King James and Royston
- roystonmuseum
- Mar 24
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 26
Guest article by Dr Alexander Courtney
On 27 March 1625 King James VI & I died. He was the first monarch to rule over Scotland, England and Ireland. During the 22 years of his reign over his newly-proclaimed kingdom of Great Britain (1603-1625), James made Royston one of his most favoured retreats. On the four hundredth anniversary of James’s death, Dr Alexander Courtney explores the appeal of Royston for the king and its significance for his life and reign.
King James fell ill in early in March 1625 with what was then called a ‘tertian ague’, an intermittent fever with ‘fits’. James did not typically have much time for physicians. His own doctor, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, recorded that the king laughed at their so-called science, thinking that the physicians’ expertise was founded on mere conjecture. James’s doctors disapproved of his consumption of fresh fruit, for example, and moaned about his drinking – not merely that the king drank too much and ‘hated water’ but that, according to them, he drank things supposedly at the wrong ‘time’ and in the wrong ‘order’ for a man of his age. Faced with such quackery, and when the best they could do was to prescribe courses of bleeding, enemas and other ‘purgative’ treatments, it is hardly surprising that James had long resisted his physicians’ attentions.
James left Royston on 6 March 1625, heading south to his palace at Theobalds. It was on that day, apparently, that he fell ill. At Theobalds his condition deteriorated, though initially there seemed no need to worry. His childhood companion, Thomas Erskine, earl of Kellie, wrote on 9 March that ‘His Majesty has had three fits of a tertian ague, but I hope it shall do him good and no harm’. The king’s illness was considered to be ‘without any manner of danger, if he would suffer himself to be ordered and governed by physical [i.e. his physicians’] rules’.
The doctors’ interventions made no positive difference. James’s favourite, the duke of Buckingham, tried to help by applying a plaster to the king’s breast and giving him some syrup to drink, but these just made James sicker – and later provided fodder for lurid tales that the king had been poisoned. By the 22nd Kellie was deeply concerned. Writing to his cousin (another of James’s old friends and servants) that James was now ‘in great extremity’, he prayed ‘God save the King, and that he may have no more such fits as he had this last night and the night before … I assure your lordship he is a sick man and worse than I love to write’. On Sunday 27 March, the king died.
Until that final illness, James’s last stay at Royston had been quite typical of his stays in the town and at Newmarket, where he had been previously in January and February. Afflicted with gout, he was no longer the vigorous horseman of earlier years, but he still enjoyed less energetic outdoor pursuits. In November 1624, the earl of Kellie wrote to his cousin that ‘His Majesty is very well in his health, and begins to be more falconer than hunter, though it dare not be said so’. James, like many a man in late middle age, did not appreciate being reminded of his frailties. Throughout his reign in England, outdoor pursuits of hawking, hunting and hare coursing had brought him to his East Anglian houses for several months every year.
A further attraction of Royston and Newmarket for the king was their proximity to Cambridge, where the University could provide young and learned preachers capable of entertaining James in another of his great lifelong passions: theological discussion and debate. James heard sermons every Sunday, but also on every Tuesday, as a thanksgiving for his deliverance from a conspiracy against his life at Perth on Tuesday 5 August 1600. James’s patronage of preaching while at Newmarket and Royston continued right up to the that last trip in January-March 1625: the University Vice-Chancellor submitted the preachers’ bill for payment of their expenses in going to court, just as the king’s ‘ague’ began.
As we have seen, James had little regard for physicians, but he extolled the wondrous effects on his health of his recreational journeys to Royston. ‘Except I have my pastime’, he once declared, ‘you may be sure I cannot live’. As Philip Herbert recorded in a letter from the court at Royston in late 1604, James spent as much time as the weather would allow out of doors and he was ‘very much better then he was when he went’ from London.
It was certainly not a case of all play and no work while James was at Royston and his other hunting houses. Never one to underestimate his capacities, James boasted of his ability to get through government business more quickly than anyone else – but such royal boasting was not idle. The state papers are full of evidence of the king’s activity at Royston, of his ordering, querying, cajoling and hectoring his councillors and officers of state. He kept notebooks to record points ‘whereupon he would give direction’. He intently read letters from his ministers, before going out to the chase, or upon his return. He also attended to his literary interests, reading and writing poetical, theological and polemical works. He sometimes graced ambassadors with access to him on these hunting journeys.
But what had mostly attracted James to Royston, Newmarket and Thetford was that he could live in these places away from the constant pressure of business. There he could be, as he put it, ‘by merry company, free from importunity’. At Royston he could live in a more ‘private’ fashion than was possible in the great palaces of London and the Thames Valley. Whereas at Whitehall he was daily pressed by a swirl of petitioners, diplomats, courtiers and privy councillors, at Royston things were very different. James travelled light and accompanied by a chosen, mostly Scottish, few. There were 240 carts required for the king’s and queen’s households for a full-blown summer progress. By contrast, James’s ‘hunting and hawking journeys’ to Royston, Newmarket and Thetford only required 43 carts. At the time of his first regular autumnal visit, it was remarked that ‘the king goes down to Royston, and with him only his hunting crew’.
This preference for a more private, itinerant life of hunting, hawking, reading, writing, or playing at cards and other entertainments with a small entourage of trusted companions can be traced to his childhood. His early life at Stirling Castle was not the lonely and dysfunctional childhood experience typically imagined for him by subsequent historians. The child King of Scots was in fact accompanied in the 1570s by a number of other boys – like Thomas Erskine – whom he would stick with and promote in later life. There were girls too, though James’s later ‘hunting crew’ was entirely masculine. James recreated in the privacy of Royston and Newmarket something of the style and scale of the itinerant, hunting kingship that he had experienced in Scotland, and the ‘merry company’ of select friends and servants that he had known and enjoyed from his youth.
That preference for privacy, however, became a source of vulnerability for James’s kingship. Famously the people of Royston, initially troubled by the costs and disruption of the court’s appearance in the midst of their town, protested with a dognapping. The king’s favourite hound, Master Jowler, was seized and subsequently returned to the pack with note around his neck: Jowler was to ask the king to ‘go back to London, for else the country will be undone, all our provision is spent already, and we are not able to entertain him longer’.
That was hardly a serious challenge to royal authority. But, especially later in the reign (and afterwards in the seventeenth century and beyond), public criticism of James often picked up on the privacy of his life at Royston and elsewhere. There, his sports done, he was said to ‘kiss his minions without shame’. In the libel ‘The King’s Five Senses’, God was called upon to save the king from himself. God should open James’s ears, so that he would ‘hear … the sounds / As well of men, as of his hounds’. God should likewise preserve James ‘from a Ganymede / Whose whorish breath hath power to lead / His excellence which way it list / O let such lips be never kissed’. The French ambassador in early 1622 even recycled such terms in his own reports to Paris: James had, he wrote, gone to ‘his Newmarket … like another used to go to his isle of Capri, where with his Buckingham … he thinks he can hide … his dishonest actions’.
Such weaving together of denunciations of James’s love of privacy with his love for his last favourite, Buckingham, forged a powerful critique of Jacobean kingship. The James presented in such words was not a king serving the public good but a tyrant, a ruler drawn to the private satisfaction of his own vice-ridden desires. That homophobic depiction of King James would be given a long afterlife in Anthony Weldon’s Court and Character of King James (published 1650), a work that would inspire very many later negative accounts of the reign. There it is said that James ‘neglected the affairs of state, and care of government, to hunt after pleasures, deserting the Imperial City [i.e. London], to sport himself at Royston and Newmarket, and such obscure places’.
Thanks to James’s association with the town, Jacobean Royston was not so obscure. It was, instead, for several weeks of each year, at the apex of the Stuart monarchy, where the first King of Great Britain resided. In seeking to understand his life, and contemporary perceptions of his kingship, it is to Royston and Newmarket and ‘such obscure places’ that we must go.
Dr Alexander Courtney is an early modern historian and teacher. His research focuses on the life and kingship of James VI & I. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
His first book, James VI, Britannic Prince, was published by Routledge in June 2024 and his second James VI and I: Kingship, Government and Religion was published by Routledge in March 2025.
