In
Part Two of this series of three posts
about the above-titled topic….
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/jane-austens-carpet-sharade-on-james_27.html
….I began to answer the question posed to me
by the highly skeptical Nancy Mayer, as to how in the world the 15 year
old Jane Austen could plausibly have
read about those “scandalous” rumors about James the first which seem to be
satirized in Jane Austen’s Sharade in
her irreverent History of England?
A
quick search on Google Books led me first to essays by Prof. David Bergeron, a
very thorough scholar who compiled
a comprehensive list of historical sources for the meme of James I's homosexual relationships with his male courtiers, in which Bergeron had led me first to a
1753 Life of James I (i.e., published only a few years after Fanny Hill!) written by William Harris,
which included the following passage about
James I:
“And
from his known love of masculine beauty, his excessive favour to such as were possessed of it,
and
unseemly Caresses of them, one would be tempted to think, that he was not wholly free from a vice most
unnatural.”
Would
Jane Austen have had access to a copy of
Harris’s Life of James I, 40 years
later? Perhaps, but also perhaps
not, I don’t believe Harris was a famous historian whose books would have been
commonly held in private English
libraries such as Reverend Austen’s at
Steventon.
But
then Bergeron led me to another source, whose name made my eyes widen in
amazement and delight: Catharine
Sawbridge Macaulay’s History of England,
published in sequential volumes during
the 1760’s.
Now,
why exactly did Macaulay’s History of England
give me such amazement and delight? Here’s why:
Because
just over a year ago, I wrote a series of posts which detailed the ways that Jane Austen, in her own satirical
History of England, specifically alluded to Macaulay’s famous and serious
multivolume history (the first ever
written by an English woman), and I also detailed the many close family
connections between Macaulay and Jane Austen, with only one degree of
separation:
So, I
was amazed and delighted the other day to learn from Bergeron’s excellent
historical scholarship that Macaulay’s History covered, in a thinly veiled
manner, the sexual proclivities of James the First! Already knowing that Jane
Austen’s History of England had alluded to Macaulay’s in other ways, it struck me as beyond coincidence that I should, by an entirely different train of textual evidence,
once again find myself staring at another allusion to Macaulay’s History in
JA’s irreverent parodic History!
I
have collected all the relevant excerpts I could find in Macaulay’s History,
not having been able to view the entire
entry for James I in Macaulay’s first volume, where perhaps there are still more. You be the judge as to whether they provided
sufficient background on James’s relationships with his male court favourites,
so as to induce Jane Austen to learn more about Robert Carr.
Here
first are the two most telling excerpts:
"The
unrivalled Villiers now shone forth in all the gaudy plumage of royal favour. James
found in the disposition of the youth an unbounded levity, and a ductile licentiousness,
which promised as glorious a harvest as vice and folly could desire."
A
“ductile licentious” and “harvest as vice” leave little to the reader’s imagination as to what
Macaulay is hinting at so strongly.
AND
“All
his [James’s] letters to his favourite Villiers
are written in a style fulsomely familiar, many of them indecent, with
very unusual expressions of love and fondness”
And
here a canny 15-year old would need no
decoder book to infer from “indecent”
and “very unusual” that the “love and
fondness” was hardly platonic!
And
here is another passage in Macaulay that pointed toward a personal relationship beyond friendship:
“His
familiar conversation, both in writing and in speaking, was fluffed with vulgar
and indecent phrases. Though proud and arrogant to his temper, and full of the importance
of his station, he descended to buffoonry, and suffered his favourite to
address him in the most disrespectful terms of gross familiarity.”
Macaulay
(who clearly really did not like James
the First!) also made the following, more general negative comments about
James’s character and behavior:
“In
March 1615, the king [James I] going to Newmarket, according to his usual
custom, to take the diversion of hunting, the students of Cambridge invited him
to see a comedy called Ignoramus. At this play it was contrived that Villiers
should appear with all the advantages which his mother could set him off with;
and the king no sooner cast his eyes upon him, than he became confounded with
admiration”
AND
“His
character, from the variety of grotesque qualities that compose it, is not
easily to be delineated. The virtues he possessed were so loaded with a greater
proportion of their neighbouring vices, that they exhibit no light to set off
the dark shades; his principles of generosity were tainted by such a childish
profusion, that they left him without means of paying his just obligations, and
subjected him to
the necessity of attempting irregular, illegal, and unjust methods of acquiring
money. His friendship, not to give it the name of vice, was directed by so
puerile a fancy, and so absurd a caprice, that the objects of it
were ever contemptible, and its consequence attended with such an unmerited
profusion of favours, that
it was, perhaps, the most exceptionable quality of any he possessed.”
Now,
even though Macaulay did not specifically mention Carr in these passages, Jane
Austen, having read the above, would have been strongly motivated to find out
more about James’s favourites from other readily available historical sources,
and to also perhaps draw upon the most
valuable resource of all, all within the confines of her Steventon rectory
home, i.e., her elder brothers and all
the older boys who were being tutored by
the Austens at that time. PLUS….perhaps most of all, cousin Eliza Hancock de
Feuillide, who, being a model for Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park,
would perhaps have been all too eager to
initiate her precocious young cousin into English history, told from the point
of view of well informed women!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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