3
Late one afternoon in 1598 or ‘99, a crowd of excited Londoners shuffled through the door of the Theatre, an open-roofed playhouse wedged between a horse pond and a garden in Shoreditch. They were there to see a performance of Henry IV, Part 2, a new play by the city’s hottest playwright, William Shakespeare. Perhaps they’d seen one of his recent popular comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Comedy of Errors, or maybe Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice, in the previous decade since he had arrived in London. More likely they had seen Henry IV, Part 1, and wanted to watch the next instalment of the history play, with characters such as Falstaff and Prince Hal. They might have recognised something of themselves in the milieu of lowlifes in which the young prince found himself, having watched him drinking and fucking his way around Eastcheap, half an hour’s walk towards the river, in the previous instalment.
Yet in Part 2, Hal was mending his wayward habits. Kingship awaited, and the play made clear to the audience that it was a heavy responsibility. Not that they would have needed the reminder: for the past eighty years Europe had been enduring the turmoil of religious reformation, with attendant political and social transformations. Under the reign of their queen, Elizabeth I, they had seen some degree of religious settlement, but the consequences of the English Crown’s break with the Catholic Church under her father Henry VIII were still fresh in people’s minds, and many would have remembered the bloody religious strife and persecution that followed his reign, not least when his Catholic daughter and Elizabeth’s sister, Queen Mary, had tried to re-establish Catholicism within the kingdom. Queen Elizabeth had surprised not just her detractors but even her allies with the extent of her political and colonial accomplishments and her success in persecuting Catholics. Yet she had continued the tragedy of the Tudor dynasty’s neurotic, violent obsession with reproduction, failing to produce an heir.
As the audience left the theatre that evening, they would have been aware that England sat on the edge of chaos. Ten years previously, Elizabeth thwarted the invasion plans of her brother-in-law, Mary’s widower Philip II of Spain, by defeating the Spanish Armada with the help of adverse weather. Yet the English had been quite literally paying for their victory ever since through higher taxes levied to support the military, combined with price-fixing by royal favourites bestowed by Her Majesty with monopolies. A series of bad harvests added to the country’s woes. The words Shakespeare put into the mouth of Prince Hal’s father, Henry IV, as he worried about his own heir and legacy, would therefore have rung true to his audience: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
Her heir, who took the throne when she died in early 1603, knew it to be true. He was just thirty-six years old, yet had already been King of Scotland for thirty-five of them. He was bestowed the crown of England by a queen who had not only forced his own mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, off the Scottish throne, but then imprisoned her for his entire childhood before finally executing her for alleged treason. Worse still, she was a Catholic. Mary’s son, James, however, was raised as a Protestant, and made an acceptable heir: family, of sorts, but also loyal to Elizabeth and to her faith.
These tensions – between Scotland and England, between Catholicism and Protestantism, and between his duty to the crowns and his own political survival – were to structure both the Scottish and English reigns of James. But he was not merely a pawn in wider political and economic games. As we will see, over his life James was to make powerful interventions and decisions that shaped the growth of colonialism and capitalism, the development of the early modern state, and ultimately the clash between Parliament and his son Charles I in the English Civil War. Yet all these developments were highly influenced by the ongoing intrigue of his royal court, not least the fallout from his persistent, foolhardy habit of falling head over heels for beautiful, arrogant, and reckless favourites – for James had realised that the unease of the crown-wearing head could be eased significantly if it lay beside a beautiful young man.
James’s desire for men was obvious, and a cause for concern, even as a teenager, decades before he took the English throne. Concerns around his upbringing had meant he was surrounded by a rolling retinue of teachers and regents who were to shape the young prince, and both his spiritual and earthly desires. He was born on June 19, 1566, in Edinburgh Castle, to Mary Stuart. Mary had ruled Scotland for more than two decades after her father, King James V, died when she was an infant. Mary inherited her father’s deep Catholic faith along with his kingdom, but with her Protestant cousin Elizabeth on the throne across the border, religious struggle both within and without the country would mark her reign.
Mary was promised to Francis, the son of the Catholic French king, Henry II, when they were both children, and lived in the French court for a decade, but he died two years after their wedding. She then married her cousin, Lord Darnley, with whom she had her son, James, but Darnley was to die in mysterious circumstances shortly after; many suspected Mary had a hand in it, thinking Darnley was plotting against her. Those rumours were fuelled when she married his suspected murderer, Lord Bothwell, just four months later. Seeing their chance, Protestant lords raised an army against Mary, Queen of Scots, and her new husband, and her own soldiers deserted her. On 24 July 1567, while held captive in a castle in a loch just north of Edinburgh, she was forced to abdicate, and James, barely a year old, became James I of Scotland. He would never see his mother again, although she would continue to play a significant role in his life. The young queen lived for another twenty years, variously imprisoned and fugitive, her Catholicism and her claim to the throne a constant thorn in the side of the Protestant lords who had toppled her and propelled James to early kingship.
Separated from his mother’s influence, the young king was raised within the Protestant faith, with a series of Protestant regents ruling in his stead until he reached his majority. More significantly, he was educated by Protestants, including George Buchanan, a fiercely intelligent and intellectually rigorous theologian and poet who believed, controversially, that political power emanated from the people, to whom the monarch was bound, and any monarch who practised tyranny could be lawfully resisted. A strange choice for a royal tutor, perhaps, but an influential one: James could be said to be the last English monarch to betray anything like an intellectual streak, and went on to write two books on kingship, amongst other writings, although his own theories deviated significantly from Buchanan’s.
James’s regents were drawn from his own family. The first was his mother’s half-brother, the Earl of Moray, James Stewart (the differences in spelling are confusing, but the Stewarts and the Stuarts were, in fact, the same family). A devout Protestant, the Earl of Moray faced an uprising from the old queen who had slipped her Scottish captors just a year into his regency and raised an army to recapture her throne. In the name of her son, the baby king, and defending his own power, he beat Mary in battle and forced her into exile in England. Despite suppressing the uprising, he continued to face opposition from Scottish Catholics still aligned with Mary, and two years later he was assassinated by a gunshot from a window fired by a veteran of the uprising.
Matthew Stewart, James’s paternal grandfather and the 4th Earl of Lennox, replaced him and died the next year, shot by loyalists of Mary. Then, the Earl of Mar, who managed a year in the role before being struck down with a mysterious illness after dining with an ambitious noble, James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton. Clearly, the Scottish regent was a lethal job to have, yet the power it held was considerable, so it should be of little surprise that the Earl of Mar was quickly replaced by none other than James Douglas himself. Douglas lasted longer in the role, and concluded the civil war between the Protestants and the supporters of Queen Mary, yet after six years he’d managed, in this strife-torn land, to make more than his share of enemies.
He stepped back from the role, allowing James, not even yet a teenager, to assert himself. His downfall was nigh; a handsome young French nobleman had arrived at court, and it spelled disaster for Douglas. This thirty-seven year-old Catholic was Esmé Stewart, the cousin of the late Lord Darnley, James’s dad. James took a shine to the exciting French relative and he soon became his favourite. Forced from power, Douglas lasted less than two years before an associate of Esmé Stewart accused him of being complicit in Lord Darnley’s murder almost fourteen years earlier. Convicted, he was executed on the ‘Maiden’, a huge, ghastly primitive guillotine the likes of which only the Scots could concoct, and young James, only fourteen years old, was finally able to reign as king in his own right, under the guidance of Esmé.
To say James rewarded Esmé is to put it lightly. Arriving in Scotland holding only a small title in France, Esmé was showered with seven peerages, two earldoms and one dukedom, making him Scotland’s only duke. But these were not just gifts of gratitude for political service. The fact that James also gave Esmé Stewart a treasure trove of his mother’s jewels might go some way in explaining the nature of his attachment. Despite, or perhaps because of, Esmé being old enough to be James’s father, James was immediately attracted to what he himself called Esmé’s ‘eminent ornaments of body and minde’.1
He was, it appears, the whole package. The nature of the relationship seems incredibly difficult to parse from historical accounts mired in the intrigue of court, and because the relationship itself was subject to so many external influences – power and ambition, its semi-incestuous nature, the significant age gap and the implications of a role of authority and care over someone who, legally speaking, is themselves invested with almost absolute authority over their supposed caretaker. But from the sources we have, it is clear that the relationship between James and Esmé was amorous, both emotionally and sexually.
More than that, it’s clear that this wasn’t a single-direction crush of a younger onto an older man, but instead, as far as we can say, a ‘mutual’ affection. As complicated and difficult as it might be to discuss today, in the norms of the age that difference in years might not have implied a predatory relationship to observers. Esmé appears to have been as besotted with his second cousin as the king with Esmé.
Predation and exploitation was a concern, but not of sexual exploitation of a younger man. Rather, there was a concern that, as with the regents before him, too much power could be held in the hands of this nobleman, and worse, a Catholic noble. In fact, it’s in the correspondence of fellow powerbrokers about this danger that we find much of the evidence for the sexual nature of their relationship. English observers in the Scottish court, ever wary of potential Catholic threats on their northern border, noted the incipient danger. English politician Sir Henry Widdrington, writing to the Queen Elizabeth’s right-hand man, William Cecil, claimed that Esmé was corrupting the seventeen-year-old James, claiming ‘the ministry are informed that the Duke goes about to draw the King to carnal lust’.2
The fact that it is only this danger of the usurpation of power that leads to these letters being written does raise an interesting question. Had Esmé not been an ambitious noble, but merely another young man without status, would evidence of their relationship have been a matter of the historical record? And how many other monarchs did engage in such same-sex behaviours, but in a way that didn’t challenge the wheels of power, and hence were never written down?
The problem with their relationship for Scottish nobles, and particularly the Protestants, was not so much the same-sex desire they showed for each other, but more that, in their relationship, they saw the consolidation of power in the hands of the king’s favourite – a dynamic which became a lifelong concern for James’s court – and especially a Catholic favourite. The peace in Scotland was fragile, and the Kirk (the Scottish national church, a Presbyterian, protestant institution) was young: only six years older than James himself. For James to be ‘in such love with [Esmé] as in the open sight of the people often he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’ must have seemed like a potential existential threat, not least because within the minds of Protestants there was a link between sodomy and Catholicism.3
Across the border Henry VIII had implemented the Buggery Act in 1533 not just as a demonstration of state power (such cases had previously been restricted to ecclesiastical courts), but also as a legal weapon to give his officials ‘licence to roam through the monasteries, convents and friaries’,4 taking advantage of the popular (and not unfounded) assumptions that such gender-segregated institutions, far from being places of solemn chastity, were nests of sodomites.5 This was happening at the exact moment Henry was attempting to dissolve the monasteries and seize as much land, capital, and power for himself, making this link in the minds of the people very handy indeed.
The Protestant religious polemicist John Bale regarded the vow of chastity and the act of sodomy inextricably linked, both a corruption of God’s plan for marriage. The Catholic Church, in its insistence upon chastity for the clergy, were corrupters of men, and according to Bale, ‘the men in theyr prelacies, priest-hodes [and] innumerable kinds of Monkery, for want of women hath brent in theyr lusts [and] done abominations’.6
Alongside sectarian assumptions about the relationship between Catholics and sodomy were others fears of corruption. As in the classical Greek and Roman worlds, in early modern Europe many same-sex relationships were structured around hierarchical relationships which were seen to have an educational function, and it was this pedagogical relationship which may have created space for the toleration of sodomy.7 Yet despite being considerably younger than Esmé, James was not just his king, and Esmé his subject. The implication of superiority, of paternalistic teaching, that went with early modern assumptions of same-sex relationships would, in this instance, have upended the natural ideological order, putting far too much power in Esmé’s grasp.
To quell these fears, Esmé converted to Presbyterianism, but it was of little use. Few believed the conversion was sincere, but merely a perfidious Catholic trick, and his role in the execution of the king’s last regent, the Earl of Morton, seemed to seal that opinion for the Protestant nobles. Rather than removing him from the king’s presence, the nobles decided to remove the king. In the summer of 1582 a group of conspirators known as the ‘Lords Enterprisers’ effectively kidnapped James in the ‘Ruthven Raid’, holding him a virtual hostage for a year. It was not strictly a coup d’etat: James remained the king, but the forcible change in his court and advisers altered the nature of the regime. The extravagant court lifestyle was out, replaced by a thrifty, militantly Protestant administration of nobles known as the ‘Gowrie Regime’, who aimed to correct the suspiciously Catholic tendencies of James under Esmé’s influence and, funded by the English, remove all trace of pro-Mary sentiment in the government.
In July 1583 James managed to slip his captors, but Esmé had already been exiled to France, where he continued to send James heartfelt entreaties on his loyalty, claiming his ‘faithfulness which is engraved within my heart, which will last forever’.8 By the time James had reasserted control over his throne, it was too late: Esmé had died in France, confounding his suspicious critics by refusing to renounce Protestantism, and his embalmed heart was returned to his king in Scotland. Full of grief, James penned a poem to his former favourite, comparing him to a phoenix. But the collapse of the Gowrie Regime led to a change in how James approached his governance. He comprehensively rejected the teachings of the Protestant schoolmaster Buchanan, who had attempted to beat his own ideas of kingly moderation into him, and instead imposed upon his kingdom his own understanding of his kingly authority as being derived directly from God.
To resolve the ongoing uncertainty with England, the question of Queen Elizabeth’s heir, and the English anxieties about a potential Catholic threat in Scotland, both James and Elizabeth began making diplomatic overtures towards each other. In 1586, the signing of English treaties with the Dutch meant the prospect of a Spanish invasion looked increasing likely, and James and Elizabeth formalised an Anglo-Scottish treaty, not only providing James with a pension from the English crown, but promising that the English would respect his legal claims and titles, in exchange for Scottish support.
It was by now clear that Elizabeth was not going to produce a child to inherit her throne, and the implications were obvious. The following year Elizabeth somewhat sealed the deal by executing James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, after many years of holding her imprisoned in England, for an alleged treasonous plot against her throne. While James publicly protested the execution, he benefited from it: Mary and her followers would no longer threaten either throne, and it left James as Elizabeth’s closest surviving relative. In letters to Elizabeth he referred to himself as her ‘natural son and compatriot of your country’, and her as his ‘Madame and dearest sister’: it was clear he was angling for a peaceful inheritance upon her death.9
With his succession to the English throne increasingly likely, his thoughts turned to producing an heir himself. James was well respected in Scotland for not having produced illegitimate children, although the fact he was rumoured to be ‘too much carried by young men that lie in his chamber and are his minions’ probably made an unwanted pregnancy unlikely, no matter how hard he tried.10 If he wanted an heir, having sex with a woman might help. Fresh on the European royal marriage market was the fourteen-year-old daughter of King Frederick of Denmark, Anne.
Anne was, in many ways, an excellent match for James. Yes, she may have been Lutheran rather than Calvinist, but she was a protestant, and both the daughter and sister of European kings. After the negotiation of a significant dowry, she took part in a proxy marriage, with one of James’s ambassadors, in Denmark on 20 August 1589. Anne immediately prepared to travel to Scotland to meet her new husband, but the voyage was beset by bad fortune. Terrible storms rose in the North Sea, splitting the fleet in which she travelled. The new queen was pushed back to Oslo to take refuge, while on 12 September one of James’s emissaries, Lord Dingwall, arrived, and told the king of the storm.
For a month James watched and waited the rough seas, ordering prayers be said for his new wife’s safe voyage, but a month later she managed to get word to him that she was safe, and would winter in Oslo. In a pique of romance, James set out to collect her himself, and spent the winter in Denmark, before braving more storms on the return leg. The storms, the passion, and the impromptu honeymoon in a country where Lutherans were much more attuned to news of demons coming in from Germany raised in James a terrible political and misogynistic paranoia. Scotland had, up to that moment, been reasonably free of the witch panics that had sprung up around Europe throughout the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. However, safely ensconced back in Scotland, James launched an investigation into the causes of the storms that had risked not just the life of his wife, but his chance at an heir.
The investigation dug up some disturbing ‘facts’, undoubtedly influenced by the allegations of witchcraft spreading around the Danish court. The Danish minister of finance, wanting to indemnify himself against any claims of incompetence in outfitting the ships for potential storms, claimed witches had raised the bad weather, which led to a witch trial. James sought, and found, the presence of witchcraft in his own land.
In North Berwick, the accusers alleged, some form of unholy and devilish gathering had been held on 31 October, the eve of All Hallows’ Day. In attendance was no less than the Devil himself, and it was clear that it was he who rose the stormy seas to prevent James’s marriage. A Scottish widow who worked as a healer and midwife, Agnes Sampson, was accused of participating. She denied the accusations until put under terrible torture, and afterwards confessed to her role: she had thrown a christened cat, with parts of a dead human attached, into the sea in order to raise a storm.11
The North Berwick Witch Trials of 1590 ignited a passion within James for understanding the nature of witchcraft and rooting it out. It seems, especially in the early days of his obsession, that his beliefs were deep and sincere; he had disbelieved accusations against Agnes Sampson until her final confession before him. Yet it also seems undeniable that his paranoia had both a political cause (a childhood being raised around diabolical religious plotting, ending in the recent execution of his mother) and useful political consequences.
One of those implicated in the tortured confessions of the supposed witches was Francis Stewart, the Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell had played a significant role in James’s court, even partially standing in for him in governance when the king was away in Denmark. Bothwell’s uncle, from whom he inherited the title, was Mary Queen of Scots’s third husband, the alleged murderer of James’s father. His interest in the occult and his exuberant nature had led him to fall from James’s grace, and he was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually escaped, to be cast as an outlaw and to launch raids upon James’s life, until finally captured and pardoned.12
After the North Berwick Witch Trials, which James attended personally, he threw himself into the science and art of witch-hunting. Witch panics in Scotland had previously been rare, in comparison to the rest of Europe, but in the eight decades following the case, there are thought to have been over two thousand executions for witchcraft in a sparsely populated country: an average of more than twenty-five a year.
There are also wider, more material political implications regarding the rise of the witch hunts than mere court scheming. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were an integral part of the restructuring of social relations in the early modern period, when a new phase in capitalist development required a new patriarchal order. Federici expands traditional Marxist explanations of this period, during which ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play[ed] the greatest part’. These forms of brutality created a degree of wealth, and a degree of landless impoverishment on the part of ordinary people, which enabled that wealth (invested in industry) and the labour of the poor to come together to produce the capitalist order.13
To this process of the enclosure of land and the creation of a proletariat reliant upon waged labour to survive, Federici adds a violent revolution in the sexual order. Traditional bases of power for women, such as healthcare and midwifery, and other parts of the mediaeval sexual order that challenged the new role for women within the wage economy and the sexual division of labour, such as sex work, were suppressed. Rather than being ‘the last spark of a dying feudal world’, witch panics and concurrent hunts were a key weapon in the violent disciplining of women, and a vital part of the creation of a modern sexual order.14
James’s opinions on witchcraft are well known, thanks in part to Daemonologie, a book he published in 1597, at the height of his obsession with satanic possession. The purpose of the book was ‘to proue two things as I haue alreadie said: the one that such diuelish [devilish] artes haue bene and are. The other what exact trial and seuere punishment they merite’.15 In the book James sets himself up as something of an expert on anti-witch theory and practice, and Daemonologie contains the same anxieties that Federici documents about women as unstable, dissolute social agents. Asked in the Daemonologie’s ‘dialogue’ why there are twenty witches for every warlock (a male witch), he replies, ‘The reason is easie, for as that sexe is frailer then man is, so is it easier to be intrapped in these grosse snares of the Deuill,’ drawing a comparison with the seduction of Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden.16
Along with the desire to discipline women into this new economic and social order, witch panics were driven by the growth of colonialism. Seeking justification for the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, and trying to likewise discipline those people’s into the economic order of the settler colonists, colonists denigrated Indigenous religious and spiritual practices as ‘devil-worshipping’, and consequently their ideas were both influenced by, and in turn influenced, European witch-hunting in the early modern period. Illustrations in Europe of Indigenous people in the Americas taking part in cannibalistic rituals mirrored those already circulating that portrayed witches’ Sabbaths, while colonists sought to depict ‘illicit’ forms of sex practised in Indigenous societies, such as sodomy, as part of these devilish practices.
These attempts to dehumanise and racialize Indigenous people as somehow gripped by satanic forces went hand in hand with attempts to destroy Indigenous economies and force populations into working in the new silver and mercury mines: an example of how race science, witch-hunting, and colonial dispossession were all interlinked forms of ‘primitive accumulation’, the violent appropriation of land and resources from ordinary people to enable capitalist economic growth. With regards to sodomy, the tools of race science and the colonial project became vital in later centuries to the creation of an idea of ‘homosexuality’ as a scientific subject.
Colonialism soon became a key concern for James, because in March 1603 Queen Elizabeth died, and he became the first king of both England and Scotland. He inherited a kingdom that had been going through a so-called Golden Age, with a blooming of cultural talent, an efficient centralised government, and new colonies being established in the Americas. Yet it was also a country still wracked with sectarian division and, particularly, a huge legacy of debt from almost twenty years of war with Spain, and from the Nine Years’ War in Ireland, where English attempts to colonize the country faced resistance from Irish nobles.17
A new king bought peace with Spain, but the desire of the Spanish for the freedom of Catholic worship in his kingdom was something James was unwilling to cede.18 England, meanwhile, still had its own share of Catholics worshipping in secret, many of whom prayed, and plotted, for liberation from the Protestant yoke by the hand of Spanish invasion. One such Catholic was a young Yorkshireman who had already fought for Spain against Dutch protestant reformers for control of the Spanish Netherlands in the Eighty Years’ War. He had then travelled to Spain in a futile attempt to rustle up support for another Spanish invasion of England, an escapade that found little enthusiasm in a country still struggling to repay the debts of its numerous failed armadas.19 His name was Guy (Guido) Fawkes, and if he could not gain the support of Spain in an invasion, he would have to foment a rebellion inside the country instead.
Joined in England with a group of fellow Catholic plotters, Fawkes and the conspirators formulated a plan whereby the new English king would be blown up in a spectacular attack on the Houses of Parliament while he was in attendance, followed by a revolt of Catholics through which the king’s daughter, Elizabeth, would be put upon the throne. The plot was foiled when an anonymous letter warning of the scheme was allegedly sent to a Catholic peer, Lord Monteagle, who handed it to the king. The undercroft of the Houses of Parliament were then searched. In the midst of the search, they caught Guy Fawkes, using the alias ‘John Johnson’, red-handed with a lantern and fuses.
The torture of Fawkes, still claiming to be John Johnson, was horrifically brutal, and carried out on the orders of James himself, who demanded that ‘the gentler tortures’ be first used on him in the Tower of London, and if they did not work, ‘by degree proceeding to the worst’. Fawkes was laid out upon the rack, which stretched his limbs until they popped from their sockets, his ligaments tearing and muscles stretching.20 Within days he had revealed not just his own identity, but the identities of fellow conspirators; one reason we can surmise the rack was used is the signature on his dictated confession is a barely legible scrawl, suggesting he had been maimed by the torture.
Along with seven co-conspirators, Fawkes was tried and found guilty of treason. The following January he was dragged by horse through the streets, sentenced to be hanged but mutilated whilst still alive, his genitals cut from his body and burned before him, disembowelled and his heart removed, his head chopped off and his body cut into parts for public display. He avoided this grizzly fate by jumping from the scaffold while the noose was around his neck, killing him instantly, but many of his fellow plotters endured the whole ghastly public spectacle.
The plot, having been foiled, proved useful for James, allowing him to become closer to Parliament. Popular mood was behind him, buoyed by widespread sympathy for the royal family after the recent attempted assassination. Taking into account the anti-Catholic mood, James passed new laws further suppressing the rights of Catholics. Parliament passed the ‘Popish Recusants Act’ the year after the attempted insurrection, giving it the power to force Catholics to swear allegiance to the king, which made explicit the idea that the pope did not possess the authority to overthrow a king.
James also took the opportunity to counter anti- Catholic laws with new demands on hardline Protestants, enforcing conformity on so-called dissenters: early Puritans. He much preferred the Anglican model, which saw the king as ‘Supreme Governor’ and gave him a certain degree of power through a system of bishops, over the Scottish model of the Kirk, which does away with the episcopacy (the rule of bishops) in favour of a Presbyterian model.
James’s most important weapon in this strategy of conformity, and marginalising radicals on both sides, was the commissioning of a new translation of a bible, which would be an ‘authorised version’: the only one permitted to be read in churches. Launching the endeavour after a conference he had convened in 1604, James would carefully oversee this new English translation, ensuring that, amongst other things, it removed much of the commentary from earlier Protestant translations which challenged his position on kingly supremacy. This new bible, known as the ‘King James Version’, is still used widely today, and regarded as a cornerstone book in the English language, rivalling Shakespeare for the number of phrases that have become everyday English idioms.
James’s concern with ensuring the power of the monarchy to rule unencumbered descended from his belief in the divine right of kings, by which the authority of a monarch to rule was granted not by the population but instead by God. This was not a new idea by any means, but James developed it considerably as an intellectual theory, and it would go on to play a significant role in the tragedies of the Stuart dynasty. He laid out his theories in a treatise, The True Law of Free Monarchies, and in a book, the Basilikon Doron, both written before he took the English throne. The Basilikon Doron was effectively a manual for kingship intended for his firstborn son and heir, Henry, which stressed to him that there were two types of kings, good kings and tyrants, and ‘the one acknowledgeth himselfe ordained for his people, hauing receaued from God a burthen of gouernment where of he must be countable: the other thinketh his people ordayned for him, apray to his passions & inordinate appetites, as the fruites of his magnanimitie.’21
If his tone with his son was paternal, his tone with his parliament was patrician. While he vowed to rule justly, he would brook no quarter to challenges to his authority from the House. This assertion of his rights, as if he were himself a god, went down as well as you might expect in England, which had long fought for the rights of Parliament against unjust kings. Part of the English Parliament’s resistance to James’s belief in the absolute power of the king was not just his attempt to sideline them, but also the system of patronage which he used to bestow gifts of land, title, and power to people who pleased him personally.
This would have been bad enough were he a king with only an eye for the ladies, but given that James’s tastes lay elsewhere, it gave young, ambitious, and presumably sexy men the opportunity to acquire significant power by making themselves available to his advances. There is power in being the king who sits upon the throne, but sometimes there is more power in being the throne on whom the king sits.
A young Scot named Robert Carr, descended from wealthy landowners, Catholics, and supporters of Mary, Queen of Scots, was the first to take advantage of this opening. According to one of James’s biographers, Bryan Bevan, Carr had ‘little intellectual ability’, but was ‘athletic and skillful at games, aristocratic in appearance, handsome with flaxen hair, a small beard and moustache, [and] possessed an air of stupid arrogance’.22 Let’s face it, any of us could have made James’s mistake. We can add to the list a certain vulnerability, as James first saw Carr as an adult at a jousting competition in 1607, when before James this handsome twenty-one-year-old was thrown from his horse. James immediately took a shine to him, even though he was some two decades older, and helped nurse him through his convalescence.
Carr quickly rose to become the king’s ‘favourite’, and was handsomely rewarded with a knighthood. He was then gifted the right to live in Sherborne Castle, which the king had taken from Sir Walter Raleigh, who was languishing in the Tower, having been involved in a plot against him. Acting upon the advice of his lifelong friend, the poet Thomas Overbury, Carr used the king’s affections to manoeuvre himself into a considerable position of power, earning himself bad favour with Queen Anne, and also with Prince Henry, the king’s heir and only seven years younger than himself.
The death of Prince Henry from typhoid fever in 1612 changed the balance of power at court. The king grew more distant from his wife, and closer to an emboldened Carr, whom he created the Earl of Somerset the following year. But Carr was also in love, and not with the king. Instead he had fallen for a married woman, Frances Howard, the wife of the Earl of Essex. She complained their marriage had never been consummated, a humiliation for young Essex, and their marriage was annulled with the king’s intervention, leaving Carr free to marry in a lavish ceremony paid for by the king. Yet Carr had lost control of himself. Not only had he lost the strategic advice of Thomas Overbury, who had opposed his love match and ended up in the Tower himself, having fallen foul of James, but his passion for Frances Howard had led him to spurn the king, being openly rude to him, forcing James into begging for his affections. James wrote to Carr complaining of his ‘long creeping back and withdrawing … from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary’.23
When Carr and his wife were accused of having arranged for Overbury to be poisoned in the Tower, the game was up; yet James, ever the romantic, commuted their death sentences and would go on to pardon them. Frances’s first husband, the Earl of Essex, would have his own revenge against the king for his humiliation, later becoming the first chief commander of the Parliamentarian Army when it took to the field against Charles I, James’s son.
Although undoubtedly wounded by Carr’s cruelty, James had a new lover boy, George Villiers, a handsome young man from the country whom James’s privy councillors, wishing to counter Carr’s influence, had dolled up with a new wardrobe and pushed into the king’s line of sight at the Royal Stables. Having been made the King’s Cupbearer, and with Carr out of the picture, Villiers began a meteoric rise through the royal appointments that gave James’s system of patronage so much power. Already a gentleman of the Bedchamber, in 1616, the year of Carr’s conviction, Villiers was made Master of the Horse and given a peerage. A year later, he was upgraded to an earl and became the king’s private secretary, and a year after that, the Marquess of Bucking-ham and a privy councillor in both England and Scotland.24 In 1619 he was made the Lord High Admiral of England. In 1623, still just thirty-one years old, he was made the Duke of Bucking-ham. Unlike Carr, he stayed close to other members of the royal family, accompanying Prince Charles on an ill-fated escapade to Spain to win the hand of the Catholic princess, the Infanta Maria Anna, in marriage. The question of whether James’s relationship with Buckingham was sexual or not has been one of historical debate, although a debate where biographers seem keen to let the benefit of doubt fall on the side of ‘not’. But undoubtedly James has form, and given that, it hardly seems reckless to suggest something physical when, for example, Buckingham sent James letters asking if he still loved him like he did ‘at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’.25
The poet Alexander Gill the Younger described James as ‘the old fool’, a refrain that has followed older men who fall hopelessly for handsome younger men down through the centuries. Gill compared Buckingham to Ganymede, the eternally youthful cupbearer for Zeus who was a symbol of homosexuality in Renaissance Europe: indeed, it is from the Latinized version of Ganymede, Catamitus, from which we get the English word catamite, meaning the younger, passive sexual partner in a pederastic relationship. As we saw in earlier chapters, this was the model through which Greeks and Romans formalised same-sex desire, and was re-emerging with the Renaissance readings of classical antiquity culture. In a poem Gill asked that God save ‘my sovereign from a Ganymede / Whose Whorish breath hath power to lead / His Majesty which way it list’.26
Concerns around James’s patronage and his lovers were not restricted to the life of court alone. Despite the best efforts of Buckingham, by now the most powerful politician and courtier in the land, James was forced by problems in Europe to convene a new Parliament in 1621 after a hiatus of seven years, leading to renewed calls for yearly parliaments. The Parliament allowed the landowning classes to address some of their major grievances emerging from James’s absolutist rule.
The system of monopolies, whereby the king could grant his favourites the total control of certain commodities, was attacked, and with it those courtiers and advisers who had pushed the system. The lord chancellor, the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, was impeached for corruption, fined, and stripped of his titles, although he was something of a fall guy for Buckingham.27 But it was clear that this was an inevitable conflict between a form of mercantile capitalism that demanded representation through Parliament, and a form of absolutism which saw no authority in the landowning class outside of its subservience to a generous king. James’s regime was, writes Perry Anderson, ‘contemptuous and uncomprehending of Parliament [and] made no attempt to assuage the growing oppositional temper of the English gentry’.28
Buckingham was also a source of grievances for Parliament owing to his acquisitions in Ireland. Both the protestant merchant class and the king had engaged with full hearts in the colonization of Ireland, and in particular the plantation of Ulster. Even before he took to the English throne, James had justified colonial conquest and advocated plantations in order to create a Protestant ‘ascendancy’ in the country and take control of the land. Yet Buckingham’s attempts to secure wealth for his family and heirs had led to the creation of a new English aristocracy in Ireland supported by a corrupt system of subsidies and other privileges, of which Buckingham and the Villiers family were scraping off the cream. As the scheme unfolded, it was clear that attempts at colonization had become a drain upon the English Parliament.
The English colonial project was turbocharged during James’s reign, with the foundation of England’s first permanent, surviving colony in North America at Jamestown, and the settlement of Bermuda and Newfoundland, all driven by the same mercantile interests that were rapidly losing patience with James. Likewise, the Mayflower Pilgrims, settler colonists whose voyage and survival at the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts became a foundation myth of the United States of America, were puritan protestants who left England in part through dissatisfaction with James’s attempts to moderate religion and enforce conformity in the Church of England.
As James grew older and more infirm, Buckingham’s power grew, but unlike Carr, the affection and love between the two held fast, despite the protestations of courtiers and Parliament. Towards the end of his life, in December 1623, James wrote to Buckingham
praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.
James R.29
In the early months of 1625 his ill health got the better of him; following a stroke and an attack of dysentery, he died on 27 March, with Buckingham in attendance. Buckingham remained a powerful force in the court of James’s son, Charles I, but was so unpopular he lasted barely three more years before he was assassinated by a disgruntled soldier, who was hailed as a hero for the deed.
James’s contempt for a parliament that represented the emergent mercantile class and belief in an absolutist monarchy was inherited by his son, Charles I. Yet the divine right of kings couldn’t survive the English Civil Wars, Charles’s execution, and the Interregnum. James’s love of the court as a profligate and flamboyant spectacle powered by intrigue and sexual desire, however, would live on in his grandson, Charles II, resulting on that occasion in innumerable illegitimate children, but no heir. It was James’s inability to decisively settle the religious divisions in the country, and the continued suspicions that his family had never truly renounced the Catholicism of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, that led to the end of his dynasty in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. This ‘revolution’, which would see the overthrow of his second grandson, James VII and II, saw England settle on an ideology of Protestantism and constitutional monarchy, and commit to continuing the dual project of colonialism and domination of Catholic European countries: in short, the creation of the world we live in today. That combination of Protestantism, white supremacy, and colonialism would prove a violently toxic mix. Amongst the many repercussions of its system of exploitation and extraction would be a drive towards a scientific rationalism that swept up same-sex desire into the world of crime and disease, making the sort of easy, open attitude that James appeared to show towards the men he loved unimaginable.