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3 - Opening the king's cabinet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
Charles too had a patrimony only too easily exploited by his foes. In The None-Such Charles, a very thorough attack on every aspect of Charles's character, a good deal is made of James's doubtful sexual licence, not only as a figure of absolutism, but also as a sign of the emasculation of the monarch in monarchy:
Who could not contract his horrid filthinesse within his Bed, his Ganimedes pallet, or his Closets … He must have the Publique to be witnesse of his lascivious tongue licking of his Favourites lips … And this was that Stemme from which a None-Such Charles sprang.
James's homosexual acts are problematic both as public acts and as secret vices: he shamelessly forces them on the attention of the kingdom, and at the same time they take place in his bed, in his closet, in secret. James is both a scandal and an unduly private shame. This theme of a secret everyone knows is central to the pamphlet's understanding of Charles; central to the secret of Charles's own sexual and gender transgressions. Though not as flagrantly transgressive as James, Charles's own crimes are structurally similar in that they involve an inversion of nature, and a public and private nature that neither allows the censure of the public sphere, nor averts scandal:
abandoning himselfe so publickly as he did into Dallidas lap, which was openly told him to his face at Paul crosse by a divine in his sermon … when as he had been publickly seen at Mass at Somerset House thinking to have gul'd the world, when he was plac'd in the Queens Lobby, even as the women are in the Jewish Synagogues, who though vailed yet do see, and are seen of all the world.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005