This year marked the 400th anniversary of the death of King James I of England (James VI in Scotland), the first monarch of the generally disastrous Stuart dynasty. By no means forgotten by historians, the anniversary was marked by no fewer than three heavyweight biographies, and headlines devoted to the King in the Times and the Telegraph.
James’s son Charles I lost both a civil war and his head; his grandson Charles II presided over the plague, the Great Fire of London, and saw his fleet towed away by the Dutch; his second grandson James II lost the throne entirely and fled into exile. But in spite of this dismal record, of all the Stuart sovereigns, the first James was easily the worst and most disgusting monarch ever to have occupied the throne.
Let’s look first at his poor personal hygiene: James had an aversion to water, and instead of washing dabbed his body with scent, which failed to disguise his appalling body odour. As a result, his skin took on the texture of dark velvet from the ingrained dirt. He was a passionate huntsman, referenced by John Donne in his poem ‘The Sunne Rising’ when he writes: ‘Goe tell court huntsmen that the king will ride’. The trouble was that once the King was in the saddle it was difficult to get him off it. So much so that he would defecate without dismounting when the chase grew too exciting.
When his hounds had dragged their quarry down, James would have the deer disembowelled, and then plunge his spindly legs into the poor beast’s steaming entrails. Cruelty to animals was one of the King’s chief characteristics, and he delighted to watch the creatures in the Tower of London menagerie tear each other to pieces. On one occasion, they failed to perform as expected, and a lamb quite literally lay down with a lion in peaceful coexistence. James could not disguise his disappointment.
His sadism was not confined to the animal kingdom. He personally ordered Guy Fawkes to be racked in the Tower after the gunpowder plotter had threatened to blow James and his fellow Scots back to where they had come from. James also had scores of innocent women burned alive on suspicion of witchcraft – another of the King’s obsessive interests.
The King was a physical coward, wore padded clothes as a precaution against being stabbed, and banned bladed weapons in his presence. This particular phobia possibly predated his birth, when his pregnant mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had seen her favourite David Rizzio dragged from her chamber in Holyroodhouse to be butchered with knives by envious members of the Scottish nobility.
James certainly had a disturbed childhood which may explain his abnormal psychology: while he was still an infant, his father Henry Darnley had been found strangled in the grounds of his Edinburgh house after it had been blown up with gunpowder – probably with Mary’s connivance. And after he had been placed on the Scottish throne following Mary’s forced abdication, James was in constant danger of being overthrown or assassinated himself.
Cruelty to animals was one of the King’s chief characteristics
Politically, James’s fear of violence dictated his craven foreign policy when appeasement of Spain replaced the heroics of the Elizabethan era. He even sacrificed the quintessential Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh to Spanish vengeance by locking him up in the Tower for years and then having him executed.
Petty vindictiveness also lay behind James’s persecution of his cousin Arbella Stuart, a plausible claimant to the throne. Her only crime was her royal blood and her secret marriage to another possible pretender to the Crown, William Seymour, Duke of Somerset. The Duke engineered Arbella’s escape from the Tower, but the complex plan went awry and the couple were detained by the mean monarch and never met again. Arbella pined away in the Tower and died a prisoner.
Although he fathered three children, James was likely gay, doting on a succession of handsome young favourites, slobbering on their necks (the King’s tongue was too large for his mouth) and openly rummaging in their breeches. The last of his favourites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, is suspected of poisoning the King with his mother’s aid by feeding him toxic homemade ‘medicine’ as he lay dying, aged 58. If they did, the long-suffering kingdom owed them a big vote of thanks.
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