Hello Steven – thanks for talking to us a few years on from the publication of The Wisest Fool: The Lavish Life of James VI and I, our Book Club pick for June. In the book, you set out to strip away the myths around the first Stuart King of England – what was the biggest misconception you wanted to challenge?

Thank you! I think the biggest misconception about James – the one that really irritated me and still does, when it makes an appearance – was the idea that he was a (quite literally) dribbling buffoonish coward with a tongue too large for his mouth, terrified of the sight of naked steel and constantly fiddling with his codpiece. It’s an image created after his death in the context of parliamentarian versus royalist propaganda. No one mentioned any of this when he was alive. He was only considered ‘cowardly’ in that he resisted dragging Great Britain into the Thirty Years War, as his policy had long been peace with Spain and the Habsburgs. In terms of his alleged dribbling, his tongue, and his codpiece: no one said he dribbled, no one in his lifetime thought his tongue anything other than perfectly normal (and his eloquent speeches were praised – he was a gifted and frequent rhetorician), and I’m yet to even see a portrait of him wearing a codpiece.

For obvious reasons, he’s often overshadowed by his Tudor predecessor, Elizabeth I, and his son, Charles I – are we guilty of missing just how successful James’ reign actually was? And did that provide the appeal to you as a historian when you set about unearthing the real figure?

Yes, I think that’s exactly it. James was a victim of him own success, particularly in England, where he faced no major rebellions and generally managed relations with parliament (as Elizabeth had done) effectively, if not always harmoniously. In managing to maintain a consistent peace policy until the end of his life, he actually denied himself an ‘Armada moment’ (Elizabeth’s being so gung-ho, we all forget or ignore, was the result of the failure of her peace policy); in managing to talk down parliaments and use blandishments when necessary, he saw no critical conflicts that were unresolvable (unlike his son). An elephant in the room has also been his sexuality. We don’t think of James as a romantic man with a personal life – and perhaps there has been a reticence to explore the nature of his relationships with male favourites until the 1980s at least – but he certainly was and had one. When approaching him, I felt there was a lot to him and his reign – a critical one in the context of British history – that was begging to be woven together into a new narrative. Happily, people seem to have enjoyed it: the reception of The Wisest Fool, as a story as well as a history has been lovely to see.

His childhood was turbulent, to put it mildly, particularly the separation from his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots and the aftermath of the coup that caused her downfall – to what extent did that drive his obsession with family and loyalty?

It’s impossible to overestimate. We accept now that a great deal of anyone’s personality – and our neuroses, and obsessions, and likes and dislikes – are formed in childhood. James’s was odd even by the standards set for royal children of the day. Heirs then were generally raised apart from their parents, but they were still taught to love, revere, and honour them. James, by contrast, was separated from his mother and taught that she was a murderess who’d killed the father he’d never known and who remained an idolatrous threat to his throne. He was, too, surrounded by people who either held him at arm’s length as God’s anointed or were keen to impress on him that he was merely an instrument of God and servant of the Protestant state. I don’t think it’s surprising that a lonely childhood led to an adulthood in which he sought affection and family desperately. It’s one of the endearing aspects of his personality, and he leant into familial language and imagery in his political and personal lives.

You have described James as someone who thrived at portraying himself as the hero and loved shaping his own legend – is it fair to call him a master of political spin, especially around events like the Gunpowder Plot and the Gowrie Plot?

Oh, absolutely – he learned in his early 20s the value of what would now be called ‘shaping the narrative’. We see this in the wake of the North Berwick Witch Trials (when pamphlet literature portrayed him as God’s champion and Satan’s enemy – a boon for a man seeking to be taken seriously as Head of the Kirk); after the Gowrie Conspiracy (where, maybe less successfully, he pushed a narrative in which God had spared him from a bloody end); and after the Gunpowder Plot (the successful sequel to Gowrie’s dry run). James, every bit as much as, say, Elizabeth I (the Virgin Queen; Gloriana) and his mother (the Catholic Martyr) knew how to craft a monarchical identity and adapt it to political events and situations. He self-presented, at various times, as James the Academic; James the Ardent Lover; James the Patriarch; James, Satan’s Adversary; James, God’s Chosen Hero; James, the Sun King.

And, on witchcraft, the topic on which you wrote your book last year, was James a zealot, a product of more superstitious time, or more intellectually engaged than we might otherwise assume? And how much of a difference in attitudes towards the occult between Scotland and England did he find when he moved south to London?

He was definitely intellectually engaged. It’s easy to think of the witchcraft craze as being a kind of regressive throwback and the sign of a mad bigot, but in the period it represented progressive theological thinking about the causes of good and evil (odd and horrifying as it might sound to us). James was actually responding to certain (in Britain generally Protestant) demands for a tougher, harder line on these imaginary enemies of God. English voices were calling for this as much as Scottish ones (hence why England’s Witchcraft Act predated Scotland’s). What differed between the mainland Great British nations was actually James’s attitude not to witchcraft (he remained a confirmed believer – he considered his Daemonologie, published in 1597, the last word on the subject) but to Scotland and England. Having witnessed all kinds of turmoil and deposition and coup attempts in Scottish history, he was convinced his native land had become a devil’s playground: a realm out of order with people a prey to Satan’s snares. By contrast, he thought England’s was a settled state and, by comparison, God’s own country. James was nothing if not an Anglophile.

That moniker, ‘the wisest fool’, has stuck – having observed him at close quarters through writing this book and beyond, does it hold up for you at all?

In a way, yes – but the full historical quote runs ‘the wisest fool in Christendom… wise in small matters but a fool in great ones.’ I’d argue he was the opposite. James could be a fool when it came to small matters – particularly matters of the heart – but he was generally wise when it came to major matters (like the benefits of peace over war, and the necessity of agile, supple politics rather than hard-headed, inflexible ideology).

Finally, if a reader was to come to the book knowing next to nothing about James, what is the one thing about him that will surprise them most?

It is probably that he was such a lover (rather than a fighter!). People who know little about him generally know him as the man behind the King James Bible. They might imagine a pretty dry, scholarly figure. What will probably surprise them is that his life was an absolute soap opera, littered with lovers (male and female) and rich in scandal, sex, and – of course – politics and religion. People are so familiar with all the glitter and sparkle of Elizabeth’s reign – the Golden Age. They might not be expecting to find that James and his wonderful wife, Anna of Denmark, took spectacle and show to levels unseen in any English court before or since. It’s also always reminding people that James wasn’t born in 1603 looking middle-aged. He had a glorious, vigorous youth, with dancing, martial pursuits, running at the ring, etc. We see a lot of drama about the young Henry VIII and the young Elizabeth … we don’t see enough about young James, and this is one of the things in the book people seem to have responded really well to (which is nice!).

And, prolific as you are, we await your forthcoming book with bated breath. Talk us through this latest biography and what to expect from its release in August?

Ha! Thank you! My next biography is called Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII. I’m very proud of it. I’ve always been fascinated by Henry’s story (if appalled by Henry himself) and was keen to tell it. But, naturally, it’s a story we feel we all know. My ‘way in’ was to recontextualise Henry based on challenging some of the ideas that have stuck since Scarisbrick’s influential 1960s political biography: chiefly that the king was disinterested in the British Isles and his goals were predominantly fixed on France. This is not the Henry that I met in contemporary sources, particularly overlooked Scottish, Welsh, and Irish ones. That Henry was not just a France-obsessed King of England but a would-be emperor who was meddling in politics the length and breadth of the British Isles (and seen to be doing so, and occasionally loved, occasionally feared, and occasionally hated for it). Most excitingly, some of the sources also had very robust opinions not just on Henry but on his wives… I’m looking forward to the book introducing people to some hitherto untouched (at least in all existing biographies) sources which had choice words about, for example, Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon, and the King’s Great Matter!