Beware hedonists bearing white powder. This, in part, was the message pressed in a short book about the excesses of the Jacobean court written by a Scottish Catholic physician and occasional counterfeiter, George Eglisham. The Forerunner of Revenge, published in Antwerp in 1626 in English and Latin, quickly gained notoriety across Europe for its particular depiction of the Stuart monarchy as a dynasty under siege. The regime’s crises, Eglisham claimed, had worsened in the previous year with the death of James I; that death was not, despite the officially authorised version of events, the effect of an intense fever on the booze-ravaged body of an ailing king, but rather a carefully planned assassination performed at close quarters by George Villiers, the riotous first Duke of Buckingham. In Eglisham’s account, James was persuaded by Buckingham to take a draught of something restorative with his wine one evening, only to be left in ‘great agonie’, screaming: ‘O this white powder! This white powder! Would to God I had never taken it.’
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