The importance of this emphasis on legislative sovereignty appeared
when James added the English to his Scottish crown, and attempted
(like the legendary Fergus!) to forge a new state, this time by uniting the
laws of two kingdoms. In the new address ‘to the reader’ prefaced to
Basilicon Doronin 1603, James tactfully declined to discuss any sick-
nesses there might be in ‘the state of England, as a matter wherein I
never had experience’; his ‘blood and descent’ proclaimed his interest ‘in
the prosperity of that state’, but he would not meddle in the government
of the lawful queen who presently ruled over it, who (he did not doubt)
was as zealous to purge ‘any corruptions stollen in her state’ as good
subjects were to inform her of them. If by ‘state’ here he meant ‘regime’,
James found himself after 1603 having to work with a parliament
possessing a high view of its responsibility to devise ‘good and necessary
laws’ for ‘the whole State of the Commonwealth in general’, as Speaker
Popham had told Elizabeth in 1581; laws including in that particular
year an act to bridle the enemies of the ‘most royal Person, State and
Government’ of the Queen.^72
In January 1604 James informed the Scots that he intended to make
of the twin kingdoms, already joined together in him as single head, a
‘sincere and perfect union’, wherein they should ‘love one another as no
more two but one estate’. In March, in the first of the long speeches to
the English parliament which became a feature of his reign, after
expressing his thanks to ‘the whole State’, ‘the whole Body of this King-
dom’, for the readiness with which he had been received in the place
which God had granted him, he obtained the appointment of a com-
mission to prepare, along with Scottish delegates, a legal union of the
two realms. James was supported in his preaching of the benefits and
possibility of such a union by a great Scottish jurist, Sir Thomas Craig,
who argued in his De Unione Regnorum Britanniaethat Britain had
always needed a single imperiumto save its ‘state’ from catastrophe; it
was a natural Civitas or Corpus Reipublicae (body of a common-
wealth), whose laws might, with the consent of both peoples, be fused
into one, since they had a common basis in the Saxon kings’ peace and
the feudal laws and charters of the Normans.^73
But James I’s latter-day attempt to create a new monarchical state by
330 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(Edinburgh and Glasgow UPs, 779, 784, 815–16; King James VI and I: Political Writings,
21–2, 25, 29–30.
(^72) Political Writings,11; CJi. 137; B. P. Levack, ‘Law, sovereignty and the union’, in Scots
and Britons; Burns, The True Law of Kingship, 255 ff.
(^73) Burns, ibid. 262; King James VI and I: Political Writings, 132–46; Sir Thomas Craig, De
Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, ed. and. tr. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh: Scottish
History Society, 1909), 3, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26, 89–90, 209, 227, 231, 233, 241, 327–8;
J. W. Cairns, T. D. Fergus, and H. L. MacQueen on John Skene and Thomas Craig, in
Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. J. MacQueen (Edinburgh UP, 1990).