indefeasible rights, and that all the privileges of subjects were
revocable gifts, they were roused to hostility. His weaknesses cast
suspicion on his best-meant schemes. His favour for his countrymen
helped to defeat his wise wish to bring about a full union between
England and Scotland. His profusion, which had been bad in the poverty
of Scotland and was boundless amid the wealth of England, kept him
necessitous, and drove him to shifts. Posterity can give him credit for
his desire to forward religious peace in Europe, but his Protestant
subjects were simply frightened when he sought a matrimonial alliance
with Spain. Sagacious men among his contemporaries could not see the
consistency of a king who married his daughter Elizabeth to the elector
palatine, a leader of the German Protestants, and also sought to marry
his son to an infanta of Spain. The king's subservience to Spain was
indeed almost besotted. He could not see her real weakness, and he
allowed himself to be befooled by the ministers of Philip III. and
Philip IV. The end of his scheming was that he was dragged into a
needless war with Spain by his son Charles and his favourite George
Villiers, duke of Buckingham, just before his death on the 5th of March
1625 at his favourite residence, Theobalds.
James married in 1589 Anne, second daughter of Frederick II., king of
Denmark. His voyage to meet his bride, whose ship had been driven into a
Norwegian port by bad weather, is the only episode of a romantic
character in the life of this very prosaic member of a poetic family. By
this wife James had three children who survived infancy: Henry
Frederick, prince of Wales, who died in 1612; Charles, the future king;
and Elizabeth, wife of the elector palatine, Frederick V.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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