The Association community is warmly invited to our Haileybury Lecture series. In this session, we will be joined by Professor Clare Jackson, who will be delivering a lecture on “The ‘wisest’ fool in Christendom? Reappraising King James VI & I after 400 years”
2025 marked the 400th anniversary of the death of King James VI & I at his Theobalds estate, near Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire. One of Britain’s most consequential and interesting monarchs, James was the first monarch to rule both England and Scotland and is the king after whom our national flag – the ‘Union Jack’ – is nicknamed. A major intellectual, James’s preoccupations ranged from witchcraft and theological controversy to hunting, diplomacy, poetry and sartorial fashions. Ruler of Scotland for nearly four decades before his accession to the English throne in 1603, James was a ‘cradle king’ whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas, including his abduction in the ‘Ruthven Raid’ in 1582 and his attempted assassination in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In his lifetime, James often confounded contemporaries’ expectations while his posthumous reputation has been distorted by homophobic prejudice and crude stereotypes.
Clare Jackson is Honorary Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. She has presented a number of highly successful programmes on the Stuart dynasty for the BBC and is the author of Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688 (2021), which won the 2022 Wolfson History Prize. Her latest book The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I (2025) won the 2026 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography.
*Please note, this is a School run event. The booking link redirects you to the Haileybury website. Booking goes live 2 weeks before the event.