Today (19 June) marks the 460th birthday of James VI of Scotland and I of England, the first monarch to unite Great Britain under one crown. He’s had a big year: 2025 was the 400th anniversary of his death, and saw a parade of events and books reassessing his reign and legacy. But amidst all this hoopla, no one has been asking the really big questions: would our dear friend King Jimmy have favored Scotland at the men’s World Cup, or England? Was he even a football fan?
Most football histories would answer that second question with an obvious and emphatic ‘no’. The oft-quoted evidence comes from the king’s own treatise on how a monarch should govern and live, Basilikon Doron. First published in 1599 and addressed to James’s young son and heir Henry, it promotes certain sports and activities for princes and courtiers, like running, dancing, fencing and tennis. But it explicitly debarred from the court ‘all rough and violent exercises, as the football, meeter [better] for lameing than making able the users thereof.’ The hostility seems clear enough: football was a dangerous and uncouth sport that men of good breeding should avoid. Yet the king’s actions did not always match his words.
After acceding to the English throne (1603), James and his court enjoyed football games on multiple occasions. Two different times in August 1612, the royal household constructed special ‘standings’ at the Earl of Southampton’s Beaulieu Palace, Hampshire so James and his retinue could ‘see the play at footeball’. One year later, two more sets of stands were built, probably in Beaulieu again, for the king and queen to ‘see the Footeball playe’.1 Notably, these are the earliest references in history (as far as I’m aware) to purpose-built football stands, however temporary they may have been. James would take in a game again in 1615, when the minister of Bishop’s Canning, Wiltshire presented a ‘football match of his own parishioners’ who could have ‘challenged all England’ in the sport.
Perhaps the King of Scots did take all this English football as a challenge for the mastery of what he called in Latin pila Scotica quae pede propellitur [a Scottish ball propelled by the foot]. Ahead of the visit to his northern realm in 1617, James ordered the Earl of Mar to ensure that ‘the football and the rowbowles and sutche manlye exerceisses maye be practysed and exercised befor his Majesties cumming to Scotland, that theis pepill heir [i.e. the English] maye see the owld exerceisses of that cuntrye [Scotland]’. Evidently, James’ attitude towards football was not entirely negative. Complicated might be a better word.
If James’ was not above watching football, he may still have wanted elites to avoid playing football themselves. The Wiltshire players were rustics. But we don’t know if the Beaulieu ones and those from the Scottish progress were non-elites or courtiers, though court spectacles usually centred the latter. Regardless, there’s no doubt football had become popular among the nobility and knightly classes by the Jacobean and Caroline periods. We find courtiers like Sir David Cunningham of Auchenharvie (Ayrshire) playing the game in London 1629, or lords like Emanuel Scope (later earl of Sunderland) and Lord Willoughby together in an even-sided match earlier in the century.2 Artist and poet Henry Peacham even claimed in his Art of Drawing (1606) that it was a natural and proper pursuit for a lord to ‘play at footeball with his men’.
Interestingly, in a later expanded edition (1612) Peacham replaced this positive reference to football with a possiblly less controversial line: ‘play at tennis with his page’. That same year, he also published the famed emblem book Minerva Britanna, which includes a depiction of football not as a lordly pastime, but as a game of ‘country swaines’, like those from Bishop’s Canning [see picture below]. Over the previous decade, Peacham had been in perennial pursuit of royal patronage. He produced several manuscript books of emblems, each dedicated either to King James or Prince Henry, and based on the king’s Basilikon Doron. Considering the views expressed in this advice book, Peacham’s shifting treatment of football may reflect an enduring unease about its value and suitability for elites. For some it was manly and martial, but for others it remained a rude and rustic ‘friendly kind of fight’ prone to ‘broken banis [bones]’. Certainly there was truth to the latter: after all, Cunningham and Scope were both badly injured while playing. Nonetheless, by this time there was an emerging view among the leisured classes, that at least in their refined hands (or feet), football could be a net positive.
These approving early modern sentiments represent a striking about-face to the contempt and indifference with which medieval elites regarded the sport. Football had been subject to repeated English and Scottish royal bans during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and during this period we have little to no evidence of the warrior classes participating in the sport. This all changed during the sixteenth century, with the royals leading the way. Henry VIII owned football boots (1525), while the household of James IV (James VI’s great-grandfather) purchased footballs (1497). Famously, James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots beheld a match while under house arrest at Carlisle Castle (1568), when ‘about twenty of her retinue played at football before her the space of two hours, very strongly, nimbly, and skillfully, the smallness of their ball occasioning their fair play’.3 Indeed, Scottish nobility and lairds seem to have been particularly taken with the beautiful game from the mid-sixteenth century onward.
It’s not certain why this shift occurred, but I have a few theories. Firstly, medieval martial sports like the melee, tourney, and joust became less common and relevant as warfare changed. ‘Those who fought’ may have turned to bellicose football as an increasingly attractive proving ground for virility and valor. Secondly, the Renaissance brought new ideas of what a gentleman, courtier and prince should be: not just a warrior but a cultivated body and mind. As the warrior classes turned into the leisured classes, athletic exercises and pastimes like ball games became the ‘work’ of the day, so to speak. Thirdly (and most importantly, I think), the nobility and gentry increasingly favored school and university education for their children over private tutelage at home, as state bureaucracies and legal systems expanded and humanism spread.
Being collectives of playful youths, educational institutions have been central (deliberately or inadvertently) to the history of football from the earliest records through to the modern codes. It therefore follows that elite interest in the sport would rise alongside elite rates of institutional education in Britain. Tellingly, football seems to have been quite popular among medieval clergymen and lawyers, those who were the main products of schools and universities before the early modern period. Scotland’s ‘educational revolution’ was particularly precocious, as the Education Act of 1496 required ‘all barons and freeholders who are wealthy [to] put their eldest sons and heirs into school’ and some degree of university. This early initiative may help explain why football was already so popular among Scottish lords and gentry (moreso than in England) by the time James inherited the English throne.
James’s interest in regulating sport and recreation, however, extended well beyond his court and its courtiers. His most significant intervention into the recreational lives of common folk kicked off during his return journey from Scotland in 1617. As he progressed through Lancashire he became embroiled in a controversy between Puritan magistrates and defenders of traditional Sunday recreations. In the dispute over whether sports and games should be allowed on the sabbath, James sided with the traditionalists, producing what became known as the King’s Declaration (or Book) of Sports. Published in 1618, this document would prove an enduring flashpoint in the culture wars (and civil wars) of decades to come.
Yet it was not a blanket defense of all Sunday recreations: above all, divine service should be observed with no interference, and only certain recreations were approved for after service. Others, like bear-baiting or bowling, were explicitly banned on Sundays (and really any day) as unlawful games. Strikingly, football was absent from both lists. This seems a glaring omission considering it was one of the most common sports cited in contemporary sabbath-breach cases, and certainly in terms of team sports. Football had even been explicitly targeted in a 1614 Parliament act against Sabbath abuses, though the bill never became law. Technically, football remained an ‘unlawful game’ and as such was not allowed by the Declaration. Yet the king’s silence left some wiggle room for interpretation; it may suggest he held a soft spot for the ‘manly exercise’ of the ‘Scottish ball’.
Whether for courtiers or commoners, James remained ambivalent about football. Neither fully fan nor foe, he was a footy frienemy. That being said, James would have loved the World Cup. He had a penchant for spectacle and sport, and could be quite adept at harnessing these for statecraft. No doubt, he would have FIFA kissing his ring and awarding him Rex Pacificus prizes. Between his two teams in the running this year, James’s heart would be with Scotland, but he would relish England’s greater resources and odds of glory – just as he coveted the power of the English throne. Above all, though, he’d seize the opportunity to further his ultimate ambition: to unite his two kingdoms symbolically and practically. But if he thought his Book of Sports was controversial, it would be nothing compared to a Team GB scheme.
- Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, 1558-1642, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson (Malone Society Collections VI; OUP, 1962), p. 109. ↩︎
- National Records of Scotland, GD237/25/1, Letter from Sir David Cunningham to the laird of Robertland, 1629 June 8. ↩︎
- Letter from Sir Francis Knollys to Lord Burghley, 15 June 1568. Printed in John Daniel Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in Captivity: A Narrative of Events from January, 1569, to December, 1584, Whilst George Earl of Shrewsbury was Guardian to the Scottish Queen (London, 1880), no. 7.s ↩︎