In 1579 Buchanan had left James as he arrived, with a treatise for the boy to ponder on. De jure regni apud Scotos promulgated the Presbyterian view that God had vested power in the people, who could resist and depose the monarch if he ruled tyrannically or failed to promote the “true” religion. That September, however, a new and long-lasting influence had entered James’s life—one who represented everything Buchanan detested: James’s Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny.
D’Aubigny was a handsome, red-bearded father of four in his late thirties. He had returned from the court in France to deal with a dispute over the title and estates of the Lennox earldom, and the newly adolescent James was fascinated by his sophisticated relative. He would stay up late with him, drinking and joking. D’Aubigny reciprocated with displays of affection and James, who had no other close family, became passionately devoted to him. D’Aubigny’s influence expanded rapidly. He reorganized James’s court and household on the French model and encouraged his interest in poetry. James in turn lavished money and titles on him, ostensibly converting him to Protestantism and eventually making him Duke of Lennox.
The English agent Sir Henry Widdrington had looked on appalled at Lennox’s growing power, convinced that he was using his conversion as a cover for plotting with the Catholic powers. He sent letters south warning that James was “altogether persuaded and led” by Lennox, so that “he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, often times he will clasp him about the neck, with his arms and kiss him.” The Kirk went further and later declared that “the Duke of Lennox went about to draw the King to carnal lust.”19
Beyond seventeenth-century descriptions of James’s “lascivious” kisses with his favorites, the exact nature of the sexual activity James enjoyed with Lennox and later male favorites is unknown. But the view of one (admittedly hostile) witness—that a man who showed so little restraint in public was unlikely to do so in private—seems a reasonable one. 20 James was a tactile man and the chief arguments against his having been a practicing homosexual fail to convince. The first is that seventeenth-century Protestants regarded sodomy with ferocious disapproval and that James himself condemned it to his son as a sin so horrible “that ye are bound in conscience never to forgive [it].”21 Homosexual sex is not, however, limited to sodomy, and James was also well known for his blasphemous oaths and his failure to live up to much advice he gave his son. The second argument is that James’s marriage to Anna had demonstrated physical passion (as proven by her frequent pregnancies). But while it is notable that James had no great male favorites during the period in which he was fathering children, it is also evident that after the birth of his last child, Sophia, in 1606, his attraction for young men reasserted itself and his sexuality became a matter of significance in English political life, with the appearance of Robert Carr in 1607 and then George Villiers in 1614.22
It is not known whether the English court knew of James’s sexual preferences in 1602–3, or if so, precisely how it was regarded. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no real concept of “homosexuality”; sex between men was simply viewed as an act of depravity, along with all other sexual acts that took place outside marriage. It was, however, understood that some men had a particular taste for it. Burghley would have passed on everything he knew about James to his son Cecil before his death in 1598, and although there is no reported gossip on the matter in the winter of 1602–3, there are hints in comments by Sir John Harington and Sir Edward Wotton, both of whom praise James’s “chastity” with regard to women. Harington could not resist pointing out that it was thought a little strange that James had no mistresses, confessing that in England to call a courtier chaste, “specially if it were afore his Mrs,” was considered an insult worthy of a stabbing. If anything was suspected, however, such worldly courtiers were unlikely to be shocked. The Earl of Essex’s closest friend, the Earl of Southampton, enjoyed the sexual companionship of both men and women without earning great opprobrium.
What really mattered to courtiers was how a king’s sexual preferences impacted on politics. Wotton and Harington praised James’s “chastity” because in not keeping mistresses he was not creating bastards to rival his legitimate children. Male lovers, however, could hold direct power in a way that a mistress could not, and the power that Lennox held foreshadowed that of James’s later favorites in England. Safe in the knowledge of James’s devotion, Lennox had moved against the regent Morton, a trusted ally of England. Elizabeth had made a formal approach to James demanding that he get rid of “the professed Papist,” Seigneur d’Aubigny, but although James was usually wary of offending Elizabeth, on this he stood his ground.
James’s stance sealed Morton’s fate and the last regent was executed during the summer of 1581, ostensibly for his part in Darnley’s murder. “That false Scots Urchin!” Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed when the news of Morton’s death reached her. “What can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!”
The following year the sixteen-year-old James was kidnapped by allies of the Kirk led by William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie and son of Patrick Ruthven, whose servant had held the pistol to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots during the Riccio murder. The captured king had been forced to look on as Lennox fled into exile in France, where he died in 1583. But in due course James used his cunning to escape his captors and effect a countercoup with Gowrie’s rivals. Gowrie, having been initially pardoned, was executed in May 1584, after attempting to stage a second coup; leading Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee to England and the Scottish Parliament ordered all copies of Buchanan’s De jure regni, with its arguments against the divine right of kings, to be handed in to the authorities so that they could be purged of offensive material.23
It was at this time that Monsieur de Fontenay, the emissary of Mary, Queen of Scots, had visited James’s court. Fontenay thought the eighteen-year-old king “for his years the most remarkable Prince who ever lived.” But he also described a very damaged individual, “an old young man,” both wary and childishly self-indulgent. There were three aspects of James’s personality that particularly concerned the Frenchman: James’s arrogance, fanned by his superior education, blinded him to his “poverty and insignificance” on the world stage. He was “overconfident of his strength and scornful of other princes”—a characteristic that was still more true of him in 1603, when he had two decades of successful rule in Scotland behind him. Last, Fontenay made his observations about James’s addiction to hunting. The sport seems to have given him a sense of release from his disabilities matched by no other physical pursuit apart from sex, but his attachment to it was as uncontrolled as his love for his favorites, and this incontinence was evident in other aspects of James’s life.
He regularly spent money he did not have (a common problem in adults with ADHD). Elizabeth, not known for her generosity, bailed out her profligate neighbor in a series of payments totalling around £58,000, from 1586 to 1603.24 He also appeased his lairds with gifts of titles without concern that he might degrade their value: by 1603 Scotland had as many nobles as England, though a population only a quarter of the size.25
Mary, however, was also curious to know not only about her son’s character but also about his religious views. It was evident that he felt his mother’s chief enemies, Presbyterians such as Buchanan, had also proved dangerous to him, and she hoped that James might invite her back to Scotland. Fontenay, however, forewarned her that although James had indeed grown to dislike his Presbyterian ministers and regarded the Kirk as the chief threat to royal rule, he despised the Pope and showed no obvious affection for her. Mary nevertheless remained desperate to believe that James would recognize her right to be sovereign of Scotland if she offered to legitimize the title of king that he had usurped from her. She made contact with her son to argue that such a deal was greatly to his advantage since the Catholic powers would then support his cand
idature for the English succession. But in 1585 she discovered James had made an agreement with Elizabeth that made him a pensioner of the English crown 12 and left her in her prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire. Terrified that she was going to be left in England to be murdered under the Bond of Association, Mary threatened to disinherit him. He never contacted her again. The following year Sir Francis Walsingham began gathering the evidence to convict Mary of involvement in Babington’s plot against Elizabeth. Only the threat that James would break Scotland’s treaties with England and turn to France or Spain to avenge his mother’s death could have saved her. But while James pleaded for Mary’s life after her conviction, he never threatened to break Scotland’s treaties with England. He may have rested his hopes on Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit regicide, but he was certainly prepared to take the risk that his mother would be killed. While Elizabeth did not want to take responsibility for Mary’s death, she had asked Mary’s jailers to murder her so that she could cast the blame there. When they refused she signed Mary’s death warrant and then suspended it as she redoubled her efforts to have Mary killed under the Bond of Association. Burghley, however, ignored her orders and convened a meeting of the Privy Council to ensure that the warrant was put into effect. James learned the grim details of his mother’s death firsthand when her servants returned to Scotland.
After eighteen years confined to a series of houses in England, Mary’s elegant frame had become thickset and her face hung with double chins. But her courage and dignity remained. On 8 February 1587 in the fire-lit hall of Fotheringay she approached the scaffold smiling, having cast herself in the role of a Catholic martyr with “an Agnus Dei about her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and a pair of beads at her girdle with a golden cross at the end of them.”26 The death of a common traitor nevertheless awaited her, and it was not to be a dignified one.
Mary’s French physician, Monsieur Bourgoing, recorded in his journal that once she had been blindfolded and her prayers said she had lifted her head “thinking she would be decapitated with a two-handed sword (according to the privilege reserved in France for Princes and gentlemen).” Henry VIII had granted such a privilege to Anne Boleyn and, when Elizabeth’s life had been under threat in the aftermath of the Wyatt revolt against Mary I, she had expressed the hope that if it came to it, she would be executed in the same manner. But Mary, who had been Queen of France, was led to the block and butchered with an axe, “like those with which they cut wood,” Bourgoing noted with disgust. It took the nervous executioner three strokes to take off Mary’s head and when his companion raised it up, with the shout “God save the Queen,” he found himself, in a moment of grim farce, holding a chestnut wig, as her gray head rolled on the floor.
Mary’s weeping servants had stayed after the official witnesses left the room and watched the executioners strip the stockings from Mary’s corpses (it was usual for the executioners to sell any clothes from the corpses of their victims; even their hair could be cut from their heads). As the men pulled and ripped, Mary’s little dog, a Skye terrier, dashed out from under her skirts. “The poor creature, covered with blood, rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively,” Bourgoing recalled. Confused, it had lapped at the pools of blood on the floor before being taken away. 27
After Mary’s servants had finished recounting their story James was silent, and he quickly retired to his room. He had once said that Scotland could never be without faction while Mary was alive, but the manner of her death was a bitter humiliation for him and for his country: a high price to pay for Elizabeth’s crown. With his noblemen demanding vengeance, James immediately cut all contact with England. South of the border, meanwhile, Elizabeth went into mourning; Burghley was banned from her presence and Sir William Davison, who had delivered the death warrant, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth then sent her cousin Sir Robert Carey to Scotland with a letter in which she swore that she had signed Mary’s death warrant on the understanding that it would be put into effect only in the event of the arrival of an invasion force. But Carey was stopped at the Scottish border and was forced to wait for days before James agreed to see him.
The storm did pass, however, as Elizabeth and James knew it would. James accepted Elizabeth’s story, with English money sweetening the pill. Elizabeth for her part forgave Burghley but not Davison, whom she made the scapegoat for what had occurred.
James seized the opportunity offered by Mary’s death to heal the divisions in Scotland. Thereafter he had rewarded and protected his mother’s servants and in the Basilikon Doron James advised his son that he had found those who served his mother among his most loyal subjects. 28 It was a lesson he would carry with him to England.
James had chosen the future Queen of Scots and England with care. In 1589 Anna was a Protestant princess, with a generous dowry comprising £150,000 and various territories including the Orkney and Shetland Isles, pawned to Scotland in the previous century. A miniature had also shown the fourteen-year-old to be very pretty, with fair hair and ivory skin. There had been an exchange of letters in French during which the lonely James fell so in love with his future companion that when the ship bringing her to Scotland was caught in storms and forced to head to Norway, he set sail to fetch her, committing “himself and his hopes Leander-like to the waves of the ocean, all for his beloved Hero’s sake.”
As soon as he arrived in Norway, James had made his way along the coast by ship and horse until he reached Oslo and the bishop’s palace. There he dashed to see Anna “with boots and all.” The minister David Lindsay, who was with James, declared her “a princess both godly and beautiful.” Anna was tall for her age, with a determined set to her chin, and James was immediately “minded to give the Queen a kiss after the Scottish fashion, which the Queen refused as not being the form of her country; but after a few words privily spoken between his majesty and her, familiarity ensued.”29 The royal couple were married the following Sunday before traveling to Denmark to enjoy a second wedding and several months of honeymooning among Anna’s relatives. It was here, amid the rich and sophisticated Danish court, that James was introduced to the modish European theories on witchcraft he later expounded in his Daemonologie, a treatise he published in support of the persecution of witches.
The Danish admiral who had escorted Anna to Norway had blamed the storms on the wife of a Copenhagen burgess with whom he had quarreled. She confessed under torture that she was a witch and was burned alive in September 1590 along with several others whom she had named. The Kirk had long been obsessed with witchcraft, but they had been unable to persuade James to take an interest in it until he returned from Denmark. Investigations, however, now led to the unmasking of a coven in Berwick that, it was claimed, had plotted to kill the King. James attended the trials and was astonished to hear the accused witches describe what he believed to be private conversations he had had with Anna in Norway. The first of the great waves of witch killing in Scotland had soon followed.
Anna had also found herself subject to the Kirk’s disapproval, with her Lutheran faith proving to be an early source of friction. Even her coronation as Queen of Scotland proved a controversial affair. James’s had been the first Protestant coronation in Scotland, but it was rushed and had kept many Catholic features. Anna’s offered an opportunity to design a more purely Protestant ceremony and the ministers of the Kirk were anxious to get rid of the anointing, which they condemned as a “Jewish” ritual. James was equally determined to keep it since it reflected his view that kings drew their rights from God and not the people. When he threatened to ask one of his remaining bishops to carry it out they gave way, but tensions remained when the coronation took place in the abbey church of Holyrood on 17 May 1590.
The ceremony began with a grand procession of trumpeters and nobles. James followed, dressed in deep red, with five earls carrying his long train. Behind them came Anna. She joined James on a throne placed on a raised platform and hymns were sung. Later, after a short oration by the minister Robert
Bruce, the moment came for the anointing.30 A witness recorded that “the Countess of Mar went up to the queen and bared a little of the queen’s right arm and shoulder. Robert Bruce immediately poured the queen’s oil onto her bare arm and shoulder.” Anna was then taken away and dressed in new robes of red velvet and white Spanish taffeta before being returned to her seat. “Silence was called for. Then his majesty had the crown delivered to her . . . Immediately afterwards his majesty delivered the sceptre to Robert Bruce that he might pass it to the queen.” As he did so he acknowledged Anna as queen and pledged obedience, but his speech concluded, “We crave from your majesty the confession of the faith and religion which we profess.” Anna had been promised the free exercise of her Lutheran faith, but from that moment it was apparent that she would be pressured into accepting the lower-church Protestantism of Scottish Calvinism.31 Anna, however, proved to be very much her own woman.
The Duke of Sully described Anna’s character as “quite the reverse of her husband’s; she was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue.”32 Even at just fifteen and unable to speak Scots, 13 Anna had made her presence felt. She had been raised in one of the most prestigious kingdoms in Europe and she encouraged a new formality at James’s court. “Things are beginning to be strangely altered,” it was reported. “Our Queen carries a marvellous gravity, which, with the reserve of her national manners, contrary to the humour of our people, has banished all our ladies clean from her.”33 Anna also made it plain that she enjoyed traditional courtly pursuits and she quickly earned herself the sobriquet the “dancing queen,” as well as the anger of the Kirk, which condemned her “night waking and balling.”34
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