The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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Anna refused to let the matter drop. In May, it was reported that ‘the Queen speaks more plainly than before and will not cease till she has her son.’ Court sympathies split into ‘two mighty factions’, the King’s faction at Stirling – Mar, Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone, and the Queen’s faction, including Maitland, at Edinburgh. The custody of the Prince became a sticking point in the royal marriage. ‘No good can come between the King and Queen till she be satisfied anent the Prince,’ George Nicolson wrote on 15 July, since there was a ‘division of this land into two factions almost to the parting of the King and Queen’.8 Obviously fearing what his wife might do to get her son back, James wrote to Mar urging him to stick to the letter of his contract, not giving Henry to anyone without permission directly from the King’s own mouth, ‘because in the surety of my son consists my surety’. He even specified that Anna should not be given custody if James were himself to die: ‘in case God call me at any time, that neither for Queen nor Estates’ pleasure ye deliver him [the Prince] until he be eighteen years of age.’9
Realising that the King would not climb down, Anna tried a more dramatic tactic. James, staying at Stirling, was told that Anna had fallen ill at Edinburgh, and wanted to see him. The King’s counsellors were immediately suspicious and advised against his going, in case some sort of attempt was made against him. Anna’s party sent her physicians to Stirling to assure James that his wife was indeed ill. James took the bait and decided ‘to set aside all occasion of suspicion, jealousy or pleasures’ and give ‘a proof of his love to his wife’ by riding to Edinburgh. Anna turned out to be ‘very merry and well disposed’, and took advantage of her husband’s rare show of concern to ask him once again for her son. This time James ‘took it in a more higher sort than before’ and replied, ‘My heart, I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’ Anna burst into tears. The following day, James said to Maitland, ‘If any think I am further subject to my wife than I ought to be, they are but traitors and such as seek to dishonour me.’10 Realising she could not win, the Queen abandoned her campaign and publicly reconciled with Mar but it was thought permanent damage had been done to the marriage: ‘There is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation betwixt the King and the Queen,’ wrote John Colville in August, ‘each intending by slight to overcome the other.’11 Nevertheless, the King and Queen knew their duty, and Anna continued to give birth to a succession of princes and princesses: Elizabeth in 1596, Margaret in 1598, Charles in 1600, Robert in 1601, Mary in 1605 and Sophia in 1607; although Margaret, Robert, Mary and Sophia all died in infancy, fears about the succession were calmed.
The death of Maitland on 5 October 1595 eased some of the factional tension. James had relied on Maitland for many years, and wrote a sonnet lamenting his demise, that generously admitted Maitland’s contribution to James’s writing.
If he who valiant even within the space
That Titan six times twice his course does end
Did conquise old Dame Rhea’s fruitful face
And did his reign from pole to pole extend
Had thought him happier if that Greek had penned
His worthy praise who traced the Trojan sack
Then all his acts that forth his fame did send
Or his triumphant trophies might him make.
Then what am I who on Pegasian back
Does flee amongs the nymphs’ immortal fair
For thou O Maitland does occasion take
Even by my verse to spread my name all where
For what in barbarous lead I block and frames
Thou learned in Minerva’s tongue proclaims.12
Despite this, it was reported that ‘His Majesty took little care for the loss of the Chancellor’. Whatever his personal attitude towards Maitland, James seemed to have little taste for the power of the Chancellorship, and was in no hurry to fill the vacant post. As he pointed out, he was damned whoever he appointed: if a nobleman, then the new Chancellor would very quickly ‘be better attended upon than the King himself’; if a commoner, then the new Chancellor would build a faction at court – Maitland, of course, had been a commoner.13
Over the next year the dominant court party emerged from a rare attempt on the part of the royal couple to manage their finances. In 1593, James had appointed a council to sort out his Queen’s accounts, a group that became known as the ‘Octavians’.14 Their endeavours were not in vain, and Anna was so impressed with their work that she recommended them to her husband. At New Year in 1596, she boastfully let James have a view of the 1000 Scottish pounds that the Octavians’ efforts had saved her. Handing over half of it to the King, she pointedly inquired as to when his Council would give as much. Stung into action, James dismissed his Treasurer, the Master of Glamis, and other Exchequer officials, and appointed the Octavians to sort out his finances on 9 January, allowing them control of all royal revenues and undertaking not to override their decisions, a tactic that effectively insulated James from any responsibility. This time, however, the Octavians had an impossible job on their hands. They suggested various schemes to reduce expenditure, but James’s hangers-on opposed them at every stage.15
From England, the factionalism at the Scottish court and within the royal marriage was viewed with dismay. Elizabeth wrote to Anna, and sent her messenger with a more important, lengthy verbal message giving the benefit of her opinion on evil counsellors. These evil counsellors were likely to be papists wanting to draw Anna away from her inherited Lutheranism – and it would be better if Elizabeth knew their names. Anna supplied only one name: it was Maitland who had talked her into trying to win back her son, and yes, he had tried to convert her. But now he was dead, and there was no one else; if such a seducer emerged, she would let Elizabeth know immediately.16
Elizabeth’s fears of Anna’s possible conversion to Catholicism were uttered more widely by those alarmed by what appeared to be a new trend towards the faith in James’s government. Although Prince Henry had been placed with the firmly Protestant Earl of Mar, the next three children (Elizabeth, Margaret and Charles) were given to guardians less staunch in their convictions;17 at the same time, Anna had taken as her confidante a known Catholic, Henrietta Gordon, Lady Huntly; and when James welcomed back into Scotland Huntly and Errol in the summer of 1596, there was an inevitable backlash from the Kirk. In September 1596, a delegation of ministers, led by Andrew Melvill and including his nephew James, were granted an audience with the King at Falkland. James Melvill commenced by informing the King that the commissioners of the General Assembly had just met in Cowper – at which point James broke in, angrily charging that such a meeting was held without a warrant, and was therefore seditious. This was too much for Andrew Melvill, who attacked the King ‘in so zealous, powerful and unresistable a manner’ that despite James’s ‘most crabbed and choleric manner’, Melvill ‘bore him down’. Calling him ‘God’s silly vessel’, Melvill took him by the sleeve, and harangued him: ‘Sir, as divers times before, so now again, I mon [must] tell you: there is two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member!’
Worse was to come from the St Andrews minister David Black, who had become infamous for his attacks on Queen Elizabeth’s religious purity. In a sermon he now denounced the English Queen as an atheist, protesting that religion in England was an empty show, and claiming that the English bishops had persuaded the King of Scots to reintroduce an episcopal government in Scotland, against the terms of the Confession of Faith by which the Kirk was founded. Moreover, he claimed, James had allowed the return of the Catholic earls Errol and Huntly. ‘But what could be expected when Satan ruled in the court and in the Council, when judges and councillors were cormorants and men of no religion, when the Queen of Scotland was a woman for whom, for fashion’s sake, the clergy might pray but
from whom no good could be hoped. Were not all kings Devil’s bairns?’ Called before the Privy Council, Black refused their jurisdiction, claiming only an ecclesiastical court could try him; his refusal was disseminated to every presbytery.
James was determined that Black would be punished, and refused to waiver. Edinburgh was soon in a state of crisis, with a campaign from the pulpits that ‘pressed forward and sounded mightily’ against the King and his counsellors. On 17 December, a sermon at St Giles’ used the story of the foiling of the evil counsellor Haman from the book of Esther to incite the congregation; the crowd became increasingly excited and leapt up shouting ‘Save yourselves! Armour, armour! Bills and axes!’ Running from the church, they seized arms, some going to the King in the Tolbooth, some to defend the ministers, shouting ‘Bring forth the wicked Haman!’ Through the intervention of the Provost, the riot quickly subsided, but James was furious. The following day the court moved to Linlithgow, from where the Privy Council declared that the riot had been an act of treason. James levied a force of Borders men, and forced Edinburgh to hand over 20,000 marks to keep the peace.18
The riots provided a neat excuse for James to impose new regulations on the Kirk. He gave himself the power to influence the location of General Assemblies, deliberately chose locations such as Perth, Montrose and Aberdeen, knowing that northern ministers were less supportive of Melvill than those in his strongholds of St Andrews and Edinburgh. Difficult ministers were called into James’s own cabinet and subjected to a barrage of threats, promises and bribes: James Melvill lamented, ‘Alas, where Christ guided before, the court began then to govern all.’ Concessions came from the General Assemblies in Perth and Dundee in early 1597: ministers would avoid political themes and attacks on the King in their sermons, unless he was informed first in private; presybteries would deal only with ecclesiastical affairs. In exchange, a commission was set up to advise the King on matters ecclesiastical, to the great suspicion of some Kirk men: James Melvill sneered that they were ‘the King’s led horse, and usurped boldly the power of the General Assemblies. They were as a wedge taken out of the Kirk to rend her with her own forces, and the very needle which drew in the thread of the bishops.’19
The commission did, however, propose that the Kirk should be directly represented in Parliament, instead of being a vociferous lobbying group. James compromised by suggesting that ministers could be appointed to vacant bishoprics, and that these new bishops might sit in Parliament, thus allowing the Kirk parliamentary representation while restoring the episcopacy. Calderwood was disgusted: this was ‘nothing better than that which the Grecians used for the overthrow of the ancient city and town of Troy: busking up a brave horse and … persuading them … to receive that in their honour and welfare which served for their utter wreck and destruction.’ Or as one old minister put it, ‘Busk, busk, busk him as bonnily as ye can, and bring him in as fairly as ye will, we see him well enough: we see the horns of his mitre.’20 James got his way, and the first three so-called ‘parliamentary bishops’ – of Ross, Caithness and Aberdeen – entered Parliament in 1600. The Kirk, sticking to their anti-episcopal line, refused to recognise them as bishops, and treated them as ministers instead.21
* * *
In the late 1590s, James set about consolidating his status as a learned king. The poetic experimentation that had preoccupied him in the early 1580s had now dwindled to a trickle of occasional pieces; the flush of religious commentary later in the decade had receded. Instead, he concentrated now on issues of greater political import. In 1597, his Daemonologie, probably composed around 1591, was finally published.22 Then, in 1598, he published his two most significant political prose works: The Trew Law of Free Monarchies and the Basilikon Doron.
The Trew Law of Free Monarchies was published anonymously but by the King’s printer Robert Waldegrave; it was quickly recognised as James’s work.23 The tract called for political principles, ‘true grounds’ with which to avoid the ‘endless calamities, miseries and confusions’ that Scotland had suffered. He had no intention, he declared, of ‘refuting the adversaries’, such as ‘seditious preachers in these days of whatsoever religion’. Instead to support his analysis of ‘the reciproc [sic] and mutual duty betwixt a free King and his natural subjects’, James turned to history, reason and above all scripture.24 One paragraph drawing on the Scriptures in particular lays out the basis of much of his belief-system and behaviour as King:
Kings are called Gods by the prophetical King David, because they sit upon God’s throne in the earth, and have the count of their administration to give unto him. Their office is to minister justice and judgement to the people, as the same David saith: to advance the good, and punish the evil, as he likewise saith: to establish good laws to his people, and procure obedience to the same as diverse good kings of Judah did: to procure the peace of the people, as the same David saith: to decide all controversies that can arise among them, as Solomon did: to be the minister of God, to take vengeance upon them that do well, and as the minister of God, to take vengeance upon them that do evil, as St Paul saith. And finally, as a good pastor, to go out and in before his people, as is said in the first of Samuel: that through the prince’s prosperity, the people’s peace may be procured, as Jeremy saith.25
Over the rest of his life, James was often to think, speak and write of himself as a Solomon or a David – and there were plenty of writers and preachers among his subjects who were willing to support him in the notion.
Basilikon Doron was a much longer work, subtitled Or His Maiesties Instrvctions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince. Henry was four years old when James composed the tract in 1598; the King’s own, much amended draft survives in the British Library.26 The book’s function is set out in its opening sonnet:
Lo here (my son) a mirror vive and faire,
Which showeth the shadow of a worthy King.
Lo here a book, a pattern doth you bring
Which ye should press to follow mair and mair [more].
This trusty friend, the truth will never spare,
But give a good advice unto you here:
How it should be your chief and princely care,
To follow virtue, vice for to forbear.
And in this book your lesson will ye leare, [learn]
For guiding of your people great and small.
Then (as ye ought) give an attentive ear,
And panse [think] how ye these precepts practise shall.
Your father bids you study here and read.
How to become a perfit King indeed.27
Who could he dedicate the book to, he asks Henry, except the person to whom it most justly appertained, his dearest son? As his natural father, he was responsible for Henry’s ‘godly and virtuous education’; as a king, he had to ‘provide for your training up in all the points of a King’s Office’.28 This is meant to be a manual reflecting his hands-on experience: as a king, he continues, ‘it became me best … having learned both the theorick and practick thereof, more plainly to expres, than any simple schoolmen, that only knows matters of kingdoms by contemplation’. James goes on to insist that the book was not ‘ordained for the institution of a prince in general’ but rather to contain ‘particular precepts to my son in special’, containing specific discussions of ‘the particular diseases of this kingdom, with the best remedies for the same’, making the book of personal relevance to Henry as future King.29 Indeed, James was later to claim that it was Basilikon Doron’s specificity to the situation in Scotland that led to its misinterpretation in England.
James could not be with his son at Stirling, but the existence of the book facilitated a new educational possibility. He cast Basilikon Doron as a textual ‘preceptor and counsellor’, a ‘resident faithful admonisher’, that could replace the all too flesh-and-blood tutor James had suffered as a child. Unlike a counsellor though, Basilikon Doron lacked human failings: ‘ye will find it a just and impartial counsellor; neither flattering you in any vice, nor importuning
you at unmeet times. It will not come uncalled, neither speak unspeered at [unquestioned]’.30 It is tempting to think that James must have had in mind the book that he was given in 1579, Buchanan’s De jure regni ad Scotos, which his schoolmaster presented to him ‘not merely as a guide, but also as an importunate critic – one even lacking, at times, in respect’ which would not only ‘show you the way’, but ‘check you and draw you back if you would stray’.31 Whereas Buchanan saw the role of his book as a rudely importunate critic, James presented Basilikon Doron as a respectful, silent tutor or counsellor, available when needed, and easy to access – he thoughtfully divided the short tract into three sections.
Basilikon Doron is an intriguing document, stuffed with advice gleaned from James’s fairly conventional reading of the classics and scripture, but with occasional examples drawn from nearer home. On marriage, for example, James instructs Henry to ‘keep inviolably your promise to God in your marriage’, and to avoid ‘the filthy vice of adultery’. ‘Have the King my grandfather’s example before your eyes,’ he suggests, ‘who by his adultery, bred the wrack of his lawful daughter and heir [Mary]; in begetting that bastard, who unnaturally rebelled [Moray], and procured the ruin of his own sovereign and sister. And what good her posterity hath gotten sensyne [since], of some of that unlawful generation, Bothwell his treacherous attempts can bear witness.’32 Henry should be ‘well versed in authentic histories, and in the chronicles of all nations, but specially in our own histories the example whereof most nearly concerns you’, but James qualifies that instruction: ‘I mean not of such infamous invectives as Buchanan’s or Knox’s Chronicles: and if any of these infamous libels remain until your days, use the Law upon the keepers thereof.’33