Of gods and beasts

Abstract

The royal body – mythologized, represented, staged, clothed, performed, imagined, gazed upon – has played a central role in the cultural construction and projection of monarchical legitimacy. Because of this, the royal body has also been a site of monarchical vulnerability, providing a locus for the subversion and critique of royal authority. But royal bodies were also bodies subject to disease, decay, and death, demanding a politico-medical history of the royal body that pays attention not only to the embodied experience of our royal subjects but also to the ways in which a monarch’s bodily illness or health could be implicated in broader political discourses. This chapter offers some reflections on the embodied kingship of James VI and I, reflections that I hope will allow us to explore some underexplored aspects of early modern political culture. The first part of the chapter focuses on the fashioned monarchical body as a locus of royal authority, looking (briefly) at the representation of James’s body in painted and engraved portraiture and assessing (in more detail) the image of the royal body in some of James’s writings on kingship. The chapter then turns to the subversive libellous counterpoint to these authorizing representations, exploring how a variety of texts, including the sensational Catholic libel Corona Regia, made the royal body the crux for wide-ranging and politically meaningful critique. The third part of the chapter examines the pathological history of the royal body. Thanks to his chief physician, we know a good deal about James VI and I’s history of chronic and acute illness, but aside from the king’s biographers and a handful of modern diagnosticians, scholars have not made much use of what we know. As we shall see, chronic physical ailments figure in both official and libellous representations of the royal body. But James’s suffering body was at the centre of other political histories, and ill health shaped James’s kingship in other ways. It was integral to some of the dynamics of Jacobean court politics, in particular the central role of the royal favourite, and it provided the occasion for both the expression of political anxiety and the practice of royal mythmaking in the early Stuart public sphere. The chapter thus concludes with a case study of the royal health crisis of 1619, exploring the medical and court politics of the royal sickroom and the multivocal representations of James’s illness in elite newsletters, popular rumour, and official ritual.