Steven veerapen
Blog Article
Top Ten Myths and Misconceptions about James VI and I
James VI of Scotland and I of England has been ill-served by history. Largely, this is because his reigns in both kingdoms came in the wake of icons: his mother, the glamorous and much-storied Mary Queen of Scots; and his cousin, Elizabeth of England, the celebrated Virgin Queen. In contrast to these fascinating and magnetic women, James has been stereotyped as a dour and uncharismatic Scot, more excited by hunting alleged witches and engaging in pedantic religious and philosophical debates than in overseeing a cultural renaissance and a colourful court. Forgotten is that, whilst king of England, he was evidently charming and forceful enough to oversee a period of stability with no major rebellions, during which the renaissance flourished.
Worse, James has suffered more than most monarchs by virtue of events following his successful reigns north and south of the border. The Civil Wars, which broke out in the British Isles during the reign of his son, Charles I, led to an outpouring of anti-monarchical propaganda and the dominance of the ‘Whig reading of history’, which identified Stuart absolutism, supposedly first propounded by James, as the slippery slope which led to conflict between crown and parliament. This led to not just critical reappraisals of his rule but to skewed, satirical portraits of the man himself: he became a lurching, cowardly fool, forever fiddling with his codpiece and drooling – literally – over handsome male favourites. As a consequence, a number of myths have attached to him. Here are my Top Ten myths and misconceptions about James VI and I – and why we ought not to believe them.
10. The Great Unwashed: James was dirty and smelly
Great play has been made in the past of an apocryphal statement attributed to Elizabeth I, in which she declared that she took a bath every three months ‘whether she needed it or not’. The idea has been to promote the early moderns as different from us: they were smelly and unhygienic – we know better and can laugh at them. James has suffered even more than his royal cousin. In the notorious book “The Court and Character of King James” (first published in 1650, twenty-five years after the king’s death), attributed to (but not definitely written by) Sir Anthony Weldon, it is noted that:
‘His [James’s] skin was as soft as taffeta sarsenet, which felt so because he never washed his hands, only rubbed his finger ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin.’
The idea that the king was grubby and unclean, given fresh cultural life in Nigel Tranter’s 1974 “The Wisest Fool” (which promotes just about every negative attribute given to the king by his enemies), would also seem to be supported by a chance remark of James’s last favourite, the duke of Buckingham, who in a private letter expressed a desire to ‘kiss your dirty hands’. Is it true? Was James averse to a good wash? Did he stink?
No. Contemporary evidence from James’s reign makes clear that he was as fresh and clean as any of his contemporaries. When king of Scots, he employed laundresses to the considerable tune of £40 Scots a year. When king of England, in 1619, his household had to place an embargo on new laundresses – too many were already employed. Why, then, did the “Court and Character” make its claim? And what did Buckingham mean? The answer to the first question is political. Hygiene did not, in the seventeenth century, involve bathing (which was a medicinal practice) but rather washing via lavers and, for the wealthy, perfuming and the frequent freshening of laundered underwear. Hand-washing was a recommended alternative to bathing, which was considered dangerous as it was thought to open the pores to infection. The Weldon text was intended as a satire of Stuart kingship, with James caricatured as an ineffective monarch who, like his successor, was supposedly unable to take care of his body natural, and thus unable to tend to the body politic. As to Buckingham, he was referring implicitly to his early bonding sessions with James, when the pair would dip their hands in the gore of slaughtered deer in declaring ‘first blood’: a barbaric but traditional practice. James, then, was not an unusually dirty man; he attended to his ablutions in the same manner as his royal peers. Years later, however, it became de rigueur in England to mock Stuart royalty past and present – and thus James was satirised as a man who failed to attend to the prescribed bodily cares of the day.
9. The Path to Salivation: James’s tongue was too big for his mouth
This irritatingly enduring myth about James comes from a single source: again, it is “The Court and Character of King James”. So seriously has it been taken, though, that attempts have been made to diagnose a potential illness or syndrome which might have caused it (this despite it being recorded only in that untrustworthy satire). According to the text, James’s ‘beard [was] very thin, his tongue too large for his mouth, [which] made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out of the cup of [on] each side of his mouth’. On this scrap of testimony, published decades after the king’s death, the myth of the slobbering, swollen-tongued monarch was born. But is it true?
Almost certainly not. James was one of the most commented-upon men in two kingdoms for 58 years. No one in his lifetime – including his critics – appears to have noticed or commented on any issues with his tongue (or his saliva). Even his physician, Dr Mayerne (of whom more later) did not note any particular glossal issues. James was, moreover, a frequent and expert public orator; indeed, he took every opportunity to deliver speeches in parliament and in public (to the mass tedium, on some occasions, of his captive audiences). No issues were ever reported with his speech, save his accent (the natural Scottish affect of which he never hid, speaking as he did in ‘swift and cursory manner … in the full dialect of his country’). Two possibilities arise for the strange claim in the Weldon text: either it was metaphorical (indicating that James was double-tongued, or duplicitous) or it was an exceptionally cruel mockery of his final days and weeks, during which he suffered a series of mini-strokes which affected his speech.
8. Mommie Dearest: James callously allowed his mother to die
James has long been castigated for not doing enough to save Mary Queen of Scots’s life when she was tried – and ultimately executed in early 1587 – for her alleged involvement in the Babington Plot against her captor, Elizabeth of England. Indeed, at least one contemporary account has the young king (he was twenty at the time of his mother’s death) sighing relief on hearing of her execution: he supposedly uttered the chilling words, ‘Now I am sole king!’ Is it true?
Absolutely not. James made strenuous efforts to save his mother’s life. He was, however, fighting a battle he couldn’t win. On hearing of her trial, he was at first disbelieving and vaguely condemnatory of her alleged conduct – he had, after all, no real relationship with her, having been separated from her in infancy and then having only exchanged letters centred on fruitless discussions about her release from English captivity and return to Scotland in a limited monarchical role. As the English parliament bayed for Mary’s blood, James sent south multiple delegations (first under William Keith of Delny and later under his lover, Patrick, Master of Gray) to plead for her. In the winter of 1586 he drew up plans for his mother’s stricter confinement, hoping that the bloodthirsty English government would be satisfied with that; and he empowered his delegates to invite the English Privy Council to add whatever conditions they liked – provided they would spare Mary’s life. More colourfully, he attempted a diplomatic wildcard; he told his envoy to propose a marriage between himself and the 53-year-old Elizabeth, probably hoping that this bizarre offer would stop any precipitate action against his mother by muddying the waters. If the offer was received, Elizabeth passed it over with diplomatic silence (leaving history to wonder how interesting dinner-table conversation might have been between James, his wife Elizabeth, and her mother-in-law Mary – assuming she still had a head with which to speak). None of this was to any avail, however. When the axe fell in February 1587, James was almost certainly as horrified and shocked as the rest of Europe. Until the news arrived, it is likely that he never thought Elizabeth would actually commit what both he and she considered an act of regicide
7. The Wee Wife: James found his wife vapid, stupid, and not to his intellectual tastes
James was, from his childhood, a bookish intellectual, deeply proud of his rigorous classical education. Despite his romantic and sexual interest in men, he was what we would now call bisexual (though the term did not exist in the period and only specific sexual acts were vilified). He was quite capable of sexual congress with women and, at the outset of his marriage to Anna of Denmark (first conducted by proxy in 1589), he appears to have thrown himself into a fantasy of passion for the young Danish princess. In the centuries since, however, myths have accrued about Anna’s supposed stupidity. Numerous history books denigrate her as shallow and empty-headed, and insist that James was disappointed – so much so that the couple supposedly led separate lives, particularly after disagreeing about the custody of their first-born son, Henry Frederick, and certainly after James’s accession to the English throne. Is any of this true?
No. Anna, both in England and Scotland, proved herself anything but stupid. James, for his part, no more wanted an intelligent, politically-active wife than Henry VIII wanted another daughter. As a sixteenth-century autocrat, what he wanted was a submissive, obedient woman whom he could govern absolutely. What he got was a passionately independent woman who maintained an iron grip over what she considered to be her rights, liberties, and privileges as queen consort. James was arguably a little irritated – but even when they disagreed over the custodianship of their son, the pair rubbed along perfectly well: so well, in fact, that they produced a string of children in Scotland and two more in England (though only three, Henry, Elizabeth, and Charles, would survive infancy). Prior to his marriage, James had a number of beaux (some of whom had an abundance of ambition which outweighed their political talent). During it, he would, it seems, be faithful (with the curious exception of a possible affair with a young woman, Anne Murray) until their arrival in England; in1607, he certainly fell in love with Robert Carr, who was later superseded by George Villiers (whom James raised eventually to the dukedom of Buckingham). James and Anna did not lead separate lives, even during his later affairs; though they maintained separate households (as was tradition), they were frequently in one another’s company, whether on state occasions or when rusticated on medicinal retreats in their high middle age. When Anna died, James was bereft and insisted on her funeral being three times as expensive as the late queen regnant, Elizabeth’s (though it was not customary for the monarch to attend).
6. Wardrobe Malfunctions: James was gauche and badly dressed
When people think of well-dressed early modern monarchs, they probably think of the leonine, broad-shouldered Henry VIII or the glittering Elizabeth I. James, on the other hand, has suffered by comparison. Indeed, on his journey south on his English accession, the Venetian ambassador, Scaramelli, cattily said, ‘from his dress he would have been taken for the meanest among his courtiers.’ This would seem proof-positive that, in comparison to the Tudors, the first Stuart king of England was a bit of a frump when it came to fashion. But was he?
No. James, on his journey south – and at other points in his reign – was keen to appeal to two crowds: the thronging public who demanded a king look like a king, and censorious Puritans and Presbyterians who railed against ostentation in fashion (bright colours being considered particularly lewd and apt to arouse lust). James’s personal tastes ran to the lavish – extremely so. In the first five years of his reign, annual spending on the royal wardrobe ballooned from the £9535 it had been under Elizabeth to £36, 377. Even in Scotland – to the disgust of Presbyterians – he had used his English pension on bright, rich fabrics. When his daughter Elizabeth wed the Elector Palatine in 1613, he decked himself out in £600, 000-worth of gemstones, including ‘the fair great pearl pendant called the Brethren, the Portugal Diamond, and the great table diamond set in gold called the Mirror of France’. His contribution to fashion was the great bejewelled and feathered hat. Rather than being meanly dressed, James was something of a peacock – to the detriment of the Treasury and Privy Purse.
5. Pearls before Swine: James was an uncultured philistine
Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Charles I – whatever their many and varied faults – are celebrated as great artistic patrons. James, on the other hand, is routinely derided as something of a boor and a philistine. This results mainly from reports that he would fall asleep during plays, and on two occasions he certainly did so: on a visit to Oxford, when he woke up during a performance, muttering, ‘I marvel what they think me to be!’; and during Thomas Campion’s “The Lords Masque” in 1613. Was he, then, a crushing bore who did not appreciate the arts?
No. From his youth, James had an avid interest in culture and the arts. As a youth he danced, took part in masques, ran at the ring, and wrote poetry – considering himself, in fact, at the heart of Scottish poetry and letters. In England, he became the patron of Shakespeare’s troupe, turning the Lord Chamberlain’s Men into the King’s Men. Certainly, his tastes were more classical than contemporary – but he, along with Anna (whose tastes were very à la mode), oversaw a golden age of English renaissance culture. Why, then, did he fall asleep during productions? In his defence, the Oxford students had dusted off decades-old works last used to entertain the late Elizabeth; and Campion’s masque, it was reported by another contemporary observer, was ‘very long and tedious’ (and its surviving script rather bears this out).
4. Fallen Majesty: James had mobility issues
An enduring image of James has the king lumbering or lurching around, learning on others for support. It derives in part from “The Court and Character”, which states:
‘His legs [were] very weak, having had (as was thought) some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age, this weakness made him ever leaning on other men’s shoulders, his walk was ever circular, his fingers in that walk ever fiddling about his codpiece.’
James, for his part, told his physician in England, Mayerne, that he had been unable to walk until he was well out of infancy. Even in his teenage years, the French envoy, Albert Fontenay, had claimed, ‘his carriage is ungainly, his steps erratic and vagabond, even in his own chamber.’ This would all seem fairly clear-cut: James had mobility issues. But it is not quite so simple.
Whatever the delay in his walking (and similar delays were claimed by Queen Anna and about Charles I, both of whom became happily mobile), James certainly overcame them. In his childhood, the English ambassador, Killigrew, reported that he ‘danced with a very good grace.’ Fontenay, elsewhere in his commentary, pointed out that the king spent six hours a day in the saddle: surely evidence that his ‘ungainly carriage’ was the result of over-exertion (and, one suspects, teenage growing pains). On his triumphal journey southwards on his accession, James rejected a carriage, insisting that he walk through York with the words, ‘for the people are desirous to see a King, and so they shall, for they shall see as well his body as his face.’ Yet he certainly experienced issues later in life. In his last decade, he was reported by Mayerne as having suffered gout and a twist in his foot, this a result of frequent riding accidents (resulting not from bad horsemanship but from the sheer amount of time the king spent in the saddle, which increased the likelihood of his falling out of it). Like Henry VIII, James’s last years were marked by periods of ill health as a result of sporting accidents – but, in his prime, he appears to have had no particular mobility issues.
3. The (Cowardly) Lion King: James was a coward
One of the most notorious slanders hurled at James has been that he was an inveterate coward. The principal exponent is, again, “The Court and Character”:
‘He was naturally of a timorous disposition, which was the reason of his quilted doublets: his eyes large, ever rolling after any stranger [who] came in his presence, insomuch, as many for shame have left the room, as being out of countenance.’
The courtier Sir John Oglander, too, allegedly claimed, ‘He was the most cowardly man I knew. He feared mischief and wore pistol-proof padded clothes.’ Was he a coward?
No. James was no more a coward than Henry VIII (who fled disease at every opportunity and instituted a personal royal guard) or Elizabeth I (who took precautions against poison). Assassination attempts were common in the period (as witness the deaths of Henry III of France, Henry IV of France, William the Silent, and two of James’s own Scottish regents); precautions such as padded clothing were less cowardly than necessary, especially when the Gunpowder Plot exposed the king’s vulnerability to attack. Moreover, James’s personal actions were not that of a coward. He sailed out in dangerously stormy seas to retrieve Anna of Denmark from Norway and he led military expeditions against his rebels when ruling in Scotland. The claims of cowardice, in fact, were not comments on James’s personal fears; they were criticisms of his foreign policy. In England, he would (with some exceptions) promote himself as a great peacemaker. This became increasingly untenable as Europe slid towards war between Catholic Habsburgs and England’s Protestant allies. James was determined to avoid war whilst the louder and more bellicose of his subjects (including Buckingham and Prince Charles) began a shouting campaign for a return to militant English Protestantism. James’s pacifism made him a target for those who equated avoidance of war with cowardice: a position which has, sadly, had many historical sequels.
2. Union Man: James’s desired Anglo-Scottish union came about in 1707
Numerous history books have celebrated James as a forward-thinker, pointing out that his much-desired political union between England and Scotland came to pass in 1707, less than a century after the king’s death and under his descendant Queen Anne. Is it true?
No. The 1707 Treaty of Union, which created a single state – Great Britain – and added a number of Scottish MPs to the English parliament (restyled as the parliament of Great Britain, though only retaining the customs of the existing English parliament), was not the union envisaged by James VI and I. James was an inveterate Anglophile who had certainly called for union, though both the Scottish and English parliaments of his day had opposed it – and he even approved the prototype Union Jack; but his idea of union was more comprehensive than the incorporating union of 1707. James’s predilection for the English form of worship and his approval of the English Common Law had led him to believe that a unified Church and legal system (the English ones) should prevail across Great Britain. The 1707 union that came to pass under Queen Anne allowed certain Scottish institutions to remain independent, notably the Kirk and Scottish legal system. Political union came to pass – but James would hardly have been satisfied with it.
1. Death Becomes Him: James was murdered
Almost every high-ranking death in the early modern period sparked rumours of murder. James’s death in 1625 was no different. However, on the surface it does appear to have more meat to it than most rumours. Indeed, whispers began almost immediately. Spectators at the king’s bedside in his final days and hours noticed that James’s last favourite and lover, the duke of Buckingham, had inserted himself – alongside his mother – into the sickroom. Moreover, they had brought an unfamiliar doctor who had gone over the heads of the royal physicians and administered quack remedies. When George Eglisham, one of the official doctors, produced a book, “The Fore-runner of Revenge”, things looked very bad indeed; it was unequivocal in stating that Buckingham had sped the death of the king. Its claims were given a further frisson when Prince Charles – Charles I – was implicated during the unravelling of his own reign. And in the twenty-first century, author Benjamin Woolley went as far as acquiring the opinions of a modern pathologist in identifying the poison used: aconite. Was James really murdered by his lover and his son?
No. Buckingham and his mother certainly did administer unorthodox remedies to the ailing James, who had been falling apart for months after several years of poor health. But their motivation was to save him, not to kill him – had they pulled it off, their credit would never have been higher. Indeed, they might have achieved a coup over the enemies of the upstart house of Buckingham, who were even then gathering. It was these enemies – supporters of the Spanish Habsburg alliance and enemies of the pro-Protestant faction, of which Buckingham was strutting his stuff as leader – who promoted the poisoning claims. Later, Charles was implicated by his own political opponents. What finally killed James was as likely to have been the remedies provided by his approved physicians as those produced by Buckingham and his mother – but in truth the king was on his way out anyway. As always, a royal death simply became a political football and accusations of poison a means of scoring points against political enemies.
Bonus: To Sirloin With Love: James knighted a steak
A charming story has long circulated in which James coined the term ‘sirloin steak’; allegedly, he enjoyed the meat served to him so much that he immediately announced, ‘I dub thee Sir Loin!’ Whilst the perennially cash-strapped king was notoriously free with knighthoods (eventually landing on the money-making scheme of selling them), the story is sadly false. The term ‘sirloin’ predates James’s reign by some time and appears to have come from bastardised French: sur loigne, or the cut of meat above – or over – the loin.
You can read all about James and his extravagant life in “The Wisest Fool”, available at all good bookshops and here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisest-Fool-Lavish-Life-James/dp/1780278160
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