Cecil, ennobled as Viscount Cranborne in 1604,…

Cecil, ennobled as Viscount Cranborne in 1604, is created 1st earl of Salisbury in 1605, his father’s title of Baron Burghley having passed to his older brother.

As James’s chief minister, Salisbury is largely responsible for the easy transition between the Tudor and Stewart dynasties.

Bacon, in 1605, writes The Advancement of Learning, the first part of his planned great work, the Instauratio Magna (Great Resoration), in which he intends to set forth his concepts for the restoration of humankind to mastery over nature.

The planned sections are: (1) a classification of sciences; (2) a new inductive logic; (3) an assemblage of empirical and experimental facts; (4) examples to demonstrate the efficacy of his innovative approach; (5) generalizations derivable fro natural history: and (6) a new philosophy representing a total science of nature.

James has moved cautiously away from Elizabethan spirit cabalism.

John Dee, who leaves Manchester in 1605 to return to London, finds James unsympathetic to anything related to the supernatural, and receives no help from the king.

James had become obsessed with the threat posed by witches and, inspired by his personal involvement, in 1597 had written the Daemonologie, a tract which opposed the practice of witchcraft and which is a source of background material for Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth.

James is known to have personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.

James’s treaty with Spain makes the English suspicious that their Presbyterian monarch is secretly pro-Catholic.