duty ‘without wasting time upon refuting the adversaries’, and Basilicon
Doron(first printed in 1599), which turns scholastic principles into
practical advice for Prince Henry, his ‘natural successor’, preach that
monarchy is a ‘form of government resembling the divinity’ and that
monarchs are accountable only to God. Churchmen must not be
allowed ‘to meddle with the policy or estate in the pulpit’, or meet in
conventions without the prince’s permission.^69
James recognized a ‘fundamental and civil law’ of Scotland defining
the king’s hereditary right and authority, but he claimed that it was
King Fergus coming over from Ireland who established this ‘estate and
form of government’ among a people who were still barbarous. ‘So the
truth is directly contrary in our state to the false affirmations of such
seditious writers, as would persuade us, that the Laws and state of our
country were established before the admitting of a king... The kings
therefore in Scotland were before any estates or ranks of men within the
same, before any Parliaments were holden, or laws made’, and they dis-
tributed land and ‘erected and decerned’ estates without a parliament’s
advice.^70 For the proposition that the king is the author of laws, not
laws of the king, James VI might have cited, instead of the mythical
King Fergus, the example of the first King James of Scotland, who had
returned in 1424 from an eighteen-year captivity in England to cure
what the contemporary Scottish chronicler and royal minister, Walter
Bower, calls ‘the instability of the state of this realm’; Lord Stair, writer
in the late seventeenth century of the authoritative Institutions of the
Law of Scotland,believed that the laws James I made for the hearing of
bills of complaint, using the understanding he had gained of ‘the course
of justice in both these kingdoms’, was the effective beginning of the
Scottish high court, the Court of Session. For James VI, at any rate, the
king was above the law, though he would delight to conform his own
actions to the laws he made. Prince Henry was advised to call parlia-
ments only when new laws were absolutely necessary, and he should
watch out for the common people’s continual ‘wearying of the present
estate’ and desire for novelties, for a few well-executed laws ‘are best in
a well ruled commonweal’ (here echoing Queen Elizabeth’s address to
her parliament in 1586).^71
The English ‘commonwealth and free state’ 329(^69) CJi. 148; King James VI and I: Political Writings, 62–4, 82; Burns, The True Law of
Kingship, 232, 234, 240, 246, 284–5; on the political bearing of witch beliefs, see Bodin’s De
Magorum Daemonomania Libri IV (Basle, 1581), bk. 4, cap. 1; James VI of Scotland,
Daemonologie(Edinburgh, 1597: repr. London, 1924), 77–81; C. Larner, Enemies of God:
The Witch-hunt in Scotland(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 198; S. Clark, Thinking with Demons:
The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 670–9;
(^70) King James VI and I: Political Writings, 21, 25, 29–30, 65, 72–5; Journal of the House
of Lords[LJ], ii. 117; Burns, The True Law of Kingship, 235, 237, 241, 247, 250–1, 286, 288.
(^71) Scotichroniconby Walter Bower, general ed. D. E. R. Watt, viii (Aberdeen UP, 1987),
216–17; James, Viscount Stair, The Institutions of the Law of Scotland,ed. D. M. Walker