James I

James I is Charles Williams's biography of James VI of Scotland and I of England, published in 1934 as part of a series of short lives of English monarchs and statesmen. Williams was then working as an editor at Oxford University Press in London, and he wrote the book alongside his novels, poetry, and criticism, in the years before he became widely known as a theologian of romantic love and co-inheritance. The commission was a historical one, but the author was already a practicing Anglican writer, and the habits of attention he brought to a king were those he brought to souls.

The book is a portrait of a ruler whom the English tradition has mostly mocked: the learned, anxious, garrulous Scot who preached the divine right of kings, wrote on demonology and tobacco, and lavished affection on favourites. Williams does not simply rescue him. He takes seriously James's actual intelligence and his genuine desire for peace, and he sets these beside the weaknesses that wrecked so much of the reign: the extravagance, the susceptibility to flattery, the fatal gap between a high theory of kingship and the ordinary business of governing. The question the biography keeps returning to is how a mind so full of sound principles could be so poor at embodying them. Williams reads the king's theology of monarchy not as mere politics but as a doctrine he believed and could not live, and he treats the resulting tension with a moral seriousness that is rare in popular biography of the period. The prose is brisk, ironic, and compressed, and the judgments are pointed without being cruel.

The book has continued to matter mainly because of its author. Readers of Williams's later work on the Arthurian cycle, on The Figure of Beatrice, and on the doctrine of substituted love will find here an early instance of his lifelong interest in the relation between an ideal and the person who fails it. It also remains a readable short account of the first Stuart king, written by someone with no interest in making him either a villain or a hero.

Who should read this: readers already drawn to Charles Williams who want to see his moral imagination at work on a historical subject, and those who want a concise, literate introduction to James's character and reign. It is not a devotional book and offers no spiritual formation in any direct sense; anyone looking for Williams's theology of romantic love or substitution should begin with his explicitly theological writing instead. Nor is it a substitute for a scholarly, archive-based life of the king.