The World of King James VI and I

For the first time in 50 years, an exhibition about King James VI and I opens in Edinburgh, the city where the monarch was born in 1566 and crowned barely a year later after the forced abdication of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots (26 April–14 September). The National Galleries of Scotland’s Portrait Gallery is pulling out all the stops for its royal native son, presenting a selection of the king’s personal effects, items of Jacobean courtly fashion and such historically significant objects as an early edition of the King James Bible. The show is geographically expansive – for instance, it tracks the exploration of the ‘New World’ and includes a print of Pocahontas in Jacobean attire – yet also intimate: a bespoke scent has been designed to give visitors a whiff of James’s court. But this is no hagiography: the exhibition accounts for the human cost of Jacobean imperialism and reveals James’s role in rekindling the practice of witch trials, which led to the state-sponsored killing of hundreds of women.

Find out more from the National Galleries of Scotland’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

James VI and I, 1566–1625. King of Scotland 1567–1625. King of England and Ireland 1603–1625 (1604), John de Critz. National Galleries of Scotland

Waistcoat embroidered with coloured silk and metal thread, with pink ribbon ties (c. 1610), maker unknown. Fashion Museum Bath

James VI and I, 1566–1625. King of Scotland 1567–1625. King of England and Ireland 1603–1625 (c. 1609), Nicholas Hilliard. Courtesy Collection of the Buchanan Society