Who Killed James VI and I?

The accusation that James VI of Scotland and I of England was murdered by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, may have been a false one but it was widely believed.

A portrait of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, by Lawrence Hilliard, c. 1600-1625. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

The veteran diplomat Sir Balthazar Gerbier addressed a short treatise to Prince Charles in June 1648, explaining why things had gone so badly wrong for the Stuarts. The dynasty, he noted, had been beset by dangerously scandalous tracts penned by ‘spirits of Delusion’. He thought that among those ‘Libels’ was ‘one more Eminent than the rest’, a short tract from 1626, in which an ‘inraged Scotsman, Eglesham, a professor of Phisick’ had made ‘a report of the practice of Poisoning in the Court of England’. At first glance, it seems puzzling that, at the height of the crisis of the English Revolution, Gerbier’s attentions should be focused on a pamphlet that was now more than two decades old. Modern scholars have scarcely noticed George Eglisham’s The Forerunner of Revenge. Its most sensational allegation – that the king’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham had poisoned James I – seems preposterous. Yet Gerbier believed that Eglisham, that ‘inraged Scotsman’, had inflicted serious damage on royal authority and that he was continuing to do so years later.

Most contemporaries knew of the charge and a significant number of them believed it. There was no denying its potency. It had played a central role in the impeachment of Buckingham in 1626 and helped inspire and justify his assassination in 1628. Most remarkable – and clearly to the fore in Gerbier’s meditations – was the charge’s resurrection in early 1648, when Parliament had reworked Eglisham’s accusations to implicate Charles I in his father’s murder. This allegation about the death of James I haunted the prolonged political turmoil in 1648 that culminated in Charles I’s trial and execution in January 1649. The alleged murder of one king helped contemporaries imagine and justify the beheading of another.

Frustrated at their inability to persuade Charles I to agree to a negotiated settlement after the second Civil War, the House of Commons voted in early January 1648 to end talks with the king. The House appointed a committee to draft a declaration justifying this dramatic decision that Royalists feared would make a ‘Bonfire of Monarchy’.

When it appeared in February 1648, the Declaration explained why Parliament felt compelled to end negotiations with the king, rehearsing the various proposed settlements that Charles had rejected and assembling a laundry list of his numerous crimes, most of them committed during the Civil Wars. But the Declaration led the attack on Charles with a new twist on an old accusation. Even before the final draft had been approved, the Venetian ambassador had heard the reports: the Declaration would charge either that Charles I had ‘hastened the death of his father by poison or that Buckingham attempted it with his consent’. 

Sir Balthazar Gerbier, print by by Thomas Chambars after Sir Anthony Van Dyck, c. 18th century. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Public Domain.
Sir Balthazar Gerbier, print by by Thomas Chambars after Sir Anthony Van Dyck, c. 18th century. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Public Domain.

James I had died at his palace at Theobalds in late March 1625. At the time he had first fallen ill, earlier that month, the court was tense, shaken by ongoing arguments between the king, the prince and Buckingham over foreign policy and unnerved by a steady succession of fatal illnesses among the English and Scottish elite. As James sickened, the level of anxiety rose yet further with the death of his cousin, the Marquis of Hamilton, whose corpse began to swell and discolour shortly after his death. A medical report ruled out foul play, but the dramatic post-mortem symptoms encouraged anxious whispers that the marquis had been poisoned. 

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At first, few were seriously worried about the king. His physicians diagnosed tertian fever, which (if properly handled) would pose little danger. After several bed-ridden weeks, James finally seemed on the mend. Then the Earl of Kellie reported from court that something odd had happened that was ‘here much disliked’. On the night of March 21st and 22nd, Buckingham placed a plaster on the king’s chest, ‘after which his Majesty was extremely sick’, and gave him something to drink, all ‘without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctours’. James’ condition immediately deteriorated and the frightened doctors and courtiers in the sickroom exchanged angry recriminations. Five days later, James was dead. Reports of Buckingham’s medical dabbling and the ensuing recriminations circulated both inside and outside the court, but soon began to subside. A year later, however, they would make a startling and more public return. In late April 1626, as the Parliament-men were preparing for Buckingham’s impeachment, a sensational new account of James’ last days, published in a pamphlet ostensibly from Frankfurt, was scattered around London’s streets.

Its author was George Eglisham, a Scottish Catholic physician and poet and a skilled polemicist. Eglisham had lost his post as one of James I’s extraordinary [i.e. unpaid] doctors early in March 1625, after he had tried to orchestrate Hamilton’s deathbed conversion to Rome. Eglisham then fled to Brussels, where his old connections in the Spanish administration encouraged him to publish, in Latin, German and English editions, his lurid accusations about ‘the practice of poisoning in the Court of England’. Printed in Brussels but carrying a fake Frankfurt imprint, the English edition was called The Forerunner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham

The Forerunner vividly portrayed Buckingham’s systematic murder of a host of rival courtiers, using a cunning poison designed by a sinister ‘poisonmonger-mountebank’. This poison, Eglisham avowed, had caused the startling distortion of Hamilton’s corpse, which ‘began to swell in such sort that his thighs were as big as six times their natural proportion, [and] his belly … as big as the belly of an ox’, while blisters, ‘some white, some black, some red, some yellow, some green, some blue’, covered his skin and ‘blood mixed with froth of divers colors a yard high’ poured from his mouth and nose.    

Eglisham reworked the murky rumours about James’ final days into a murder allegation: Buckingham had quarrelled with James over foreign policy and needed the king out of the way. As James lay in his sickbed, Buckingham had waited until the doctors were at dinner and then given the king a glass of wine with a white powder in it. Overcome
with ‘many soundings and pains’, James exclaimed: ‘O this white powder, this white powder! would to God I had never taken it, it will cost my life.’ Buckingham then applied a plaster to James’ chest and ‘his Maiesty grew faint, short breathed and in great agony’. The king died shortly afterwards and, when Buckingham asked the attending physicians to certify that he had given the King ‘a good and safe medicine’, they declined. Meanwhile, ‘the kings body and head swelled above measure’.      

This cunning work of Habsburg-sponsored disinformation was designed to embroil English domestic politics in conflict and it succeeded all too well. For three days in late April 1626 Parliament interrogated the royal physicians about the events in James’ sickroom. Although one doctor reported that James had reacted to Buckingham’s remedies by asking ‘will you murder me and slay me?’, the testimony only made things murkier, for it revealed that many had sampled Buckingham’s potion and that the duke’s servant, Mr Baker, had eaten some of the plaster. Nevertheless Buckingham had clearly acted without the doctors’ approval and with no consideration for the suitability and timing of his remedies, which had been prepared at his request by an obscure physician from Essex. The hearings also unearthed hints of Buckingham’s relationship with Piers Butler, an eccentric Irishman who reportedly distilled poison from toads. Some in the Commons thought the evidence would support a murder conviction, but the House charged Buckingham only with a ‘transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’ in offering medicine to the king against the physicians’ orders.  

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Forced to defend himself, Buckingham explained that James had ‘commanded me to send for that physic’, that he had refused to apply it until two sick children and Sir James Palmer had first tested it and that, when some began accusing him, the dying king had announced ‘none but devils would speak of any such thing’. The effectiveness of Buckingham’s testimony, however, was undercut a week later when Charles dissolved the Parliament before the Lords had fully considered the impeachment charges. Eglisham’s allegations of poisoning were to tarnish Buckingham’s reputation for the rest of his life. Indeed, after John Felton assassinated Buckingham in 1628, one well-placed observer reported that the assassin had claimed Eglisham’s tract as one of his motivations. 

George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham and favourite of James VI and I,print by Jacobus Houbraken after Cornelius Johnson, c. 1745. Yale Center for British Art; Yale University Art Gallery Collection. Public Domain.
George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham and favourite of James VI and I, print by Jacobus Houbraken after Cornelius Johnson, c. 1745. Yale Center for British Art; Yale University Art Gallery Collection. Public Domain.

When Parliament revived Eglisham’s 1626 accusations in 1648, however, their target was not the long-dead Buckingham, but Charles I. The Forerunner had not directly implicated Charles in Buckingham’s crimes, but Eglisham had appealed to the young king for justice against his father’s murderer and Charles’ steadfast defence of Buckingham in 1626 inevitably raised awkward questions. In May 1626 Charles had briefly imprisoned two Parliament-men because he thought they had hinted at his involvement in James’ murder and ‘if he were not tender of this point of the death of his father’, a councillor explained, ‘he was not worthy to wear the crown’. Charles soon released both men, but contemporaries continued to ponder, albeit quietly, his possible involvement. One man, writing shortly after the dissolution of Parliament, brooded over the 1626 proceedings and The Forerunner before concluding that Charles, if nothing else, was an accomplice after the fact because he had clearly dissolved the session to protect Buckingham from justice. 

Eglisham’s charges long survived in the ‘underground’ manuscript news culture, but late in 1642, shortly after the first Civil War began, possibly as many as six editions of The Forerunner were published in London. This revival included a clever reworking, called Strange Apparitions, which imagined a dramatic confrontation between the ghosts of James, Buckingham and Eglisham. The old king at first refused to believe that his favourite had murdered him, but Buckingham eventually confessed, provocatively adding that soon ‘Time shall produce’ the names of the others involved in James’ murder. These works and later allusions to them helped stiffen the resolve of Parliament’s supporters and their continued use horrified royalist commentators. The revival of Eglisham’s charges early in 1648, however, took them in a far more radical direction.

Chief among the crimes enumerated by Parliament’s Declaration of February 1648 was Charles I’s response to Parliament’s inquest held in 1626 into ‘the Death of His Royal Father’. The Declaration claimed that when Parliament was about to deliver its verdict against Buckingham, Charles had dissolved the session before ‘Justice could be done’. Since the king had never launched his own inquiry into James’ death, the Declaration now concluded that ‘we leave the world … to judge where the guilt of this remains’. Parliament ordered that 5,600 copies of the Declaration be distributed across the realm and onto the Continent. Preachers reportedly read from the text in their pulpits. To second the Declaration, a radical London printer issued an abridged version of Eglisham’s Forerunner, now highlighting James I’s alleged protestation that ‘if His owne sonne should commit Murther ... he would not spare him, but would have him dye for it’. To help contemporaries imagine the inevitable next step, printers issued the first English translations of Vindicae Contra Tyrannos, the controversial 1579 Huguenot justification for the deposition of wicked rulers. The implication of these publications was clear. Charles I was probably involved in his father’s death and parricide was an unforgivable crime.

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Royalists fully appreciated the danger posed by the Declaration’s claims about James I’s murder. One writer rebuked the parliamentarians that ‘if any thing must doe your feat of dis-uniting the hearts of this Kingdom from his Majesty’ it ‘is that which concerned the death of the late king’. The impact on foreign opinion was potentially even more disastrous; Secretary of State Sir Edward Nicholas fretted that ‘nothing in that libel did leave a worse impression among strangers than the particular malicious and false aspersion concerning the death of King James’. While the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus urged its readers to ‘shut your eyes’ and ‘stop your eares’ against the Declaration, a much better response was to attack it and, with Nicholas and Sir Edward Hyde coordinating their efforts from exile, the Royalists mounted an impressive campaign of refutation.

Their newsbooks reacted immediately. One denounced the Declaration and ‘its poison-pointed arrows, to murder Majesty withall’. Another announced that Parliament’s sole goal was to ‘render his Majesty odious’ by charging him with being ‘accessary to [James’] Death’. A third rudely responded by urging the authors of the tract to ‘kiss my bum’. One of the most effective short responses, one that claimed to ‘stop the mouths of all Divelish Detractors’, appeared in Mercurius Elencticus. It demanded that Parliament print all the testimony from the 1626 investigations, which would prove that James had insisted on the irregular treatments, that John Baker had eaten part of the plaster and that James Palmer (among others) had drunk the potion. Moreover the newsbook urged readers to interrogate Palmer and Baker themselves and provided their addresses. To counteract Eglisham’s melodrama, the newsbook employed its own high pathos. James had died in Buckingham’s arms, it reported, and afterwards the duke was so overcome with tears that Palmer had to take ‘the Dukes hand in his, and with his Fingers closed up the Kings eyes’. Nicholas thought this account so powerful that he arranged for it to be reprinted in Dutch and French.

More detailed responses soon appeared in longer books. Dr George Bate, who had attended Charles, directly attacked Eglisham as ‘a man of a cracked Brain’ and ‘bad … Reputation’ and he stressed that, since Eglisham was ‘a Papist’, his malicious motives were abundantly clear. Bate pronounced Buckingham’s treatments ‘innocent’ and delivered ‘out of a good affection’ and he ascribed James’ death to the fever which had ravaged ‘an aged man’ who ‘kept an Ill Diet’ and had ‘an evill constitution’. For his part, Secretary Nicholas emphasised the evidence from 1626, especially Buckingham’s answer to his impeachment, which he challenged Parliament to reprint, and reiterated that the Commons had charged Buckingham and not Charles and that they had accused the duke ‘only of Misdeameanour and a transcedent Presumption, and not of Treason’. Hyde stressed similar points. Buckingham’s ague remedies were the kind that ordinary people believed ‘to do much good’ and that doctors knew ‘can do no hurt’. Hyde insisted, too, that ‘there was nothing administered to the King, without the privity of the Physicians and His own Importunate desire and Command’. As for Eglisham, he was an ‘infamous ... Papist’ with ‘an ambition to be taken notice of as an Enemy to the Duke’. Hyde added that Eglisham had eventually confessed his ‘Villainy’ and died with ‘great penitence’. Finally, all of these Royalist responses stressed that, when the doctors had opened James’ corpse for embalming, they found no evidence of poison: Eglisham’s claim of tell-tale swellings was false.  

The Royalist campaign against the Declaration was highly sophisticated and it revealed how seriously they took the reinvention of these old allegations about James’ death. But in the radicalised landscape of 1648, the allegations were beyond effective rebuttal. A petition from Leicestershire later that year simply assumed that the Declaration had declared Charles ‘to be guilty of the death of King James’, while another from Rutland flatly charged the king with ‘the death of his father’. As radicals in the army brooded over the blood guilt of Charles Stuart, the Declaration powerfully suggested that the king had more than just his subjects’ blood on his hands.

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Talk of the murder of James I continued in the run-up to Pride’s Purge and Charles I’s trial. A radical newsbook noted in September 1648 that Parliament had charged Charles ‘with all the blood that had been shed by this War’ and then added ‘the death of his father King James’, too. When the army justified its intervention to prevent Parliament from reopening dealings with the king, it took the claims of the Declaration as part of its warrant and, in December, the Parliament-men that were left after the purge led by Colonel Pride all swore to their faith in the document. Another late 1648 tract charged Charles of dissolving the 1626 session, ‘lest his fathers death should be inquired into (fearing that himself might be found too much concerned in it)’. Not surprisingly,

many observers assumed that a charge of ‘Murder and Parricide’ would appear in the indictment being drawn up against the king. Fragmentary evidence suggests that some involved in framing the indictment were eager ‘to blacken him, what we can’ and thus to include a review of his entire reign. Eventually, the High Court of Justice opted for a much briefer document, focusing on Charles’ actions in the 1640s. But the murder of James I had not been forgotten.  

At his trial, Charles refused to recognise the court’s authority or to offer a plea, thus negating the prosecution’s requirement to fully present its case. Shortly after Charles’ execution, John Cook, the High Court’s prosecutor, published King Charls His Case, which contained the speech he had intended to make if the king had entered a plea. His book revealed that Cook had planned to discuss ‘the Death of King James’ to aggravate the charge of tyranny against Charles. Following the script set out by the 1648 Declaration, Cook noted that Charles had ‘no justice to do justice’ even ‘to his own Father’. He had dissolved the 1626 Parliament in order to protect Buckingham ‘and would never suffer any legal inquiry to be made for his Fathers death’. Cook then put the case to his readers that ‘there is one accused upon strong presumptions at the least, for poisoning that Kings Father’ and yet ‘the King protects him from justice’. What could explain this? Clearly Charles had acted ‘to conceal a Murder’ and this ‘strongly implies a guilt thereof’ and so he was probably ‘a kind of Accessory to the fact’.

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Stories of James I’s murder were to long outlive his son. The partisans of the new English republic appropriated Eglisham’s charges in their propaganda campaign to tarnish monarchy. Eikon Alethine, a response to Charles’ bestselling Eikon Basilike, dismissed the dead king’s alleged commitment to justice by reminding readers of ‘the dissolving the Parliament, for questioning the Duke of Buckingham for poisoning his Father, when he was bound by all ties of justice and Nature, to have heard them’. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton cited Charles’ actions in 1626 to protect Buckingham when he was charged with ‘no less than poisoning the deceased King his Father’. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton likened Charles to Nero: thus, just as the emperor had killed his mother with a sword, ‘Charles did the same with poison to his father’. Sir Anthony Weldon, John Hall, Sir Edward Peyton, William Lilly, Sir Arthur Wilson and the newsbook editor extraordinaire, Marchamont Nedham all took James’ murder and Charles’ involvement in it as a given and they played endless variations on Eglisham’s themes, which soon became the leitmotif of their collective project to vilify the entire Stuart dynasty. In this black legend of the Stuart family, Mary Stuart had murdered her husband; James I had killed his eldest son, Henry; and Charles I had poisoned his father. This trail of murder had provoked God’s righteous anger against the English and Scottish monarchy. As the preface to Weldon’s book warned, those who still supported the Stuarts should ‘take heed how they side with this bloody House, lest they be found opposers of Gods purpose, which doubtless is, to lay aside that Family’.

A systematic Royalist counterattack was hampered by the Cromwellian regime’s tightened control over the presses, but Sir William Sanderson’s massive Compleat History of Mary and her son James, published in 1656, vigorously refuted Eglisham and his later admirers. The Marquis of Hamilton, Sanderson insisted, had died not from poison but from excessive drinking and a late night meal of ‘Mushroom Salads’. Sanderson took great pains to dissect what had really happened in James’ sickroom, emphasising the harmless nature of Buckingham’s remedies and James’ determination to try them. He referred readers with any lingering doubts to Baker and Palmer, who could still be ‘examined, with very great satisfaction, to clear that calmny’. The Forerunner itself, he observed, ‘at the first sight is frivolous’, but thorough investigation revealed it to be ‘malacious’ and unworthy of even fleeting attention. By noting Eglisham’s Catholicism, Sanderson, like Bate and Hyde in 1648, stressed that a revolution driven mostly by Scripture-quoting Protestant radicals was in fact based on a work of ‘popish’ disinformation.   

The Restoration of Charles II drove stories of James I’s murder underground, though it continued to fascinate historians into the 19th century.  The eminent Victorian scholar S.R. Gardiner had little patience for the tale, however, dismissing Eglisham’s accusations as ‘worthless’. His brusque dismissal of the story’s significance has cast a long shadow over subsequent scholarship, but Gardiner’s verdict rested in part on a small tract published by Dr Norman Chevers, a physician based in Calcutta, who had become interested in James’ death. Gardiner approvingly cited Chevers’ scientific conclusion that Eglisham’s accusation ‘amounts to absolute falsehood’, but he ignored Chevers’ other major argument: although James I had not been murdered, there was an important history to be written about the belief that he had. Chevers had thus called for ‘a close scrutiny into all that relates to the Eglisham pamphlets’, for this little tract was nothing less than ‘the spark igniting that train which exploded in the Great Rebellion and in the death of King Charles the First upon a scaffold at Whitehall’.      

Chevers overstated his case, but he had an important point to make. Talk and writing about the murder of James I exacerbated the political tensions of the 1620s and the revolutionary dynamics of the 1640s and early 1650s. Contemporaries took it seriously and so it is long past time that historians did so, too. The Forerunner did not cause the English Revolution, but its history does help us better understand the forces that did. Balthazar Gerbier was a notoriously slippery character, trusted by virtually none of his contemporaries, but, like Norman Chevers, he knew that The Forerunner of Revenge was a libel ‘more eminent than the rest’.

 

Alastair Bellany is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Thomas Cogswell is Professor of History at UC Riverside.