Five years before the gunpowder plot, an attempt was made on the life of James Stuart. That was what he claimed, at any rate. Yet the facts of the matter remain mysterious. The story goes that James – already king of Scotland and future king of England – was out hunting, when one of his entourage, the handsome young Alexander Ruthven, suggested they stop in at his family seat of Gowrie House. After lunch, he invited James to accompany him to another part of the castle. As they made their way, he locked one door after another behind them, the king apparently making no objection.
Minutes later, a tower window was flung open and James’s soldiers in the courtyard below caught a glimpse of their master screaming, “Treason! Treason! Treason!” before he was dragged back out of sight by Alexander. Using hammers to smash their way through the series of locked doors, they burst in to find the king holding Alexander at bay with his hunting knife. They instantly slew Alexander, and soon after, his older brother the Earl of Gowrie, who was racing to his aid.
The details of the story don’t add up. If it had been a conspiracy between the two brothers, why had Lord Gowrie seemed surprised when the king’s party arrived that day? Why hadn’t James smelled a rat when Alexander started locking doors? And what are we to make of his later claim that the reason he went off alone with Alexander was because he’d said he had “a crock of gold” to show him?
According to Gareth Russell’s confident, compelling new biography of James I, the most likely explanation is that the supposed murder attempt was in fact a lovers’ tryst that somehow turned nasty, causing James to panic. It may also have been the moment when his heavily pregnant wife, Anna, first realised the truth about her husband’s sexuality. Not the first English monarch to have same-sex affairs, and not the last, he seems to have gone looking for “a crock of gold” (the phrase became a running joke in Scotland) with a series of beautiful young men throughout his reign. Despite that fact, and the slightly lurid title of this book, the author doesn’t give undue attention to James’s boyfriends. He devotes time, too, to his love for his wife, to whom he once declared, “God is my witness that I ever preferred you to all my bairns, much more than to any subject.”
After Anna’s death in 1619, James, by then addled by heavy drinking, became more open in his affairs with men. This was particularly the case with George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, whom he addressed in letters as “my only sweet wife”. For his part, Buckingham addressed him as “husband”, and “Dad and Master”, once declaring that he looked forward to having his “legs soon in my arms”. Make of that what you will: it’s the raciest detail we get in a book that largely avoids prurience, providing a sober, rounded portrait of James Stuart, which rescues him from the caricature, product of later parliamentarian bias, of the slobbering (not true) weakling (also not true) who was forever fiddling with his codpiece (there is no contemporary evidence for this). Instead we meet a complicated man, an obsessive hunter, an intellectual who wrote decent poetry and books, superstitious, impulsive, passionate, and above all, deeply paranoid.
This last detail is little wonder. The most striking lesson of this propulsive biography is just how brutal life was 450 years ago. James’s appalling father was strangled before he was one year old. At the age of five, he saw his grandfather slain. He never knew his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, who was later beheaded by her cousin. And so it went on. As well as distrustful, these traumatic experiences left him with a hysterical sense of his own divinity, but also wily and highly practical when it came to power politics and his own survival.
The same cannot be said for his son and heir. Although he was a friend of Buckingham, Charles I never, so far as we know, sought a crock of gold. He inherited his father’s conviction he could do no wrong, but without the terrorising childhood that might have persuaded him to tread more carefully. Thus the stage was set for the civil war, and the block prepared for his head.
• Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King by Gareth Russell is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
