The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of King James VI and I

Summary

A major reassessment of King James, revealing the long origins of an uneasily united kingdom

King James, often overlooked or, more often, cruelly stereotyped, presents a fascinating figure: a diplomat whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas. James identified himself with the “Mirror of Great Britain,” a spectacular jewel commissioned upon his accession to the English throne, which not only furnished him with one of his favorite metaphors―that of the mirror, with its limitless capacity to magnify, illuminate, and distort―but gave symbolic endorsement to his vision of British union.

Wolfson History Prize–winning historian Clare Jackson finally reappraises the life and legacy of the “first king of Great Britain.” Jackson contextualizes the tempest of James’s childhood as well as the many attempts on his life. So, too, does she consider the renewed creativity of the Jacobean era, culminating in the King James Bible, Macbeth, and King Lear, and demonstrates how the king’s keen interest in joining worlds old and new set the geopolitical stage for centuries to come.

In so doing, Jackson reveals King James as perhaps the most consequential monarch of the early modern era, whose impact, for better and for worse, still reverberates today. Closely attentive to James’s own words, The Mirror of Great Britain tells the story of this highly unusual, significant monarch with flair, insight, and, above all, empathy for the man who bore the crown.