The Six Loves of James I

 

 

In the last few decades some really amazing authors have begun writing about the Stuart dynasty. The abundance of Tudor biographies and novels have led to an interest in the family which succeeded them on the throne of England. While the Tudors were wily politicians, they were continually challenged when it came to male heirs. Because Margaret, the oldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, married James IV of Scotland, her Stuart descendants became the heirs of the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland and of the principality of Wales. James VI of Scotland, son of the murdered Mary Stuart, was de facto heir of the last Tudor, Elizabeth I. He became James I of England. Gareth Russell's fascinating biography of this brilliant and complicated man is a must-read for anyone venturing into the upheavals and achievements of the seventeenth century. Mr. Russell is known for his painstaking research of primary sources as well as for his witty and entertaining prose. This must be at least the tenth work among his several books and plays that I have read.

James I was a series of contradictions. A peaceful man, he was haunted by violence from the womb, when a Scottish lord held a pistol to his mother's pregnant stomach during a palace coup. He survived the violent deaths of both his parents as well as attempts upon his own life, in addition to kidnappings. Yet what damaged him most was the harsh, unloving and even brutal treatment he received as a motherless child from those entrusted with his upbringing. When he finally had a his own wife and family, he loved his Anna, and saw to the thorough education of his children. He was nevertheless constantly becoming infatuated with a series of handsome young men. 

A scholar of Hebrew and Greek, James presided over the translation of the Bible into the English, known as the "King James version." Famous for writing works of theology, he was also notorious for rowdy and boisterous banquets at which he became drunk, while making and laughing at coarse oaths. A persecutor of Catholics, he also insisted on the Anglican liturgy being uniform and dignified, with vestments and candles, which the Calvinists saw as papist. A prosecutor of witches, as a matter of conscience, he would then scandalize the court by showing public affection for his boyfriend of the moment. It was James I's elevation of his favorite, George Villiers, as Duke of Buckingham, while treating him practically as a member of the Royal Family, that prepared the way for Buckingham to be a fixture at the court of James' son, Charles I. Unfortunately, the role Buckingham played in the government of Charles, particularly as perceived by the people, weakened the royal authority.

From Folger Shakespeare Library:

“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is all too often overlooked or even mocked for the same reasons. Yet James I was a multifaceted ruler who led a fascinating life—and his personal relationships only add to that complexity.

For generations, historians avoided labeling the intimate relationships between James and his “favorites” as romantic. But after combing through James’s personal correspondence, historian and author Gareth Russell has uncovered compelling evidence of five significant love affairs with men. His award-winning book, The Six Loves of James I, reveals how these relationships—and his marriage to Queen Anna of Denmark*—guided the course of his life and reign.

James I’s story is a turbulent one, filled with assassination attempts, kidnapping, and witch hunts. It’s also a story of a man who loved “indiscreetly and obstinately,” for better or for worse. In this episode, Gareth Russell explores the untold history of a complicated king through the lens of the great loves of his life. (Read more.)

 

The Six Loves is available HERE.

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Catherine Herridge Uncovers Shocking Revelations About The Biden Family

 From Zero Hedge:

Herridge, a veteran Emmy-winning investigative reporter, has previously pursued stories on the Hunter Biden laptop, the Biden family's foreign business dealings, and related corruption allegations - reporting that put her at odds with CBS leadership and the broader media consensus.

In February 2024 she was among those laid off in a round of cuts. CBS then seized her reporting files, including materials involving confidential sources. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Herridge described the seizure in stark terms: "When my records were seized I felt it was a journalistic rape."

She added that "CBS News' decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization" and that "When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes your reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism."

She has maintained that she simply "reported out the facts of the story. I called balls and strikes." The network eventually returned the files under pressure from the House Judiciary Committee and her union.

Earlier, during the 2020 campaign, the Biden team had already labeled her a "partisan, rightwing hack." Her treatment fits a pattern of institutional pushback against journalists who refused to look away from the Biden family's financial ties.

Those ties have been documented for years. House Oversight Committee investigations, led by Chairman James Comer, obtained bank records and witness accounts showing Chinese Communist Party-linked money flowing to Biden family members.

Comer stated that the documents demonstrated the family had received funds from CCP-connected entities and that family members "attempted to sell access & influence around the world." (Read more.)

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The Agony of The Odyssey

 From Paul du Quenoy at Chronicles:

“Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school teacher Heather Levine tweeted in 2020, responding to a post from a fellow “scholar-educator” who called Homer’s epic poem “trash.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the teachers were part of an online group of left-wing activist educators who tried to get Homer’s epic and other classics of Western literature banned from classrooms because of their supposedly racist, sexist, and ableist contents.

These undoubtedly enlightened purveyors of knowledge have yet to register any reaction to this summer’s blockbuster release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s film, which he co-produced with his wife Emma Thomas and for which he wrote the script, debases The Odyssey so cheaply that Hellenophobic New England schoolmarms might well be pleased, assuming they are not too triggered to see the film.

Nolan was on tap to direct Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad executed more than two decades ago by Wolfgang Petersen, but the studio eased Nolan out of the project, giving him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Nolan has said in interviews that at the time, he felt ill-prepared to tackle The Iliad. He only conceived his Odyssey project in 2024, after the stunning success of Oppenheimer, his disjointed biopic of the troubled atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. According to interviews, Nolan kept the subject of his next film secret for nearly a year while he read several translations of Homer’s epic, along with various related media, apparently including comic book adaptations.

Perhaps naturally, Nolan contextualized The Odyssey within his larger oeuvre of feature films, many of which, including Memento, Interstellar, and his Batman trilogy, relate existential quests involving emotionally tortured men who suffer from familial loss. From that perspective, Homer’s epic—a hero’s 10-year voyage home from a distant battlefield to a faithful but beleaguered family—may have seemed a natural fit. Nolan had the time, money, and opportunity to make a stirring and searching literary adaptation of great significance, if for no other reason than that a serious film adaptation of The Odyssey hasn’t been undertaken since Italian director Mario Camerini’s flawed 1954 attempt in technicolor, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas. (Read more.)

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Narrative Icons

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

One of the most useful distinctions made by people who analyse art is between an image that simply presents something, and an image that tells a story. A portrait of a king, a still life of a bowl of fruit, a simple landscape, or an icon of Christ Pantocrator asks us to contemplate a single subject. They are essentially static images, like a single object in a dark room under a spotlight. Nothing is happening, and nothing is about to happen. It’s just Him and you.

But iconography is about making a visual statement about some eternal reality, even when the image itself is a story being told. We are all familiar with the single-figure icons of course, but there are narrative icons as well. The Nativity icon is a good example of this, where a single image will have several elements of a story presented as if they’re all happening at the same visual “time”1. The format here is to have the most important thing - the Nativity itself - in the centre, with all the side adventures going on around it.

This is called “continuous narrative,” in which the same characters appear multiple times within a single image to depict successive moments in a story. Time is compressed into one pictorial space. But instead of reading left-to-right like a comic strip, the viewer follows the action throughout the composition.

This technique goes back to classical Roman art (for example, Trajan’s Column) and was taken east by Byzantine artists, where it became especially common in manuscript illumination, fresco cycles, and some icons. (Read more.)

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Blame Democrats, Not ICE, for Recent Deadly Shootings

 From Chronicles:

In the wake of recent shootings in Texas and Maine, President Trump’s mass deportation campaign hit another wall. Over the past week, two men, one from Mexico and another from Colombia, were killed during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops.

ICE says that both of the two men, Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, were in the country illegally, but that they were not the intended targets of ICE’s operations. Critics have used these cases of mistaken identity to impugn ICE and Trump’s efforts to secure the nation’s interior. In response, ICE temporarily paused vehicle stops across the country.

However, President Trump on Wednesday used TruthSocial to reverse that policy, writing, “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Fatal shootings by ICE, while unfortunate, are rare. Considering the scale of ICE’s operations, the number of fatalities during these inherently dangerous operations has been very low. ICE agents have been making hundreds of arrests each day across the nation for the last 18 months, and ramped up to 2,000 arrests per day in June. Despite the intensity of its operations and the fierce public backlash, there have been only 11 deaths related to ICE enforcement operations during Trump’s second term beginning January 2025. That is compared an average of 800 people killed in the U.S. every year by police and other law enforcement officers. And yet, left-wing newspapers like The Guardian quote pro-immigrant activists about “terrifying new levels” of ICE violence. (Read more.)

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Cholera in the Mid-1800's

We recall the death of Charles X from cholera as told in the novel Madame Royale. From Geri Walton:

These 22 rules were then summed up by the author:

“By timely adoption of simple means such as these, Cholera or any other epidemic will be made to lose its venom; so true is it that ‘internal sanatory arrangements, and not quarantine and sanatory lines, are the safeguards of nations.'”

While Victorians may have thought this good advice, the bacterium responsible for Cholera was not isolated until 1854 by an Italian anatomist. Even then its exact nature was still unknown. Ultimately, attempts at understanding cholera fell upon the shoulders of a German physician and pioneering microbiologist named Robert Koch. Koch determined in 1884 that the causative agent of cholera was Vibrio cholerae. Despite his discovery and despite Cholera inoculations for humans occurring in 1885 and a Cholera vaccine being developed in July of 1892, Cholera pandemics continued to exist into the early twentieth century. (Read more.)

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Isabel of Castile and Chess

From Nobility:

Today, the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board, but it was not always this way. Nor was this piece always called “Queen.” It was the King’s “adviser,” so in the Kingdom of Bengal (India), it was called the mantri (minister); in Persia, the Vazīr (vizir); in the Arabic world, Wazīr/Firz (vizier); in Turkey, vezir; but an improvement was made when chess was brought to Catholic medieval Europe. Players began referring to this piece as the “queen,” since its initial position was right next to the king, making them the royal couple. The queen was one of the weaker pieces though. She moved just one square at a time, diagonally at that, making her less powerful than today’s bishop.

All this changed with Isabella the Catholic’s dramatic intervention in the siege of Baza, in 1489, seven years into her ten-year war of reconquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada.

Her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon, was one of the best generals of his time and he had excellent generals helping him in this siege, but it all seemed “a bridge too far.” The city was too powerful, defended by a strong, 20,000-man garrison, and well provisioned to withstand the longest siege. The Catholic troops and artillery seemed woefully disproportional to the task and after six months of siege warfare, the King called his generals to a council of war, and they recommended lifting the siege and withdrawing. Before striking camp, however, Ferdinand sent a messenger to Isabella who was then at Jaen, 90 miles away. She sent back word that a retreat would demoralize all Spain. They should continue the siege and she would go herself to their assistance.

The Queen’s arrival at the camp sent the Crusaders into transports of joy and enthusiasm, while inside Baza, the Muslim garrison despaired, seeing in her arrival the fatal seal of impending doom. Three weeks later they surrendered and were given all the honors of war.

As the news of Baza’s fall was carried everywhere, the Crusaders’ enthusiasm at Isabella’s arrival at their camp reverberated throughout Spain, and among the manifestations of joy, the rules of chess were changed, with the Queen becoming a most powerful piece, sweeping and majestic in her moves. A few years later, Luis Ramírez de Lucena enshrined the new rules in Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez, the oldest printed book on chess we have today, and the new rules were here to stay. (Read more.)

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Persecution: Dems Target Christians Again

 From The Western Journal:

Roman Catholic nuns are engaged in a legal battle with New York over a state law encouraging terminally ill patients to end their lives. Becket, a law firm that tackles cases of religious freedom, filed suit last Friday. The group is asking a federal court to block the law before it goes into effect Aug. 5. Just The News said the groups represented in the suit are numerous: Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Little Sisters of the Poor, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, Diocese of Rockville Centre and its Bishop John Barres, and other orders.

The outlet noted the law in question is the New York Medical Aid in Dying Act.

A short description of the law describes it as a way for “a terminally ill, mentally capable adult with a prognosis of 6 months or less to live to have the option to request, obtain and decide to ingest medication to die peacefully in their sleep if suffering is unbearable.”

Becket said the groups it represents cannot prescribe suicide drugs in accordance with their faith, nor can they direct patients in how to obtain them or facilitate a suicide in any way. Becket argued the law will require them to do so.

“Beginning August 5, any healthcare provider who declines to prescribe suicide pills could still have to tell terminally ill patients about their ‘right’ to kill themselves, help them meet the requirements for obtaining suicide pills, and direct them to a provider willing to prescribe the lethal drugs. Refusal invites significant fines, license revocation, or even time behind bars. (Read more.)

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The Sin of Cultural Misrepresentation Does Not Apply to Western Culture

 From Chronicles:

If any proof is needed to show that the entire progressive edifice is nothing but a strategically deployed façade designed to subvert Western culture, one needn’t look very far to find it. Still, a recent article published in Variety goes out of its way to demonstrate it. 

The piece focuses on Disney’s new live-action version of the children’s story Moana. The original 2016 animated film is a classic hero’s journey—and notably, it’s one of the few modern Disney movies that didn’t give in to the prevailing trope of treating its female lead like a girl boss to demonstrate that she is, thereby, worthy of the audience’s respect. But instead of just letting a great Polynesian story remain a compelling adventure on its own terms, Disney treats the culture the original film depicted like it’s too fragile to exist in a live-action version without the intervention of DEI box-ticking commissars. 

Instead of art, we now get identitarian policing. Experts like Dr. Grant Muãgututi’a were brought in to micromanage every piece of minutiae—from the scenery, communication, and dance moves to Moana’s specific mannerisms and traditional Mãori tribal tattoos. Everything had to be vetted—in Muãgututi’a’s words—“to ensure the tradition of respect within the culture was accurately reflected.”

Now, I have no problem with minority actors being cast in roles that authentically represent their backgrounds. We’ve come a long way, and I think we can all agree that it was ridiculous—and, admittedly, pretty hilarious—it was to see Sean Connery “Japanified” in his James Bond role or Fisher Stevens affect an exaggerated Indian accent in Short Circuit. 

But for the past decade, the Western canon has been at the mercy of revisionists and ideologues who would rather shoehorn identity politics into these stories than create anything original. This has led to the relentless race-swapping of established historical and mythological characters—yet this progressive obsession with “representation” only ever seems to flow in one direction. (Read more.)

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