He acceded to the English throne upon the death of the heirless Queen Elizabeth I in James I was not a popular king. Although he had ruled as king of Scotland, he was unprepared for the challenges he faced upon assuming the English throne.

The Preserved and Living Word of God
Background
The kingdoms of Scotland and England were individual sovereign states , with their own parliaments, judiciaries, and laws, though both were ruled by James in personal union. James succeeded to the Scottish throne at the age of thirteen months, after his mother was compelled to abdicate in his favour. Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in , though he did not gain full control of his government until In , he succeeded the last Tudor monarch of England and Ireland, Elizabeth I , who died childless. He continued to reign in all three kingdoms for 22 years, a period known after him as the Jacobean era , until his death. After the Union of the Crowns, he based himself in England the largest of the three realms from , returning to Scotland only once, in , and styled himself " King of Great Britain and Ireland ".
How the King James Bible came to be
But in seeking to prove his own supremacy, King James ended up democratizing the Bible instead. Emerging at a high point in the English Renaissance, the King James Bible held its own among some of the most celebrated literary works in the English language think William Shakespeare. Its majestic cadences would inspire generations of artists, poets, musicians and political leaders, while many of its specific phrases worked their way into the fabric of the language itself. Even now, more than four centuries after its publication, the King James Bible a. And even though Elizabeth had established the supremacy of the Anglican Church founded by her father, King Henry VIII , its bishops now had to contend with rebellious Protestant groups like the Puritans and Calvinists, who questioned their absolute power. By the time James took the throne, many people in England at the time were hearing one version of the Bible when they went to church, but were reading from another when they were at home. So in , when a Puritan scholar proposed the creation of a new translation of the Bible at a meeting at a religious conference at Hampton Court, James surprised him by agreeing. Over the next seven years, 47 scholars and theologians worked to translate the different books of the Bible: the Old Testament from Hebrew, the New Testament from Greek and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin.
The translation had a marked influence on English literary style and was generally accepted as the standard English Bible from the midth to the early 20th century. The reign of Queen Elizabeth I — 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 —58 , who had attempted to restore Roman Catholicism in the country. Never authorized by the crown, it was particularly popular among Puritans but not among many more-conservative clergymen. 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, , 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 — , archbishop of Canterbury , served as overseer and established doctrinal conventions for the translators. The new Bible was published in