The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
Page 9
* * *
Lennox was the first to fall. In the late summer of 1582, Lennox and James were apart, the King hunting in Atholl while Lennox presided over the Court of Justice in Edinburgh in his capacity as Lord Chamberlain. It was perhaps with this separation in mind that, on 22 August, the Kirk prepared a final supplication against Lennox and Arran, almost desperate in tone, for presentation to the King:
Sir, for the dutiful reverence and obedience we owe to your Highness, and for that we ever abhorred to attempt anything might seem displeasant to your Excellency, we have suffered now about the space of two years such false accusations, calumnies, oppressions and persecutions, by the moyen [means] of the Duke of Lennox, and him who is called Earl of Arran, that the like of their insolencies and enormities were never heretofore borne with in Scotland. Which wrongs, albeit they were most intolerable, yet for that they only touched us in particular, we comported them patiently, ever attending when your Highness should put remedy thereto. [But now they] have entered plainly to trouble the whole body of this common wealth …44
Although they did not know, by the time the ministers finished work on the document, the King was in no position to listen. Those nobles dissatisfied with Lennox, including Gowrie, Mar, the Master of Glamis and the Master of Oliphant, had bonded together, calling themselves the ‘Lords Enterprisers’: with Lennox away from the King, they saw their chance.45 On 22 August, the same day that the Kirk prepared their supplication, as James was riding south to Perth he was met by Gowrie, who invited him to spend the night at Ruthven Castle. James accepted (although one contemporary report has it they ‘took him unwilling’) but when he tried to depart the next morning he was prevented from leaving, and moved forcibly from Ruthven to Perth. ‘With great difficulty’ his captors extracted a proclamation from him, dated 30 August, declaring that he was not being held their prisoner, and that he had chosen to reside in the burgh of Perth until the present commotion was pacified. No one was to think that he remained in Perth ‘to be forced or constrained, for fear or terror, or against his will’, nor should they answer any ‘seditious and contrary reports’ to call to arms.
Hearing of the capture of the King in what became known as ‘the Ruthven Raid’, Lennox decided he would be safer in Edinburgh. Stripping the ‘whole tapestry and plenishing, or what was worthy to be carried’ from his residence at Dalkeith, he transported it with sixty-four horse in attendance. In Edinburgh, he convened the Town Council, claiming himself innocent of any ill doing, and pressed them to find out the King’s views on the situation. But Lennox could not win over the Kirk. Despite the Provost of Edinburgh’s pleas for the minister ‘to be sparing in his sermon’, James Lawson delivered a stinging lecture on 26 August. He declaimed against Lennox, Arran and their counsellors as ‘violators of discipline, annullers of excommunication, setters forth of proclamations to traduce the best of the nobility and ministry, setters up of Tulchan [false, titular] bishops through insatiable covetousness’.46 Lennox was singled out for his ‘raising of uproars in the Kirk, troubling of the common wealth, the introducing of prodigality and vanity in apparel, superfluity in banquetting and delicate cheer, deflowering of dames and virgins, and other fruits of the French court, and vexing of the commons of the country with airs’. But his worst crime was that Lennox ‘made the King the author of all these faults, and laboured to corrupt him’.47
On 30 August, James was moved again, this time to Stirling. He hoped that his captors would allow him to ride to Edinburgh the following day, and prepared to do so, putting on his riding boots. But as he was about to depart, the lords came to him and said that ‘it was not expedient that he should ride at that time, till farther order were taken with things out of order’. They gave the King a stark choice: either Lennox left Scotland, or they would. James moved to leave the room, but when he reached the door, the Master of Glamis put his leg in the King’s way. He did not break down as he so often did when crossed but, Calderwood recorded, ‘the King laid these things up in his heart, and took them heavily’.48 The Lords Enterprisers drew up a list of charges against Lennox, dated 17 September 1582, claiming that they had taken possession of the King in his own best interest: ‘Whereas the King of Scots’ good nature and virtuous education are now plainly understood to have been abused, and his royal qualities … are now obscured by the craft, subtilty, and treason of Esmé d’Aubigny and his complices.’49 Their aim was to ‘show his Majesty how all things went wrong by the misgoverning of that new counsel come lately from France’. James needed to banish his present counsellors, and ‘take him[self] to be counselled by his old nobility’.50
From his stronghold of Dumbarton Castle, Lennox issued a proclamation of his innocence on 20 September, but it was greeted with contempt. ‘Blessed be God,’ came the answer, ‘that hath so humbled that proud Pharaoh, now, in the eyes of all, that he is compelled to offer amendment to them whom before, when with humility they craved reformation, disdainfully he called “Pultrons, Mischants, False Prophets,” and shamefully handled, stroke, banished, and put oft in hazard of their lives. But I fear, if Pharaoh were freed of his plague, he should return to his wonted hardness, and do as a dog in his old vomit.’51 On 14 September an English embassy, headed by Sir George Cary and Robert Bowes, met with James at Stirling, and once again pushed the case against Lennox; two days later, letters from France were shown to the King, showing how Lennox was in league with the French. The letters told Lennox that he would be thought a coward and lose all honour if he left Scotland; he had the King’s heart still, they assured him, and would not want for assistance in Scotland. On 17 September Lennox was granted a few extra days to leave the country. James confessed to Cary and Bowes that Lennox was ‘not wise’, that he had ‘been urged to many things against his will’, and the lords’ action at Ruthven ‘was honest’. But, he added, ‘Three sorts of men have enterprised it: one meaning well, another for their own particular, the third to avoid punishment.’ The ambassadors asked if they could assure Elizabeth that Lennox would leave the country: James said they might. But James was still by no means free from attack. On Wednesday 19 September, John Craig rebuked James in a sermon for subscribing to a ‘slanderous proclamation’. James, it was reported, was reduced to tears and complained to Craig that he might have told him that privately. Craig retorted that he had often been told, but to no purpose. The Kirk’s General Assembly, meeting from 9 October in Edinburgh, was ambivalent towards the new state of affairs: they approved the enterprise of those guarding the King, but refused either to condemn or ratify the lords’ printed declaration of its causes.52
The next few weeks witnessed a tedious cat-and-mouse game. Lennox tried to buy time, while the Council urged James to hasten his departure with threats: that Lennox would be denounced as a rebel, that he would be charged with treason. As Lennox rode to Callander and Blackness, there were wild rumours that he intended to seize Holyroodhouse, where James was now residing, and take Edinburgh. But the rumours came to nothing. By 14 December, patience was running out. The Council passed an act charging Lennox to depart, and James strengthened it by composing a sharp letter, accusing the Duke of ‘inconstancy and disloyalty’ in disobeying his orders to leave Scotland.53 On 16 December Lennox replied, protesting that ‘I feel myself to be the most unhappy man in the world on seeing the bad opinion which your majesty has conceived of me, and because the persuasions of those who are now about you have made you believe that I have any other intention than to render you the obedience and fidelity which I owe you … I would never have thought that your majesty would have wished to write such words to me.’54 Two days later, he wrote again:
Whatever may befall, I shall always be your very faithful servant, and although there might be still this misfortune, that you might wish to banish me from your good graces, yet in spite of all you will always be my true master, and he alone in this world whom my heart is resolved to serve. And would to God my body could be cut open, so that there should be seen what is written upon
my heart; for I am sure there would not be seen there those words of inconstancy and disloyalty, but, indeed, those of ‘fidelity’ and ‘obedience’… I have such extreme regret that I desire to die rather than to live, fearing that that has been the occasion of your no longer loving me. For if this disgrace befell me, truly the punishment would be to me much greater and more grievous to bear than death, for which ever since I wish and shall wish, even until at length I know that the proof which you have of my obedience has taken from you all the bad opinions which you formed of me.55
Finally realising the King was powerless to help him, Lennox departed for France. He fully expected to return to Scotland: on 1 May 1583, Robert Bowes reported that ‘it is verily looked that Lennox shall be in Scotland before August next’, and on the 29th updated his report that the Duke planned ‘to visit the King and Scotland as soon as his body may endure travel’.56 But by the time Bowes wrote this, Lennox was already dead. On 26 May, ‘at seven of the clock’, the Duke ‘caused to write a writing to the King’s grace, showing his grace the estate he was at, desiring him to be good to his bairns, and to take upon his Grace the defence of them’. Declaring himself a Protestant, he refused the ministrations of Catholic priests – a consistency of behaviour in extremis that would have confounded his critics – and died that night. Ignoring his wishes, his widow Catherine, a staunch Catholic, had him buried with full Roman rites. But one part of Lennox escaped that fate. The night he died, his attendants set about performing his last wish: ‘he was bowelled, the same night, his heart taken out, the body put in a leaden kist, and after in a coach, and on the morn conveyed away secretly.’ The heart was kept, ‘to send away to the King, not suddenly, for his death will make the King’s grace melancholic’57 – and indeed James was said to be ‘much perplexed’ by the news of Lennox’s death.58 He often blamed the Duke’s early demise on the harsh conditions in which he had been held in his last months in Scotland: before Lennox went to sea, Sir James Melville wrote, ‘he was put to as hard a diet as he caused the Earl of Morton to use there, yea, even to the other extremity that he had used at court: for, whereas his kitchen was so sumptuous that lumps of fat was cast in the fire when it soked [smouldered]’, now he was ‘fain to eat of a maigre [lean] goose, skowdrit with bar stra [scorched with barley straw]’.59 In June 1583, unbeknownst to his widow, Lennox’s embalmed heart was sent to James.60
There can be little doubt that James’s love for Lennox stood firm even as, either under pressure or for political expediency, he hastened his departure. The grief that he felt is painfully evident in a poem written after Lennox’s death, and published in 1584. While sharing the unpolished execution of his previous sonnets and translations, it was undoubtedly striking in its portrayal of his relationship with Esmé.61 ‘Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix’ opened, somewhat pretentiously, with a ‘column of 18 lines serving for a preface’, in which James set out the argument in the shape of an implausible diamond-shaped votive column or urn – although there is no attempt to ally the form to the content, as there is with most ‘shaped poems’. The argument is then reprinted as a sixteen-line stanza in which first and last letters of each line spell out ‘ESME STEWART DWIKE [duke]’, leaving no doubt as to the true identity of the poem’s eponymous ‘Phoenix’/Lennox. The narrative analogy of the poem is clear enough. An exotic foreign bird – the French d’Aubigny – lands in Scotland, and attracts a great deal of admiration. In time, this admiration turns into envy led by three birds, the Raven, the Stainchell, and the Gled, perhaps standing for Angus, Gowrie and Mar.62 Their vicious attacks on the Phoenix mirror Lennox’s experiences in 1582; when the Phoenix takes refuge between the poet’s legs, they also attack the poet – the Ruthven Raid. The poem ends with the Phoenix’s flight and self-immolation: Lennox’s departure for France and eventual death. More remarkable is James’s casting of the Phoenix as female, allowing a more obvious love narrative to emerge – and the way in which he sexualises the ‘sheltering’ of the bird: the Phoenix ‘betwixt my legs herself did cast’, and the envious birds ‘made to bleed | My legs’. But for all the love that is expressed, James also registers his frustration with the Phoenix, whose death here becomes a suicide. Perhaps in order to cope with his loss or through simple pragmatism, James felt the need to blame Lennox for his own death, rather than blaming the ravenous fowl in whose clutches he remained.
* * *
Lennox’s departure had been greeted gleefully by the Kirk, who, according to Melville, did ‘rejoice in God, and thank him for delivering King, Kirk, and Commonweal of such counsel, as set themselves plainly to pervert all’.63 But their joy was shortlived. Even as he mourned the Phoenix, James the poet had a happy announcement: ‘Part of my tale | Is yet untold. Lo, here one of her race, | A word bred of her ash: Though she, alas | … be brunt [burned], this lacks but plumes and breath | To be like her, new gendered by her death.’64 On 16 November 1583, Esmé’s son Ludovic landed at Leith. Intelligencers reported that his entourage included some forty Scots and Frenchmen, ‘who are reported altogether to be addict to papistry’. James immediately called for Ludovic to come to Edinburgh, ‘and greatly doth esteem for him, showing to take great care for his bringing up’.65 Ludovic was to have a long and distinguished career in James’s inner circle, but his success was largely due to James’s continued devotion to his dead father. Within a few months, James had issued a proclamation prohibiting men, on pain of death, from speaking of Lennox as anything other than a true Christian. The phoenix had risen from the ashes.
CHAPTER FIVE
A True Son of His Mother
ALTHOUGH THE RUTHVEN Raiders achieved their immediate objective of ejecting Lennox from Scotland, they were in truth a ragtag coalition with too many internal differences to sustain rule for long. Even during the autumn of 1582, before Lennox departed the country, James was attracting a group of noblemen who were willing to help him escape the clutches of Gowrie’s faction. This new group was led by Huntly, Atholl, Bothwell, Montrose and Seton who subscribed a bond to ‘remain with his Majesty until the abuses and enormities of the commonwealth should be redressed’.1
Their chance came in June 1583. James was at Falkland Place in Fife, and for once not heavily guarded. He turned to the trusted courtier Sir James Melville, and begged him to help him escape, a commission that Melville found ‘very unpleasant’. When James persisted, however, saying that he was determined ‘to liberate himself fully or die in the attempt’, Melville gave in and agreed to provide what assistance he could. The plan was for James to journey to St Andrews: the Earl of March could be persuaded to invite him there on the pretext that the King would eat his ‘wild meat and other fresh fleshs that would spoil in case his Majesty came not to make good cheer with him’. Sympathetic lords would be told to meet him there.2 On 27 June, the King and Melville rode out from Falkland, and were met by March and the Provost of St Andrews at Dairsie. James was elated. ‘Meeting them,’ recalled Melville, ‘His Majesty thought himself at liberty, with great joy and exclamation, like a bird flown out of a cage, passing his time in hawking by the way, after the said meeting, thinking himself then sure enough.’ Melville was not so sanguine. ‘I thought his estate far surer when he was in Falkland.’3
In time, realising that the bird had flown, the Lords Enterprisers followed in pursuit but were halted by a proclamation forbidding them to approach the King’s person: James was turning against them the very machinery that had facilitated his continued captivity at Ruthven and Stirling. Gowrie, however, was admitted into the royal presence: there, kneeling, he humbly asked for the King’s pardon, particularly for his words and deeds against Lennox.4 James started to berate Gowrie, but he soon pardoned him. In the weeks that followed, James appointed a new Privy Council, including the young Earl of Huntly, Crawford, Argyll and Montrose, as well as John Maitland of Thirlestane and Robert Melville of Murdocairnie. But it was Arran who established himself as the figurehead of the new regime. Now, as ever, he polarise
d opinions. To the English ambassador Sir Edward Hoby, the Earl ‘carrieth a princely presence and gait, goodly of personage, representing a brave countenance of a captain of middle age, very resolute, very wise and learned, and one of the best spoken men that ever I heard’. To Sir James Melville, who knew Scottish politics much better, ‘the Earl of Arran was a scorner of religion, presumptious, ambitious, greedy, careless of the commonwealth, a despiser of the nobility and of all honest men.’5 A measure of Arran’s steady assumption of power can be found in the fate of the Earl of Mar. Coming to court in August 1583, he failed to reconcile with Arran and was commanded to leave the country. Argyll, to whose custody he was committed, convinced him to give up Stirling Castle to Arran – but this was not enough to assuage Arran, and in January 1584 Mar was banished from England, Scotland and Ireland. By this time, he had already fled the country, but by March he had defied his banishment and was back in Edinburgh, plotting to regain control of the King.6