Abstract
Once upon a time, scholars had no difficulty characterizing King James’s reign negatively, and thus no difficulty assessing the historical and cultural consequences of his accession in 1603. The most emphatic declaration ever issued on the subject comes from the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, who wrote that ‘on the day of the accession of James the First England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held, and began to be regarded as a power hardly of the second order’.1 This rather abrupt transformation — the very day of his accession! — has a great deal to do, for Macaulay, with what we in the United States like to call ‘the character issue’. Macaulay’s King James is a coward and a pedant, given to hectoring Parliament but weak when push came to shove, ungainly, effeminate and childish: ‘It was no light thing’, quoth Macaulay, ‘that, on the very eve of the decisive struggle between our Kings and their Parliaments, royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue.’2
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Notes
Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay: Complete, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1879), vol. 1, p. 54.
See the nicely succinct survey of the historiography in Pauline Croft’s King James (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 4–9.
Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 153.
G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant: The Court of King James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 423.
W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931), p. 62.
Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (1963; London: Rout-ledge, 1988), p. 54, 2.3.28.
Rebecca W. Bushneil, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 20–5, 34–6.
See Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 100–7; and
Curtis Perry, ‘The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1054–83.
DiGangi, Homoerotics, especially pp. 1–23; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). There is by now a very large bibliography on the subject of early modern homo-eroticism and/or sodomy.
Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castle-haven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 33.
Since there is some debate about the actual erotic content of James’s relationships with favourites, it is worth noting here that gossip and libel concerning royal sodomy can be a figurai or ideological construct in this way even if the sexual acts imagined did indeed take place. Francis Osborne’s salacious memoir, for instance, records a process by which public kissing prompts speculation about more private erotic congress, but that in itself suggests an act of imaginative projection which marks the difference between reporting and constructing. Osborne describes James kissing favourites ‘after so lascivious a mode in publick, and upon the Theater as it were of the World’, and adds that this ‘prompted many to imagine some things done in the Tyring-house, that exceed my expressions no less then they do my experience’. I quote Osborne’s memoir, which was first printed in 1658, from The Works of Francis Osborne (London, 1673), p. 535. The best evidence we have of a consummated erotic relationship between James and a favourite is in the letters sent from Buckingham to James, which if not clearly sexual are at least suffused with bodily intensity. See David M. Bergeron, King James & Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), pp. 98–143.
For a more comprehensive survey of some of the scandal tropes of favouritism and of their Elizabethan and Early Stuart uses, see Robert P. Shephard, ‘Royal Favorites in the Political Discourse of Tudor and Stuart England’, PhD Dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1985, pp. 276–359.
Robert P. Shephard, ‘Sexual Rumours in English Politics’, in Jaqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds, Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premod-ern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 101–22. The specific allegation about sexual stipends is discussed on pp. 103–4, and is attributed to John Pole, a criminal figure from the same demimonde of spying and information as Christopher Marlowe. Shephard provides numerous instances in which Elizabeth’s political intimacies were gossiped about in sexual terms, and in fact he opines that ‘the frequency and intensity’ of erotic ‘rumours about Elizabeth were much greater than those about James’ (p. 102).
See also Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 66–90.
See Lawrence Normand, ‘“What Passions Call You These?”: Edward II and James VI’, in Daryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, eds, Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996), pp. 172–97. See also
Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Edward II and Elizabethan Politics’, in Paul Whitfield White, ed., Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 89–100; and Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 271, n. 26.
Rowland Wymer, ‘Jacobean Pageant or Elizabethan Fin de Siècle? The Political Context of Early Seventeenth-century Tragedy’, in R. H. Wells, G. Burgess, and R. Wymer, eds, Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 138–51.
Anon., Thomas of Woodstock or Richard the Second Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 153, 4.3.40.
Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 83. For a more extended discussion of the implications of this conception of favouritism, see
Curtis Perry, Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See for instance the essays collected in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
See Burnett, ‘Edward II and Elizabethan Politics’, pp. 94–6; and Ronald Knowles, ‘The Political Contexts of Deposition and Election in Edward II’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 14 (2001), 105–21.
Peter Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England’, The Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 415–29.
On the importance of the Edward II story in the 1620s, see Curtis Perry, ‘Yelverton, Buckingham, and the Story of Edward II in the 1620s’, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 54 (2003), 313–35; and Danielle Clarke, ‘“The Sovereign’s Vice Begets the Subject’s Error”: The Duke of Buckingham, “Sodomy” and Narratives of Edward II, 1622–28’, in Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 46–64.
Bernard Mellor, ed., The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1961), p. 2.
Johann P. Somerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 181. I have silently modernized i/j and u/v.
See John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 292–312;.
Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 125–84.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.
The best account is Neil Cuddy, ‘The King’s Chambers: The Bedchamber of James I in Administration and Politcs, 1603–1625’, D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1987.
Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: fames I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 83–114.
Anon., The Faithful Friends, ed. G. M. Pinciss (Oxford: Malone Society, 1975). The play was most likely never performed, and the manuscript is clearly that of a work in progress. Interestingly, the emended and excised passages tend to be accounts of the politics of favouritism, so the manuscript is itself a monument to the Jacobean difficulty with this issue.
The argument for 1621 is based on the topical reading of the play put forward by Norma Dobie Solve in Stuart Politics in Chapman’s Tragedy of Chabot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1928). Albert H. Tricomi has argued for a much earlier date of composition (c.1611–1612) in ‘The Dates of the Plays of George Chapman’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 242–66. See Evans’s summary of the arguments in The Plays of George Chapman, pp. 618–21. Chapman’s source is a brief moral exemplum in the 1611 edition of Etienne Pasquier’s Les Recherches de la France. Solve provides a detailed account of the relation between the play and its source in Stuart Politics, pp. 63–83.
In addition to Solve, Stuart Politics, see Thelma Herring, ‘Chapman and an Aspect of Modern Criticism’, Renaissance Drama, o.s. 8 (1965), 167–79.
Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 12–29.
Blair Worden, ‘Favourites on the English Stage’, in J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds, The World of the Favourite (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 163.
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Perry, C. (2006). 1603 and the Discourse of Favouritism. In: Burgess, G., Wymer, R., Lawrence, J. (eds) The Accession of James I. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501584_10
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