How James deployed crown finance provides fundamental insights into his personal rule.

This book rejects outright the stereotypical image of James VI and I as mindlessly extravagant and integrates crown finance with James's kingship. It offers both a fresh view of crown finance - one of the blackest elements in James's historical reputation - and a reconstruction of how the king who wrote on divine right monarchy operated his kingship in practice. Drawing on both his humanist education, particularly his reading of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, and his kingship in Scotland, James developed a clear, considered agenda for crown finance. He used it consciously to underwrite his novel position as the first king of "Great Britain" and to consolidate the Stuart dynastyoutside of Scotland. This study analyses in detail how James fashioned and refashioned political regimes in England to further this agenda between 1603-25.

JOHN CRAMSIE is Assistant Professor of British and Irish Historyat Union College, Schenectady, New York.