Queen James by Gareth Russell: All the King’s men – including the one he called his ‘only
Queen James by Gareth Russell (William Collins £25, 496pp)
Right from the start, and even before it, James I’s existence was steeped in violence. In 1566, a party of assassins broke into the palace of his mother Mary Queen of Scots and held a pistol to her pregnant belly while her secretary (some say lover) David Riccio was hacked to death.
George Villiers later Duke of Buckingham ‘one of the handsomest men in the whole world’
A year later, Mary herself was forced to abdicate and go into exile, under suspicion of having arranged the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. This left baby James, only 13 months old, to be crowned king of Scotland.(Later, in 1603, he became king of England too.)
At 16 he was kidnapped by a gang of Presbyterian courtiers and held for ten months, and when he was 21 his mother was beheaded by her English cousin, Elizabeth I. No wonder James always maintained that he had been ‘baptised in blood’.
Inevitably, he became a complex character. On the one hand James was petulant, paranoid, hygiene-deficient and a foul-mouthed alcoholic – he once told a clergyman: ‘I give not a steaming turd for thy preaching!’
On the other, he was scholarly, devoted to his pet armadillo, deeply loyal to friends and a loving husband and father. He bequeathed us the magnificent King James Bible and, as Shakespeare’s patron, some of the finest plays in the English language.
But here’s the question that Gareth Russell puts at the centre of this readable re-telling of James’s life: was he also gay? Certainly, the rumours started early. Instead of making a beeline for the ladies, James was more likely to seek affection and support from other men. His first in a long line of favourites was his older cousin Lord Esmé, whom he showered with jewels, honours and some rather lush poetry.
After that there was Patrick Gray, described by one seasoned court-watcher as ‘too feminine to please some tastes’, whom James appointed Master of the Wardrobe and treated with ‘great favour and familiarity’.
Despite these early forays into same-sex flirtation, to secure the Stuart succession it was essential that the king start producing sons. His choice fell in 1589 on Princess Anna of Denmark. Pragmatic, shrewd and witty, Anna was willing to put up with James’s passion for young men so long as they treated her with respect. While there can be no doubt about James’s liking for his own sex, he was also a devout Christian who was adamant that sodomy was ‘a sin which ye are bound in conscience never to forgive’. But pamphlets still circulated at court in which he was described as a ‘buggerer’.
Queen James by Gareth Russell is available now from the Mail Bookshop
In around 1614, James became caught up in the love affair that eclipsed all others.
All the signs suggest that it was Queen Anna who had first talent-spotted George Villiers, aka ‘one of the handsomest men in the whole world’. She groomed the lad, literally, knowing that her husband had strong feelings about bad breath and beards (ironic given that James became sloppier and more odorous as he aged). This time it really does seem to have been a full-blown sexual and romantic union. George addressed the king as ‘my dear husband’ while James called him ‘sweetheart’ and ‘my only sweet wife’.
When Anna died in 1619, it was only George whom James could bear to have near him as he mourned with genuine intensity the woman whom he had, in his own way, deeply loved.
It’s a tricky business teasing out his sexuality at a time when taboos, beliefs and customs are so different from our own.
While Queen James doesn’t add much that is new to our understanding of James I’s fluid sexuality, it is very good at clearing a path through the convoluted backdrop of politics, religion and wild speculation that so often makes books about the Stuart period such a slog.