The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  A French visitor to his court, by name Fontenay, gave this description of James when he was eighteen:

  Three qualities of the mind he possesses in perfection: he understands clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory. His questions are keen and penetrating, and his replies are sound. In any argument, whatever it is about, he maintains the view that seems to him most just, and I have heard him support Catholic against Protestant opinions. He is well instructed in languages, affairs of state, better, I dare say, than anyone else in his kingdom. In short, he has a remarkable intelligence, as well as lofty and virtuous ideals and a high opinion of himself.

  I have remarked in him three defects that may prove injurious to his estate and government: he does not estimate correctly his poverty and insignificance but is over-confident of his strength and scornful of other princes; his love for favourites is indiscreet and wilful and takes no account of the feeling of his people; he is too lazy and indifferent about affairs, too given to pleasure, allowing all business to be conducted by others.

  He dislikes dancing and music, and the little affectations of court life such as amorous discourse or curiosities of dress, and has a special aversion for ear-rings. In speaking and eating, in his dress and in his sports, in his conversation in the presence of women, his manners are crude and uncivil and display a lack of proper instruction. He is never still in one place but walks constantly up and down, though his gait is erratic and wandering, and he tramps about even in his own chamber. His voice is loud and his words grave and sententious. He loves the chase above all other pleasures, and will hunt for six hours without interruption, galloping over hill and dale with a loosened bridle. His body is feeble and yet he is no delicate. In a word, he is an old young man.

  An old young man: the judgement is telling. James never knew the careless exuberance of youth. He was on his guard from the day he was conscious of his position. He had a high sense of the sacred character of kingship, but he could not but be aware that the person of a king might be roughly handled, and his life at risk. Two of his predecessors had been murdered. His mother had been compelled to abdicate, his father assassinated. Mary’s English partisans plotted to kill Elizabeth. In 1584 the leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain, William of Orange, was murdered. In 1587 Mary went to the block. Two years later, James’s cousin, the Duc de Guise, was stabbed in the presence of another cousin, Henry III of France. Within a few months Henry himself fell victim to an assassin’s dagger. Kings might, as James believed, rule by divine right, but dangers surrounded them. If, as the gossip Weldon smirked, fear of assassination led him to wear padded clothes, he had good reason to think this necessary.

  His loneliness was relieved in 1579, when he was thirteen, by the arrival from France of a glittering cousin, Esmé Stewart, Seigneur d’Aubigny. He was in fact Darnley’s first cousin and, with the exception of an elderly great-uncle (old Lennox’s brother), James’s nearest living relative on his father’s side. Esmé Stewart was a man of about thirty, an accomplished horseman and fencer, and he brought a breath of French sophistication to Presbyterian Scotland. James was dazzled by him and made a hero of him. Others too could see his value. He became a focus for the opposition to Morton, who was arrested in the last days of 1580 and charged with complicity in Darnley’s murder, which had for more than a dozen years cast a dark shadow over the public life of Scotland. When Morton was executed a few weeks later, almost all those who had been involved one way or another in the conspiracy against Darnley were dead.

  James created Esmé Earl of Lennox, the title being vacant since the death of his uncle Charles, Darnley’s younger brother, in 1576. But Lennox, reared a Catholic in France, was suspected of favouring a Spanish alliance against England, and so provoked the opposition of the pro-English Protestant party. They responded in traditional style, seizing the person of the King while he was hunting near Perth, and consigning him to the care of the Earl of Gowrie, son of another of Rizzio’s murderers. Meanwhile Lennox was exiled or perhaps thought it prudent to exile himself. James escaped from his captors, found support in the Catholic north from the earls of Huntly, Crawford and Argyll, and turned the tables. Gowrie was arrested, charged with treason, and executed. James was still only sixteen.

  To be sixteen was, however, to be of age. His minority was over. He was ready to rule as well as reign. With the help of an able chief minister, Sir James Maitland of Thirlestane (a connection of Lethington’s), he would govern Scotland efficiently for twenty years, pursuing always his mother’s dream of the English succession. Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that establishing himself as Elizabeth’s heir dominated his mind and determined his policy.

  It also informed his attitude to his mother. He had little filial feeling, and this can be no surprise. He had no memory of Mary and he had been taught that she was guilty of his father’s murder. Even when she was about to be put on trial for her life, he contented himself with asking that she should be kept in prison. He had already written to her that he could do nothing for her because she was ‘a captive in a desert’. Now he declined to play the one card that might have saved her, never threatening to break the treaty of alliance between Scotland and England, which he had signed in 1585 and which, he believed, came close to assuring him that he would indeed be Elizabeth’s successor. When Mary was sentenced to death, he protested, but mildly, and he asked the ministers of the Kirk to remember his mother in their prayers, requesting ‘that it might please God to illuminate her with the light of His truth, and save her from the apparent danger in which she is cast’. That was as far as he went, but even that was too far for the Kirk. The ministers of Edinburgh refused to do as he asked on the grounds that such prayers implied a belief in Mary’s innocence and a condemnation of Elizabeth’s conduct.

  James ordered the court to go into mourning for his mother, and was disconcerted when the Earl of Sinclair appeared in armour and told him this was the proper mourning for the Queen of Scots. But he accepted Elizabeth’s explanation that she had never intended that the warrant for Mary’s death should be executed (though she had signed it). There was no point, he thought, in disturbing the friendship between the two states. However, when at last he inherited the English throne, he had Mary’s body removed from Peterborough Cathedral and a splendid tomb erected in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps this salved his conscience, or such conscience as he had.

  The business of government occupied him. Given the history of the last two reigns and his own minority he was remarkably successful in imposing his authority and maintaining order. He had learned from his study of history how unwise some of his predecessors, notably James I, James III and James V, had been in attempting to repress the nobility with harsh severity. So, while preferring to rely on men of comparatively humble birth, such as ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate’, his lord advocate and secretary of state, whom he created Earl of Haddington, he excluded as far as possible the great nobles from the management of affairs of state. He also promoted the royal law courts, which competed successfully with the baronial courts from which the nobility drew so much of their local power. At the same time, however, he conciliated the nobles by confirming them in possession of estates that before the Reformation had been Church lands, and rewarding them with further grants.

  Moreover, few nobles were now quite as ardent reformers as their fathers had been. The Kirk’s democratic tone was no more to their taste than it was to the King’s. When Knox’s successor as the most influential figure in the Kirk, Andrew Melville, angrily told James that he was no more than ‘God’s sillie vassal’ – ‘sillie’ meaning simple, not stupid – it would have been a very dull noble who didn’t understand that such a challenge to the King threatened a subversion of the whole social order.

  Gradually, with skill and patience, James re-established royal authority over the Kirk and its General Assembly. He even managed to restore the office of bishops, though insisting, both in deference to the opinion of the Kirk, and in his own royal interest, that th
ese must not be the ‘proud, papal prelates’ of old, but royal servants supervising the clergy and subduing their more extreme opinions.

  By the time he inherited the English Crown, James had succeeded in establishing royal authority more effectively than any previous Stuart king. Even so, this remained fragile.

  In 1588 James was twenty-two. It was high time he was married. Various brides were suggested, among them a sister of Henry of Navarre, who would become King of France the following year, but eventually Anne, the younger daughter of the King of Denmark, was the chosen candidate. Her portrait pleased the King – she was blonde, blue-eyed, a typical Scandinavian beauty. There was some difficulty over the dowry, which the Danish king couldn’t afford, but this was resolved when James, now full of an unaccustomed eagerness, declared that the princess was not a piece of merchandise and he would take her without a dowry. In the one romantic gesture of his life, he sailed to Norway (then part of the Danish state) to meet and marry his bride, already the subject of some of his most ardent, if least competent, verses. Seeing her, he convinced himself he was in love. The marriage took place. It was celebrated with some flourish at the Danish court, where Anne’s father told his new son-in-law, that they would soon teach him to drink like a Dane.2 They spent four months in Denmark, James taking time off from feasting and his new marital duties to attend lectures in Copenhagen, arguing with theologians about the doctrine of predestination and discussing the Copernican theory with the great scientist Tycho Brahe. Anne did not share her husband’s intellectual interests, and in later years they would drift apart, but for the time being the marriage went well. They would have seven children, of whom three survived to adulthood. It is probable than Anne was the only woman with whom James slept. Unlike earlier Jameses and his grandsons, Charles II and James VII and II, he left no illegitimate children, at least none of whom there is any record. There is no reason to suppose that, while in Denmark, he enquired about his stepfather Bothwell, who had died, raving mad, in a Danish prison a decade previously. That was all past history, and in any case Bothwell, as far as James was concerned, had been his father’s chief murderer.

  When he returned home in May 1590, he found that the arrangements he had made for the government by the Council in his absence had worked well and his kingdom had remained at peace, untroubled by rebellion or riot. This is a fair measure of his achievement. Nevertheless Scotland remained a violent country in which the King could not feel secure. Three episodes may be taken as illustration.

  There was first the business of the North Berwick witches. The origin of this story may seem ridiculous. Before James himself decided to go and fetch his future wife in person, the plan had been for Anne to sail to Scotland. However, a storm blew up and the Danish fleet had to return to port. Its admiral then expressed his belief that the storm had been stirred up by witchcraft. Soon after the return of the royal party, a coven of witches was discovered at North Berwick. Under examination they confessed to having summoned up the storm. Perhaps they even believed that they had such powers. More probably, they said what their torturers would have them say. James was terrified. Like most in his generation he believed implicitly in the powers of darkness and in the awful possibility that men and women might traffic with the devil. His conviction was such that he would actually write a book on demonology. In later life he would amend his views and conclude that much of what passed for witchcraft was mere fantasy; but for now he was a firm believer. More alarming still was the witches’ confession that the leader of their coven was his cousin the Earl of Bothwell, the Lord Admiral of Scotland. This added credibility to the story. Who better than the Lord Admiral to intercede with Satan to call up a storm at sea?

  Bothwell was Francis Stewart, like the King a grandson of James V. His father was John Stewart, Mary’s favourite among her illegitimate half-brothers; when he had died in 1563, she had cried out that God always took from her those she loved best, and she then made a pet of his infant son, Francis. John Stewart had been a friend of Bothwell and had married his sister, which was how the earldom and the title of Lord Admiral descended to Francis. However charming he may have been as a little boy, he grew up to be wild, unruly, and only doubtfully sane. Unlike the wretched victims of the witch trial, Bothwell was not ‘examined’. He was, however, imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle in April 1591, but escaped two months later. In December that year he raided the Palace of Holyroodhouse in an attempt to kidnap the King. Unsuccessful, he again evaded arrest.

  He had his allies, among them another cousin, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, the son-in-law of the murdered regent. The King, alarmed by the connection, ordered the Earl of Huntly to hunt them down, at the same time offering Moray a pardon for all offences if he would break with Bothwell. Moray may have intended to do so, but Huntly was too quick for him, besieging him in his castle of Donibristle in Fife and killing him when he tried to escape. Legend has it that he delivered the fatal blow himself. According to the popular ballad inspired by the killing, James had ‘bad ye bring him wi’ye,/But forbade ye him to slay’. Be that as it may, Huntly escaped without punishment for the murder, suffering no more than a week’s house arrest. The murdered man’s mother, Lady Doune, commissioned a painting of her dead son, displaying all his wounds. It still hangs in the Morays’ Darnaway Castle.

  Bothwell was still at large. Two years later he again broke into Holyrood, on this occasion even forcing his way into the King’s bedroom, where he brandished his sword. Servants rushed in, Bothwell fled, and James showed himself in his nightshirt at the window to calm the excited crowd that rumour of the Earl’s raid had brought into the streets. This was Bothwell’s last fling. He fled the country and went to Italy, where he is said to have scraped a living as a fortune-teller till he died in Naples in 1612. His crazy and dangerous antics make it easy to understand why James was so eager to remove to the calmer atmosphere of England. In Scotland the King lived cheek by jowl with his subjects, for the poor quarter of the Canongate came right up to the gates of Holyrood; in England there was a distance between them more suited to the majesty of royalty.

  More mysterious and more dangerous than Bothwell’s extravagant wildness was the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’. The official story, as told by the King himself, is quite straightforward. Unfortunately it makes little sense.

  On the morning of 5 August 1600, James was at Falkland Palace in Fife, preparing for a day’s hunting, in weather that, he said, was ‘wonderful, pleasant, and seasonable’. While in the field he was approached by the young brother of the Earl of Gowrie, Alexander Ruthven, who was known as the Master of Gowrie. He was an agreeable, good-looking young man who had already applied for a position at court, where his sister Beatrix was one of Queen Anne’s maids of honour. Alexander had ridden over from Gowrie House in Perth with, according to James, a remarkable story: he had come upon a man burying a pot of gold in a field, and suspected that the man was a Jesuit spy. Would James please ride back to Perth with him and question the arrested man himself? The King agreed, and when the hunt was finished, at eleven o’clock in the morning, he set off with the Master, the rest of his entourage following behind.

  It was a journey of about fourteen miles, and at one point James asked the Duke of Lennox (son of his admired Esmé Stuart) what he thought of young Alexander, who was the Duke’s brother-in-law. Lennox said he was ‘an honest gentleman’ and the King then told him why they were heading for Perth. The story struck Lennox as thin, but he did not try to dissuade James.

  They arrived in Perth and were met by the Earl of Gowrie, who escorted them to the family home. Gowrie House no longer exists – the Perth Sheriff Court now occupies the site – but it was a fortified house with gardens that ran down to the River Tay. A meal was prepared, and after a while James and the Master disappeared upstairs. Some of the King’s men made to follow but were told that James and young Alexander had private business to discuss.

  They were absent for some time. Meanwhile the company below finished their meal
and some strolled into the garden and plucked cherries from the trees. The afternoon wore on until one, Thomas Cranstoun, the Earl’s master-stabler, came out and told them that the King had already left. However, the porter said he hadn’t seen him go, and Gowrie said he would go back into the house and see if James was still there. He returned and told the company that the King had indeed left. Lennox then called for their horses to be brought, but while they were waiting for them, the King’s head appeared at a window in the turret. There was a hand over his face, and he seemed to be calling for help.

  John Ramsay, the King’s favourite page, who had been restless all afternoon, heard the cry, ran up a turnpike stair (with a hawk he had been admiring still attached to his wrist) and into a gallery chamber, where he found James and Alexander struggling together. ‘Strike him low,’ the King cried. ‘He wears a pyne dowlit’ (secret doublet). Ramsay stabbed the Master and pushed him down the stair where those rushing up finished him off. His last words were reputedly ‘Alas, I had na wyte [knowledge] of it.’

  All was now confusion. Gowrie hurried into the house and found John Ramsay alone in the gallery chamber – the King, for his safety, having been locked in the next room. Ramsay and the Earl drew their swords. Someone called out that the King was dead. Gowrie lowered his point and Ramsay stabbed him. Both brothers were now dead, and the ‘conspiracy’ had failed. There was no sign of the Jesuit or the pot of gold, though the King later claimed he had indeed seen him, and subsequently one of Gowrie’s servants, by name Henderson, confessed to having impersonated him. However, he bore no resemblance to the description James had given, so his evidence seems worthless.