To answer the question of why his love life mattered so much is simple on the face of it: these lovers were men. As historian Lady Antonia Fraser has noted, ‘the degree of their intimacy is less important than its political consequences’[i], because these men rose into positions of unequalled power. For modern historians, the emphasis should not be on their gender, but rather a discussion of their competency and the danger that they posed to the Kingdoms of Scotland and England.
Our said dearest son
James VI (1566-1625) was born into the turbulent world of sixteenth-century Scottish politics, when murder, assassination and usurpation were the norm. His own father, Lord Darnley, had been murdered when James was less than a year old, probably with the connivance of his mother, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. Within a few months she was forced to abdicate and flee Scotland, and James would never see her again. Crowned at thirteen months old and raised a Protestant, he became the pawn of successive Regents who, to protect him from kidnap by the next power hungry noble, cocooned him in Stirling Castle with his tutor, George Buchanan, a sadistic disciplinarian. Jock o’ the Slates, as he was known because of his prolific learning, survived his childhood to reach his majority, but he did so in a cold and dangerous world, protected from everyone:
‘Suffer nor admit no noblemen of our realm or any others, of what condition soever they be of, to enter or come within our said Castle or to the presence or our said dearest son, with any more persons but two or three at most.’[ii]
Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox circa 1542-1583
When James first met his cousin in 1579, he was a thirteen-year-old orphan, controlled by dour older men in search of power and governed by the strict guidelines of the Presbyterian Church. Esmé Stuart, on the other hand, was thirty-seven, married with children and fresh from the French court. He was well-travelled, educated, fun and described as ‘of comely proportion, civil behavior, red-bearded, and honest in conversation’[iii]. Whatever James’ sexuality might have been, Esmé dazzled him, bringing light into his studiously lonely world. One contemporary witness noted how James was not ashamed to show his affection for Esmé whenever the moment took him:
‘The King altogether is persuaded and led by him … and is in such love with him as in the open sight of the people often he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him.’
The nobles were concerned, not so much at James’ unabashedly open affection, but rather at what the observer notes first: that the king was persuaded and led by him. Within months, Esmé begun to reap the rewards of his relationship, not only in expensive gifts such as Mary Queen of Scots’ diamond The Great H of Scotland, but more significantly in titles and positions in government. By March 1580, Esmé had been made the Earl of Lennox and was already so powerful that the English Ambassador reported firstly that he ‘carryeth the sway in court’, and then, a few months later, that ‘few or none will openly withstand anything that he would have forward’[iv].
This political influence was dangerous. Lennox was a Catholic in a highly charged Protestant court, where religious civil war constantly threatened the fragile peace. He was rising at the expense of the ancestral nobility, and even his conversion to the Protestant faith in the summer of 1580 could not allay fears that he was a papal agent intent on restoring Mary Queen of Scots’ to the Scottish throne. For James, his renunciation of the Catholic faith only served to deepen his affection for him.[v]Yet, the nobles’ fear seemed justified when, in April 1581 Lennox had the King’s last regent, the Earl of Morton, executed for treason and for having been involved in the murder of the King’s late father. Rather than punishing him, the King made him the Duke of Lennox four months later.
In the volatile world of sixteenth-century Scottish politics, James, with his polarized dependence on Lennox, was taking an enormous risk. It could not last, and there was a certain amount of inevitability when the nobles finally took their revenge, kidnapping James whilst he was out hunting in August 1582. The usurpation of the monarch was not without precedent and for the ten months that he was held captive he must have wondered if he was about to suffer his mother’s fate. He would be lucky and survive to escape and reclaim his authority, but one outcome was that, despite resistance and many tears, he was forced to send his favorite into exile. They would never see each other again and Lennox died in France on May 26, 1583 still professing that he had ‘such extreme regret that I desire to die rather than to live, fearing that that has been the occasion of your no longer loving me.’[vi]
In tribute, James would pen the poem Ane Tragedie of the Phoenix, full of deep desire, with Lennox’s name woven into the text[vii], but he would not learn from his close shave with disaster. When in love, James loved passionately, unreservedly, and openly, regardless of the danger to his own person or the stability of his country.
Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset circa 1587-1645
There is something lavishly romantic about the way that James (now also King of England) met his next great love, the seventeen-year-old Robert Carr in 1607. Yet of all his relationships, this one proved the most troublesome.
Carr sparked James’ passionate nature from the outset. He was a remarkably handsome man, described by the Earl of Suffolk as ‘straight-limbed, well-favored, strong-shouldered and smooth-faced…’, and when he fell from his horse at a tilt, James’ elaborate sense of romance caused him to follow the boy to Charing Cross Hospital to ensure his welfare. It was obvious to all from the outset that James was in lust, if not yet in love, and the way that he fussed over the injured boy gave rise to satirical comments by some and false statements of concern by others[viii].
There had been other male favorites since the fall of Lennox, but none had been given the same political power until Carr. James’ passion was once again measured in his generosity and, like Lennox, Carr’s rise was spectacular. He was immediately knighted and then made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber (a role that required him to sleep in the King’s room). Contemporaries reported how James would lustfully kiss, pinch and fondle his favorite in public[ix] and by 1610 he was so powerful that he was able to influence the King into dissolving Parliament. In 1611 he was made Viscount Rochester and in April 1612 James made him a Privy Councillor. It is unlikely that such a rise would have come for free and when Carr was created Lord Chamberlain, James wrote that ‘no man should marvel that he bestowed a place so near himself as his friend, whom he loved above all men living’.
James was again playing with political fire, allowing one man to dominate and influence him as he had with Lennox. In 1613 the Spanish Ambassador reported that, when in Council, Carr:
‘showeth much temper and modesty, without seeming to press and sway anything. But afterwards the King resolveth all business with him alone, both those that pass in Council and many others wherewith he never maketh them acquainted.’
James seems to have learnt nothing from his near escape in 1582, treating Carr as his closest advisor at the detriment of others, despite evidence of his incompetence. He was so detested that even the Queen was keen to see a new man in her husband’s bed. It took fate and Carr’s own conceited insolence to save the two kingdoms, though it would bring James to the edge of personal scandal.
Despite being James’ lover, Carr fell in love with his mistress, Frances Howard, the wife of the Earl of Essex. James was not against his favorites marrying and he openly assisted Carr in having Frances’ first marriage annulled so that she would be free to marry him. The king paid for the wedding and, as a gift, he created the new couple the Earl and Countess of Somerset.
The new earl was still on the rise, and as far as James was concerned, their love was as viable as ever, wife or no wife. But, as well as complimenting him on his looks, the Earl of Suffolk had also noted that Somerset was:
‘…endowed ‘…with some sort of cunning and show of modsty, tho, God wot, he well knoweth when to show his impudence’.
It was a characteristic that would be Somerset’s downfall, and within a year of the wedding, he had been insolent to the king once too often. James complained to Somerset that he had shown him a ‘strange frenzy’ and ‘strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride and (which is worst of all) with a settled kind of induced obstinacy’[x]. The king was tiring of Somerset’s sullen behavior and, worse still, that he would no longer sleep with him:
‘I leave out of this reckoning your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary, accounting that but as a point of unkindness.’
The King warned him that ‘there must be some exterior signs of the amendment of your behavior towards me’, but it was already too late. A key opponent to the Somersets’ wedding had mysteriously died in the Tower of London, and by the summer of 1615 the Countess had been found guilty of his murder. James was damaged by the association; Somerset was his favorite, he had secured the annulment that had allowed them to marry and the country was abuzz with tales of the salacious court. The Somersets were sentenced to death, but James still felt enough for his old favorite to have the sentence commuted to imprisonment. Nevertheless, his passion was gone and the sweet prose to Somerset at the height of his power was replaced with regret:
‘I shall never pardon myself but shall carry that cross to the grave with me, for raising a man so high as might make him presume to pierce my ears with such speeches.’
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628
Where Somerset failed, Villiers succeeded, captivating the King and earning the mantle of his last and perhaps greatest love. His meteoric rise took him through the ranks from knight to earl to marquis in three short years, and in 1623 he was made the Duke of Buckingham.
Though they were together for nine years, James was a man coming to the end of his life. He suffered from gout and, probably, porphyria, the same mental illness that was to later afflict George III. It caused him moments of severe abdominal pain and bouts of senility that left him open to persuasion as never before:
‘The King seems practically lost. He now protests, now weeps, but finally gives in.’
Buckingham was more than willing to take advantage. He was described as having an effeminate countenance and as:
‘the handsomest-bodied in England; his limbs so well compacted and his conversation so pleasing and of so sweet a disposition.’
In reality he was also arrogant, incompetent and startling corrupt, but Buckingham was able to satisfy James’ desires as he seems to confirm when he told James that he had been pondering ‘whether you loved me now . . . better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham [in 1615], where the bed's head could not be found between the master and his dog’.
James was repeating his earlier folly, promoting a man of little talent above both his natural station and his intellectual one. It was a position that would put James and his kingdoms yet again in danger. On the domestic front, Buckingham helped to destroy the financial reforms the Earl of Middlesex had been attempting to impose, ensuring that the Earl was finally impeached by Parliament in 1624. When his shady dealings in Ireland were in danger of coming to light in 1621, he nurtured the row between the King and Parliament over the royal prerogative; James prematurely dissolved Parliament and the investigation that would have exposed him was ended.
Buckingham had also managed to gain control of foreign policy, at which he was also incompetent. Against his better judgment, in 1623 James allowed his heir, Charles, to travel with Buckingham to Spain to woo the Spanish Infanta. The negotiations that the duke led were so calamitous that they came close to making the Prince a hostage to the Spanish. When the party returned, Buckingham hid his humiliation by calling for a patriotic Protestant war on Spain. Two years later, to again restore his own popularity, he led a doomed raid to help the Huguenots in France. And finally, as the king neared death, he instigated a military campaign to recover the Electorate of the Palatinate, which quickly dissolved into yet another disaster.
But ‘sweete Steenie’, as the King called Buckingham, could do no wrong, even during the disastrous trip to Spain when the pain of being parted from him was forefront in James’ mind:
‘…god blesse thee my sweete Steenie and sende thee a quikke and happie return with my sweete babie [Prince Charles who was 22], in the armes of thy deare dade and stewarde.’
As he sunk into senility, James needed love, whatever form that took. In one of his most famous letters, where he calls Buckingham both his wife and his child, he shows us that the thought of being without him was unbearable:
‘…I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’
He would cling to Buckingham until the end, whatever the cost.
Neither a God nor an angel
James made many of the classic mistakes in his relationships with his favorites and that his lovers were men meant that they were able to hold political positions, such as Privy Councillor, Lord Chamberlain and Treasurer of Scotland, which a female mistress could not. He promoted them far above their natural station, allowed them to influence him in matters of Church and State, and listened to them at the detriment of his ‘natural’ advisors, the nobility.
Yet, ultimately, the main problem was that James’ men were not right for the positions they held. He chose them for their looks and their flattery, not for their competence. They were greedy and unfit for the roles he gave them. They influenced him into decisions the canny King, who had survived so much as a child, should not have made, often putting himself and his kingdoms at risk of not only being financially milked but also of war. But when in love, James loved passionately and loyally:
‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore, I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here, assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.’
What do you think of James VI/I’s lovers? Let us know below.
Now, you can read about whether King James VI/I’s predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I, was really the ‘Virgin Queen’ here.
[i] Fraser, Lady Antonia, King James VI of Scotland and I of England, Book Club Associates, London, p126
[ii] Mary Queen of Scots to the Earl of Mar, March 29, 1567
[iii] Rictor Norton, "Queen James and His Courtiers", Gay History and Literature, January 8, 2000, updated January 9, 2012 http://rictornorton.co.uk/jamesi.htm
[iv] Stedall, Robert, Esme Stuart 1st Duke of Lennox
[v] Bergeron, David M, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1999, p38
[vi] December 18, 1582 in Bergeron, pp49-50
[vii] Bergeron, p53; Murphy, Samantha A Writing Britain: James VI & I and the National Body
[viii] Fraser, p126
[ix] Fraser, p126
[x] Stewart, Alan, The Cradle King: a life of James VI and I, Pimlico, London, 2009, p266
