Clare Jackson (5:33)
Yeah, it probably won't be comprehensive because that would probably take the rest of the podcast. But I think one of the themes of the biography is that James surprised most people. He certainly surprised the English. I mean, they were surprised, first of all, that his accession to the crown in 1603 was as peaceful and uncontested as it turned out to be. And then he sort of continued sort of disconcerting. English contemporaries, at any rate, they weren't used to having a monarch who was so fond of talking and writing, who had such strong and developed views about kingship, who really felt that his place as monarch was in Parliament, in the law courts, constantly interrogating his judges and his privy councillors. I mean, they'd been used to this very, very long, quite silent reign of Elizabeth, with lots of things left unspoken. So there was that dimension to the surprise he encountered among contemporaries. There's also been lots of speculation over the centuries about his male favourites and the relations with them, well, as with his wife, Queen Anna, but really more catastrophically, perhaps for James, was the impact of the mid century civil wars. So it was very difficult really for subsequent generations to see James other than as the father of Charles I, who disastrously led British Isles into more than a decade of civil war and who ended up being executed on the order of the English Parliament. Very much histories of the stuarts, especially after 1688, especially after the Williamite revolution, and his own grandson, James vii. And second, fleeing into exile, there was what's often called a sort of secret history genre that attempted to sort of explain the Troubles of the 17th century through the moral failings of the Stuarts themselves. And James became very much bound up in Charles I's failures as a king. And really that sort of very stereotypical Whiggish view of James that persisted through the 18th century didn't really get dislodged in the 19th century. There are very sort of crude stereotypes by the likes of Lord Macaulay that focus very much on James and his male favourites, that are very cruel actually, in their assessments of James's physical bearing. I mean, it's now understood that James had a range of physical disabilities. One can only do retrospective diagnoses after about four centuries. But he clearly did have an odd gait. He clearly had some sort of neurological disorders. And there's been speculations about modern analyses of These, but certainly to the more crude stereotypes, you know, he was somebody who slobbered at the mouth, whose tongue was too large to fit, who walked oddly, who was forever hanging on his younger favour. And that sort of very crude one dimensional view of James persisted. And actually, as I say in the book, one of the more depressing rejoinders you get quite often when you say you're working on James is the kind of sellers and Yeatman, 1066 and all that. I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but James I usually, because it's very English, slobbered at the mouth and had favourites. He was thus a bad king. And that language of slobbering at the mouth is there in a Spectator book review of 2021. It's just a very easy kind of reach for. And one of the things I talk about in the book is that, you know, homophobia has certainly been a fact in James's subsequent reception among historians. Lots of interest in his relationships with latterly someone like George Villiers, later Duke of buckingham. So to 19th century historians like Sir Walter Scott or court historian Jessie, you know, this was sort of grossly indecent and they really didn't often see beyond that. I've actually argued that perhaps scotophobia is just as prevalent a factor in some of the treatments of James as homophobia, particularly among contemporaries. I think that's one of the things that really shocks James when he comes to the throne is the extent to which there is just a lot of anti Scottish xenophobia. And the more in a sense that he retreats among his Scottish favourites, the worse it becomes. So, yeah, I hope that my biography doesn't veer too much in another direction, but I think what I really wanted to do was write a biography of James vi. And first, I think Scottish historians know a lot about James as King of Scotland from 1567 to 1603. But because the royal court relocates to London in 1603 often, their interest at that point tends to wane. And it is felt as though Scotland then becomes an absentine monarchy and it's governed remotely. Whereas English historians tend often to sort of assume that somehow James appears from nowhere in 1603 and that he's this kind of naive, inexperienced king rather than someone who's actually been on the throne for nearly four decades. So I wanted to try and write something that tried to make sense of those two reigns that are often sort of seen as some kind of insuperable biographical hurdle. Most biographies of James will be just portions of his reign with sort of 1603 as some unbridgeable point. It is a massive event in British history, and that's again, one of the themes of the book. But I still think this is one person and one king. And certainly James talks a lot when he's king of England about being an old king. He was past middle age. At the point that he becomes king of England, he says he was 36 and then he dies in his 58th year. But he sees this as something that happens in the sort of second part of his life. And I wanted to write something that was thematic, that looked at, for example, his attitude to witches in Scotland, as well as his involvement in prosecutions for witchcraft in England, and try and sort of bring those together to make sense of this fascinating, multifaceted individual.
