This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Around 1623, when James VI of Scots and I of England was old, drunk, tired, heartbroken, politically ineffectual and correspondingly unpopular, someone jeered that Elizabeth had been king of England, James, her successor, its queen. In Queen James Gareth Russell has set out to consider, in James’s own words, “the particular man” as opposed to the king — the private and the personal overriding the public and the political.
But in the same breath Russell admits this is really an impossibility in the case of an “aspiring absolutist” such as James. So Russell arrives at a generous and pacey guide to both the life and reign, all but coterminous as they were, since James was crowned King of Scots at 13 months.
James seemed to prefer England to Scotland but the Scots to the English
Although James lost two regents of his blood to assassination before he was four, the second of whom — his grandfather — he witnessed bleeding to death, his subsequent childhood at Stirling Castle was surprisingly safe. Secure from deposition and mortal peril, that is; James was still subject to the physical and mental sadism of a genius, his celebrated tutor George Buchanan, a man capable of kindness and intellectual integrity who deliberately withheld the best of himself and inflicted the worst, twisted by anti-Stuart ideology that seems to have been opportunistic in origin.
Russell parts company from many traditional accounts, stating that James was not a victim of “grooming” or romantically involved in any way with his dashing, older French cousin, Esmé Stuart. Esmé undid much of Buchanan’s malign work, instilling in the traumatised, uncouth but brilliant young king self-confidence (successfully) and dignity (rather less so). Russell sees Esmé and his children as James’s preferred successors to Scotland before he himself had issue. Their claim was inferior to that of the Hamiltons, but that great house’s chief was then insane.
In any case, James kept a constant eye on bigger game to the south, the English throne of his godmother, Elizabeth. James tirelessly pursued his confirmation as Elizabeth’s heir, while trying and failing to save her captive, his own estranged mother Mary Queen of Scots, from execution. Within these negotiations Russell locates the king’s first known homosexual attachment, a callow double agent, Patrick Gray.
Gray made a hash of everything, though in enforced retirement he was “admired for his ability to plan parties”. His more amiable and loyal replacement was Alexander Lindsay, the king’s beloved “Sandy”. Other possibilities, such as the Earl of Huntly, seem more ambiguous, harder to extricate from their mainly political significance. In each case Russell gamely and clearly lays out the evidence, laudably relaxed about possible readerly dissent.
(William Collins, £25)
Blazing firelight casts grim shadow about the king’s marriage to Anna of Denmark, an event which precipitated the notorious North Berwick witch trials; Russell neither emphasises nor excuses the king’s culpability. Queen Anna, a consort long underappreciated by historians, deservedly receives as sustained attention as any of the king’s men.
Another woman, “Fair Mistress Anne Murray”, makes a brief appearance; the king wrote her some conventional poetry early in his marriage, and, though Russell seems tentatively convinced, I would personally settle here for an old Scots “not proven”.
The fat English years are more familiar than the lean Scottish ones; Russell sums them up with the brilliant formulation that James “seemed to prefer England to Scotland but the Scots to the English”. It was in the end a true-born Englishman who won out over Scottish wiles, not that the English proved at all grateful.
The major Scots favourite of the English Jacobean reign was Robert Carr, later Earl of Somerset, finally a convicted poisoner. His rise and downfall, to posterity as to contemporaries, appears to encapsulate all the ways in which James’s surprising efficiency north of the border had curdled into fainéant corruption to its south. Somerset’s rivals overplayed their hand with their candidate to supplant him, a penniless Leicestershire youth who happened to be the most handsome, insinuating man in Europe, George Villiers, later Duke of Buckingham.
The general historian chooses between two techniques — directly to supply intrigued if not always informed readers with the past’s pungent taste or to translate that past into seductively contemporary terms. Gareth Russell, an unmatchable master of the second school, is also sophisticated enough wholly to avoid its anachronistic potential pitfalls.
Facing stiff competition from Lucy Hughes-Hallett in the bookshops and Mary & George on the screen, Queen James nonetheless deserves to emerge as triumphant as ever did King James at Holyrood, or Buckingham at Whitehall.
