Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Manky listener discretion advised. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, the English Heritage team working on restoring
Speaker 1: Apethorpe Haul in Northamptonshire made a phenomenal discovery. Their job
Speaker 1: wasn't an easy one. Though Apethorpe had once been a
Speaker 1: magnificent estate that hosted Tutor and Jacobean Royalty over the centuries,
Speaker 1: it had fallen into disrepair, first during a period where
Speaker 1: it was used as a youth detention facility, and then
Speaker 1: later when it was purchased, presumably as an investment by
Speaker 1: a Libyan businessman who never spent a single night there.
Speaker 1: The palace was crumbling, and the only reason it even
Speaker 1: lasted long enough to be protected by the English government
Speaker 1: was because of an elderly gardeners caretaker who continued working
Speaker 1: without salary to block windows, stop leaks and chase away
Speaker 1: would be vandals. When the English Heritage restoration began, the
Speaker 1: magnificence of the house slowly became apparent again. There were
Speaker 1: centuries old grotesque wall paintings that had been covered in
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century and plaster freezes hidden under attic floorboards.
Speaker 1: But the best discovery was in the chamber that had
Speaker 1: originally been built in order to accommodate the visits of
Speaker 1: King James the First. James the First also known as
Speaker 1: James the sixth in Scotland, frequently visited Apethorpe. It was
Speaker 1: the estate he spent the most time at outside of
Speaker 1: his own palaces, and in his bedchamber, the restoring team
Speaker 1: removed a wall of plaster to uncover a secret passageway.
Speaker 1: Passageway that led to the room that would have been
Speaker 1: occupied by the King's favorite George Villiers, the first Duke
Speaker 1: of Buckingham. A secret passageway between the bedrooms of two men,
Speaker 1: just normal platonic dude stuff. If you know King James
Speaker 1: at all, it's probably because of the Bible that bears
Speaker 1: his name, or the episode on this podcast we did
Speaker 1: about his habit of witch hunting. Neither of those two
Speaker 1: character traits seemed particularly aligned with the other big thing
Speaker 1: about King James that he had a pattern of selecting
Speaker 1: close male favorites. These relationships were absolutely intimate, undeniably romantic,
Speaker 1: and probably sexual, although that's a matter of much debate
Speaker 1: even today among scholars. Personally, I defer to Antonia Fraser's view,
Speaker 1: which she wrote in her nineteen seventy five biography of
Speaker 1: the King quote in sexual matters, it is generally better
Speaker 1: to assume the obvious unless there is some very good
Speaker 1: reason to think otherwise. And that was decades before they
Speaker 1: found the secret bedroom tunnel. Whatever the extent of the
Speaker 1: physical relationship between King James and George Villiers, the relationship
Speaker 1: itself reshaped English politics. George went from being a minor
Speaker 1: second son of landed gentry to a duke, a meteoric
Speaker 1: rise that first delighted and then terrified and threatened other noblemen.
Speaker 1: King James had been in his late forties when they
Speaker 1: met George. In his early twenties. The young man had
Speaker 1: been thrust into court by his ambitious mother Mary, who
Speaker 1: saw her handsome son as a key into high society.
Speaker 1: But even she could not have imagined just how successful
Speaker 1: George would be. But no one can rise forever, and
Speaker 1: the intimate jealous closeness that George and James shared might
Speaker 1: have in the end cost them both their lives. I'm
Speaker 1: Danish schwartz, and this is noble blood.
Speaker 2: I'm thrilled to be speaking today with Benjamin Wooley, a
Speaker 2: professor at Goldsmith's University of London and the author of
Speaker 2: The King's Assassin, which was the basis of the new
Speaker 2: television series Mary and George that's finally available in the US.
Speaker 2: I'm so thrilled to be talking with you. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for being here. Thank you.
Speaker 3: I look forward to it.
Speaker 2: So let's start with Georgie's early life. Though obviously he
Speaker 2: would have this meteoric rise through court politics, his early
Speaker 2: prospects were extremely limited. You write that he was the
Speaker 2: second son of a father who had already been married
Speaker 2: and already had earlier sons from that marriage. So what
Speaker 2: did that mean in terms of George's future in the
Speaker 2: seventeenth century.
Speaker 3: Well, being a second son at that particular time was
Speaker 3: not a comfortable position to be in. So they stood
Speaker 3: to inherit nothing. Under the system of primogeniture that's called
Speaker 3: where the eldest son inherits everything in the family. If
Speaker 3: there's an eldest son, that obviously means they're in line
Speaker 3: to get that. So the second son has nothing, and
Speaker 3: that can make life extremely difficult. I mean you kind
Speaker 3: of see it now, don't you. In the relationship between
Speaker 3: I don't know, Princes William and Harry. It's a complex,
Speaker 3: difficult relationship. It's a difficult position for people like Harry.
Speaker 3: You know, you have the air and the spare and
Speaker 3: that was very much the case for second sons, even
Speaker 3: more so right through the entire system as it worked
Speaker 3: in that time. And George was, as you say, in
Speaker 3: an even worse position because he wasn't even in the
Speaker 3: first family. He was a second son in a second family,
Speaker 3: so his prospects were bleak. And a kind of measure
Speaker 3: of that is that if you look through the history
Speaker 3: of that time, people who were in his position who
Speaker 3: came from sort of I suppose, middling gentry rings, so
Speaker 3: they went from the aristocracy. But there weren't peasants by
Speaker 3: any stretch of the imagination, but this sort of gentry class.
Speaker 3: It was really difficult for them, and they would do
Speaker 3: things like well what notably, a lot of them piled
Speaker 3: at well, not that many, but some of them piled
Speaker 3: on a ship and set off for Virginia in the
Speaker 3: US to set up Jamestown. The people who did that
Speaker 3: was a really motley crewe who were made up of
Speaker 3: a lot of second sons, who had nothing else to do.
Speaker 3: So that was his predicament, that was his situation, and
Speaker 3: that is what makes made for me his story and
Speaker 3: his mother's role in that story all the more remarkable.
Speaker 2: So from a pretty early age, his mother is able
Speaker 2: to see some sort of potential in him. What does
Speaker 2: she see in him? And then how does she cultivate that?
Speaker 3: Well, she sees some potential in him and some lack
Speaker 3: of potential in her eldest son, John. So the eldest
Speaker 3: who would inherit whatever fortunes of the family made was
Speaker 3: I think, right from the start, clearly had a problem
Speaker 3: of some sort I mean in more modern turns where
Speaker 3: you'd say had some sort of mental illness, probably congenital
Speaker 3: mental illness, because it seemed to show up quite early on,
Speaker 3: and it certainly manifested itself in violent ways later on
Speaker 3: in his life. So he was a difficulty and she
Speaker 3: couldn't see what she could do with him, because she
Speaker 3: was determined, a very determined woman who was going to
Speaker 3: try and sort of get the ranking she thought she deserved.
Speaker 3: She thought her and her family she came from this
Speaker 3: family which she later claimed was related to five kings
Speaker 3: of your Europe. I mean, that's highly debatable, but she
Speaker 3: nevertheless thought she came from a very special line, and
Speaker 3: John wasn't going to carry that, not as a reflection
Speaker 3: of her line and background, nor as that of her
Speaker 3: husband who died when John and George were just were young,
Speaker 3: who was called Sir George Villiers. So George's father was
Speaker 3: also called George. One of those things that happened throughout
Speaker 3: history at that time, causing chaos for those of us
Speaker 3: trying to research the families. But she could see that
Speaker 3: George was a much better prospect, if you liked, for
Speaker 3: realizing her ambitions than John. He wasn't very scholarly, he
Speaker 3: wasn't very intellectual.
Speaker 2: So he wouldn't be a good fit for the church exactly.
Speaker 3: So if you're looking at the options that were available,
Speaker 3: that's exactly the sort of option that might have been considered.
Speaker 3: But he was obviously he good looking, charismatic, seemed to
Speaker 3: be musical, very good dancer, physically, sort of self assured,
Speaker 3: and all those things made it clear that he would
Speaker 3: have a successful time if she could somehow get him
Speaker 3: within the orbit of the royal court. I mean, most
Speaker 3: people it wouldn't have heard in her position, which was
Speaker 3: complicated in any number of ways. I mean, she was
Speaker 3: what was called a waiting woman to a richer relative,
Speaker 3: which doesn't mean she was a servant exactly or a
Speaker 3: sort of scullery maid, and her enemies would make her
Speaker 3: out to be as such later on, but she was.
Speaker 3: She was in a kind of one of those very
Speaker 3: ambiguous social positions, which was between service, if you like,
Speaker 3: in companionship to another higher ranking individual. So she was
Speaker 3: low in the pecking order, and so to even think
Speaker 3: about trying to get somebody into the royal court was itself,
Speaker 3: you know, that was a moonshot, as it were, in
Speaker 3: talking about the times were in. But nevertheless, she was
Speaker 3: that ambitious, and George seemed to present a prospect as
Speaker 3: somebody who she could just shapen into the sort of
Speaker 3: person who would do the job, would have a possibility
Speaker 3: of success. So that was her aim as her singular aim,
Speaker 3: and various sort of historical forces basically aligned themselves to
Speaker 3: make this a completely unexpected possibility.
Speaker 2: You wrote that there was the sort of benefit of
Speaker 2: the fact that James, obviously, coming from Scotland, had surrounded
Speaker 2: himself sort of with Scottish men. He had had a
Speaker 2: favorite Somerset, who was sort of disliked by nobility, and
Speaker 2: so English nobility had a vested interest in helping to
Speaker 2: propel an English boy into the King's orbit.
Speaker 3: Exactly so, one of the courtiers was complaining how the
Speaker 3: English were unable to the beams of his royal sunlight
Speaker 3: or something. I can't quite remember the exact quote, but
Speaker 3: they couldn't get a look in literally to the King,
Speaker 3: or well the King's bedchamber, which it wasn't just a bedroom,
Speaker 3: it was the sort of locust of power at the time,
Speaker 3: the place where people who counted, so to speak, had
Speaker 3: to have access in order to get the King's ear
Speaker 3: physically get the king's ear. It was like that. It
Speaker 3: was that kind of court. So they needed a glamorous
Speaker 3: young English boy to catch the King's eye, and George
Speaker 3: went down to London. His mother obviously sent him down
Speaker 3: the King's Way as it was called, down from Leicestershire,
Speaker 3: which is in the midlands of England, down to London,
Speaker 3: and George hung around court. In fact, he nearly ended
Speaker 3: up marrying the child of a prominent courtier who died
Speaker 3: before a marriage could be achieved. I don't know what
Speaker 3: the father's attitude towards it would have been, but the
Speaker 3: executive of the father's will of the bride to bees
Speaker 3: or the prospect of a bride to be, the executors
Speaker 3: of his will just did everything to prevent George wheedling
Speaker 3: his way into the fact that particular family line, so
Speaker 3: he was that whole scheme fell apart. I don't know
Speaker 3: if that was something that Mary was involved in or not.
Speaker 3: The historical record doesn't tell us, but it was some
Speaker 3: time and somewhere after that that this group of nobles,
Speaker 3: led by the Earl of Pembroke, initially it seems, got together.
Speaker 3: So he was actually Pembroke shows in Wales, and so
Speaker 3: he had Welsh connections, but Wales in England were essentially
Speaker 3: one nation at the time, one kingdom, and so he
Speaker 3: worked to come up with a scheme and George was
Speaker 3: pushed forward as the candidate to fulfill that scheme, and
Speaker 3: that's when the scheming really began, and it turned out
Speaker 3: to be extremely successful, culminating in its first stages with
Speaker 3: George catching the King's eye by doing a beautiful dance,
Speaker 3: one that we had the privilege of watching being recreated
Speaker 3: for the show. Mary and George. He did this dance
Speaker 3: that caught the King's eye and that is what set
Speaker 3: the ball rolling.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of the famous masquerade that Anne Boleyn
Speaker 2: danced in to catch Henry the eighth Side that these
Speaker 2: masquerades were just a market for people to see beautiful.
Speaker 3: People exactly, and they were very effective of that when
Speaker 3: it came to the royal court, and that's a very
Speaker 3: good comparison. It subsequently led to George being knighted and
Speaker 3: being made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which means it's
Speaker 3: a kind of ticket to enter and be part of
Speaker 3: the bed chamber. It doesn't mean at this stage anything
Speaker 3: relating to having any kind of physical intimacy with the king.
Speaker 3: There were lots of gentlemen of the bedchamber essentially, not
Speaker 3: not just the sort of intermediary between the king and
Speaker 3: his people, or more particularly individuals like his Privy counsel
Speaker 3: and so on, you know, the people who ran the government.
Speaker 3: It wasn't just that it was also a protective ring
Speaker 3: around him because obviously the monarch was vulnerable. I mean, yes,
Speaker 3: an entourage that was there to protect him so had
Speaker 3: to be very closely monitored because within two years of
Speaker 3: James coming down from Scotland when he inherited the English throne,
Speaker 3: because from Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms at
Speaker 3: this time and would remain so throughout James's reign, much
Speaker 3: to his frustration. But he barely got his backside onto
Speaker 3: the throne when somebody tried to blow him up. So
Speaker 3: that's the famous gunpowder plot. It was called of sixteen
Speaker 3: oh five. So he was paranoid already. As he put
Speaker 3: it himself, he had been nourished in fear because of
Speaker 3: his extraordinary early years. He inherited the Scottish rome when
Speaker 3: he was still a baby.
Speaker 2: He was a cradle king, of course, And just backing
Speaker 2: up a little for the context, his mother would have
Speaker 2: been Mary, Queen of scott who was beheaded. His father
Speaker 2: was murdered when he was just an infant. This is
Speaker 2: someone who has seen death and destruction since he was
Speaker 2: since he was born. I can't even imagine exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so he'd never had a period when he was
Speaker 3: settled and safe, and that was reflected in his behavior
Speaker 3: throughout his reign in England as well as Scotland. He
Speaker 3: was restless. He would never stay in one place for
Speaker 3: very long. He would tour the country, bankrupting local grandees,
Speaker 3: guy insisting they put him up for a little while,
Speaker 3: and he would, you know, he would hunt, and he
Speaker 3: would he would do. He would distract himself with any
Speaker 3: number of entertainments.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: He was a great patrol, of course, of the arts
Speaker 3: of the King's Men, which was Shakespeare's troupe of players actors.
Speaker 3: So he was somebody who constantly needed distracting from his fears,
Speaker 3: if you like, constantly worried that he was going to
Speaker 3: come under attack. So for somebody to get into the
Speaker 3: bedchamber was to give them a level of trust that
Speaker 3: was extremely important and special, and it was how that
Speaker 3: trust was used that would define George's career.
Speaker 2: Before we jump back into George's career, I think it's
Speaker 2: probably worth just taking a moment to address the elephant
Speaker 2: in the room, which is in terms of you mentioned
Speaker 2: James liking distractions. He has a history of male favorites.
Speaker 2: George was certainly not the first male favorite, and historians,
Speaker 2: i think, for centuries have been trying to parse out
Speaker 2: what those relationships were, whether they were physical, whether they
Speaker 2: were sexual, whether they were romantic. What is the conclusion
Speaker 2: you've you've come to in terms of James's relationships with
Speaker 2: his male favorites and George in particular.
Speaker 3: Well, I think what i'd say about that, And obviously
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about it a lot, and when I
Speaker 3: was involved in this production as historical consultant, we have
Speaker 3: these extraordinary conversations about what the nature of the intimacy
Speaker 3: was between George and James. You know, they had their
Speaker 3: own reading of that situation.
Speaker 2: Well, television is always more dramatic than history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not only that it has to be more dramatic.
Speaker 3: It has to really physically show you what's going on.
Speaker 3: You know, you can't.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can.
Speaker 3: Obviously be a little bit euphemistic about it. Bedroom Dawes
Speaker 3: can close at vital moments, but that clearly isn't the
Speaker 3: way things go at the moment when it comes to
Speaker 3: historical drama. So I just should make it absolutely clear.
Speaker 3: I love the scripts, I love the people who worked
Speaker 3: on it, and I'm really pleased with what they did
Speaker 3: with it. But thinking of this historically, if there's this
Speaker 3: key to it, in a way, it's a series of
Speaker 3: letters which were helpfully drawn together into an edited so
Speaker 3: there was an edited edition of these letters published by
Speaker 3: an American academical bergerom called King James and the Letters
Speaker 3: of homo Erotic Desire, and it is a really good
Speaker 3: piece of academic work because he's dug into the letters,
Speaker 3: you know, the references that the letters make to people
Speaker 3: and places and so on are explored. But they also
Speaker 3: because they're in a collection, and because when I first
Speaker 3: encountered this, I just read it through from beginning to end.
Speaker 3: It's an extraordinary collection. Now, if it was a collection
Speaker 3: of letters between a man and a woman, I think
Speaker 3: you would just take it as read that this was
Speaker 3: a romantic, intimate sexual relationship. I don't think you would
Speaker 3: start to fret about whether or not it was sexial
Speaker 3: in nature. The complication is obviously that this was the
Speaker 3: same sex relationship and it was being conducted in a
Speaker 3: period when, as we see it now, they were much
Speaker 3: more you know, homophobic, whatever term you want to use
Speaker 3: for it. That's where I think it gets tricky. And
Speaker 3: from my perspective as somebody who sort of researched it
Speaker 3: and thought about it, I think part of the problem
Speaker 3: is us we assume that the past is always slightly
Speaker 3: more in terms of sexual relationships and politics and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing more regressive than as you further you
Speaker 3: go back, It's like homophobia just escalates, gets worse and
Speaker 3: worse and worse. Although any number of those sorts of
Speaker 3: things considered to be wrong. Now that's to use a
Speaker 3: anachronistic concept. I think, to try and think about what
Speaker 3: was going on now. I'm the romantic in the sense
Speaker 3: that I do think romance love is something that's probably
Speaker 3: common through various centuries of history. I keep, as it were,
Speaker 3: running into it when I'm writing and researching and writing
Speaker 3: the people I write about, But then I consider myself
Speaker 3: a biography. I'm always sort of looking for that kind
Speaker 3: of thing.
Speaker 2: But how those.
Speaker 3: Relationships form and what form they take is if you
Speaker 3: look at it through contemporary eyes without bearing in mind
Speaker 3: what was going on at the time, you kind of
Speaker 3: lose the picture of what could be happening, what sort
Speaker 3: of relationship it could be. And so if you think
Speaker 3: about that time, we're thinking about a time when you know,
Speaker 3: gender fluidity, if you like, was something that was much
Speaker 3: more a part of life. I mean, you've only got
Speaker 3: to think of Shakespeare. Every Shakespeare played I had men
Speaker 3: playing boys and men playing women.
Speaker 2: In some of James's letters, I believe even calls George wife.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, did He made this plea to George. After
Speaker 3: James lost his wife Anne of Denmark the Queen, he
Speaker 3: wrote this extraordinary letter to George asking him to be
Speaker 3: his wife, and George reciprocated with very loving letters back
Speaker 3: to James. Now, obviously there's a power dynamic here. For example,
Speaker 3: a lot of the criticism, if that's the word of
Speaker 3: people from people, particularly in the past, of portraying James
Speaker 3: as in inverted commas gay or homosexual, and I'm putting
Speaker 3: them in perverted commas because those for concepts would be
Speaker 3: nothing to people who lived in that period. I mean,
Speaker 3: they just wouldn't know what you were talking about. The
Speaker 3: idea of sexuality wouldn't have made any sense to them.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so one of the objections to painting their
Speaker 3: relationship as being sexual was because of the sodomy laws
Speaker 3: of the time and James's support of those laws. But
Speaker 3: there were sodomy laws, they weren't They weren't anti homosexual
Speaker 3: laws or same sex relationship laws. They were very specific
Speaker 3: about a very specific physical act, a bit like rape law.
Speaker 3: And I think partly they're because of concerns about power
Speaker 3: relations and about how men abusing boys and so on.
Speaker 3: Obviously there are biblical prohibitions against men lying with men,
Speaker 3: as to use the terminology of the Keith James Bible,
Speaker 3: of course, But again I think to read that through
Speaker 3: contemporary eyes, assuming that this is evidence of basically being
Speaker 3: sexily regressive in some way, that wasn't you know, that
Speaker 3: wasn't the preoccupation. The preoccupations were in all sorts of
Speaker 3: different directions and concerns, with all sorts of different issues,
Speaker 3: theological and otherwise. So I think James could happily have
Speaker 3: an intimate sexal relationship with another man without that without
Speaker 3: him thinking that he was breaking really many taboos. I mean,
Speaker 3: sexual acts themselves were taboo in the sense you didn't
Speaker 3: do them in public, you didn't talk about them in public,
Speaker 3: things like that. That more or less applies now that
Speaker 3: the idea that the same sex relationship itself was something
Speaker 3: that he had to particularly hide or was particularly concerned about,
Speaker 3: or that it's particularly controversial even to consider. I think
Speaker 3: that's to look at it through an anachronistic lens.
Speaker 2: I think that's so well said. Especially I've read some
Speaker 2: people that talk about because for someone who doesn't know
Speaker 2: much of history, they might hear King James and only
Speaker 2: associate him with the Bible. And he was married with
Speaker 2: I believe seven children with.
Speaker 3: Not all the three yeah, not all.
Speaker 2: The survivors survived. But you know, had had clearly a
Speaker 2: sexual relationship with a woman. But I agree with you
Speaker 2: that I don't think, in my opinion, the reading feels
Speaker 2: like it wouldn't have precluded a romantic or sexual relationship
Speaker 2: with men as well.
Speaker 3: The thing is is what I loved about it was
Speaker 3: the romance. It was a very romantic relationship at least
Speaker 3: particularly for James, and James for me, emerges from this
Speaker 3: story as a fascinating, really fascinating character. And I have
Speaker 3: said to Chap who played him in Mary and George
Speaker 3: Tony Curran, I had a long discussion with him before
Speaker 3: he started out on this production. It was a big
Speaker 3: you know, it was a massive amount of work for him.
Speaker 3: Six months or so they were filming, and he did
Speaker 3: point out after he'd been filming for a couple of
Speaker 3: well maybe a couple of months, I can't remember, but
Speaker 3: he said, when I went to the set one day
Speaker 3: and he said it was nice to be able to
Speaker 3: talk to me with some clothes on. He you know,
Speaker 3: it was it demanded a great deal of this actor,
Speaker 3: and I think Tony did an amazing job of it.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that everyone picks it up, having you know,
Speaker 3: look took the aftermath of the show and some of
Speaker 3: the reviews, which is a shame. Not everyone kind of
Speaker 3: sees what I saw. But then, of course I'm seeing
Speaker 3: something seeing it from a very particular perspective. But I
Speaker 3: think he pulls out the subtleties of a very very
Speaker 3: interesting historical character who is bizarrely almost completely absent from
Speaker 3: our historical record as a significant figure. I cannot understand
Speaker 3: why that's the case. You know, we've all heard of
Speaker 3: Henry the eighth and Elizabeth, but why James the first
Speaker 3: sixth isn't up there with the sort of the big
Speaker 3: names of British monarchy. I have no idea.
Speaker 2: I just have to say I also love Tony kran
Speaker 2: I have loved him from the episode of Doctor Who
Speaker 2: where he plays Vincent van goh So anyone who has
Speaker 2: seen that episode of Doctor Who, it's the same wonderful actor.
Speaker 2: Back to George, this close relationship with the king leads
Speaker 2: to a I will say, meteoric rise in court. I believe.
Speaker 2: Is this correct? He's the first non royal family member,
Speaker 2: or the only non royal family member at the time,
Speaker 2: to become a duke.
Speaker 3: Yes, dukedoms were generally for members of the royal family,
Speaker 3: and that's still the case. Actually, but there were some
Speaker 3: other dukedoms I shouldn't, you know, pretend they weren't. I mean,
Speaker 3: for example, the Duke of Norfolk, the Howard family. They
Speaker 3: were not. They didn't have direct they had links to
Speaker 3: the royal family, but they're very remote. So there were
Speaker 3: dukes around who weren't members of the royal family, but
Speaker 3: nobody had been made a duke for the best part
Speaker 3: of a century. Elizabeth First didn't make any of her
Speaker 3: courtier's dukes. She made some lower you know, earls, for example.
Speaker 3: She made no one a duke, and in fact, had
Speaker 3: she done so, that would have changed the shape of
Speaker 3: her reign because it implied in some way, I suppose,
Speaker 3: because she was childless, that the person she promoted to
Speaker 3: that position was in line for the throne. Even so,
Speaker 3: you know, it carries a lot of weight, that title.
Speaker 3: And indeed, during George's time when he was made duke,
Speaker 3: which was around the time well in the midst of
Speaker 3: this amazing escapade, him and Charles hairing off through France
Speaker 3: to Spain to try and capture the the hand of
Speaker 3: the Infanta, the Spanish princess. He was made due then,
Speaker 3: but it immediately aroused rumors that he was aiming to
Speaker 3: seize the throne. His enemies certainly thought that that was
Speaker 3: a possible motive. In any case, it was the most
Speaker 3: extraordinary promotion, and it was something that elevated the Villiers
Speaker 3: family to a social rank that even Mary, who had
Speaker 3: this very high opinion of her social position, a true
Speaker 3: who if you like, or natural social position, even she
Speaker 3: couldn't have imagined that happening. And she became a countess.
Speaker 3: It's a special title. It was one that James basically
Speaker 3: bestowed on. It wasn't heritable, but it was one he
Speaker 3: just thought, I'm going to make you a countest. I
Speaker 3: think you're such an amazing woman. Here's a countess ship.
Speaker 2: So with Mary becoming a countess, she also gained incredible
Speaker 2: access to the King. George obviously has sort of unprecedented
Speaker 2: access to the King's person. Your book is called the
Speaker 2: King's assassin. Can you sort of walk us through what
Speaker 2: you've determined about King James's illness and then death with
Speaker 2: regards to George and Mary. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there's two controversies surrounding what I wrote about this.
Speaker 3: One of them is, you know, to just accept that
Speaker 3: George and James had a sex of relationship. But the
Speaker 3: other one is that George and Mary were somehow involved
Speaker 3: in James's death. I'm slightly puzzled by both controversies. What
Speaker 3: I don't say in the book is that George and
Speaker 3: Mary definitely killed James. There's no way of knowing that
Speaker 3: that though, is not, as I see it, the issue.
Speaker 3: So I first encountered these two when I was researching
Speaker 3: another book called The Herbalist, about a sort of a
Speaker 3: completely different figure. He was a sort of a radical
Speaker 3: from the Civil War pier called Nicholas Culpepper. His nemesis
Speaker 3: was a doctor called William Harvey. Brilliant doctor incidentally discovered
Speaker 3: the circulation of the blood, for example, changed the course
Speaker 3: of medical history, you could say. But William Harvey was
Speaker 3: at James's bedside in his final hours, alongside him with
Speaker 3: these two figures, Mary and George, and I thought, who
Speaker 3: on earth are they, and then they started to interfere
Speaker 3: in the King's care in what was being in the
Speaker 3: medicines dispensed to him. Now, what we do know from,
Speaker 3: among other things, actually spies that were in the King's
Speaker 3: court at the time who had that somehow had access
Speaker 3: we don't know their names, but who had access to
Speaker 3: the king's bedside and saw what was going on. So
Speaker 3: these were people who were reporting back to their spymasters
Speaker 3: back in Catholic Europe what was going on. So we
Speaker 3: know something was going on, and what seemed to be
Speaker 3: going on was that Mary and George decided to apply
Speaker 3: a medicine that their own apothecary, Mayor's apothecary to be specific,
Speaker 3: had mixed up as a plaster and potion in James's
Speaker 3: final hours while he was ill with what was diagnosed
Speaker 3: fairly familiar disease at the time, malaria, because malaria was
Speaker 3: endemic in England. Then having dismissed the royal doctors from
Speaker 3: the King's bedside and then subsequently trying to force them
Speaker 3: to sign a declaration to say they had agreed to
Speaker 3: the dispensing of this medicine to James. Having done all
Speaker 3: that leading to James having a series of fits and dying. Now,
Speaker 3: he was weak, he was ill. He was not that old,
Speaker 3: but he was aging, and he you know, he could
Speaker 3: have died of natural causes. But soon after his death
Speaker 3: the rumors started to spread that they had poisoned him.
Speaker 2: On paper, it's a little suspicious, but impossible to convict
Speaker 2: based on based on the circumstances.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, but I mean it would be more or
Speaker 3: less impossible to convict anyone of any poisoning at that time,
Speaker 3: because of course there's no forensic evidence to be had,
Speaker 3: and that's not the point. The significance of this is
Speaker 3: the impact it had subsequently, because the House of Commons
Speaker 3: set up essentially a sort of secret committee that interviewed
Speaker 3: the doctors and asked them what had happened, and they
Speaker 3: used it in order to draw up a case against George,
Speaker 3: because by this stage the Parliament, which had once hailed
Speaker 3: George as Saint George on horseback, the great champion of
Speaker 3: the people, had turned against him because of his involvement
Speaker 3: with Charles, and it poisoned. They may not marry and
Speaker 3: George may not have poisoned James, but what they did
Speaker 3: poisoned relationships between parliament and the king. The new king,
Speaker 3: Charles the First, and even when Charles was arrested by
Speaker 3: parliamentary forces, so Charles tried to all without Parliament for
Speaker 3: a period basically of two decades or over two decades.
Speaker 3: And the upshot was that Parliament went to war with Charles.
Speaker 3: That was the Civil War.
Speaker 2: They Charles the just for any listeners, Charles the first,
Speaker 2: James's son after James died.
Speaker 3: Exactly who inherited the throne here When James died, Charles
Speaker 3: eventually lost to Parliament and was arrested, and one of
Speaker 3: the charges brought against him was that he was involved
Speaker 3: in the death of his father. So that rumor had
Speaker 3: been rumbling around through throughout that period, and I think
Speaker 3: that's the aspect of it that makes it so important historically.
Speaker 3: And the roots to that was when George and Charles,
Speaker 3: this was when James was still alive, when they went
Speaker 3: to Spain to try and see if Charles could marry
Speaker 3: the Infanta, the Spanish king. That would have changed the
Speaker 3: geopolitics of Europe. In an instant England, which had been
Speaker 3: a sort of hostile Protestant power, James had tried to
Speaker 3: regularize relationships between Britain and Spain that would have secured
Speaker 3: it if that had happened. It didn't happen, and George
Speaker 3: has sort of tactically decided, well, if you're not going
Speaker 3: to support that, we'll turn against you. James wasn't prepared
Speaker 3: to do that. When James died, he was conveniently out
Speaker 3: of the way and him and Charles, who subsequently married
Speaker 3: a French princess, could pursue a policy of antagonism towards Spain.
Speaker 3: And that's what George did. It didn't go well, it
Speaker 3: went very badly. In fact, George was not a terribly
Speaker 3: good tactician, you could argue, but he was a really
Speaker 3: interesting politician, and he tried to set up a kind
Speaker 3: of Northern Protestant cluster of nations hostile to Catholic Europe.
Speaker 3: And when I was researching this, Brexit was underway though,
Speaker 3: the British referendum which led to the decision to leave
Speaker 3: the European Union, and in a sense George was a
Speaker 3: sort of proto brexiteer, you could argue. He thought that that,
Speaker 3: you know, Europe should be more open, more Protestant, it shouldn't,
Speaker 3: you know, cow taw to the Pope and to the Habsburgs,
Speaker 3: who were the royal sort of the royal dynasty that
Speaker 3: ruled Catholic Europe. He thought that that that there should
Speaker 3: be a challenge to that. America was bound up in
Speaker 3: this Jamestown and the founding of Jamestown was during this period.
Speaker 3: It was seen as part of this sort of Protestant
Speaker 3: this new Protestant order, and one way or another, George
Speaker 3: was at the heart of this. That's why he's a
Speaker 3: much more significant figure than maybe we really appreciate him
Speaker 3: to be. And that's why a really chunky piece of
Speaker 3: scholarship exploring his life and politics is something we need.
Speaker 2: One thing I found actually a little touching is that
Speaker 2: relationship between George and Charles. Obviously, George had this intimate
Speaker 2: relationship with Charles's father, but the age gap between George
Speaker 2: and the son Charles is much closer. And once Charles
Speaker 2: becomes king, he really not I feel a little bad
Speaker 2: making this one, but sticks his neck out again and
Speaker 2: again for George and protects him. I find that very touching.
Speaker 3: Yes, they start off as antagonists because Charles Charles, when
Speaker 3: James is still alive, Charles is feeling neglected by his father,
Speaker 3: and he makes a couple of attempts to actually get
Speaker 3: George into trouble, and James sticks by George at Charles's expense,
Speaker 3: and George turns it around. He actually he actually stages
Speaker 3: a kind of banquet, he calls it the Friend's Banquet
Speaker 3: or something like that, which to which he invites Charles
Speaker 3: and lots of other sort of leading members of court
Speaker 3: to patch up the relationship. And then that's followed up
Speaker 3: by then it's just the two of them and about
Speaker 3: two others in support who ride across France to Madrid,
Speaker 3: across the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates France and Spain,
Speaker 3: on to Madrid and turn up at the doorstep for
Speaker 3: the English ambassadors, frightening the living daylights out of the
Speaker 3: port chap because they had no idea that this was
Speaker 3: going to happen, and putting the entire sort of future
Speaker 3: of the Kingdom at stake in that maneuver, and they
Speaker 3: just they're glued together from then then on, and that's
Speaker 3: why you know, the poisoning thing comes up. Subsequently, Charles
Speaker 3: was at Theobalds, the country retreat where James fell in
Speaker 3: and died. During that time, and so that's why there
Speaker 3: was suspicions surrounding Charles that he was plotting with George
Speaker 3: and Mary, and George stood by him until George was assassinated. Well,
Speaker 3: actually that in itself is an interesting question, but by
Speaker 3: one of the naval personnel who claimed he hadn't been paid.
Speaker 3: But George was assassinated, and that, in a sense is
Speaker 3: one of the first things that leaves Chiles so marooned
Speaker 3: politically that civil war is too strong to say it
Speaker 3: at that point would have seemed inevitable, but certainly seemed
Speaker 3: more likely.
Speaker 2: I would say, I've already kept you and I'm so
Speaker 2: grateful for your time. But before you leave, just one
Speaker 2: more quick question. George had this incredible rise, but he
Speaker 2: would die fairly young and fairly tragically when he was assassinated.
Speaker 2: Can you speak to that just a little bit.
Speaker 3: Once Charles was on the throne, George decided to throw
Speaker 3: everything at trying to sort of carve out himself a
Speaker 3: role for himself as a kind of military leader of
Speaker 3: the Protestant cause. So there was this big tension geopolitically speaking,
Speaker 3: between the Protestant countries kingdoms, mostly of Northern Europe, but
Speaker 3: very crudely and the Catholic countries of southern Europe, and
Speaker 3: he wanted to try and build an alliance actually out
Speaker 3: of countries that Protestant countries in the north of Europe.
Speaker 3: And he embarked on a number of military campaigns to
Speaker 3: do this, and one of them one involved in an
Speaker 3: attempt to try and actually go and support of Protestants
Speaker 3: in Spain and France with two two missions, and they
Speaker 3: went very badly wrong and he was heavily defeated. And
Speaker 3: also by this stage under Charles, the regime was running
Speaker 3: short of money because these military oppers are very expensive.
Speaker 3: Sailors who had been press ganged into taking part in
Speaker 3: these expeditions were going unpaid. And there was one of
Speaker 3: these figures called the figure called John Felton, who met
Speaker 3: George when he was acting as Admiral of the Fleet
Speaker 3: and had gone to Portsmouth and had gone to an
Speaker 3: inn called the Greyhound. John Felton came up to him
Speaker 3: and essentially stabbed him to death. And that assassination sent
Speaker 3: shock waves through the entire court because it would it
Speaker 3: was going to change everything basically in terms of the
Speaker 3: power dynamics of the of Charles's court and his body
Speaker 3: was brought back. His mother was still alive. She was
Speaker 3: there to receive the body when it was brought back
Speaker 3: to London. And, as I suppose, the last gesture of
Speaker 3: the sheer ambition of this rise to power of the
Speaker 3: Villiers family, he ordered the most spectacular, arguably spectacularly vulgar
Speaker 3: memorial to George, which was took up a whole side room,
Speaker 3: so to speak, of the royal part of Westminster Abbey.
Speaker 3: In other words, he was buried among the kings and
Speaker 3: queens of England and Britain, probably the biggest and gaudiest
Speaker 3: memorial of all. Ironically, James is also buried there, but
Speaker 3: there's now a plaque, but there was no memorial to him.
Speaker 3: There wasn't even a plaque when he was interred in
Speaker 3: Westminster Abbey. So those who go to Westminster Abbey can
Speaker 3: see George in all his magnificence, and if they just
Speaker 3: pop over to the other side of the chapel, they
Speaker 3: will also see his mother lying alongside his father, the
Speaker 3: one who died when he was young, making her claims
Speaker 3: to being the offspring of five rulers of Europe.
Speaker 2: They made it all the way to Westminster.
Speaker 3: Abbey, they did in Stile.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. This was fascinating to any listeners.
Speaker 2: I highly recommend watching the television series wherever it is streaming,
Speaker 2: wherever you geographically are located. Thank you again so much.
Speaker 2: What a privilege.
Speaker 3: Thank you, It's been great.
Speaker 2: Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and
Speaker 2: Mild from Aaron Manky. Nobel Blood is hosted by me
Speaker 2: Danish Forts, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston,
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