6331. Thomas Washington
THOMAS WASHINGTON, of Warton, Co. Lancaster, first son of ROBERT
WASHINGTON, of Warton, was born there A. D. 1493. He was son
and heir, and was aged 24 at his father's death, 9 Henry VIII. (1517).
6339. James I (VI) Stuart , King of England
James VI and I (1567-1625)
Born in Edinburgh Castle on 19 July 1566, James was the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots and her second husband, Lord Darnley. He was less than a year old when he saw his mother for the last time, and thirteen months old when he was crowned King of Scots in Stirling after her forced abdication. His childhood was constantly disturbed by the struggles of the nobles who vied for control of him. Given a demanding academic education by his tutor George Buchanan (who tried to teach him to hate his mother) and advised by four successive regents, he grew up to be a shrewd, wary intellectual who managed to reconcile the warring factions among his nobility with such success that he has been described as 'the most effective ruler Scotland ever had'. Other opinions were more mixed; David Hume wrote that 'many virtues ... it must be owned, he was possessed of, but no one of them pure, or free from the contagion of the neighbouring vices,' whilst Henri IV of France called James 'the wisest fool in Christendom'. James was a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings and in the right of his bishops to run the Scottish Church; his response to Calvinist protests was 'No Bishop, No King'.
His great ambition was to succeed Elizabeth I on the throne of England, and so he made only a formal protest when she signed his mother's death warrant in 1587. Two years later, he married Anne of Denmark. Happy together at first they had three sons and four daughters, but gradually drifted apart.
© 2001, Saul M. Montes-Bradley. All Rights Reserved