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The Elizabethan Age ended when the queen died in her castle by the bank of the Thames at Richmond in 1603. (Actually in 1602 by the calendar used at the time, wherein March was the final month of the year).
Within days, in the first week in April, James VI of Scotland began his spectacular journey south to claim the English throne and bring about the union of the crowns. James, an impatient and arrogant intellectual, arrived in the capital with all the insecurities of any new monarch of those times and the common sense to see that his first ambition had to be ending the war with Spain.
Elizabeth had inherited an almost bankrupt realm. The war, still going on in spite of the success over the Spanish Armada in 1588, was a continuous drain on the fragile economy. What has this to do with the story of Empire? War with Spain meant that piracy was rife and attacks on shipping commonplace. If the British were to expand their trading interests, especially to the East Indies and the West Indies, then everything had to be done to limit the opportunities of the trading ships being attacked.
It took a year. In 1604 the war with Spain officially ended. James issued a decree that all acts of piracy must cease. The coincidence of a sort of peace was the returning to England of the first very valuable cargoes of spices from south east Asia.
Son of Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley. On Mary's abdication, James became king of Scotland at the age of one. In 1589, he married Princess Anne of Denmark (1574-1619).
On Elizabeth's death, there were some 12 potential claimants but Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's Secretary of State, had long been schooling James VI for the English throne.
James's birthright was by his great-grandmother, Margaret Tudor (1489-1541), the eldest daughter of Henry VII of England who had married James IV of Scotland. As monarch of the two crowns, James wished to be known as king of Great Britain and so was the first to use the title. His surviving legacy is the King James's Version of the Holy Bible.
When James VI & I sent out his proclamation to cease pirateering, he was sending it to sailors who were official corsairs. Pirates were usually licenced and high-seas robbery was considered part of the war effort with the state benefiting from this treasure trove. In those times there was no email. No text messaging. Many of the English corsairs loitering along the Spanish Main and off the Azores did not even know that Elizabeth was dead. It took as long as a year before the royal proclamation reached all the pirates - even then obedience was extremely hard to enforce.
James VI proclamation on piracy
According to King James, piracy had to end if there was to be progress towards peace, leading to colonial expansion. On the 23rd of June, sixteen hundred and three (James was not yet crowned king), he ordered all the pirates to come home.
"We are not ignorant that our late dear Sister, the late Queen of England, had of long time wars with the king of Spain, and during that time gave Licences and Commissions to divers of her, and our now Subjects, to let out and furnish to sea divers ships warlikely appointed, for the surprising and taking of the said King's subjects' goods, and for the enjoying of the same, being taken and brought home as lawful Prize.
"We further will and command, that our men of war, as be now at sea having no sufficient commission as aforesaid, and have taken, or shall go to sea hereafter, and shall take any the ships or goods of any subject of any Prince in league or amity with us, shall be reputed and taken as pirates and both they and all their accessories, maintainers, comforters, and partakers shall suffer death as pirates and accessories to piracy, with confiscation of all their lands and goods, according to the ancient Laws of this Realm. Given at our Manor of Greenwich the twenty third day of June, in the first year of our Reign of England, France, and Ireland, and in the sixth and thirtieth of Scotland. God save the king."
