The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain

by Неизвестный

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  The Armada may have been crushed, but the Kirk still saw papists under every trundlebed. In January 1589, the ministers presented petitions to the King and the Council urging vigilance, and urging the King ‘to purge his house, Council, and Session, and to retire his power of lieutenantry, wardenry, and other his authority whatsomever, from all and whatsomever person avowed or suspected to be Papists’. Their insistence seemed vindicated on 27 February. James was sitting with the Lords of the Session at the Tolbooth, about to rise as usual at twelve, when a packet was presented to him by the English ambassador Asheby. He was informed that it contained matters from the Low Countries, but on retiring he discovered it was in fact a set of letters, intercepted by English agents, from Huntly and Errol among others, to King Philip II of Spain and his commander the Duke of Parma, all of them expressing regret that Philip had not thought to use Scotland as a landing point for the Armada, and requesting men and money to help invade England. Also implicated were Crawford, Maxwell, Lord Claud Hamilton, and the Protestant Bothwell.48

  The mere fact of correspondence between Scotland and Spain was hardly shocking: James himself had written to Parma only two months earlier.49 But these letters laid open a treacherous negotiation of some three years’ standing with one Robert Bruce (decidedly not to be confused with the Kirk minister) acting as their intermediary – indeed, in early 1587, Bruce had negotiated with Parma to smuggle Spanishpaid soldiers into Scotland in the hulls of thirty grain ships. Moreover, the letters contained evidence that Spain had been funding Huntly’s party.50 What really mortified James was that the treachery had been uncovered by English agents, allowing their Queen to rub salt in the wound, and indeed, Elizabeth’s covering letter made no attempt to conceal her glee. She had told him before, she reminded him, that she would be his ‘faithful watch, to shun all mishaps or dangers’. Now these letters ‘of high treason to your person and kingdom’ are nothing more or less than ‘as in a glass, the true portraiture of my late warning letters’. If only he had followed her advice, instead of just reading it, ‘you might have taken their persons, received their treason, and shunned their further strengthening’. Instead, their strength ‘hath grown daily by your too great neglecting and suffering of so many practices which, at the beginning, might easily have been prevented’. ‘Good Lord!’ she continued, ‘methink I do but dream: no king a week would bear this! Their forces assembled, and held near your person, held plots to take your person near the seaside; and all this wrapped up with giving them offices, that they might the better accomplish their treason!’ Now he must listen to reason. ‘Of a suddenly [immediately] they must be clapped up in safer custody than some others have been, which hath bred their laughter.’51

  Under such pressure, James had to be seen to take action against Huntly, but the action was so mild as to be laughable. The Earl was held in Edinburgh Castle, his own choice of prison, to await trial, but his wife, servants and friends were given free access and, within a day, James and Maitland were seen going to the castle to dine with Huntly, where, according to the English agent Thomas Fowler, the King ‘entertained Huntly as well and kindly as ever, yea he kissed him at times to the amazement of many’ exclaiming that ‘he knew he was innocent’. Huntly’s friends were ‘in fury’ at his imprisonment, reported Fowler, and using ‘threatenings and proud words to many, specially to Englishmen’, who blamed James directly through his ‘fond dealing’. ‘It is thought,’ he concluded, ‘that this King is too much carried by young men that lies in his chamber and is his minions.’52 As if to mourn the loss of his favourite, James refused to go hunting while Huntly was imprisoned, and visited him every day until his release on 7 March, on which night Huntly slept in James’s bedchamber.53

  Yet James’s displays of affection for Huntly were not without a political motive. James’s immediate objective was precisely to maintain the factionalism that proved so supportive of his own position. James, it seems, understood Huntly’s machinations to have less to do with designs against the King, and more to do with challenging the power of Chancellor Maitland. The conspirators claimed that the intercepted letters were devised by Maitland and sent into England deliberately to be intercepted, or that they were part of an English plot devised to set the Scots ‘together by the ears’, at each other’s throats.54 So James welcomed Huntly into his bedchamber, but when Maitland objected to the restoration of Huntly to the captaincy of the royal guard (which had been taken from the Earl for a few days), James was quick to climb down, and reinstate the penalty, commanding Huntly to retire to his country estates. More immediately important to the King than appeasing England was keeping his very different favourites in line – not necessarily with each other, but with him. Maitland and Huntly had equal but different calls on the King’s love and favour. As the English intelligencer Thomas Fowler put it, ‘The King hath a strange, extraordinary affection to Huntly, such as is yet unremoveable, and thereby could persuade his majesty to any matters to serve his own particulars of friends.’ Maitland, on the other hand, ‘is beloved of the King in another sort, for he manages the whole affairs of the country. He sees he cannot be without him; he finds his whole care for his well-doing, and yet hath flattered the King too much. The King hath had a special care to make and keep these, his two well-beloved servants, friends, but it never lasted forty days without some suspicion or jar.’ Recently, Fowler reported, Maitland had abandoned all politic flattery, and now dealt with James ‘most plainly and stoutly’, telling him that if he continued to support Huntly as he did, then ‘he would not have a protestant in Scotland to follow or acknowledge him’. Nevertheless, Fowler continued, if James had his way, ‘he will have Huntly in court again within a month … When Huntly or his solicitors come in place he forgets all, and many say they doubt him bewitched.’55

  James stayed with Maitland for a fortnight in early March, and the Chancellor took the opportunity to press home what he should do: Huntly must be banished, he urged, and James accepted.56 Before going north to his estates, Huntly invited James to hunt and dine with him one last time on 13 March. When they met, Huntly claimed that he had heard rumours that Edinburgh was in ‘tumult’, the citizens ‘in arms’ and likely to turn against him, and that a plot by Maitland’s party was planned for that afternoon. (In fact, it seems that the Provost of Edinburgh had secretly told the town’s burgesses ‘to have their armour and weapons in their booths, ready for whatsomever adventure, because he had heard that there was a variance among the nobility.’) Errol then appeared with a dozen horsemen, and he, Huntly and Bothwell spent an hour urging the King to go with them ‘to some neuter place’ but James refused, threatening ‘if they attempted any such thing against his heart, they should never have his heart, and if ever he find his time, to be revenged’.57 Finally, the King returned to the planned banquet; Huntly, presumably believing himself vulnerable to attack, rode instead to his house at Dunfermline, and from there via Perth to Strathbogie. James, ‘in a great brangle’ and ‘melancoly’ at Huntly’s departure, was forced by Maitland to discharge Huntly’s guards but continued to send the Earl regular and ‘very friendly’ posts.58

  Before long, Edinburgh was buzzing with rumours that Huntly was ‘convening … his faction’. Errol, on the other hand, claimed that the accusations against him were the work of Maitland, ‘behind my back’, and urged that he should be heard before his King and his peers. Maitland received word from the Master of Glamis that Huntly had assembled his followers at Brechin, and planned to march to Edinburgh. When news of this reached James, he rode posthaste from Haltoun to Edinburgh, at two in the morning on 5 April, to sleep in his Chancellor’s lodging for safety. Loyal forces were commanded ‘to repair to the King’, while Bothwell, with men from the Borders, reached Dalkeith on 6 April. Bothwell offered himself up to James, saying he was willing to answer any accusation in any place – ‘except where Chancellor Maitland was’. For his part, he had three points of treason with which to charge the Chancellor. James w
ould not listen.59

  Huntly, Errol and Crawford passed through Perth on 10 April, capturing the Master of Glamis in his house at Kirkhill and leading him in disgrace past his own Glamis Castle. News of this indignity reportedly ‘irritate[d] his Majesty very much’,60 and Huntly was forced to write to James, assuring him that he had acted only to reveal his enemies’ intention, for his own security.61 James, however, was by now deeply hurt by Huntly’s constant betrayals. ‘What further trust can I have in your promises,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘confidence in your constancy, or estimation of your honest meaning?’ Every time he gave the Earl a chance, only to be bitterly disappointed. ‘Are these the fruits of your well conversion? Is this a likely purgation of your letters intercepted by England? Or is this a good proof of your honest course in my service?’ Huntly had ‘offended two persons in me, a particular friend and a general Christian king’. To satisfy the particular friend, the Earl had ‘willingly (without irking) to be content with whatsomever form I shall please to use you in. To remit fully to my discretion your contentment in all things. To use yourself in whatsomever thing as I shall direct you … Never to trust hereafter but such as I trust. And finally to repent you of all your faults, that in heart and mouth with the forlorn [prodigal] son ye may say’ – misquoting the book of Luke – ‘Peccavi in caelum et contra te [I have sinned against heaven and against you]’.62

  On 9 April, James rode to Linlithgow with 140 horse; at his request, Edinburgh sent a further two hundred. Perth was the meeting point for Huntly, Errol, Crawford, Bothwell and Montrose. As James gathered strength, he advanced from Linlithgow to Stirling to Perth, whence the lords had recently departed for Aberdeen. By the time he reached Dundee, James had two thousand men to move to Brechin, and thence to Cowie. By now James had taken on the role of military leader. Warned that the enemy might attack while they slept, the royal forces kept watch for two nights, at Brechin and Dunnottiris. ‘His Majesty would not so much as lie down on his bed that night, but went about like a good captain encouraging us,’ wrote John Colville on 18 April.63 A few days later, English agent Thomas Fowler confirmed this verdict: ‘The King hath marched already almost six score miles, and means to go forward three or score miles further. It hath been very painful to him already, but not as it will be. Never was prince more willing than he in this journey against these false ingrateful traitors who have deceived him.’ The demands on James’s time and energy were immense. ‘This people must have free access to the King’s presence: if there were no more but the continual disquiet of such a throng from morning to night and their entertainment, it were too much toil for any prince; but he must visit their watches nightly, he must comfort them, be pleasant with them passing from place to place, that in effect day or night the good King has little quiet and less rest. He hath watched two nights and never put off [taken off] his clothes.’64

  As the King reached Cowie, Huntly, Crawford and Errol came to the Brig o’ Dee with three thousand men. By this time, James had hardly one thousand of his own, but the simple knowledge that he was present had a strange effect on the rebel earls’ men. As Calderwood tells it, Huntly had ‘made many to believe’ that he had a royal commission to muster forces – an assumption that James’s presence clearly proved to be false. Unsurprising, then, that ‘fear seized upon the most part of Huntly’s faction when they heard the King was in person in the fields.’ While Errol was keen to fight on, Huntly was reluctant, and as their men deserted, and many northern barons defected to the royal troops, their situation became untenable. On 20 April, despite the sorry state of his troops, James entered Aberdeen without opposition. Since Huntly had not surrendered, James ‘purposed to go forward to his lands, to demolish his castles and houses, and specially Strabogie [Strathbogie]’. In secret, however, Huntly was told that if he threw himself on the King’s mercy his punishment would be mild. As James reached Terrysoule, Huntly finally ‘came in’, and was committed to prison, without being allowed to see the King. His work done, James returned to Edinburgh; Crawford later turned himself in on 20 May, claiming that Huntly had misled him, by implying that he had a commission to levy forces.65

  While James was in the north, Bothwell and his men had been marauding through Cannongate, Edinburgh, Leith and Dalkeith ‘living dissolutely’. On the King’s return, Bothwell used his influence with some of James’s close attendants to gain access to him on 11 May, as the King strolled in the garden of the house where he was staying. Bothwell ‘meanly apparelled’ in ‘a long black cloak’, ‘in a wet alley fell on his knees to the King’, craving pardon and ‘protesting that he had no intent to do evil to his Majesty nor to the religion’. This time James was not listening, and ‘suffered him to sit a long time upon his knees without any answer’, committing him to the attention of the new Captain of the Guard, William Hume.66 Under examination, Bothwell denied that he had made any attempt against the King or the true religion, and insisted that he had gathered men only to support him in his ongoing feud with Maitland. Both Bothwell and Crawford were convicted of treason: Bothwell warded in Tamtallon, and Crawford in the Castle of St Andrews. Huntly, whose punishment was left to the King, was sent to Borthwick Castle. But as Calderwood noted sourly, James ‘meant no great harm to the convicted, for they were soon after set at liberty’. The return from England, around the same time, of the Master of Gray with Lord Hunsdon only added to the general disillusionment with the King’s performance of justice – ‘banishment was but only for the fashion’.67

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The New Rib

  JAMES WAS SOON to have an all too brief respite from the factionalism riddling Scottish politics. In 1589, the King turned twenty-three, by contemporary standards a dangerously advanced age for a reigning sovereign to remain unmarried and, more pertinently, without an heir. There had long been rumours of possible brides, of course. When James was still considered a potential convert to Rome, there was talk of a marriage to the Pope’s niece. Since at least 1583, rumours had persistently come from Spain that James was about to turn Catholic and marry a daughter of King Philip:1 as late as 1588, Lord Burghley thought it worthwhile routinely to interrogate any captive Spaniards on the subject.2 But in the search for a Protestant bride, two courts were looked to by the King’s counsellors: Huguenot Navarre, and Lutheran Denmark.

  A Danish match, building on the centuries-old trading links between the two countries, was mooted as early as 1582;3 in the summer of 1585 a Danish embassy was received in Scotland. By October 1586, the possibility had been brought to the attention of Elizabeth and it was noted that ‘The Queen is not much pleased with the King of Scots’ match with Denmark.’4 But it was only after Mary’s death that James made serious steps towards finding a wife, ‘while as yet the memory of the execution of his mother was recent in men’s minds’, as David Calderwood put it.5 On 26 March 1587, emissaries were sent to both Navarre and Denmark, ‘to treat upon a match to the king’. The Navarre reconnaissance mission found a likely bride in Catherine de Bourbon, sister to King Henri of Navarre, to whom all Protestant France looked (and who would in 1589 become Henri IV of France). This was a match that would have pleased George Buchanan: his correspondence includes two letters from 1580 in which friends at the Navarre court urged him to forward the match, although by that date his influence over James had severely declined.6 James’s other tutor Peter Young was despatched to Denmark in March 1587 alongside Sir Patrick Vans of Barnbarroch, with a remit to express interest in either of King Frederick’s two daughters, Elizabeth and Anna, but with no commitment and no discussion of money and the vexed question of sovereignty over the Orkney islands (which Scotland then had as part of a messy marriage bargain in the fifteenth century). This mission was not particularly successful – access to the Danish king was difficult, and the elder daughter was suddenly contracted elsewhere – and the men returned home in August.

  The pendulum swung towards Navarre in June when James’s idol, the poet Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, visited the Scottish
court as an unofficial envoy from Henri, accompanying James to hear a theology lecture by Andrew Melvill at St Andrews. In September, James sent William Melville of Tongland (brother of Sir James Melville) to report on Catherine; Melville brought back ‘a good report of her rare qualities’ and a portrait of the princess.7 In September 1588, James wrote a flattering letter to Catherine referring to his ‘intentions’8 but Catherine replied in December saying his letter was ‘too much care and remembrance of me from so far away’, and could only be inspired by James’s friendship for her brother the King.9 Meanwhile, Danish hopes had been kept alive by Colonel William Stewart, the Prior of Pittenweeme. In February of 1588, acting very much on his own initiative, he travelled to Denmark to gain assurances that Anna would be available should James ask. King Frederick finally died in April, just as the Convention of Estates voted to grant James a tax of £100,000 over the next three years, making a marriage financially viable. Another Scottish embassy to Denmark, ending in November, produced further assurances about the size of the dowry.

  With the options well matched, there was also the matter of age to be considered: Catherine was thirty-one while Anna was fourteen. Some urged that ‘it is much better for the King to match with a wise staid woman than with a child, considering his careless disposition’;10 others saw greater child- and heir-bearing potential in Anna than in Catherine, ‘old, cracked and something worse if all were known’.11 It was in early 1589, according to Sir James Melville, that James finally put his mind to the question of which to choose. ‘His Majesty determined first to seek counsel of God by earnest prayer, to direct him where it would be meetest for the weal of himself and his country. So that after fifteen days’ advertisement and devout prayer, as said is, he called his Council together in his cabinet and told them how he had been advising and praying to God the space of fifteen days to move his heart the way that was meetest, and that he was resolved to marry in Denmark.’12 But there may have been a more pragmatic reason. On 28 May, there was a riot in Edinburgh led by local officials against Maitland, apparently because they believed that Maitland was opposed to the Danish marriage – which they wanted in order to guarantee and further Edinburgh’s trade with Denmark. It seems unlikely that the riot was instigated by James himself, as Sir James Melville suggested, but it certainly strengthened the case for a match with the Danish princess.13 For a few weeks, James kept up the pretence that he was still considering Navarre. By the summer, Henri had heard rumours that Scotland was looking elsewhere. James quickly wrote to reassure him, asking to be commended to his sister and apologising that he had not had sufficient leisure – ‘as the present scrawling will bear sufficient witness – and you know that it doesn’t do to present anything other than l’exquis to the ladies’ – and assuring him that ‘in spite of all contrary reports that might have come to your ears’, he remained his greatest supporter.14 But by now the decision was already made.