Kristen McDermott Jonson ’ s Gossips and the Stuart Family Drama

1608–9 was a difficult year for James I of England as a monarch and as a father. His triumphal 1603 progress through England and the providentially thwarted threat of Gunpowder Plot in 1605 had lost their power to generate automatic goodwill for his domestic and foreign policies. The 1607 Parliament had been a disaster for James, refusing to pass his plan to create a ‘Great Marriage’ between Scotland and England. A major bone of contention was the question of whether or not Scottish children born before 1603 would become naturalized citizens of the putative ‘Great Britain’. James impatiently berated the Parliament for nitpicking: ‘[The Union] is no more unperfect, as it is now projected, than is a child that is born without a beard. It is already a perfect union in me, the Head.’1 The failure of the Great Marriage was particularly galling to a monarch who was fond of envisioning his relationship with his nation as paternal. James returned frequently to the metaphor he introduced in his accession address to parliament, calling himself ‘a loving nourish-father’ who would provide the English people with ‘their own nourish-milk’.2 His own familial relations, however, were far from idealized. Intimate relations with his queen, Anna of Denmark, who had ended her childbearing years after enduring the deaths of two infant daughters in 1605 and 1607, had probably ceased; James’s infatuation with Robert Carr dates from this period. Moreover, James was apparently growing increasingly resentful of the popularity of his charismatic son, Henry, and of his demands for an autonomous court of his own. James’s premier court poet, Ben Jonson, shared a fondness for paternal metaphors with his patron, and was contending with his own professional and family troubles in 1608–9 as well. His quest for patronage was considerably complicated by the triune nature of the royal court, and his chief rival for Queen Anna’s patronage, Samuel Daniel, continued to enjoy greater favors than Jonson in spite of Jonson’s more frequent writing commissions. Jonson’s family life was apparently similarly unsettled, with compelling evidence that at least two illegitimate children were born in 1609. The Early Theatre 9.1