The Evidence

Before charting the recent course of interpretation regarding the sexual nature of James’s relationships, something must be said about the evidence. The sheer bulk of that evidence should make historians think twice before brushing all of it aside. There is not enough space here to present and evaluate even a significant fraction of it. My goal in this section, therefore, is not to prove that James and his favorites engaged in sexual relationships but to give readers a brief sampling to suggest the overall breadth and character of the evidence. Another goal is to familiarize readers with several key features and pieces of this record so that they will be in a better position to understand the later discussion of competing scholars’ interpretations.

Some of the following evidence is colored by political, national, and religious prejudices. Some of it springs from a literary convention, the practice of demonizing political favorites by attributing all kinds of evil to them, including sodomy.Footnote ⁷ Most of it is secondhand, and all of it is open to interpretation. Certainly all these qualifications must be kept in mind. However, they should be balanced by other considerations, too. The contemporary comment on James comes from a great variety of sources, including diplomatic dispatches, poems, libels, memoirs, and pamphlets. These are not all equally susceptible to literary conventions, and many of them implicate the king just as much as (or more than) his favorites. While each individual comment is suspect, their totality is impressive. Furthermore, people did not just speculate about James’s erotic interaction with his favorites; they observed it. Contemporaries witnessed and remarked on James hugging, falling upon the necks of, and kissing his favorites in public. For example, as early as 1582 an English agent reported from Scotland that James was so much in love with Esmé Stuart that he would often put his arms around the favorite’s neck and kiss him in full public view. This was a pattern of behavior that we shall soon see was repeated in England. It can be objected that James’s physical displays of affection were calculated demonstrations of favor, but they appear to be spontaneous and heartfelt outbursts of a more personal than public nature.Footnote ⁸ Contemporaries also knew that the critical mark of success bestowed on a favorite was to give him access to the king’s bedchamber. Of course, sharing a bed is not proof positive of sexual activity, but it is highly suggestive, especially when viewed in conjunction with other indicators discussed below. Finally, it is sometimes objected that the testimony about James comes from the blatantly propagandistic, anti-Stuart tracts published during the Civil War and afterward, but it is not necessary to employ any of this post-Jacobean propaganda. The overwhelming majority of the evidence comes from James’s own lifetime. And let us not forget that lifetime. The impression that James was sexually involved with other males did not arise from one or a few isolated incidents but, rather, from a persistent pattern of behavior that began at age thirteen and lasted until James’s death at age fifty-eight. The literary evidence should be read in light of this circumstantial evidence.

The impression that James and his favorites were engaged in sex was widespread. A series of French ambassadors to England recorded their observations in their reports back to Paris. Of course they were prejudiced because they believed that James was too friendly with Spain, and they were inclined to interpret what they saw at the Jacobean court in light of their own country’s recent history. One French ambassador wrote that James reminded him of Henry III, the recent king of France who, fairly or not, had become notorious for his association with effeminate favorites of dubious sexual identity known as minions. Another French ambassador similarly concluded that James “cannot exist without a minion.”Footnote ⁹ A third French ambassador, Count Leveneur de Tillières, wrote the most graphic accounts of James and his favorites, describing James’s life as “filthy,” “scandalous,” and “abominable.” Tillières reported that James took his “beloved Buckingham” to Newmarket the way the Roman Emperor Tiberius had retreated to Capri.Footnote ¹⁰ He further described James as a man who repeatedly allowed himself to be carried away by his passion for a young male with a beautiful face (beau de visage), then lost interest when the favorite’s beauty faded and he acquired facial hair (beaucoup de barbe).Footnote ¹¹ A quite different observer was Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the well-known diarist, antiquarian, and member of Parliament. D’Ewes was not an eyewitness, but he is a good source for the stories that were circulating in the streets of London. On one occasion James was reported to have blurted out spontaneously, “Becote [By God] George I love thee dearly.” On another occasion, James called for Buckingham, and “as soone as he came, hee fell upon his necke without anye moore words.” Yet another time, “hugging him one time verye seriouslye, hee burst foorth, ‘Begott man, never one loved another moore then I doe thee.’”Footnote ¹² These profuse expressions of love do not prove that sex was also occurring, but it was a reasonable inference. D’Ewes recorded in his diary that he and a friend secretly bemoaned that they “had probable cause to feare” the king was guilty of sodomy.Footnote ¹³ An underground poem by an anonymous author was more blatant. It compared James to Jove and Buckingham to Ganymede. In this poem the other gods rebel against the pair of lovers. Mars is dispatched against the “white-faced boy” to “scourge his arse.” Jove must be punished for “loving so ‘gainst nature,” turning “love’s pleasures arse wise.” Meanwhile, oblivious to this impending rebellion, Jove “with Ganymede lies playing.”Footnote ¹⁴

In addition to private musings like these, there is considerable comment of a more public nature. In a pamphlet published in 1622, Thomas Scott compared James to a sluggard and exhorted him to abandon “thy brutish passions, thy beastly companions.” Whereas James prided himself on his intelligence and compared himself to Solomon, Scott retorted that it required no wisdom to “eate, drinke, daunce, and rise up to play with the Sodomites; to abuse our bodies worse then beasts in sinnes not to be named.” By contrast, a truly wise king would “flee from Sodom.”Footnote ¹⁵ Some readers might object that the sin of Sodom was not necessarily sexual, but in the idiom of the day, references to “brutish passions,” “beastly companions,” and the sin “not to be named” would have dispelled any doubt about Scott’s meaning. Meanwhile, an anonymous tract circulated around London in a manuscript entitled Tom Tell Troath. The author of this work observed that ordinarily James might safely expect “not to have your darling sinne layd open,” but under the present circumstances he could expect no such immunity for “that which all the World sees.” In his most caustic criticism, this author made an oblique comparison between James and a hypothetical king who made himself “absolute and dissolute.” Such a king “may solace himselfe as securely in his bed-chamber as the Grand Signor in his Seraglio, have Lords Spirituall for his Mates, Lords Temporall for his Eunuchs, and whom hee will for his Incubus.” There also he can “kisse his minions without shame.”Footnote ¹⁶ It is true that these works were politically motivated and can be lumped with other antifavorite literature. But these writings were much more antimonarch than antifavorite. They targeted James and demonized him for his apparent sexual transgressions in the bedchamber. The language in Tom Tell Troath is grossly exaggerated; the king is surrounded not only by minions but mates, eunuchs, and incubi. This was mudslinging, to be sure, but some of the mud stuck because it seemed credible.Footnote ¹⁷ It was consistent, as the author said, with “that which all the World sees.” That world included the European continent, where a book entitled Corona Regia was published that ridiculed James for a number of things, including his love of beautiful boys.Footnote ¹⁸ In one caustic passage, Corona Regia observed that Christ had said, suffer the little children to come unto him, but James was more discriminating, summoning only boys, particularly the very fair ones. This mock panegyric listed several of James’s favorites by name one after another, praising each for his loveliness. Paul Hammond rightly notes: “It is remarkable that such comments could be printed in 1615, and that the apostolic succession of boyfriends in the bed of the Fidei Defensor was so clearly visible to a European observer.”Footnote ¹⁹

The foregoing examples represent only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.Footnote ²⁰ Furthermore, even if one brushes aside all this contemporary comment by observers, gossipmongers, and critics as unreliable, there are still the numerous suggestive letters written by James himself and Buckingham. These letters were not written by outsiders with suspect motives but by the parties to the relationship themselves. The contents undoubtedly and movingly testify to genuine love. At least two of them appear to go further, suggesting that this love found sexual expression.

In the first of these letters, written in early 1615, James complained to Somerset about “your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary.”Footnote ²¹ It is sometimes objected that “lying in my chamber” does not necessarily imply occupying the same bed, let alone sexual activity. But that does not explain James’s “earnestly soliciting” Somerset “many hundred times.” What did he miss and want so earnestly that he asked for it hundreds of times? Why could it only be provided by Somerset lying with James in the bedchamber? What could fill this bill if not sex? Furthermore, why did Somerset refuse? Why would he have recklessly offended the king by refusing a simple request to sleep in the same room as the king? Why would he have refused it in such a way that James characterized it as “creeping back and withdrawing yourself,” as if the suggestion had somehow become repulsive to Somerset who had married the beautiful Frances Howard a little more than a year previously? This is a long letter illuminating a complex emotional relationship that was unraveling at this point. Part of Somerset’s irrational behavior was due to the fact that he spotted a rival on the horizon: James was becoming enamored of George Villiers who would soon displace Somerset as the king’s greatest favorite. A full exposition of this letter would therefore require much more space, but it would not materially change the apparent message of this key passage where James himself acknowledged pleading with Somerset hundreds of times to lie with him in the bedchamber. Admittedly, the sexual connotations are only implied. And, as we shall see, some scholars see no sexual implications at all.

In the second revealing letter, the duke of Buckingham wrote to King James that he had been debating with himself “whether you loved me now … better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham [Castle], where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog.”Footnote ²² Here, Buckingham was affectionately reminiscing about the first time he got into bed with James in the summer of 1615. Buckingham obviously attached special significance to this event as a milestone in their love affair “which I shall never forget.” We shall see that this letter, too, has been interpreted in various ways. Some scholars contend that sleeping with the king did not necessarily entail having sex with him. For others, however, sex seems a practically unavoidable implication.

Progress

Most historians of an earlier era fumbled the subject of James’s sexuality. Some treated the subject better than others, of course, but the general tendency was to make light of it, express disapproval (even repugnance), or dodge the subject altogether. It would serve no useful purpose here to trace this long line of evasiveness, discomfort, and downright prejudice.Footnote ²³ But one theme running through these earlier works does require attention because we will see it reemerge in recent work. The evidence of James’s love for his favorites was so conspicuous, so eloquently and repeatedly affirmed by James himself, as to be undeniable. The strategy adopted by some historians, therefore, was to insist that no matter how intensely James gave expression to his love in words, he never gave it sexual expression. Where his favorites were concerned, James experienced love without sex.

A few examples will suffice to illustrate this asexual view of James’s relationships. In 1967, David Matthew described his relationships as “technically innocent.”Footnote ²⁴ In 1971, betraying more of the underlying prejudice behind this distinction, Gordon Donaldson wrote that James’s first love affair with Esmé Stuart had “a physical, but not necessarily gross, side to it.” Regarding James’s more famous love affairs with Somerset and Buckingham in England, Donaldson conceded that these relationships were “partly physical,” but he denied that they were “scandalous.” Turning logic on its head, Donaldson asserted that “the mere fact that the king made so much of his favourites in public suggests that nothing to be ashamed of took place in private.”Footnote ²⁵ The important distinction for Matthew and Donaldson, therefore, was to believe that James remained “technically innocent” and that he did nothing “gross,” nothing “to be ashamed of.”

By far the most tenacious advocate of this opinion that James never crossed the line from love to sex is Maurice Lee Jr. Lee described James’s love affairs in peculiarly coy language. He employed euphemisms such as James’s “enthusiasm for pretty young men” or a “predilection for handsome young men.” These “handsome young men came and went.” They “took James’s fancy.” Somerset was “the apple of James’s eye.” Buckingham, too, was “King James’s pretty favorite” and “the apple of the king’s eye.” Yet Lee was convinced that James never took a bite out of these apples. Quite the contrary, James “was simply not much interested in sex.” Like Matthew and Donaldson, Lee draws the line at “actual physical sexual relations.” He finds it “really impossible to suppose” that James “engaged in physical sexual relations with Buckingham.” Instead, he finds that the mountain of evidence pointing in that direction actually leads to an entirely different conclusion: “The explanation that seems to fit the evidence best is that James was one of those people, perhaps more numerous, even in this post-Freudian liberated world, than we suppose, who are simply not much interested in physical sex at all.” Lee expressed these views in 1984 and 1990, and as recently as 2000, he still declared that “James was not a practicing homosexual.”Footnote ²⁶

Despite Lee’s steadfast refusal to imagine James engaging in sex with his favorites, other authors in the 1980s and 1990s were finally moving from denial to acceptance. A word of caution is in order here. Most of these authors use the modern binary constructs for sexuality. For them, the issue was whether James was “homosexual,” a term and a construct that did not exist until the nineteenth century, nearly two hundred fifty years after James’s death. As we indicated above, the chief constructs for male-male sex in the Jacobean period were pederasty and sodomy. Furthermore, as we shall see at the end of this article, queer theory would insist that we not impose modern constructs on premodern people. To be precise, the question should not be whether James was homosexual but whether his sexual relations followed the pederastic or sodomitical patterns of his own day or, to be even more neutral, simply whether he engaged in sex with other males. A little forbearance is necessary, therefore, as we examine the views of several authors, some of whom were not as fully informed about queer theory as others and sometimes naively employed the idiom of the modern period.

In 1981, a pivotal year in the reassessment of James’s sexual behavior, Caroline Bingham published the first full biography of James that treated his sexual behavior frankly and without prejudice. She wrote that James was “generally believed [by his contemporaries] to be homosexual.” Her own conclusion was that “there does not seem any reason to suppose otherwise of him than of most people: that the loves which he displayed in public were consummated in private.”Footnote ²⁷ Bingham’s biography of James coincided with the publication of the far more influential biography of Buckingham by Roger Lockyer. Lockyer’s monumental study painted a sympathetic and favorable portrait of Buckingham, supported by prodigious archival research, which made his judgment about the physical relationship between Buckingham and James all the more credible. Lockyer based his interpretation on the two key letters quoted earlier in this article. In Lockyer’s estimation, Buckingham was a “young man who had everything to gain from gratifying” James, and he did precisely that at Farnham Castle, giving the king what Somerset was denying him. In Lockyer’s own words, by “giving himself to James,” Buckingham “played the trump card which ensured his victory over Somerset.”Footnote ²⁸

Another major contributor to a more straightforward treatment of James’s sexual life was David M. Bergeron. In 1991, Bergeron published a study of James and his family. In this book Bergeron said that if we ask whether the relationship between James and his first favorite in Scotland was “a homosexual relationship, the answer is probably yes.” Regarding James’s relationships with his other favorites, Bergeron was more circumspect, but he appeared to assume that these, too, were sexual relationships.Footnote ²⁹ More important, in 1999 Bergeron published a modern edition of the revealing correspondence between James and Buckingham under the title King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire.Footnote ³⁰ As the title suggests, Bergeron’s book focused on desire while resisting any definitive conclusion about its consummation. Yet Bergeron repeatedly highlighted the references in these letters to physical familiarity. In one such letter, Bergeron observed that Buckingham “reinforces desire by naming the body of the beloved. No other people write to James desiring to have his legs in their arms.” Bergeron might have added that neither did anyone else write to James vowing once he got “hold of your bedpost again, never to quit it.” By the same token, James did not write to anyone other than Buckingham expressing a desire for what Bergeron characterizes as a “same-sex marriage.” Above all, there is Buckingham’s letter reminiscing about the episode at Farnham Castle. Bergeron refers to this letter several times in such a way as to dispel any ambiguity. He states that this letter “certainly hints” at a sexual encounter. It is a “plausible interpretation” of this letter that it alludes to “a probable sexual encounter.” Or, to put it yet another way, a “probable first sexual encounter at Farnham should strain no one’s credulity.” In sum, in Bergeron’s final statement on the subject, Farnham was “presumably the site of the initial sexual encounter between James and Buckingham.”Footnote ³¹

Other authors have continued to write about James’s sexuality in a frank and straightforward manner. In his contribution to the Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (1996), Kevin Sharpe referred unequivocally to James’s “homosexual relations” and stated more specifically when it came to Buckingham that the king’s “public demonstrations of their sexual relationship not only offended sensibilities; sodomy was in this period a felony for which the penalty was execution.”Footnote ³² In King James (2003), Pauline Croft concluded that it is “almost certain” that the king and Buckingham had a physical as well as emotional relationship.Footnote ³³

Meanwhile, other scholars were pushing back the frontiers of our knowledge on the history of sexuality. The theoretical inspiration of leaders like Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was accompanied by works that focused more particularly on Jacobean England, works such as Jonathan Goldberg’s James I and the Politics of Literature (1983) and Bruce R. Smith’s Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (1991). These authors tended to emphasize the literature of the period as opposed to the facts about James and his favorites, but there was little doubt about the conclusion they expected their readers to reach.Footnote ³⁴

When one combines all this scholarship on King James and the history of sexuality with the global gay rights movement that was raising people’s consciousness and understanding, it is not surprising that historians were becoming far more inclined to accept the idea that James had sex with his favorites. Yet here we are in the twenty-first century, and the prevarication has resumed. The trend toward a clear-eyed recognition of James’s sexual relations with other men has been reversed.

Regression

By far the most surprising example of this regression comes from Roger Lockyer, who, despite his forthright approach in his biography of Buckingham in 1981, backpedaled when he published a biography of James in 1998. The same author who had declared earlier that Buckingham played his trump card by “giving himself to James” turned agnostic. Now Lockyer merely speculated that “James found his principal emotional—and conceivably sexual—fulfilment in handsome young men.” What Lockyer had previously appeared to establish as fact now became only conceivable. No scholar in the world was better equipped to address the relationship between Buckingham and James, yet when he reached this particular subject, Lockyer merely stated that “the King was captivated.”Footnote ³⁵ Most surprisingly, in his final chapter, providing his overall evaluation of James and rebutting the negative caricature passed down to us by critics like the infamous propagandist Sir Anthony Weldon, Lockyer did not even raise the issue of James’s sexuality, which has contributed so much to that unflattering stereotype. Nowhere in Lockyer’s book is the key incident at Farnham Castle even mentioned. In 2004, in his entry on Buckingham in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Lockyer retreated even further from his earlier position. Here he did mention the incident at Farnham but radically changed his interpretation of it with the following caution: “Sharing a bed was not uncommon in the early seventeenth century, and did not necessarily imply physical intimacy.”Footnote ³⁶

Lockyer was not the only one to backpedal. In 1986 in his survey of early Stuart England, Derek Hirst took an evenhanded approach, stating that “we shall never know whether James was actively homosexual.” In 1999, however, Hirst expanded his discussion of the subject and arrived at a more decided position. He now wrote that the succession of “male intimates” in James’s life “probably stemmed not from the homosexuality that has often been alleged but from a socially accepted homosocial delight in physical fellowship … and a less socially accepted but still not necessarily homosexual taste for intimate intergenerational relationships.”Footnote ³⁷ Consequently, between 1986 and 1999, Hirst moved from a neutral stance to the opinion that James’s relationships were probably not sexual in nature.

Another surprisingly regressive example is Alan Stewart’s The Cradle King (2003). Stewart employed coy phrasing similar to Lee’s when he wrote that James was “smitten” with his first favorite in Scotland and “only had eyes” for him. Stewart acknowledged that this first favorite was followed by a long succession of others in both Scotland and England and that “James’s intimacy with these men seems to have been taken for granted by contemporary court observers.” Stewart then quoted at length from these contemporary observers without giving his own opinion of their merit or accuracy. On the subject of Buckingham, Stewart again deferred to another authority. He allowed that “perhaps” Roger Lockyer was right in his original interpretation of the episode at Farnham Castle, dutifully quoting from Lockyer’s book and Buckingham’s letter on the subject but strangely failing again to give us his own opinion on the matter.Footnote ³⁸ One reviewer, Simon Adams, faulted Stewart for this “cursory treatment” of James’s “complex sexuality.” It was not as if Stewart had no expertise to bring to bear on the subject. Adams observed: “One would have expected a fuller discussion of this important subject from the author of Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England.”Footnote ³⁹

Far more important than the previous examples, however, is the case of Jenny Wormald. In 1983 Wormald published a groundbreaking article entitled “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?”Footnote ⁴⁰ Wormald’s basic argument was that James was such a good king of Scotland that he could not have turned into as bad a king of England as tradition has portrayed him. Instead of these two kings, Wormald argued that James was a consistently shrewd ruler from beginning to end. In her opinion, the negative stereotype of James arose mostly from English xenophobia against the Scots and the scurrilous caricature of James that appeared in a number of anti-Stuart tracts, above all The Court and Character of King James attributed to Weldon.Footnote ⁴¹ The damaging effect of these works was perpetuated into the modern era when several were collected and published in 1811 as the Secret History of the Court of James the First, edited by Sir Walter Scott.Footnote ⁴² There was great merit in Wormald’s positive view of James, and his reputation has been steadily rising, due in no small part to her indefatigable championship of his cause. But where does James’s sexual behavior fit into that view? In 1983 and the two following decades, Wormald said very little about this subject.Footnote ⁴³ Then, having become the chief authority on James, she was selected to write the entry about him in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Here she came closest to articulating her view of James’s sexuality. She wrote, “Sir Walter Scott introduced the note of immorality; and some modern scholars—notably literary critics—still find the question of James’s homosexuality a source of great fascination. There is almost a danger of forgetting that, even if homosexual activity as opposed to homoerotic feeling is ascribed to the king, at the very least, James was bisexual.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Although these two sentences appear to be forthcoming about James’s sexuality, on closer examination we find that they are very problematic. Wormald pulls James out of the closet with one hand, so to speak, and pushes him back in with the other. To begin with, Wormald sets herself apart from “some modern scholars—notably literary critics” who have taken an interest in James’s sexuality. Indeed, she implies that interest in this subject is a peculiar “fascination” rather than a matter of serious scholarly inquiry. These opinions echoed Wormald’s contention in an earlier essay that, of course, James had favorites, but “modern historians and particularly literary critics have made much more of this than contemporaries did.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Even if contemporaries were as uninterested in this subject as Wormald makes them seem (and that is a highly debatable contention), today’s interest is neither unwarranted nor the product of a mere fascination on the part of so-called literary critics.

Another problem in Wormald’s opening sentence is that she appears to conflate the issue of morality with the issue of homosexuality. In the first clause of that sentence, she writes that Scott “introduced the note of immorality,” but in the second clause she narrows the subject to the question of James’s homosexuality, inadvertently appearing to equate the two. This is a missed opportunity to affirm James’s “homosexuality” while disentangling it from the larger issue of morality. To her credit, though, Wormald does acknowledge that James had sex with his favorites. Or does she? The closer one examines the passage above, the more conspicuous the qualifiers appear. She refers to “James’s homosexuality” as a “question,” not a fact. She suggests that James could have experienced “homoerotic feeling” without “homosexual activity” (harkening back to Lee’s assertion that he was “not a practicing homosexual”). Finally, even if we do ascribe homosexual activity to James, Wormald claims he still was not homosexual. Rather, “at the very least” he was bisexual. Of course queer theorists have shown that the tripartite labels of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual are peculiarly modern constructs that should not be applied to a premodern person like James. Yet even if we accept this modern terminology for the moment, how does it really apply to James? It is true that James was married to Anne of Denmark and that he had sexual intercourse with her. They had several children, three of whom lived past childhood. Does that make James bisexual? Not really. James married and fathered children because it was his duty. He needed to produce heirs to the throne. Back in 1589 James wrote a remarkably open letter to his subjects in Scotland explaining his decision to marry. He observed that he was “found fault with by all men for the delaying so long of my marriage.” The prospect of no heir “bred disdain,” and people began to wonder if James suffered from an “inability, as if I were a barren stock.” These and other considerations drove James into marriage, although he would happily have delayed the act, “for, as to my own nature, God is my witness I could have abstained longer.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, James never showed an amorous interest in any other woman before or after his marriage; all his extramarital love affairs were with young males.Footnote ⁴⁷ Except for his wife, James’s lifelong sexual desire or preference was directed exclusively toward those males.Footnote ⁴⁸

In addition to the passage quoted above, Wormald tells the story of George Villiers’s rise to favor in a way that downplays the sexual component by accentuating the role played by James’s wife. Wormald writes that Villiers (soon to be Buckingham) “was brought to James’s attention by his wife and by George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet this is only a half-truth. In reality, it was Abbot and a group of allies at court who promoted Villiers as a counter-favorite to replace Somerset. They dressed him for the part and purchased him a place at court as a cupbearer so that he could impress himself upon James, which he speedily succeeded in doing. (Readers will notice the uncanny comparison here with Ganymede, the cupbearer to the gods.)Footnote ⁵⁰ It only became necessary to enlist Anne’s help when it came to the critical point of installing Villiers as a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber. Abbot himself explained that this was necessary because James and Anne had worked out an odd accommodation whereby she had to give her prior approval before he would “admit any to nearness about himself.” The king liked this arrangement because once Anne gave her approval, then she subsequently had no grounds to complain if she felt mistreated by the new “Dear One.”Footnote ⁵¹ So, contrary to what Wormald claims, Villiers was not “brought to James’s attention by his wife.” Villiers had already attracted James’s attention quite effectively with the assistance of other parties before Anne was approached.

Further, contrary to Wormald’s version, when the conspirators attempted to enlist the queen’s help, she adamantly refused. In Abbot’s own words, the queen “having been bitten with Favourites, both in England and Scotland, was very shy to adventure upon this request.” Upon further importunity, Anne still “would not come to it; albeit divers Lords … did earnestly solicit Her Majesty thereunto.” Abbot tried again. “I laboured much,” he recalled, “but could not prevail.”Footnote ⁵² Abbot and his allies persisted until the queen finally capitulated, helping to orchestrate what was made to seem an impromptu ceremony whereby Villiers was installed in the king’s bedchamber. What stands out most in Abbot’s version is Anne’s adamant opposition to the creation of another new favorite, relenting only after Abbot’s insistent pleading with her.

Anne had both personal and political motives at work in this episode. She disliked Somerset, and the backers of Villiers were old allies.Footnote ⁵³ Those political considerations should have made her an enthusiastic supporter of the plan to displace Somerset. Why did she resist getting involved? Abbot said that she hesitated because she believed that they would all live to regret it. She warned that James would teach Villiers to despise and turn against his backers. But there is also that other curious explanation offered by Abbot that the queen, “having been bitten with Favourites, both in England and Scotland, was very shy to adventure” upon another one. What a shame that Abbot did not enlarge upon this motive. We will never know for certain what he meant by “bitten,” but the word seems to suggest a more personal resentment of favorites. One wonders if, much as Anne disliked Somerset, she thought his hold over James was weakening after his marriage to Frances Howard. An older, married, spent favorite might have seemed less threatening to Anne than a fresh youth like Villiers who had already succeeded so well at arousing the king’s passionate interest.

Wormald is not the only historian to represent Queen Anne’s role as if she were an active agent from the outset, happily approving and assisting the creation of a new favorite. Mark Kishlansky has written that Villiers’s “looks and charms brought him to the attention of Queen Anne.” Thereupon, “She recommended him for a minor office that gave him frequent access to the king.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Kishlansky appears here to be erroneously linking Anne to the initial office of cupbearer, which was obtained for Villiers by his promoters before the queen entered the picture. Kishlansky confirms this in his contribution to the Penguin History of Britain, when he states, “At the plea of the Queen, Villiers was made cupbearer at the royal table.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In sum, Kishlansky thrusts Queen Anne prematurely into the story, practically discovering Villiers, bringing him to the king’s attention, and helping him to obtain his first court office—none of which is true.Footnote ⁵⁶

The chief source for these events is a reminiscence written by Abbot years later, by which time he was alienated from Buckingham and isolated from power. His memory could have been faulty or colored by subsequent events, but he had no reason to substantially misrepresent Anne’s role. For what it is worth, he concluded this account by affirming “in the word of an honest man, I have reported nothing but truth.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In their exaggeration of the queen’s role, Wormald and Kishlansky depart not only from Abbot’s account but from the detailed modern account in Lockyer’s biography of Buckingham, which one might expect to be authoritative.Footnote ⁵⁸ To the extent that we know Anne’s true role, her involvement does not minimize the underlying physical attraction that was driving events toward the installation of another “Dear One” in the bedchamber.

Unlike Anne, the archbishop of Canterbury was involved in the plot to advance Villiers from the outset. Does his involvement categorically rule out the possibility that sex was the lure? Could he possibly have played the role of panderer between James and Villiers? Well, yes, of course he could have. When Abbot joined the faction promoting Villiers to replace Somerset, setting up a counter-favorite to replace the current favorite, he was merely playing a political game that was commonplace at the Jacobean court. Abbot compared the strategy to an old proverb about using one nail to drive out another.Footnote ⁵⁹ At one point, there were so many attractive young men vying for the king’s attention at court that one observer remarked that these “younge court-gallants” popped up like mushrooms and just as quickly disappeared when James was provoked by the transparency of this stratagem.Footnote ⁶⁰ These young aspirants to favor were obviously meant to be alluring. Whether Abbot knew or cared what happened subsequently in the bedchamber between James and his favorites is anybody’s guess. He may not have thought the subject through that far or graphically. One influential argument holds that sodomy was defined in such monstrous terms in Jacobean England that people in general were disinclined to equate it with anything that existed in reality right under their very noses in their neighbors or even in themselves.Footnote ⁶¹ Abbot may have been an example of this type of Englishman who did not make the connection between the ghastly construct of sodomy and the behavior of the king. It is true, as we have seen, that some of James’s contemporaries did make this connection, but this was easier for puritan and political critics outside the court to do than for the archbishop who knew that James was head of the Church of England and, whatever else he might be, not a monster. There is some evidence, too, that sodomy was not viewed with universal horror, especially if it involved boys. As we saw earlier, the classical myth of Ganymede could be conflated with the horrific Christian construct of sodomy, but the love of boys was not always so stigmatized. When one of James’s contemporaries, Sir Anthony Ashley, married, it came as a surprise because he was known to favor boys. An underground verse of the period remarked that Ashley had “left sodomy,” but nevertheless his bride had a “buttock plump,” and she could “hold up her rump, With her black arse hole” for her husband.Footnote ⁶² This lighthearted treatment of sodomy, even anal intercourse, suggests that it could be viewed by James’s contemporaries with equanimity or even humor. Even the scurrilous Weldon described Ashley in rather bland terms as someone who just “never loved any but boyes.”Footnote ⁶³ Along these same lines, Randolph Trumbach notes that numerous plays and satires in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period portrayed homoerotic relations between men and boys favorably. He declares that the “most sympathetic discussion of sexual relations between males in the seventeenth century appeared in the plays of the London stage.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Either way, whether Abbot turned a blind eye to the subject or simply included James in that class of men who “never loved any but boyes,” the archbishop’s role in bringing Villiers and James together does not in any way diminish the likelihood that sex was part of the bargain.

Emphasizing the roles of the queen and archbishop in the advancement of Villiers does not erase the fact that the king’s basic interest in the young favorite was physical and almost certainly sexual. Nor does minimizing the possibility of sex between James and his favorites do greater justice to James; in fact, quite the contrary. If one considers the series of favorites throughout his life, the risks he took for them, and the price he paid for them, sex might reasonably be called the ruling passion of his life. Acknowledging this does not have to tarnish James’s reputation. Rather, it can lead to a fuller and more sympathetic understanding of the man. It can also help to explain James’s behavior in specific instances and illuminate the politics of the period more generally. For example, Wormald, who did so much to rehabilitate James’s reputation by showing that he was the victim of xenophobia, misses the opportunity to appreciate how much he was also the victim of homophobia (or “sodomophobia,” as Mario DiGangi and Kenneth Borris have more accurately dubbed it).Footnote ⁶⁵

No less important, we cannot understand the marriage of James and Anne without acknowledging this huge impediment to their happiness. James might never have married if it had not been incumbent on him to produce heirs, and he repeatedly sought emotional and physical fulfillment with other men outside his marriage. However, it is also true that Anne chafed at these extramarital affairs, a subject that has received too little attention. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski is on the right track when she describes Anne as struggling against “the homosexual and patriarchal ethos” of her husband’s court.Footnote ⁶⁶ The accommodation described by Abbot, whereby Anne had the right of prior approval over James’s choice of favorite, might appear to invest her with equal power. However, in the final analysis, James got what he wanted, and Anne was relatively powerless. James courted Anne in a touchingly romantic way at the beginning of their marriage, and he remained fond of her until the end.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet their marriage was repeatedly undermined by a greater passion neither one of them could control.

Just Friends?

One reason for the indecision and ambivalence surrounding the subject of James’s sexuality today may be a misguided desire to protect his reputation, but that is only one part of the explanation. A large body of scholarship has accumulated in recent years on the history of homosexuality, and one might have expected this to bring James and his favorites into sharper focus. Surprisingly, though, major work in this field has had precisely the opposite effect. In fact, it goes a long way toward explaining why the authors noted above began to backtrack and hedge on the subject of James’s sexuality.

In 1982, Alan Bray published a short but powerful book entitled Homosexuality in Renaissance England. Most of Bray’s book is about seventeenth-century England. Yet James, who ruled seventeenth-century England for over twenty years and was by far the most prominent example of homosexuality (to use Bray’s word) in Renaissance England, is almost entirely absent. The few cursory mentions of him do not address his own sexual behavior. Instead, this crucial subject is relegated to a brief footnote.Footnote ⁶⁸ Bray boldly asserts that “homosexuality was institutionalized” in the schools and universities of the time; it was “deep-rooted.” Regarding society at large, it was an “unalterable fact that homosexuality did exist within it on a massive and ineradicable scale.” It was “ubiquitous.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Including the example of James would have helped to soften the picture of sexual relations among men portrayed by Bray. Ubiquitous as these relations were alleged to be, they were largely opportunistic and exploitative, reflective of unequal power relations in places like schools and households. Probably because of the influence of Michel Foucault, Bray pictured these relationships before 1700 as more about power than love.Footnote ⁷⁰ While power and opportunism certainly were factors in James’s relationships, at least two of them exhibited mutual, heartfelt love. Adding these examples to the picture would have made male-male relations in the period seem more loving, but it would also have contradicted the main thesis in Bray’s book that sodomy was defined in such ghastly terms that people could not recognize it in their neighbors or themselves. Bray contended that there was “a reluctance to recognise homosexual behaviour, a sluggishness in accepting that what was being seen was indeed the fearful sin of sodomy.”Footnote ⁷¹ James stands as a glaring contradiction to that thesis.

After writing this pathbreaking work, Bray produced a widely read essay titled “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” (1990). The central argument of his essay is that the signs of male friendship in this period were easily mistaken or misinterpreted by contemporaries as sodomitical. When contemporaries attributed sodomy to males who were close friends, this could be an innocent misinterpretation or a politically motivated slur that surfaced in political propaganda. In either case, these accusations should not be taken at face value. In Bray’s words, “We will misunderstand these accusations if, beguiled by them, we uncritically assume the existence of the sexual relationship which they appear to point to. … What such accusations have in common is rather the outline of a relationship that at other times an Elizabethan might have called friendship.”Footnote ⁷² Thus Bray’s work, which had begun as an exposé of “ubiquitous” sex among men in Renaissance England, now provided a scholarly rationale for questioning most of the evidence that had previously been assumed to document that phenomenon. These sources were now interpreted as mistaken or baseless. In this article, Bray did at last turn his attention to King James. However, he used the relationship between James and Buckingham as an example of the ways in which signs of friendship such as public displays of affection and the sharing of a bed could be misread and falsely stigmatized as sodomy.Footnote ⁷³ Bray’s essay has been described as “perhaps the single most influential essay on male homoeroticism.”Footnote ⁷⁴ It undoubtedly influenced historians like Lockyer, Hirst, and Stewart (discussed above), who became skeptical about James having sex with his favorites.

Distrust of contemporary perceptions led to greater scrutiny of those perceptions in their own right, without drawing any conclusions about the accuracy of what they said about James. Curtis Perry demonstrated that the specter of the sodomitical favorite had a long history as a literary convention or trope; it was a handy way of demonizing political opponents by attributing all kinds of evil to them, including sodomy. In Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England, Perry masterfully explores this extensive literature, reminding us that it would be naive to take all the gossip about James at face value. Indeed, he doubts that we can draw any hard conclusions from that literature about the real lives of particular kings and their favorites. “The constant murmur of gossip accompanying royal favoritism,” he writes, “tells us relatively little about the actual practice of the politics of intimacy or about the nature of the relationship between various monarchs and their favorites.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Another outstanding historian who has made fruitful use of this literature without drawing any hard conclusions about James and his favorites is Alastair Bellany. In The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England, Bellany meticulously examines the swirl of gossip that surrounded the trial and conviction of Somerset and his wife for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Bellany’s subtle analysis exposes the complex nexus of sodomy, sorcery, popery, and other “multiple transgressions” that James’s contemporaries associated with his court. Like Perry, Bellany remains agnostic on the question of whether James’s relations with his favorites were sexual. Regarding James and the earl of Somerset, Bellany concludes that aspects of the relationship will always remain “unknowable,” leaving historians “to disagree about whether the relationship was homosexual or not, physically consummated or not, one sided or mutual.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Perry and Bellany demonstrate that excellent scholarship can be produced while suspending judgment about contemporary depictions of James and his favorites as sexual partners. Of course the drawback of this cautious approach is that it leaves us entirely in the dark about the credibility of those depictions.

If we assume that all the accusations of sodomy were a misreading of signs, then what we are left with is misunderstood friends, and Bray set out to understand them. His last book, The Friend, published posthumously in 2003, is an erudite study of friendship. In this work, Bray radically decenters sex and foregrounds friendship. Only at the end of this book does Bray finally acknowledge a sexual relationship—between two women in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁷ This, as one reviewer perceptively commented, is “a strange apotheosis for a book about male friendship.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In his previous work, Bray had alleged that sex among men in Renaissance England existed on a “massive and ineradicable scale.” It was “deep-rooted” and “ubiquitous.” In The Friend, sex is practically nonexistent until it occurs at the end between two women. What explains this radically altered perspective? Bray wrote with several definite objectives in mind.Footnote ⁷⁹ One objective was to avoid the error that Bray thought marred the pioneering work of John Boswell. In Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994), Boswell had imagined that sex was part of the male unions he studied.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bray did not see sex as integral to these relationships. In fact, he seems to have thought that sex would cheapen or sully them. He set out to write about sexless same-sex unions. By minimizing or eliminating sexual activity between these male partners in the past, Bray seems to have thought they would appear more admirable and acceptable to modern eyes. This served another of Bray’s objectives, which was to resurrect a finer form of friendship as a corrective to “a crisis of friendship” that he thought was occurring in the modern world.Footnote ⁸¹ He wanted past friends to serve as inspiring role models, and in the process he made them seem ethereal. But another of Bray’s objectives was, very much like Boswell’s, to find an accommodation between Christianity and homosexuality. Bray admitted that he was returning to this “ethical ground” first explored by Boswell, still seeking “in the past ways perhaps of transcending—with integrity on all sides—the looming confrontation that is still with us between Christianity and homosexuality without the damaging conflict on which it seems bent.”Footnote ⁸² Bray found grounds for this reconciliation in Christian practices that sanctified friendship, ceremonies of sworn friendship or ritual brotherhood, and rites of voluntary kinship, particularly joint participation in the sacrament of Holy Communion. The “vows of sworn brothers” were “confirmed by the Eucharist” and comparable to marriage. Those vows were also confirmed by the kiss of peace or friendship, but this was a holy kiss, a chaste kiss, not a carnal kiss.Footnote ⁸³ Bray’s meticulous analysis of these past relationships succeeds in documenting the existence of intense male friendships that were sanctified by the church. Bray’s book is a hugely important contribution, but it needs to be read with caution. Reviewers of The Friend were understandably gentle in their criticisms in light of Bray’s recent death, but they did note the personal motives that colored the book.Footnote ⁸⁴

In The Friend, consistent with his overall agenda, Bray attempted to desex the relationship between James and Buckingham. Bray sustains this sexless view through his interpretation of three key letters on the subject. The first of these letters is the one in which Buckingham fondly reminisced about the first time he got into bed with James. According to Bray, Buckingham attached special significance to that event not because it initiated a sexual relationship but, rather, because it was a “powerful mark of favor.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Unlike some other commentators, Bray does at least believe that Buckingham was talking about getting into bed with the king. That only leaves the purpose in question. Certainly joining the king in bed was a mark of favor, but is that all it entailed? Bray’s ethereal view of friendship prevents him from considering the possibility that sex was also involved. However, as Mario DiGangi points out, “it is impossible to be sure that sexual acts did not take place between friends who shared beds or other intimacies.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Furthermore, even if Bray’s sexless explanation were plausible in the case of Buckingham, it does not fit at all with James’s begging Somerset “many hundred times” to resume lying with him in the bedchamber. Somerset had no rational reason to refuse joining James in bed if the only reason was for James to bestow a “powerful mark of favor” on him, and James had no rational reason to implore him “many hundred times” if that was the only purpose he had in mind. When we consider James’s scolding letter to Somerset in conjunction with Buckingham’s letter reminiscing about the incident at Farnham Castle instead of treating these two in isolation from one another, then we see again that sex is a far more plausible explanation for both of them than Bray’s sanitized alternative.

In any case, Bray does not let us dwell too long on the image of James and Buckingham in bed together. He spends much more time discussing a letter in which James looked forward to a “new marriage” with his favorite. In this letter James also vowed that he would rather live a life of banishment to any part of the world than to live a “sorrowful widow’s life without you.” He referred to Buckingham as his “sweet child and wife” and himself as “your dear dad and husband.”Footnote ⁸⁷ According to Bray, what James meant by a “new marriage” was that the two men would “seal their friendship and its fidelity by receiving the Holy Communion in the general communion at Christmas together.” It would be “a reaffirmation of the league between them in the Eucharist.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Here Bray’s interpretation may shed some light on a previously puzzling piece of evidence. It is possible that this is what James had in mind. However, nowhere in this letter does James spell out his meaning in these particular terms. Rather, Bray reads this meaning into James’s words. Furthermore, James employed a bewildering number of familial analogies in this letter, using the language of husband and wife alongside that of father and child. He imagines himself a widow if forced to live without Buckingham, but he was in fact not a widow but a widower at this stage in life five years after the death of Queen Anne. That raises the possibility that what he meant by a “new marriage” was a second marriage for himself. James even refers to Buckingham as his “only sweet and dear child.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Presumably he meant godchild, but the phrase is puzzling because James appears to be overlooking the fact that he had two, living, biological children at this time (Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth). Bray attributes James’s seemingly contradictory analogies in this letter to “the exuberance of the seventeenth-century baroque.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Other historians might interpret them as merely typical of a lover striving to find analogies sufficient to express the intensity of his love. But even if James did have the blessed sacrament of the Eucharist in mind, Bray simply cannot know for a fact that this rules out sex. Instead, he insinuates that holiness and earthiness are incompatible. Ironically, although by a very different path, Bray ended up agreeing with the authors discussed at the beginning of this article who want us to believe that James’s relationships with his favorites were asexual.

We cannot fathom what was happening between James and his favorites by examining the evidence in a piecemeal fashion separate from the larger, known context. Bray’s spiritualized interpretation collapses in the light of this larger picture. For one thing, the initial attraction between James and his favorites was distinctly physical. In 1607, when Robert Carr was just beginning his rapid ascent to become earl of Somerset, a court observer remarked that the king “doth admire good fashion in cloaths” and “dwelleth on good looks and handsome accourtrements.” Carr, well aware of these preferences, had “changed his tailors and tiremen many times, and all to please” the king. The new favorite had the natural advantage of being “straight-limbed, well-favourede, strong-shouldered, and smooth-faced.”Footnote ⁹¹ The royalist historian the earl of Clarendon remarked that out of all the wise men living at the time, James was “the most delighted and taken with handsome persons and with fine clothes.” Buckingham first gained favor “purely from the handsomeness of his person.” Indeed, thought Clarendon, no one anywhere had ever risen to such heights as Buckingham had “upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and gracefulness and becomingness of his person.”Footnote ⁹² James especially enjoyed watching Buckingham show off his long, slender legs in dancing. The courtiers who played this game of sexual politics knew that the key was to entice the king by parading a young male with alluring clothes and a pretty face in front of him. As we saw earlier, promoters of these aspiring favorites invested time and money in the necessary trappings. When James rebuffed one of these dolled-up males, a contemporary observed that this was a blow to his sponsors who had hoped to recover their fortunes “by setting up this new idoll, and took great paines in tricking and prancking him up, besides washing his face every day with posset-curd.”Footnote ⁹³ There is no reason to think that the physical magnetism that drew James to his favorites was subsequently transmuted into a purely spiritual sense of brotherhood when they joined him in bed.

But what did happen in that bed? That brings us to a third letter that has hitherto received little attention. A decade ago I was the first to suggest that this letter written by Buckingham to James broadly hinted at mutual masturbation.Footnote ⁹⁴ To make sense of the relevant passage in this letter, one has to understand that the two men enjoyed puns and word games. In this particular letter, Buckingham referred to James’s “large bountiful hand” and then expanded on the metaphor, saying, “there is this difference betwixt that noble hand and heart, one may surfeit by the one, but not by the other, and sooner by yours than his own; therefore give me leave to stop, with mine, that hand which hath been but too ready to execute the motions and affections of that kind obliging heart to me.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The word “surfeit” can mean to suffer an excess or to reach satiation. Here, the latter meaning seems to apply since Buckingham says that he prefers to surfeit by James’s hand rather than by his own—“sooner by yours than his own.” Furthermore, Buckingham represents the king’s hand as an instrument for expressing affection, “that hand which hath been but too ready to execute the motions and affections” of the heart. The word “motions” seems especially out of place here unless it refers, like the rest of this passage appears to refer, to mutual masturbation.

Amazingly, Bray agrees that this passage is about masturbation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet at the same time he attempts to explain it away. How can he do this? One tack is to argue that Buckingham could not possibly have been referring to any real practice of masturbation here because that would have constituted sodomy, and that would have been unthinkable given the contemporary horror about sodomy.Footnote ⁹⁷ But it is not certain that James, Buckingham, and all of their contemporaries automatically equated mutual masturbation with sodomy. And it is a plain fact that the law did not equate the two. Sodomy, as Sir Edward Coke famously explained, required penetration (res in re, thing in thing). It is true that this requirement was ignored during the next reign in the infamous case of the earl of Castlehaven, and there was nothing like universal agreement across Europe about whether masturbation constituted sodomy. For most Englishmen who had any concrete conception of sodomy, however, it apparently amounted to “anally penetrative intercourse.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Bray’s other tack is to treat Buckingham’s language as a joke. Now there is no doubt that the favorite was writing tongue in cheek. His words are, as Bray says, a “double entendre.” But does that reduce his language to a mere joke? Bray thinks that James should have laughed “at this saucy letter.”Footnote ⁹⁹ But it seems to me that this letter should also have drawn the king’s mind to the concrete act itself. Buckingham may have been jesting with the king, but the jest was rooted in reality. It did not refer to masturbation in the abstract but specifically to James’s “large bountiful hand” and specifically to Buckingham’s expressed preference to be satisfied by that hand rather than his own. This is precisely the way that lovers write to each other about their physical intimacies, conjuring up vivid memories, when they are constrained in letters to use coded language.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Finally, perhaps what is most telling about Bray’s treatment of this passage is that he discusses it for seven pages without naming the sex act to which it alludes. He manages to insinuate that the passage is about masturbation without ever actually using that indelicate term. Even masturbation between friends, it seems, had become, in Bray’s mind, a subject “amongst Christians not to be named.”

Queer History

The influence of Alan Bray can hardly be overestimated, but he was not the only scholar working in the history of homosexuality who tended to write James out of the story. Queer history in general—with its emphasis on social constructionism and queer theory—tended in this direction. Foucault, Bray, and their successors insisted that homosexuality is a peculiarly modern construct, and consequently they also insisted on the foreignness or alterity of earlier sexual constructs. “It can scarcely be stressed too strongly or too often,” Bray wrote, “that the society of Renaissance England is at an immense distance, in time and culture, from our own.” Most subsequent authors followed Bray in believing that the Tudor-Stuart “mental universe is alien.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ James was an alien person inhabiting an alien world. He could not be homosexual. Nor could any sexual identity be imposed on him because the very idea of a sexual identity is also peculiarly modern. So what was the appropriate way to refer to James?

An immediate problem arising from this approach was how to refer to premodern men who had sex with other men without employing the anachronistic, modern label of “homosexual.” This led to a variety of creative solutions—homoerotic, homosocial, nonheteronormative, and so forth. But none of these alternatives is entirely satisfactory. Most speak more to desire than to consummation; they serve better to evade than to answer the question of whether any actual sex act occurred. Alan Stewart provides one such example. He expresses the case of James in the following words: “Among prominent early modern men James VI of Scotland is perhaps most readily claimed today as homoerotically invested.”Footnote ¹⁰² Stewart neither evaluates the credibility of this claim nor defines exactly what he means by “homoerotically invested.” Another case in point is Paul Hammond. In Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester, Hammond writes, “Jacobean homosociality may have been precarious precisely because James’s known predilections and his demonstrative behaviour with his male favourites threatened to cross a crucial boundary, redescribing the eroticism which coloured homosociality as an unmistakable sign of homosexual interests.” Thus, James did have known predilections (what Hammond describes later as a “predilection for handsome young men”), and he did engage in demonstrative behavior with his favorites in public, but these only threatened to cross a boundary between “homosociality” and “homosexual interests.” Whether that boundary was in fact crossed, and what lay on the other side of that boundary besides “interests,” we are left to wonder.Footnote ¹⁰³ Thus, using the language of homoeroticism and homosociality can blur rather than clarify the basic question of whether James engaged in male-male sex.

The author who succeeds best at incorporating James into queer history is Randolph Trumbach. As noted at the outset of this article, Trumbach opts to use the nomenclature of the period in question. Consistent with the work of Michael Rocke on Renaissance Florence, Trumbach views James’s relationships as a prime example of “Renaissance sodomy.” In Trumbach’s own words, “The history of the relations between King James and the males, young and old, who caught his eye and who became his favourites neatly summarizes the career through which men passed, from passive boy to the active male lover of boys whom he later encouraged to enter manhood, marry a wife and sire a family as he himself had done.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We should hasten to add that James and his favorites do not conform perfectly to Trumbach’s model, and they by no means prove his far more sweeping claim that “all men desired both women and boys, and a substantial majority of men (if not all) acted at some point in life on their desire for boys.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nonetheless, whatever was happening in England at large, James and his favorites did substantially conform to a long-standing pattern of male-male sexual relations in Europe. Understanding this bigger picture might make conventional historians more receptive to the idea of James having sex with his favorites. Trumbach accepts the known facts and the inferences that naturally flow from those facts without attempting to explain them away. Given the ingenious evasions and clever circumlocutions of recent years, that straightforward approach is refreshing.

Trumbach’s analysis overcomes the problem of nomenclature, but it still leaves James inhabiting the alien world of Renaissance sodomy as distinct from modern homosexuality. The larger problem caused by queer theory is that it emphasizes differences at the expense of any similarities or underlying continuity between premodern sodomy and modern homosexuality. Indeed, it throws into doubt whether there could be any such thing as a history of homosexuality, at least a history extending more than a few centuries into the past. In his well-known essay “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” David Halperin describes homosexuality and heterosexuality as “modern, Western, bourgeois productions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Other authors, like Trumbach, push the origins of these modern categories back as far as 1700, but that still leaves James inhabiting the utterly alien world of premodern sodomy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such a strictly constructionist approach discredits any attempt to link modern homosexuality with figures from the distant historical past. “The hunt for ‘homosexuals in history,’” as Stewart explains, “seemed to have no place in an academic field heavily influenced by Foucauldian theories of the social construction of sexuality.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Halperin declares more colorfully: “I confess that this sort of gay identification still gives me the creeps.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ There simply was no place for King James in a pantheon of famous male homosexual figures in history if no such list was valid.

However, Halperin has recently modified his opposition to this approach. He now confesses that “there was something priggish about my insistence on the alterity of the Greeks, about my effort to get historians of sexuality to adhere unfailingly to neat, categorical, air-tight distinctions between ancient paederasty and modern homosexuality.” He admits there may yet be some merit in “the broader queer project of identifying with and reclaiming non-heteronormative figures from the past,” and he acknowledges that “continuities are no less crucial to take into account than historical ruptures.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Halperin’s recent softening of his position may herald a greater interest in continuities among sexual categories before and after 1700. And if so, then King James may not have to remain isolated on the other side of a great divide.

Conclusion

There will never be unanimity on the question of whether James’s relationships with his favorites were sexual. Many of his contemporaries thought they were, but their testimony can be discounted as confused, misinformed, or politically motivated. Even letters written by James himself or actions such as the sharing of a bed are open to interpretation. In the late twentieth century, there appeared to be a movement toward interpreting James’s relationships as sexual, but that movement lost momentum and even reversed itself in the face of several trends. As the reputation of James trended upward, there was apparently a reticence to ascribe sex with other males to him. Meanwhile, Alan Bray’s highly influential work, far from affirming James’s sexual relations with other males, portrayed those relationships as sexless. Scholars across the board adopted Bray’s thesis that James’s contemporaries misread the signs, wrongly seeing sodomy where there was only friendship. A flood of books and articles analyzed the sodomitical discourse that swirled around James while suspending judgment about whether that discourse was rooted in reality. Finally, queer theorists popularized a vocabulary that shifted attention away from sexual activity, which was impossible to prove conclusively, to homosociality and erotic desire that were safer and more demonstrable topics. If sex itself still had to be addressed, the leading voices in queer history warned against applying modern labels to premodern figures, insisting on a sharp distinction between premodern sodomy and modern homosexuality. This left James inhabiting an alien world on the other side of a great cultural divide, a mere footnote to modernity.

What I have tried to show in this essay is that there are many reasons for the pendulum of interpretation to swing back, for historians to contemplate again the very strong likelihood that James was sexually active with his favorites. First, it is true that in previous centuries James’s reputation was badly damaged by his relations with his favorites, contributing to an overall impression of debauchery at the Jacobean court. But in the twenty-first century, we should be able to look more objectively at the issue of James’s sexual behavior and separate it from the sodomitical caricature of an all-encompassing moral depravity. Today James is appreciated for his stewardship of the church, statesmanship, and political acumen. These virtues are not incompatible with a preference for sex with other males. Second, Alan Bray’s influential article explaining how the signs of male friendship could be mistaken for sodomy spawned two decades of fruitful scholarship, but James’s contemporaries could hardly have been wrong in every single instance, especially in light of Bray’s other contention that sex between men existed on a massive and ineradicable scale in Renaissance England. It is time now for historians to turn their attention to the harder work of determining when the suspicion of sodomy was warranted, and no case is more richly documented than James’s. That case never was satisfactorily addressed by Bray, who gave little attention to James at the outset and became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of James engaging in physical sex acts of any sort with other men. As we saw, Bray’s asexual view of James and his favorites in The Friend is vulnerable to a number of criticisms. Meanwhile, a cautious approach that emphasized homoeroticism and homosociality in place of outright sexual activity appears altogether too cautious with respect to James in light of the work of Michael Rocke and Randolph Trumbach. Finally, there are even indications that the uncompromising insistence that male lovers before 1700 are worlds apart from their modern successors may be yielding to a greater appreciation for some degree of continuity, however small, between them. All in all, then, the time is ripe to reconsider the king who begged Somerset hundreds of times to resume lying in his bedchamber, the king whom Buckingham fondly remembered joining in bed for the first time, the king whose “large bountiful hand” Buckingham preferred to his own.