Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Bad King James VI & I

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

You might know him best as the longest reigning Scottish king, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, the father of Charles I, or the eponymous poster of the translation of the bible into English.But King James VI of Scotland, and I of England, had some very questionable traits and got up to shady stuff… Today Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets with Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller to explore why James was actually a very naughty King indeed.You can listen to Huw and Ben’s podcast, Bad Gays, here.*WARNING* There are adult themes and fruity language in this episode.Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Edited and mixed by Anisha Deva.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!For your chance to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books (including a signed copy of Dan Snow's On This Day in History), please fill out this short survey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, Bedwifsters. It's Kate Lister, and this is your fair-doos warning. Fair-dos we are going to be covering adult themes, themes of sexual nature, lots of swearing, and it's just generally an adult bonanza. So if that's just not your thing, if you don't want to hear about gay kings, then just give us a swerve, no problem. You might know him best as the longest reigning Scottish king.

The king who unified, kind of unified, the English and Scottish crowns, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, the father of Charles I, or the eponymous poster of the translation of the Bible into English. King James the 6th of Scotland and the 1st of England also had some questionable traits and got up to some pretty shady shit, you know. Today we're questioning why James may have actually been a very naughty king indeed. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. So, and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister.

When it comes to queer history, because it's such a persecuted and maligned history, what we tend to do now is look at the good stuff, find the brilliant people throughout queer history. The ones we want to hold up, they were amazing, they made huge contributions, and of course we should do that. It's right to do that.

But then we have to turn our attentions to the naughty ones. And Hugh and Ben from the Bad Gays podcast are trying to uncover a more nuanced history of gay men. And when the good has been uncovered, this means that they are left looking at the bad and the downright ugly. And today we are looking at King James, his sexual history, his wrongdoings, from his pathological hatred of witches to colonising the rest of the world. Let's get to it. Hello to Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller from the Bad Gays podcast. How are you? Hello, yeah, great to be here. Hey, it's wonderful to be here. I'm so thrilled to talk to you to today.

brilliant idea for a book and a podcast this is. Hugh, where did that idea come from? We've had enough of the good gays. We want bad gays. I guess I was a bit frustrated with not seeing more interesting gay history or more complicated gay history in sort of popular sources you might get to, you know? I think we're all aware every Pride Month comes around and it's this list of like, you know, the top ten gay heroes and stuff.

And, you know, you can see the same people again and again. And I'm like, well, where are these villains? Because I know they're out there. So, yeah, I started talking to Ben about it. And we thought, well, yeah, let's do a podcast. I love it. Perhaps it's like a testament to how far we've come in the LGBTQ plus movement is that now we're kind of ready to go. Yeah, there were arseholes as well.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think 10 or 15 years ago probably wouldn't have been the right time to do the podcast or even possible. I don't know if you'd have found an audience for it, but now there's an audience of like LGBTQ people who want more interesting stories, who want more complicated stories about our history. Who was like the first bad gay that you found? Who kind of started this off? Well, we started off with one of the true irredeemable shes. shits, not only of, am I allowed to say shit on this podcast? Please do, yes. Okay, then I will. One of the

true irredeemable shits of all time, a guy named Ernst Riem, who is someone who I had come across in my work when reading Eleanor Hancock's wonderful biography of him. I am someone who occasionally commits acts of academic history. Oh, no, not one of them. I know, and in the process of committing one of those acts, I was researching as I still am, the queer history of Weimar Berlin. You know, this is a history. that I think a lot of people have in their heads in this very kind of Liza Minnelli and cabaret kind of way. There's a lot of sequences, a lot of dirty bloomers, and there's these fabulous glittering nightclubs, and then there's this Nazi backlash.

And so when you find someone like Ernst Réin, who you can place in those fabulous glittering nightclubs, but who is then actually the leader of the SA and becomes one of the most important Nazis before being purged by Hitler a few months after he comes to power in the night of the long knives, and you find someone who is not only like a Nazi and doing a few gay sex acts on the side, but someone who's writing letters about how for him this is actually part of a coherent political sexuality, then that's an important story, I think,

that we wanted to find and tell, and that was where it all began. And Reim is also in the book. We couldn't get rid of him. He's a great example, really, because of what I was saying, which is that you'll have this rundown, perhaps, in the top 10, I don't know, gay political heroes,

and you'll have Harvey Milk or Eleanor Roosevelt, or someone. And they'll always ignore the fact the first openly homosexual politician was the leader of the essay. But how can you talk about how gay politics is like it is, but ignoring who the first ever openly gay politician was? I've never heard of him before. That's really quite taken me back. I know we're here to talk about James I first, but you've derailed me now. So let's talk about gay Nazis. Who is he? He was born into this very militaristic family. He serves in the First World War. He runs one of these kind of Vimar-era-a-ante-democratic right-wing paramilitaries, falls in with Hitler and the Nazis very early,

defends Hitler in the Beer Hall-Putch, and then at some point in the 20s, as the Nazis are organizing themselves and gathering steam, he begins to kind of put together his profound misogyny, his belief in a kind of male bonding, and his appreciation for gay sex into a political sexuality. And there's a strain of gay intellectual life. I wouldn't say organizing, because they're mostly writing about this, which is called the masculinists. You know, if someone people may have heard of like Magnus Hirschfeld

is talking about what he calls steps in between the two kind of sexes as he would understand them, in which there's some kind of connection between sexual minorities and gender transgression. And the masculinists are much more enthralled with the idea that by absolutely rejecting women, men gain social and especially military power. Oh. And so he sort of puts this together and creates a kind of political sexuality out of that. Now, it's important to say that not all of the masculinists were Nazis.

Many of them had very questionable politics, as you can imagine by people whose entire worldview is structured by misogyny. but not all of them were actually Nazis. I mean, when the Nazis turned their sights on massacring gay men, they didn't spare the masculists. I mean, it wasn't that this was some kind of tolerated part of the Nazi organization or something. But it is, I think, important to think about how something like that masculinist identity formation could at least be resonant with for some of the people participating in it, Nazi politics. And as we say in the book, when talking about Vain, think about that next time you're editing your grinder,

profile. Wow. This was the idea that like you're so manly, you just want to fuck other men. Yep. Exactly. Riem used to take the piss out of Hitler because he said, you know, that Hitler's taste was for these women with big arses bending over in the fields and that's what he's into and he used to sort of like, yeah, take the piss out of him for that because he had this like higher form of sexuality which was just fucking other soldiers. Wow. Okay. So we might have to have you guys back to do a whole show on him. But we're here to talk about King James. the first of England and seventh of Scotland? Sixth, I'm getting ahead of myself. See, I've been so derailed by gay Nazis. I've lost track of all my kings now. Right, okay, so let's talk

about him. And one of the things I want to ask you first is, this is the thing that all historians have the issue with. The person isn't there, so we can't say, James, Jamie, are you gay? And that wasn't in his vocabulary. There isn't a confessional somewhere. He couldn't have attended Stuart Gay Pride. He just, he couldn't have done it. So how do you... I want to see the costumes at that. Like, it's just fabulous.

How do you piece this together to say, we think he's gay? It's even more complicated than that because gay as an identity, which is to say this kind of construction of the idea that, A, you have a sexuality to begin with, who your sexual object choice is this governing identity factor in your life, whether heterosexual or homosexual, that idea does not perceive the 20th century by very long. No. And so anytime we go back into the history before them, we have to be careful about the identity labels that we use. And I always give that kind of historian's disclaimer. That being said, for us in this book, the question was, what do we learn by putting someone like James into this category? And how do we kind of show our evidence

in terms of what we can say about him and what we can't say about him. And I think Hugh could probably talk more about some of the specific evidence that we found there. For example, one of the interesting questions it raises, if we acknowledge that there wasn't such a thing as homosexuality, as an understood sort of identity, is then how did people perceive these things, right? People saw what he was doing. He wasn't particularly ashamed of it. How has that sort of same-sex acts understood at a time?

And, like, of course, one of them is the fact that we're seeing at this time, this sort of shift in the way it's understood from before Henry VIII, it was a matter of church law, like it was a sin, and if you were suspected of it, you'd be taken in front of a church court, and Henry VIII actually shifted that and made it a civil issue for the first time in the UK in 1533, the Buggery Act. The name gives it away, it's about buggery. It's not about, oh, I'm in love of this man, it's about, you know, you're sticking your dick in the wrong place. And part of the reasons for that, then, you get sort of tied into, which is really important when it comes to, like understanding his life and the effect of sexuality on history around that time is its relationship

with Catholicism. And Hala also ties into like not just the reformation and the change in the religious order, but the change in the economic order as well from this like feudal systems, it's like bourgeois system, you know, where there starts to be a lot of accumulation of wealth and people are going into industries and colonisation starts to happen. And homosexuality becomes tied in with the idea of Catholicism like quite early on. And one of the reasons that he introduces the Bugary Act is to sort of build on this sort of popular conception amongst like regular folk that the monasteries are full of gays. So it happens like within a year of the dissolution of the monasteries. And he's like, okay, all these guys, these monks, you know what they're all up to. They're not prosecuting each other

in the church courts. I'm going to bring this power into the state. And so it's part of like seizing all this land, which he then gives out to people and that sort of like makes farming more efficient. And you have this thing like what Marxists would call like primitive accumulation. Like you suddenly get all this land and you're getting all this extra money that you can invest in stuff. and so there's a start of capitalism, really. So, yeah, there's loads of complicated things going on. But then that legacy of, like, the idea that homosexuality is linked, or sodomy is linked with Catholicism, like, really sticks around.

And obviously, the idea that James's mother was Mary Queen of Scots, the idea that Stuarts are all secret Catholics is obviously something that hangs around for the entire reign of the Stuets and is kind of behind a lot of the popular H. Charles II when he gets born on trial. And eventually ends up in 100 years later with the glorious revolution and the end of the Stuart monarchy. That's a big thing for James because he keeps getting involved with all these handsome younger men,

who are favourites, these showering gifts and also rights and privileges on, which they abuse and misuse and really rile up the parliamentarians who think this divine right of King's idea has had its day, and we should start taking back a bit more power to Parliament. When you say he had favourites, you know, obviously if I was Queen or if you guys were King, we would definitely do nice things for our mates. We would have favourites, of course you would. You'd be like, have a crown, have a sceptre. We're not really talking about like he just did nice things for his mate,

this was really blatant. His preference for quite young, handsome men. Sugar babies, really. Well, actually, it starts even before that. It starts when he's a young man, when he's a teenager. He was a sugar baby. He wasn't a sugar baby, but... I think he always had plenty of sugar.

He had the sugar. Now, he came to the throne when he was a baby, like one years old, because Mary Queen Scots was deposed as a Catholic by the Presbyterians. And so he had these regents who ruled in his stead. And around that time, he became friends with his cousin, who was also called a Stuart, Esme Stewart. The cousin was, I think, in his mid-20s. Obviously, today would have a completely different sort of ethical perspective on that sort of relationship. How old was James? He was a sort of teenager, like 14, 15, 15. And actually, there's a quote actually from the time, which says, from the time he was 14 years older, and no more, that is, when the Lord Stuart came into Scotland. Even then he began to clasp someone in the embraces of a great love, blah, blah, blah, and he says, in such love with him as in open sides of the people, often he would clasp them around the neck with his arms and kiss him. Oh, James. Another quote great from the time is when James himself is talking about Esme Stewart.

He describes himself loving his, quote, eminent ornaments of body and mind, end quote. Oh, now there's a line. That's impressive for a 14-year-old, though, I've got to say. And unfortunately, this favor of his older cousin, he was Catholic himself, which obviously was very suspicious. He converted to Presbyterianism to be close to James, but in the end he was forced out of court and actually went to live in exile in France, where the French didn't like him because he was an up of state for Catholicism. And the Scottish were like, well, he'll convert straight back to Catholicism once he's in France, but he didn't. And he actually remained loyal

to James. And when he died, not long after, he had his heart embalmed and sent back to James. So do you think he really did love him? I mean, you know, like, all right, like the cousins, so that's, we're onto a weird one already. And he was 14. So he was 14. So, again, today, we would definitely be a few eyebrows raised about this. But do you think that there was genuine affection there? Or do you think Esmey Stewart was just after the crown jewels and then some? No, the letters seem to be full of quite intense, genuine affection. Just about all the teenage crushes that you used to have when you were 14 and stupid.

Like this sort of sentimentality and love, I guess, there's something that continued throughout his life with a number of his favourites. And I think, unfortunately, if he was chasing that, sort of true love of Esme Stewart throughout the rest of his life. He never really got it because the other guys he fell for were a bit more cutthroat and they were after his money. Oh. Oh, so he really did love him then, you think, that there was genuine love there between him? I mean, he wasn't hiding it, was he? Like they were canoodling in public and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and this was also something that was raising issues in the court because, you know, Esme is Catholic. And this is at a

moment at the very beginning of the English Reformation when England's Protestantism is understood as being very important but also very fragile and something needs to be protected from various Catholic influences. And so there's a politician named Sir Henry Woodrington who writes from the Scottish court to the English court of Queen Elizabeth I. This is when James is 17 and he writes in the letter, quote, the ministry are informed that the Duke, that's Stuart, goes about to draw the king to carnal lust. Yeah, I can see why that would raise a few eyebrows at the Scottish court. Your very young, very impressionable king is being seduced by a much older man.

And a secret Catholic. And a secret Catholic to boot. And worse, French. No, he's not French. It's right, poor old James. But he does get married, doesn't he? He does. And they have seven kids.

Go on, tell me about that. Yeah. We use the word gay as, like, a quiet provocation. as we just discussed, like you can't refer to people in the past, before 19th century, that's gay. But in the same way as well, like, it's a very broad use of the word gay. Like, today he would almost certainly be regarded as bisexual. Okay. Obviously, marriage in those days in royal families had a different emphasis.

It wasn't about romance or a love match specifically. It was about bringing together crowns. It was about power politics and stuff like that. But seven kids is above and beyond the need to produce an air and a spare, isn't it? It does seem to be. Is there any evidence that you had mistress? on the side as well. Yes, yes. Oh, there is. After he was married, or during his marriage, rather, he did actually have a mistress, so yeah, bisexuality was clearly part of his life. But obviously,

the nature of a mistress and nature of a favourite he has sex with is very different because of the sort of gender politics and time and the exclusion of women from power. So the opportunities for the male lovers was obviously like to sort of take advantage of their relationship as much bigger. I'll be back with Hugh and Ben after this short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British.

See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independent, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. He's not here to answer for himself, but it seems like he has a genuine interest in women as well as men. Who is his next great man love, his big man crush?

Well, the next one is this guy called Robert Carr. He meets Carr when he's at a jousting ton. A car is jousting and gets knocked off. Sorry. And is... A child. Oh, sorry. Right.

I'm a serious historian. Let's do this. They're at a jousting competition and he gets knocked off. Right. Yeah, James is watching. Sees him getting knocked off and purely, of course, out of the goodness of his heart decides he should visit this handsome, young, blonde gentleman in the stables. Right.

To check that he's okay. Which he does. This is someone who, according to one of James's biographers, Brian Bevan, had, quote, little intellectual ability but was athletic and skillful at games aristocratic in appearance handsome with flaxen hair

a small beard and mustache and possessed an air of stupid arrogance Oh God James we've all been there Oh no Yeah like a jacobian hymbo Basically If we've been around today He'd just had a mattress on the floor

Without a bed frame I'm sure He got very many fancy bed frames Very soon through this particular I bet he did He got a knighthood, he got Sherbourne Castle from Sir Walter Raleigh. No. Yes. Yeah, when Sir Walter Raleigh fell out of favour, the Sherbourne Castle's given over to Robert Carr.

Robert Carr clearly indulges affections for a long time. Then Robert Carr fell in love with a woman, Francis Howard. And so to sort of repaid a favour of all this loyal service, I guess. James decided that he would give his blessings to this marriage. But the problem was that Francis Howard was already married and was married to the Earl of Essex. Actually, this is a great example of how a lot of times, where history, this sort of stuff is regarded almost as titill-tattle, but actually you wouldn't regards, like, the marriage trials of Henry VIII as, like, incidental to English history.

So this is exactly this sort of thing, like the implications of this are massive, because he actually organises a church court, which he packs with loyal bishops in order to annul this marriage, against the Earl of Essex's wishes. And obviously, like, hugely humiliating to be sort of cuckolded by the king in your own court. Holy shit. Wow. And so they do get married. And eventually the new couple, Carr and Francis Howard, are actually put on trial for murder. But meanwhile, this sort of cuckolded, if we can use that phrase, Earl of Essex is so humiliated. He devotes the rest of his life to military training. And actually, in the reign of James's son, the Earl of Essex becomes the first leader of the parliamentarian army in an attempt to oust the king. So this sort of thoughtless humiliation of one of his earls would go on to sort of really affect the future organisation of, the kingdom. Unfortunately, once he was married, he obviously sort of withdrew his affections. In fact, this time he'd been made the Earl of Somerset. So this was just some guy he met at a

jousting competition, becomes the Earl of Somerset. And he writes to Somerset and he complains that he, quote, been creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary. He wanted some of that, didn't he? Yeah. Oh, he must have been phenomenal in bed. I mean, I know, like, people that make good money out of sex, but none of them have been given a castle. It's impressive work. He gets married and kind of retreats from his affection.

Tell me about his next big love, George Villiers. Yeah, so don't feel too bad for James because there's a new lover coming in. He's actually someone who gets introduced to James by James's counsellors who want to kind of get Carr out of the picture and reduce Carr's influence. So they just find this country kid, put him in a pretty wardrobe, and literally, like, throw him in front of the king at the Royal stables and then it works oh it's a honey trap all of a sudden villiers becomes the gentleman of the bedchamber he's made master of the horse he's given a peerage that he becomes an earl then he becomes the

king's private secretary then he becomes the marquess of buckingham he's a privy councillor in both england and scotland in 1619 he's the lord high admiral of england and in 1623 he becomes the duke of buckingham at 31 years old holy hell a 10 year rise from cookbear at the Admiral of the fleet is pretty impressive. Wow. As we write in the book and Hugh wrote this line, I don't want to take credit for it. There's power in being the king who sits upon the throne, but there's also power in being the throne upon which the king sits.

It's so true. The role of royal mistress and lover to the king, if you played your cards right, the rewards for it were astonishing. But I'm really interested in what you're saying about when it's a man that's the lover, he really can have political influence and his influence. and is infinitely more dangerous because of it. Oh yeah, a huge amount.

And again, the repercussions, I mean, this decision to sort of distract James from Carr by throwing this sort of simpleton or this country boy in front of him must be one of the great historical blunders because Buckingham is far more ruthless and intelligent than Carr and manages to get himself to not just high power, but really have a huge amount of influence in state affairs. And really, really fuck things up for Parliament and the nascent bourgeoisie who are emerging at that time. Do we know much about him, just as sort of a simple country boy with a pretty face and a nice ass? Do we think that he fancied men or is he just kind of offered up as just bait to James?

Today the idea that you'd, for example, if you're a straight guy and you were offered to the king and you would like go along with it, for example, seems like really almost taboo. Or like it's very hard to understand because we have such an idea that your sexual identity is like the core of who you are. Gay for pay. Yeah. And so the idea of that seems really intense. that you might want to do that. But I think at the time, you know, there's different emphasis on it. And so actually for him, you know, like, oh, it's a sex act.

I'll do what I have to do, et cetera, et cetera. Like, I don't think it's so important about whether he is attracted to men or not. There is this letter from Buckingham to James where he says, if he asked, if he still loves him, quote, like he did at Farnham, where the bed's head could not be found between the master and his dog, end quote. The relationship, I think, is undeniably sexual. I think you'd have to be pretty nitpicky to try and say, oh, this isn't actually a sexual relationship or even that there wasn't love.

Like, when I'm writing to him, he said, I desire only to live in the world for your sake. I will live and die a lover for you. Oh, I think that's quite important that we kind of tease out that when he said there's like gay identity is new, that is not saying that same sex attraction didn't exist, but it's like the idea that it was something that you are, that you'd say, I am gay and that kind of means something else.

It was more understood, we think, along the terms of this was just something that you did. it wasn't someone who you are. Right, because people around this court are noticing what's going on, right? They're not blind. Alexander Gil the Younger writes a poem in which he asks that God save, quote, My sovereign from a Ganymede whose horace breath has power to lead his majesty, which way it lives? I think gives you a sense of how this is being looked at, right?

There's an understanding with this Ganymede sort of ancient Greek vision of same-sex, sex, sex. This is like understood and even discussed, but it is not thought of as a coherent identity or way of being in the world. Instead, it's a thing that people do, which you can have different kinds of attitudes about. And this is a moment when, as he was saying earlier, these attitudes are shifting from being religious attitudes to being legal attitudes. All throughout history, well before you get the sort of concept of homosexuality as a sexual identity, there's far more emphasis always put upon the actual sexual role. So it's not about being gay or straight. It's being like top or bottom. Top or bottom. Yeah. Who's the girl? Exactly. So when you go back into, you know, ancient Greece or Rome, there's a lot of emphasis upon that

is what makes a same-sex relationship acceptable is to do age, so they're dominant, older man and a sort of more receptive younger man. The reference to Ganymede is like really important there because Ganymed was Zeus's lover. But he was also his cup bearer, which is exactly the same role as Buckingham and he was also the passive partner. So there's a sort of understanding that again that fits into this idea of the divine right of kings, that he's kind of this godlike figure who has this dangerous receptive partner. There's another pyramid that's written around the same time, which is sort of gender's parliament as this sort of faithful wife who's being cheated on by this relationship that he has with Buckingham, but also that pyramid presents the king as being

the passive partner and him therefore leaving himself like receptive or open to being bugged, to being fucked by another more powerful figure, let's say. So there he's like playing this idea that like the king has let himself be bugged by Buckingham. The king has also letting the country be bugged by Catholicism and popery and the Spanish and a French, you know. And this takes us back to those connections that he was making earlier between homosexuality and Catholicism. That go back to the enclosure and abolition of the monasteries by Henry VIII. I mean, this is not the first or the last time, right? The body of state is conceived of as being like the human, especially the human,

male body, that envision of quite literally the body politic is a huge part of one of the main reasons I think why discourses about sex and sexuality, specifically the idea of men being penetrated, are so crazy. Yes. All right, so you've definitely convinced me that he is, at the very least, bisexual. Why do you argue that James was a bad gay? What did he do that he's ended up in your book as bad gay, bad? I mean, there's sort of two aspects of that, one of which is a sort of more personal sort of political issue, which is the power that he gave to these men, especially to Buckingham, was really reckless and they behaved in a reckless way that led to like a massive political destabilisation of the country. So one example of this would be that he makes Buckingham the Grand Admiral of the Fleet. And amongst his rights and privileges as a Grand Admiral is that he can raid foreign shipping. So he starts to raid French traders in the English Channel.

and take their goods as loot, which he's legally allowed to do, and this is one of the privileges. But obviously, this is exactly at the time when this nascent bourgeoisie, as we call them, like this new middle class who's emerging, whose money is based around trade and manufacturing and early industrialisation, like they need some sort of steadiness within transnational trade. So they get really pissed off because they're like, well, now you've just opened all our shipping up to raids, like retaliatory raids by the French. So it really destabilises this power that the king has because this guy is just like recklessly going around

sort of provoking this bourgeoisie and their response obviously is to put more and more emphasis on the power of parliament and to organise politically within parliament which sort of reaches fruition in the time of his son, Charles I, who adopts exactly the same sort of ideology of the divine right of kings like I don't mean to listen to parliament, my authority comes from God so you have to believe in me, blah, blah. So that's like one aspect of what makes him

I think bad, which is that his sexual proclivities, his urges led him to make very reckless decisions with regards to how he hands out these privileges. And secondly, his role in much bigger sort of geopolitical, grand historical narratives, I guess, which is his persecution of women under the sort of idea of witch terror, like there's a witch panic that spread across England and Scotland, which was largely instigated by him because he thought that witches had tried to kill his fiancé by drown. her on the voyage over from Denmark and to ruin his marriage. And that's part of a sort of very interesting history about the way that women were sort of forced into new, much more

restrictive roles within the workforce. I mean, the great book about this is Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, where she talks about the relationship between persecution of the witches, the rise of capitalism and homosexuality and colonialism. Other than that, the other aspect of his behaviour, which is undoubtedly bad, was his role. in the colonial project. So he really went to turbo drive the colonisation of Ireland, which was another thing they handed to Buckingham as a gift. See, that's just don't give your sugar baby's power of another country. I think that's just 101, isn't it, of how to be a king. It's just, you just don't do it. A house keep, maybe, a mixtape, possibly. Ireland, no. That's also the way that kings have behaving.

The fact that kings do things like this is one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to have political power completely centralised in the corpus of one person who envisions themselves as representing the entire state and who thinks that they're directly descended from literally God. It's set up to fail, isn't it? I mean, that's just a disaster. It really is. And he's also, of course, really key in trying to utilize this new bourgeois force to have this money and can invest in things like big boats, etc., etc., to sort of start the colonisation of the Americas for the English. So James Town, which is the first, English permanent settlement in North America is James Town after him, King James.

Oh, yes, of course. Oh, okay, so we've got colonialisation. So he's the kind of one that is partly-ish responsible for people in England going, I think we'll go to America. They'll be very happy to see us there. Puritanism, he's got a fairly dab-and in that one. Witches, when he decided to write his witch book, which at the time he thought that he was being very scientific about.

Is that right? Yeah, he writes this book. called demonology. What he writes in the book is he's going to prove two things, as I have already said, the one that such devilish arts have been and are the other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merit. And this book is really part of, and you mentioned this Sylvia Federici book, Caliban and the Witch about the witch hunts and their relationship to the sex gender system and colonization. These witch panics are driven by two things that are going on. One of them is the desire to and need to discipline women into being much more silent and less powerful

reproductive forces for a working class that is increasingly being driven off the land by land enclosures. And so all of a sudden, instead of thinking about we need to have X number of peasants in order to live off of X amount of land and they kind of give the grain up, you're thinking about needing to have some kind of actual industrial workforce. But this is obviously the very, very beginning of this process. There's not a fully fledged industrial workforce in the time of James or anything near it. But this process is kind of beginning. And then the other thing this is related to is finding justification for the subjugation of peoples who are indigenous to these lands that are being colonized. And so those people are then described as devil-worshipping and immoral in all

these ways. Powerful women are seen as an evidence of this immorality. Sodomy is seen as evidence of this immorality. That's what all of this is kind of a part of. And so it's interesting because you see James as someone who is, on the one hand, engaging in the kinds of sexual activity that are going to end up being under this kind of rubric he's developing, written off as satanic and a justification for colonization. And on the other hand, developing that rubric. It makes him a very, I think, complicated and interesting figure at this moment of this historical process. Because he wasn't actually a friend to other gay men.

I mean, we've just spoken quite a lot about how he was unashamedly enjoying sexual relationships with his very beautiful fleet of twinks that he's got going on. But he actually wrote into law, didn't he? He strengthened the sodomy laws that Henry VIII had put out there. And in one of his books, he said that sodomy is a sin that should never be forgiven. Right, but I think this is also a really interesting question, which I think underpins actually a lot of our book, which is how do these people in the past and their understanding of their sexuality

or their relationships, how has that come to sort of create our current gay identity? And one of the things that's interesting, I guess, is that it takes a long time before people start to recognize amongst themselves a shared sexual identity that warrants some form of solidarity. Okay. And that becomes so powerful in the 20th century. So, like, he didn't see these other guys as having any relationship towards him. He's a king. He has his relationships, his favorites. He enjoys sex or whatever.

What's he got to do with him that's some stable boy? Wow. Is having sex. Like, there's no sense of solidarity there, of course. And it's actually quite late in the game. the sort of inter-19th century where you start to get these bonds between, especially gay men and lesbian women, around their sexuality that forms into like a political identity that you can organise around. And then I guess one of the conclusions of our book is that although that's

important, that isn't actually enough, you know, that within that sense of political solidarity between, for example, gay men, there can still be some very reactionary, unpleasant tendencies. Wow. Oh, guys, it's been so amazing to talk to you. And you've definitely reassessed my understanding of King James. I do feel a little sorry for him, though. Like, I feel a little bit sorry that he was kind of thrusted in the public world at its very young age and he had this weird relationship.

But I think that he's just broken a number of cardinal rules, isn't it? It's just don't put your fuck buddies in charge of Parliament. I mean, it's a crazy life. Don't give your fuck buddies literally all of Ireland. On the podcast and in the book, we're not in a game of sort of, let's say, canceling people or judging them in that way. We're just saying, like,

These are the interesting aspects of his life. These are the problematic aspects. But I mean, yeah, he had a terrible life. His dad was murdered before he was born. His mother was deposed and executed. And to become king, he had to sort of swear loyalty to the woman who actually had his mom executed, Elizabeth, and actually had to sort of regard her as a sort of real mother. And then he was given this huge amount of power.

And actually, there were worse kings. There were more reckless kings. There were stupidly kings. There were more evil kings. Without a doubt, there were certain aspects in terms of maintaining this personal union of the kingdoms and generally keeping a lid on things, things could have got a lot nastier.

Like, you know, it was coming out of the wars of religion in the rule of Mary, not Mary Queen of Scots, but Queen Mary of England. You know, hundreds of people were killed, persecuted for their religion. So he managed to sort of put a lid on a lot of those simmering tensions. You know, after the gunpowder plot, which could have blown the country sky high,

like literally and metaphorically, he managed to balance those tensions reasonably well and keep them under wraps until the reign of his son. So probably the best that we could say about James is, we've had worse. Probably. We've had worse, but let's not have another one like it. Let's not have another one.

Guys, if people want to know more about your work and about you, where can they find you? Well, they can go to badgayspod.com, which is where they can find all the episodes of our show. And they can also find a link to order our book, Bad Gays and Homosexual History. You can also find our show in whatever podcast player you're using to listen to this podcast, if you just type Bad Gays into the bar. And you can find me at... Benwrightsthings.com or at Ben writes things on Twitter. You can find me online at hugh.substack.com or on Twitter at Hugh Lemmy. That's H.W. Hugh. Thank you so much for joining me today, guys. You have been so much fun to talk to.

Thank you. Yeah, it's been great conversation. Thanks for having us. It's been wonderful. Thanks. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Hugh and Ben for joining me. I had so much fun talking to them. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your part. It really does help us a lot to just leave us a little thumbs up somewhere. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.