Abstract
James Stewart was the only child of Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. It was a dysfunctional family from the outset. Mary quickly discovered that Darnley’s attractions were purely superficial: he proved a cold and treacherous husband. For a while she took comfort in the warmer company of her Italian secretary, David Riccio, but Darnley soon put an end to that by conspiring in the secretary’s murder. Riccio was literally dragged away from Mary and murdered within earshot, a shocking experience for the queen who was pregnant with James at the time. Although Riccio was dead, the rumour survived that he was the father of Mary’s child. Born three months later, on 19 June 1566, James would always be sensitive about this false and painful rumour concerning his legitimacy. After the murder of her secretary, Mary turned for support to certain members of the Scottish nobility and became especially enamoured of the Earl of Bothwell. Although hard evidence is lacking, Mary and Bothwell have always been the prime suspects in Darnley’s murder, which occurred the following year. The house he was staying in was blown up and he was found outside the building: he had been strangled.
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Notes and References
For an extended discussion of James’s life up to the age of seventeen, see Caroline Bingham, The Making of a King: The Early Years of James VI and I (London, 1968), especially chapters 2 and 3.
Maurice Lee Jr, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana, IL, 1990), p. 32.
David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (New York, 1967), pp. 19–27.
Neil Cuddy, ‘The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’, in David Starkey and others (eds), The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987), pp. 180–1.
Joseph Cady, ‘“Masculine Love”, Renaissance Writing, and the “New Invention” of Homosexuality’, in Claude Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (New York, 1992), pp. 17, 26, 37 n. 24; Joseph Cady, ‘The “Masculine Love” of the “Princes of Sodom” “Practicing the Art of Ganymede” at Henri Ill’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henry III and His Mignons in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux’, in
Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (eds), Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto, 1996), pp. 123–54.
David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh, 1843), III, 480, 642, 775–7.
Joseph Bain (ed.), Calendar of Letters and Papers Relating to the Affairs of the Borders of England and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1894), I, 82.
For Lennox, see Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds), The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1917), XIX, 77–80 [hereafter DNB]; Bingham, Making of a King, chapters 5 and 6; Willson, King James VI and I, pp. 32–43, 58–9; Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, chapter 2; Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh, 1971), chapter 10; The Diary of Mr. James Melvill 1556–1601 (Edinburgh, 1829), pp. 59–96.
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (London, 1983), pp. 23, 81. The phoenix was a common symbol in the literature of the period. Shakespeare used a female phoenix in Henry VIII to represent the succession from Elizabeth I to
James I. Ivo Kamps, Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 132–5. Sir Philip Sidney and his circle used the phoenix in their writings.
Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York, 1990), pp. 67–9, 81–2.
William K. Boyd (ed.), Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots 1547–1603 (Edinburgh, 1910), VI, 129, 130. [Hereafter CSPScotland.]
Fontenay’s report is printed in Robert Ashton (ed.), James I by his Contemporaries (London, 1969), pp. 1–3.
David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh, 1843), III, 698. Spelling modernized. It is believable that James’s contemporaries described him as ‘foul-mouthed’. On the other hand, it is hard to know how much stock to put in charges that he was slovenly or dirty. Willson, King James VI and I, pp. 27, 36, 191, 208, 379;
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (London, 1972), p. 89.
Ashton, James I by his Contemporaries, p. 3. Ashton explained in a footnote: ‘Fontenay is almost certainly referring to James’ affection for male favourites.’ According to David H. Willson, Fontenay wrote that James’s ‘love for favourites is indiscreet’. This may convey Fontenay’s meaning, but it is not an accurate translation. King James VI and I, p. 53. For the original French, which Ashton translated more accurately, see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury MSS. (London, 1889), III, 59–61. For James’s health, see
A.W. Beasley, ‘The Disability of James VI & I’, The Seventeenth Century, 10, no. 2 (1995), 151–62.
S.J. Houston, James I, 2nd edn (London, 1995), p. 110.
William K. Boyd and Henry W. Meikle (eds), Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots 1547–1603 (Glasgow, 1915; Edinburgh, 1936), IX, 676, 698–707; X, 1–8.
W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 13–21;
Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History, 68 (June 1983), 197–8; DNB, VIII, 186–90.
CSPScotland, X, 122, 124. I have modernized spelling in the last quotation. See also Ethel Carleton Williams, Anne of Denmark: Wife of James VI of Scotland: James I of England (London, 1970), p. 15.
A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts (New York, 1977), p. 54.
Maurice Ashley, The House of Stuart: Its Rise and Fall (London, 1980), p. 116.
Even Pearl Hogrefe fell into the trap of describing Anne as ‘frivolous, without any intellectual interests’. Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens (Ames, IA, 1975), p. 142. Two excellent correctives to the traditional view are Leeds Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 191–208 and
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Enacting Opposition: Queen Anne and the Subversions of Masquing’ in Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 15–43. See also
David M. Bergeron, ‘Masculine Interpretation of Queen Anne, Wife of James I’, Biography, 18, no. 1 (1995), 42–54.
Allen B. Hinds (ed.), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, X (London, 1912), 513. [Hereafter CSPV.]
From James’s Basilikon Doron in Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), p. 42.
David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia, MO, 1991), pp. 52–63, 72. See also his ‘Francis Bacon’s Henry VII: Commentary on King James I’, Albion, 24 (Spring 1992), 17–26.
For Anne’s religious position, see Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 169–82. Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James the First (London, 1839), I, 168. See more about this below in chapter 7.
Allen F. Westcott (ed.), New Poems By James I of England (New York, 1911), pp. 19–21.
Frederick von Raumer, History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Illustrated by Original Sources [trans. H.E. Lloyd] (London, 1835), II, 196. In letters he exchanged with the Duke of Buckingham later in his life, both writers sometimes referred to the women in their lives as ‘the cunts’. Akrigg, Letters, pp. 436, 440, 441 n. 6, 442.
David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence, KS, 1985), p. 40; Bergeron, Royal Family, pp. 81–2; Williams, Anne of Denmark, p. 112; Willson, King James VI and I, p. 403.
I am greatly condensing events in this paragraph. For more detail see Maurice Lee Jr, Government by Pen: Scotland under James VI and I (Urbana, IL, 1980), chapter 1; Lee, Great Britain’s Solomon, chapter 3; Willson, King James VI and I, chapters 7 and 8; Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII, chapters 10–12; Rosalind Mitchison, Lordship to Patronage: Scotland 1603–1745 (London, 1983), chapter 1;
Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Scottish Politics 1567–1625’ in Alan G.R. Smith (ed.), The Reign of James VI and I (London, 1973), pp. 22–39; and
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (Toronto, 1981), chapter 9. For an especially sympathetic treatment of James’s relations with the Kirk, see
Wormald’s ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: the Kirk, the Puritans and the Future King of England’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 171–91.
James Craigie (ed.), The Poems of James VI of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1958);
Allan F. Westcott (ed.), New Poems By James I of England (New York, 1911).
There are two modern editions of these works: Charles Howard McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (New York, 1965) and
Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994).
Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and the True Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in Peck, Mental World, pp. 36–54; Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (University Park, PA, 1993), pp. 152–6;
Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, 1996), pp. 40–3;
Conrad Russell, ‘Divine Rights in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 101–20.
Compare J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, 1986), pp. 47, 93, 101, 115–17, 132–4, 160, 181;
Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory’, in Peck, Mental World, pp. 55–70; J.H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1996), chapters 7 and 8; and Sommerville’s introduction to James’s Political Writings.
G.B. Harrison (ed.). King James the First Daemonologie (1597) [and] Newes From Scotland (New York, 1966), p. 15.
James Craigie (ed.), Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I (Edinburgh, 1982), p. 190.
Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into Three Bookes (Edinburgh, 1597), pp. 30, 43–4, 78. I have modernized spelling. Two modern editions are available in Harrison’s King James the First Daemonologie (1597) [and] Newes From Scotland and Craigie, Minor Prose Works, pp. 1–58. See also Christina Larner, ‘James VI and I and Witchcraft’, in Smith, The Reign of James VI and I, pp. 74–90; Stuart Clark, ‘King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship’, in Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London, 1977), pp. 156–81;
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ‘The Fear of the King is Death: James VI and the Witches of East Lothian’, in William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modem Society (Manchester, 1997), pp. 209–25. Clark credits (or blames) James for introducing two distinctly continental beliefs about witchcraft into Scotland — the idea of a pact between the witch and the Devil and the idea of the sabbat, though this appears to be an exaggeration of his personal role. James did not really say much about the sabbat, which he called convenings, and he spent more time speculating on how witches get to these meetings with the Devil than what they do after they arrive there except for the ‘kissing of his hinder parts’. Daemonologie, pp. 35–40.
William Arbuckle, ‘The “Gowrie Conspiracy” — Part I’ and ‘The “Gowrie Conspiracy” — Part II’, Scottish Historical Review, 36 (April and October 1957), 1–24, 89–110. Willson, King James VI and I, pp. 126–30; DNB, XVII, 502–9; Louis A. Barbé, The Tragedy of Gowrie House: An Historical Study (London, 1887). A work that is very prejudiced against James but full of details and analysis is George Malcolm Thomson, A Kind of Justice: Two Studies in Treason (London, 1970).
Arbuckle, The “Gowrie Conspiracy” — Part II’, p. 89; Alexandre Teulet (ed.), Relations Politiques de la France et de L’Espagne avec L’Ecosse au XVI Siècle (Paris, 1862), IV, 229–35.
See, for example, Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), pp. 43–52.
Patrick Collinson, ‘The Jacobean Religious Settlement: The Hampton Court Conference’, in Howard Tomlinson (ed.), Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (London, 1983), pp. 27–52;
Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169–207; several of the essays in
Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (Stanford, CA, 1993); and
Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990).
J.R. Tanner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I (Cambridge, 1960), p. 297.
Maurice Lee Jr, James I and Henry IV: An Essay in English Foreign Policy 1603–1610 (Urbana, IL, 1970), pp. 13, 16. Lee thought the early years of James’s reign compared to Winston Churchill’s description of England in the 1930s, wasted years of ignominious passivity. Given Lee’s normally favourable view of James, it is tempting to wonder whether the passions of the Vietnam war era drove him to take this uncharacteristically negative view of the king’s foreign policy.
W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997).
James originally intended for his oldest son, Henry, to marry a Catholic, but this role fell to Charles when Henry died in 1612. See Roy Strong, ‘England and Italy: The Marriage of Henry Prince of Wales’, in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), pp. 59–88.
The literature on James’s abortive effort at union has been mushrooming in recent years. See, for example, B. Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh, 1986);
Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987); chapter 2 in Lee, Government By Pen; Jenny Wormald, ‘The Union of 1603’ in
Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 17–40;
Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I, and the Identity of Britain’ in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York, 1996), pp. 148–71. James made an eloquent plea on the subject in a speech to Parliament in 1607. See Sommerville, Political Writings, pp. 159–78.
On the other hand, as Keith Brown acknowledges, Scotophobia was matched across the border by Anglophobia. People on both sides of the border were wary of a union, and in light of today’s devolutionary movement, it is no longer so clear that James was on the right side of this issue. See Brown’s Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (New York, 1992), pp. 86–8.
Tanner, Constitutional Documents, p. 222. G.R. Elton tried to discount the significance of the ‘Apology’ and J.H. Hexter to reassert it. See Elton, ‘A High Road to Civil War?’ in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 164–82 and Hexter, ‘The Apology’ in Ollard, For Veronica Wedgwood These, pp. 13–44.
R.C. Munden, ‘James I and “the Growth of Mutual Distrust”: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603–1604’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), pp. 43–72. Conrad Russell minimizes the transition from Elizabeth’s to
James’s Parliaments in ‘English Parliaments 1593–1606: One Epoch or Two?’, in D.M. Dean and N.L. Jones (eds), The Parliaments of Elizabethan England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 191–213.
Linda Levy Peck, ‘“For a King not to be bountiful were a fault”: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 31–61 and Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1990).
Eric Lindquist, ‘The Failure of the Great Contract’, Journal of Modern History, 57 (December 1985), 617–51.
S.R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642 (London, 1883–4, 1894–6), III, 197–8.
For James’s view of this course of events in 1621, see his ‘Declaration’ printed in Sommerville, Political Writings, pp. 250–67. For the Commons’ petition on foreign policy and their ‘Protestation’, see J.P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 39–43.
Norman McClure (ed.), The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington (New York, 1977; reprint of 1930 edition), pp. 118–21.
S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (London, 1862), pp. xiii–xiv.
Cuddy, ‘Anglo-Scottish Union and the Court of James I’, pp. 116–17; Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 68 (October 1995), 278 n. 57; Gardiner, History, II, 111;
Norman E. McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), I, 238, 241.
Gordon Williams (ed.), A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London, 1994), I, 258–61.
Ibid., pp. 13, 144. Wentworth actually said that he would be glad to hear that the King of Spain spent all his money on favourites and wanton courtiers, but this was obviously an indirect way of commenting upon James’s behaviour. Judging from James’s reportedly angry reaction, he knew that he was the real target of Wentworth’s criticism. Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I (London, 1857), I, 646–7, 649–50.
Thomas L. Moir, The Addled Parliament of 1614 (Oxford, 1958), pp. 137–9, 142–8; Mai ja Jansson, Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (House of Commons) (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. xxxiv–xxxv, 415, 420, 423.
W. Dunn Macray (ed.), The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1888), I, 74. For Herbert see DNB, IX, 659–63.
For Carr, see Willson, King James VI and I, pp. 336–56; G.P.V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant or the Court of King James I (New York, 1967), pp. 177–204; and DNB, III, 1081–5.
Gardiner, History of England, II, 166–87. Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of James I (London, 1849), I, 254, 261, 269, 273, 276, 284–8.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire Preserved at Easthampstead Park Berks (London, 1940), IV, 385.
David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London, 1993).
Houston, James I, p. 111. Roger Lockyer also referred to ‘the aura of sleaze which hung around James’s court’. James VI and I (London, 1998), p. 173. Alastair Bellany, ‘“Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1993), pp. 285–310;
Alastair Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins: Sartorial Transgression, Court Scandal, and Politics in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58, no. 2 (1996), 179–210.
Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London, 1981), pp. 12–18.
For Buckingham’s career see Roger Lockyer’s Buckingham cited above. For balance see Michael B. Young, ‘Buckingham, War, and Parliament: Revisionism Gone Too Far’, Parliamentary History, 4 (1985), 45–69. For a concise life of Buckingham see the DNB, XX, 327–37.
Francis Bamford (ed.), A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander (New York, 1971), p. 41.
Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (ed.), Miscellaneous State Papers from 1501 to 1726 (London, 1778), I, 455, 471.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Supplementary Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar & Kellie (London, 1930), p. 65.
The standard authorities on Cranfield are R.H. Tawney, Business and Politics under James I: Lionel Cranfield as Merchant and Minister (Cambridge, 1958) and
Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and Profits under the Early Stuarts: the Career of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex (Oxford, 1966). It is easy to overestimate Cranfield’s accomplishments and his motives, however. For a corrective, see
Michael B. Young, ‘Illusions of Grandeur and Reform at the Jacobean Court: Cranfield and the Ordnance’, Historical Journal, 22, no. 1 (1979), 53–73.
Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992). See especially pp. 179–235.
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Young, M.B. (2000). Life and Loves. In: King James and the History of Homosexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_2
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