Out of Rehab

Alice Hunt: Two Kings or One?, 25 December 2025

The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I 
by Clare Jackson.
Allen Lane, 524 pp., £35, August, 978 0 241 61127 2
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Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King 
by Gareth Russell.
William Collins, 478 pp., £25, February, 978 0 00 866085 7
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... biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done much to establish James’s political agility ...