Was James I of England a good king?

[grumbler]

I rated him mediocre.  He did recognize that there were practical limits to his power, but he brought up his son to refuse the acknowledge that, and he didn't reform any of the institutions that needed to be reformed if he was to leave a stable legacy.

[Razgovory]

Good Enough.

[Habbaku]

Peaceful/defensive maybe better? No desperately expensive interventions on the continent.

Defensive and lacking in ruinous foreign adventures I'll grant, but Elizabeth didn't have the luxury of being particularly "peaceful" it seems to me. She intervened multiple times on the continent, had the massive failure of the English Armada, the conflict in Ireland, the war with Scotland, etc.

[Valmy]

I think his rating varies a bit depending on which of his three kingdoms we are talking about. I think I could see him being anywhere from good to disastrous depending one what we are talking about.

He ultimately failed in his aims of creating a united Kingdom in England and Scotland, however that doesn't mean much as that was an incredibly ambitious scheme, but he did manage to balance things pretty well and manage forces that would ultimately be fatal to his son. In Ireland his little scheme of bringing peace, civilization, and Protestantism through the inspirational plantations of good Scots and Englishmen was both a failure in his lifetime and going forward, and managed to effectively unite the Old English and Celtic Irish against the British. It is hard not to see him as one of the more disastrous rulers of Ireland, even considering the stiff competition for that title.

But it is not like I am some expert on every detail of his reign. I could be missing something there.

[Admiral Yi]

What do you mean by Old English Valmy?

[Valmy]

What do you mean by Old English Valmy?

The Norman lords who invaded Ireland way back in the 13th century (and later pre-Tudor immigrants). Their descendants. They had been the main pillar of the English King's attempts to rule Ireland since then but the Protestant reformation and the policies of the Tudors and the Stuarts eventually made them make common cause with the Irish. James' policies were a last straw for most of them.

[Josquius]

Medium-OK.
A lot of his achievements were down to being succesfully born whilst his cousins didn't have kids. But he didn't make any standout errors piecing together the union of the crowns.

[Savonarola]

I'm curious, how did the professor describe Charles I?

An even bigger disaster.  In fact he said all the Stuart kings were terrible.

The course is offered as a political science, humanities or sociology course.  The professor doesn't seem that well informed about history (among other things he said that Mary Tudor stepped down so her protestant sister could inherit the throne); however I thought I might have been missing something about James I so I posed the question here.

[Sheilbh]

The Norman lords who invaded Ireland way back in the 13th century (and later pre-Tudor immigrants). Their descendants. They had been the main pillar of the English King's attempts to rule Ireland since then but the Protestant reformation and the policies of the Tudors and the Stuarts eventually made them make common cause with the Irish. James' policies were a last straw for most of them.

Yeah - to the extent that any name with a "Fitz" is of Norman origin, but now clearly very Irish.

They also mingled more with the general Irish population (like the Normans elsewhere) over centuries rather than being planters and settlers.

An even bigger disaster.  In fact he said all the Stuart kings were terrible.

Nice to know Whig history's still around

[Admiral Yi]

I thought the prefix Fitz meant aknowledged bastard son of.

So did these early Norman settlers come as invaders directly from Normandy?  Did they come as part of formal Norman English policy of Irish colonization?  Were they disenfranchised second and third sons looking for land?  What's the deal, what's the skinny?

[The Larch]

I thought the prefix Fitz meant aknowledged bastard son of.

So did these early Norman settlers come as invaders directly from Normandy?  Did they come as part of formal Norman English policy of Irish colonization?  Were they disenfranchised second and third sons looking for land?  What's the deal, what's the skinny?

This is what wiki says:

Fitz (pronounced "fits") was a patronymic indicator used in Anglo-Norman England to help distinguish individuals by identifying their immediate predecessors. Meaning "son of", it would precede the father's forename, or less commonly a title held by the father. In rare cases it formed part of a matronymic to associate the bearer with a more prominent mother. Convention among modern historians is to represent the word as fitz, but in the original Norman French documentation it appears as fiz, filz, or similar forms, deriving from the Old French noun filz, fiz (French fils), meaning "son of", and ultimately from Latin filius (son). Its use during the period of English surname adoption led to its incorporation into patronymic surnames, and at later periods this form was adopted by English kings for the surnames given some of their recognized illegitimate children, and by Irish families when anglicizing their Gaelic patronymic surnames.

[Valmy]

I thought the prefix Fitz meant aknowledged bastard son of.

So did these early Norman settlers come as invaders directly from Normandy?  Did they come as part of formal Norman English policy of Irish colonization?  Were they disenfranchised second and third sons looking for land?  What's the deal, what's the skinny?

Probably...sort of...maybe.

The story goes that Henry II, the guy who rid himself of troublesome priests, was constantly being harrassed to go into Ireland. Irish lords wanted to use the Normans to fight their rivals, his knights and vassals wanted adventure and some land, and the church thought the Irish monasteries were out of control and needed a good Catholic overlord. Henry was stretched thin as it was with his massive Angevin Empire in France and knew Ireland was a big mess and wanted nothing to do with it but eventually he wore down and granted permission for the Irish lords to recruit whomever wanted to go. So a bunch of Normans (I presume mostly from England but I suspect a few from France as well) invaded and took over a bunch of the towns and eventually ran out of gas and they just added to the already chaotic political situation.

Henry II first tried to work through a local Irish lord, Rory O'Connor I think is his anglicized name, to be his deputy but that was a disaster. Then he sent over his son, the ever successful John Lackland, and that was a big disaster. So after that Ireland kind of descended into a chaotic stalemate that the English Kings sort of treated with apathy and neglect. Now I presume people from England and France continued to settle there and the fortunes of the "Old English" waxed and waned. Eventually the Tudors sought to increase their control of Ireland and this, combined with the Protestant Reformation in England and Scotland, took a bad situation and somehow made it worse. And then James I came along and began to build the situation that Ireland finds itself in today by introducing these plantations of Scots and English settlers who were supposed to show the Irish advanced farming and techniques and the joys of Protestantism and civilization and turn those Irish barbarians into right proper British subjects. The "Old English" were at first glad to see the more royal involvement but being Catholics quickly realized their power was being reduced in favor of Protestants and these new comers. So at that point they began to more and more oppose the British. It is why Dublin, once the center of English rule, is now the capital of Ireland.

So anyway that is my very simplistic understanding of the situation and who these Old English were. Sheilbh might know more specifics.

[Admiral Yi]

Cool.  Had never even heard any of that before.

[Sheilbh]

I've no idea and I think that all sounds right.

The other point which is key is that the Normans were ultimately conquering lords and they behaved like typical medieval conquering lords - they got involved in local politics, they fought among themselves, they inter-married with the grand Irish noble families like the O'Conors, O'Neills or O'Donnells. They were to a large extent assimilated into the Irish order, like Normans everywhere. In part this may have been because medieval English politics was focused on France and there's kings being deposed and civil wars. So the English crown and state is not that directly involved in Ireland and the Anglo-Normans get on with their own thing. By the 16th century they're described as "more Irish than the Irish themselves" - they move perhaps from being Anglo-Normans in Ireland to Hiberno-Normans.

This shifts with the Tudors and especially the reformation. The Tudors intend to tie Ireland into the English state and to run it - so they send over their men the New English. Plus they go Protestant while the Old English, like the Irish generally remained Catholic. The Tudors start plantations and settlements of English into Ireland as early colonisation - the plan for many early American colonies is directly taken from Derry, right down to the walls. It's not purely religious though as this is when there starts to be some quasi-racial discourse around the Irish and settlement continues under Mary just as much as the Protestant Tudors. It accelerates hugely with James I and the Stuarts, particularly with the predominately Scottish settlement of Ulster - which is why Protestantism in Ulster is Presbyterian, not Anglican and they're doing stuff to encourage the preservation of Ulster Scots.

And James I/VI wins in Ireland against revolts which is seen as the end of the Gaelic order in Ireland at least symbolically with the flight of the earls. The last great Irish landowners flee to continental Europe and the land is seized and divvied up by (generally) absentee landlords, if not settled either by private colonial companies or the crown.

[Admiral Yi]

Did the Norman Irish get dispossesed as well?

Many thanks all.