History of the Constitution of the United Kingdom and applied it to their form of government. When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 without issue, she was succeeded by her cousin James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he became King James I of England. This was a major step towards creating a single British state, although the Kingdom of Great Britain did not come about until a hundred years later. James VI faced a fractious religious England since it contained Anglicans (of the Church of England), Puritans, Separatists (who wanted to break from the Church of England), and also many Roman Catholics,
James II of England of these is that James purposefully "followed the French Sun King, Louis XIV, in trying to create a modern Catholic polity. This involved not only trying to Catholicize England ... but also creating a modern, centralizing, and extremely bureaucratic state apparatus." The second is that James was undone in 1688 far less by Protestant reaction against Catholicization than by nationwide hostile reaction against his intrusive bureaucratic state and taxation apparatus, expressed in massive popular support for William of Orange's armed invasion of England. Pincus presents James as neither naïve nor stupid nor egotistical. Instead, readers are shown an intelligent, clear-thinking