You're listening to the Thirty Years' Years' War by When Diplomacy Fails, Episode 6. Jesus Jesus What God hath conjoined then, then, I am am the husband and all the whole is my lawful

wife I am the head and it is my body I am the shepherd and it is my flock I hope therefore

no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I that am a Christian king under the gospel

should be a polygamist and husband to two wives, that I, being the

head, should have a divided and monstrous body, or that being the shepherd, to so fair a flock,

whose fold hath no wall to hedge it but the four seas, should have my flock parted in two.

The King of England and Scotland had spoken.

It was a crisp, cool day on the 19th of March 1604, and King James I had laid down the challenge,

as well as the justification, for the unlikely union between Scotland and England, two entities which only a generation before had been at one another's throats.

Unions under a common monarch were not unheard of in the 17th century. Poland, Lithuania,

had fused itself together under this arrangement in the 14th century and liked the idea so much that they advanced

it even further to a real union in 1569. If those two states of Poland and Lithuania,

Lithuania a formerly pagan duchy, another Poland being a Catholic kingdom, if they could set

aside their differences and combine

themselves together, then why not those two kingdoms on the island of Britain, Scotland and England?

James continued in his efforts to persuade his audience, with a note that,

even as little Brooks lose their names by running and falling into great rivers,

so by the conjunction of rivers, little kingdoms in one,

are all these private differences and questions swallowed up?

Through such a metaphor, the new king implied that any outstanding issues or grievances

between the two old enemies would be subsumed into the healing balm which was this union.

The conclusion was reached then that, only those unable to live in a well-governed Commonwealth,

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