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Blow out the trumpet!On the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the succession of the English crown fell upon the head of the reigning Scottish king, James VI. He became James I of the first Scottish, Irish and English kingdoms; Great Britain as he proclaimed it. The first sixty years of the Stuart monarchs gave us the Gunpowder Plot, still commemorated with the burning of the effergy of the Dutchman Guido Fawkes, the establishment of a Parliament which was to meet at regular intervals rather than the ad hoc fund raising body it had previously been, the mass exodus of the poor and persecuted to start a new life in the New World and the only period in British history where the nation was governed as a Republic.  Programmes |