The Six Loves of James I

Historian and novelist Russell (The Palace) winnows fact from fiction in this peppery, humane look at the complex love life of a regent known for his controversies and scandals. Russell begins with the monarch’s turbulent childhood, charting his upbringing and ascension despite failed coups, “sadistic” tutors, and multiple traumatizing family deaths. Enlisting a deep bench of first and secondhand sources, Russell traces how the king’s political and sexual consciousness developed through connections with “favorites,” though he argues that some of James’s plausible youthful love affairs with these favorites rest on circumstantial evidence at best. (For instance, the king’s exact connection to Esme Stuart—“onto whom James latched as an adolescent”—Russell finds impossible to determine.) But as James comes into power in England, so too, Russell shows, does his heart; Russell reconstructs James’s adult romances with six favorites, including “chief favorite” Alexander Lindsay; James’s “remarkable” wife, Queen Anna of Denmark; and most movingly, Lord George Villiers, James’s “great love” and companion of a decade. In urbane and sometimes salacious prose, Russell shows James for all his faults and favors (he’s a “superb huntsman” with a “filthy” sense of humor and an unfortunately murderous tolerance for witch-hunting), with an eye to debunking the crueler myths around his private life as the product of the era’s homophobia. It’s a sly, precise, and persuasive biography, fit for both gleeful gossips and students of Jacobean history. (Dec.)