The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain

by Неизвестный

  Whatever the truth, both James and Maitland were encouraged to keep away from Edinburgh, the Chancellor moving to Lethington, while the King wandered the country, pretending to chase Bothwell. In May, in an attempt to win round the Kirk, James called another Parliament, probably at Maitland’s instigation. After the promises at his homecoming from Denmark, action against Arran’s 1584 ‘Black Acts’, one of which had controversially confirmed the status of bishops, was now long overdue. In its place, the May 1592 Parliament now passed a ‘Golden Act’ by which the Kirk was finally allowed to develop its ecclesiastical polity, and official recognition was given to their system of Sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly. On one level, this bypassing of the episcopacy was a triumph for the Kirk. But James insisted on keeping another of the 1584 Acts which asserted his royal supremacy, and suggested to the Parliament that they pass an Act which would take action against attacks against him in sermons. When Parliament refused, James ‘chafed and railed against the ministers’.42

  Worse was to come: Bothwell was not finished. On 27 June 1592, he launched a midnight attack on James at Falkland Palace. With three hundred men and a battering ram, he attempted to break down the palace gates. James locked himself in a tower, which the Earl continued to besiege until morning, before fleeing again. This time it was self-evident that James had been betrayed by men close to him, a realisation that sent the King into a depression, ‘lamenting his estate and accounting his fortune to be worse than any prince living’, since he was destined to ‘die in himself’ – betrayed to his death ‘by the means of those who are nearest to him and most trusted’.

  One of his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, a young laird named John Wemyss, was accused of dealing with Bothwell and put under arrest. Wemyss’s lover, one of Anna’s Danish maids named Margaret Vinstarr, contrived a daring escape for Wemyss through Holyrood’s royal bedchamber, ‘where the King and Queen were in bed’, and let him out at a window ‘where she had prepared cords for his escape’. This incident led to James upbraiding Anna, causing her, and himself, to end up in tears,43 but it was reported that she refused to dismiss Vinstarr, announcing that ‘she will rather go to Denmark than part with Mistress Margaret or any others [of] her domestic servants’.44 Once again, the King’s nervousness sent him moving from one residence to another through the summer and into the autumn; still dogged by Anna, Maitland found himself so unpopular by September that he gave up life at court altogether, and retired to the west of Scotland with friends.45

  The King’s lack of action against Huntly was to damage him still further. In the autumn of 1592 another Spanish plot was uncovered. More correspondence with Spain was intercepted, this time blank pieces of paper presigned by Huntly, Errol, Sir Patrick Gordon of Auchindoun and their new ally, the tenth Earl of Angus, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. A Scottish Catholic named George Kerr was apprehended as he was about to set sail for Spain, and found to be carrying the so-called ‘Spanish blanks’; he confessed under torture that a Spanish invasion, of 30,000 Spanish troops joining 15,000 Scots raised by the conspirators, was being planned under the leadership of the Scottish Jesuit Father William Crichton, now resident in Spain, and that the blank pieces of paper were designed to carry details of the plot. The Kirk reacted with horror to the relevations, with most of their alarm directed at the King himself. James had shown himself to be incapable of taking decisive action against Huntly, despite his repeated and proven acts of treason. Perhaps, it was whispered, the King himself was involved? One document among the ‘Spanish blanks’ seemed to suggest this was a real possibility: a memorandum in which, it appeared, James listed the arguments for and against a possible invasion of England by Scotland in the summer of 1592, concluding firmly that such a plan was impossible. The reasons given for this impossibility are interesting. The current disorderly state of Scotland, it was argued, meant that James could not be sure of conquering his own country, let alone the major power to the south. He certainly could not leave Scotland to lead an army into England, since he would be giving the already troublesome nobles carte blanche to undermine his tenuous grip on government. If he were to invade England, it would have to be some time off in the future, and he would do it with as little aid as possible from overseas powers. ‘In the meantime,’ James wrote, ‘I will deal with the Queen of England fair and pleasantly for my title to the Crown of England after her decease, which thing, if she grant to (as it is not impossible, howbeit unlikely), we have attained our design without stroke of sword. If by the contrary, then delay makes me to settle my country in the meantime and, when I like hereafter, I may in a month or two (forewarning of the King of Spain) attain to our purpose, she not suspecting such a thing as she does now, which, if it were so done, would be a far greater honour to him and me both.’ What the memorandum suggests is that James was willing to give an ear to plans to attack England, and to evaluate them, not from a moral highground, but from practical exigency.46

  Once again, James could not bring himself to be anything but lenient to Huntly, but this time the Kirk was adamant that the King had to act against this blatant Catholic threat. Accordingly, James mustered his forces and marched north to Aberdeen in February of 1593, but it was clearly only for show: as soon as Huntly and his allies retreated towards Caithness, James gave up the chase. A few token gestures – taking bonds of good behaviour, some garrisons staking out strategic locations – fooled nobody. When he seized the rebels’ estates, only to hand them over to their friends, the English ambassador Lord Burgh wrote that James had only ‘dissembled a confiscation’; compounding this interpretation, the July 1593 Parliament failed to pass the expected act of forfeiture against Huntly and his followers. James’s lack of real action may have been as much due to fear as to love of Huntly: James confided to Bowes that Huntly, Errol and Angus were three of the most powerful nobles in Scotland, and ‘if he should again pursue them and toot them with the horn he should little prevail’.47

  Seeing how the Kirk was turning against the King, Bothwell took his chance. In a bizarre turn of events, he now pledged his support to the Kirk, and they reciprocated in kind, minister John Davidson ingeniously explaining that Bothwell was a ‘sanctified plague’ who had been sent to cause James to ‘turn to God’, and away from the papists.48 Elizabeth, too, saw the potential of the rebel Earl as a possible magnet for anti-Catholic activism. Her efforts were not appreciated by her loving cousin, as James made clear to her ambassador, Lord Burgh: ‘Touching that vile man,’ he said of Bothwell, ‘as his foul offences towards me are unpardonable and most to be abhorred for example’s sake by all sovereign princes, so we most earnestly pray her [Elizabeth] to deliver him in case he have refuge anymore within any part of her dominions, praying you to inform her plainly that, if he be received or comforted in any part of her country, I can no longer keep amity with her but, by the contrary, will be forced to join in friendship with her greatest enemies for my own safety.’49 To the Queen herself, he protested that he would rather be a slave in the galleys of the Turk than demonstrate leniency towards a man who had dishonoured him. Elizabeth could hardly think him so ignorant of the honour of a prince, he continued, unless she thought that he, James, had been bewitched by Bothwell and turned into an ass. For once, Elizabeth was moved by the passion of his protest, and wrote a letter in which she partially apologised.50

  But the threat from Bothwell still remained. At Holyroodhouse on 24 July, James was preparing to dress, when he heard a disturbance in the chamber next to his own. Rushing in, undressed as he was, he was confronted by Bothwell kneeling next to his drawn sword – a sign that Bothwell considered that he had control of Holyroodhouse, but would not use his power to harm the King. James, always nervous of weapons, was reluctant to trust to such a fine distinction. He shouted that ‘Treason’ was afoot, and rushed to Anna’s bedchamber, only to find the door bolted. Turning back to the outlaw, he screamed that Bothwell might take his life, but would not, like Satan dealing with a witch, obtain h
is immortal soul. He, James, was a sovereign king, only twenty-seven years old: he would rather die than live out his life in captive shame. James believed not only that Bothwell had been helped by the witches of North Berwick, but that Bothwell had satanic powers of bewitchment – to which James was immune. Bothwell flamboyantly offered him his sword, urging him to strike him down – but luckily James’s response wasn’t required. At the moment, other courtiers entered, and James changed tactic, calming the situation and agreeing to bargain with them. Their discussion ended in a compromise: Bothwell agreed to withdraw from court until he came to trial on the witchcraft charges. The trial, it went without saying, would acquit the Earl; James would then pardon Bothwell for all his other offences, but in exchange, Bothwell would withdraw from court life. Aware of a crowd gathering outside, James appeared at a window to assure them that nothing was amiss.51

  This dramatic attempt on James inspired him to three sonnets, the self-pitying tone of which can be heard in the following:

  Shall treason then of truth have the reward

  And shall rebellion thus exalted be?

  Shall cloaked vice with falsehood’s fained fard

  In credit creep and glister in our eye?

  Shall coloured knaves so malapertly lie

  And shameless sow their poisoned smitting seed?

  And shall perjured infamous foxes sly

  With these triumphs make honest hearts to bleed?

  How long shall Furies on our fortunes feed?

  How long shall vice her reign possess in rest?

  How long shall Harpies our displeasure breed

  And monstrous fowls sit sicker in our nest?

  In time appointed God will surely have

  Each one his due reward for to resave [receive].52

  Bothwell retired from court, as agreed, and James went to work. The outlaw Earl’s power had alarmed several major players, and they now came together, overlooking previous differences: Treasurer Glamis, Lord John Hamilton, Homes, Maxwell, several members of the Douglas and Stewart families – and Chancellor Maitland, who returned to court, much to the King’s relief. In September 1593, James felt secure enough to declare that he was a free King, and to threaten Bothwell that he had to stick to his side of the bargain.53 But James still showed little real desire to rid himself of the Catholic earls led by Huntly. In November of 1593, a small convention in Edinburgh passed an Act of Oblivion for all the Catholic earls’ illegal acts, on various conditions, including that they should formally submit to the Kirk. James was heavily implicated in this manoeuvre: it was claimed that he had manipulated the nobles at the convention, and tampered with the wording of the Act. The Kirk, predictably enraged, took little notice of the Act: the Synod of Fife excommunicated the earls anyway. Elizabeth taunted James with a letter ‘in which she lamented the sight of a seduced King, an abusing Council, and wry-guided kingdom’.54

  Amends were made in April 1594. Bothwell appeared at Leith, this time with only a small group of men, driving some of the King’s horse back to Edinburgh – James himself, according to an unsympathetic Calderwood, ‘came riding into the city at the full gallop with full honour’. The King went to St Giles’ and appealed to Edinburgh to support him: ‘If ye will assist me against Bothwell at this time, I promise to prosecute the excommunicated lords [i.e. Huntly and his followers] so that they shall not be suffered to remain in any part of Scotland.’ Bothwell realised that his honeymoon with the Kirk was over, and fled north.55 Shortly after, James was made aware of yet another Spanish plot involving Huntly and the Catholic earls. This time, having made his promise to Edinburgh, he could not refuse to take proper action. Crucially, he drew his support now not from the nobility, but from the lairds and the burghs. He also appealed to the Kirk for support, but their initial reaction was sceptical, telling James they would pray for him. But then news reached Edinburgh that Huntly was sheltering the fugitive Bothwell. Faced with this dangerous concentration of rebel power they were forced to act.

  James’s military expedition was ready in September to march to the north-east with the Kirk represented by Andrew Melvill; the advance guard commanded by the young Earl of Argyll soon reached Aberdeenshire. A skirmish on 3 October, rather grandly known as the battle of Glenlivet, saw Huntly defeat Argyll; when James approached, the Earl put up no resistance, but refused to surrender Bothwell. Bothwell again fled for his life to Caithness, but this was to be the last time. The royal forces burned the rebels’ houses to the ground. Either exhausted, or realising his luck had turned, Bothwell fled north.

  In dealing with his prisoners, James showed his true colours. To him, Huntly was never a real enemy, as Bothwell was. In March 1595, with official permission, Huntly and Errol left the country, but Huntly returned to Scotland the following year, and was officially received into the Kirk in 1597, rewinning James’s friendship and being rewarded in 1599 with the title of Marquis.56 While Huntly was never again to have the influence over the King that he had enjoyed in the late 1580s, he and James retained a close friendship in future years, cemented when James asked for Huntly’s son to be sent to London as a companion to his own son, Charles. Indeed, at the end of his life, James summoned Huntly to London to present him to Charles, who would be his new king, describing him as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince, assuring Charles that so long as he would cherish and keep Huntly on his side, he needed not be very apprehensive of seditious or turbulent heads in Scotland’.57 Bothwell’s flight this time took him abroad. He lived on for another thirty years, but never returned to Scotland. Scotland’s most seditious and turbulent head was gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Advice to A Son

  IF JAMES HAD believed that marriage to Anna would stop the attacks on his masculinity he was truly misguided. Rumours in Scandinavia that Anna had conceived shortly after their wedding proved to be unfounded. The Earl of Worcester, sent by Elizabeth to welcome the new Queen in the summer of 1590, joked that Anna’s toothache was evidently ‘a token of breeding child’, but again no child was born.1 By the autumn of 1591, there were intimations of resentment on the part of the Scottish people: an anonymous Englishman in Berwick reported their ‘great disliking of their Queen, for that she proves not with child’.2 And in time, the resentment spread to the King.

  In the summer of 1592, James sent for several Edinburgh ministers and showed them some harshly mocking ‘contumelious verses’ that had been sent to him. James thought they must be the work of one Captain Hackerston, one of the leading followers of Bothwell, then the King’s principal bugbear. ‘Ye may see,’ James told the ministers, ‘what they mean to my life, that carry such libels about them.’ The scurrilous rhymes contained three rumours: ‘calling him Davy’s son, a bougerer [bugger], one that left his wife all the night intactam.’ The claim that the King was in fact the illegitimate son of Mary’s Italian secretary David Riccio was older than James himself and would never be quashed; but the other two, impugning his masculinity, struck him to the heart. Ever since Esmé Stuart had come into Scotland, it had been suggested obliquely that the King’s relations with his male favourites might cross the line into physical expression, and James himself, in his open letter to the Privy Council as he set sail to Denmark, had drawn attention to rumours that he had no desire to marry. But now he had a wife – and yet what had been only hinted at before was now spelled out in the libels. James decided to act, but he had a strange order for the ministers. ‘I thought good to acquaint you with these things, that ye may acquaint the people with them, for they have a good opinion of you, and credit you.’ And so the Edinburgh ministers were despatched to inform their flocks that the King was not the illegitimate son of David Riccio, that he did indeed consummate his marriage, that he was not a bugger. Quite what the Edinburgh congregations made of these assurances is not recorded.3

  It was with great relief, then, when it became clear in late 1593, after over three years of marriage, that the Queen was pregnant. On 19 February 1594, An
na gave birth to her first child, a son, at Stirling. James named him Henry Frederick, Henry after his father, and Frederick after Anna’s. The baptism in August was a grand affair, far more lavish than James’s precarious finances truly afforded, and attended by representatives of many European courts. As with James’s own christening, the festivities were marked by entertainments, this time with James contributing, with William Fowler, to a masque in which he starred as one of the Christian Knights of Malta, doing battle with Moors and Amazons, the latter portrayed in full female dress by several noblemen.4

  When Henry was only two days old, family tradition was honoured when the Earl of Mar, James’s boyhood friend Jocky o’ Sclaittis, was appointed as his guardian, with Stirling Castle as his residence. The dowager Countess of Mar, who had looked after James, was still alive, and was called on to undertake the same duties with Henry. The same restrictions of access were imposed – with the interesting addition that no enemy of the prince ‘nor their wives, bairns, or servants’ should be allowed into the castle.5 While this state of affairs seemed perfectly natural to James, Anna was firmly opposed to losing her child so early. In March 1595, she asked her husband to transfer to her the keeping of Prince Henry and Stirling Castle. James was dismayed, and demanded to know who had put such a thing into her mind: of all people, Maitland was blamed. ‘There ariseth a variance at court,’ wrote one commentator. ‘The Queen would have had the prince in keeping in the Castle of Edinburgh and Buccleuch [a Border nobleman] to be captain … It was thought that the motion proceeded from the Chancellor who was now a great courtier with the Queen.’6 The King thought the idea ‘perilous to his own estate’ and refused to yield, angrily swearing ‘that if he were about to die he would with his last breath command Mar to retain possession of the Prince.’7