The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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James avoided these tensions for a while by taking a couple of hunting trips, but he had to face the music when Parliament opened in Edinburgh on 17 June, with the King ‘riding in pomp’ from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the Tolbooth; Buckingham, who had recently become the first Englishman to be admitted on to the Scottish Privy Council (five more were to follow during the visit), was singled out as the only English peer to ride with the King.27 For once, James made a speech that avoided most of the bones of contention, and did not mention religious doctrine at all. But James still offended his Scottish audience by doing ‘England and Englishmen much honour and grace’. There was nothing he ‘studied’ harder for, both ‘sleeping and waking’, as to ‘reduce the barbarity’, as he put it, of Scotland to ‘the sweet civility’ of England. He hoped that his Scottish subjects would now be as ‘docible’ to the good features of English culture as they were ‘teachable to limp after’ its bad elements, namely ‘to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes, to take tobacco, and to speak neither Scottish nor English!’28 James attended Parliament every day of its three weeks’ tenure. An English observer, reporting to Bacon in London, told of how James ‘doth strive to shape the frame of this Kingdom to the method and degrees of the government of England’. Despite ‘a momentary opposition (for his countrymen will speak boldly to him)’, his campaign had ‘in part been profitable’. While total success was elusive, James had ‘won ground in most things, and hath gained Acts of Parliament to authorize particular Commissioners to set down orders for the Church and churchmen, and to treat with Sheriffs for their offices by way of composition.’ But James would not trust those commissions. Everything was to have ‘an inseparable reference to his Majesty. If any prove unreasonably and undutifully refractory, his Majesty hath declared himself, that he will proceed against him by the warrant of the law, and by the strength of his royal power.’29
These were James’s last days in his birthplace, and there, on 19 June, he celebrated his fifty-first birthday.30 Over the next few weeks he toured the country. James visited the celebrated coalworks at Culross belonging to Sir George Bruce, younger brother of the Earl of Kinross. The coalworks extended to an area which, at high tide, was under the sea. James, determined to see the works below ground but unfortunately ignorant of this detail, emerged from the coalpit on to a loading platform to find himself apparently surrounded by the sea, in the middle of the Forth. He was reportedly ‘seized by an immediate apprehension of some plot against his liberty or life’ and yelled out ‘Treason!’ His guide quickly reassured the King that he was perfectly safe, and the royal party made a hasty retreat to dry land.31
The King moved on to Stirling on 30 June, where he was greeted by the Commissar Robert Murray with a eulogy to both James and Stirling, as the place of his nurture:
This town, though she may justly vaunt of her natural beauty and impregnable situation, the one occasioned by the labyrinths of the delightsome Forth, with the deliciousness of her valleys, and the herds of deer in her park: the other by the stately rock on which she is raised; though she may esteem herself famous by worthy founders, re-edifiers, and the enlargers of her many privileges, – Agricola (who in the days of Galdus fortified her), Kenneth the Second (who here encamped and raised the Picts), Malcolm the Second, Alexander the First, William the Lion; yet doth she esteem this her only glory and worthiest praise, that she was the place of your Majesty’s education, that these sacred brows, which now bear the weighty diadems of three invincible nations, were empalled with their first hair. And that this day the only man of Kings, and the worthiest King of men, on whom the eye of heaven glanceth, deigns (a just reward of all those cares and toils which followed your cradle) to visit her.32
Another happy moment came on 19 July at Stirling when in the Chapel Royal he received a deputation from Edinburgh University, which was alarmed by rumours that ‘all colleges were to be laid waste, except St Andrews and Glasgow’.33 They debated on such themes as ‘Ought sheriffs and other inferior magistrates to be hereditary’; ‘On the nature of local motion’; and ‘Concerning the origin of fountains or springs’. After supper, the King sent for the learned disputants: John Adamson, James Fairlie, Patrick Sands, Andrew Young, James Reid and William King. Perhaps relaxed by the supper’s wine, James decided to play with the scholars’ names, starting with Adamson as ‘Adam’s Son’, and ending with King who ‘disputed very kingly, and of a kingly purpose concerning the royal supremacy of reason above anger and all passions’. ‘I am so well satisfied with this day’s exercise,’ he told the academics, ‘that I will be godfather to the College of Edinburgh, and have it called the College of King James, for after its founding it stopped sundry years in my minority; after I came to knowledge, I held to it, and caused it to be established; and although I see many look upon it with an evil eye, yet I will have them know that, having given it my name, I have espoused its quarrel, and at a proper time will give it a royal God-bairn gift, to enlarge its revenues.’ James was so proud of his wit that he commissioned a sonnet to immortalise it, whose last couplet memorialised the tangible benefit of the exchange:
To their deserved praise have I thus played upon their names,
And will their college hence be The College of King James.
The sonnet was then rendered in Latin three times for inclusion in The Muses’ Welcome.34 From Stirling, James travelled to Perth, where a speech by the merchant and burgess John Stewart reminded him of the Gowrie Plot, when God ‘did give you out of the bloody hands of these two unnatural traitors within this town’.35
The trouble with the Kirk would not go away, however. At St Andrews, James sat with the Court of High Commission as three ministers were tried on 12 July for their involvement with the recent clerical protest against the proposed innovations. There James came to blows with the man who was ironically one of the most devoted documenters of his reign, David Calderwood. Calderwood took the King to task over the question of the authority of the General Assembly. When James insisted on obedience, Calderwood equivocated by talking of active and passive obedience, namely that ‘we will rather suffer than practice’. James was incensed. ‘I will tell thee, man, what is obedience. The centurion, what he said to his servants, to this man, Go, and he goeth, to that man, Come, and he cometh, that is obedience.’ For ‘carrying himself unrevently, and braking forth into speeches not becoming a subject’, Calderwood was committed to prison.36
The following day, still smarting from the encounter, James met with a group of thirty-six ministers in the chapel of St Andrews Castle and angrily demanded to know what ‘causeless jealousies’ there could be to his proposed five articles. The churchmen fell to their knees, and after being allowed to confer, begged that a General Assembly might be called to approve the articles. When James asked what assurance he could have that the Assembly would consent, the ministers replied that they could see no reason why the Assembly would not consent ‘to any reasonable thing demanded by his Majesty’. ‘But if it fall out otherwise,’ James persisted, ‘and that the Articles be refused, my difficulty will be greater; and, when I shall use my authority in establishing them, they shall call me a tyrant and persecutor.’ The ministers cried out that no one would be so mad as to say that. ‘Yet experience tells me it may be so,’ replied James wearily, ‘therefore unless I be made sure, I will not give way to an Assembly.’ At length, however, James was mollified by the ministers’ insistent assurances that the articles would be passed by the General Assembly, and agreed to hold one in late November.37 His work was almost done. At Glasgow on 27 July James attended his final meeting of the Scottish Privy Council. Travelling through south-west Scotland via Hamilton, Sanquhar, Drumlanrig and Dumfries, by 4 August he was in Carlisle.38 Regaining his good humour, James was even prevailed upon by Robert Hay, a Gentleman of his Bedchamber, to allow Calderwood bail on 28 July, although ultimately the minister was banished from Scotland.39
Once back in London, however, James resumed his antipathy towards the K
irk in which he had been raised. The General Assembly which he had reluctantly called was sparsely attended, and little headway was made in pushing through the proposed reforms. The conduct of his bishops was ‘a disgrace’, James raged by letter, threatening to impose financial penalties on dissenting ministers. ‘Since your Scottish Church hath so far contemned my clemency,’ he added in his own hand as a postscript to the Archbishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, ‘they shall now find what it is to draw the anger of a King upon them.’40 As he had previously hinted, what he could not achieve through the ministers’ acquiescence, James now imposed by law, ordering the Privy Council in January 1618 to issue a proclamation forcing the observance of religious holy days.41 Insult was added to injury when, on 24 May, James issued a proclamation that claimed that sports and games were lawful on Sundays and other holy days.42 Amid rumours that more punitive measures were to come, the final General Assembly of James’s reign met at Perth on 25 August 1618. A difficult, tense affair, it seemed at first as if no progress would be possible, especially on the question of kneeling at communion. To help matters, James had sent a letter which was read out twice ‘to move the Assembly partly with allurements, partly with persuasions’, as Calderwood put it.43 But at last, thanks mainly to the stage management of Archbishop Spottiswoode, the General Assembly approved James’s five articles.44 To what extent the articles were effectively imposed is another matter: James’s insistence in March 1620 that the punishment for disobeying the articles should be extended to laymen suggests that their success was far from wholesale.45 But the ‘salmonlike’ return to Scotland in 1617 was to be a rare last chance for James to indulge himself in domestic policy. From now on, his concerns would be on an international stage.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Peacemaker
EVER SINCE PHILIP III of Spain had sent Diego Sarmiento de Acuña to London in 1614, James had been obsessed with the idea of marrying Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta. While James was thrilled by the idea of Spain’s power, wealth and prestige, Philip saw the benefit of having England on side against a possible threat from France. During 1615, Sarmiento and other Spanish envoys elaborated the articles for a marriage treaty. In order for Charles to marry the Infanta, Spain would require some concessions to English Roman Catholics: first, an agreement not to enforce the laws against them, and, eventually, the permission for them to practise their religion. The Infanta’s household would be Spanish and Roman Catholic, and would be able to worship publicly, and be buried in Catholic graves. Her priests would be allowed to wear their robes in public. The Infanta would have to keep control over the education of her children, who would be baptised according to Roman Catholic rites, and given Catholic wet nurses. The children of the marriage would be allowed to choose their religion, but the choice to be a Catholic would not automatically bar them from the throne. James’s first reaction to these articles was hostile, but he did not throw them out altogether – much to the horror of the anti-Spanish faction that had emerged at court, led by Secretary of State Sir Ralph Winwood, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot, and the Earl of Pembroke. These men called instead for war against Spain, and urged James to call a Parliament to fund it. He, of course, refused.1
James did, however, give in to another petition from Winwood, Pembroke and Abbot. It was gold that tempted the always inpecunious King. In 1595, lured by tales of the legendary Indian city El Dorado, the famed courtier and explorer Sir Walter Ralegh had reached Orinoco, and claimed it as English. But after being imprisoned by James in 1603, Ralegh had been unable to persuade the English government to allow him to capitalise on his discoveries, and Spain had made considerable inroads in the region. Now the anti-Spanish faction, led by Abbot, Pembroke and Winwood pressured James to free Ralegh from the Tower and allow him to sail to the Orinoco River, to reclaim it and its rumoured wealth for England. In March 1616 James finally relented, and Ralegh was released, in order to begin preparations for the venture. Ralegh was permitted to sail heavily armed, but only after solemnly undertaking that he would not attack any Spanish subject, on pain of death. Sarmiento protested, but James reassured him by saying that on his faith, his hand and his word, he would send Sir Walter bound hand and foot directly to Spain should he injure a single Spaniard; any Spanish gold would be returned to King Philip, and Ralegh would be delivered for hanging in Madrid.2
Ralegh’s mission was a catastrophe. Battered by gales, hurricanes and fever on board, the fleet was horribly weakened by the time it reached the mouth of the Orinoco. With Sir Walter too ill to go further, a group of boats was led up the river by Keymis and Ralegh’s nephew, George. Coming close to the Spanish settlement of San Thomé, the Englishmen were fired on during the night; in the battle that followed, Ralegh’s son Walter was killed, and the English captured the town, only to fall under siege from the Spanish. After twenty-nine days, Keymis admitted defeat, returned to tell Ralegh of his failure and then committed suicide. Unable to attempt another push up river and without the force necessary to launch an assault on any other settlement, Ralegh returned home with the dregs of his men via Newfoundland, arriving at Portsmouth on 21 June 1618. He was promptly arrested, and put back in the Tower.3
Ralegh had broken every promise he had made to the King. Sarmiento (now elevated as Count de Gondomar) insisted that James must fulfil his promise to send Ralegh to Madrid for his due punishment. According to Secretary of State Sir Thomas Lake, James was ‘very disposed and determined against Ralegh and will join the King of Spain in ruining him’; Gondomar reported home that ‘The King promises that he will do whatever we like to remedy and redress it.’4 On 21 June, the Privy Council objected as best they could without criticising the King directly: Gondomar was insolent, they said, to insist that Ralegh be hanged in Madrid, as though England were nothing more than a tributary to Spain.5 The following day, James put it to Gondomar that in fact Keymis was the guilty party, but the Spaniard was not impressed. James, he declared, could not act as judge of the case, because he himself had given Ralegh his commission, and he was surrounded on his Privy Council by Ralegh’s friends. Gondomar, sadly, had no power to punish Sir Walter himself: instead, he could only point out that Ralegh remained unhanged, and his friends on the Council were still at liberty. For once, James grew angry at Gondomar: he pulled his hat off and threw it on the floor, and, clutching his hair, screamed that this might be justice in Spain, but it was not justice in England. He would not punish a man unheard – even if an assassin were to kill the Prince of Wales, he had to be tried before he could be punished. Gondomar pressed home the case against Ralegh and at length James admitted that Sir Walter’s crimes were scarlet, and formally promised to send Ralegh to Spain for execution. When the Privy Council protested at this development, James declared that he was King, and would take whatever course he desired, ‘without following the advice of fools and of designing persons’.6
In the end, though, some degree of compromise had to be allowed to creep in. A commission of Privy Councillors was appointed to examine the case, and concluded that Ralegh planned to plunder Spanish holdings in America, contrary to his undertaking. This, they decided, demanded the death penalty. However, since Ralegh already had a death penalty hanging over him and was thus legally dead, he could not be tried on the new charge. A special commission was appointed to hear the case; it was found that the death sentence imposed for his original crime could still be carried out; Ralegh was executed; and Bacon was set to work drafting a Declaration justifying the King’s course of action in the case.7 James had won the day – but at great personal cost. To many of his subjects, it seemed that he had kowtowed to Spanish pressure and put to death an English national hero.
He soon had a chance to win back popular support. James was on his 1618 summer progress when a plea for help reached him from Bohemia. By 1617, the Hapsburg Emperor Matthias, hereditary Archduke of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Bohemia and Hungary by election, was bedridden with gout, and concerned about his succe
ssor. He had persuaded Bohemia and Hungary to accept his cousin and heir apparent, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, as his successor. But Ferdinand was an ardent Roman Catholic, and Bohemia, a religiously pluralistic state with a sturdy Protestant element, had good reason over time to reconsider her decision. In May 1618, a group of Protestant Bohemian nobles broke into the palace in Prague and threw two leading officials out of the window, violently marking the end of their support for Ferdinand’s claim. Imperial armies were soon despatched to quash the rebellion, but the Bohemians were saved by mercenary forces financed by the Duke of Savoy and by Frederick, Elector Palatine, husband of James’s daughter Elizabeth.
The Bohemians looked to other Protestant princes for military and financial support with less success. They approached James with their grievances, asking for his ‘aid and favour’. But James failed to reply, ‘either by writing or by word’.8 He was tempted instead by an alternative suggestion from King Philip III of Spain that James should ‘interpose himself for the accommodating of the business of Bohemia’,9 that is, function as an intermediary arbitrator. James immediately took a fancy to this new role of international peacemaker. Before long a tract was published entitled The Peace-Maker: or Great Brittaines Blessing, which, although anonymous (and probably penned by playwright Thomas Middleton), was directed in a style very like James’s own ‘To all our true loving, and peace-embracing subjects.’ The pamphlet presented England not only as the home of peace – ‘Insula pacis. The Land of Peace, under the King of Peace’ – but as the source of all peace. ‘Nay, what Christian kingdom that knows the blessing of peace, has not desired and tasted this our blessing from us? Come they not hither as to the fountain from whence it springs? Here sits Solomon, and hither come the tribes for judgements: oh happy moderator, blessed father, not father of thy country alone, but father of all thy neighbour countries about thee.’ In making its case for peace as the perfect state, it attacked as unmanly and irrational the current fashion among young English gentlemen for duelling, which it linked to James’s two other bêtes noires, witchcraft and tobacco10 – James had already taken action a few years earlier to discourage the voguish bloodsport which he regarded with understandable horror.11 As Gondomar reported, ‘The vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by his means, so that his authority will be increased.’ The English envoy in Spain, Francis Cottington, told King Philip that James ‘was resolved to use his utmost endeavours and to interpose his best credit and authority for compounding the difference, if he should find the same disposition and inclination’ in Philip.12 In England, Buckingham assured Gondomar that James would ‘do all that he can and that lies in his power, and to finish the business peaceably and quietly, if the Bohemians will listen to him, and are willing to have his advice’. But should the Bohemians prove ‘obstinate and pertinacious’ he would persuade his son-in-law and the other German princes to refrain from giving them any aid.13