Memory

Abstract

While James lived, he was subjected to countless unfavourable comparisons with Queen Elizabeth ‘of blessed memory’. In the reign of his son Charles there was no such nostalgia for James. For the most part, there was discreet silence. After the civil war and execution of Charles, however, memories of James and his court did resurface in a series of historical and polemical works. These works afford us an opportunity to examine how James’s sexual relations with other males were remembered and represented. Of course, the factual accuracy of these representations is suspect, but in some ways that only makes them more interesting. What we want to examine is how these works treat the subject of King James’s sexuality. What aspects do these polemical tracts choose to exaggerate, omit, distort? What attitudes do they reveal? What words do they use? What constructions of sexuality are implied by these words? In these tracts we find people discoursing about, or (in today’s jargon) ‘writing’, sex. By examining these works as discourse, we can learn more about the way in which sex between males was construed or constructed in the middle of the seventeenth century. This will help us to determine how much sodomy dominated the discourse, what other less monstrous ways there were for thinking about sex between males, and whether supposedly ‘modern’ constructions were already taking shape.