The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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The Kirk was not the only victim. James had also triumphed over the Ruthvens, whose humiliation did not end with their deaths. James swore ‘to root out the whole house and name’.20 The bodies of the two young men were set upon gibbets, quartered, and subjected to public display at the cross in Edinburgh. As traitors, the Ruthvens forfeited all their estates and honours; Gowrie’s sisters were instantly banished from court; and William and Patrick Ruthven fled to Berwick, to seek shelter in England. In November a Parliament decreed that, ‘as the name of Ruthven should be extinguished in all time thereafter’, so the place that was now unhappily named Ruthven should be reborn as ‘Huntingtower’. For saving the King’s life, the young John Ramsay was knighted, and later created Earl of Holderness. On the anniversary of the event, any favour Holderness cared to request was granted.21 Revising his Basilikon Doron for publication, James included a new dig at the family: ‘virtue or vice will oftentimes with the heritage, be transferred from the parents to the posterity’, he had written; ‘witness the experience of the last house of Gowrie’, he added. To his brother-in-law Christian IV of Denmark in November 1605 he recalled the occasion ‘when by the favour of the divine power we on the fifth day of August in the year 1599’ – James’s chronology seems to have gone astray here – ‘[we] escaped the impious and wicked hands of traitors bent on our destruction’.22 Even as late as 1623, James noted in a letter he was writing to his son Charles and his then favourite Buckingham that he was writing ‘upon the good fifth day of August’ – still a day of public thanksgiving.23
Initial reports suggested that the alleged plot brought the King and Queen closer: ‘The Queen makes exceeding much on the King and is glad of his happy deliverance’, reported Nicolson a week after the attempt.24 But James’s ruthless eviction from her household of two of the ladies ‘in chiefest credit’ with Anna, Barbara and Beatrix Ruthven, put a different complexion on the case for the Queen.25 In August, her younger daughter Margaret died, and it was erroneously reported at the same time that she had miscarried her current pregnancy.26 Sir George Home, who had become ‘the only man of all other most inward with the King’, took it on himself to advance a theory concerning the Gowrie plot, suggesting that the Queen might have been involved. It was impossible to prove. ‘What the Queen’s part was in the matter,’ wrote Roger Aston, ‘God knows. The presumptions were great both by letters and tokens, as also by her own behaviour after the deed was done.’ James could not be convinced, and was concerned only, in Aston’s words ‘to cover her fully. She has now won so far in to the King by her behaviour towards him as no man dare deal in that matter further. She does daily keep the preaching and entertains the King in a more kind and lovinger sort than ever she did before. She now will obey the King in whatsover, and his will shall be obeyed.’27
Other reports were less sanguine about Anna’s new obedience. By mid-October, according to the deputy governor of Berwick, ‘the Queen of Scots is very narrowly looked unto, and a strait watch kept about her’. It was even reported that after she had given birth, ‘she shall be kept as a prisoner ever after, and the King will no more come where she is. It is said that the Queen says plainly that she will be utter enemy to all that were at the murder of Gowrie save the King himself.’28 It was reported that there was ‘an open diffidence’ between James and Anna, which one correspondent put down to ‘the discovery of some affection between her and the Earl Gowrie’s brother’, Alexander, which had been ‘the truest cause and motif of all that tragedy’.29
Matters came to a head at the dinner table in late October, in a display of what the Master of Gray called the ‘very evil menage’ of the King and Queen. Anna burst out that she knew that James intended to imprison her, but warned him to beware what he minded at for she was not the Earl of Gowrie. He responded that he thought she was mad. He would find she was neither mad nor beside herself, she flashed back, if he did what he intended.30 James laid the blame for her behaviour on her advanced pregnancy.31 Despite this embarrassing public scene, however, the royal couple were soon reconciled, perhaps as a result of the birth on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline, of another son, Charles – by a coincidence, Anna was happily not able to witness the hanging and quartering of the Ruthven brothers’ corpses in Edinburgh’s marketplace the same day.32
Anna did not forget her loyalty to the Ruthvens. Two years later, in December 1602, the English agent James Hudson described Anna to Principal Secretary Sir Robert Cecil as ‘that violent woman who will not leave till she either restore the last destroyed house or revenge the fall of it’. Hudson clearly believed Anna to be a danger to the King, but ‘the gentleman, the husband, is so syllid [beguiled] in love that none dare deal in this matter as they would or should for fear of offense’. Nevertheless, Hudson continued, Anna’s perfidy was a public talking point for the Kirk ministers: ‘it has been plainly spoken in pulpits and so fervently that it has drawn out many tears from the auditors to hear so much of the peril of his person, and it has been plainly told herself that she must leave such matters and take a better course’.33 Anna had no intention of leaving such matters. A month later, she managed to smuggle Beatrix Ruthven back into her palace, and there, ‘in a chamber prepared for her by the Queen’s direction’, Anna had ‘much time and conference’ with Beatrix. When the incident came to James’s attention, he saw it as a security breach, and ordered ‘all dangerous passages … coming near the King’s chamber’ to be sealed up. But he didn’t blame Anna: instead, her servants were summoned to the chapel to be lectured on the necessity of shunning the Ruthvens – no dealing with them ‘without the King’s and Queen’s direction and privity upon pain of death’.34 In February 1603, when Anna asked Sir Roger Aston how she was regarded in England, he brought to her attention two matters, which he saw as connected: ‘the countenance which she had given to the brethren and sestern [sisters] of Gowrie’ and ‘the suspicion conceived of some late practice that should have been against his Majesty’. While she protested her innocence of complicity in any plot against the King, he reported, Anna ‘could not deny’ the Ruthvens.35
* * *
How James and Anna were regarded in England was by the time of the Gowrie Plot perhaps their primary concern. Since the execution of his mother in 1587, James’s every move was made with one eye on England, and his claim to the English throne. The succession was no simple matter. By a series of statutes passed between 1533 and 1546, Henry VIII’s crown was to pass to his only legitimate son Prince Edward and then, if Edward should die without issue, to his elder half-sisters, first Mary, and then Elizabeth. In the unlikely event that all three should die without children, the statute empowered Henry to direct the succession by letters patent, or by ‘his last will in writing, signed with his most gracious hand’. This scenario had indeed come to pass: Edward had died unmarried at the age of sixteen in 1553; Mary Tudor had died childless five years later; and now Elizabeth was past the age of bearing children. According to Henry’s last will, written on 30 December 1546, under these circumstances the crown was to descend through the line of Henry’s sister Mary. It was a highly pointed dictate. For Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, was only Henry’s younger sister; the elder, who one might expect to have priority, was Margaret, who became Queen of Scotland, and who was James’s great-grandmother. Henry had passed over the Scottish line completely.36 However, the document could be challenged. Henry’s will was supposed to be ‘signed with his most gracious hand’, but there were those who claimed a seal had been used. In any case, the document had helpfully gone missing.
Among the dozen or so pretenders, only two apart from James had any real claim. Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, was the obvious heir through the Suffolk line, but the marriage of his parents, Katherine Grey and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had been secret, and his legitimacy was far from secure. From the line of James’s ancestor Margaret, there was another great-grandchild from her second marriage. But Lady Arbella Stuart was female, and her Protestant credentials were dubious: the P
ope himself had recommended her to English Roman Catholics as Elizabeth’s proper successor. Even so, for those willing to make a negative case, the odds were stacked against James. James owed his claim to the English throne through his mother, but his mother had been executed for treason against the current sovereign of England. James was an alien, and aliens could not inherit a pebble on English soil. Just how strongly this was felt had been seen in the year of James’s birth when Patrick Adamson had published his poem welcoming the King of Scotland, France and England. In the English Parliament, a lawyer named James Dalton launched a tirade against Adamson’s poem, protesting that he hoped he would never see the day ‘that ever any Scot or stranger shall have any interest in the Crown of this realm, for it is against the law that any person other than such as be born the Prince’s subjects hold merit in this land’. The matter was calmed by diplomatic interventions by Queen Mary’s ambassador and Elizabeth herself, but the point was well made: James was no Englishman.37
The King of Scots’ case required some support on the ground in England. James may have hoped to enlist as allies the powerful Cecils: father William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and most valued adviser until his death in 1598, and son Sir Robert Cecil, who was officially appointed Principal Secretary of State in 1596 after unofficially fulfilling the duties of the post for several years. James’s relations with the Cecils, however, had been fitful: the repeated failures of the English to pay his annual pension could easily be blamed, fairly or unfairly, on the Lord Treasurer.38 James turned instead to Elizabeth’s young, handsome and famously headstrong favourite, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. In 1592, James approached Essex for help in a trivial matter concerning which he had previously approached Lord Treasurer Burghley, but ‘always without effect’;39 two years later, he was routinely recommending his ambassadors instead to Essex.40 The surviving papers of Essex’s right-hand man, Anthony Bacon, bear witness to a thriving correspondence between the Essex camp and any number of Scottish informants: Dr Thomas Morison, Edward Bruce, Abbot of Kinloss, John Bothwell, the laird of Holyroodhouse, Dr Herries, Robert Bowes, James Hudson, Roger Aston and James Foulis.41 James’s distaste for the Cecils intensified when he received reports, vehemently denied, that Sir Robert Cecil had met Bothwell during an embassy to Rouen in 1598.42
But there were those who thought that Essex himself had designs on the English throne, and might prove a rival to James’s claim.43 In March 1599, Essex set off to Ireland at the head of the English army, and at the height of his power. Realising that James might interpret this as a potential military threat, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, an Essex supporter already in Ireland, sent a messenger to Scotland in the summer of 1599 to assure him that Essex would not challenge his claim.44 By the autumn, Essex was in no position to challenge anybody’s claim: ordered out of Ireland by the Queen, he was held under house arrest in London, and then tried by Star Chamber in November. Mountjoy then proposed a concrete plan in February 1600: James should prepare an army ‘at a convenient time’ and Mountjoy would provide forces from Ireland. But, sensing that Essex’s powers were declining, James was noncommittal, and the scheme withered away.45 By May 1600, Essex was placing himself in James’s hands: ‘such as I am, and all whatsoever I am (though perhaps a subject of small price) I consecrate unto your regal throne … Neither do I doubt, that the minds of al my countrymen … will jointly unite their hopes in your majesty’s noble person, as the only center, wherein our rest and happiness consist.’46 The following month, Essex was brought before a court at York House, dismissed from all his offices of state, and put under house arrest.
It was not until the end of the year that Essex showed signs of regaining his former confidence. On 25 December 1600, the Earl wrote James a long tirade against what he saw as ‘this reigning faction’, by which he meant Cecil’s party, which had ‘left no degree, county, nor no man almost of living, courage, or understanding without some complaint against them’. Among their heinous deeds, he alleged, were ‘their devilish plots with your Majesty’s own subjects against your person and life’. He urged James to beware of the ‘reigning faction’: ‘as they seduce some that are weak and ignorant by their slanderous reports of your Majesty, so they abuse others that are well affected to you by a persuasion that this faction hath a great secret interest in your favor, which doth more advantage them and hurt your Majesty and your friends than any one thing whatsoever’. But he was responding to calls to take on the Cecils. ‘Now am I summoned of all sides to stop the malice, the wickedness and madness of these men, and to relieve my poor country that groans under her burthen [burden]. Now doth reason, honor, and conscience command me to be active. Now do I see by God’s favor the fairest and likeliest hopes that can be of good success.’ To aid this campaign, Essex suggested that James send an ambassador, preferably the Earl of Mar, to London, and gave 1 February 1601 as a deadline. ‘And when by God’s favor your Majesty shall be secured from all practises here and against all competitions whatsoever, you shall be declared and acknowledged the certain and undoubted successor to this crown.’47
James apparently responded to this in a ciphered letter, which has not survived. An embassy was prepared, to be led by Mar and Edward Bruce, Abbot of Kinloss. They were instructed to ‘temper and frame all your dealing with the Queen or Council by the advice of my friends there, whose counsel ye shall directly follow in all your behaviour there’. If his friends ‘perform their promises on their part’, Mar and Kinloss were delegated ‘ample power to give them full assurance of my assisting them accordingly’.48 The embassy was about to leave, a few weeks behind schedule, in mid-February when news arrived from England. Essex had indeed followed reason, honour and conscience and been ‘active’, as he predicted, attempting to lead an uprising in the City of London on Sunday 8 February 1601 – precisely one week after he had wanted James’s embassy in England. The rebellion failed miserably, as Essex’s expected support failed to materialise; there was no doubt in the minds of local commentators that the fiasco must spell the end of Essex’s political hopes. James hurriedly revised his instructions to the ambassadors. If James’s ‘friends’ thought it best that his allegiances remain hidden, then they should follow their advice; but ‘if they think that your kything [intervening] in it may do good, stand not upon terms and I shall avow you bravely’. If, however, ‘as God forbid, it be past redding ere [saving before] ye come there, use then all the means ye can to get me a party there and assure them I can neither with honour nor surety disguise myself any longer’.49
The situation was ‘past redding’ even before Mar and Kinloss finally arrived in London, with Essex and several of his associates already executed. In a series of audiences with Elizabeth, Mar and Kinloss received ‘nothing but negative answers, the matters being of so sour nature to the Queen, who loves neither importunity nor expostulation’.50 Exhausted after a month, the ambassadors complained of the Queen’s ‘coldness’,51 which they attributed to her continued suspicions about James’s connections with Essex. Cecil reported that Elizabeth was ‘infinitely distasted’ because Mar and Kinloss ‘were reserved in confessing the traffic between’ James and Essex, ‘whom it seemed the King did either believe to be his friend, or thought it wisdom to seem so. For her Majesty, knowing all particulars, took it unkindly.’ But, he added, Elizabeth’s heart was so far from malice ‘though it will never be free from jealousy, as she was contented to lap up all things, and to profess once more a good satisfaction and mutual correspondency’.52 Elizabeth had good reason to be suspicious: when Essex was arrested, it was said that he’d been wearing James’s most recent letter in a casket round his neck. Writing to James in April 1601, Elizabeth signed off with a teasingly opaque reference: ‘Remember, that a bird of the air, if no other instrument, to an honest King shall stand in stead of many feigned practices, to utter aught may anywise touch him. And so I leave my scribbles, with my best wishes that you scan what works becometh best a King, and what in end wil
l best avail him.’53 But at the last minute, Elizabeth added an extra paragraph to her letter, offering an increase in her pension to James, from £3,000 to £5,000 a year – on the condition that it should be ‘thankfully accepted and sincerely requited and deserved’.54
At the same time, Mar and Kinloss followed James’s instruction to ‘get me a party’ in England, turning inevitably to Sir Robert Cecil, whose influence with Elizabeth was now almost unchallenged. Given that Cecil knew that James had inclined to Essex earlier, the establishing of this new relationship required some fancy footwork, and James rose to the occasion with a letter that demonstrated the slippery evasion of great statecraft. Employing the most rudimentary of ciphers to disguise the leading players, ‘30’ (James) made formal advances to ‘10’ (Secretary Cecil), declaring how ‘heartily glad’ he was that 10 ‘hath now at last made choice of two so fit and confident ministers whom with he hath been so honourably plain in the affairs of 30’. The fact that these fit and confident ministers had in fact been sent to deal with Essex was tidily forgotten. Unable to ‘speak face to face’ with Cecil, James proposed that they use ‘his long approved and trusty 3’ as their intermediary, ‘a sure and secret interpreter’. ‘3’ was Lord Henry Howard, indeed one of Essex’s closest followers through the late 1590s, the Earl’s eyes and ears at court when Essex was in Ireland.55 But, as one commentator noted in September 1599, despite his Essex affiliations, Howard was a ‘neuter’ (neutral party),56 who also pursued friendly relations with Cecil. At the time, this worked to Essex’s advantage: as the same commentator noted, when ‘things were far out of square between him and Mr Secretary’, Howard ‘hath infinitely travelled in his business’, and ‘by his direction’ the Earl and the Secretary seemed ‘to be upon better terms’.57 When Essex started to formulate his plans for the February 1601 uprising, Howard kept his distance. Now Howard was ideal, James argued, because he had urged James ‘to take a good conceit’ of Cecil, and had tried to bring about a ‘conformity’ between Cecil and Essex, when Cecil ‘mistrusted the aspiring mind of Essex’. For his own part, James protested ‘upon his conscience and honour, that Essex had never had any dealing with him which was not most honorable’. As for the Earl’s ‘misbehaviour’, it wasn’t James’s place to judge it, because, although he ‘loved him for his virtues, he was no ways obliged to embrace his quarrels’.58 But he was pleased that Cecil had broken his silence towards him, for James admitted that it had been ‘continually beaten in my ears that your silence did proceed, not of duty to your sovereign, but out of unquenchable malice against me’.59