You could call it royal hypocrisy. You could call it cognitive dissonance. You could even call it moral inconsistency—assuming, of course, that someone who claimed a divine right to rule over everyone else was expected to have morals in the first place. Personally, I'll settle for economic opportunism on a truly royal scale, courtesy of King James I of England.
But before we get to James and his famous hatred of tobacco, we need to back up a few thousand years.
Actually...more than 12,000 years.
Long before Europeans had ever heard of tobacco, Native peoples in South America were cultivating and using it. The plant probably originated somewhere in the Andes or nearby western South America before spreading throughout the Americas. It was smoked, chewed, snuffed, and used in religious ceremonies from the Amazon to what is now Canada. Contrary to popular belief, the earliest smokers probably weren't rolling cigars. They were more likely smoking loose tobacco in primitive pipes or as wrapped leaves, while true cigars seem to have been developed much later, in the Caribbean.
Like every successful vice in history, tobacco traveled well. Whether it spread because people enjoyed it, because they believed it had medicinal value, or because nicotine is one of the world's more persuasive chemicals is anyone's guess. Archaeologists have found evidence that people were using wild tobacco in what is now Utah roughly 12,000 years ago. That does not mean they were farming it, however. Deliberate cultivation probably began somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, making tobacco one of the oldest domesticated plants in the New World.
The first Europeans to encounter tobacco arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492. While exploring Cuba, two members of his expedition reported that the local Taíno people carried "firebrands and bundles of leaves" that they lit and inhaled. The Europeans had just witnessed the world's first recorded cigar smokers. Columbus himself wasn't particularly impressed, but one of his sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, apparently acquired the habit and may have become the first European smoker.
The Taíno also gave Europe the word tobacco—or at least something close to it. Historians still argue over whether the original word referred to the plant itself or to the Y-shaped tube used to inhale its smoke. Either way, within little more than a century the strange New World weed would conquer Europe far more effectively than any Spanish conquistador ever could.
By the late 1500s, tobacco had become the latest must-have import for Europe's upper crust. Spanish and Portuguese sailors carried it home first, and before long it had reached England. Contrary to popular legend, Sir Walter Raleigh did not introduce tobacco to England. English sailors and explorers had already encountered it and members of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony returned home smoking it. Raleigh's real contribution was far more powerful: he made it fashionable. As he was one of Queen Elizabeth I's favorite courtiers, anything Raleigh did instantly became more interesting. If Sir Walter had shown up wearing a lobster on his head, half the nobility would have been shopping for crustaceans by week's end.
Then, in 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. James took one look at the growing number of Englishmen puffing away on clay pipes and reacted much the way a modern health crusader reacts to a teenager with a vape.
In 1604, he published his famous pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco. It wasn't merely a criticism of smoking—it was a full-throated literary assault. James described tobacco as:
"A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs..."
That is one of history's more memorable one-sentence product reviews, even if the King neglected to put it on Yelp. (That’s quite a contrast to the positive advertising by tobacco sellers some 360 years later—and those guys knew about the scientific evidence that backed up the claims made by the king!)
Given such strong feelings, you might expect James to outlaw tobacco entirely.
He didn't.
Instead, in that very same year, he imposed what amounted to one of the biggest "sin taxes" in English history. The import duty on tobacco jumped from 2 pence per pound to 6 shillings and 10 pence per pound. Since there are twelve pence in a shilling, that meant the tax soared from 2 pence to 82 pence per pound—a staggering forty-one-fold increase.
Apparently, tobacco was so vile, so disgusting, so offensive to God and man...that the Crown simply couldn't afford to let anyone stop buying it.
The irony only deepened over time. England's American colony at Jamestown was struggling to survive until John Rolfe began growing a sweeter variety of tobacco that English smokers actually wanted to buy. Suddenly, the "loathsome" weed became the economic engine that kept Virginia alive. Before long, English ships were carrying ever-larger cargoes of tobacco across the Atlantic, customs officials were collecting ever-larger duties, and the Crown was becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from the very product its king had condemned as an abomination.
Walk into an English tavern in about 1700 and you'd likely be handed two things: a mug of ale and a long-stemmed white clay pipe. The pipe wasn't yours, mind you—it belonged to the tavern, just like the tankard and (probably) the cat sleeping by the fireplace. You smoked it, handed it back, and the innkeeper tossed it into the hottest part of the fire. Before long it was hot enough to burn away every trace of tobacco—and quite possibly every germ within a hundred yards. Centuries before anyone had heard of bacteria, publicans had accidentally invented a remarkably effective sterilization process.
The pipes themselves were so inexpensive that they were practically the disposable coffee cups of the seventeenth century. Most cost only a fraction of a day's wages, and if one broke, nobody shed a tear. Archaeologists have since repaid the favor by digging up millions of broken stems and using them to date old settlements with surprising accuracy. It seems the humble tavern pipe, designed to be smoked, broken, and forgotten, has become one of history's most talkative little artifacts.
History has a wicked sense of humor. Governments often discover that the fastest way to embrace a vice is to figure out how to tax it. James I may have sincerely hated tobacco, but he also loved revenue. Faced with choosing between his principles and his treasury, the treasury won by forty-one to one.
