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

by Неизвестный

  The debates continued into March 1607 with the business being referred to a conference with the Lords, then to the Upper House judges, then back to the Commons, the main point of contention being whether the post-nati should have equal rights in England with the English. The Lower House concluded that neither ante-nati nor post-nati should be naturalised, nor given the rights enjoyed by English citizens. If they enjoyed English benefits, who was to ensure that they paid English taxes, obeyed English law? No: a piecemeal situation was unworkable. The Commons saw only one solution: a single, united legal system with one Parliament and one law, so that practices could not diverge – what they called a ‘perfect union’. The King and his government were less idealistic and less patient: James argued that the perfect union would come about over time, a marriage that must be preceded by a courtship – after all two parties could not be put to bed on such short acquaintance (an image that he presumably did not relate to his own marital experience). To advocate a perfect union was to pay lip service, and not to speak from the heart.24

  Eventually, on 2 May, James spoke to the House somewhat exasperatedly. What did they need to do? He was the Union. ‘It is merely idle and frivolous to conceive that any imperfect union is desired, or can be granted. It is no more unperfect, as now it is projected, than a child that is born without a beard. It is already a perfect union in me, the Head.’ James was disappointed in his Commons. ‘I looked for no such fruits at your hands; such personal discourses and speeches; which of all other I looked you should avoid, as not beseeming the gravity of your assembly. I am your King. I am placed to govern you, and shall answer for your errors. I am a man of flesh and blood, and have my passions and affections as other men. I pray you, do not too far move me to do that which my Power may tempt me unto.’25 But it was clear that the Commons would not consent to the King’s proposals, and the suggestions were postponed.

  For James, this was more than a parliamentary defeat. It demonstrated to him that his dreams of a Great Britain were not shared by his Commons, and that they would go out of their way to oppose him when they saw fit. The only success met by the pro-Unionists in James’s lifetime was the passing, as late as 30 June 1607, of a bill repealing hostile laws; the passing of the Union would wait for another century.

  * * *

  Bruised by the failure of the Union, the attacks of Puritans, and the increasingly uncooperative Commons, James felt his popularity to be at an all-time low. At the same time, he had to come to terms with the popularity of his heir. Artists and writers portrayed Henry as an emphatically active, martial prince – and it does appear that Henry had a real hands-on interest in all things warlike. One account describes how

  he did also practise tilting, charging on horseback with pistols, after the manner of the wars, with all other the like inventions. Now also delighting to confer, both with his own, and other strangers, and great captains, of all manners of wars, battle, furniture, arms by sea and land, disciplines, orders, marches, alarms, watches, strategems, ambuscades, approaches, scalings, fortifications, incampings; and having now and then battles of headmen appointed both on horse and foot, in a long table; whereby he might, in a manner, view the right ordering of a battle …

  He even played host to a Dutch engineer named Abraham van Nyevelt who instructed him in ‘all manner of things belonging to the wars’.26 Whether from his own inclination or from the wishful thinking of others, Henry had become an icon of everything James was not.

  There are suggestions that James was not wholly happy with this state of affairs. Henry was less than committed as a scholar, studying ‘not with much delight, and chiefly under his father’s spur’, as the Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin reported in June 1607. For this, he continued, Henry was ‘often admonished and set down’. Molin tells of how one day James taunted Henry that if he did not pay better attention to his lessons he would leave his crown to his brother Charles, a far better scholar. Henry made no reply, out of respect for his father, but later when his tutor tried to make the same point, he said: ‘I know what becomes a Prince. It is not necessary for me to be a professor, but a soldier and a man of this world. If my brother is as learned as they say, we’ll make him Archbishop of Canterbury.’ When this was reported to James, he took it ‘in no good part’, continued Molin, ‘nor is he overpleased to see his son so beloved and of such promise that his subjects place all their hopes in him; and it would almost seem, to speak quite frankly, that the King was growing jealous; and so the Prince has great need of a wise counsellor to guide his steps’.27

  In time, Henry tired of his rural retreat at Oatlands. On 16 December 1608, the fourteen-year-old Prince declared to his father that he was living too far away from court. James replied that he could make whatever arrangements he liked, and Henry took him at his word, ordering the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke to vacate their lodgings and stables at the palace so that he could move in, and then, when they refused, simply removing their possessions.28 There were moments when Henry stood up for what he believed. When his servant and friend Phineas Pett was accused of wrongdoing in naval matters, Henry stood by him during his trial, and bitterly attacked his accusers when Pett was ultimately found innocent. He befriended his father’s bête noire, Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been shut up in the Tower of London since 1603, and was reputed to have said that ‘None but my father would keep such a bird in a cage’.29 Anna’s chaplain, Bishop Goodman, wrote that Henry ‘did sometimes pry into the King’s actions, and a little dislike them … and truly I think he was a little self-willed’.30

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Terrible Blow

  FIVE YEARS AFTER the Gowrie Plot, in 1605 James unearthed another conspiracy against his life, although this one was undoubtedly real.1 The Gunpowder Plot seems to have been the brainchild of an English Catholic gentleman named Robert Catesby who, as early as 1603, was discussing with his friend Thomas Percy the possibility of assassinating the new King. By the spring of 1604, the conspiracy had widened to include three other men: Catesby’s cousin Thomas Winter, a friend named John Wright, and a mercenary recently returned from the Low Countries wars named Guy Fawkes. The plot was startling in its audacity – and its simplicity. As James later put it, Catesby and his fellows intended ‘not only … the destruction of my person, nor of my wife and posterity only, but of the whole body of the State in general; wherein should neither have been spared, or distinction made to young nor of old, of great nor of small, of man nor of woman: the whole nobility, the whole reverend clergy, bishops, and most part of the good preachers, the most part of the knights and gentry; … the whole judges of the land, with the most of the lawyers, and the whole clerks’. This they would accomplish in a single blow by planting barrels of gunpowder under the Parliament House in Westminster – poetic justice since Parliament was where ‘the cruel laws (as they say) were made against their religion’, so ‘both place and person should all be destroyed and blown up at once’.2 Practical planning commenced in May of 1604 with the renting of a house that backed on to the Parliament building; from there the conspirators started to dig a tunnel, a difficult and back-breaking task that necessitated the recruitment of more men. It was only after ten months of toil that they discovered that the house next to their own had a cellar that ran directly under the Parliament building. Once they had rented that house, it was a simple matter to break down the wall between the two cellars, and to move twenty barrels of gunpowder under the relevant chamber. It was Fawkes who carried out this work, covering the barrels with iron bars and faggots.

  But Catesby’s plans didn’t stop at the dynamiting of Westminster. An explosion at the opening ceremony might carry off James, Anna and Henry, but that still left two heirs to the throne still alive, Prince Charles and Princess Elizabeth. Elizabeth was being raised at the Haringtons’ estate at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, which happened to be only twenty miles from Catesby’s mother’s house at Ashby St Leger. The plotters resolved to snatch the princess ‘by drawing friends tog
ether at a hunting’ strategically located between the two houses at Sir Everard Digby’s at Dunchurch.3 Thomas Percy would use his position as a gentleman pensioner to abduct Prince Charles, under the pretence of taking him to a safe hiding place.4 In order to organise all this, more recruits were needed, and, by October 1605, some thirteen conspirators knew about the plot. It was only a matter of time before someone betrayed the elaborate conspiracy.

  One Warwickshire conspirator, Catesby’s first cousin Francis Tresham, was worried that the blast in Parliament would kill his brother-in-law William Parker, Lord Monteagle, and decided to warn him, while giving the conspirators a chance to escape. Monteagle was at supper at his house in Hoxton, near London, on 26 October when he was passed a note that had been given to one of his servants by a stranger. Monteagle told his servant, Thomas Ward, to read the letter aloud:

  My Lord, out of the love that I bear to some of your friends, I have a care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise your excuse to shift off your attendance at this Parliament. For God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time. And think not slightly of this advertisement [warning], but retire yourself into your country, where you may expect the event in safety. For though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say, they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them. This counsel is not to be contemned, because it may do you good, and can do you no harm, for the danger is past so soon as you have burnt the letter. And I hope God will give you the grace to make good use of it: to whose holy protection I commend you.5

  The letter was then taken by Monteagle himself to Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who was dining with four other Privy Councillors, Northampton, Nottingham, Suffolk and Worcester. They suspected that ‘a terrible blow’ might refer to an explosion, but determined to postpone any search, and instead allow the plot to develop.

  James was on a hunting trip at Royston until the beginning of November, and it was only on his return to the capital that Salisbury showed him the letter. The King read the message and congratulated himself on breaking its cunning code – plotters had attempted to blow up his own father so the notion did not strike him as far-fetched. Since the opening of Parliament was scheduled for 5 November, he determined that a search should not be carried out until the night before, to give the plot time to mature. Late on 4 November, Suffolk led a search that discovered Guy Fawkes, calling himself John Johnson, standing guard over a pile of faggots. James was informed, and he commanded a more detailed search. At 11 p.m. the gunpowder was discovered, and ‘Johnson’ was arrested and taken to the Tower. James was awakened and told of developments; he gave thanks to God for his deliverance, and gave instructions that ‘Johnson’ must not be allowed to kill himself: he was their source for further information. James provided his councillors with a series of questions with which to interrogate ‘Johnson’, and asked whether they thought a recent ‘cruelly villainous pasquil [lampoon]’ that had inveighed against James’s adoption of the title ‘King of Great Britain’ might not also be his work?6 (Fawkes had in fact written a memorandum in July 1603 dealing with the unpopularity of the Scots in James’s court.)7

  Within hours of Fawkes’ arrest, the conspirators had fled to Dunchurch, but soon discovered that they had to keep moving. On 6 November, Harington at Combe Abbey received a message from one of his neighbours, claiming that horses had been stolen during the night by armed men whom they believed to be papists. Harington wrote to London for instructions, but as rumours intensified he decided to wait no longer but to take action himself, and whisked Elizabeth to Coventry, placing her in the custody of a merchant there. It was a wise decision: Sir Thomas Edmondes reported that ‘popish flight-heads’ came ‘but two hours too late to have seized upon the person of the Lady Elizabeth’s grace’.8 In truth, however, the Warwickshire conspiracy had fairly much evaporated, and its dregs, led by Catesby, fled west, to what they hoped was a safe house, Holbeach House, near Stourbridge. There they were captured, Catesby being shot on the spot, the others dying of their wounds, or being taken to London for trial and, ultimately, execution.

  James made the most of the opportunity. On 9 November he appeared in Parliament to offer thanks to God ‘for the great and miraculous delivery he hath granted to me, and to you all, and consequently to the whole body of this estate’. He begged the members’ indulgence to explore a conceit of his: ‘That since kings are in the word of God itself called Gods, as being his lieutenants and vice-regents on earth, and so adorned and furnished with some sparkles of the divinity; to compare some of the works of God the great King, towards the whole and general world, to some of his works towards me, and this little world of my dominions.’ Just as God punished sin by the ‘general purgation’ which only Noah and his family survived, James ‘may justly compare these two great and fearful Domesdays, wherewith God threatened to destroy me and all you of this little world in me’, the Gowrie Plot and this new Gunpowder Plot. He ‘amongst all other Kings have been subject’ to ‘daily tempests of innumerable dangers’, ‘not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth: and while I was in my mother’s belly’, a rare reference to the trauma of the Riccio murder.9

  James went on to congratulate himself on bringing the matter to light – an uncharacteristic act because he had always believed suspiciousness to be ‘the sickness of a tyrant’ and tended personally to the other extreme. On this occasion, however, things were different. When Salisbury showed him the letter, he was ‘so far contrary to myself’ that he ‘did upon the instant interpret and apprehend some dark phrases’ it contained, namely the ‘general obscure advertisment’ of ‘some dangerous blow’. This interpretation, he continued pedantically, required reading ‘contrary to the ordinary grammar construction of them’ – the kind of construction that you might expect a mere university divine or lawyer to offer. If he’d interpreted it in any other way, ‘no worldly provision or prevention could have made us escape our utter destruction’. In fact, the whole affair showed ‘a wonderful providence of God’. It so happened that Fawkes was taken with ‘his firework for kindling ready in his pocket’: if he’d been apprehended only a few minutes earlier this evidence would not have been there. Even if the plan had gone ahead, it would have been to James’s immortal fame, since future ages could not say that ‘I had died ingloriously in an ale-house, a stews [brothel], or such vile place’; instead, ‘but mine end should have been with the most honourable and best company, and in that most honourable and fittest place for a king to be in’.10

  A few months later, upon the publication of the King’s Parliament speech of thanksgiving, these self-glorifying notions were developed in an accompanying tract entitled A Discourse of the Maner of the Discovery of this Late Intended Treason. Ostensibly written anonymously by a courtier, it describes how, with God’s aid, the King discovered the plot, saving his own person and the whole realm. Salisbury and Suffolk are portrayed as possessing no intellectual nous of their own, instead referring the letter to James since they apparently knew of ‘his fortunate judgement in clearing and solving of obscure riddles and doubtful mysteries’. In fact, the Discourse continues, Salisbury didn’t believe the letter to be of importance, but James ‘apprehended it deeplier’, and ordered the search of the Parliament house, astounding his Secretary. At the same time, the Discourse insisted that the King was indifferent to his own harm, ‘whereby he had drawn himself into many desperate dangers’; no, his concern derived only from his care for the state. A marvellously sycophantic piece of work, it pleased James enough – if indeed he did not pen it himself – to include it, without comment, in his collected Workes, published in early 1617.11

  The Catesby plot had a severe effect on the royal family. Nine-year-old Elizabeth in particular suffered from the aftereffects of the ordeal. In January 1606, her guardian Harington reported that the Princess was still suffering ‘from the fever occasioned by these distu
rbances’: ‘this poor lady hath not yet recovered the surprise and is very ill and troubled.’12 For all his bravado in Parliament, James, too, was deeply disturbed. ‘The King is in terror,’ reported the Venetian ambassador. ‘He does not appear nor does he take his meals in public as usual. He lives in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him. The Lords of the Council also are alarmed and confused by the plot itself and by the King’s suspicions.’13 For James, the Gunpowder Plot, calling to mind only too clearly the attack on Riccio and the Gowrie Plot, was just the last in a line of threats to his life. This was no time for complacency.

  * * *

  Most directly, the Gunpowder Plot gave James pause for thought about his policy towards English Catholics. This, after all, was not the first Catholic conspiracy he had encountered in his new country. In his final years in Scotland, James had been informed, primarily by Lord Henry Howard, that Sir Walter Ralegh, one of Elizabeth’s favourites, opposed his claim to the throne; James did not forget the advice and as a result Ralegh was one of the few Englishmen to lose out on James’s accession, as the new King deprived him of his post of Captain of the Guard, other lucrative posts and licences, and ordered him to leave his house, Durham House in the Strand. On 14 July 1603 he was summoned before the Privy Council and grilled concerning his possible involvement in any plot ‘to surprise the King’s person’, and in particular a plot contrived between the Spanish agent Count Aremberg and Ralegh’s friend Lord Cobham. Unable to prove his innocence, Ralegh was imprisoned in the Tower of London three days later. In November, he was brought to trial before a specially appointed, and notably hostile, commission at Winchester. He was found guilty on charges of receiving bribes from Spain; ‘compassing and imagining’ the death of James and his family, ‘the old fox and his cubs’; and of trying to put Arbella Stuart on the throne, to deliver England into the hands of Spain.