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The two sides of royal selves
King James--yes the one on the bible
King James VI of Scotland (AKA James I of England), was the first Stuart monarch. Because of the patrilineal tradition of naming they were given the name of the male that started the line. In this case one of the husbands of Margaret Tudor, officially referred to as 'what's his name.'
I am only half joking, this husband of Margaret Tudor (she had various husbands, Matthew Stewart, ended up giving his name to a whole new line of kings even though she was actually the one that made the difference as the royal descendant of Henry VII. Eventually they started a line that would include Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI/I, who would end up the last descendant of Henry VII (seventh), descended from him twice. So in a way James was sort of the last Tudor monarch, very much a player during the Tudor period, but he officially began the house of Stuart. ('Stuart' is the Frenchified spelling of 'Stewart' adapted by his Mother Mary Queen of Scots, and so whatever James believed about his controversial mom he at least chose this way of aligning himself with her.)
Every British monarch since James has claimed the throne through descent from him, so he’s a fairly prominent figure for that and other reasons. But personally, James was a strange bird. (Not unlike other kings/queens in that respect.) A theory argues that he wanted the scriptures 'less Catholic' because of the church's severe stance on homosexuality. That kind of bothered him, apparently, because he himself was gay. Of course in an equally possible theory, he wasn’t gay. Naturally.
He had some pronounced physical problems. His parents were, after all, first cousins, and he was raised in a brutally austere environment by cruel Calvinists. He didn’t walk till about three and when he was a tall, awkward adult (his mother was almost six feet tall), he had to lean around on his close advisers, mainly male of course. Even in portraits like that left he is looking kind of lanky and awkward and is leaning on a chair. Always something he is leaning on, because of the downside to falling flat on his face in public.
According to a contemporary account of these details of his physical condition, his leaning constantly on men is mentioned, but also the fact that he couldn’t use his mouth normally. One surviving detail from someone who saw him first hand was that when he drank anything, the liquid would pour out the sides of his mouth. He was said to appear to chew his drinks. Kind of a gruesome image, particularly for someone who was a king since he was a babe in arms, and one would guess raised with some thought to royal manners. This inability to control his mouth also made it so that when he would kiss male friends/associates (a MUCH more normal thing at the time because of custom and courtesy untouched by open fear of looking homosexual), he may not have been particularly delicate about it.
Too, the consequence of a King having people around him that mainly served to compliment him and tell him exactly what he wanted to hear about himself, would probably have been to under represent these quirks to that king, so maybe he wouldn't have thought twice about how various mannerisms--how he drank or leaning elbow to shoulder on his 'favorites' rather than falling on his face--affected his reputation.
I know that sometimes I personally am shocked to find out 'through the grapevine' how others view various things I do that seem to have a very natural explanation for someone who like me knows my circumstances.
All of us feel that we have unusual circumstances that explain our actions sufficiently so that we don't see it coming when people might guess something random and strange about us. In fact from a social psychology perspective, we more commonly view our own actions as externally motivated and others' actions by contrast as internally motivated--i.e. to explain FAULTS rely on a nurture vs. nature assumption about ourselves and nature vs. nurture assumption about others: 'I fall short because of being stressed/ill/broke but my crazy neighbor lady does because that's the way SHE IS .'
And also looking at it that way is handy so that we are able to self-justify not helping our crazy neighbor lady in any way to change the environmental factors. We reserve environmental factors to explain our own faults and limitations.
And the ordinary tendency to not correctly guess others' assessments of our behavior would be at least doubly so for a king that only got feedback from people who feared for their life making an honest appraisal, even for the king’s own benefit.
As is typical, this surviving report of the report of King James' 'bad manners' was through a foreign ambassador, which are usually (like Chapuys to Henry VIII) some of the only people who feel at liberty to say ANYTHING critical about a monarch. Kings were pretty careful not to openly persecute non-subjects. Foreigners had to be fairly careful about what they ate because poisoning (from someone or other) was a pretty common fate. After widespread use of gunpowder, random musket balls became a threat as it remains today for those in fear of assassination. Kings certainly made use of today's more typical anonymous murder in the case of foreign diplomats, but they didn't often just hall them off to the Tower to be executed like they did most people who criticized them, probably because they didn't have the option of controlling the respective opinion of those officials' home country directly through such tyranny, and thus had to actually practice some form of 'PR' that politicians more widely practice to EVEN THEIR SUBJECTS these days.
I think it is possible that James was spared any feedback on his mannerisms just like Henry VIII didn't get any good advice about his weight problem. You would think that one of his ‘people’ would have said “Highness, wouldn’t it be nice if you could lose some weight so we don’t have to raise and lower you into bed with ropes and pulleys? By that I mean nicer for---“ and his head would be off before he made himself clear that he was a loyal servant that had only the king’s best interest in mind.
Then again with James’ strange physical problems and the rumors that may have originated with them, maybe it was all true. Who knows--I don't. He did have a fairly happy marriage with a less then glamorous political wife--though maybe this is an example of how he was different than your average king. It wouldn't make him the only one--Louis XVI was married to one of the most beautiful women in Europe, Marie Antoinette, and was clearly smitten with her. So it was some other quirk or other than failure of normal heterosexuality(this also a less interesting historical debate) that most likely caused Louis' inability to consummate the marriage for seven years.
But as I said, depending on my own point of view and my likelihood to look at things one way or another I might downplay the nature of the rumors about James unnecessarily. Often I am struck when, in the aftermath of some National Enquirer-type story, the subjects of the rumors dismisses the shocking details easily as hugely-fictional slander, but eventually, when more comes out, the things that were so shocking as to be branded as obviously manufactured by slanderers, were impossibly right on.
(A lot of the Charles and Di stuff was much like that. I won’t go into it, as well as it illustrates what I am saying, because it is pretty crude. Overall, what was so horrifying that it was an easy target for dismissal by Charles’ and Di’s people as bold faced slander, even lies, was all dead on, and even the worst of it was tape recorded from the very beginning. In fact really the extreme shockingness of it served as an alibi of sorts for the guilty.)
So as typical of historical figures that will always remain a mystery, at the end of the day, and after all the information we have swirling around us from various sources, it comes down to what we believe, and probably why we believe it. So ‘reader of history beware,’ and beware that judgment of truth is more up to you than you realize.
King James' better seller--not just better than the Morgan Bible
Personal scandal often distracts any investigation into the psychology of complex historical figures, such as James Stuart, Louis XVI, Joseph Smith, etc.
In James case, his name is widely familiar because it dons many sacred books. More knowledge about his background than that fact about James will sway personal opinion about him rather widely. Those only knowing him because their bibles bear his name therefore often assume he must have been some devout politico-religious figure like Constantine. Any of them who end up indulging additional curiosity are often quite surprised about some of the first facts they run into.
As one who has found it frustrating as I first got to know James that the rumor of his sexuality is smack in the middle of any other in-depth discussion of him that would better explain who he was and why he operated, I would like to add some issues that I think are particularly helpful in getting beyond any simplistic view of his being either saint or sinner. I have above tried to deal with why who his romantic inclinations were toward can be either ignored or not depending on personal preference--it certainly doesn't have to be the defining issue for anyone, royal or commoner. After ignoring the really racy personal stuff that I tend to be less interested in, there are other issues that are more relevant IMO about him and more able to be applied to our modern sensibilities.
Whatever the less delicate aspects of James’ reputation, (and maybe because of them), he strongly considered himself an intellectual, and so it was imperative that he get involved in the major moral and thought efforts of the day. One of those was a debate continuing from Henry VII (twice his great grandfather). On that debate--which language scripture was read in throughout the Isles, James as a Calvinist voted for English.
A similar effort, the Morgan Bible, was the result of the like feeling that the scriptures should be made available in Welsh. Due to the relative status and self-promotion abilities of the authors, along with the bad luck of Welsh as a future language, few people hear of Mr. William Morgan. Very few associate his name with a famous bible. To bad for us Morgans, I guess.
Anyway, one of James' higher-profile and exigent contemporary efforts was his authorship of Daemonology, the definitive work on witchcraft. (James had a heavy Scottish accent raised as he was in Scotland (see the above post on Scotish vowels). If I was good at posting audio or video yet I would pronounce the approximate title of his book for you—ask me next time you see me, but /ae/ was not [yet] antiquated, it served an auditory purpose.
Here is a quote from Daemonology, which contained his belief in the seriousness of witches and their evil powers (until the end of his life when he admitted that despite the lives he had ended in the quest, he was less convinced than before):
I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting . . . sundry kinds of herbs to the hair or tails of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming of blood, by healing of horse-crooks, . . . or doing of such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.
(One small question, what is the difference between a 'daft' wife and a regular one?)
And James was serious about prosecuting witches, too, the full deal. He attended some of their trials to see that they were justly prosecuted, and one would assume that meant they were burned at the stake afterward. (For anyone who wonders why burning at the stake came about, it was because during the Spanish Inquisition, really a larger attempt to cleanse Christianity that only later got associated with Spain, they determined that it would be wrong to shed blood in the name of religion. Thus this more humane alternative. Makes sense if any of it does, I guess).
Another quote from James discussing his reasoning:
If any person or persons shall use practice or exercise any Invocation or Conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or shall consult convenant with entertain employ feede or rewarde any evil or wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose; or take any dead man or child out of his or her grave, or the skin bone or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte, Sorcerie, Charm or Inchantment: or shall use practice or exercise any Witchcrafte, Inchantment or Sorcerie, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined or lamed in his or her body, or any part thereof...shall suffer the pains of deathe.
One trial was to find guilty some 'witches' who were accused of conjuring a storm to sink the royal boat. James' party met with some foul weather and according to the wisdom of his day, foul weather was naturally caused by witches. Of course. You know those three witches in Macbeth--bubble bubble, toil and trouble, etc? I used to assume that Even Shakespeare knew what a trite superstition witches are, but they weren't that yet. The Bard probably thought witches were real and a real threat if he was anything like his royal highness. And in fact, he put the trouble threesome in his play, meant to be a flattering piece about the history of Scotland, to make it interesting to James, who was in the audience at its premiere.
The conjured storm in question happened on James' way over to meet half way, in his one romantic gesture to the opposite sex, his political bride, Anne of Denmark. We all know that it stretches belief for an otherwise reasonable person to believe in poor haggard nobodies conjuring the weather of Kings over a cauldron of toads, except that I have made the point elsewhere on my blog how culturally different and easily influenced our beliefs are, and that when we are born, and who we take advice from, often determines what we believe about major things.
Witchcraft, in the heyday of thinking it was responsible for all world evils, was basically the result of the 'God of the Gaps' assumption, or the notion that all things are a result of some kind of spiritual force, good or evil. If something could not be explained in the purview of going religious beliefs (in terms of what God would bring about say he was directly involved), then it was labeled witchcraft. This resulted in a lot of geniuses, autistic savants, etc. burned for witchcraft, because they could do things that people couldn't understand through normal Godly means, themselves not declared holy men.
Witchcraft seems so foreign to us. So 'superstitious' as it were. We ask ourselves, how could anyone believe that? But how likely is it, really, that only four hundred years ago human beings were capable of being so tricked by cultural beliefs into thinking something wacky like that? How is it also possible that now we are in the clear--nothing could ever happen to make us think something so obviously ridiculous. IMO I am probably just as vulnerable.
So because I am at least as likely as being daft as a famous king of England, I often engage in my own purgation of thoughts and worldview to find where it is that I see and prosecute witches. We all use the phrase, when something happens that we think is unjust, 'a witch hunt.' That is because at the core of injustice is the untrue belief in someone else's faults--prosecuting witchcraft or going on a hunt for the witches in the slovenly hovels of humanity around our own neighborhoods.
And ironically, James' education, while making him feel confident enough to cast all kinds of judgments on others to their death and pain, was actually part of the problem. Yes he had the benefit of all that an Elizabethan education could teach him--and all of the peril. Has anyone read a sixteenth century medical manual? Would any of us like our doctors to read from them while they were operating?
But while we admit that of course the view of medicine four centuries ago was quaint and antiquated, we still identify with how people of the time thought about the soul because we do the same.
(This applies to all you who don't believe in religion at all. Religion or the existence of spiritual entities is not what I am condemning here. Please, those of you naturalists patting yourselves on the back, try to pay closer attention, I know I have limitations myself, but my point is here if you want it).
James might have been better off without some of that education. And I think that I may be better off without some of mine. Education is good to help us steep ourselves in the comings and goings of our culture (as far as we would actually want to do that), but how is it in terms of doing anything of lasting importance? How is it in terms of avoiding the current myths that make the rounds? Uh, bad. Not only is it unlikely that education would help us avoid those myths, it is actually the very method by which those myths are actually perpetuated.
To educate is often to build a mental edifice so intricate, complex, and impressive (to those that lack access to it), that the edifice begins to be a very compelling substitution for the reality we all have access to as ordinary folk.--an 'Emperor with no clothes' situation. And often a dangerous one. To believe strongly that the answers to bettering the world around us=the pursuit of discovering and rooting out secret and undeclared evils in the private behavior of others leads to obvious potential to harm them and in a circular way back to us. We can all have our worldviews; very few people would take them from us, luckily, in a society that since Elizabeth I (IN THEORY) has valued 'not making windows on people's souls.’
But having a worldview and rooting out evil in the beliefs of others are totally different. I might advocate my own beliefs as dispassionately as possible but I hope that it will be a rare day that I should be confident enough in that worldview to cause me to hinder the lives of others, as unlikely as I am, in the long historical sense, of actually being 'right.'
The only way to get closer to being 'right' if I really want to, is to put my opinions out there and see what people have to say about them, hopefully being interested in what they have to say in response--because what do I want with opinions that aren't any good, after all?
I certainly hope, though, that before I am willing to start lighting bundles (I won't use the more common word here to avoid an unfortunate pun) and cause others that don't share my thoughts immediately to suffer, I will take a moment to reflect on how likely it is that my grounds to persecute are solid ones. On the basis of how shaky it is that I am pointing a finger in the direction of a true evil, I probably wouldn't even want to make any imposition on others whatsoever, even as minor as passing restrictions on their lifestyle, based on my belief that they aren't as good as me. Because truth is the best I am doing is to define right by what I am like and wrong by what I am not.
I think it is important in any endeavor to affect the actions of people around me I will remember the example of James, a figure who in many ways I admire and sympathize with. He was intelligent and as good a person as he could be in his circumstances. His parents were the victims of judicial murder, and most likely the reason he became a cruel Calvinist to any degree was, most charitably, because he was, after all, raised by them.
But which ended up being worse: any real witchcraft, or its subsequent prosecution?
I may be confident that someone should put away those evil playing cards, stop using bad words, stop doing something on an holy day of the week, stop teaching my kids their various political views (I threw in one bc I do actively sympathize with and in some forms try to effect change in this area--to be very fair and to be clear that I include myself in any group I mention by ‘people’ or ‘we’, etc.)
But even if I were, despite the realistic chances, ever to be in the right, at the risk of repeating sad and bloody history, it becomes obvious that more harm can come from overly zealous attempts to correct bad situations that I see around me over zealous than the bad situation itself did in the first place. And before anything that is attempted to force others to be like me IN ANY WAY I should ask if I am very sure of my information, and if I am sure, how it is that I got so lucky to have good information considering it is so hard to do it?
Ultimately admitting I was wrong, like James did, after a lifetime of ill consequence, will come too late to avoid the potential harms I have caused or might still, as everything we do continues to live on after us in ways we can’t even guess. Even James’ admission was nobly rare--most people remain committed to the end whatever they were committed to and whatever intervened to shake their conviction. Chances are, like the character of James I himself, there are alternate realities to the ones I am certain of, as long as I think I have a choice, I will deliberately choose the one that allows me to be as merciful to the poor wretched souls in my wake as I can.
Henry VIII—Shackling the tyrant within
Is the saying ‘Jolly Old England’ or is it ‘Bloody Old England’? Or is there some reason that we often hear both of these sayings? Maybe there is some connection between unrestrained Epicurean indulgence and unfathomably cruel tyranny? I think is at least possible, because one of history's worst tyrants was also one of its famous Epicures.
Since I was a young child I was intrigued by the figure of Henry VIII and the level of misery he caused in his reign. Henry VIII was actually a fairly bad dude. I am constantly shocked when I learn additional details about the cruelty he seemed to heap upon actual the actual necessity of being an absolute monarch.
Mark Smeaton, one of the men that was framed for adultery with his second (of six)wife, Anne Boleyn, wrote to ask him for mercy after receiving his death sentence of beheading. The block horrifies us, but it was actually a somewhat merciful form of death at that time, reserved only for the nobility. To show contempt for this individual, Henry answered back that not only would he not commute his death sentence, this man didn’t even deserve the mercy of a quick stroke of the axe.
So because he showed the ridiculous imprudence of asking for no death at all, Smeaton got the full treatment of drawing and quartering, and those that accepted their fate (and provided an accusation against Anne) got the royal treatment--beheading. This act of cruelty and hostility on Henry's part went beyond, in my opinion, the obvious realities of monarchy with a throne that needed protecting against any threat, real or perceived. Henry's treatment of Smeaton was actually contrary to practical purposes, for it allowed Smeaton the freedom to rescind his confession and be the sole among the five accused men not to 'admit' wrongdoing with the Queen. This probably made it a bit more difficult for Henry to solidify public opinion against his second wife and could have been a key component of his developing tyrannical reputation.
Of course I knew Henry did have this reputation for cruelty (it was a main feature of the beafeaters' tour of the Tower). But I also know that negative reputations of historical figures are obviously sometimes undeserved. For instance, I have noticed that when academics on historical documentaries refer to 'Victorianism,' they often raise their eyebrows like everyone naturally understands the terrible things about Queen Victoria’s reign—-but really she was just a chubby and comparatively benevolent German woman. A bit stuffy, perhaps, and in post-sexual revolution times, maybe prudishness really is the worst evil.
But the facts such as the story I mentioned about Smeaton tend to not only meet the expectation I have of Henry, they usually even end up exceeding it. Historians really don't even do him necessary justice in that regard. And thus I continue to add to any judgment I might have made from obviously dubious historical rumors with more facts to flesh out this famous king.
Not that he needed fleshing out. By age forty he was so large that he needed crudely rigged devices with ropes and pulleys to get him in and out of his fifteen sq. ft. bed, and onto his horse. HorsES to be exact. His steed needed constant refreshment to stave off death via exhaustion, and he tried to commute these sentences at least in his animals. He needed a long string of them to get him to the coast of the English Channel when he went to war with King Francis I late in his reign.
So this makes me think that he had some obvious ways that he could have made his own life much better. Whatever the failings of a Renaissance physician, they did understand the basic food in=fat equation. He could have done something about his weight to get rid of what would have most likely been the indignity and inconvenience of the raising-and-lowering machine, but he didn’t.
So ever since I was 10 and my parents first took me to the tower of London to be introduced to this character and the consequences of his life, I have wondered more or less sophisticated versions of the following question: why would a man that had such obvious ways of improving his life instead focus on such studied cruelty and hostility toward others?
My mistake was assuming that those two facts about him were at odds. It may be exactly because of the immense stress he was under because of personal reasons, his weight only being one of them, that caused him to be more and more outwardly hostile in his tyranny. The thing that enabled him to be so much more unrestrained in his tyranny was his power to dodge culpability for his own problems (he constantly had people around him calling him the ‘handsomest Prince in Christendom’) and also of course his power to enact his hostility as some sort of opiate-like diversion from the various pains he suffered as king.
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