Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  Bothwell traveled north to Scandinavia in the hopes of raising another army. In Norway, a former paramour, Anna Throndsen, accused him of never returning her dowry. Bothwell was about to face imprisonment when the Danish king, Frederick, learned that he was wanted for Darnley’s murder. Frederick brought Bothwell back to Denmark and threw him into the dank and remote fortress of Dragsholm Castle, where he remained for a decade, dying of madness in April 1578. As of the mid-1990s, his mummified body was still preserved under glass at Fårevejle Church, near Dragsholm.

  JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND (ALSO JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND)

  1566-1625 RULED SCOTLAND 1567-1625 RULED AS JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND 1603-1625

  JAMES STUART WAS THE ONLY CHILD OF MARY, QUEEN of Scots, and her useless wastrel of a husband Robert Darnley. He was crowned King of Scotland on July 29, 1567, when he was just thirteen months old, after a faction of rebel Protestant nobles forced his mother to abdicate in his favor. So James grew up parentless, raised as a strict Calvinist by a gaggle of regents with competing interests that sometimes escalated into violence. Though the young king preferred the sexual society of men, when he wed the fourteen-year-old Anne of Denmark in 1589, by all accounts James thought her very beautiful and was actually in love with her.

  After his mother’s death in 1587, James corresponded secretly with Queen Elizabeth and her ministers in the expectation that he would succeed the Virgin Queen. He was proclaimed King of England upon Elizabeth’s death on March 24, 1603, and was crowned on July 11.

  An avid peacemaker, James finally ended the fifteen-year war with Spain. He also tackled the perennial issue of religious tolerance (or lack thereof), brokering a sit-down between the Catholic bishops and the evangelical Puritans. His greatest legacy is the English-language translation of the Bible to which he lent his name. The Papists weren’t too happy about it. A cabal of Roman Catholics conspired to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But their plan (referred to then as the Powder Treason, but now known as the Gunpowder Plot) was thwarted on the eve of destruction, when at midnight on November 4, 1605, one of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was discovered in the cellars of Parliament surrounded by barrels of gunpowder. The plotters were ultimately caught, tried, and executed.

  The king was a talented scholar and a notable patron of the arts. During what would be known as the Jacobean Age, English drama and literature flourished.

  Still, no matter how good a king he might be, to the English, James was a “double-other”—being both a Scot and a homosexual. James and his voluptuous blond queen had a rather unusual arrangement whereby Anne would vet James’s favorites. Perhaps she sought to ensure that they were not dangerously grasping—or diseased. After all, James was still sleeping with her as well. She bore the king five children, three of whom survived, and by all accounts they had a relatively accommodating relationship, as far as royal marriages go.

  So, does that make James bisexual? Yes—and no. In the sixteenth century, gender identity was not viewed in today’s black-and-white terms. Men of noble birth learned from the cradle that it was their dynastic responsibility to beget heirs. Without someone to inherit their estates and the wealth they yielded, their line would become extinct and the lands and titles reapportioned to another family. For kings, ensuring the succession was an imperative, in order to prevent a civil war over the fate of the crown.

  So of course James did his duty and fathered at least the requisite heir and a spare. But when it came to his preference of a lover for an extramarital affair, his choice was always a man.

  James died of dysentery on March 27, 1625, at the age of fifty-eight. He was succeeded by his bellicose and divisive son, Charles I.

  JAMES I OF ENGLAND AND IRELAND (ALSO JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND) and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628

  I desire only to live in this world for your sake . . . I had rather live banished in any part of the Earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you . . . God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

  These words were written to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, by his devoted lover, King James—the same King James who lent his name to an English-language translation of the Bible.

  Courtiers and clerics rhapsodized about Villiers’s flawless good looks, his childlike face, and his long slender legs that put one in mind of a thoroughbred colt. Simon d’Ewes described Villiers as “full of delicacy and handsome features; yea his hands and face seemed to me especially effeminate and curious.” And Bishop Godfrey Goodman praised Buckingham’s “very lovely complexion,” adding that the king’s favorite “was the handsomest bodied man of England; his limbs so well compacted, and his conversation so pleasing, and of so sweet a disposition.”

  George Villiers was the second son of a second marriage made by a Leicestershire knight whose family had come over with William the Conqueror. George’s widowed mother stage-managed his court career, steering him directly into the lap of King James I. In his formal portraits, the russet-haired, red-bearded James appears tall and dashing. But by the time young George captured the king’s fancy, James was an aging queen of forty-seven, obese, fidgety, and prematurely senile. His skinny legs couldn’t support his massive bulk. His tongue was too big for his mouth and lolled when he spoke.

  Long before he was married to Anne of Denmark, James’s favorites were men. When he was thirteen years old he fell madly in love with the 6th Seigneur d’Aubigny, his cousin Esmé Stuart, a dashing, worldly older man, whom he openly (and frequently) kissed. He also appointed him to the highest positions of honor and prestige, creating him Duke of Lennox and First Gentleman of the Bedchamber—the position given to each of James’s subsequent favorites. The First Gentleman slept in the same room as the king, and more important, controlled all access to the monarch. However, the duke’s greatest claim to fame may be that he taught his young cousin how to drink—a pastime at which the king would excel for the remainder of his life, to the immense consternation and embarrassment of his queen.

  “The King drinks so much, and conducts himself so ill in every respect that I expect an early and evil result,” she lamented. In 1604, one year after he became King of England, she predicted that he only had a few good years left before his drinking would either kill him or turn him into an imbecile.

  Lennox, James’s imbibing instructor, ended up getting himself kidnapped by a cabal of envious nobles. He escaped and fled to France, where he died a year later, leaving instructions for his heart to be embalmed and sent to his seventeen-year-old royal lover.

  He was replaced in James’s favor by a handsome young courtier named Robert Carr, who drew the king’s attention when he was injured in a tournament. The king sent his personal physician to heal the wounded combatant, and soothed his pains by making him Earl of Somerset and Lord Chamberlain, succeeding Lennox in that office.

  A contemporary wrote of both Carr’s and Villiers’s effect on their sovereign lover: “Now, as no other reason appeared in favor of their choice but handsomeness, so the love the King shewed was as amorously conveyed as if he had mistaken their sex, and thought them ladies, which I have seene Sommerset and Buckingham labor to resemble in effeminateness of their dressings; though in W[horeson] lookes and wanton gestures, they exceeded any part of woman kind my conversation did ever cope withal.”

  In 1614, when he was first introduced to the king, the twenty-two -year-old George Villiers was devilishly handsome, with chestnut-colored locks cascading past his shoulders, a rakish Vandyke beard, and a mustache that curled insouciantly upward. Villiers seems to have been chosen for his role as the king’s favorite by opponents of his former favorite, the Earl of Somerset, Robert Carr.

  James fell in love with Villiers, loading him with honors, the first of which was appointing him cup bearer, a position previously held by Somerset. Then the king promoted Villiers through three ranks of the peerage in as many years, making him a viscount and Lord Hi
gh Admiral in 1616, an earl in 1617, and a marquis in 1619. In 1623, on St. George’s Day, April 23, James made his lover Duke of Buckingham and a Knight of the Garter.

  Gobsmacked by his generosity, the newly made Buckingham told the king, “You have filled a consuming purse, given me fair houses, more land than I am worthy of . . . filled my coffers so full with patents of honor, that my shoulders cannot bear more.”

  To his courtiers, James’s passion for Buckingham was obvious. Simon d’Ewes wrote in his diary that James was often wont to exclaim, “Becote [by God] George, I love thee dearly,” and “Begott, man, never one loved another moore than I doe thee.”

  This affection was corroborated by George Gerrard, who wrote in 1617 that “the king was never more careful, or did more tenderly love any that he hath raised than this Lord of Buckingham.”

  The contemporary writer Théophile de Viau, who also happened to be gay, immortalized the relationship in his poem “Au marquis de Boukinquan”: Apollo with his songs

  debauched young Hyacinthus,

  And it is well known that the king of England

  fucks the Duke of Buckingham.

  The love affair became a topic of international gossip. The Venetian ambassador wrote that James was a man “who has given him all his heart, who will not eat, sup, or remain an hour without him, and considers him his whole joy.”

  Monsieur Tillières, the French ambassador, claimed that James chose his favorites “not on the basis of any skill or talent in governance or statecraft, but instead, the king simply allowed himself to be carried away by his passion.”

  And in 1617, the Spanish ambassador reported to his sovereign that James had summoned his Privy Council and reiterated before them his preference for Buckingham above all others. This was not a “defect,” James insisted, because, “just as ‘Christ had his John; so have I my George.’ ”

  The king’s remark was not biblical heresy; it was gay code. James, and other cultured men of the day, would have been familiar with the plays of the popular (and probably gay) Elizabethan-era dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), who had said that not only were Christ and John “bedfellows,” but more specifically, that “he used him as the sinners of Sodoma.”

  Even if James’s ministers didn’t get the reference, James himself was having his own sly joke on them. His meaning was crystal clear, however, in 1619 when he christened a new ship Buckingham’s Entrance. Apparently, the attendant giggles, snickers, and blushes were too much to withstand, and the vessel was renamed the Happy Entrance.

  Interestingly, James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, accepted her husband’s passion for Villiers. In letters to the latter, she would ask George to promise to remain “always true” to her husband. When Queen Anne died on March 2, 1619, James did not remarry.

  But in 1620, Buckingham did—a duty that was completely expected from a man of his rank and position, regardless of his sexual preferences outside of wedlock. Initially, the king had hoped that his lover’s marriage would produce “sweet bedchamber boys to play me with,” as he confided to George, but Lady Buckingham gave birth to a daughter, sparing everyone the skin-pebbling results of such a royal inclination. James ultimately (and chastely) delighted in his lover’s wife and subsequent children, playing the role of benevolent uncle.

  Over the years, Buckingham became a force to be reckoned with, and in the waning years of James’s life, the duke solidified his power with the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I. In 1623, the two young men embarked on a diplomatic mission to Spain. James sent his lover passionate letters, lamenting, Alas, I now repent me sore that ever I suffered you to go away. I care for match nor nothing, so I may once have you in my arms again. God grant it! God grant it! Amen, amen, amen.

  The duke flirtatiously replied, . . . my thoughts are only bent on having my dear Dad and Master’s legs soon in my arms.

  He also expressed the passionate desire to get “hold of your bed-post again.” Of the myriad images conjured by this phrase, none are chaste.

  When Buckingham and the Prince of Wales returned to English soil, they jointly encouraged King James to declare war on Spain. The king’s ministers viewed his overweening pacifism as a defect, because it was considered effeminate—and effeminacy was but a hop, skip, and a jump from homosexuality. As it was, James’s contemporaries were alarmed that his court was controlled by a gay mafia, and the licentiousness of the court undermined the subjects’ respect for their sovereign.

  Still, James refused to be dragged into the Thirty Years War, a conflict that had erupted in 1618 as a German civil war with factions either supporting or attacking the Hapsburg rulers. It was also a religious war among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.

  Over the next couple of years, James grew increasingly ill and unable to attend to affairs of state. In 1625, he was plagued by attacks of arthritis, gout, and frequently recurring ague, and the business of running the kingdom was left to Charles and the Duke of Buckingham, who assiduously pressured James to enter the war. His health failing and his spirit flagging, James finally relented. After decades of effeminism and peace, war was looked on as “the most manly and English way.” Buckingham, in his capacity as Lord Admiral, assumed the chief responsibility for England’s disastrous entry into the conflict.

  In early March, James was felled by an apoplectic fit; and in his weakened condition, an attack of dysentery claimed his life on March 27, 1625. He died in his bed at Theobald House with his beloved Buckingham at his side.

  Buckingham then became a tremendous influence on the policies and strategies of the twenty-four-year-old Charles I. But a year after James’s death, Parliament attempted to impeach the duke. The new king protected him, but in 1628 Parliament tried once more to oust him.

  Later that year, while preparing to lead another naval expedition to the Continent, Buckingham was stabbed to death by John Felton, a disgruntled sailor. The killer claimed he had been encouraged to assassinate the duke by the collective anger over the disastrous condition of the economy and the unpopular Thirty Years War.

  The ugly legacy left by James and his George includes England’s lengthy involvement in a costly foreign war, engendering such widespread disillusion and unrest that it led to the overthrow of the monarchy by Oliver Cromwell.

  CHARLES II

  1630-1685 RULED 1660-1685

  CHARLES WAS THE ELDEST SURVIVING SON OF CHARLES I and Henrietta Maria of France. In the climactic event of the English Civil War between the Parliamentarians (the “Round-heads”) and the Cavaliers loyal to the crown (the “Royalists”), his father was beheaded on January 30, 1649. Oliver Cromwell, the MP for Cambridge who had distinguished himself as a leader of the Parliamentary forces, proclaimed himself Lord Protector of the Realm. The period that followed, between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration of Charles II, was known as the Interregnum.

  Charles II was crowned King of Scots at Scone on January 1, 1651, and attempted to regain his English title. But after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, he fled to the Continent, spending the next nine years in France and in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. There, he held court as the exiled King of England, and his supporters continually sought ways to restore him to his father’s throne.

  The Protectorate collapsed in 1659, and on May 23, 1660, 185 Charles sailed for England to reclaim his crown, triumphantly entering London on May 29, his thirtieth birthday.

  In 1662, Charles married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, a tiny brunette who had the misfortune to fall in love with her handsome, philandering husband.

  Charles’s reign was marred by the Plague of 1665, which decimated the English population, and the Great Fire of London, which began on September 2, 1666, destroying more than thirteen thousand homes and eighty-seven churches in the city.

  Politically, his rule was marked by a tug-of-war between Popish supporters and Anglicans. Plots and counterplots were hatched to assassinate Charles and crown his Catholic br
other James, or to exclude James, and all Roman Catholics, from ever sitting on the English throne. Charles equivocated, unwilling to cut his own brother out of his rights of succession.

  Charles died on February 6, 1685, and James did indeed succeed him without incident.

  The Plague, the Great Fire, and the religious dissent notwithstanding, the most discussed subject of Charles II’s Restoration is his prolific sex life. George Villiers, the witty, rakish 2nd Duke of Buckingham (and son of James I’s favorite) , once remarked, “A king is supposed to be the father of his people and Charles certainly was father to a good many of them.”

  He acknowledged and ennobled a total of seventeen children. Of the twenty-six dukes in England today, five of them are direct descendants of Charles II and his mistresses.

  However, none of Charles’s children were legitimate, and therefore the succession of his kingdom became the salient political issue of the day. It eventually led to the Glorious Revolution—in which Charles’s brother, King James II, duked it out with his son-in-law William of Orange, and lost—and to the 1701 Act of Settlement, which prohibited a Catholic from sitting on the throne of England (or taking a Catholic as his or her consort).

  That act is still in effect today.

  CHARLES II and Lucy Walter 1630-1658

  In the decade after his father, “the Royal Martyr” Charles I, was summarily beheaded at Whitehall, his son, the future Charles II, actively fought to claim his kingdom. But from the lengthy list of mistresses he accumulated during that time, the young prince appeared equally consumed with having sex as often as possible. According to one biographer, Charles was first seduced by the woman who had been his wet nurse. Between that liaison and his accession to the English throne in 1660, he had enjoyed the favors of no fewer than seventeen mistresses, starting with his first real love, the Welsh-born Lucy Walter, a noblewoman’s daughter-turned-courtesan.