Personal Relationships of James VI and I

Personal Relationships Of James VI And I

The personal relationships of James I of England included relationships with his male courtiers and his marriage to Anne of Denmark, with whom he fathered children. The influence his favourites had on politics, and the resentment at the wealth they acquired, became major political issues during his reign.

Growing up, James (b. 1566) did not know his parents — his father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was murdered in 1567, and his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to flee when she married the suspected murderer, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Two of his grandparents died before he was born; his grandfather was killed in a skirmish while James was still a boy, and his grandmother lived in England. He had no siblings. His first documented male favourite, at the age of 13, was his older relative Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox.

James adopted a severe stance towards sodomy using English law. His book on kingship, Basilikón Dōron, (Greek for "Royal Gift") lists sodomy among those “horrible crimes which ye are bound in conscience never to forgive”. He also singled out sodomy in a letter to Lord Burleigh giving directives that Judges were to interpret the law broadly and were not to issue any pardons, saying that "no more colour may be left to judges to work upon their wits in that point."

However, nearly two centuries later, Jeremy Bentham, in an unpublished manuscript, denounced James as a hypocrite after his crackdown: ", if he be the author of that first article of the works which bear his name, and which indeed were owned by him, reckons this practise among the few offences which no Sovereign ever ought to pardon. This must needs seem rather extraordinary to those who have a notion that a pardon in this case is what he himself, had he been a subject, might have stood in need of."