Researcher fleshes out portrait of English nobleman Esmé Stuart

LAWRENCE — When David Bergeron was working on his 2022 book on Ludovic Stuart, who was Duke of Lennox (1583-1624) during the reign of Britain’s King James I, he came across interesting materials, too, on Ludovic’s younger brother who succeeded him as Duke, Esmé Stuart.

But it wasn’t until he read what he considered a cursory entry on that younger brother in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that the University of Kansas professor emeritus of English decided he ought to flesh out Esmé Stuart’s biography for the benefit of history.

The resulting article, “Ben Jonson’s Patron, Esmé Stuart,” was published in the latest edition of the Ben Jonson Journal and received its 2024 Beverly Rogers Literary Award.

Esmé Stuart had been known previously as a patron of Ben Jonson, the great British writer and contemporary of Shakespeare. Bergeron’s article paints a portrait of the inner-circle courtier as actor, founder of an acting troupe and patron of the arts in other ways.

“We learn more about his involvement with other dramatists,” Bergeron said, “in terms of intervening on their behalf when they're thrown in jail. And he was himself an actor in court entertainments. He was a producer. He is a founder of his acting troupe.

“People have known he was a patron of Jonson for a long time. Jonson even lived in Stuart’s home for five years. But we haven't always known the particulars of that.”

Bergeron well understands why Esmé Stuart has been overshadowed, in death as in life, by his older brother, Ludovic. Ludovic Stuart held the title Duke of Lennox for nearly 40 years, while Esmé Stuart was duke for less than a year before he, too, died.

Esmé was the younger of the Stuart brothers and had grown up in France, as had Ludovic. Ludovic Stuart went to Scotland in 1583, at the invitation of King James, and received the title of Duke of Lennox, which his father had had before him. Probably around 1602, Esmé Stuart also moved to Scotland and in 1603 followed his brother and the king to England.

There he immediately joined his older brother in the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber – the tightest circle around King James.

It was from that position that Esmé Stuart served as a patron of artists like Jonson. Bergeron found many references to this in sources — centuries old and now mostly digitized — with which he had become familiar during his book research.

“A lot of it is in the National Archives, and, well, it gets tricky,” Bergeron said. “We have the Calendar of State Papers, which is an indispensable source. ... a listing of documents, and perhaps a snippet of what might be in that document. That's how you get into something. Then you can go from that listing to find out where the original is. ... But it takes a lot of legwork and brain work.”

Bergeron said he was pleased that his article had helped to elevate the importance of Esmé Stuart in the historical record.