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Upon the death of Elizabeth I, James VI, King of Scots (son of Mary, Queen of Scots), succeeded as James I, King of England, thereupon uniting the crowns but not the governments of England and Scotland. To mark the union of the crowns, a new ensign was designed superimposing the red cross of St George on the white cross of St Andrew. Closer union of the nations parliaments, for example, was rejected by the commons and abandoned after 1607.One of James I\'s first acts of foreign policy was to bring the long war with Spain to an end. Although this greatly helped the depleted English treasury (and helped enforce James\'s reputation as rex pacificus), the policy was, in part, unpopular because peace meant that both the English and the Dutch had to acknowledge the Spanish claim to a monopoly of trade between their own South American colonies and the rest of the world.
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