ABSTRACT
‘James I slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was, thus, a Bad King.’ This famous judgement from 1066 And All That reflects a tradition of writing about James that can be traced to the memoirs of renegade courtiers who fought for parliament in the civil war. Sir Anthony Weldon’s memorable and stylish Character of King James, published posthumously in 1650, is justly famous, a portrait smeared with malice because its author had been sacked from a lucrative Court office for writing a libel against the Scots [28]. When, in the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott published a Secret History of the reign [25], he reprinted the salacious backstairs gossip of Weldon and Sir Francis Osborne, ignoring the more sober contemporary histories of William Sanderson and Godfrey Goodman [10; 22], both of whom had written in refutation of such slanders. The first of the Stuarts received little help from royalists like Sir John Oglander and the Earl of Clarendon, who sought to excuse the blunders of Charles I by throwing blame for his troubles on his father. An image of James I as a slobbering, cowardly, tactless Scot and a Bad King was planted firmly in the popular mind by Scott’s novel The Fortunes of Nigel, which enjoyed immense popularity at the end of the nineteenth century.
