James VI brought his own experience of kingship to England in 1603 and his gender, ethnicity and personality reshaped the polity. Finance was one aspect of governance that was particularly affected. Typically James's influence on finance is identified with wasteful extravagance and corruption. Neither charge can be refuted, but they deserve to be contextualised. James was hardly more extravagant than his Tudor predecessors or his early modern contemporaries. For Francis Bacon and other governors who looked to the Tudor past, Henry VII's expenditures were virtually a Jacobean ideal, but less for scale than form: ‘he never spared charge which his affaires required and in his building was magnificent, but his rewards were very limitted, spending more upon his owne state and memory then upon the deserts of others’. Decay and corruption too were inherited from Burghley's treasurership and Cecil attempted to clean up his father's mess as much as James's own. Finally, if finance is a political issue then James's role must be defined more broadly than as simply presiding over prodigality and peculation. The theory and practice of James's kingship decisively affected finance, particularly the policy-making process and his conception of a monarch's role in it. The decisive factor was the fluidity of policy-making, the willingness of James to take counsel widely and trust his own counsel above others. This enabled projectors and the projecting mentality to penetrate policy-making so deeply that they became both the instruments of policy and a mindset informing policy-making itself.