The Six Loves of James I

“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is all too often overlooked or even mocked for the same reasons. Yet James I was a multifaceted ruler who led a fascinating life—and his personal relationships only add to that complexity.

For generations, historians avoided labeling the intimate relationships between James and his “favorites” as romantic. But after combing through James’s personal correspondence, historian and author Gareth Russell has uncovered compelling evidence of five significant love affairs with men. His award-winning book, The Six Loves of James I, reveals how these relationships—and his marriage to Queen Anna of Denmark*—guided the course of his life and reign.

James I’s story is a turbulent one, filled with assassination attempts, kidnapping, and witch hunts. It’s also a story of a man who loved “indiscreetly and obstinately,” for better or for worse. In this episode, Gareth Russell explores the untold history of a complicated king through the lens of the great loves of his life.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 16, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Pavel Barter in Belfast and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Gareth Russell is a Northern Irish historian, author, and broadcaster. Educated at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and Queen’s University, Belfast, he specialises in European and royal history.

Young and Damned and Fair, his biography of Queen Catherine Howard, was based on his postgraduate research and was published to critical acclaim in 2017. His account of the Titanic disaster, The Ship of Dreams, was a Daily Telegraph Best History Book (2019). Do Let’s Have Another Drink, his affectionate biography of the late Queen Mother, was named a Book of the Year (2022) by The Times. In 2023, his bestselling The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court was named a BBC History Book of the Year.
 
He frequently contributes to documentaries and news reports in Britain and America. He provided commentary on Elizabeth II’s funeral and Charles III’s coronation for BBC Northern Ireland.

Russell divides his time between Belfast and London.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

Queen Elizabeth I has quite the following. She’s the subject of books, TV series, and movies. She’s been portrayed by Dames Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, and Cate Blanchett.

But pop culture has a lot less to say about Elizabeth’s successor, James I. That’s too bad, because James also led a fascinating life.

As the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, James’s childhood was overshadowed by violence. His father was murdered, possibly with his mother’s complicity.

Like his mother, James was the target of assassination attempts, including the famous Gunpowder Plot, where conspirators tried to blow up Parliament with James inside.

Yet, James also managed to avoid conflict. He brought together the royal lines of England and Scotland and refused to go to war with the Catholic powers of Europe.

James was also notably queer, with several well-documented relationships with men who were his “favorites.”

Historian and novelist Gareth Russell explores James’s eventful life in a spirited new biography, The Six Loves of James I. The BBC named it “2025’s History Book of the Year.”

Here’s Gareth Russell in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, Gareth, let’s start with some Shakespeare-centric questions, if we could. James became the patron of Shakespeare’s King’s Men almost immediately after he assumed the throne in England. So, was he already a true Shakespeare fan?

GARETH RUSSELL: Absolutely not, but it is such a testament to Shakespeare’s importance rather than James’s devotion to the art form.

So, he really was not particularly interested in theater and often found it and anything adjacent to it, such as the masques, quite boring—and he always thought they were too long. It was his wife, Anna of Denmark, who was much more interested and genuinely, I think, enjoyed theater as an art form.

But the reason why I say it’s more a testament to Shakespeare’s importance than James’s taste: James is a very canny… “manipulator” is only a little bit too harsh. I don’t think it’s so harsh it becomes inaccurate. He can find what people are looking for, he can read public opinion, and when he comes to London (which he takes an immediate dislike to), he understands its importance. He understands it’s the beating heart of the English political system.

And within London, the importance of Shakespeare and of the theaters to set and manipulate the public mood is something that James comes to appreciate very, very quickly indeed, and that’s why you see him taking such a prominent role within the King’s Men so quickly. It’s because he knows that Shakespeare has the ability to be the weathervane of public sentiment

BOGAEV: Smart. A political move. And the politicking was reciprocated by Shakespeare, right, who tailored some of his plays for both his monarchs. But do you know for sure that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth as a nod to James’s Scottish roots, and also that he borrowed from James’s book, Daemonologie, about witchcraft?

RUSSELL: I suppose we’re into slightly more theological territory on what is certainty, so I would step back from saying “absolutely certain,” but I would be stunned if it hadn’t been.

It’s such an interesting, rich play when you look at the Scottish aspect of James’s rule when he was James VI of Scots before he became James I of England. It’s saturated in the history of Scotland and the politics of the Scottish aristocracy, and also, in the political morality of witchcraft and the threat that it poses. Because one of the things that I find so interesting watching Macbeth again after working on this book—I was struck immediately by a very important dark connection in the story, which is that witchcraft is not, in Macbeth, an isolated sin.

If you look at what the Weird Sisters do in that play, it is to construct and manipulate an environment that incubates treason. But really, their primary role in the story is to facilitate Macbeth taking steps towards treason against Duncan, and later the downfall of a mighty noble house in the form of the murders of people like Lady Macduff and also the attack on Banquo. So, in that regard, that is textbook—almost literally textbook—James. James referred to witchcraft as a form of treason. So political plotting was treason against the king on Earth, witchcraft was treason against the king in heaven, and the two sins were inextricably linked—and Daemonolgie really stresses that witchcraft is a form of moral and spiritual treason. James’s witch hunts—particularly the North Berwick witch hunts between 1590 and 1592—their primary focus, their primary drive, is a belief that there is an aristocratic nobleman who is manipulating and being manipulated by a coven.

In James’s case, it was his cousin on the illegitimate side of the family, The Earl of Bothwell, later known as the Necromancer Earl. James was convinced that Bothwell was using the coven at North Berwick to plot to seize the throne. So, when you start to look at the cousin using witchcraft to get himself closer to the throne, the plotlines of Macbeth and what James thought was the reality of the North Berwick witch hunts become even more striking.

BOGAEV: Well, Shakespeare also wrote two other plays set in a semi-mythical time when England and Scotland were a single country known as Britain, and those plays are Lear and Cymbeline. In Lear, the old king’s decision to separate Britain into three kingdoms has tragic results. Some scholars read that as a nod to the wisdom of James’s vision of a unified Britain, which he tried to put forth once he was monarch of England, so does that interpretation ring true for you?

RUSSELL: I think so. If I was a betting man, I’d put my money on that interpretation. I often say that we should see James as our first great unionist leader in the British Isles. He is a very strong believer, as you say, Barbara, in a unified kingdom.

He did believe that the division of the British Isles into separate political entities was a disaster for all involved, and that ultimately, it was the monarchy’s duty to remove borders and therefore remove future wars.

And it comes up against enormous resistance. It comes up against quite a bit of resistance in Scotland. It is actually initially England that refuses to play ball with the unionist project at all, and really the level of anti-Scottish xenophobia that is conjured in the debates in the English Parliament is quite strident and it becomes personal about James, his presumed lover, Robert Carr, and his other Scottish attendants.

So, it doesn’t surprise me that Shakespeare, writing with an eye to royal patronage, is presenting a softly unionist play in King Lear.

BOGAEV: Okay, you’ve introduced Robert Carr, so let’s dig into your thesis, The Six Loves of James. Your epigraphs really set the stage. One of them is, “Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” First, how do we know that James was queer?

RUSSELL: A lot of evidence, really. Obviously, that quote, it is reported in letters from April and May of 1623 and April 1624 by merchants in London—separate merchants writing home—to say this joke is doing the rounds.

So, you then start to go into, “Well, what did English people think?” And you see in diary entries from judges and lawyers that there is what they call a “just suspicion that sodomy be a sin in our prince.” So, you’re getting a little closer, and then you start to get into James’s private correspondence, and at that point, there really is no… I don’t believe that there is any explanation for his letters other than them being romantic or sexual, unless you have, I would say, intellectually acrobatic or contortionist interpretations.

BOGAEV: Because they were so amorous?

RUSSELL: They’re amorous. They are erotic. So, we have a luckily surviving note from the Duke of Buckingham, James’s last favorite, to James thanking him for using his hand to bring Buckingham more joy than he’d ever experienced with his own. A letter saying that he couldn’t wait to feel James’s thighs in his arms again.

So, we do have erotic ones. But what we also have, you know, are letters from James when one of the favorites was on a diplomatic mission abroad, and he said, “Sweetheart, I rode this day away from all eyes so that none could see the tears pouring down my face. I care nothing in this world but that you should be in my arms again.”

There’s a letter, again to Buckingham, where he references a marriage between them after Queen Anna’s death. There’s a letter to, as you mentioned, Robert Carr, where he says that he’s so upset that Robert refuses to share his bed anymore even though James has begged him to.

I was aware, Barbara, truth be told, before I started writing the book, that there was general consensus that the relationship with the Duke of Buckingham, that pretty much lasted for the last decade of James’s life, that that was accepted to be romantic, and likewise with Robert Carr, and that there just wasn’t evidence, really, for anyone before. There was speculation, but there wasn’t that kind of first-hand evidence that one would be looking for.

So, for me, the great joy with this book was to be able to uncover letters that went right the way back to his early 20s, when he was writing to a favorite then, the Marquess of Huntly, who had gone to… he had large estates in the Highlands, and had to go back, and James wrote to him and said, “Since the second you have left me, I have not been one moment unthinking of you except when I’m asleep.”

There is open speculation in Edinburgh, where he’s nicknamed the Buggerer King. There are concerns amongst the Presbyterian Kirk about his private life. There are protests in Edinburgh in his early 20s urging him to separate from a male favorite and do his duty and pick a wife.

There’s a letter that he writes, which did make me laugh, because James was—I don’t think I’m being too harsh on James to say he was not a man overburdened with tact. And when he was doing his duty to the monarchy and marrying the Princess of Denmark, he was separating from a man he loved very much. He was trying to find his favorite, Alexander Lindsay, a wife as well, but, you know, a good match with a good noble house.

BOGAEV: This is Sandy.

RUSSELL: James called him Sandy, which is still a popular Scottish nickname for Alexander. But James writes to Sandy’s betrothed and sort of tells her that he thinks she’s not sufficiently enthusiastic about accepting “This man of mine, whom out of my own bed I have been willing to bestow upon yours.” So yes, when I say not gifted with tact, it’s pretty… he’s someone who is very open about it.

BOGAEV: Right. It was like an early modern throuple.

RUSSELL: It is. It is a 16th-century emotional vortex, I would say, and listen, from a historian or a biographer’s perspective, that is absolute gold.

BOGAEV: Seems like a really obvious question, but it’s not an un-complex answer. How did early modern people understand sodomy in the late 16th to mid-17th century when all of this is going on?

RUSSELL: I don’t think that’s an obvious question at all. I think it’s a really necessary one, because I think we have an idea that history moves in one direction, and that attitudes move in a more liberalizing direction with the flowing of the centuries, and that simply isn’t true.

So, if you were, you know, to use modern nomenclature, if you were a queer person in London, you would much rather have been living in, say, the 1610s than the 1910s. You know, attitudes did oscillate between them. So, if you were in London, the chance that you were going to be exposed to homosexuality or same-sex relationships is pretty high, and there are complaints from the emerging Puritan movement that London is sort of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Within the world of high politics that James inhabits, there is an interesting dynamic. People at the time, including at least two Archbishops of Canterbury who were very aware of the details of James’s private life, they did not regard it as any more of a failure in their king than they would have previous monarchs’ heterosexual adultery. Homosexuality at this stage had not yet taken its place as sort of the Rubicon of Christian morality, that it was just seen as one sin among many.

BOGAEV: Well, sexuality wasn’t the only thing that influenced James’s life. We haven’t gotten to his incredibly turbulent early life, which left so many scars.

You write that James once said that his life had been “baptized in blood,” and someone described him as “a young man who had been nurtured in fear.” So, we Americans, remind us of the dramatic circumstances of his youth as the son of Mary, Queen of Scots.

RUSSELL: I think we often have this idea that people in the past were completely immune to violence, or tragedy, or pain. It is very clear that James’s upbringing is shocking, as you quoted there, Barbara, to his own contemporaries.

So, he’s born in Edinburgh at Edinburgh Castle to Mary, Queen of Scots, his very glamorous and controversial mother, and he is born at the crisis point of his mother’s queenship.

She has married her Anglo-Scottish, but essentially English, cousin, Lord Darnley. He’s a very thin-skinned young man and easily becomes the pawn of feuding factions at the Scottish court, and just before James is born, Darnley led a plot that murdered Queen Mary’s chief advisor in front of her. There has then been coup, countercoup, and then when James is still in the cradle, his father is found strangled in the detonated smoking ruins of an Edinburgh mansion.

And I always say that it’s a little bit like monarchy’s answer to Murder on the Orient Express, which is that there is a litany of suspects because everybody has a motive, and, you know, it’s—

BOGAEV: I was going to say Game of Thrones, but you’re right, Agatha Christie’s better.

RUSSELL: It’s like everyone in that carriage had a reason for wanting him dead, and thus far, there has been no historical Poirot to figure out who did it. But at the time, the widespread suspicion and conclusion, possibly cultivated by her enemies, is that Queen Mary was guilty of it, and this does lead to a rebellion. It forces her off the throne.

James, as I say, still an infant, is seized by his uncle, who is leading the rebellion against Queen Mary. Mary flees abroad to England—fatefully and ultimately fatally—and James is, at 13 months old, proclaimed James VI of Scotland. He is sent to beautiful Stirling Castle, a countryside castle on a crag, and James is sent there to live out his childhood whilst his uncle rules Scotland in his name. Now, his uncle then acquires quite an unfortunate claim to fame by being the first head of government in history to be assassinated by a handgun. And Scottish politics just—

BOGAEV: It doesn’t end, really, and meanwhile, his own mother is insisting that her son, James, is a false king

RUSSELL: Yes, Mary is not taking demotion well at all, quite justifiably. But she is insisting from house arrest in England that she is still the rightful Queen of Scots and that the abdication that was elicited from her during the coup was elicited under duress and was therefore illegal.

Even when eventually James and Mary start writing to each other, they both make a point of signing off the letter as, you know, “King of Scots” or “Queen of Scots,” just to remind the other one of where they stood.

BOGAEV: And then he’s kidnapped when he was 16.

RUSSELL: Yeah, there’s not much chance for emotional equilibrium to develop, Barbara, after. So yes, he starts to take more of a role in government after 13, 14, 15, and so, when he’s 16, he’s kidnapped by people he thought were loyal to him, and what is quite a lovely detail is that he eventually frees himself. He fakes a hunting trip, and he is met by his supporters who’ve been waiting for him, and he launches a countercoup, and it’s really by 17 that James has established himself quite brutally, but by contemporary standards fairly, as King of Scots in action as well as name.

BOGAEV: So, this whole kidnapping episode was called the “Gowrie Revolt.” And you write that after his victory, he had a period of romantic, and political, and emotional confidence, and it was this time that he perhaps had the first of his six lovers. Don’t worry, we’re not going to get to all six. We’re very late to the first one. But anyway, his name is Patrick Gray, and James was working towards an Anglo-Scottish treaty at this time, and he used Patrick Gray as an envoy, but Gray was a spy for England?

RUSSELL: Yeah. Gray was not in my original book proposal. I didn’t think Gray was one of the loves. That was an interesting discovery.

BOGAEV: His first big love is a traitor to him.

RUSSELL: Yeah—

BOGAEV: That’s a blow.

RUSSELL: It’s a blow. What’s interesting is that both his mother seems to have been tipped off about Patrick’s role in her son’s life, judging by her letters and by the quite strong dislike she takes for Patrick Gray.

But also, James’s tricky godmother, Elizabeth I of England, recruits Patrick as her spy. And it’s one of Mary’s representatives, one of her envoys in Edinburgh, who is the first to say that how James falls in love is one of the great weaknesses in how he is king—

BOGAEV: His Achilles’ heel.

RUSSELL: Yeah, I mean, Patrick was fascinating because he was described as extremely good-looking. I mean, he was sort of considered quite dazzlingly attractive. People admired his wit. But if Patrick was awake, he was plotting, and I think at the very end, James did realize that he had a traitor amongst his midst, and he doesn’t execute Patrick, but he does banish him. And so, I do think that Patrick, the breakdown of the relationship with Patrick, I think leaves another welt mark on James’s ability to trust.

BOGAEV: And so many of them betrayed him. You mentioned Lord Huntly. He became chancellor, and he seems to have implicated himself perhaps as a traitor in his dealings with the Spanish during the Spanish Armada.

And then he also—I mean, that’s under dispute, but he also later rose up against James, and surrendered though at the last minute before their armies clash. So, is this another example of James’s affection for his favorite blinding him and putting him at danger?

RUSSELL: I think so. I think Huntly, from everything you can tell from the sources, Huntly must have had charisma seeping out of his fingertips.

But he is someone who does put, massively, the entirety of Scottish foreign policy at risk, because Huntly is secretly liaising with the Spanish government to the extent that he promises them that if they want to launch a second Armada, he will let them use his deep-water ports in his estates in the northeast of Scotland.

It is serious enough that Elizabeth I repeatedly writes to James and asks for Huntly to be punished. There are threatened resignations from the Scottish cabinet about the leniency that is shown to Huntly, and Huntly, like Patrick, there are suspicions among courtiers, quite well-documented ones, that Huntly is deliberately manipulating the king’s affections in order to further his own political agenda.

BOGAEV: Right. That’s always the question of how sincere these minions—they were called—were in their love of the king, which is, I guess, also always the case, whether platonic or not.

But it was around this time that James finally agreed to marry. He’d been under a lot of pressure to marry, and his bride was Princess Anna of Denmark, just 14 years old. I guess not that unusual then. But I feel like your next book should be about her.

RUSSELL: You are not the first person to say that. She has emerged as—many people, myself included—as one of their favorites. She is technicolored magnificence, I think, as a personality.

BOGAEV: I mean, just so interesting how she handles herself from the start. She has great—also great presence of mind. But I just have one question about her, which is, what do we know about what she made of James’s sexuality?

RUSSELL: I think we can be fairly certain of what she did—in fact, we can be certain after a certain period of their marriage. So, it does seem very clear that she knew by 1603, so about 13 years into the marriage.

She is allegedly one of the chess masters, along with James’s English Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, who tries to pick a favorite for her husband in 1603 and 1604. We know that she did. There’s a small mountain of evidence that she picked the future Duke of Buckingham to oust her husband’s lover, Robert Carr, because she loathed Carr. And she made hay, I think, while the sun shone.

Her mother, Queen Sophie of Denmark, had been married to an energetically, indeed almost compulsively heterosexual husband, who humiliated Sophie with a litany of mistresses and illegitimate children, and Anna was practical enough to realize that—

BOGAEV: Right, “At least that’s not happening to me.”

RUSSELL: Bingo. So, “I will never have to be outshone by a mistress, and my children will never have to be threatened by bastards.” That is how she sees it. Now, the more difficult question is, when did she figure out? And there’s, I think, pretty good evidence to say that it was sometime around 1600.

But again, it’s into that slightly philosophical territory of what does knowing mean, really? But if it was 1600, she has certainly made her peace with it by 1603, 1604. So, as you say, great presence of mind. “If this is the hand I have been dealt, it’s not really a bad hand,” when she looks at the fate of many other queens around her who are married to men who prefer women.

BOGAEV: Also, they managed to sleep together.

RUSSELL: Absolutely.

BOGAEV: She has a lot of kids. Unfortunately, not many of them make it to adulthood.

RUSSELL: No, they don’t. That’s one of the more tragic parts, and actually, James and Anna’s love for their children and grief at the children’s premature death was some of the most upsetting parts of this to write and to research because it’s very human.

BOGAEV: I think five out of seven died.

RUSSELL: Yeah, that’s exactly it. There are four as infants and then there’s one that makes it to 18 and dies of typhoid.

BOGAEV: The heir.

RUSSELL: The heir. And it was harrowing. Sometimes with primary sources in the archives, you see the boundaries between the centuries collapsing, and you’re just reading about parents who’ve lost a child. It was deeply, deeply upsetting to read.

All I can say is that he very clearly was the father of a large family with Anna—there were seven children, seven pregnancies—but also, that he very clearly had sexual and romantic relationships with men.

I do think it was love with his wife, Anna. I don’t think it was ever the kind of passionate, discombobulating, all-consuming love that you see with the male favorites. It’s a much more comfortable, stable love, and whatever the parameters of that were, I do think she was one of the loves of his life, and she certainly was his best ally. I think she was a remarkable queen and one of his most gifted advisors.

BOGAEV: And certainly, a better relationship than many royals.

RUSSELL: Totally.

BOGAEV: Moving on, Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. So how smooth was the transfer of the crown to James?

RUSSELL: It was very smooth, but unexpectedly so. There is a brief blip when she dies in March 1603 when food prices quadruple throughout the south of England because people start panic buying because they’re concerned about the change of regime. But equally, that is, as I say, like a blip on the radar.

James has been working covertly with prominent figures in the English government for quite some time before Elizabeth I dies to ensure that it is a peaceful transition of authority. It’s really down to Elizabeth’s last chief minister and James’s first in England, Robert Cecil, who has everything smooth and ready to go.

Now, it does mean that James has to leave Scotland quite quickly when the news comes north. But he is greeted with enormous crowds as he moves south through England because people are so relieved that there hasn’t been civil war when the previous childless monarch dies. So, all things considered, it is a remarkably smooth accession.

BOGAEV: Right. But then just two years later, the Gunpowder Plot happened, and that was instigated by Catholic frustration, so that’s very high. And James’s public and Parliament, there were stresses in those relationships. And here you say that James pretty much seems to have devoted himself to his queen, say, and laid off the many minions for about a decade or so.

But then this period between 1603 and 1607 was affected by what you call his, “Complicated chronology of romantic affairs” and more heavy drinking, and some diplomat at the time wrote that “James seems to have forgotten he is King.” What happened?

RUSSELL: I think it’s monarchical Mardi Gras to be completely honest. I think he had spent so long planning for this smooth accession to the English monarchy, which is hugely wealthy, so much so that it has an income that’s about 20 times higher than the Scottish monarchy.

So, James has this idea that when he gets to England, he will be free from many of the assassination plots that shaped his early time as King of Scots, and that he will be, you know, living with a budget comparable to King Solomon’s. That’s what he thinks is going to happen.

What he doesn’t realize is that the legacy of Henry VIII, who died half a century earlier, had been so financially disastrous that the English monarchy has been struggling for decades to fully pay its bills. So, he arrives with a slightly false version of what being King of England involves, and so what happens?

I think it’s the age-old question of, you always think that the next regime is going to be exactly what you want it to be. So, you have Catholics, and Puritans, and the Irish, and the Welsh, and the North of England, and everyone who is frustrated. The pro-peace, the pro-war lobby, all of them under the last years of Elizabeth, they are convinced that James will be the king that they want.

“The son of the Catholic martyr, Mary, Queen of Scots, of course he’s going to end all discrimination against Catholics.”

“Oh, but wait, he was brought up Presbyterian, therefore he will usher in a new Puritan era.”

He can’t—with the best will in the world—he cannot be all those things to all those people, and their frustration is commensurate to the strength of the hopes that have been dashed.

And the last point towards his building unpopularity, and he does become incredibly unpopular, is, yes, his private life, and that includes his drinking.

He seems to be struggling with public visibility. He seems to think he’s earned the right to relax, to vanish for months on end to his private hunting lodges, to leave Anna essentially to handle the diplomatic side of the monarchy, the public-facing role of the monarchy.

And I think the drinking feeds into something else, which is that the ghosts of his childhood are starting to rattle free. I think a lot is happening in those first few years. James is dealt a bad hand in England, and he plays it badly.

BOGAEV: It’s so psychologically interesting. It’s like Jungian philosophy about midlife. You get to a certain place and you don’t like it, and you fall apart, and nothing works that was working for you before.

You mentioned Robert Carr. I think he’s—what? Three or four of the loves in the chronology? He had a terrible downfall after James giving him so much power and wealth and the highest offices, eventually Lord High Chamberlain, and the commoners are very angry about this. He ends up accused of poisoning someone, and he is in the Tower of London, and his wife was the one who implicated him. She goes to the scaffold, and she gives this devastating portrait of James’s court, as you were just describing. But here it’s, in very ugly language, as a “sinkhole of moral corruption.” Wow, what a movie scene.

RUSSELL: Absolutely. The downfall of Robert Carr is the most dramatic thing that’s happened, really, since the downfall of Anne Boleyn or the downfall of Catherine Howard, except in his case, it’s quite a bit more deserved. He has become almost the avatar of hubris.

Robert, in the first three years of their love affair, kept himself, you know, confined to redecorating the hunting lodges, and then in the final three years, he becomes very corrupt and deeply unpleasant.

And actually, the interesting thing about writing about Robert for the book was it was like writing about two different people. His arrogance and his corruption becomes so strong that it bursts out into this shocking murder and blackmail scandal that never really goes away. This is 1614, 1615. James survives that scandal for ten years, but his reputation doesn’t, and it will haunt him for the last decade of his life. And discussion of that scandal will still be used by the monarchy’s critics a generation after Robert Carr has passed from favor.

So, I think with Robert Carr, you see the closest that James ever comes to his private life potentially detonating his monarchy and his dynasty. It’s such a rich, dramatic, fabulously dark story.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve reached number six now, George Villiers. And you mentioned, I think before, that James secretly married one of his great loves, and this is the one that they might have secretly married, had their own private ceremony.

But this is late in James’s life, and he’s really… he’s ailing. He’s sick, he hurts everywhere it sounds like, and Queen Anna dies, and also the Emperor of Vienna in the same year.

And there’s a new emperor, Ferdinand, who has ramped up the counter-reformation in his empire, and that’s the kindling, as you say, of the Thirty Years’ War that decimated Europe.

But James refuses to go to war, and this was very unpopular. This adds even more to his unpopularity, and some blame George Villiers for James’s pacifism. Or perhaps are they blaming James’s quote-unquote “unmanly sexuality?”

RUSSELL: They are. They keep calling the foreign policy effeminate: “His effeminate foreign policy. Why are we not involved in this war for the soul of Europe?” Which is how the initial outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War is seen. Obviously, they don’t call it that. You need to reach the end, but it’s already very clear that this is going to be an enormous conflict.

And you’re right, is it George? Is it James? I suspect it’s both, Barbara, and they are openly saying in debates in the Houses of Parliament that the king’s policy is unmanly. “How can we expect anything else when the court is peopled by sodomites?” They draw direct parallels.

It’s where we get the Queen James nickname from, because they are mocking both his private life—and it did have that connotation then as well—but also, they were comparing him to “King Elizabeth,” who had walloped the Armada in the 1580s.

And so, James… it’s interesting, at the very end, I think, having been such a keen interpreter of the public mood, James decides to swim quite tenaciously against the populist tide; and, as you say, it is deeply unpopular, and it shreds what is left of his reputation among many of his English subjects.

BOGAEV: But he was always a pacifist.

RUSSELL: He says that he will be quite content when he reaches his sepulcher for people to be able to say that “Here lay a king who declared no wars.”

And you said, it devastates Europe. You’re absolutely right. There are nearly six million casualties in the Thirty Years’ War. It causes two famines in the German states where most of the war is fought. The population there collapses by 50—five-zero—percent. And James, okay, he couldn’t have told just how badly that war would go or for how long it would rumble on, but there were signs early on that it was going to be long, and it was going to be brutal.

So, when I look at that, I suppose you can legitimately ask in his defense, how many lives did he save in these islands by not getting involved in that war even when everybody wanted him to?

BOGAEV: Well, it’s an amazing story. And I’m thinking, there’s such fascination with the Tudors and with Elizabeth I and Henry VIII and Shakespeare. but you don’t see popular culture glomming onto James, except for this one Starz miniseries about George Villiers and his mother starring Julianne Moore.

[CLIP from the Starz miniseries Mary & George. Julianne Moore is Mary Villiers and Nicholas Galitzine is George Villiers.]

MARY VILLIERS: My son. He is subject to my rule. He is my George, and he should know I am Mary.

GEORGE VILLIERS: Mother, have you found me a wife yet?

MARY VILLIERS: I think we aim higher. King James. So c*ck struck, it’s like a curse.

BOGAEV: That was a clip from Mary & George. Julianne Moore as Mary Villiers, Nicholas Galitzine plays her son George, and Tony Curran in the role of James. So, why the—at least pop culture—neglect of James?

RUSSELL: I mean, I think it was great that Mary & George happened because it, you know, it’s one specific scandal or episode in James’s reign. But I really enjoyed it, partly because I think it did show the slightly shoddy glamour of James’s monarchy towards the end.

But I was also quite gratified, in a slightly thin-skinned and personal way, because I think it reminds us that there’s such a rich goldmine of stories in the Jacobean period, and, you know, if Mary & George entertained a viewer with a story from that period, wonderful. If it also inspired more storytellers to look at other parts of James’s life or that period, even more wonderful.

I think that the role of historical drama in entertaining with stories from our past and maybe encouraging some people to look at the history of that past, that’s a great thing, and there are very few periods that I think are better suited to that than James VI and I. It’s just an absolutely remarkable, drama-packed, colorful tapestry of a life. So, I hope that one day we are seeing many more dramas set in and around James’s time.

BOGAEV: Well, me too. Thank you.

RUSSEL: Thank you.

BOGAEV: And thanks for this.

RUSSELL: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

——————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Gareth Russell, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. The Six Loves of James I is out now in paperback from Atria Books.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Pavel Barter in Belfast and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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