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- [00:00]
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McDonald's Ad Presenter
K Pop Demon Hunters Saja Boys breakfast meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:44]
Gareth Russell
It is an honor to share.
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McDonald's Ad Presenter
No, it's our honor.
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Gareth Russell
It is our larger honor.
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McDonald's Ad Presenter
No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
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Gareth Russell
but and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.
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Graham Duke
Welcome to Rex Factor. This time Gareth Russell on Queen James with your hosts, Graham Duke and Ali Hood.
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Ali Hood
Hello. Hello and welcome to RexFactor, where we have reviewed all the queen and prince consorts of England from Ellswith to Prince Philip, and we have thus finished series three.
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Graham Duke
Done.
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Ali Hood
Because this is coming out after the grand final, grand final and grand final result. So of course we all know who won series three of Rex Factor.
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Graham Duke
When was this coming out then?
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Ali Hood
July, August.
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Graham Duke
So we might even know who won Champion of Champions.
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Ali Hood
Mmm. We may even be doing that tonight.
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Graham Duke
Oh, really?
- [01:56]
Ali Hood
I was gonna do it before the final vote and then I thought, no, actually it makes more sense. Just have a clean and then afterwards. So as you can see, we are still still podcast, even though series three itself has finished. And we are speaking today to the historian Gareth Russell that we previously spoke to for his book about Hampton Court. And his new book is Queen the Life and Loves of Britain's First King. So it's about James I of England, 6th of Scotland, his reign and his personal life.
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Graham Duke
Yeah.
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Ali Hood
So we are very glad to be joined on the podcast again today by the historian Gareth Russell. Gareth, thanks for joining us again.
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Gareth Russell
Thanks for having me.
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Ali Hood
So for those of you who didn't listen to our previous chat with you about Hampton Court or haven't heard you elsewhere, could you just introduce yourself to the listeners in terms of who you
- [02:42]
Gareth Russell
are and what you do yes, I'm a historian and broadcaster and my previous book, as she mentioned, was the palace from the Tudors to the Windsors. 500 years of history At Hampton Court. Nearly forgot the subtitle there, which was the Pause. And I'd previously written biographies of Catherine Howard and the late Queen Mother, but my current biography, which is out now, is Queen James the Life and Love of Britain's First King. So it's about James VI if you're Scottish, and James I if you are in the rest of the uk.
- [03:17]
Ali Hood
James just Ali just holding that up for the benefit of us, but not the listeners who won't get to see this.
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Graham Duke
No, for goodness sake.
- [03:24]
Gareth Russell
Well, can I say, oh, it was private product placements. Thank you very much. It was absolutely beautifully done.
- [03:30]
Graham Duke
I'm going to get to grips with what we're doing right now. But, yeah, it's really nice to have you back. And we haven't been able to get to Hampton Court since, because I remember at the time we were saying, absolutely, go there.
- [03:40]
Ali Hood
I want to this summer.
- [03:42]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, it's really beautiful. I mean, look, I'm sort of biased. I don't know whether it's biased or Stockholm Syndrome Six of one, but I mean, it's gorgeous any time of year. But actually, what's really nice about going in the summer is the Privy Gardens, which are one of the Royal family's private gardens. They, in 1995, I think they refined, so they find and then replanted the original plans for the garden from William iii. So it's completely layout, as it would have been when he installed it, and they come to bloom obviously in spring and summer and it's really, really beautiful.
- [04:15]
Ali Hood
But as you said, we're not there to talk about here to talk about that today. We're here to talk about your new book on James. Now, I always want to try and think of kind of interesting and original questions when doing the interviews, but equally, I feel like I've got to lead with what I assume everybody's going to ask about, which is the title Queen James, why this title? And did the publishers have any kind of pushback on whether you went for that or not?
- [04:39]
Gareth Russell
No, they haven't at all. So actually it is being published with a different title in America, which is the Six Loves of James the First. And I think people, quite a few people online have speculated or indeed asserted that it was changed in America for political reasons, which makes it more interesting, but that's not why. So the Stuarts are less familiar in America and I was really Touched when the publishers said, we love it and we want to have it as one of our Christmas releases, which is very flattering. But they also said that they felt it was as interesting as the Six Wives of Henry viii and they sort of like a way to let American readers know that. So we came up with the Six Loves of James I. No, there was no pushback on Queen James, which was great. I mean, one of the things that's a bit interesting, or perhaps boring, I find it interesting is that for some reason, British readers tend to respond slightly better to shorter titles and Americans to slightly longer titles. I'm not really sure why that is one of those esoteric publishing things. So we wanted a title that was a bit like Ron Sill and did what it said in the tin, which Queen James did. And also, you want something that's contemporary and links to the present. That's what a history book is. It's bringing the past to a modern readership. And just like Today in the 17th century, Queen had many different names and Queen James was a contemporary nickname for James. So in the 1620s, there is particularly 1623 and 1624, which is right to the end of his life. I came across some really interesting letters from German merchants who were living in London and sort of being shown around various dinner parties. And I think they'd heard the joke one too many times to find it funny. But apparently the joke during the rounds of the London dinner party circuit was Elizabeth was King, then James was Queen. And it was a direct. It was an arched eyebrow sort of sneer at his private life to imply that he was letting his male favourites king it over him. It also did, as I said, today, Queen means many things. It also enabled them to make a comment about his private life and his foreign policy, because there was a massive war going on in Europe at the time, later called the Thirty Years War, although obviously doesn't get that name until the final, final year tally is totted up. But James refused to get us involved in it and people were very angry at him and said he was diminishing the valor of a Protestant military nation and said he was behaving more like a queen who brings peace than a king who brings war. So in both cases, I think his private life and his foreign policy are things that caused him difficulty while he was alive in terms of public opinion, but looked at with the benefit of hindsight, they make him a lot more sympathetic or interesting. And so it was really. The nickname worked perfectly. I think it's a bridge between the Past and the present. And also how attitude shifted and changed around James over time. So that was really sort of, in a nutshell, the three reasons why it was picked. That's cool.
- [07:42]
Graham Duke
It's such a great title. And I know we're not on video anymore, but that is a really impactful cover, isn't it?
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Ali Hood
Yeah, it is.
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Gareth Russell
Georgie designed it. She did the palace for the Hampton Court book as well. And it was. I can always say I can also join in the enthusiasm for the COVID because I have nothing to do with it. So it's not like sort of congratulating myself. Yeah, it was brilliantly designed and it was the sort. For people who have seen the COVID it's really a close up of a bit of his face and his eye looking over the words Queen James. And it is from my favorite portrait of James. And I just thought what was quite nice was that it was sort of zooming in on him and it's quite. It's literally eye catching. It is an eye. So, yeah, I love the COVID So
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Ali Hood
the focus of the book, it's a biography of James and it sort of takes in all the sort of some of the big important things of his reign, like you say, in terms of the peace policies and his priorities in England and in Scotland, but also quite a focus on his personal life and the way in which that obviously with the monarchs in this period, the personal and the public and political, it all sort of merges into one. But obviously the fact of Queen James, like you said, there's the peace element, but also the question of James's sexuality. And I guess the interesting thing for me, the fact that he called it Queen James, it's one of those weird things. You sort of talk about it in the book, how it's not like that any historians now seem to particularly question the fact that James has relationship with men in his life. It's just this weird thing where they have to put so many caveats and explainers around it and you give a quite good explanation of how, like Mary Boleyn and Henry viii, there's barely any actual evidence for it, but it's just. It's there as a fact.
- [09:16]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, I mean, it was. That was the one bit of snark I allowed myself. Because you had to be professional. Yeah, I mean, Mary Boleyn is about. There's. There's the evidence. If you presented the same evidence for James and one of his male favorites for Henry viii, the Mary Blitz, you'd rightly be laughed out of the room because it's so slender. And it's just based on repetition. And I was aware going into it that there is there. I think there is a slightly disproportionate, sorry, disproportional amount of evidence required for homosexual relationships. The one thing I would say in defense of people who require more is that many of these monarchies and aristocratic society were homosocial, which meant that you tended to socialize a lot more with your own gender. So it can be more difficult to spot when a friendship shifts into something romantic. And I'm sure there are dozens, if not hundreds of people throughout the past who were, what we would say, gay or bisexual and will just never have the evidence to make that that case. And I have been, you know, not dubious. I just have disagreed in the past. So with the book we were talking about at the start, the palace, in my chapter on William iii, I said, look, the evidence for him to be gay or bisexual just is not strong enough. Some of these letters are, are just very friendly and very affectionate with James. That is not the case. And having spent two years working on this and reading his letters, if you do not think James was in love and sleeping with men, then you will not thank anyone before the Stonewall riots was ever drinked. The proof here is very, very strong and it should be, look, I mean, if you're trying to make these kind of assertions about relationships that were important enough to shift policy and all the rest of it and really shape the Scottish and then the British monarchies, the English monarchy, I should say you should be. You should be expected to prove your point. So there are some points in the book where I say, actually these relationships he allegedly had, there. There is no evidence that holds those up. But there is pretty. I mean, sorry, there's not. There is evidence, strong evidence for six of them. And that will. Yes, when you read people sort of falling over themselves to, to insert so many qualifiers to what is, I think, a fairly non controversial assertion. You know, if you had letters from someone saying, I can't wait to feel your thighs and my arms again, there's no century in the world without splatonic.
- [11:46]
Ali Hood
So.
- [11:48]
Gareth Russell
And yeah, I mean, I am, I think with. I think it's sort of, again, in defense of some people who do that, you know, they were just rumors, etc. There was, there has been for about 20 or 30 years a really interesting but pervasive and I think misleading view that it's somehow intellectually superior to say, to. To confront homoerotic sources and say, actually it's not gay or it's not homosexual, whatever no one could literally want to use. And it's somehow intellectually more sophisticated to say it was just a really extreme bromance. And part of that comes, I mean, it's, it's not an unfair point that it comes from people initially who were writing about Marie Antoinette and they were trying to point out that a lot of the letters from these aristocratic women in the 18th century are more affectionate than we would typically write to a friend. That's just the way they express themselves. But again, we have affectionate, friendly letters from James and they don't even come close to these romantic ones. So, yeah, I think that, I mean, for me it was great. The evidence is overwhelming and there's a lot of it.
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Ali Hood
And you talk in the book as well, a lot about the, like we said about the word queen, but there are lots of words and more sort of sexualised words. But the ways in which that sort of holds slightly different things today. But even at the time, words could mean sort of different things in different contexts. And it's quite, it's really interesting getting that sense, both in England, Scotland and Europe, actually, the sort of. The nuance of language.
- [13:18]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, that was fascinating for me. And luckily with each of those relationships you sometimes get a new turn of phrase. Some of them are repeats, signposts. But yes, I mean, I find the history of language and the way people communicate and colloquialism is really, really interesting. Fascinating, you know, so at one point, one of them was described as, this isn't necessarily romantic but a proper man. And there are five different meanings for them. I mean, they're all complementary, luckily for Alexander Lindsay. But it's, it's. I try to sometimes give a modern equivalent and say it could mean like a real man or a manly man. It has. And we have sort of six connotations
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Ali Hood
that
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Gareth Russell
conjures up for us. What was particularly interesting was that some of the words had meant something in a previous generation. So minion is the one that really shifts and it goes for meaning sort of like a hooray, Henry, sort of young, good looking, upper class man of good breeding but little use at the Royal Courts. And then under Henry III in France, it shifts. And the connotation by the 1570s, very clearly supposed to allude to a male favorite who's sexually intimate with his royal patron. And then there are other things that they start to do which is telling. They start to put sort of three or four words into a sentence, all of which on their own. You could, some of them, at a real stretch, explain away as platonic. But when they throw them all together, it's when they say, like his only beloved nightly bedfellow, minion and conceit, it's. You don't. I mean, really, that's four of the big headers in one sentence. But they can't use words that are openly critical or judgmental. So, for instance, they don't use sodomite unless they. They loathe the person they're talking about. And sodomy was the most interesting one because it means so many different things. And it gets to the stage where it means so much that it almost means everything and nothing at the same time. It's just a very bad word. So, I mean, it's based on the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis for their sins. And in it, it is a group of men attempt to assault an angel that appears to look like a man. So some people think it's about. In James's lifetime. People say Solomon means sexual coercion. Some say it means sex between men. Some say it means blasphemy. I mean, there's all this list of things that it could possibly mean. So when James is talking about sodomy, it's not clear what he means, but it is really only invoked when people are very, very angry and are really trying to condemn something. And James is never called a sodomite, but there are more biologically specific terms. So there's a lot of pamphlets start appearing when he's in his late teens and early twenties in Edinburgh calling him the Buggerer King. And there are protests because he's spent too long with a male favorite, the proper man, Alexander Lindsay, and he keeps delaying his marriage. And eventually the Scottish people, particularly in the capital, have had enough of this. And there are protests in the city saying he has to pick a wife and he has to get on with it. And in particular, they want him to pick a Danish princess because the merchants have found out that one of the deals on the table for the royal marriage is some very generous trading concessions with Denmark and Norway. So they sort of want the king to lie back and think of Scotland, I think, is the preference. And it's. It's just. To me, it was such an interesting. It was. I mean, as a historian, hopefully, you're always. You're always interested in, in what's, in what you're writing about. But when you have such really, really fascinating sources and there's so many of them. It was just a real joy to write about how attitudes changed and how he interacted with them.
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Graham Duke
I'm amazed that. It just seems odd to me that as society just lets go of it being a controversial topic, that I thought that it would mean that people were more accepting or open to these ideas rather than sort of then trying to take an intellectual upper hand and saying, oh, no, it's not this thing.
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Gareth Russell
Yeah, it's. That's really nice of you, but I think there are many, many people in the field who much prefer to take the intellectual upper hand, even if it's not always necessarily justified. I think it's. People are always, I think, rightly worried that history is going to be sacrificed to modernity and that will try and make people sort of, you know, gay rights activists or feminists or concepts that these people would not have understood. And I can understand from a reader's perspective that might be frustrating and, and they worry that you're judging the past by the standards of the present. So what I mean, I have an appendix at the back of the book explaining the evidence I use and also the language I use, because that's also something people understandably have concerns about. But I think with, in a nutshell, gay rights really comes in as a concept in the 20th century. But homosexuality or men falling in love with men or women falling in love with women is an eternal reality. They just, the, the language that we use to describe it is different. And the story of the past is always written with the words of the present. You just have to be very conscious of, not. Of making the story readable and accessible without sacrificing the nuances of what James and the people at the time would have understood. So, you know, you can't, you can't ever write it with the understanding of a fulfilling ending in the way that we would understand it, because he has no, you know, he never thinks he's gonn marry any of these people. And he never. He understands, albeit he says himself, God is my witness, I could have abstained for longer from getting married. He understands that it's his duty to do it. Monarchy and marriage are, are two really two halves of the same coin at this point in history. And he has no intention of doing what Elizabeth the First does and jeopardizing the succession by not marrying. So it is, I mean, it's really. It's nuanced and it's important and it's also, hopefully it's explaining the past in its own terms.
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Graham Duke
Brilliant.
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Ali Hood
So if we get into James himself a little bit then. And I mean, hopefully some of our listeners should be familiar with James because we've sort of did him in the first series, the second series, and we did Anne of Denmark in the third series, so we've covered him quite a few times. But I think it's really great to get a chance to get in a bit more on his sort of personal life and how that affects his kingship. So could you just give a little bit introduction to James and like his, his sort of character and sort of, I guess, his kind of early years, formation in Scotland.
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Gareth Russell
Absolutely. So he is the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her universally detested English husband, Lord Darnley. And when James is still in the cradle, Lord Darnley is found strangled in the detonated ruins of an Edinburgh mansion. And the reason why it's still one of the most famous unsolved cold cases in British history is because there are no shortage of suspects. Pretty much everyone wants Darnley dead, but it's his wife, rightly or wrongly, who takes the blame, and she's pushed off her throne and into exile in England. So when James is 13 months old, the men who overthrew his mother proclaim him James vi. And he spends most of his childhood being brought up at Stirling, which was, I think, my favorite place to visit for research for this book. It was absolutely brilliant. It's such a remarkable, remarkable and really well managed historical house. But he has a, you know, he's a very, very loving governess, the dodger Countess of Mar, who he calls Lady Minnie, which means Lady Mummy, and she adores him and she's very, very protective. Unfortunately, he also has a tutor called George Buchanan, who was an interesting choice to tutor a future monarch in that he's not that king, not that keen on monarchy. It would be a bit like someone announcing that Prince Louis or Princess Charlotte is being educated by someone who's a member of republic. It just would be quite an odd choice for someone to make. And Buchanan is horrible to him. I mean, really awful. And all the love that he gets from Lady Mar, the opposite, you know, he's sort of beaten. Even in the context of the 16th century, unusually. And they do believe in corporal punishment, even for royalty. It's not true that princes were ever spared the same whipping boy myth, that there was someone who was whipped in their place is. Is nonsense. But Buchanan is. Is awful to him. And one of the things I found quite, really tragic was a source I read when James was in his 40s and he spotted Someone across the room who looked really like George Buchanan, who was long dead by this stage, and he started shaking. So it was a. It was a. It was a childhood that there was love in, but there was also. There was. There was cruelty there as well. Throughout his teenage years, he mounts a series of attempted coups to move from being child pawn to adult king in Scottish government. There are several kidnapping attempts, but really, by the time he's about 17 or 18, he has established himself as in control of the Scottish government. And he rules, it has to be said, very successfully for the next 18 or so years. And he marries Anne of Denmark, who you mentioned, in 1590. They have children together. She is not very popular in Scotland, although she becomes hugely popular when he becomes King of England with Elizabeth I's death in 1603. And he moves south with her and their children. And he rules through many tumultuous events. He commissions the King James Bible at the Hampton court conference in 1604, partly to help restore unity to the Church of England. And despite the physical cruelty of his education, it was intellectually brilliant and he was very intellectually impressive. He was a gifted linguist and he was a very gifted theologian. He survives the Gunpowder Plot. He is the main target of it in 1605, and he rules until 20 years later, until his death. And throughout this while the marriage with Anne, I think there is love there. They have a great, very similar sense of humor, and they are each other's best allies. The great passionate loves of his life are with men. And the first one really takes off when he's 17 with a courtier called Patrick Gray. And the last one, which really is about the last decade when he's on the throne, is with George Villars, the Duke of Buckingham. So who was the subject of the recent TV series of anyone Singing Mary and George, where James is played brilliantly by Tony Curran and. And George very well by Nicholas Gallitzin. So it's a period of immense social change, religious upheaval, political turmoil. James is also someone who fatally supports the witch hunts in Scotland and later writes a book defending them, although the degree to which he is responsible for starting them has been overstated. And actually his views on them changed in both directions, from skeptic to support and back again over the course of his life. So he. I describe him in the book as a man with a great mind but sharp edges. And he dies very unpopular for a variety of reasons, particularly in England, one of which is his extravagance. The other is his personal life and the Third, as she mentioned at the top of the show was this anti war foreign policy. So he individually is fascinating. His life is absolutely extraordinary.
- [24:53]
Graham Duke
Wow.
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Ali Hood
And he's like you said, he's this great intellect and he's perhaps one of the most, if not the most intellectual kings England or Scotland have had. And the witchcraft just seems such an odd. It seems that the bit that stands out, it seems so many other ways in which he seems so sort of sympathetic and of almost a more modern, rational mindset and then you've got this thing going on. But it's interesting that and the male lovers and the marriage, it all kind of comes together, doesn't it? Because it's actually from when he goes to go and collect and from Denmark and the storms that all kind of comes into being.
- [25:31]
Gareth Russell
Yes. I mean, there's the history of witchcraft, which I had to research for chapter eight in the book where I talk about the witch hunts and that trip to Scandinavia that you mentioned about going together. That was really. I mean, I was. It was one of those things. I wish I could have written more because I was finding all of it so, so interesting. But yeah, he, he did believe in witchcraft. They all did. And I make the point in the book that this is a society that feels like it's buckling apart at the seams. And you know, in the same way that anything, any society where suddenly the meaning of. Of something really fundamental has changed and this society, the word Christian no longer meant the same thing it had two generations before. There are all these new denominations springing up and they believe they're getting closer to the truth. But of course, if the light is becoming brighter, the devil will be growing stronger, trying to frustrate it. And it's a tumultuous time. So it's not. You wouldn't find anyone who didn't believe that witchcraft was a possibility. But I think people will be. I certainly think it's a surprising fact, given the stereotype of the witch hunts, to know that there were none. There were no mass witch hunts in the British isles before the 16th century. They are 16th century and 17th century phenomenon. Another part of it is it's no coincidence they really take off in the 1590s when the weather is terrible and the harvests are failing and falling and food prices are going up. It's a society in flux. But the way I would sort of explain it is if you think of sort of, for us, something like maybe child abuse or torture or murder, like really horrific, horrific things. We know that they do occur and he believes that witchcraft does occur and it's as bad a crime as possible. And all those things I've just mentioned, those, those terrible crimes of torture, the abuse or murder of a child and murder itself. They believe witchcraft encompasses all of those. It's not just people flying around in brooms, it's women and men as necromancers who are kidnapping children and torturing them and draining them and using their bodies and their spells. If you roll up every moral turpitude you can think of, witchcraft covers it. And so when a witch hunt kicks off, I think a lot of people end up going along with it because they're frightened, but also they are genuinely morally frightened of if someone turned around to you and. And said, this guy is a serial killer or he might be a serial killer, the fear you would have of being the one who spoke up and said, no, he isn't. And then it turns out that he was. That is how many people end up being caught up in the witch hunts. And to your point, in James's intellect, he's very clever. And so when the great witch hunt kicks off just after he and Anne survive these massive storms coming back from Denmark, they start outside the Royal household. It's not James who kicks off the North Berwick witch trials. And initially he thinks they're nonsense, because when people are coming to him and the Presbyterian Church in particular are telling him, you are not doing enough in this moral crusade against Satan in Scotland, James makes a perfectly reasonable reply. But you tortured them. You tortured these. Richard Graham and Agnes Sampson, who at this case are the two main victims. Come witnesses, of course. They told you they were witches and wizards to get you to stop inflicting the pain. And then there's a remarkable moment where he questions Agnes himself and she. She convinces him that she is a witch. And after that, James is, I think, suffers. To me, it seems like he suffers a complete mental break. He seems to become a different person and he is terrible, terrified and very vindictive. And what's interesting is, as he gets older, he seems to start to have qualms of conscience. And by 1616, he's intervening in England to shut witch hunts down. But that doesn't take away from the real damage that he did facilitate. He didn't start the witch hunts in the 1590s, but he did help the big one, the North Berwick witch trials, reach the scale and pay him that it did. And it ended up dozens of people died. But what was, I think, statistically quite fascinating is the numbers for Scotland are odd. They are lower than the European average for witch hunts. So to get to give listeners an idea, between 1563, when witchcraft is transferred from church courts to secular courts which can impose the death penalty, and really the end of the witch hunt says around 7 or widespread belief in witchcraft, say about 1727, 1500 people are tried in Scotland for witchcraft, compared to 10,000 in Switzerland for the same period. So that is much lower than the European average. However, within the British averages, Scotland is nearly per head of the population, I should say about 10 times higher than England. So there is definitely a more widespread belief in it in Scotland, particularly in the Lowland, the south of Scotland, after the Reformation. And the first big witch hunts start when James is a child. So he grows up with this fear that the devil is getting stronger. And I think that explains the really dark role that he plays in the North Berwick witch hunts.
- [30:59]
Graham Duke
Golly, it sounds like a qanon, like this fear of the unknown and, and, and wrapping up all of those terrible, terrible activities that you talk about, like abuse and all this sort of thing.
- [31:15]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, I think that's it because it's. Well, what it really is is the, the lethal mistake they make in the witch hunts, which many modern conspiracies make as well, is they mistake a symptom for a cause. So all of this stuff is, you know, things like, for instance, the weather and everything being a bit grim and horrible. That is the, that is what is impacting a broken society. But they try to find witchcraft as the reason for it. Rather, the belief in witchcraft is produced by this society under siege or. But what they don't realize, they make it the other way around. They flip it. And we, we all do it. It happens, happens throughout. And what is. I mean, there's a great book, I think, coming out later this year by Stephen Verapin, who's also written in James, and he's writing about the witch hunts in particular. And I remember him saying once that actually the other figure that people miss because we always talk about witch hunts, the witch hunter, is also misunderstood because he's constantly invoked in modern political discourse. Oh, it's a witch hunt. And the implication is that the person being hunted is knowingly being persecuted by a hunter who knows that they're lying, who knows that the cause isn't true. And actually, what's much more frightening about the hunts is that not only did the perpetrators believe in it, but some of the victims did. And there are clear cases of. There's a, there's a schoolmaster in one of them called John Finn who to love doing horoscopes, that was his thing. And there's a perfectly good case to be made for if you, I mean, yes, you're having hammers taken to your legs, but if you believe God is providential and the ways of God are slow but sure, can you convince yourself, maybe I deserve this, Maybe I. Maybe in casting a horoscope I have, I have done something that is, that is a sin, a mortal sin, and therefore I have brought this upon myself. So the complexities of the witch hunts at that period are just really, really dark and tragic. And I should say there are also the reasons that listeners will expect and have come across. You know, there's one crucial early maybe witch hunter is the wrong term, but someone who brings the evidence to the government, a guy called David Seaton, who's just one of the worst people I've encountered. But he tortures his maid, a woman called Gaylis Duncan, into providing the first evidence that kickstarts the North Berwick witch hunts. And one of the people she identifies is a lady called Euphemia Macallion who comes from a wealthy Edinburgh family. And she, I find out, sort of halfway through, Euphemia had recently become wealthier because her mother in law had left her six times as much in her will. Then she left the brother in law, who is David Seaton, the man who started them, and he's obviously deliberately planting this evidence so he can have Euphemia locked up and get his hands on the money. So it's, there's all, there's multiple motivations, those who believe and those who exploit. And I think James is one who believes God.
- [34:38]
Graham Duke
That's a good distinction, isn't that it?
- [34:41]
Ali Hood
I don't know if this is maybe unfair on James, but I was reading through the book and all the different aspects of him that you were covering and another interesting bit of him, and maybe this isn't connected to the witch element and it's coincidence, but you say that there's quite a lot of ways in which actually he's quite misogynistic, that he sort of genuinely didn't enjoy the company of women. And actually looking at his story again, it's remarkable. Other than the lady mummy, as he said, who's lovely to him, actually he does have a dart of kind of positive experiences because obviously his mother Mary, she's actually alive for quite a bit of it, but away. And he gets lots of bad stories about her. There's the constant looming issue of Elizabeth the First and the succession, and she's not Always exactly the most positive sort of godmother, weird figure in his life. And it's like, actually, yeah, he does sort of struggle for quite a long time. It almost feels like until he marries, he doesn't really have any kind of positive things. And I don't know whether that you think is any kind of factor in the way that he views women. And he's more inclined to believe that that's a separate sort of box for him.
- [35:42]
Gareth Russell
But I think it's. Well, I don't think it's wrong. I mean, there is. There is a point where at one point he asks, why does. Is the devil work more in women? I will say with the North Berwick witch hunts, he is convinced that the coven is headed by a man. And I think Scottish witchcraft is. Is interesting within the wider context of belief in dark magic in early modern Europe, in that in Scotland they tend to agree, accuse men as often as they accuse women, at least at the start, they'll often use. For men, they'll say necromancy. So necromancer implies sort of using parts of the dead or very, very dark magic. Other countries, obviously, you would expect to see more women. And that does tend to develop in Scotland. James at one point does ask a courtier, why does the devil seem to use women more often? So I'd be surprised if, if it, if that didn't impact. And the idea, James, like, like many people who. I mean, I will say his, his, his. You're absolutely right, Graham, that one of the reasons he has this attitude towards women is that he doesn't have a lot of them growing up. As I say, society is mostly homosocial and he gets on quite well with his, his cousins, for want of a better word, Henrietta and Marie Stewart. But he meets them when he's a bit older. Unlike many people who have a dodgy attitude towards the other gender, James doesn't seem to include it towards any women he actually knows. So he, you know, he thinks his wife is fantastic. He adores his daughter Elizabeth, loves the cousins, loves the. The governess. And he also, he's very good friends when he's younger, in his sort of late teens, with a woman called Christiane Lindsay, who writes poetry and her husband works for him. And James is dabbling in poetry at the time. But he does also hold this view that women tend to be weaker than men. And so I think he thinks that. I mean, he very much revises that view for his wife, who. He can never define defeat in an argument, but he. I think the attitude towards Women is very complex. And to go back to George Buchanan, he is patient zero in this because he taught him that his mother was a monster. And I think James always hoped that that would be proved wrong. But if you hear it over and over again as a child, there'll always be a bit of you that wonders, is that true?
- [38:06]
Graham Duke
Gosh, that's sad.
- [38:07]
Ali Hood
It might also remind me a little bit of Prince Albert who's like sort of really had this almost phobia of sexual infidelity because of his parents marriage breaking up. And actually can see with James and the way obviously that all the stories he gets about Mary and how that must really set him, he has.
- [38:23]
Gareth Russell
And the other thing that I did not know until I started researching the book is you can expand on that he has this absolute phobia of royal bastards because his grandfather James V had left a small tribe off them. And that meant that James, James was dealing with so many cousins from the wrong side of the blankets, but many, many members of the aristocracy who had royal blood. And in particular his cousin, the Lord High Admiral Bothwell, whom he loathes and cannot trust but also can't get rid of for a very long time because he's also a king's grandson. And I found a letter that I just loved. It was just a very unexpected side of Charles, the first James son. So when Charles loses his virginity when he's about 17 or 18 and it's to a young lady of the court, we don't know who it was because Charles has to recruit a friend to lie for him when his father wanders where he is because he knows that if James finds out that he's having premarital sex, that he will be on the end, receiving end of one of James's interminable and very angry lectures about you must not do anything that produces illegitimate children. And he comes back to this with his own sons, he says, you know, have the example of my grandfather in front of your eyes at all times, who by his. His many bastards bred the wreck of his daughter. So his James's mother, Mary. So, yeah, I think he does have an absolute horror of infidelity that can result in a child, whether that be from a royal man or a royal woman. So in many ways, actually, in terms of whether chicken or egg, but in many ways the fact that he, he very clearly prefers to have sex with men, I think is kills two birds with one stone.
- [40:05]
Ali Hood
Yeah,
- [40:11]
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- [40:27]
Ali Hood
And because I was interested. Well, actually, it was making me think about Elizabeth and her favourites and again, you know, lots of rumors about the extent to which she has actual relationships with them, or if it's just flirting, etc. But again, it was interesting thinking about a lot, in some ways the same dynamic with James and his nobles, because the men that he's involved with are going to become prominent at court and there's lots of factions that will revolve around them. Elizabeth has this going on as well. Guess Elizabeth there was the fact that there was the danger of children that perhaps may be more likely to preclude it. But yeah, I was wondering just the interesting, the dynamic and the comparison with Elizabeth's favourites, James favourites, and the extent to which the fact that James has a sexual relationship with them, does that change it in the way of a normal favourite? Or actually, is it kind of just the normal fare and it just happens to be that James is a man, but otherwise, actually, this is just what we usually get with the monarch.
- [41:18]
Gareth Russell
I would probably lean towards the second, to be honest. And they. They don't ever really seem to object to the male favorites until they cross the metaphorical corridor from the bedchamber to the council chamber and then people start getting really quite moralizing about the whole thing. So if you look at some of the favorites, Philip Herbert, the early days of. I mean, Robert Carr actually is probably the best one to look up because he's favourite from about 1607 into the early 1610s. And there's almost a direct dividing line, if you like, between say, the first three years, 1607 to 1610, where Robert, who, you know, by his own admission would struggle to count to 10 without looking at his own fingers, like he's not. He is not what you would call someone overburdened with a heavy iq. And he knows he has no head for politics. And so for the first three years of their relationship, he sort of confines himself to going on hunting trips with James. He redecorates their private apartments at the hunting lodges together. He takes James's pet armadillo, which I love, for walks. And then in 1610, one of his friends tries to start maximizing Robert's proximity to the King. So three main factions at James's court and they're all thwarted by James, brilliant but very unpopular Chief minister Robert Cecil. And they hope that Robert Carr, the King's favorite, will be able to tip the balance in one of their respective favours. And so some of Robert's friends start sort of selling access to him. And when Robert cecil dies in 1612, Robert Carr makes the fatal mistake of Pinocchio thinking he's a real boy and that at this point he can actually be a political heavyweight. And he moves into politics with almost uniformly disastrous results and he turns the court against him. Parliament starts speaking against him. And Parliament at this point, now that particularly the adult parliament in 1614, they make the most unbelievably obvious innuendos about Robert's role as the King's lover in order to get at him about politics. And I think this is. We can't ever really know why someone does something, but I think they a were trying to get a bit of a laugh from their fellow MPs, but also maybe to subtly threaten James with, you know, we're not outright saying it, but we do know why this man is now Lord High Chamberlain and Treasurer and all the rest of it. And we want it stopped. So to give listeners an idea of one of the metaphors in these anti Robert Carr speeches, one of them, I think it's the MP for Yorkshire stands up and makes this really bizarre. I mean, I remember reading it thinking, where is this going? It's a very heavy laden metaphor about the Royal Court and the King's household in particular functioning like a cistern which obviously every time you flush it needs to be filled up. And no one in the House of Commons seems to have understood where it was going either, until at the very end the Right Honourable Member for Yorkshire says, why should we pay to refill this cistern when every day the King allows it to. To be drained by a private cock? And at that point you can almost feel the speaker of the House becoming airborne trying to shut the speech, speech down. That's one of the, you know, that's when they start to meld the private with the public. So if they. And again, you see this with mistresses throughout history. Barbara Castlemaine, the Countess of castleMaine under Charles II, she becomes really unpopular, as does Louise de Carrawell, the Duchess of Portuguese, when they are suspected of dabbling in politics. Whereas Nell Gwynn, who Charles II's mistress, who just will not get involved in politics at all, no one minds. So I think that you do see a pallor with the favourites that's not a million miles removed from the way people respond to mistresses. And you know, homosexual intercourse was almost universally, not entirely, but almost viewed as a sin. So was adultery. But they had Tolerated that in kings for centuries. And they were prepared to tolerate this. It was only when it moved into the political sphere and if the favorite was demonstrably unqualified for political office in the way that Robert Carr clearly, clearly was, that they start to raise very serious objections. And then you get speeches like that in the House of Commons.
- [45:43]
Ali Hood
So actually, in many ways it's like it would have been almost the same objections if you turn some of these figures from male into female.
- [45:51]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, absolutely.
- [45:52]
Ali Hood
Doing the same things. The objections are the same. Just the, perhaps the level of the insult, the nature of the insult or the euphemism changes, but actually the core is this person shouldn't be influencing what's going on.
- [46:03]
Gareth Russell
Well, that's it. And I think one of the things I don't want to fall into the habit of the trap, sorry, of doing is saying that simply because these are two men who have fallen in love, that any criticism of them is motivated by what we might call homophobia or anti gay prejudice or whatever nomenclature you want to use. Sometimes unquestionably, their lives are more difficult because of it. And it took, I think, an immense amount of bravery to live the way James did, in court, at least. But it's not true that every bit of criticism and every bit of difficulty they faced was simply, simply a result of that. Some of it was a consequence of their own actions. And James had been brilliant earlier in his reign of keeping his favorites out of politics. I mean, one of the ones that, two of the ones, sorry, that no one objects to are Alexander Lindsay in Scotland and Philip Herbert in England. And there's a great memoir, an account by one of Philip Herbert's friends written years later, where he says, you know, Philip was very good looking, great at hunting, again, not overburdened by brains. But no one objected in the four years he was favorite because he never asked for too much and he never tried to sway the balance politically. But as James gets older, his health does start to decline. And I think personally that, I think personally his relationship with alcohol became a lot darker at that point. And so he starts to rely more and more on the favorites. He keeps a less tight reinforcement on them, if that makes sense.
- [47:33]
Ali Hood
And also the death of his son, the eldest son that dies. If he'd been alive in the later point of the years, he's probably the kind of the satellite, completely, completely grim.
- [47:43]
Gareth Russell
I think the death of Prince Henry in 1612 is an absolutely vital, vital development in his reign because if Henry dies as an adult, he's 18 and so he would have been adult for a couple of years by their standards. But the fact that there is no adult heir for quite a bit of it really until for another few years and then the Queen dies and she had been I think really an anchor. The amount of people who can seriously rival the favorites have dropped like flies between 1612 and 16 the Chief Minister goes, then they heir to the throne and then the Queen Consort. So yes, it's absolutely. It changes things. It makes it easier for people like Buckingham to become in many ways favorite consortium and Chief Minister all enrolled into one, which I think is a big mistake, an understandable one, but a mistake nonetheless.
- [48:34]
Graham Duke
So sorry. So King Charles, I had an older brother called Henry who died. So will he be on our nearly rex's list?
- [48:41]
Ali Hood
Yeah, if we do the nearly series then yeah, he'd be one of them.
- [48:45]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, he's a great one to do but not so not to sort of produce like stick by one where it's really not needed. He's yeah, he'd be a great one to do because people really mourn him and he has this thing that I think any neardy rexy will come often he becomes the fabulous if only so they're held up as everything would have been perfect had this one lived. And he's very different to his father. He is quite popular with the Puritans, which is not a sentence you can say for most of his stewards or indeed most people. But he his death and that actually to be honest was the most moving bit because there's very good eyewitness accounts of the grief that James and Anne suffer when Henry dies. And it was a bit of a chin wobbler moment reading it. I mean it's really raw and palpable through those eyewitness accounts of her sort of when Anne hears he's dead, she falls to the ground and has to crawl into her room and lock herself in to sob. James faints and spends days in beds sobbing. I mean it's really a very palpably human reaction to the loss of a child.
- [49:53]
Ali Hood
And he's also you talking about the fact that James so unpopular pursuing peace and not doing enough. And again Henry was kind of very sort of militant Protestant. So again you can see how the people that want that have got the promise to come that maybe matter of James soft on this sort of thing because they know that coming up is the guy that's definitely going to do what they want to do.
- [50:14]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, absolutely. I mean Henry even at even, you know, in his early to mid Teens when he's, you know, a lot of people bring over foreign experts, sometimes musicians, artists. He brings over a Dutch engineer called Abraham Van Neifeld who is an expert in military technology. So it's very clear he the kind of king that Henry will be when he becomes Henry ix. And I mean obviously Charles the First, there is the Civil War and the wars of the Three Kingdoms. But I having researched and hopefully shown briefly in the book just how bloody the Thirty Years War was, it may be that had Henry lived the body count would have been higher. I mean the 30 years war was an extra, extraordinarily brutal business and you know, caused the population, I mean it caused millions of deaths. So. But you're absolutely right from the perspective of the pro war, very hardline Protestant lobby in England, Henry is, Henry is, is the prince that was promised and they're winning for him. And they don't mind James because they think, oh well, we've got, we've got Henry coming up. And then when Charles gets a bit older they start to see glimmers that he, at least initially Charles is kind of keen to get involved in Europe and then realizes the cost is absolutely prohibitive. But Henry is the great if only. He's the when while he lives. Just wait and see while he lives. And then he's the if only when he dies.
- [51:47]
Ali Hood
And coming a little bit more towards the end, we haven't actually asked that much about the men. The six loves James. So like, does he have, does he have a type? Because that was something I was again an Elizabeth comparison. I was thinking that if they could have been a scenario in which they could have done this, they could have sat down and had quite a good chat about men because it sort of seemed like some of the characters he's talked to aren't that different from Elizabeth.
- [52:10]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, actually, you know what, you're true, they're not that different. I always sort of say he must have. Robert Carr, who he's is one of the longest lasting ones, is the only one he hasn't described as really good looking. So that's the most obvious one. They're all quite ditty. They tend to be, they tend not to be as, I mean he is very clever. They tend not to be as clever as him. The first two, Patrick Gray and George Gordon, they are, they're a little bit older than him. Patrick's wife. Patrick's in his early 20s, James is 17 when it kicks off and Huntley, sorry, George Gordon Gordon is 25 and James is 21. So they are people he is impressed by. But I would say that the type is very good looking proper man like Alexander Lindsay, Philip Herbert and certainly George the future Duke of Buckingham who everyone describes even people who hate him. You can feel the combo being choked out of them. He's the best looking man we've ever seen but he's rotten on the inside. They have to get but they all admit he's very very good looking. He's not a fan of beards. He gets really he has one but when George grows a beard he begs him to shave it. George won't and there's a bit of an argument over that he's ruined his face and all the rest of it. And George says no I like it, I want to keep it. But they so not as clever as him generally very very good looking and he also does enjoy a bit of a spark. He likes someone who has a bit of a temper that seems to be. Yeah he does enjoy someone who is maybe slightly more so because there's all the. But one of the things that is fun. I was so I mean I should have. I should have maybe suspected this would prove to be the case. It's a bit like Amberlynn's six sixth finger. The story of James sort of slobbering and a tongue too big to his mouth and being physically quite weak and bow legged. It's all nonsense actually all the eyewitness accounts. Even though she don't like him up until his 40 he's a really strong broad shouldered, healthy strong but he's not someone who necessarily wants to launch himself into a physical fight. But Huntley, George Gordon certainly is and even Alexander Lindsay who I have characterized before as like a basically a golden retriever in human form. Very good nature. He does still at one point punch the camera captain of James's guard because their families have been enemies for centuries and who doesn't love a good punch up so and Philip Herbert punches the Earl of Southampton because they fought over a tennis match. And Robert Carr certainly has a temper so I think he likes people who are maybe a bit less brainy, more brawny than him and sort of an 8 out of 10 or above the look scale. It's my in a nutshell so actually yeah you're right Greer that could be Robert Dudley Elizabeth so who or Essex. Yeah I think very similar types had had him and Elizabeth not cordially loathed one another and have you ever met they could have had quite an interesting chat.
- [55:17]
Ali Hood
And are these. Are these kind of long. Are these romances or are they kind of shorter term or does it vary?
- [55:26]
Gareth Russell
They all have varying lengths. I think the one that that is, that is definitely truncated before its time through necessity is the one with Alexander Lindsay where James finally gives into pressure to get married and him and Lindsay seem to come up or at least James does come up with this. He goes to retreat for two weeks of prayer for God to give him advice on who to marry him and the strength to do it and he decides that he's going to leave Lindsay safe. Lindsay's a younger son of the late Earl of Crawford so he's nothing to inherit himself. So James finds him a wealthy widow to marry. He's actually pretty close in Sandy's. She's almost the same age as him but he knows that that will leave Sandy in charge of a household and safe from maybe people who don't wish him well. But there's a. I remember when I read that letter I kind of. I thought I, I'll go back and retranslate that or just re transcribe it sorry because I thought he, she, he could not have said this but James writes to said prospective wife of Lindsay and says, you know, I hope you will love and cherish this, this man of mine whom out of my own bed I have been willing to send to yours. And I thought, well, not subtle James. I don't know if Jean is going to be thrilled with that. So yeah, that's the one that I think they kind of fall on their own sword and I do think from reading their letters it's quite clear that Lindsay is a bit distressed by the impending separation but they do it for the good of James's marriage and I do think James spent several years really trying and does not. I couldn't find any evidence of any male favourites in the first few years after his marriage to Anne of Denmark Whether to your point that means that there was maybe flings or one night stands or whatever that just haven't made it into the surviving sources, I don't know All I can say is that from my research and perspective there was, there is, there is no evidence to suggest immediately after the marriage that there was anything like that in terms of an average, no, they do fluctuate there's sort of one that's about four years long, one that's a year, one that's three, one that's four, one that's seven and one that's nine really so it does that they fluctuate. There's not there I couldn't come across There's a few, sorry, I should say, who it's implied there were flings with but I actually found the evidence against them to probably just be a KS off because he, he was friendly with these men and he was known by his courtiers to have had romantic relationships with other men. They suspected that that was the explanation for the friendship. But in terms, but there were other reasons to explain the intimacy. So the ones that the evidence survives for and that's therefore all we can go on, they are. They're all one year plus between one and 10 years.
- [58:17]
Ali Hood
Because it's interesting. Watch. Once he marries Anne and I think the only sort of affair it seems like he has in the first few years is actually with a woman. So it seems like it's really had to really be turned by the marriage but then it. She's the one, Anne is then the one that starts to attract the rumors
- [58:32]
Gareth Russell
that she's having an affair.
- [58:33]
Ali Hood
So it's almost like there's a new person who we can assume is having an affair with these prominent people.
- [58:37]
Gareth Russell
Yes. And Anne, I have to say I love Anne of Denmark and she's sort of the person who rather than backing down, will double down when she's criticized. So she's very beautiful. And they start. There are these pamphlets circulating in Edinburgh calling James the bugger a king. And that's when the same rumors start that she's having an affair with the Lord High Admiral or his cousin on the Duke of Lennox or the very good looking younger Erlock Murray. And it's all, I mean it's nonsense, there's not really any evidence of intimacy at all but she, I think sort of takes the bullet a bit, if you like, reputation wise. Yeah, there's a, there's an interesting. I sort of argue in the book that I do think in 1595 he had a brief affair round about May or June, ended by July with one of her ladies in waiting. And the evidence I use is there is an English ambassador who said, who refers to this court here as the King's mistress. An Anne of Denmark turns from liking her very much to sort of nuking her life and making sure she never comes back to court and tries to make sure she never gets married, although she fails in that. When the book came out actually there was a review that I think that picks up on that and says is it not possible that that was just James overcompensating and writing these quite saucy poems about Anne Murray in order to irritate his wife who he was arguing with at the time over the upbringing of their son. That's a perfectly valid explanation. He sort of thought the poems were a bit. I protest too much. But the fact that Anne of Denmark absolutely detests this woman after the rumors percolate seemed to suggest to me that there might actually have been something there. But yes, so Anne Murray might be the outlying female fling and actually, if you're looking, looking for a fling, it would be her say between May and July 1595. And I lay out the evidence and I just as a reader, I hate when I sort of feel like I'm being strong armed into a conclusion. So I always lay out the evidence for why I've reached it about what was or wasn't happening both in the government and in the bedroom. And it's entirely up to the reader to make up their own mind because I think you have to trust your reader's intelligence.
- [60:53]
Ali Hood
That's fair enough. And a final question on James and his loves. And I suppose this is the age old question for any sort of. Oh, and this is a tricky terminology question, maybe too big a question to ask you at this point, but we've had sometimes people object when we've used the term mistress because it's got certain connotations and they're saying, well, you wouldn't. What would be the male term? And then we struggle with that, we're not quite sure. So do you have a term for. Because this is where we've got James and, and the person who's having affairs with a male. Is there a. An official derogatory term?
- [61:27]
Gareth Russell
No, there is. I mean there's favorite, which is not used as a complimentary term ever, whether it's platonic or romantic. I can understand the pushback on that, I genuinely can, because I think mistress comes seemingly loaded with moral judgment. The flip side, I would say, is that we can sometimes tie ourselves in knots. And you get to the stage where you, you can't describe anyone as anything without using seven or eight different words or, or just not using a clear definition at all. And I think maybe to start we began with the title, which is that some words that were pejorative, sacred Mistress, like Queen James. Maybe the answer is to understand what they mean, but separate them from the moral judgments so that their meaning remains precise, but it doesn't remain as judgmental as it was. So I think to some degree that is up to us as the listeners and the readers also as much as it is the broadcasters and the authors, because you don't want to get to the stage where you have history that is impenetrable with the amount of words that have to be used. And it is. I mean, I'm not at all pushing back against the people who raised those objections. It's a really worthwhile conversation to have. But Mistress and Favorite, I think, would still be the ones that I went for on the understanding that, you know, I'm not. I'm not casting the same judgment that perhaps someone in the 16th or 17th century would use. And also. Also, it is worth pointing out that mistress was the word used at the time. So, yeah, that's where I would fall on it. But I understand and I think it's a worthwhile discussion to have about, you know, what is the meaning of this? But I would still use the word.
- [63:20]
Ali Hood
Brilliant. Thank you. Well, I think that brings us sort of nicely a full circle back to the terminology questions and contemporary and historical uses. Very interesting. So thanks so much for coming on again and chatting to us about. There's a lot more.
- [63:33]
Gareth Russell
My pleasure.
- [63:34]
Ali Hood
In the book. Lots of great characters. James himself, and like you said, and you go into more detail about the characters of the various men, both the men that he has relationships with, his lovers, but also the, you know, some of his leading advisors and all the other people at court. So it's a really fascinating book.
- [63:47]
Gareth Russell
Thank you.
- [63:48]
Ali Hood
Is there any sort of final thought for your perspective on James? Anything we've not covered or something you particularly?
- [63:54]
Gareth Russell
No. First of all, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed the interview. It's been great and I love the questions. No, I think he is a fascinating man with a fascinating life. So it's. It's a topic I have left with reluctance. Usually when a book's over, you think, get it away from me. I'm so tired. But I probably could have gone on researching James for another year quite happily. He is. He is compelling in good and bad ways.
- [64:16]
Graham Duke
I mean, I just read the. This inside sleeve bit of that. I said, bloody hell, that sounds brilliant. It's roaring tale.
- [64:26]
Gareth Russell
It is a ripple. Growing teal is the perfect way to describe it.
- [64:29]
Ali Hood
Yeah.
- [64:30]
Gareth Russell
If it didn't turn out. If it didn't turn out, well, it was my fault. Like, I had all the ingredients I needed there to make a good buffet for the reader.
- [64:39]
Graham Duke
Nice.
- [64:39]
Ali Hood
Do you know what you're working on next? Or is that sort of under.
- [64:41]
Gareth Russell
Absolutely, yeah. It's very early days, but working on a book called the Last Summer At Versailles, which is about the implosion from May to October and what it was like to be living in Versailles when that happened.
- [64:56]
Ali Hood
Oh, brilliant. We're in my back. So we just watched Marie Antoinette.
- [64:59]
Gareth Russell
Oh, the Kirsten Dunst one?
- [65:01]
Ali Hood
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [65:02]
Gareth Russell
She's one.
- [65:03]
Ali Hood
Yeah.
- [65:03]
Gareth Russell
I did my undergrad thesis in sort of French royalism and what it was like to really, really back the wrong horse in 1789. And so, yeah, I wanted to do it for a while. And it's. I focus on six people from across from sort of far right to far left, to use modern terminology again, three men, three women. And what it feels like to be in this place when it feels like the whole world is just if you're a royalist, buckling and falling apart around you, or if you're on the other side and being reborn with new possibilities. So, thus far, loving it.
- [65:36]
Graham Duke
Brilliant.
- [65:36]
Ali Hood
That's fascinating. Well, brilliant. Thanks so much for coming on and yeah, hopefully when that comes out, we'll have to talk to you about that.
- [65:42]
Gareth Russell
Yeah, I'd love to. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this.
- [65:44]
Graham Duke
Thanks, Gareth. Speak soon.
- [65:46]
Gareth Russell
Thanks. Bye. Bye.
- [65:50]
Ali Hood
So that was Gareth Russell on King or Queen James.
- [65:53]
Graham Duke
Brilliant. He's a fascinating chap. Well, both Gareth and James. So, yeah, he's going to do a good job there.
- [66:01]
Ali Hood
Yeah. So I definitely recommend checking out the book and I think he's done the audiobook for this one, which I'm not sure if he did for his previous ones, but he has done the audiobook. So if you like listening to Gareth and you want to hear the book, then. Yes, audiobook form is also. He's like, he's got.
- [66:15]
Graham Duke
Whatever you have. I could listen to him all day. It's brilliant.
- [66:20]
Ali Hood
So, yeah, so do check out Gareth's book on James and other books and his podcast. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can find all of our details on our website rexfactorpodcast.com and if you'd like to support the podcast and get more episodes and content from us, then go to patreon.com rexfactor you get ad free versions of the main podcast and over 400 bonus episodes.
- [66:45]
Graham Duke
Imagine that.
- [66:45]
Ali Hood
I know. So that is all from us today. Hopefully you enjoyed this interview with Gareth. Our next episode will be messages and previews 11 where we'll respond to some of your messages, share previews of our bonus content, particularly including our most recent special episode on Wu Zetian, the only female Chinese empress in her own right.
- [67:06]
Graham Duke
Right.
- [67:07]
Ali Hood
Fema Regnant Emperor.
- [67:09]
Graham Duke
Okay.
- [67:10]
Ali Hood
Anyway, we will see you next time. Cheer Sa.