The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I

Steven Veerapen

Birlinn, £25  

Few Scottish monarchs began life faced with such poor odds. James VI, who later became James I of England and Ireland, was born in 1566. This was less than a year after his mother Mary Queen of Scots had married Henry, Lord Darnley, but already their relationship was in ruins.

The queen had been heavily pregnant with James when her secretary David Rizzio was murdered by malcontents led by Darnley; had events gone differently, both she and her unborn child might well have died with him. 

Instead it was Darnley who perished, murdered, people said, with the collusion of his wife and her lover Bothwell. With his mother in captivity in England, James entered childhood effectively as an orphan, under the care of the Earl of Mar and his wife. With no memories of his mother, who was not permitted to see him, he came under the control of a hardline Protestant clique. 

Steven Veerapen writes in this entertaining retelling of James’s life: “In [Mary’s] absence she could be whatever her son’s guardians wished her to be, and what they wished her to be was something verging on the demonic.”

Rigorously schooled by the poet and intellectual George Buchanan, whose loathing of his mother is legendary, James grew into a scholarly young man who loved hunting. Too often, when affairs of state called, he was to be found in a royal forest or hunting lodge, usually in the company of attractive and attentive young men. 

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Yet, as Veerapen is eager to emphasise, James was not the pathetic figure of popular legend, a caricature promoted by propagandists. Rather, he was a complex, thoughtful, cultured and often skilful monarch whose inadequacies can in part be traced to his unfortunate beginnings.  

There is little doubt that James was bisexual. Much of Veerapen’s analysis hinges on the king’s personal life, and the ways in which his desires shaped his decisions and court. Such a keen focus on sex, passion and love sometimes feels overworked, but there is no doubt that James cannot be understood without examining this side of his life. 

After his first great love, for his ambitious and manipulative French cousin Esmé Stuart, in 1589 he was betrothed to Anna of Denmark. At this point he banished his male lovers from the royal bedchamber which, Veerapen writes, “usefully demonstrates James’s bisexuality. He evidently envisaged that his new wife would, in one person, fulfil both his sexual and emotional needs, and thus he would have no need for a pretty male to cater to just one of them. This was to prove, in time, a chimerical expectation.”

Anna was a loyal, strong-willed, intelligent wife, with whom James was often at loggerheads, and Veerapen takes time to sketch this assured young woman. Despite their frequent arguments and James’s flagrant infidelities, their bond remained close to the end.

The outset of their union, however, was far from propitious: “Anna’s tenure as Scottish consort began not with a bang but with a witch hunt.” Witches were accused of trying to sink Anna’s convoy on its way to Scotland and their ferocious persecution remains an indelible stain on Denmark and Scotland’s reputations. 

The Wisest Fool is a sensitive portrait of a king who, despite errors of judgement managed to negotiate a period of exceptional political and religious turbulence. Essentially, James was a man of peace, far in advance of his times compared with his bellicose English parliament, who were desperate for war with Spain. 

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Greatly to his discredit, however, was his treatment of his mother. With his eye forever on his claim as Elizabeth I’s successor, he abandoned her rather than risk losing his bid for the English throne. Not only did he block any chance of Mary returning home to rule jointly with him, but on hearing of the plot against Elizabeth’s life, in which Mary was fatally implicated, he said “his mother might drink the ale and beere which her selfe had brewed”. 

Yet despite such callousness, he was a fond husband and father, and affectionate and generous to his various male lovers (letters to his favourites were rather unnervingly signed, “Your Dad”).  Striving to surround himself with close family, presumably compensating for his loveless origins, he is by turns an admirable, odd and forlorn figure, forever a prey to his emotions.    

Perhaps most intriguing is how James handled the union of crowns in 1603. To his relief, he was warmly greeted in England, enjoying a honeymoon start as its new ruler. Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth I’s consigliere William Cecil, was unexpectedly impressed: “His virtues are so eminent … I have made so sufficient a discovery of his royal perfection as I contemplate greater felicity to this isle than ever it enjoyed.”

James too was surprised by the ease with which he settled into his new role. Blithely disregarding the anti-Protestant and anti-Scottish sentiment fomenting within the English realm, and seemingly heedless of his neglect of his homeland, he smugly wrote: “Here I sit, and govern Scotland by the pen. I write and it is done, and by a clerk of the Council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword.” 

Despite promising to visit Scotland every three years, he returned only once. Even more troublingly, Guy Fawkes confessed that the motive behind the Gunpowder Plot “was not just to rid England of its Protestant elite, but to ‘blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains’.”  

Veerapen’s analysis of James is as psychological as political, and his experience as a historical novelist brings imaginative colour to the book. Although he writes with panache, he is a little too keen on hackneyed or glib phrases – “Queen Elizabeth had a mouth like a sailor”; “Long before the king was a glint in his mother’s eye”; “Anna would go on firing out children with the regularity of a ceremonial gun salute”. 

Even so, this is a probing, well-rounded and very readable account of a king too often over-looked, despite his pivotal role in modern British politics.