Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical thriller The Poison Bed fictionalizes the story of King James’s favorite, Robert Carr, and the poisoning scandal in which he became embroiled. The term “favorite” could mean anything from a close friendship to an intimate sexual relationship, and as The Poison Bed dances back and forth between Robert’s rise to power and his imprisonment in the Tower of London along with his wife, the beguiling Frances Howard, the author explores the complicated, murky ways in which homoerotic desires and relationships were expressed in early modern England. Here, Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James and Robert.

Rubens’ glorious ceiling in the Whitehall Banqueting House, one of the great artistic legacies of the Stuart era, depicts the heaven-bound figure of King James I surrounded by the flickering wings and dimpled flesh of a host of cherubs. Not long ago, I sat beneath it in the company of several towering drag queens trussed into a corsets, heels, bum-rolls and a good deal of flesh-toned hosiery, while one announced in a booming voice, “Yes, darlings—our new king is a bit of a queen!” The evening was a gender-bending performance, part of the Historic Royal Palaces LGBT events program, telling the story of James I and his male favorites.

The gay community has long claimed James I as their royal poster boy, and why not? He was, after all, well known for having had a series of beautiful male favorites, including one whose heart he kept in a box after his death. Given there was no term for homosexuality at the time (only the illegal practice of sodomy), we cannot judge James’s behavior by the standards of today. And it is important to remember that when it comes to the private behaviors of kings, much evidence is based on little more than slander and supposition.

We do know, however, that James was not thought to have had any liaisons with women prior to his marriage. Indeed, it was rumoured that his close relationship at an early age with an older male cousin, Esmé Stuart, was a physical one, and Stuart was forced to leave Scotland because his influence over the young king was becoming problematic. To add to this, once there was an heir, a spare and a daughter all in good health, James chose to live separately from his wife from 1607 onwards. While this in itself was unremarkable, it was unusual in that he didn’t subsequently take a mistress, as was expected behaviour for a king at the time. James certainly preferred the company of men and there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting he actively disliked women, although many deem his marriage to have been a happy one.

In my mind, some of the most compelling evidence to suggest James had deep and passionate feelings for the men in his life is the abundance of surviving letters between him and his favorites. These texts are strikingly intimate. Take this, for example, to George Villiers:

I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

                                  James R.

Two men, close friends, who call each other husband and wife, offers little ambiguity from our modern perspective. We would assume them gay on that evidence alone. But, as many historians have pointed out, the language of friendship between men in early modern England tended to be uninhibited and overblown with terms like “love” thrown about liberally. Masculinity was differently defined at the time—one only has to consider the clothes men wore at the Stuart court: festoons of pearls and lace and pom-poms on their shoes the size of cabbages, none of which would seem out of place on the main stage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” So, the letters, though compelling, are not sufficient evidence to prove James’s sexual preference.

The recent discovery of a secret tunnel at Apethorpe House, one of James’s favorite residences, between his and George Villiers’s bedchambers caused a flurry of supposition. But this too has a plausible and mundane explanation. Corridors between bedchambers were commonplace in palaces of the period. Privacy, as we recognise it, didn’t exist in such buildings, which were designed to house a court of hundreds. The bedchamber was as much a place for political activities as for sexual. Corridors such as this would have allowed access to the king’s close circle, including the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, of which Villiers was one. All early modern kings had Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, young courtiers who had close access to the monarch and were required to sleep in his room on a rota, as a security measure.

The role of the historian is to seek evidence, making for a sticky problem when it comes to the intimate sexual practices of a monarch, when the only proof of sex was a bloody sheet or a pregnancy. The fact that James fathered children is irrefutable evidence that he had sexual relations with his wife. Beyond that we have only hearsay to go on. There was much contemporary gossip about James, whose pacifist policies with the old enemy Spain were deemed “feminine” as compared with those of his predecessor Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have joked that, “King Elizabeth had been succeeded by ‘Queen James.’” This pointed more to James’s style of foreign policy, though we cannot discount the possibility that its subtext was aimed at the new King’s rumored sexual proclivities. After all, his preference for the company of beautiful men was no secret.

Three men held particularly significant roles in James’s life, both public and personal: the aforementioned Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. All were privileged in much the same way as a royal mistress, the latter two rising from obscurity to greatness by way of the king’s favor. It is a matter of historical record that courtiers schemed to place beautiful young men in the King’s path in the hope of creating some advantage out of it, in much the same way pretty daughters were dangled under Henry VIII’s nose. It was a weakness to exploit. Huge political capital could be gained to those in league with a royal favorite. James bestowed honours and promoted these men to the highest offices, giving them excessive political responsibilities and power, though they were not always suited for such roles.

In the case of Robert Carr, James’ goodwill was stretched almost to breaking point. Carr became mixed up in a poisoning plot, for which he and his wife were convicted, which forms the central plot of my novel The Poison Bed. There is reason to believe that James’ actions around the trial indicated his fear that Carr, were he to be condemned, might have revealed personal details about his private habits in his scaffold speech. One could suppose that James had something to hide.

I have read more than one indignant tirade directed against those who choose to accept James as homosexual, stating that to do so casts negative aspersions, or “outs” a man who is no longer able to speak for himself. This pre-supposes that to call someone homosexual is an insult and that to be homosexual, and in this I include bisexual, is degrading. This, I refuse to accept. I do however understand historians’ reluctance to take a firm stance on James’ sexuality. Stuart historian Dr. Samantha Smith is clear as to why:

“There is no denying that James I was fond of his favorites, who happened to be young men, but we cannot say for certain if this attraction resulted in sexual relations. There is no actual evidence to support such claims and the act of sodomy was in fact illegal and deemed a sin in 17th century England and James was a man who feared sin.”

The assumption that male homosexuality can be defined by penetration precludes other sexual practices between men that don’t involve sodomy. It was sodomy, specifically, that was the legal and religious infringement at the time. The law had nothing to say about most other intimate acts. It is possible to imagine, then, even considering his fear of sin, that James may have indulged in practices we might nowadays consider homosexual but not in the act of sodomy itself.

Seventeenth century historian Rebecca Rideal comes at the question from a subtly different angle, focusing on the romantic aspect of love. We know, she says, “he had romantic relationships with men which is evidenced by his correspondence. Whether this was sexual, we will never know, but it was romantic nonetheless.” It is clear she accepts the letters as proper proof of an intimacy that escaped the bounds of ordinary friendship, and I tend to agree with her.

For the purposes of telling the story of Robert Carr’s relationship to James in The Poison Bed, I have made the assumption of both men’s bisexuality. This may be audacious and certainly might put some noses out of joint. But fiction is the mode by which we can explore the liminal space between the lines of the historical record. It allows us to imagine what happened behind closed doors and weave a plausible version of the past from what we know and what we can never know.

Jeremy Finley’s superb debut, The Darkest Time of Night, was a political thriller that morphed into something much less down-to-earth (if you’ll pardon the pun). As Lynn Roseworth searched for her missing grandson, she was forced to come to terms with her work as a secretary for a professor devoted to extraterrestrial research, and the terrifying possibility that it may have something to do with her family’s crisis.

In Finley’s sequel, The Dark Above, Lynn’s grandson is now an adult and desperate to put what happened to him as a child behind him. But after his identity is exposed, he must find others who have had his same experiences to prevent a dark future.

While there are certainly elements of “The X-Files,” “Stranger Things” and other sci-fi thrillers in Finley’s books, the main inspiration came from a surprising place: his mother-in-law.

She was the last anyone expected to be responsible.

After all, my new novel, The Dark Above, is a supernatural thriller that begins 15 years after a child vanished in the woods under mysterious circumstances. As disasters begin to unfold across the world, the fractured family of that boy must overcome their own internal struggles to uncover the sinister reasons of the global epidemic.

As the book releases this month, I anticipate the question that I got last year, when the first book in the series, The Darkest Time of Night, was released. People would ask where the idea for all this came from, and I’d just nod in the direction of an elegant woman, Sudoku stashed in her purse, her fingernails expertly cleaned to remove the dirt from her garden.

“Your mother-in-law?” was the usual response.

After all, Linda (last name withheld because she shies away from attention) is, perhaps, the absolute last person on earth you would ever think to inspire novels based on terror from the stars.

You’ll find her curled up with Ann Patchett’s latest novel, not with a Stephen King paperback. And as far as dark obsessions go, she does tend to vacuum when her house isn’t dirty. She enjoys quilting and baseball and politics.

And she also once worked for one of the nation’s foremost experts in UFO research.

I delight in telling people that fact, just to see their eyes bulge out of their heads.

At least mine did when I first heard it, all those years ago standing in her kitchen surrounded by her collection of primitive antiques.

Nonchalantly, loading the dishwasher, she mentioned how when my father-in-law was in law school, she needed a job, and fast, to make ends meet. There was an opening for a secretary at the university’s astronomy department, and she scored the job.

She talked about how nice the professors were, but remarked how strange it was to take messages for one of them. The calls, she recalled, were bizarre, from people who saw things in the sky and swore that they, or others they knew, had been taken.

I scraped my jaw off the floor as she told of how that professor would later have a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Spielberg used him as a consultant, then later as an extra in the final scene when humanity makes contact with alien life.

That professor was none other than J. Allen Hynek, who would become one of the country’s most famous UFO researchers, whose notoriety would including coining the phrase “close encounters of the third kind” to describe people seeing creatures inside a craft.

My mother-in-law’s life would veer in a different direction after leaving that job, raising five children, establishing her own successful small business and ultimately becoming a grandmother of 18.

But her brush with something truly otherworldly got my creative juices flowing. What if an unassuming grandmother had knowledge about missing people that not even the FBI or police were aware of? What if she, and only she, could unravel what happened to her vanished grandson?

When I called to tell her and my father-in-law about the book deal, they both cheered. I then let on that the idea for the books came from her days as a secretary for a UFO researcher.

“Oh,” she laughed. “Oh my.”