When James I took the throne in 1603, he combined the crowns of England and Scotland for the first time. An important aspect of this ‘union of the crowns’ was religion. James decided to hold a conference to decide on the future religious settlement, where he would preside like King Solomon. When this conference was held in Hampton Court early in 1604, two very different visions of that future contended for James’s support, and his decisions had important implications for how England and Scotland were ruled going forward. Those allied to the losing side, often called Puritans, retained a sense of ‘unfinished business’ which was to have repercussions. Some decided to leave for the continent or the colonies in the New World, while others stayed and found themselves later fighting against James’s son, Charles I. Meanwhile the Conference also sponsored the creation of the Authorised or ‘King James’ Bible, often seen as one of the greatest literary achievements in the English language. The speaker collects early books and manuscripts, and will bring with him some items from his own collection that both sparked his academic focus on the Hampton Court Conference and help illustrate its impact, including a book that sailed with the Mayflower. When James I took the throne in 1603, he combined the crowns of England and Scotland for the first time. An important aspect of this ‘union of the crowns’ was religion. James decided to hold a conference to decide on the future religious settlement, where he would preside like King Solomon. When this conference was held in Hampton Court early in 1604, two very different visions of that future contended for James’s support, and his decisions had important implications for how England and Scotland were ruled going forward. Those allied to the losing side, often called Puritans, retained a sense of ‘unfinished business’ which was to have repercussions. Some decided to leave for the continent or the colonies in the New World, while others stayed and found themselves later fighting against James’s son, Charles I. Meanwhile the Conference also sponsored the creation of the Authorised or ‘King James’ Bible, often seen as one of the greatest literary achievements in the English language. The speaker collects early books and manuscripts, and will bring with him some items from his own collection that both sparked his academic focus on the Hampton Court Conference and help illustrate its impact, including a book that sailed with the Mayflower.
Mark Byford studied at New College, Oxford where he received a first-class degree in Modern History. He then continued there to complete a doctorate, which focused on the history of the Reformation under Elizabeth I. He was elected to the Salvesen Junior Research Fellowship, spending eight years in all at Oxford in the 1980s. He subsequently went into business, working in strategy, executive search, and leadership development at the Boston Consulting Group and Egon Zehnder, focusing mainly on biotech and pharmaceuticals. He now has his own CEO coaching company, Further Horizons LLP. He retained his academic interests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and has published a number of articles on reformation and book history. For the past twenty-five years, he has been collecting early English books and manuscripts, and now has a library of some 2,500 books and manuscripts from before 1650, one of the largest private collections in the country. He is now an honorary fellow of New College Oxford, and an associate member of the Oxford History faculty. He is on the councils of the Church of England Records Society and the Oxford Bibliographical Society, he is a trustee of the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library and of a number of other learned societies. Mark is currently writing a book on the Hampton Court Conference with Professor Ken Fincham of The University of Kent at Canterbury.