6v (holograph draft).
James I’s speech to Parliament, 1607, in Johan P. Sommerville (ed.), James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 173.
Jennifer M. Brown, “Scottish Politics 1567–1625,” in Alan G. R. Smith (ed.). The Reign of James VI and I (London: Macmillan, 1977 [1973]), pp. 36–37.
For more on this period of the correspondence see Rayne Allinson, “‘These Latter Days of the World’: the Correspondence of Elizabeth I and James VI, 1590–1603,” Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 2.1–27. [http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-16/allilatt.htm]
See John Bruce (ed.), Correspondence of King James VI. of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and others in England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: Camden Society, 1861).
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© 2012 Rayne Allinson
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Allinson, R. (2012). Mine Own Hand: King James VI of Scotland, 1579–1603. In: A Monarchy of Letters. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008367_10
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