The Basilikon Doron of King James VI and I | Hacker News Reader

The Basilikon Doron of King James VI and I

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23 pointsdrdee7 comments

I love seeing James the VI and I because so many Englishmen fixate on James I and forget he was sixth of that ilk in Scotland. My school in Edinburgh was founded by his wife's jeweller Jinglin' Geordie, he held the royal (gambling and other) debts.

Less fortunately for Scotland perhaps, the Scots crown diminished from this point on. Money moved south with the king, the Darien Scheme destroyed the scots economy and "the parcel of rogues" agreed to sell the debt to England in the Union. Long after James VI & I of course.

Charles I fixation with divine right of kings must stem from this work. So the English revolution and Cromwell also lies in the bones of his book. Maybe he should have stuck to poetry. Lovely to have his manuscript writing.

Also interesting how Scottish postboxes don't have the cypher EIIR for the present queen, as she is not considered II by many Scots, and the boxes would be repeatedly vandalised/blown up. I believe though that Churchill introduced legislation that all future monarchs would be numbered as the higher of the two kingdoms, so a future James would be the VII.

Indeed: the current Queen is Elizabeth II of England, but Elizabeth I of Scots as well as the United Kingdom.

That's one James, not two Jameses, in case anyone besides me didn't know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I

And yes, it's the King James of the Bible version:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version

And of Shakespeare patronage

From the Scots sonnet:

  > Zour father biddis zow studie heir and reid

It becomes easier to decipher if you know that it's actually Y, not Z. By various accidents of history, printers of the time used Z for the antiquated letter Ȝ (yogh), which itself came from another antiquated letter-form (ᵹ) and stood for a variety of sounds represented in modern English spelling with Y, J, etc.

Ok, Basilikon and basil as synonyms for royal have a pretty interesting history:

So it's unclear why basil's lumped in with royalty, but the story gets even more muddled when a mythical monster rears its tiny, ugly head. The basilisk, which you might remember from your Greek mythology or your Harry Potter, depending on your personal brand of nerdiness, was originally a tiny, highly venomous serpent. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder named it basiliskos, Greek for "little king," because it supposedly had a crown-shaped mark on its head. It had the power to freeze living things with its gaze and melt surrounding shrubs with its poison, and might have been based on stories of King Cobras filtering over to Ancient Greece from India.

https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/...

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