James had problems sleeping for some time afterwards, and for the rest of his life he trembled at the sight of armed men. It would be a mistake, however, to label James a coward, as many Englishmen later would. As a teenager he learned to use his intellect and cunning to manipulate the fearsome warriors who wished to control him, developing a close and secretive side to his otherwise expansive character and growing perversely proud of a talent to deceive.
In 1579 Buchanan had left James as he arrived with a treatise for the boy to ponder on. De jure regni apud Scotos promulgated the Presbyterian view that God had vested power in the people who could resist and depose the monarch if he ruled tyrannically or failed to promote the ‘true’ religion. That September, however, a new and long-lasting influence had entered James’s life – one who represented everything Buchanan detested: James’s Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny.
D’Aubigny was a handsome, red-bearded father of four in his late thirties. He had returned from the court in France to deal with a dispute over the title and estates of the Lennox earldom and the newly adolescent James was fascinated by his sophisticated relative. He would stay up late with him, drinking and joking. D’Aubigny reciprocated with displays of affection and James, who had no other close family, became passionately devoted to him. D’Aubigny’s influence expanded rapidly. He reorganised James’s court and household on the French model and encouraged his interest in poetry. James in turn lavished money and titles on him, ostensibly converting him to Protestantism and eventually making him Duke of Lennox.
The English agent, Sir Henry Widdrington, had looked on appalled at Lennox’s growing power, convinced that he was using his conversion as a cover for plotting with the Catholic powers. He sent letters south warning that James was ‘altogether persuaded and led’ by Lennox, so that ‘he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, often times he will clasp him about the neck, with his arms and kiss him’. The Kirk went further and later declared that ‘the Duke of Lennox went about to draw the King to carnal lust’.19
Beyond seventeenth-century descriptions of James’s ‘lascivious’ kisses with his favourites, the exact nature of the sexual activity James enjoyed with Lennox and later male favourites is unknown. But the view of one (admittedly hostile) witness – that a man who showed so little restraint in public was unlikely to do so in private – seems a reasonable one.20 James was a tactile man and the chief arguments against his having been a practising homosexual fail to convince. The first is that seventeenth-century Protestants regarded sodomy with ferocious disapproval and that James himself condemned it to his son as a sin so horrible ‘that ye are bound in conscience never to forgive [it]’.21 Homosexual sex is not, however, limited to sodomy, and James was also well known for his blasphemous oaths and his failure to live up to much advice he gave his son. The second argument is that James’s marriage to Anna had demonstrated physical passion (as proven by her frequent pregnancies). But while it is notable that James had no great male favourites during the period in which he was fathering children, it is also evident that after the birth of his last child Sophia in 1606, his attraction for young men reasserted itself and his sexuality became a matter of significance in English political life, with the appearance of Robert Carr in 1607 and then George Villiers in 1614.22
It is not known whether the English court knew of James’s sexual preferences in 1602/3, or if so, precisely how it was regarded. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no real concept of ‘homosexuality’; sex between men was simply viewed as an act of depravity, along with all other sexual acts that took place outside marriage. It was, however, understood that some men had a particular taste for it. Burghley would have passed on everything he knew about James to his son Cecil before his death in 1598 and although there is no reported gossip on the matter in the winter of 1602/3, there are hints in comments by Sir John Harington and Sir Edward Wotton, who each praise James’s ‘chastity’ with regard to women. Harington could not resist pointing out that it was thought a little strange that James had no mistresses, confessing that in England to call a courtier chaste, ‘specially if it were afore his Mrs’, was considered an insult worthy of a stabbing. If anything was suspected, however, such worldly courtiers were unlikely to be shocked. The Earl of Essex’s closest friend, the Earl of Southampton, enjoyed the sexual companionship of both men and women without earning great opprobrium.
What really mattered to courtiers was how a king’s sexual preferences impacted on politics. Wotton and Harington praised James’s ‘chastity’ because in not keeping mistresses he was not creating bastards to rival his legitimate children. Male lovers, however, could hold direct power in a way that a mistress could not, and the power that Lennox held foreshadowed that of James’s later favourites in England. Safe in the knowledge of James’s devotion, Lennox had moved against the regent Morton, a trusted ally of England. Elizabeth had made a formal approach to James demanding that he get rid of ‘the professed Papist’, Monsieur d’Aubigny, but although James was usually wary of offending Elizabeth, on this he stood his ground.
James’s stance sealed Morton’s fate and the last regent was executed during the summer of 1581, ostensibly for his part in Darnley’s murder. ‘That false Scots Urchin!’ Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed when the news of Morton’s death reached her, ‘what can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!’
The following year the sixteen-year-old James was kidnapped by allies of the Kirk led by William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie and son of Patrick Ruthven whose servant had held the pistol to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots during the Riccio murder. The captured king had been forced to look on as Lennox fled into exile in France where he died in 1583. But in due course James had used his cunning to escape his captors and effect a counter coup with Gowrie’s rivals. Gowrie, having been initially pardoned, was executed in May 1584, after attempting to stage a second coup; leading Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee to England and the Scottish parliament ordered all copies of Buchanan’s De jure regni, with its arguments against the divine right of kings, to be handed in to the authorities so that they could be purged of offensive material.23
It was at this time that Monsieur de Fontenay, Mary, Queen of Scots’s emissary, had visited James’s court. Fontenay thought the eighteen-year-old king ‘for his years the most remarkable Prince who ever lived’. But he also described a very damaged individual, ‘an old young man’, both wary and childishly self-indulgent. There were three aspects of James’s personality that particularly concerned the Frenchman: James’s arrogance, fanned by his superior education, blinded him to his ‘poverty and insignificance’ on the world stage. He was ‘overconfident of his strength and scornful of other princes’ – a characteristic that was still truer of him in 1603 when he had two decades of successful rule in Scotland behind him. Lastly, Fontenay made his observations about James’s addiction to hunting. The sport seems to have given him a sense of release from his disabilities matched by no other physical pursuit, other than sex, but his attachment to it was as uncontrolled as his love for his favourites and this incontinence