About the
homosexuality: Around page 566 of my copy of
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), Chuck Mackay goes into some detail about
James I's being -- ahem -- "addicted to the most abominable of all offences" in the person of a young
Scotsman named
Robert Kerr. Everybody in the episode
comes to a bad end, mostly by
poisoning each other.
Be the evidence compelling or no, people have certainly been suspecting it since at least as far back as
1841, and Mackay claims that it was widely rumored in
James I's time already.
I don't recall Mackay saying anything about
James I being a
misogynist, and I can't find anything on skimming through at the moment. Mackay was writing in 1841, though, a time when attitudes about women were very different than they are now. I'm not sure that what we call
misogyny would have registered on Mackay as anything in particular.
Reification, anyone?
Again according to Mackay,
James I was also a staunch opponent of
witchcraft.