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Nero and the Tyrannical Household in Late Jacobean England
from Part I - Emasculated Kingship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2021
In May of 1626, Sir John Eliot notoriously summarised the charges of the House of Commons against the royal favourite George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, by providing a lengthy and detailed comparison between Buckingham and Tacitus’s Sejanus.2 According to the classical historian Tacitus, Lucius Aelius Sejanus was an ambitious soldier who held a corrupting influence over the Emperor Tiberius, leading a benign and even good ruler to degenerate into a savage, lewd, and cruel tyrant. Drawing upon this popular history, Eliot declared that Sejanus and the contemporary Sejanus, Buckingham, were men of boldness, flattery, slander, corrupt preferment, and pride, thoroughly unworthy of honour.
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