The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  Despite the production of the Casket Letters and Buchanan’s ingenious and indignant narrative, Mary’s guilt could not be proved to the satisfaction of the English commissioners. On the other hand, Elizabeth was not inclined to restore her to her Scottish throne. She might disapprove of the rough treatment Mary had suffered. She deplored rebellion and the deposition of a fellow monarch. She was surely unconvinced by Buchanan’s argument that the ancient constitution of Scotland, which was actually an imaginative myth, provided precedents for such action. But the government of Scotland was now in the hands of the regent Moray, a Protestant and a man who had shown himself to be a good friend of England. So Mary must remain where she was, whether her situation was to be described as a guest under restraint or a prisoner. Elizabeth continued to refuse all her cousin’s pleas for a meeting, something Mary was sure would lead to a true understanding. It may be that Elizabeth was afraid this would prove to be the case. Or perhaps she merely wished to save herself embarrassment. Nevertheless, she protected Mary for years from the hostility of the more extreme Protestants who sought her death for fear that, if Elizabeth herself should die, Mary’s claim to the throne would be supported by English Catholics and foreign powers. If the English Parliament had had its way, Mary would have been put on trial and sentenced to death in 1572, after the discovery of the Ridolfi plot against Elizabeth.32

  For much of the 1570s and even into the next decade, Mary’s confinement was irksome rather than rigorous. She was treated as a queen and served by her own household, at one time as large as thirty people. She was permitted to ride out, hunting and hawking. She was officially denied the comforts of her religion, but at various times disguised Catholic priests held posts within her household. Certainly she was under constant supervision, but some of her jailers, notably the Earl of Shrewsbury, were even friendly. She had her little dogs and cage-birds, and she spent hours doing embroidery, sending samples of her work as presents to Elizabeth with friendly messages. Her servants were mostly devoted to her, and for a while she delighted in the company of her niece Arbella Stuart, the daughter of Darnley’s younger brother Charles and Elizabeth Cavendish, whose mother Bess of Hardwick was now married to Shrewsbury. Yet much of her life was a torment of boredom and frustration. She was often in poor health, especially in winter, and by the time she was forty she already moved, and often looked, like a much older woman.

  Hope is the prisoner’s stay, often illusory. Mary trusted that when her son assumed management of his own affairs he would press hard for her release. Schemes to associate her with him in the government of Scotland were propounded, considered, abandoned, with regret on her part, indifference on his. As the years passed, her contact with the outer world was restricted, her understanding of it clouded. As recompense, her attachment to the Catholic faith, light and even perfunctory in her youth, deepened. She spent hours in prayer, wrote devotional poetry and in 1580 an ‘Essay on Adversity’. Though she could not know it, she was preparing herself for martyrdom.

  Events beyond her prison conspired against her. Protestant England was engaged in a cold war with Catholic Spain. Religious civil wars agitated France. Protestants everywhere had been horrified by the St Bartholomew’s Night massacre of French Huguenots in 1572; one man who had witnessed it was Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had been in Paris on a diplomatic mission at the time. Meanwhile in the Netherlands a Protestant rebellion against their lord Philip of Spain was assuming the character of a war of liberation; in 1584 the Dutch leader William of Orange (known as ‘the Silent’, because, though normally loquacious, he had on one important occasion held his tongue) was assassinated. In 1570 the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth and absolved English Catholics from allegiance to her. In response Parliament had passed an act declaring the presence of Catholic priests in England to be illegal. Those who dared to defy the law were, if arrested, tortured and executed – as traitors rather than heretics.

  Elizabeth, who disliked bloodshed, except when alarmed, might be, despite everything, well disposed towards her ‘cousin and sister’, but the men around her were Mary’s enemies. They had good reason to be so. Elizabeth was nine years older than the Scots queen. Suppose she died? Suppose she was assassinated? What then? As Protestant patriots, men like Cecil and Walsingham feared the worst for England and for themselves; their own necks might be in danger if Mary survived Elizabeth and became queen. So ingrained is the myth of the sturdy Protestantism of Elizabethan England that their fears may seem fanciful. But they were real enough. Catholics were still numerous, their loyalty doubtful. Mary had supporters and sympathisers, at home and abroad. All the chief men in government had lived through one Catholic reaction – Mary Tudor’s. They were determined there should not be another, and to ensure against it they were equally determined to be rid of the Queen of Scots. But they knew that Elizabeth would consent to her death only if she had irrefutable proof that Mary had given her approval to a plot against her life.

  At last in 1586 the opportunity presented itself. Anthony Babington was a young idealistic Catholic gentleman from Derbyshire. As a boy he had served as a page in Shrewsbury’s household, seen the Queen of Scots, if only from a distance, and conceived a devotion to her. He gathered like-minded young men about him, fervent in the Catholic faith and hostile to the established order. Some of them, like Babington himself, saw Mary as an oppressed and ill-used queen, a figure of romance, a beacon of hope for their fellow Catholics. They fell in love with the idea of her,33 and so they devised a plot: Elizabeth would be killed, Mary rescued and Catholicism restored. It was wild and fanciful and it never had any chance of success.

  In the heightened tension of the 1580s, Mary’s confinement had become narrower. For some time her communication with the world beyond her prison had been cut off. Now – miraculously, it must have seemed – a new secret channel of communication was opened, and she received Babington’s letters. It was no miracle. Walsingham had arranged it, having already infiltrated one of his spies as an agent provocateur into Babington’s little group of conspirators. The bait was laid. It only remained for Mary to take it, and the trap would be sprung. At last, in one letter, she assented, or seemed to assent, to all Babington’s plans, stipulating only that he must move quickly enough and with sufficient strength to set her free. When this letter – like all her correspondence – was sent to Walsingham, opened, copied and scrutinised, before being passed on to Babington – the spymaster drew a gallows on the paper.

  Though it is probable that Mary did approve Babington’s plans, it is not absolutely certain. The fatal letter may have been doctored. Mary still wrote by preference in French, her first language – her written English was very poor. Her letters were then translated and put into a cipher by her secretary, and it is just possible that he, believing the correspondence secure, may have thought it wise to make his mistress’s approval of the assassination plot explicit in order to fortify Babington’s resolution. Alternatively, Walsingham or one of his agents may have done this. Certainly Walsingham added one damaging footnote.

  Babington and his friends were arrested, tortured till they confessed, and then executed in the horrible manner of the age.34 They were certainly guilty of their plot, but it had never had any chance of success, for ultimately it was as much Walsingham’s conspiracy as theirs, and Elizabeth had been in no danger.

  Nevertheless, she was at last convinced. The Queen of Scots must be put on trial. Mary defended herself with spirit, while denying that an English court could have any jurisdiction over her. She offered to state her case, before Parliament, and was refused. She told Walsingham she knew he was her enemy. He denied it, saying he was an enemy only to the enemies of England and his queen. This was casuistry, for he had no doubt that Mary was the enemy of England, as he understood England, and therefore he was indeed her enemy, as she alleged.

  The verdict was never in doubt; this was a show trial, in which there was no possibility of an acquittal. Mary was sentenced to
death.

  Only two questions remained. Could Elizabeth be brought to sign the death warrant, and would Mary consent to submit to the sentence? The answer to the first was in doubt for weeks. Elizabeth hated the idea. She was not cruel and it may be that the idea of sending her cousin to the block, of condemning her to suffer the death inflicted so long ago on her own mother Anne Boleyn, revolted her. Moreover, she was reluctant to take the responsibility of carrying out a judicial sentence on an anointed queen, and she was afraid of the response from Spain and France. Her scruples deserve respect but her next move invites only contempt: she urged Mary’s latest jailer, Sir Amyas Paulet, to relieve her of responsibility by arranging the murder of the Queen of Scots himself. To his credit he refused. ‘I am so unhappy to have lived to see this unhappy day,’ he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘in which I am required by direction from my most gracious sovereign to do an act which God and the law forbid…God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot on my poor posterity, to shed blood without law or warrant.’35 Elizabeth was infuriated by his ‘daintinesess’, but at last she signed the warrant and her ministers whipped it away before she could change her mind.

  Any fear that Mary would offer resistance – a fear that remained even on the morning of her execution – was unfounded. She accepted death as a martyr to the Catholic faith, as she wrote to her brother-in-law Henry III of France on 8 February 1587, in her last letter a few hours before she was due to die, and she played her part in the macabre and horrible drama at Fotheringay as a piece of noble and self-conscious theatre. When the executioner lifted her severed head, it fell away from his hand and he was left holding the auburn wig she had chosen to wear. It was then seen that her hair was grey and the face was that of an old woman, though she was not yet forty-five. A little pet dog, a terrier, had accompanied her into the hall, hidden under the folds of her dress. It now ran out and stood beside her bleeding neck and would not be coaxed away.

  Chapter 10

  James VI and I (1567–1625): The King as Survivor

  On the ceiling of the banqueting hall in the Palace of Whitehall, Rubens depicted James VI and I as the ‘British Solomon’ dispensing justice amidst swirling Baroque clouds. Though the most successful of the Stuarts, he has more often attracted ridicule than admiration; the Duc de Sully, chief minister of his cousin Henry IV of France, called him ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. His mother Mary has never lacked devotees. Nor has his son Charles. Their deaths on the scaffold, and the manner in which they met them, lend their memory a nobility their lives frequently lacked. James died, in ordinary and inglorious fashion, in his bed. Highly intelligent, a scholar and poet, he was an unusual man to find on a throne, perhaps the only king of either Scotland or England who may reasonably be styled an intellectual. He liked to call himself ‘the great schoolmaster of the realm’, and it is easy to imagine him as a university don.

  If posterity has found it hard to grant him respect, it is partly because of the picture of him drawn by a malicious court gossip, Sir Anthony Weldon, in his unreliable memoirs.1 It was Weldon who told how the King’s clothes were ludicrously padded to guard against dagger-thrusts, how he fiddled continually with his codpiece, how a weakness in his legs gave him an unsteady gait, how he fawned over his handsome favourites Robert Ker (or Carr), whom he made Earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, who was created Duke of Buckingham, how he lacked dignity and majesty of person, rarely washed, made unsuitable jokes, and was frequently in liquor.

  Moreover, his reign in England has generally been compared unfavourably with the fabled glories of the Elizabethan age. Some of his subjects indeed made such a comparison. But many of the problems James faced first appeared in Elizabeth’s last years, and were inherited by him unresolved. Much of what is styled Elizabethan is also Jacobean. It was in James’s reign and under his patronage that the Church of England came to its rich maturity, and it was James himself who commanded the making and publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible. If not its begetter, he was its patron and inspiration, and the King James Bible is his richest legacy, a work such as Elizabeth never contemplated, and the great storehouse of the English language.

  He became King of Scots when less than a year old, and was crowned in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling. John Knox preached the sermon, and the Bishop of Orkney, consecrated according to the Roman Catholic rite but now an energetic reformer, anointed the infant. Then while the little boy’s guardian, John Erskine, Earl of Mar, held the crown over James’s head (for it weighed three and a half pounds and the baby could scarcely be expected to wear it), the nobles present approached and touched the symbol of kingship in homage. The oath was taken on his behalf in the absence in France of the regent Moray by James Douglas, Earl of Morton, one of the accomplices in his father’s murder. It was necessary to do all in order, and in conformity with precedent, since the child was king only because of the coup d’état which had resulted in his mother’s deposition, the first time this had happened in Scotland since Malcolm III’s son Edgar supplanted his uncle Donald Bane in 1097. A good many of those who had joined the confederacy against Bothwell were by no means ready to approve of Mary’s imprisonment, her forced abdication, the appointment of Moray as regent and the coronation of the little King. Indeed, the attendance at the coronation was exiguous. Many hesitated to commit themselves to the new regime till they saw how things worked out. Others, Maitland of Lethington among them, reverted to their former loyalty and became Mary’s partisans. Her party grew in numbers and for the first six years of James’s reign there was intermittent civil war. It was a time of great disorder, of murders, skirmishes, running battles in the streets of Edinburgh and Stirling. ‘All natural ties,’ wrote Scott in his Tales of a Grandfather, ‘were forgotten in the distinction of Kingsmen and Queensmen; and, as neither party gave quarter to their opponents, the civil war assumed a most horrible aspect. Fathers, and sons, and brothers, took opposite sides, and fought against each other.’

  In 1570 Moray was assassinated in Linlithgow, shot in the street from a window by one Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. This Hamilton had been sentenced to death in 1568 after being taken prisoner at Langside, where he had fought in the Queen’s army. He had been reprieved, but his estate had been declared forfeit. His wife was turned out of the house she had brought him as her dowry, and it was given to one of Moray’s dependants. Hamilton vowed to be ravenged on the regent, whom he held responsible for his misfortunes. He waited patiently for an opportunity, and when he had fired his carbine, calmly mounted his horse and rode away. A few days later he escaped to France.

  Buchanan, in his History of Scotland, hailed Moray as the best man of his age, the inspiration and standard-bearer of the Protestant cause, a partisan sentiment. He was succeeded as regent by Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox. Dumbarton Castle, where Mary’s supporters had been holding out, was captured and the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews, James Hamilton, was hanged in his episcopal robes on a gibbet in Stirling. Less than a year later, in 1571, Lennox himself was murdered in the same town, and James, not yet five, saw his grandfather’s bleeding corpse carried into the castle. The next regent, James’s guardian, the Earl of Mar, died within a few weeks of his appointment, remarkably of natural causes, and was replaced by Morton, a leader of the gang who had murdered David Rizzio, who thus crowned a career of treachery, violence and murder by assuming the government of Scotland. For all his faults Morton was a man of some ability as well as fierce determination. He came down hard on Mary’s remaining supporters, fewer in number as their cause weakened in the years of her imprisonment in England. At last, in 1573, only Edinburgh Castle remained in their hands. Morton called for assistance from England and was sent a fine siege-train with which he battered the castle walls. The garrison, short of supplies and seeing no hope of relief, surrendered on a promise of pardon. The promise was not kept. The commander, Kirkcaldy of Grange, was hanged. Maitland of Lethington, who
in his last years had been as ardent for Mary as he had previously been energetic in opposition to her, committed suicide in prison.

  Such was the happy state of Scotland in the boyhood of King James.

  His own upbringing was miserable, harsh and often frightening. His father was dead, his mother a prisoner in England, himself in effect an orphan. Buchanan, now rising seventy, was made his tutor. In one respect he did his work well. James was taught Latin before he could write English, and learned his lessons thoroughly, becoming a notable scholar. He learned Greek too, and as an adult would be able to converse in French, Italian and Spanish. But Buchanan was a harsh master, ruling his charge by fear and thrashing him when displeased. In later life James would acknowledge the debt he owed him, while also, by his own account, trembling once at the approach of a man who resembled his old tutor. Buchanan’s magisterial methods may be considered disgraceful, but worse still perhaps, in his savage partisanship he taught James that his mother was a wicked woman, an adulteress guilty of his father’s murder. It would be years before James could free his mind of the poisonous version of his family tragedy that Buchanan had given him.

  The boy was starved of affection. It is a common observation that those denied love in their youth will grow up either harsh and incapable of giving love themselves or conspicuously tender. James, to his credit, was the latter. The fondness he lavished on his favourites, the maudlin sentimentality he displayed in old age, were a consequence of his lonely and loveless childhood, a compensation for its miseries. The experiences of childhood and youth had another result: they bred him to caution.

  When he assumed control of the government he would move carefully to achieve his ends, displaying none of the recklessness and indifference to the opinion and personal interests of the nobility that had characterised several of his predecessors and led James I and James V to push their policies beyond what was tolerable. He might be as determined as they had been to assert the rights of the Crown and extend its power, but unlike them, he knew when to compromise, even when to yield. His caution was represented by many as timidity. He was said to have a horror of violence. Some have attributed this to his pre-natal experience when his pregnant mother saw Rizzio stabbed to death in her presence and was herself threatened with being ‘cut into collops’. This may of course be true, but actually James didn’t lack physical courage – he was a daring rider in the hunting field – and the history of his rule in Scotland at least offers plenty of evidence that he was possessed of an unusual degree of moral courage.