Death and the King's Favorite (with Benjamin Woolley)

wasn't an easy one. Though Apethorpe had once been a magnificent estate that hosted Tutor and Jacobean Royalty over the centuries, it had fallen into disrepair, first during a period where it was used as a youth detention facility, and then later when it was purchased, presumably as an investment by a Libyan businessman who never spent a single night there.

The palace was crumbling, and the only reason it even lasted long enough to be protected by the English government was because of an elderly gardeners caretaker who continued working without salary to block windows, stop leaks and chase away would be vandals. When the English Heritage restoration began, the

magnificence of the house slowly became apparent again. There were centuries old grotesque wall paintings that had been covered in the eighteenth century and plaster freezes hidden under attic floorboards. But the best discovery was in the chamber that had originally been built in order to accommodate the visits of King James the First. James the First also known as

James the sixth in Scotland, frequently visited Apethorpe. It was the estate he spent the most time at outside of his own palaces, and in his bedchamber, the restoring team removed a wall of plaster to uncover a secret passageway. Passageway that led to the room that would have been occupied by the King's favorite George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. A secret passageway between the bedrooms of two men,

just normal platonic dude stuff. If you know King James at all, it's probably because of the Bible that bears his name, or the episode on this podcast we did about his habit of witch hunting. Neither of those two character traits seemed particularly aligned with the other big thing about King James that he had a pattern of selecting close male favorites. These relationships were absolutely intimate, undeniably romantic, and probably sexual, although that's a matter of much debate

even today among scholars. Personally, I defer to Antonia Fraser's view, which she wrote in her nineteen seventy five biography of the King quote in sexual matters, it is generally better to assume the obvious unless there is some very good reason to think otherwise. And that was decades before they found the secret bedroom tunnel. Whatever the extent of the physical relationship between King James and George Villiers, the relationship

itself reshaped English politics. George went from being a minor second son of landed gentry to a duke, a meteoric rise that first delighted and then terrified and threatened other noblemen. King James had been in his late forties when they met George. In his early twenties. The young man had been thrust into court by his ambitious mother Mary, who saw her handsome son as a key into high society. But even she could not have imagined just how successful

George would be. But no one can rise forever, and the intimate jealous closeness that George and James shared might have in the end cost them both their lives. I'm Danish schwartz, and this is noble blood.

I don't know, Princes William and Harry. It's a complex, difficult relationship. It's a difficult position for people like Harry. You know, you have the air and the spare and that was very much the case for second sons, even more so right through the entire system as it worked in that time. And George was, as you say, in an even worse position because he wasn't even in the first family. He was a second son in a second family,

so his prospects were bleak. And a kind of measure of that is that if you look through the history of that time, people who were in his position who came from sort of I suppose, middling gentry rings, so they went from the aristocracy. But there weren't peasants by any stretch of the imagination, but this sort of gentry class.

It was really difficult for them, and they would do things like well what notably, a lot of them piled at well, not that many, but some of them piled on a ship and set off for Virginia in the US to set up Jamestown. The people who did that was a really motley crewe who were made up of a lot of second sons, who had nothing else to do. So that was his predicament, that was his situation, and that is what makes made for me his story and his mother's role in that story all the more remarkable.

in his life. So he was a difficulty and she couldn't see what she could do with him, because she was determined, a very determined woman who was going to try and sort of get the ranking she thought she deserved. She thought her and her family she came from this family which she later claimed was related to five kings

of your Europe. I mean, that's highly debatable, but she nevertheless thought she came from a very special line, and John wasn't going to carry that, not as a reflection of her line and background, nor as that of her husband who died when John and George were just were young, who was called Sir George Villiers. So George's father was also called George. One of those things that happened throughout history at that time, causing chaos for those of us

trying to research the families. But she could see that George was a much better prospect, if you liked, for realizing her ambitions than John. He wasn't very scholarly, he wasn't very intellectual.

complicated in any number of ways. I mean, she was what was called a waiting woman to a richer relative, which doesn't mean she was a servant exactly or a sort of scullery maid, and her enemies would make her out to be as such later on, but she was. She was in a kind of one of those very ambiguous social positions, which was between service, if you like,

in companionship to another higher ranking individual. So she was low in the pecking order, and so to even think about trying to get somebody into the royal court was itself, you know, that was a moonshot, as it were, in talking about the times were in. But nevertheless, she was that ambitious, and George seemed to present a prospect as somebody who she could just shapen into the sort of person who would do the job, would have a possibility

of success. So that was her aim as her singular aim, and various sort of historical forces basically aligned themselves to make this a completely unexpected possibility.

was that kind of court. So they needed a glamorous young English boy to catch the King's eye, and George went down to London. His mother obviously sent him down the King's Way as it was called, down from Leicestershire, which is in the midlands of England, down to London, and George hung around court. In fact, he nearly ended up marrying the child of a prominent courtier who died

before a marriage could be achieved. I don't know what the father's attitude towards it would have been, but the executive of the father's will of the bride to bees or the prospect of a bride to be, the executors of his will just did everything to prevent George wheedling his way into the fact that particular family line, so he was that whole scheme fell apart. I don't know if that was something that Mary was involved in or not.

The historical record doesn't tell us, but it was some time and somewhere after that that this group of nobles, led by the Earl of Pembroke, initially it seems, got together.

So he was actually Pembroke shows in Wales, and so he had Welsh connections, but Wales in England were essentially one nation at the time, one kingdom, and so he worked to come up with a scheme and George was pushed forward as the candidate to fulfill that scheme, and that's when the scheming really began, and it turned out to be extremely successful, culminating in its first stages with George catching the King's eye by doing a beautiful dance,

one that we had the privilege of watching being recreated for the show. Mary and George. He did this dance that caught the King's eye and that is what set the ball rolling.

There were lots of gentlemen of the bedchamber essentially, not not just the sort of intermediary between the king and his people, or more particularly individuals like his Privy counsel and so on, you know, the people who ran the government. It wasn't just that it was also a protective ring

around him because obviously the monarch was vulnerable. I mean, yes, an entourage that was there to protect him so had to be very closely monitored because within two years of James coming down from Scotland when he inherited the English throne, because from Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms at this time and would remain so throughout James's reign, much to his frustration. But he barely got his backside onto the throne when somebody tried to blow him up. So

that's the famous gunpowder plot. It was called of sixteen oh five. So he was paranoid already. As he put it himself, he had been nourished in fear because of his extraordinary early years. He inherited the Scottish rome when he was still a baby.

were sexual, whether they were romantic. What is the conclusion you've you've come to in terms of James's relationships with his male favorites and George in particular.

with it. But thinking of this historically, if there's this key to it, in a way, it's a series of letters which were helpfully drawn together into an edited so there was an edited edition of these letters published by an American academical bergerom called King James and the Letters of homo Erotic Desire, and it is a really good piece of academic work because he's dug into the letters, you know, the references that the letters make to people

and places and so on are explored. But they also because they're in a collection, and because when I first encountered this, I just read it through from beginning to end. It's an extraordinary collection. Now, if it was a collection of letters between a man and a woman, I think you would just take it as read that this was a romantic, intimate sexual relationship. I don't think you would start to fret about whether or not it was sexial

in nature. The complication is obviously that this was the same sex relationship and it was being conducted in a period when, as we see it now, they were much more you know, homophobic, whatever term you want to use

for it. That's where I think it gets tricky. And from my perspective as somebody who sort of researched it and thought about it, I think part of the problem is us we assume that the past is always slightly more in terms of sexual relationships and politics and that sort of thing more regressive than as you further you go back, It's like homophobia just escalates, gets worse and worse and worse. Although any number of those sorts of things considered to be wrong. Now that's to use a

anachronistic concept. I think, to try and think about what was going on now. I'm the romantic in the sense that I do think romance love is something that's probably common through various centuries of history. I keep, as it were, running into it when I'm writing and researching and writing the people I write about, But then I consider myself a biography. I'm always sort of looking for that kind of thing.

to think of Shakespeare. Every Shakespeare played I had men playing boys and men playing women.

to James. Now, obviously there's a power dynamic here. For example, a lot of the criticism, if that's the word of people from people, particularly in the past, of portraying James as in inverted commas gay or homosexual, and I'm putting them in perverted commas because those for concepts would be nothing to people who lived in that period. I mean, they just wouldn't know what you were talking about. The idea of sexuality wouldn't have made any sense to them.

But anyway, so one of the objections to painting their relationship as being sexual was because of the sodomy laws of the time and James's support of those laws. But there were sodomy laws, they weren't They weren't anti homosexual laws or same sex relationship laws. They were very specific about a very specific physical act, a bit like rape law. And I think partly they're because of concerns about power relations and about how men abusing boys and so on.

Obviously there are biblical prohibitions against men lying with men, as to use the terminology of the Keith James Bible, of course, But again I think to read that through contemporary eyes, assuming that this is evidence of basically being sexily regressive in some way, that wasn't you know, that wasn't the preoccupation. The preoccupations were in all sorts of different directions and concerns, with all sorts of different issues,

theological and otherwise. So I think James could happily have an intimate sexal relationship with another man without that without him thinking that he was breaking really many taboos. I mean, sexual acts themselves were taboo in the sense you didn't do them in public, you didn't talk about them in public, things like that. That more or less applies now that the idea that the same sex relationship itself was something that he had to particularly hide or was particularly concerned about,

or that it's particularly controversial even to consider. I think that's to look at it through an anachronistic lens.

Six months or so they were filming, and he did point out after he'd been filming for a couple of well maybe a couple of months, I can't remember, but he said, when I went to the set one day and he said it was nice to be able to talk to me with some clothes on. He you know, it was it demanded a great deal of this actor, and I think Tony did an amazing job of it. I'm not sure that everyone picks it up, having you know, look took the aftermath of the show and some of

the reviews, which is a shame. Not everyone kind of sees what I saw. But then, of course I'm seeing something seeing it from a very particular perspective. But I think he pulls out the subtleties of a very very interesting historical character who is bizarrely almost completely absent from our historical record as a significant figure. I cannot understand

why that's the case. You know, we've all heard of Henry the eighth and Elizabeth, but why James the first sixth isn't up there with the sort of the big names of British monarchy. I have no idea.

of a century. Elizabeth First didn't make any of her courtier's dukes. She made some lower you know, earls, for example. She made no one a duke, and in fact, had she done so, that would have changed the shape of her reign because it implied in some way, I suppose, because she was childless, that the person she promoted to that position was in line for the throne. Even so, you know, it carries a lot of weight, that title.

And indeed, during George's time when he was made duke, which was around the time well in the midst of this amazing escapade, him and Charles hairing off through France to Spain to try and capture the the hand of the Infanta, the Spanish princess. He was made due then, but it immediately aroused rumors that he was aiming to seize the throne. His enemies certainly thought that that was

a possible motive. In any case, it was the most extraordinary promotion, and it was something that elevated the Villiers family to a social rank that even Mary, who had this very high opinion of her social position, a true who if you like, or natural social position, even she couldn't have imagined that happening. And she became a countess. It's a special title. It was one that James basically bestowed on. It wasn't heritable, but it was one he just thought, I'm going to make you a countest. I

think you're such an amazing woman. Here's a countess ship.

So I first encountered these two when I was researching another book called The Herbalist, about a sort of a completely different figure. He was a sort of a radical from the Civil War pier called Nicholas Culpepper. His nemesis was a doctor called William Harvey. Brilliant doctor incidentally discovered the circulation of the blood, for example, changed the course

of medical history, you could say. But William Harvey was at James's bedside in his final hours, alongside him with these two figures, Mary and George, and I thought, who on earth are they, and then they started to interfere in the King's care in what was being in the medicines dispensed to him. Now, what we do know from, among other things, actually spies that were in the King's court at the time who had that somehow had access we don't know their names, but who had access to

the king's bedside and saw what was going on. So these were people who were reporting back to their spymasters

back in Catholic Europe what was going on. So we know something was going on, and what seemed to be going on was that Mary and George decided to apply a medicine that their own apothecary, Mayor's apothecary to be specific, had mixed up as a plaster and potion in James's final hours while he was ill with what was diagnosed fairly familiar disease at the time, malaria, because malaria was

endemic in England. Then having dismissed the royal doctors from the King's bedside and then subsequently trying to force them to sign a declaration to say they had agreed to the dispensing of this medicine to James. Having done all that leading to James having a series of fits and dying. Now, he was weak, he was ill. He was not that old, but he was aging, and he you know, he could have died of natural causes. But soon after his death the rumors started to spread that they had poisoned him.

and that's not the point. The significance of this is the impact it had subsequently, because the House of Commons set up essentially a sort of secret committee that interviewed the doctors and asked them what had happened, and they used it in order to draw up a case against George, because by this stage the Parliament, which had once hailed George as Saint George on horseback, the great champion of the people, had turned against him because of his involvement

with Charles, and it poisoned. They may not marry and George may not have poisoned James, but what they did poisoned relationships between parliament and the king. The new king, Charles the First, and even when Charles was arrested by parliamentary forces, so Charles tried to all without Parliament for a period basically of two decades or over two decades. And the upshot was that Parliament went to war with Charles. That was the Civil War.

And the roots to that was when George and Charles, this was when James was still alive, when they went to Spain to try and see if Charles could marry the Infanta, the Spanish king. That would have changed the geopolitics of Europe. In an instant England, which had been a sort of hostile Protestant power, James had tried to regularize relationships between Britain and Spain that would have secured

it if that had happened. It didn't happen, and George has sort of tactically decided, well, if you're not going to support that, we'll turn against you. James wasn't prepared to do that. When James died, he was conveniently out of the way and him and Charles, who subsequently married a French princess, could pursue a policy of antagonism towards Spain. And that's what George did. It didn't go well, it

went very badly. In fact, George was not a terribly good tactician, you could argue, but he was a really interesting politician, and he tried to set up a kind of Northern Protestant cluster of nations hostile to Catholic Europe. And when I was researching this, Brexit was underway though, the British referendum which led to the decision to leave the European Union, and in a sense George was a

sort of proto brexiteer, you could argue. He thought that that, you know, Europe should be more open, more Protestant, it shouldn't, you know, cow taw to the Pope and to the Habsburgs, who were the royal sort of the royal dynasty that ruled Catholic Europe. He thought that that that there should be a challenge to that. America was bound up in this Jamestown and the founding of Jamestown was during this period.

It was seen as part of this sort of Protestant this new Protestant order, and one way or another, George was at the heart of this. That's why he's a much more significant figure than maybe we really appreciate him to be. And that's why a really chunky piece of scholarship exploring his life and politics is something we need.

to patch up the relationship. And then that's followed up by then it's just the two of them and about two others in support who ride across France to Madrid, across the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates France and Spain, on to Madrid and turn up at the doorstep for the English ambassadors, frightening the living daylights out of the port chap because they had no idea that this was going to happen, and putting the entire sort of future of the Kingdom at stake in that maneuver, and they

just they're glued together from then then on, and that's why you know, the poisoning thing comes up. Subsequently, Charles was at Theobalds, the country retreat where James fell in and died. During that time, and so that's why there was suspicions surrounding Charles that he was plotting with George and Mary, and George stood by him until George was assassinated. Well, actually that in itself is an interesting question, but by one of the naval personnel who claimed he hadn't been paid.

But George was assassinated, and that, in a sense is one of the first things that leaves Chiles so marooned politically that civil war is too strong to say it at that point would have seemed inevitable, but certainly seemed more likely.

And he embarked on a number of military campaigns to do this, and one of them one involved in an attempt to try and actually go and support of Protestants in Spain and France with two two missions, and they went very badly wrong and he was heavily defeated. And also by this stage under Charles, the regime was running short of money because these military oppers are very expensive. Sailors who had been press ganged into taking part in

these expeditions were going unpaid. And there was one of these figures called the figure called John Felton, who met George when he was acting as Admiral of the Fleet and had gone to Portsmouth and had gone to an inn called the Greyhound. John Felton came up to him and essentially stabbed him to death. And that assassination sent shock waves through the entire court because it would it was going to change everything basically in terms of the power dynamics of the of Charles's court and his body

was brought back. His mother was still alive. She was there to receive the body when it was brought back to London. And, as I suppose, the last gesture of the sheer ambition of this rise to power of the Villiers family, he ordered the most spectacular, arguably spectacularly vulgar memorial to George, which was took up a whole side room, so to speak, of the royal part of Westminster Abbey.

In other words, he was buried among the kings and queens of England and Britain, probably the biggest and gaudiest memorial of all. Ironically, James is also buried there, but there's now a plaque, but there was no memorial to him. There wasn't even a plaque when he was interred in

Westminster Abbey. So those who go to Westminster Abbey can see George in all his magnificence, and if they just pop over to the other side of the chapel, they will also see his mother lying alongside his father, the one who died when he was young, making her claims to being the offspring of five rulers of Europe.

Aaron Manky, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. Four more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.