Kingdom of Heaven Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Worship and Trade
A Non-Denominational & Unincorporated Church
KING James the 1st of England was originally King James the 6th of Scotland.
He was the son of a black father and a coloured mother both of royal blood.
Without the necessary background, this may sound like a far-fetched story motivated by a crazy desire to identify black heroes in world history.
Here is the necessary background.
We should not forget, that after the Moors settled in Spain and southern Europe in 711 CE, significant numbers of black people found their way into northern European countries such as Scotland, Ireland, France and Denmark.
The nations of Scotland and Ireland were, since the beginning of the first millennium, had significant numbers of blacks, who in Scotland, wielded political power as the kings and rulers.
It is also from the preponderance of black people in Ireland in medieval period that the term ‘black Irish’ has continued to be used to this day.
After the downfall of the Moors in Granada, Spain, the white countries of Europe took a special interest in Scotland because there was a thriving black population there.
Unlike the Moors in Southern Europe who were Moslems, the Scottish blacks were Christians and therefore could not be victimised on grounds of religion.
They also wielded significant military power.
To neutralise black influence in Scotland the neighbouring white nations adopted the strategy of white washing the line of the black kings of Scotland.
They entered into treaties with the Scottish kings that would ensure intermarriages between white princesses of the northern countries and the black kings of Scotland and their heirs.
These were arranged marriages that would be overlooked by the Catholic Church.
King James the 4th of Scotland was made to marry Margaret, the daughter of King Henry the 7th of England.
England was then still under the Roman Catholic Church and it was King Henry the 8th of England who would later break away from the Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church.
It was from James the 4th’s arranged marriage with Margaret that the Scottish Kings began having a legitimate shot at kingship in England.
James the 5th was born to Margaret and would also be made to marry two white French women and his second wife was Mary the daughter of the Duke of Guise. This Mary gave birth to a daughter she named Mary and would inherit the Scottish kingdom after the death of her father James the 5th.
She was known as Mary the Queen of Scotland.
Mary was a Catholic and the Queen of England hated her for this and also the fact that Mary had a legitimate claim to the English throne through her ancestors Henry 7th and grandmother, Margaret.
It was arranged that Mary (Queen of Scotts) be married to Edward the son of the British King, Henry 8th.
In response, Mary’s mother, the daughter of the Duke of Guise, a Catholic, condemned the arrangement and, the Queen of the Scotts had to decline the marriage.
From then on, Italy, France and England began battling of influence for the Scottish kingdom.
Mary’s mother as a daughter of a French Duke had been very influential during Queen Mary’s reign, but when she eventually died, the Queen of Scotland became isolated and vulnerable.
In 1565, Queen Mary was married by her cousin, a black Scottish man of the royal family who was called Darnley.
Darnley was killed in 1567 by the white rivals of the Queen, but he had left Queen Mary a male heir of her own lineage.
Queen Mary’s son was born a few months before his father’s murder and he was named James the 6th.
James the 6th was, therefore, the son of a black man and a coloured woman.
The black man’s gene is dominant to the white man’s gene because the latter is recessive.
When the two races meet through miscegenation, it is the white side which is forced to die (recess); however the offspring loses some black characteristics such as kinkiness of hair and darkness of skin, but only to a small extent.
This means James the 6th being a son of a black man and a coloured woman, probably looked no different from any black man we see today.
The white nations were angered firstly by Mary’s refusal to marry Edward of England and for that they murdered a man named Beaton who was an advisor to Mary and her mother.
When Mary produced a black heir, she undid the generations of genetic whitewashing that the whites had forced the Scottish kings to succumb to.
Darnley was killed for fathering Mary’s black heir.
Mary too would face imprisonment and Queen Elizabeth laid a heavy hand on her because she was Catholic and she was a potential competitor to the throne of England.
In 1587, Mary the Queen of Scotland was executed by order of Queen Elizabeth of England.
King James the 6th then began ruling Scotland.
Although angered by his mother’s death, he did not retaliate against England. Rather he looked at the situation diplomatically and realised that the Catholic Church had no place in the region of Northern Europe anymore.
All the other nations of Northern Europe with exception of France were now affiliated to protestant churches.
The Caucasian whites who were once known as barbarians had a bad history with the Catholic Church and had been exploited and treated as less than humans by the Roman popes and priests for over 1 000 years.
For this reason, protestant churches were popular in northern Europe and they were named ‘protestant’ because they were in protest to the Roman Catholic Church which was once considered orthodox.
King James the 6th thus made ties with the Anglican Church through associating closely with the English.
Very quickly, he became an ally of England and an enemy of the Catholic Church. Once England and Scotland were cooperating with each other, France could not do much against the Scotts on behalf of the Catholics.
This angered authorities of the Roman Catholic Church because the church had lost its dominion over the northern territories of Europe.
Meanwhile, King James was becoming great in his own country.
He was known for good governance and having a general sense of kingship which lacked in many European nations at this time.
He treasured nobility, but conducted his duties with dignity and humility.
His government was orderly popular.
The kingdom of England was at this time lacking male heirs yet there was a descendant of King Henry the 7thh (through Margaret) thriving in Scotland.
Before long, it became obvious that England was going to be under King James.
In 1603, King James the 6th of Scotland was crowned King James the 1st of England.
Scotland, England and Ireland were now all under his rule.
The King of Witch Hunters. King James I
Spurred on by his newfound conviction, in 1590, James instigated a widespread purge of witches. He began by rooting out the witches in Scotland he believed to be responsible for the potentially fatal May storms that he was convinced were part of a wide scale plot to end his life. In all, between 70 and 100 ‘witches’ from the Scottish coastal town of North Berwick were rounded up and accused of using their devilish arts to attempt to kill the King and his new wife.
Most of the suspect’s confessed- under torture. Some admitted to trying to kill the king using a wax effigy. Others claimed to have whipped up the infamous storm by casting spells using bizarre items such as male genitalia and severed limbs- and a dead cat and offering them to the sea. Satan himself had also joined in the fun when the witches summoned him to their aid during a black mass in North Berwick Churchyard. The witches were swiftly executed- and James left his subjects in no doubt that witches were in their midst by circulating details of the trials throughout the country in a pamphlet, Newes from Scotland.
Even though witchcraft was already a criminal offense in Scotland, the law having outlawed it in 1563, the North Berwick trials were unique. For the authorities did not often pursue witches. James fervently believed this had to change. So, in 1590, he tightened up the witchcraft law- and did his best to ensure that the courts followed it through. Now any dabbling with magic, whether black or white could bring an individual to the fire.
In 1591, James followed one trial with particular interest. Mary Napier’s trial was unique because the court accused her of consulting a witch with treasonable intent- not being a witch herself. James was determined she should die. So when Napier claimed to be pregnant, the King told the court to find out if she was indeed pregnant- and if not, burn her. The King’s disappointment was deep, however when the court acquitted Napier of the charges, pregnant or not.
These trials and executions, however, had warmed James up nicely for his subject. So he moved on to a full-scale book. In 1597, James published his Daemonologie or “the Science of Demons.” In doing so, he became the only monarch in history to publish a book about witches- and how to find them. The eighty-page book was the result of seven years of painstaking research. Like the medieval Malleus Maleficarum, theDaemonologie was designed to convince readers of the genuine danger of witches- as well as equip them with the knowledge to root them out.
The book became the main point of reference for Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder general. In the meantime, it equipped Scottish witchfinders with the wherewithal to carry out the king’s will. By the time James left Scotland to take up the throne of England, half the Scottish witches arrested were being convicted – and burnt.
The Witches of Leicester
On his arrival in England in 1603, James found himself king of a country of skeptics. Although witchcraft was on the statute books, the numbers of trials had been steadily declining during the reign of Elizabeth I. James immediately set about remedying this. Daemonologie was reprinted twice and in 1604the law was tightened to mirror that in Scotland. Hanging now became mandatory for the crime. The result was a pleasing surge in paranoia. A rash of copycat pamphlets followed the Daemonologie’s republication. So did a spate of trials, the most famous being that of Lancashire’s Pendle witches in 1612.
The fact that his subjects were very well aware of what their new monarch’s pet subject was shows in many of the new and popular plays of the time. In 1604, Christopher Marlow’s The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, which was first performed in 1588, was re-released. Ben Johnson followed suit by writing his new witch play, The Masque of Queens. However, the most famous witchcraft play of the period was Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which drew on many of the motifs of witchcraft beloved to James- and had its inaugural performance in 1607 when Queen Anne’s brother, the King of Denmark came to visit.
However, as his reign in England progressed, James became a less fervent, more skeptical witchfinder. In 1616, the King was on royal progress about the country when his interest was piqued by a provincial witchcraft case in the town of Leicester. At its center was a 12-year-old boy, John Smythe from Husbands Bosworth, a Leicestershire village. The child had accused a group of women of bewitching him. Nine women were arrested and brought to trial at the Leicester assizes.
Town officials told the fascinated King how during the court case, John Smythe had given ample evidence of the ‘strange fits’induced by the witch’s craft. While possessed by the witch’s familiar animal spirits, he produced the exact noises of the animal in question, barking, meowing or clucking as appropriate. The court also witnessed how he became so strong that two men could not hold him and that he could”strike himself such blows on his breast…that you might hear the sound of it the length of the chamber….and yet all he did to himself did him no hurt.”
This evidence convinced the judges, and the women were found guilty and hung. Having heard the particulars of the case, and having so narrowly escaped the wiles of witches himself, James was eager to meet a fellow survivor. So he asked to meet John Smythe so he could question him about his experience. The boy was presented to the king. However, the experience of meeting his monarch must have been overwhelming -because Smythe immediately broke down and admitted he had made the whole story up.
Quite inadvertently, the witchfinder king had exonerated the Leicester witches-albeit too late to save their lives.
The Supernatural 1611 King James Version Bible
When the King James Bible was introduced in 1611, it carried these words on its title page: "Appointed to be read in churches."
King James Version (KJV), also called Authorized Version or King James Bible, English translation of the Bible, published in 1611 under the auspices of King James I of England. The translation had a marked influence on English literary style and was generally accepted as the standard English Bible from the mid-17th to the early 20th century.
Background
The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) succeeded in imposing a high degree of uniformity upon the Church of England. Protestantism was reinstated as the official religion of England after the short reign of Mary I (1553–58), who had attempted to restore Roman Catholicism in the country. In 1604, soon after James’s coronation as king of England, a conference of churchmen requested that the English Bible be revised because existing translations “were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.” The Great Bible that had been authorized by Henry VIII (1538) enjoyed some popularity, but its successive editions contained several inconsistencies. The Bishops’ Bible (1568) was well regarded by the clergy but failed to gain wide acceptance or the official authorization of Elizabeth. The most popular English translation was the Geneva Bible (1557; first published in England in 1576), which had been made in Geneva by English Protestants living in exile during Mary’s persecutions. Never authorized by the crown, it was particularly popular among Puritans but not among many more-conservative clergymen.
Preparation and early editions
Given the perceived need for a new authorized translation, James was quick to appreciate the broader value of the proposal and at once made the project his own. By June 30, 1604, James had approved a list of 54 revisers, although extant records show that 47 scholars actually participated. They were organized into six companies, two each working separately at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge on sections of the Bible assigned to them. Richard Bancroft (1544–1610), archbishop of Canterbury, served as overseer and established doctrinal conventions for the translators. The new Bible was published in 1611.
Not since the Septuagint—the Greek-language version of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) produced between the 3rd and the 2nd centuries BCE—had a translation of the Bible been undertaken under royal sponsorship as a cooperative venture on so grandiose a scale. An elaborate set of rules was contrived to curb individual proclivities and to ensure the translation’s scholarly and nonpartisan character. In contrast to earlier practice, the new version was to use vulgar forms of proper names (e.g., “Jonas” or “Jonah” for the Hebrew “Yonah”), in keeping with its aim to make the Scriptures popular and familiar. The translators used not only extant English-language translations, including the partial translation by William Tyndale (c. 1490–1536), but also Jewish commentaries to guide their work. The wealth of scholarly tools available to the translators made their final choice of rendering an exercise in originality and independent judgment. For this reason, the new version was more faithful to the original languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors. The impact of the original Hebrew upon the revisers was so pronounced that they seem to have made a conscious effort to imitate its rhythm and style in their translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The literary style of the English New Testament actually turned out to be superior to that of its Greek original.
See the misprints and errors in early editions of the King James Bible, including the “He and She Bibles,” “Judas Bible,” and “Wicked Bible”
Two editions were printed in 1611, later distinguished as the “He” and “She” Bibles because of the variant readings “he” and “she” in the final clause of Ruth 3:15 (“and he went into the city”). Some errors in subsequent editions have become famous. Perhaps the most notorious example is the so-called “Wicked Bible” (1631), whose byname derives from the omission of “not” in the injunction against adultery in the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt commit adultery”). The printers were fined £300 for the error.