Stuart England

No king of England had had a more secure or more enviable inheritance than that to which James VI of Scotland succeeded as James I of England on the death of his distant cousin the childless Queen Elizabeth on 24 March 1603. Over the previous century the Tudors had overcome fundamental opposition to their rule and built a durable system of government. The great barionial families which had fought the Wars of the Roses in the later fifteenth century had been tamed or extinguished, and their military followings abolished. By the end of the sixteenth century a high proporation of noble families owed their eminence not to independent bases of power in the regions where their estates lay, but to the favour of the cron, whose policies they implermented in the localities and at whose court they competed for further rewards. In areas where previously the king's writ had at times seemed scarcely to run, especially Wales and the north of England, the royal machinery of justice had first rivalled and then superseded the power of local magnates as a focus of loyalty. By the time of James I's accession the regional rebellions of 1536-69 belonged to the past. -- Introduction.… (more)