Thomas Scott’s oppositional pamphlets of the early 1620s appropriated royal words to challenge both foreign policy and domestic censorship. In the conflicts of the 1640s some went further, severing James’s words from their original contexts and making them serve political positions that he had argued against. By briefly considering some of Scott’s pamphlets and a parliamentary pamphlet of 1642, this Coda highlights the role that James’s writings inadvertently played in fuelling explicit criticism of his policies in the last years of his reign and in helping to set the terms of political debate in the 1640s. It also suggests that considering both the dynamics of this kind of oppositionist reading and the particular kind of authority that the First Folio of 1623 begins to accord to Shakespeare further illuminates the critical underestimation of James’s writings traced throughout the book.