The Sun Rising by Anna Whitelock

The Sun Rising: King James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain, 1603-1625

By Anna Whitelock

Viking 2025

The man who was to become King James I of England in 1603 at the death of old Queen Elizabeth was a few years short of forty and already far more cosmopolitan than any ruler of the island in five hundred years, and as Anna Whitelock makes clear in her insightful new book The Sun Rising: King James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain, 1603-1625, he had big dreams and was quick to express them. Despite the resistance of “the curiosity of a few giddy heads” in Parliament, he issued royal proclamations calling himself the king of “Great Britain” rather than plain old little England.

“James’s assumption of the personal of a British monarch, with trappings of national flag, name and nascent British identity – all without parliamentary approval – threatened English sensibilities,” Whitelock writes. “While the Scottish Parliament accepted and adopted the name of Great Britain, albeit reluctantly, Parliament in England did not.” But it hardly slowed him down, and the times were in his favor: whatever it was called, his new kingdom was amassing money and sending out ships all over the world. This was the era of the Virginia Company and Pocahontas and John Smith, who very much wanted to add to “King James’s vision of imperium” by adding the New World to the Old. This was the era of Sir Walter Ralegh and imperialism cheerleader Richard Hakluyt. Whitelock points out that he was one of a great chorus of speakers and writers who saw a wide variety of reasons for that addition: “Hakluyt argued the importance of colonisation for the ‘enlargement of the gospel of Christ’,” for instance, “for commodities which were supplied by Europe, Africa and Asia; the ‘employment of many thousands of our idle people’, and as a challenge to the wealth and power of the Spanish in Europe and in the Indies.”

This was the menu, and The Sun Rising traces them through the two decades of this new rule: militant evangelism (recurring more strongly in these pages than any other item), international domination, and of course overwhelming greed. Whitelock’s research is wide-ranging and very pleasingly comprehensive (her “select” bibliography is extensive enough to make the mind boggle at what the un-select version looked like), and one perhaps unexpected side-effect of all that research is hands-down the book’s most surprisingly enjoyable element: its portrait of James.

That’s him on the US cover, that sharply-coiffed handsome Victorian gentleman decked out for a fancy dress ball. It’s hardly the traditional image of a slope-eyed lip-drooling Stuart imbecile that was fashioned and energetically promulgated by his enemies. Whitelock’s research (and lively writing style) dispense with any side’s PR in favor of documentable reality, and her James is every bit as intelligent, curious, wry, and assured as his great Tudor predecessor, with ten times her stomach for conquest and hunger for the aforementioned “imperium.” Whitelock’s book makes the conquest of the New World an appreciable jump more comprehensible in human terms.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News