Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King, Gareth Russell, Harper Collins, £25.

Before James Stuart was even born, a dagger was held to the belly of his mother, the heavily pregnant Mary Queen of Scots. Her dear friend – perhaps too dear – David Riccio, bled to death at her feet in March 1566. Mary’s supper party at Holyrood House that night had turned into one of the most brutal assassinations in history. This was the turbulent and traumatic world into which James was born. His father Lord Darnley, Mary’s second husband, who had conspired against Riccio, was strangled to death a year later in the orchard of Kirk O’Field in Edinburgh when James was an infant — a murder that to this day remains unsolved.

By the time James was just one year old he had already replaced his mother as monarch, while she was held captive at Lochleven Castle. At five he witnessed the death of his grandfather Matthew Stuart, 4th Earl of Lennox — regent of Scotland at the time — who was shot in the back while riding. James snuck into the bedroom where he lay and watched him bleed out. Finally, when James was 21 his mother was beheaded. Her death warrant was signed by her cousin, Elizabeth I. Mary Stuart’s life in Scotland had been unstable and deeply tragic.

James Stuart’s childhood was marred by further tragedy – political and familial conflict and the deaths of many close to him. His adult life was no more fortunate: he faced multiple assassination attempts against his person — Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot being the most memorable. Five years before, another attempt was made against James’s life at Gowrie House, the ancestral seat of a member of his entourage, Alexander Ruthven. The story goes that James and his friends were out hunting when Ruthven invited him back to the house for lunch, after which Ruthven led James into the belly of the building, locking the doors behind them as they moved up flights of stairs towards the tower. James either did not notice that Ruthven was locking them in or he did not seem to mind. Onlookers outside the house were startled when James suddenly threw open the window of the tower and screamed ‘Treason! Treason! Treason!’ as he struggled against Ruthven, who tried to drag him back into the room.

Eventually the rest of James’ entourage and personal guard managed to hammer through the locked doors to liberate their king, who was parrying with Ruthven, clutching his hunting knife. Ruthven was killed and James rescued, narrowly escaping with his life. In a considered account of this incident in Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King, Gareth Russell questions why James had dropped his usually faultless guard. Did James believe – or hope – that Ruthven had sought to be intimate with him? Queen Anna of Denmark, James’s consort, was certainly suspicious of the incident, asking ‘why her husband, who was notoriously alert to the risk of assassination, treason and above all kidnapping, had willingly gone’.

James’ answer was inadequate and unconvincing, claiming that ‘Alexander had told him that he had discovered a crock of gold, which he had hidden in the tower and wished to share with his king’. This ludicrous tale was the talk of the town, entertaining the masses who jibed that there could only be one reason the king went into that tower. Where Russell describes public humiliation over the incident, he also sheds light on the fragility of James Stuart, noting that the hope of intimacy was the ‘most tragic’ of all the reasons James could have ventured into that tower.

This desire for male intimacy and trust is at the heart of Russell’s biography and James’ long line of favourites and lovers is covered in great detail and sensitivity. Russell eloquently argues that James had romantic and tender relationships with multiple men. Exchanges with his favourites were helplessly romantic, with lines from his letters evidencing as much. In a love letter to George Villiers, James states he would ‘rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you’. By paying clear-eyed attention to these relationships, Russell centres James’s sexuality and passions where they have previously been marginalised, in fear of what they meant – that the first king of Britain loved men.

This thoughtful, humane approach to James Stuart is a refreshing take on the first king to wear the crowns of both England and Scotland, shouldering the heavy responsibility that came with them. Politically, Gareth Russell’s James was no warmonger, but he was paranoid and impulsive. Those instincts were most famously on show during his appalling misogynistic crusade against so-called ‘witches’, in the belief that a coven working out of Berwick conjured a tempest that almost wrecked the ship he and Queen Anna were travelling in.

Russell astutely points out that James was no fool. When told, ‘the Devil preached a sermon calling on the witches to destroy King James!’, he was sceptical. James only became convinced when a purported witch named Agnes Sampson was brought before him to testify. She allegedly whispered in his ear ‘the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at [Oslo] in Norway on the first night of marriage… he believed all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same’, and so thereafter James was ‘fatefully and fully convinced’.

This prompted the North Berwick witch trials of 1590-92. Across the border between England and Scotland, ‘panic grew [as] hundreds were questioned and dozens executed’. In total around 70 people (mostly women) were killed. They were tortured then strangled or burned to death. By 1597 James was so obsessed with witches and sorcery, he published his treatise, Daemonologie, which details the practice of witch hunting.

Russell’s portrait of James Stuart is strikingly human. He is a complex man, scarred by his childhood and living in constant fear for his life, loving many but trusting few, most notably his loyal and formidable queen. Russell is considered in his approach to sexuality in the early modern period, careful not to judge James’s actions and passions by today’s standards but examining the evidence available with rigour and scholarship. Queen James is a stellar example of how to write historical biography.