As drama Mary & George dramatises the final moments of King James VI and I, find out what’s known about what really happened in the king’s sickroom…
James VI and I became king of Scotland in 1567 when he was just 13 months old, and succeeded his cousin, Elizabeth I of England, in 1603 to become the first monarch to unite the two crowns. He went on to rule the kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland for a further 22 years, and his death meant the end of a period often known as the Jacobean era (taking its name from Jacobus, the Latin version of James). He is the longest reigning monarch of Scotland, holding the throne for 57 years and 246 days.
“He had presided over some of the most significant political and cultural events in British history,” said historian Joe Ellis on the HistoryExtra podcast. “The Gunpowder Plot, the witch hunting craze, colonization in America, and the success of William Shakespeare.”
Over the course of his reign, James VI and I had also been the target of multiple kidnap and murder plots, from groups of nobles who planned to steal away the boy king in his minority and rule in his place, to the infamous attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. So it’s perhaps no surprise that, in the wake of his death, rumours swirled that the king had been poisoned.
How and when did James VI and I die?
James VI and I died, aged 58, at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire on 27 March 1625.
In his later years, James had suffered with many ailments, including “increasingly painful arthritis, gout and kidney stones,” Joe Ellis explains. “And because of his frail health, he was increasingly a peripheral figure at court and on the political stage.”
“In his final years, he rarely visited London; he preferred to stay at hunting lodges around Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. We find [James’s eldest surviving son] Prince Charles really beginning to play a much more significant role in policymaking and direct government.”
James often exchanged letters about remedies with his favourite courtier George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Historians Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell write of the shared letters between the pair, which “make clear the importance to their friendship of the shared experience of illness”.
“James and Buckingham nursed each other through bouts of ill health,” write Bellany and Cogswell, “and exchanged reports about unorthodox remedies. When Buckingham’s conversion to the anti-Spanish cause nearly broke their friendship in 1624, it was the duke’s subsequent illness that provided the occasion for its renewal.”
After years of ill health, official sources had it that the king died of a stroke and attack of dysentery, complicated by malaria or typhus, which were endemic in England in the early 17th century.
Yet, the presence of the Duke of Buckingham at James’s sickbed suggested to some that the king had been murdered by his favourite, in order to hasten the accession of the 24-year-old Prince Charles, soon to rule as Charles I. So what is the evidence?
Was James VI and I murdered?
Historians Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell have investigated the rumours of murder that took hold in the late 1620s.
“Long dismissed by historians as an implausible falsehood, the allegation that James VI and I had been murdered would haunt English politics for three decades,” they wrote for BBC History Magazine.
Fuelling such allegations was the fact that the Duke of Buckingham was present at the king’s sickbed, and some sources have it that he had procured a medicine that was not prescribed by the king’s physicians.
“There were a set of treatments that were regularly used,” to manage James’s condition, author Benjamin Woolley told the HistoryExtra podcast – usually repeated purging (whether through bleeding, laxatives or emetics). James reportedly “scoffed at medicine” and found the regime repugnant. In this final illness, Villiers had consulted an Essex doctor named John Remington and procured a plaster suggested by his mother Mary Villiers. Unbeknown to the other doctors, it was “applied to the king’s breast”.
While any possible role that Buckingham played in the king’s final moments in 1625 are lost to history (and leave room for dramatic exploration such as the drama Mary & George), the secretive nature of James’s death left room for speculation that thrived in the febrile political climate of the time. Buckingham had long been unpopular for his influence over the king and Prince Charles, and became a key target of the accusations.
The rumours took hold, Bellany and Cogswell explain, “in great part, because of an astonishingly successful piece of political writing. In the spring of 1626, George Eglisham, a Scots Catholic poet, physician and polemicist, published The Forerunner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham, a pamphlet accusing Buckingham of murdering several leading courtiers, as well as the king.”
The sensational Eglisham publication stoked existing political rivalries, say Bellany and Cogswell. “As contemporaries began to pore anxiously over copies of Eglisham’s tract, the allegation that Buckingham had murdered James entered the turbid stream of rumour, libel and controversy that engulfed the favourite in the turbulent last two years of his life.”
Buckingham was assassinated himself in 1628, by an embittered army officer who blamed Villiers for military failures and other personal grievances. While there is no conclusive evidence that Buckingham had a hand in the king’s death, the rumours had a long and significant legacy that fed into antagonisms between parliamentarians and royalists and, ultimately, civil war.
“By shaping the rumours of 1625 into a credible secret history,” write Bellany and Cogswell, “[Eglisham] had fashioned an endlessly malleable political legend that would ultimately help send Charles I to the scaffold.”
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