James I by Thomas Cogswell

Author:Thomas Cogswell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141980423
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

6

Gorget and Armour

Paul van Somer’s portrait of King James standing next to his crown, sceptre and orb initially seems regal, if a little routine. But then something unusual comes into view. The king has a plate-metal gorget around his neck with the rest of his armour stacked at his feet. (See picture 6.)

The painting reminds the viewer that the man who then described himself as Rex Pacificus had earlier led troops against Scottish rebels, and a closer examination of his rhetoric about the blessings of peace reveals an important qualification. In 1604, James assured Parliament that he would not break the peace – ‘except I be forced thereunto for the honour of the kingdom or else by necessity’.1 In 1618, the year Somer painted the picture, continental developments had prompted the king to take the extraordinary step of donning a gorget. The message was clear: James would put on the rest of his armour and go to war if honour and necessity ever required it.

* * *

While his passion for hunting remained, James was plainly ageing, and reports circulated of grooms running on either side of him, holding the reins. Nevertheless, ‘nothing is easier than to divert him from doing anything,’ the Venetian ambassador noted in 1622, ‘than to propose hunting.’ James ‘has long been accustomed to remain in retirement in remote places of which he is very fond, free and enjoying himself, without pomp or gravity’. The sprawling conflict that would soon engulf James, and the continent, only intensified his devotion to rural sports. In 1620, Roman observers were astonished that James had ‘no thought of anything but his hunting’, and in 1623, when his councillors urged the king to stay near London, he went to Newmarket and ordered them not to join him there without an invitation. Consequently there was little exaggeration in the 1622 report that ‘he goes hunting every day’.2

Hunting helped ease the pain of Somerset’s fall from grace; so too did George Villiers. In 1614 this younger son of an obscure gentleman only had one shabby suit, but his fortunes dramatically improved after he met King James – predictably enough, in the kennels. This clever, attractive man, and his impudent manner, delighted James. ‘If I speak,’ he told the king, ‘I must be saucy.’ He teased James about his ‘well shaped legs’, and he traded scatological references with the king. The new favourite once wrote that the French had ‘shitten mouths’, adding ‘I pray you, sir, do not kiss that word’, and the two amused themselves with a rude abbreviation of countesses – ‘cunts’. James promptly became his ‘dear dad’, and Villiers, again playing to the king’s canine enthusiasm, was ‘your humble slave and dog’.3 The king lavished offices, titles and even an aristocratic wife on the young man, who eventually became the Duke of Buckingham.

Publicly, Buckingham was the king’s private secretary responsible, James said, for ‘keeping my back unbroken with business’. He seemed to be everywhere. After James appointed him Lord Admiral, Buckingham swiftly

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