Abstract
As we have seen, Alan Bray and other early historians of homosexuality following in his footsteps argued that sodomy was viewed as a monstrous sin in seventeenth-century England, so monstrous in fact that the English would have had difficulty equating it with anything they observed in the ordinary lives of themselves or their neighbours. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to find Sir Simonds D’Ewes using the word ‘sodomy’ in connection with James. D’Ewes considers sodomy a sin, and expects God to inflict ‘some horrible punishment’ for this form of wickedness. But he is thinking in terms of ordinary human beings, not witches, papists or atheists. Moreover, although sodomy was a sin ‘amongst Christians not to be named’, D’Ewes does name it and does recognize it when he sees it, even in his king (although he discreetly refers to James in the abstract or impersonally as ‘the prince’, as if it would be too disrespectful or dangerous to express himself more directly). Finally, what we find in D’Ewes’s diary is not tacit acceptance, but explicit disapproval.1
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Notes and References
Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 3–23.
Elisabeth Bourcier (ed.), The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1622 – 1624) (Paris, 1974), pp. 92–3.
Bourcier, Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, p. 101. Three months later a ‘Dr. White’ was imprisoned, but he may not be the same person. Norman E. McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), II, 473.
Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal, 25, no. 4 (1982), 805–25 and
Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), chapter 5.
Gordon Williams (ed.), A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London, 1994), II, 577–9;
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), p. 65;
James M. Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1986), pp. 1–3. For Ganymede in the Middle Ages, see chapter 9, ‘The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages’, in
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago, 1980), pp. 243–68. For artistic representations of the Ganymede myth, see
Gerda Kempter, Ganymed: Studien zur Typologie, Ikonographie und Ikonologie (Cologne, 1980).
Carl Miller, Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre’s Hidden History (London, 1996), p. 177.
Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago, 1991), pp. 191–2, 195–6.
Smith (ibid., pp. 206–8) discusses one major example, Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage. See also Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, 1992), pp. 126–35. For other examples, see Bray, Homosexuality, pp. 16, 33, 52, 54, 60.
W. Douglas Hamilton (ed.), Original Papers Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Milton (London, 1859), p. 67. ‘The Warre of the Gods’ was brought to my attention by Bruce Smith in Homosexual Desire, pp. 202–3 and 307 n. 19. I have subsequently read the original in the commonplace book of Tobias Alston, among the Osborne manuscripts (b197) in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. Quotations are from pages 112–13 of Alston’s book. There appears to be sexual innuendo about Buckingham and James in another poem in Alston’s collection: ‘A Proper New Song made of those that Comenst [Commenced] the King being at Cambridge, December 1624’ on pages 48–54.
The French ambassador’s dispatches have been published in German and translated from the German, into English. For the German, see Friedrich von Raumer, Briefe aus Paris zur Erlauterung der Geschichte des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1831), II, 276–7. For the English translation, see Frederick von Raumer, History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Illustrated by Original Sources, [trans. H.E. Lloyd] (London, 1835), II, 219–20.
Robert Shepard, ‘Sexual Rumours in English Politics: The Cases of Elizabeth I and James I’, in Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (eds), Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto, 1996), p. 112.
Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of James I (London, 1849), II, 266;
Dale B. Randall, Jonson’s Gypsies Unmasked (Durham, NC, 1975), pp. 177–8.
The pamphlet was Tom Tell Troath, discussed below. James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London, 1845), I, 191–2.
Corona Regia (1615), pp. 68, 89, 90–2, 104–5. Winfried Schleiner, ‘Sciopius’ Pen against the English King’s Sword: The Political Function of Ambiguity and Anonymity in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature’, Renaissance and Reformation, 26 (1990), 271–84 and ‘“That Matter Which Ought Not To Be Heard Of”: Homophobic Slurs in Renaissance Cultural Politics’, Journal of Homosexuality, 26, no. 4 (1994), 62–5. I am grateful for correspondence on this subject with Professor Schleiner who, most recently, was inclining to doubt that Schoppe was the author of Corona Regia. See also
David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (Oxford, 1956), pp. 238–9; Logan Pearsall Smith (ed.), The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (Oxford, 1966), II, 88, 91–3, 280–1;
J.P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 59–60.
Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Downshire Preserved at Easthampstead Park Berks (London, 1940), IV, 443, 503.
Joseph Cady, ‘The “Masculine Love” of the “Princes of Sodom” “Practicing the Art of Ganymede” at Henri Ill’s Court: The Homosexuality of Henry III and His Mignons in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-Journaux’, in Murray and Konrad, Desire and Discipline, pp. 140–1. I am grateful to the author for this reference and other assistance. See also Keith Cameron, Henry III: A Maligned or Malignant King? (Exeter, 1978), pp. 17–19, 81–4.
Marlowe’s Edward the Second in Havelock Ellis (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: Five Plays (New York, 1956), pp. 270, 276, 279, 282, 300.
Modern scholars disagree about the sodomitical or homosexual content of Marlowe’s Edward II. John M. Berdan, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II’, Philological Quarterly 3 (1924), 197–207; Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation, pp. 48–77, 56–7 n. 46;
Stephen Orgel, ‘Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?’, in Ronald R. Butters and others (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture (Durham, NC, 1989), p. 25; Joseph A. Porter, ‘Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Canonization of Heterosexuality’, in the same anthology, pp. 127–48; Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, issue 29 (Spring 1990), 9–10; Miller, Stages of Desire, pp. 171–90. Two recent and complex analyses of the subject can be found in Goldberg, Sodometries, pp. 114–26 and Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, pp. 209–23. Compare also chapter 4 of
Mario Digangi’s The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 1997). Digangi’s book came to my attention after I had completed my own manuscript. We discuss several of the same themes but interpret them very differently.
Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence, KS, 1973), pp. 15–16, 44–5.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Elizabeth, Lady Falkland, and the Authorship of Edward II’, in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 317–20;
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (eds), The Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1917), III, 1150–1.
W.J. Smith (ed.), Herbert Correspondence: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Letters of the Herberts of Chirbury, Powis Castle and Dolguog, formerly at Powis Castle in Montgomeryshire (Cardiff, 1963), I, 74. Sir Simonds D’Ewes wrote that Yelverton ‘laid open…so many of the Marquis’s inordinate actions, comparing him to the Spencers, that misled King Edward the Second’.
James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London, 1845), I, 186.
S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (London, 1862), p. 121.
Moses Hadas (ed.), The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York, 1942), pp. 144–227, especially pp. 144–5, 168–9, 178, 183, 189–90.
Joseph Gavorse (ed.), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (New York, 1959), pp. 145–6.
Ben Jonson, Sejanus His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Manchester, 1990), pp. 16–22.
Philip J. Finkelpearl, ‘“The Comedians’ Liberty”: Censorship of the Jacobean Stage Reconsidered’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (Winter 1986), 128.
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 92–111;
Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984), pp. 49–57;
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (London, 1983), pp. 68–70, 142, 176–7; Smith, Homosexual Desire, pp. 203–4;
Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1990), pp. 131–7;
Martin Butler, ‘Ben Jonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 1993), pp. 91–115.
S.R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642 (London, 1883–84, 1894–96), IV, 296.
Deuteronomy 23:18 states that one should not bring the ‘price’ (Authorized Version) or the ‘wages’ (Revised Standard Version) of a dog into the house of the Lord for payment. See also Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 28, 158–9 n. 30.
Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 126–8, 162–5, 269–95. See especially p. 285.
David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. Thomas Thomson (Edinburgh, 1843), IV, 8.
Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), p. 66.
Allen B. Hinds and others (eds), Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice (London, 1864–1940), XVII, 438. Hereafter cited as CSPV.
Jennifer Brady, ‘Fear and Loathing in Marlowe’s Edward II’, in Carol Levin and Karen Robertson (eds), Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama (Lewiston, NY, 1991), p. 179.
I follow the common practice here of referring to the process used against Bacon as an impeachment. Technically it was one stage in the evolution of that process which had not yet been fully developed or named as such. See Colin G.C. Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature in Early Stuart England (London, 1974). See also
Jonathan Marwil, The Trials of Counsel: Francis Bacon in 1621 (Detroit, MI, 1976). For this Parliament in general, see
Robert Zaller, The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict (Berkeley, 1971).
Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 112–13.
Oliver Lawson Dick (ed.), Aubrey’s Brief Lives (London, 1950), p. 11.
The Victorian editor of D’Ewes’s autobiography omitted much of this language on the grounds that it was ‘too gross for publication’. Halliwell, Autobiography, I, 191–2. Alan Bray recovered the excised portion from the original manuscript in the British Museum and printed it in his ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship’, p. 14. The full text taken from an obscure eighteenth-century printing is now more handily available in Ian McCormick (ed.), Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing (London, 1997), pp. 52–3.
Nieves Mathews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (New Haven, 1996), p. 309.
Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ, 1998), pp. 12–14.
Neil Cuddy, ‘The Conflicting Loyalties of a “vulger counselor”: The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597–1624’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 121–50; Gardiner, History, IV, 126, 133, 137.
Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I (London, 1858), III, 269. One ‘boy’ Southampton may have had in mind was Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, with whom he had quarrelled in 1610. DNB, IX, 659.
Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 68 (October 1995), 276 and ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, vol. 1 (1991), 46;
Roger Lockyer, ‘An English Valido? Buckingham and James I’, in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (eds), For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986), p. 51.
Lisa Jardine, ‘Boy Actors, Female Roles, and Elizabethan Eroticism’, in David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York, 1991), pp. 62–3.
Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 666.
In addition to Neil Cuddy’s ‘Confliciting Loyalties’, cited above, see also Richard C. McCoy, ‘Old English Honour in an Evil Time: Aristocratic Principle in the 1620s’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 133–55.
David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), p. 27, quoting William Trumbull.
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© 2000 Michael B. Young
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Young, M.B. (2000). Base Fellows. In: King James and the History of Homosexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514898_4
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