O this white powder!

Beware hedonists bearing white powder. This, in part, was the message pressed in a short book about the excesses of the Jacobean court written by a Scottish Catholic physician and occasional counterfeiter, George Eglisham. The Forerunner of Revenge, published in Antwerp in 1626 in English and Latin, quickly gained notoriety across Europe for its particular depiction of the Stuart monarchy as a dynasty under siege. The regime’s crises, Eglisham claimed, had worsened in the previous year with the death of James I; that death was not, despite the officially authorised version of events, the effect of an intense fever on the booze-ravaged body of an ailing king, but rather a carefully planned assassination performed at close quarters by George Villiers, the riotous first Duke of Buckingham. In Eglisham’s account, James was persuaded by Buckingham to take a draught of something restorative with his wine one evening, only to be left in ‘great agonie’, screaming: ‘O this white powder! This white powder! Would to God I had never taken it.’ The king was dead within the week.

This story was, as Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell show in this absorbing and meticulously researched study, almost certainly false. But if Eglisham’s sensational claim was nonsense, it was powerful and transformative nonsense that rapidly became one of the most enduring political myths of the 17th century. Eglisham first gave light and air to his secret history in order to try to influence the direction of Anglo-Spanish diplomacy; as a papist who had found some favour at court, he did his utmost to discredit Buckingham, who threatened that position by urging the king to pursue Roman Catholicism in the Thirty Years’ War.