Abstract
James I died in 1625, but the repercussions of his homosexuality did not die with him. The trend in recent years has been to interpret the disintegration of Charles’s regime in the 1640s as the product of immediate circumstances, unrelated to what occurred earlier in his own reign, let alone to anything that occurred in the reign of his father. In this chapter, therefore, we are bucking the trend in suggesting that James’s homosexuality continued to have repercussions long after his death, repercussions that were evident in the war on the continent, the continuing ascendancy of Buckingham, the marriage of Charles, the deteriorating reputation of the monarchy and eventually even the outbreak of civil war.
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Notes and References
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds), The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1917), XVII, 1006; A Briefe and True Relation of the Murther of Mr. Thomas Scott Preacher of Gods Word and Batchelor of Divinitie, Committed by John Lambert Souldier of the Garrison of Utricke (London, 1628).
For the political narrative of these years, see Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979). For the death toll, see
Michael B. Young, ‘Buckingham, War, and Parliament: Revisionism Gone Too Far’, Parliamentary History Yearbook, 4 (1985), 62, 69 n. 120.
Francis Bamford (ed.), A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander (New York, 1971), p. 197.
Compare Roger Lockyer’s Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London, 1981) with my own ‘Buckingham, War, and Parliament’, cited above.
James Holstun, ‘“God Bless Thee, Little David!”: John Felton and his Allies,’ ELH, 59 (1992), 513–52.
Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. J.W. Harper (New York, 1966), p. 92. For the context of this play, see
Thomas Cogswell, ‘Thomas Middleton and the Court, 1624: A Game at Chess in Context’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 273–88;
Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/4 (Cambridge, 1986), chapter 4.
Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), pp. 277–300;
Alastair Bellany, ‘“Raylinge 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 (Stanford, 1993), pp. 285–310;
Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 49–66; and Holstun’s ‘God Bless Thee, Little David!’, cited above.
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), VI, 106–8;
Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of Charles I (London, 1849), I, 101;
James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London, 1845), II, 186.
Roger Lockyer, ‘An English Valido? Buckingham and James I’, in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), p. 58. Lockyer tries to distinguish between the role Buckingham played under James and the role he played under Charles, arguing that it was only under the latter that Buckingham obtained too much power and undermined royal authority.
Pierre Matthieu, The Powerful Favorite, Or, The Life of Aelius Sejanus (Paris, 1628), pp. 1, 5, 46, 114, 154. For the use of Matthieu’s works as political propaganda, see David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 32, 36.
W. Douglas Hamilton (ed.), Original Papers Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Milton (London, 1859), p. 67. Gill was a friend of John Milton. See Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 27–9.
J.A. Taylor, ‘Two Unpublished Poems on the Duke of Buckingham’, Review of English Studies, new series 40, no. 158 (May 1989), 240. See also
V.L. Pearl and M.L. Pearl, ‘Richard Corbett’s “Against the Opposing of the Duke in Parliament, 1628” and the Anonymous Rejoinder, “An Answere to the Same, Lyne for Lyne”: The Earliest Dated Manuscript Copies’, Review of English Studies, new series 42, no. 165 (February 1991), 32–9.
Fairholt, ‘Poems’, pp. 30, 34–5, 52. The equation of the king’s sceptre with his penis was a common device in the poetry of Charles II’s reign, too. See Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993), pp. 125–53.
Allen B. Hinds and others (eds), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice (London, 1864–1940), XVII, 439.
Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987), p. 13; ‘The Image of Virtue: the Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–42’, in his Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London, 1989), pp. 147, 154; and The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 183, 188, 190, 210, 212, 217. See also Sharpe’s shorter early essay on ‘The Personal Rule of Charles I’ in Politics and Ideas, pp. 101–22.
John Bruce (ed.), Calendar of State Paper, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I (London, 1859), III (1628–1629), 412. See also pp. 343, 393, and 413.
Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York, 1972), p. 70.
Albert H. Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England 1603–1642 (Charlottesville, VA, 1989), p. 171;
Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia or Observations on Queen Elizabeth, Her Times and Favorites, ed. John S. Cerovski (London, 1985), p. 40.
Charles Howard McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (New York, 1965), pp. 5, 27, 43;
Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 4, 31, 49.
Jonathan Goldberg in his James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (London, 1983), pp. 113–15, 139–41.
T.B. Howell (ed.), Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1809–26), III, 409. For Castlehaven’s trial, see also Caroline Bingham, Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1, no. 3 (Spring 1971), 447–68; Cynthia Herrup, ‘“To Pluck Bright Honour from the Pale-faced Moon”: Gender and Honour in the Castlehaven Story’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, volume 6 (Cambridge, 1996), 137–59, and ‘The Patriarch at Home: The Trial of the Second Earl of Castlehaven for Rape and Sodomy’, History Workshop Journal, issue 41 (Spring 1996), 1–18.
Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginnings of the English Revolution (New York, 1971).
For a review of the controversy, see Dwight D. Brautigam, ‘The Court and the Country Revisited’, in Bonnelyn Young Kunze and Dwight D. Brautigam (eds), Court, Country and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, 1992), pp. 55–64. See also Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, pp. 11–22;
R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philiadelphia, 1987);
R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 99–112;
Derek Hirst, ‘Court, Country, and Politics before 1629’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford, 1978), pp. 105–38.
Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment, p. 16. See also Leah S. Marcus, ‘Politics and Pastoral: Writing the Court on the Countryside’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 1993), pp. 139–59.
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York, 1972), p. 105. Italics mine.
For the general tendency to link homosexuality with the court, see Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), pp. 33–7.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 666.
Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. vii–viii.
Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), p. 211.
Conrad Russell, ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, History, 72 (1987), 412–14.
A flood of new books is now reaffirming this view of King Charles that S.R. Gardiner took one hundred years ago. Notable contributions in addition to the works of Conrad Russell cited above include Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987);
L.J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989);
Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–1641 (Cambridge, 1990); and
Allan MacInnes, Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, 1991).
Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel: The Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex 1591–1646 (Lincoln, NE, 1970), p. 70. For the campaign of 1644, culminating in the defeat at Lostwithiel, see chapter 17.
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© 2000 Michael B. Young
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Young, M.B. (2000). Legacy. In: King James and the History of Homosexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_7
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