"King by divine right"

King by divine right:

With the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, tu Tudor line died out and James VI ( 1566-1625) of Scotland became the first Stuart king in England, with the title of James I.

• He was a protestant
• He believed that ,as a monarch, he was the representative of God on earth.
• He summoned Parliament only to ask for money, but its members refused to levy any taxes unless the money was needed for war.
• He was interested in witchcraft and the supernatural
• He belief in black magic.

As in the early days of Elizabeth I, Catholics were barred from public life and were fined if they refused to attend the Church of England.

Extreme Protestants, called Puritans, disapproved of both the rites and the bishops of the Church of England.

• They had a high sense of duty and morality
• They did not want to live in a country which they believed was going to fall into moral decline.
• The Pilgrim Fathers in 1620 left England for America on the Mayflower and founded New Plymouth.

King James authorised a new translation of the Bible in 1604. Fifty scholars, influenced by Humanists using the original Hebrew and Greek and worked on the translation for seven years. This new version would be heard and read by laymen.

The Protestant religion encouraged personal knowledge of the Bible and this version would be used by the Church of England for more than 3 hundred years, greatly influencing the spread of literacy and writing.

In 1605, some radical Catholics plotted to blow up( far saltare) the king in the Houses of Parliament. The failure of the " Gunpowder Plot"is still commemorated in England on 5th November.