King James I is best known for rounding up dozens of translators to produce the King James Version of the Bible.

James, who ruled England from 1603 to 1625, wrote meditations on matters spiritual, as well as plenty of letters, poems — even a colorful attack on smoking called a “Counterblast to Tobacco.”

He was married but gay, according to David Bergeron, KU professor of English and author of King James and the Letters of Homoerotic Desire.

He dumped the Earl of Somerset when Somerset was implicated in a murder.

His last love was the Duke of Buckingham, with whose children he bonded more closely than he had with his own.

Yet toward the close of his life, the multifaceted monarch may have become a medical mess.

In the January issue of the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Science, several Kansas University researchers contend that between 1616 and his death, the king had a series of small strokes — these coming on top of chronic kidney disease and hypertension.

One of the article’s authors is Fred Holmes, now retired from the KU Medical Center Department of Medicine.

At autopsy, Holmes says, James’ brain was so swollen that it bulged from his skull. The doctors thought this was a sign of genius. In fact, it’s a sign of stroke.

But the KU researchers don’t just use brain size to make their case for James’ strokes. They point to more surprising evidence: changes in his prose style.

Holmes, along with Kristine Williams, assistant professor of nursing, and Susan Kemper, professor of psychology, did a statistical analysis of the last 10 sentences in each of 57 letters that James wrote between 1604 and 1624.

The researchers looked at the length of the sentences and the number of clauses they contained, among other things.

When people age normally, they speak and write in shorter sentences with fewer clauses. But the changes come gradually.

A steeper downward slope would be typical of someone with Alzheimer’s disease or, in James’ era, syphilis.

The change in James’ sentences, however, was not so much a slope as a stairstep decline typical in stroke, Williams says.

The average number of words per sentence dropped from 38 to 30, the number of clauses from about five to four.

Williams concedes that these are still extraordinarily long and complex sentences, and some would use that fact to argue against the idea that James’ strokes caused him to become demented.

But Holmes, citing several sources, says “most historians who know James believe that vascular dementia affected his performance very much.”

If poor health made James a less able ruler, there’s little evidence that the king suffered much, according to English professor Bergeron.

He says that when James’ wife finally died in March 1619, James ditched the dark clothes of mourning immediately after the funeral and tootled around London in colorful garb.

That’s a strikingly brief period of grieving for a queen, Bergeron says.

Though James’ health failed toward the end of his reign, his ability to find happiness did not.

— Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is rmartin@kucr.ku.edu.