ABSTRACT
When Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603, Sir Robert Cecil, her secretary, had already smoothed the way for the Scottish King James VI to succeed to the English crown as James I. James ruled until his death in 1625, when his son, Charles, inherited the throne. Historians have traditionally viewed the Jacobean court as licentious and corrupt and James himself as a weak monarch with questionable morals and an overreliance on unworthy upstart favorites like Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham.1 Within the last few decades, efforts have been made to revise this image of James. Scholars like Jenny Wormald, David Bergeron, and Maurice Lee have argued that James was rather a competent king ruling at a difficult time.2 Historians have also explored further the conditions that made the Jacobean court seem a place of immorality, such as reputed drunkenness of king and courtiers, James’s homosexuality, and a series of lurid scandals involving some of the most powerful people at court as their evidence.3 However, they have not sufficiently investigated the impact that the gender and marital status of the new sovereign had on the sexual behavior of the nobility that lived and worked in and around his court, and, consequently, on the perception of the Jacobean court as a whole.
