Erotic Policy: King James, Thomas Campion, and the Rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish Marriage

King James arrived on the English throne in 1603 determined to unite his two kingdoms, creating one Great Britain. Toward this end, he not only addressed administrative and legal aspects of national Union; he also encouraged intermarriage between English and Scottish nobility. This measure, he believed, would assist in instilling a British cultural identity amongst the two nations' elite and lead to the birth of more legally British citizens. The present essay looks at how these politically potent nuptial events were translated into a specifically Jacobean form of national rhetoric. The essay focuses on Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque, the entertainment mounted on the wedding night of the first Anglo-Scottish marriage celebrated at court, that between James Hay and Honora Denny. Arguing against established readings of the masque as a critique of James's policies, this essay shows how poetic eroticism was being used to articulate a regicentric vision of British nationhood. The essay resituates the masque against the backdrop of the contemporary parliamentary debates over British naturalization, showing how Campion's erotic rhetoric is connected to key political issues, such as the legal status of the king's "body natural." Whereas earlier masques had negotiated tentatively between the Elizabethan rhetoric of national enclosure and the emergent rhetoric of national union, The Lord Hay's Masque uses eroticism to confront and discredit residual categories of representation (such as virginity). In this way, the masque marked an important point of departure in the panegyrical practices of the Jacobean court.