by Неизвестный
James’s reply to Elizabeth was short and to the point. Since, he wrote, ‘ye purge yourself of yon unhappy fact’, and considering her ‘rank and sex, consanguinity and long professed goodwill to the defunct’, and her oft-protested innocence, he dared not wrong her by judging dishonourably her ‘unspotted part’ in the affair. Not everyone would make such a generous interpretation, he hinted, hoping that her ‘honorable behaviour’ in times to come might ‘fully persuade the whole world of the same’. For his own part, he looked to her for ‘a full satisfaction’ which would ‘be a mean to strengthen and unite this isle, establish and maintain the true religion, and oblige me to be, as of before I was, your most loving and dearest brother’.12 Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer Burghley complained to Carey of James’s ‘strange course’, and let it be known that Elizabeth thought these a ‘strange kind of speeches’, so ‘repugnant’ from the previous friendship between the two sovereigns, that she intended not to reply, but to wait until the King reverted to his usual tone. The King of Scots, Burghley continued, appeared to intend ‘to suspend his former manner of intelligence until he may be better satisfied of her Majesty’s innocency’, implying that the English Queen, who was answerable to no one but God, was somehow on trial. Surely, Burghley persisted, ‘the word and writing of a Christian prince uttered with a free conscience in the sight of God’ was enough?13 Secretary Walsingham weighed in, writing a long discourse to Maitland, now Chancellor, that argued strongly that James should not consider revenge or allying with France or Spain.14 Burghley hoped, in a letter to Archibald Douglas, that James should not listen to counsel from ‘passionate pleasing men’ that would lose him ‘the hearts of great numbers living’, that is, the English, would vouchsafe for him ‘more good than his mother’s life could have done if she had continued’. After all, the Lord Treasurer pointed out, Mary ‘by nature was to die before him, and cannot be recovered’.15
An outbreak of trouble on the Borders, which James did little to quell, increased English fears. Time and again, rumours of an immediate invasion made the rounds in Berwick, which prepared itself for an assault.16 Elizabeth sent one of her most senior advisers, Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon (father of Sir Robert Carey who had brought the news of Mary’s death) to attempt to salvage the broken relationship. In July, James made his demands: he wanted a formal letter, signed by Elizabeth, acknowledging him as ‘lawful and nearest successor to the Crown, failing her bodily succession’. In addition, as a token ‘to remove all kind of suspicion of her evil meaning, specially after the infernal proceeding against his dearest mother’, she should make him a donation of ‘some lands in England, chiefly in the north parts, of ample and sufficient revenue, with the title of Duke’.17 He also demanded the right to be consulted about the marriage of Arbella Stuart, the daughter and heir of his uncle, Lord Charles Stuart. Arbella was his nearest rival to the English throne, and although as the daughter of a younger son her claim was clearly subordinate to his as son of an elder son, she had the crucial advantage of having been born and bred in England, which many argued was a prerequisite for an English sovereign.18 James felt that Elizabeth needed to exonerate herself from ‘yon unhappy fact’, but his chosen penalty – material benefits to himself – compromised his moral highground. Using Douglas in London as a secondary channel of communication, he intimated that, as an alternative, he could so very easily seek revenge for his mother’s death, and take up the many offers of support from Catholic states overseas. Douglas informed the English that James was held back only by moral constraints, ‘but ye may be sure he cannot be long restrained’. James’s every move was watched. Hunsdon maintained that James had ‘no good meaning’ towards the English Queen, and that troops from France and Spain were expected in Scotland. At the close of the Scottish Parliament on 29 July, Maitland made a speech before the King and the nobility calling for ‘a revenge for the death of the Queen’; all the lords made a solemn vow on their knees ‘that they would always be ready to aid and assist him, both with the hazard of lands, lives, and goods, whensoever his Majesty should command them in that action’.19 In London, Archibald Douglas was forced to face English protests about the Parliament, and answered questions to the satisfaction of the Privy Council. Sir Lewis Bellenden, the Scottish Justice Clerk, asked for understanding in interpreting James’s actions – he had to show Scotland that he had neither abetted nor acquiesced in Mary’s execution.20 By November, Hundson was reporting that James was to receive money from Spain which would provide for a simultaneous Scottish and Spanish assault on England. Even Hunsdon, though, did not rule out the possibility of a positive end to this troubled period ‘in this dangerous time’. He advised that Elizabeth should send a letter through him – since James could not accept an openly friendly letter from England – and the letter should offer an increased pension.21
England was right to suspect that James was looking to Catholic princes. In addition to his tetchy diplomatic ballet with Elizabeth’s councillors, James was in contact with the Duc de Guise, and Henri III of France, using Mary’s death to encourage funding for Scotland.22 This was bad news to Spain who believed that James was a hopeless heretic, lost to the Catholic cause, and better off supplanted. King Philip quickly set about sabotaging James’s new Catholic overtures. With beautiful timing, Philip discovered that in fact he was the heir to Elizabeth’s throne, with two clean bloodlines leading back to Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt. And if that claim failed to convince, Philip announced that James’s mother had named him her heir in her last will and testament. Angry with her son in May 1586, Mary had indeed intimated to the Spanish agent Bernardino de Mendoza that she intended to make her throne over to Philip: ‘I have made the decision that in the case that my son does not conform to the Catholic religion before my death (which, I must tell you, I have little hope of as long as he remains in Scotland) to cede and give my right, by will, in the succession of this crown, to the King.’23 The will itself, much talked of, never came to light – presumably because it never existed. As Mary died, Philip urged his claims on Pope Sixtus V asking for his support in a crusade to supplant the ‘young heretic’ James and to place his daughter, the Infanta, on the Scottish throne.24
It was only in later years that James started to exhibit a real defensiveness towards the memory of the mother whose death, in all probability, he had done his share to bring about. In 1596, when Edmund Spenser brought out the second part of his epic poem The Faerie Queene, James made a formal objection to Elizabeth concerning the character Duessa, the murderous, treacherous, adulterous, impious woman whom many read to represent Mary, demanding that ‘Edward [sic] Spencer for his fault, may be duly tried and punished’.25 When James reached England in 1603, one of his first acts was to send a velvet pall to cover the tomb of his mother in Peterborough Cathedral; ten years later, at his order, Mary’s body was exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey, where her monument faced that of Elizabeth. ‘Our dearest mother,’ James wrote to the Dean of Peterborough, should be ‘in our Church of Westminster, the place where the kings and queens of this realm are usually interred.’26
* * *
England was further discouraged by the latest rising star in James’s court, whose ascent was aided by the fall of the Master of Gray. Soon after his return from England, Gray had been accused by Sir William Stewart that he had confessed that he and Maitland had been involved in the action at Stirling in November 1585. Gray denied ever having said this, but he was nonetheless warded in Edinburgh Castle and in May 1587 formally accused of a series of crimes, including trafficking with Spain and the Pope; planning the assassination of Maitland; counterfeiting the King’s stamp, and attempting to use it to prevent the King’s marriage; and for consenting to Mary’s death in return for rewards in England. Gray confessed to sedition, and of trying to impede James’s marriage, but at James’s intervention was saved from death and financial ruin by being permitted to enjoy the profits from his estates, while being banished from the realm.27 A sole except
ion to the Gray estates was the abbacy of Dunfermline, most of which the King gave to George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. Huntly was four years older than the King, and had been sixth Earl of Huntly since 1576 after his father ‘deceased suddenly one afternoon coming from the football’.28 As early as 1579, he had been identified as the key to Roman Catholic hopes in Scotland – in the words of the exiled Catholic Bishop of Ross, the Earl, then only eighteen years old, was the man on whom hopes should be pinned to ‘restore the worship of God in Scotland, one of these days’.29 As the prime landed magnate in the north, with influence in the burgh of Aberdeen and on the Moray Firth, with their deep-water ports, Huntly was seen as strategically placed to forward Catholic hopes; years spent in France only consolidated his Francophile and Catholic leanings, and his value rose as in time he became one of James’s favourites.
The Kirk was dismayed, letting the King know of their ‘grief that sundry papists of great calling are promoted to offices and benefices; and that such, and others of high rank within the country, take upon them the maintenance of Papists and idolators’ – Huntly’s name headed the list of the guilty parties.30 At the July 1587 Parliament, Huntly, now a Privy Councillor, bore the sword at the opening ceremonies, and was made one of four Lords of the Articles.31 By mid-August, an anonymous ‘advertiser in Scotland’ was informing Walsingham that ‘My Lord of Huntly is indeed a great courtier and knows more of the King’s secrets nor [than] any man at this present doth’;32 Ogilvy of Powrie reported that Huntly ‘now remains ordinarily at court, and that by his Majesty’s special command’.33
Whatever his motivation, James’s sudden show of favour towards Huntly turned out to be a canny move. With Mary dead, Scottish Catholics may have gained a perfect martyr, but they had lost a living figurehead: Huntly was the most obvious choice as successor, but by entering James’s circle, his potential danger might be significantly diluted. James now held the disaffected Kirk and the disaffected Catholics in an uneasy balance, made all the more tenuous by the perennial insecurity of Huntly’s relationship with the King. Scotland’s state papers of the period are littered with conflicting accounts of James’s favour towards the Earl, and Huntly’s irritation with James’s insistence on maintaining positive relations with England. More than once, Huntly made a show of leaving court to express his anger and disappointment with the King. Nevertheless, Huntly’s position at court was shored up when, on 21 July 1588, he married Lady Henrietta Stuart, one of the daughters of James’s beloved Esmé, shipped over from France at a cost of five thousand marks, voted by the Privy Council.34 James himself contributed verses to an entertainment at the wedding festivities featuring men portraying Mercury, nymphs and zani.35 At their marriage, Huntly and his wife publicly renounced Roman Catholicism and embraced the reformed faith. Thomas Fowler wrote that ‘The King, desiring to have him his familiar in court, persuaded him from papistry, and, as he thought prevailed.’ At Huntly’s subscription to the Kirk, James ‘rejoiced exceedingly’, and the Earl was subsequently ‘lodged in the King’s chamber, and had place in the King’s favour above all others’. Huntly’s modus operandi was very different from that of his predecessor Lennox, however. The Earl, Fowler observed, ‘never meddled in matters of state’; instead, he ‘followed [the King] in all pastime and would flatter and feed his humour in whatever exceedingly’. Indeed, continued Fowler, Huntly was ‘shallow witted. But he hath shrewd counsellors about him whose advice he follows.’36
These shrewd counsellors understood that, Catholic sympathies aside, Huntly could be the invaluable linchpin of an anti-Maitland party. Maitland’s rise – as Secretary in 1584, Vice-Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal in 1586, and finally Chancellor in 1587 – had been seen as a triumph for those committed to Protestantism and good relations with England, but there were many who opposed some, if not all, of these supposed achievements. Round Huntly there now coalesced a de facto opposition, politically conservative, supportive of the nobility against what they saw as the lower-born Maitland’s advances on their privileges, and generally drawn to France rather than England. There was indeed a Catholic tinge to the Huntly faction, which included Errol, Lennox, Crawford, Seton and Maxwell, but its politics also drew Protestants such as Atholl, Montrose and Lord John Hamilton; certain courtiers, including Bothwell, Glamis and Gray vacillated between Maitland and Huntly.37
James neatly balanced his intimate favour for Huntly with a display of his orthodox Protestantism. As part of his campaign to keep the Kirk sweet, James spent the winter months ‘in commenting of the Apocalypse and in setting out of sermons thereupon against the Papists and Spaniards’.38 The former was A Fruitful Meditation, published in early 1588 and expanded to five times its length as Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle S. John in 1616; it marked the King’s first entry into theological writing, which was later to become a passion.39 James also put his grasp of Church doctrine to public test by challenging to a debate a leading Jesuit, Father James Gordon – Huntly’s uncle, no less. The encounter turned into a marathon five-hour scholarly exchange, in which James, tellingly, displayed none of the vehemence or tantrums he was prone to when debating with Kirk ministers. At the end, the two men praised each other graciously and generously, with Gordon conceding that no man ‘use his arguments better nor quote the Scriptures and other authorities more effectively’ than James.40 In his chamber, however, according to Bernardino de Mendoza, James declared ‘that Gordon did not understand the Scripture, which is a fairly bold thing to say’. What could be expected though, Mendoza sneered, from a King who had ‘the assurance to translate Revelation and to write upon the subject as if he were Amadis de Gaule himself’.41
In the spring of 1588, James was forced to turn his attention to more pressing matters. Rumours reached James that Huntly, Crawford and Montrose in the north, and Maxwell and Lord Claud Hamilton in the south were plotting to bring a Spanish army to Scotland, and to force his conversion to the old faith. In fact, Spain was not interested in Scotland, but the rumour served to bolster those still faithful to Catholicism, and to rally troops at Dunfermline and Linlithgow. At the beginning of May, Maxwell ‘passed through the country with a plaid about him, like a wayfaring man’;42 the King denounced him as a rebel, but friends still flocked to him. James soon showed himself ‘earnest to proceed against Maxwell’, and levied one hundred horse and two hundred footmen, but rumour had it that he had also ridden to Calder for secret negotiations with Maxwell and Lord John Hamilton, a charge strenuously denied by James’s entourage.43 As James advanced, Maxwell’s castles surrendered one by one until only Lochmaben remained, holding out until 9 June, when the royal forces seized the castle, hanging the captain and five garrison men, and bringing Lord Maxwell back to Edinburgh as a prisoner.44 The incident demonstrated to James that he should not be too complacent about his neutralisation of the Catholic threat, and from then on he was more careful: when Huntly invited him to attend a banquet at Dunfermline, James accepted readily enough; but then he panicked during the night, and left secretly and in great haste before dawn. The old nervousness, of the King ‘nourished in fear’, was back.
While the Scottish Catholics was countered with relative ease, a greater threat was on the horizon. In July, England braced herself for the Spanish Armada that her intelligencers had long reported was being prepared for an attack on her shores. At this most crucial moment, the new English ambassador in Scotland, William Asheby opted, without any authority, to offer James whatever was needed to keep him on the side of the English – promises that included an English dukedom, funds to keep a royal guard and to police the Borders, and a yearly pension of £5,000. James, predictably fired with a new enthusiasm for England, wrote to Elizabeth: ‘In times of straits true friends are most tried, now merits the thanks of you and your country, who kithes [shows] himself a friend to your country and estate; and this time must move me to utter my zeal to the religion how new a kinsman and neighbour I find myself to you and your country.’ He had therefore offered her
‘my forces, my person, and all that I may command to be employed against your strangers on whatsomever fashion and whatsomever mean as may best serve for the defence of your country. Wherein I promise to behave myself not as a stranger and foreign prince, but as your natural son and compatriot of your country in all respects.’ Calling for commissioners to confirm Asheby’s offer, he continued ‘I protest I desire not for that I would have the reward to precede the deserts, but only that I with honour, and a[ll] my good subjects with a fervent good will may embrace this your godly and honest cause, whereby your adversaries will have ado not with England but with the whole Isle of Britain.’45
Unfortunately for Asheby and James, by the time these offers were rashly made and enthusiastically accepted, the international political situation had altered beyond recognition. The Spanish fleet set sail from Corunna on 12 July and were in English waters within a week; England’s fleet, commanded by the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham, engaged them on the 21st. For the next ten days, the two fleets were consumed in battle, but on the night of the 28th, the Armada suffered grievous losses from English fireships, and on the following day the battle of Gravelines made England’s victory clear. The Spanish ships fled northwards, and started a slow and costly return to the homeland by circumnavigating the British Isles.
On 11 August, Asheby received two letters, portentously written in Sir Francis Walsingham’s own hand, informing him that he had committed a ‘great oversight’ ‘in the offering to the King, it being done without commission.’ In replying, Asheby threw himself on Elizabeth’s mercy, but even as he grovelled, he reiterated the urgency of an Anglo-Scottish pact: ‘What danger and utter ruin must needs follow if the minds of these two princes be not firmly knit together, all the world doth foresee.’46 From Paris, the disgraced Master of Gray saw James’s position with clearer eyes. ‘I am sorry to know from Scotland,’ he wrote to Archibald Douglas, ‘that the King our master has of all the golden mountains offered received a fiddler’s wages.’47