King James I and Tobacco




While the whole world was excited about the newly discovered tobacco, there were some people unhappy with it. King James I wrote, “Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

King James I of England was at rule when tobacco was first brought the Europe. He did not like the idea of smoking and tried a lot of things to stop tobacco. Since doctors were using tobacco to cure diseases, they were upset that people were buying it without prescription because they were losing money. Knowing James’ opinion about tobacco, they came to him for help. The next year, in 1604 the king increased the import tax on tobacco by 4,000 percent: from 2 pence/lb to 6 shillings 10 pence/lb.

At that point the tobacco industry grew so much that there were 7,000 sellers in London alone. However, the tax increase really did its job. People were not able to pay a high price like this. The country officials were working hard on proving to the king that tobacco tax could have brought a really high profit to the treasury if it went lower, so he lowered the tax to 2 shillings/lb and the tobacco fans started buying it again.

Although James I had to change his intension to eliminate tobacco use by high taxes, he was still a staunch anti-smoker. In 1604 he wrote a book, Counterblaste to Tobacco, which clearly showed his attitude to smoking and unveiled all known tobacco-use flaws.

First of all, the king pointed out that the herb was introduced neither by king, nor by great conqueror, nor by learned doctor of physics, but was adopted from “unbaptized barbarians [Indians in the Americas]”. Because of such doubtful origin of tobacco James wanted the users to “prove both necessary and profitable” application of it.

After the introduction he gave “false and erroneous grounds” which attracted people in tobacco. People in that time believed that “the brains of all men” were “naturally cold and wet” and the dry and hot substances as tobacco would work especially good for them. James argued saying that the herb could not “have a drying quality” and it definitely could not serve as something good for brain because it worked against nature and had “a certain venomous faculty”. The explanation to this was the following, “For the nose being the proper organ and convoy of the sense of smelling to the brains, which are the only fountain of the sense, doth ever serve us for an infallible witness, whether that odor which we smell be healthful or hurtful to the brain”.

Another thing that people in the seventeenth century really liked was that tobacco was able “to purge both the head and stomach of rheums and distillations” because during smoking or chewing they had an urge to spit the phlegm out. To James’ opinion the tobacco users “burdened” themselves because the herb was the reason for the formation and building-up of the rheum.

King James was very concerned about people who had to tolerate smoking. To his mind a smoker and a non-smoker could not be equally free in the same room. Moreover, if a man in the family smoked, his wife had a poor choice: “either she must also corrupt her sweet breath therewith, or else resolve to live n a perpetual stinking torment”.

And finally it is important to point out that King James I was sure that smoking killed a lot of people. Those who thought that smoking had healing powers were absolutely wrong, because even by that time the physicians found out that the inner organs of smokers were “infected” by “unctuous and oily kind of foot”. James compared smokers with old drunkards and harlots: it was foolish of people to believe “if a man smoke himself to death with it (as many have done) then some other disease must bear the blame for that fault”. It was the same as if “old harlots thanked their harlotry for their many years that custom being healthful (say they) to the purging of the loins, but never had mind how many died of the pox in the flower of their youth, and so did old drunkards thought they prolonged their days by their swine like diet, but never remembered how many died drowned in drink before they be half old.”

Steven Rogers

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Posted on September 26, 2009 
Filed Under Facts on Smoking, Smoking and Health, Tobacco History

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