Part of a series of short books on the English monarchs (the other one I’ve read is Aethelred the Unready). When Queen Elizabeth I died childless, James I/VI inherited the throne of England on the basis that Henry VII was his great-grandfather; he was already King of the Scots as the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who had abdicated under pressure from her nobility. Thomas Cogswell portrays James as flawed but generally competent as a ruler. James was passionately dedicated to hunting, to the extent that he was accused of neglecting state business to go after wildlife; he lavishly spent the treasury surplus that Elizabeth I had painstakingly accumulated; and he may have based his choice of councilors on whether they were physically attractive rather than whether they were competent. Still, he kept the peace both internally and externally, was reasonably intelligent for an English ruler (he’s the only one whose “Complete Works” were published), was the target of The Gunpowder Plot, and was responsible (in the sense that he was King at the time) for the King James Bible and the English settlement of North America.

A quick and entertaining read. Illustrated with portraits of James at various life stages, including a posthumous one by Reubens that shows him being escorted to Heaven by a flock of cherubs. He looks a little nervous. For more of James I and his times, see The Royal Stuarts, God’s Secretaries, The Gunpowder Plot, God’s Secret Agents, Faith and Treason, and Unnatural Murder). ( )