His upbringing had been deeply disturbed. David Rizzio, secretary and lover of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered in an adjoining room as she listened to his screams. James was in her womb at the time. His father, the charming Henry Darnley, was murdered by his mother’s next lover, the Earl of Bothwell, blown up when lying ill in his Edinburgh house. James never saw his mother after he was one year old and, although baptised, like her, a Catholic, was then put in the care of a string of terrifying Presbyterian governors, in particular George Buchanan, a towering European intellectual, the tutor of Montaigne, friend of Tycho Brahe, who considered the deposing of wicked kings perfectly legitimate, and whose memory continued to haunt James in adult life. As a boy king, he had been a trophy in the hands of rival noble factions in Scotland, kidnapped, held, threatened and imprisoned. ‘I was alane,’ he wrote later, ‘without fader or moder, brither or sister, king of this realme, and heir apperand of England.’
James retreated from the brutality and anarchy. He became chronically vulnerable to the allure of beautiful, elegant, rather Frenchified men. He loved hunting, excessively, an escape from the realities, at one point killing every deer in the royal park at Falkland in Fife, which had to be restocked from England. It has been calculated that he spent about half his waking life on the hunting field. And he became immensely intellectual, speaking ‘Greek before breakfast, Latin before Scots’, composing stiff Renaissance poetry, full of a clotted and frustrated emotionality, translating the Psalms, capable on sight of turning any passage of the Bible from Latin to French and then from French to English.
In 1584, when James was eighteen, the French agent Fontenoy sent home a report on this strange, spiky-edged, intellectualised, awkward and oddly idealistic king:
He is wonderfully clever, and for the rest he is full of honourable ambition, and has an excellent opinion of himself. Owing to the terrorism under which he has been brought up, he is timid with the great lords, and seldom ventures to contradict them; yet his special concern is to be thought hardy and a man of courage…He speaks, eats, dresses, dances and plays like a boor, and he is no better in the company of women. He is never still for a moment, but walks perpetually up and down the room, and his gait is sprawling and awkward, his voice is loud and his body is feeble, yet he is not delicate; in a word he is an old young man.
Fontenoy had asked him about the time he spent hunting: ‘He told me that, whatever he seemed, he was aware of everything of consequence that was going on. He could afford to spend time in hunting, because when he attended to business he could do more in an hour than others could do in a day.’
Behind the bravado lay weakness. Scotland was no place to be a king. The English throne, infinitely more powerful in relation to the nobility than his own; supported by the structures and doctrines of the church, rather than eroded and undermined by them; rich, potent and admired—all this awaited him like a harbour tantalisingly visible from far out to sea, but, until Elizabeth’s death, only to be longed for and lusted after.
Elizabeth taunted him. James had often sent his spies to Whitehall or to Richmond to see how near to death the ageing queen was coming. But the English Council was aware of this too and whenever a curious Scotsman seemed to be watching and attending on the queen more carefully than usual, it was arranged for him to stand waiting in a lobby from where he could see, ‘through the hangings, to the queen dancing to a little fiddle’. Over and over again, James would hear reports of her fitness and her vigour.
Meanwhile, she dandled her kingdom and her money in front of his eyes. There were other claimants to the English throne, but none so strong. Both his mother and father carried Tudor genes but Elizabeth would make nothing sure. In 1586, all too vaguely, she had promised to do nothing that would take away from ‘any greatness that might be due to him, unless provoked on his part by manifest ingratitude’. She began to send him money, and in the letters that accompanied the cash, Elizabeth allowed herself to speak to James from the enormous and magnificent height of an imperial throne. As she wrote to him in June 1586:
Considering that God hath endewed ws with a crown that yeildeth more yerly profeit to us, than we understand yours doth to youe, by reason of the dissipation and evill governement thereof of long tyme before your birth, we have latelie sent to youe a portion meete for your awin privat use.
The English carefully varied the amount from year to year, sometimes £3,000, sometimes £5,000, so that James would never quite know where he stood. The Scots always called the grant an ‘annuity’ – a payment due every year—and the English ‘a gratuity’, made out of the kindness of their hearts. The English policy had its effect. Although James’s mother was a Catholic, and although he had flirted with the Catholic states in Europe and had made vague, lying promises to English Roman Catholics that he would introduce something like toleration when he acceded to the English throne, he had never done anything to put his chances of succession in jeopardy. He had been bought. By the time of Elizabeth’s death—she died, in the end, ‘mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree’, so quietly that no one was quite sure of the precise time of her death—James’s mouth was dry with years of panting.
It was a difficult role to play. Although there is no evidence of his affection for a mother he hadn’t seen since he was an infant, James had been forced to acquiesce in her execution in 1587. The unstated but implicit assumption was that he had bargained that acceptance for a recognition of his title to the English throne. The conventional modern view of such an upbringing would be negative: such abuse would be bound to destroy the person. James, for all his strange, unaccommodated behaviour, went precisely the other way. The outcome of his violent, threatened youth was not someone filled with vitriol and vengeance, although James could be foul-mouthed, but what might be called exaggeratedly social behaviour, a longing for acceptance and a desire for a life and a society in which all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home. At his twenty-first birthday, he had invited all the warring magnates and grandees of Scotland to walk hand in hand through the streets of Edinburgh. It was a ritual, a pantomime of the good society which lasted scarcely longer than the birthday itself; Scotland was not suited to amity. But England was different and for James it must have seemed that at last, that dream of coherence would become a reality.
The reign began with a month-long fiesta during which James was introduced to England and England to James. In London, the Secretary of State, little shrunken Robert Cecil, his back humped like a lute, his wry neck holding his head to one side, his twisted foot giving him an awkward stance, read out the proclamation of the new king at four in the morning in the Tudor palace at Richmond, at 10 a.m. at the ramshackle royal palace in Whitehall, then in great state at various places in the City of London. Cecil, subtle, secretive, immensely courteous and prodigiously hard-working, was at the heart of English government, as his father, Lord Burghley, had been before him. Both were royal servants intent on continuity and on the coherence of the state. They were merciless in the destruction of their enemies, against whom they deployed an array of spies, charm and money. Only when Robert Cecil died did the world discover the reality. He had sunk himself into almost irretrievable debt. He had plotted and misinformed against everyone. Through the impartiality of his courtesy and the ubiquity of his deceit, he had maintained his unrivalled position of influence. As his father had done with Elizabeth before her accession, Cecil had been in secret correspondence with James, via an intermediary, for two years.
In letter after letter, Cecil flattered and cajoled him, portrayed England as a place of civility and charm, a featherbed into which James could at last relax after all the stony travails of his Scottish youth. The warm and civilised care which Cecil lavished on the future king represented to James everything he hoped of England. And, of course, the letters portrayed Cecil himself as the indispensable gatekeeper who could usher James into the promised land. The Earl of Essex, before his disastrous re
bellion and death in 1601, had been playing the same role. Once Essex was out of the way, Cecil had slid smoothly into position and now at last, with the queen dead, he could bring the secret arrangements to conclusion: he dispatched the English Privy Council’s envoys to Scotland. They invited James ‘to repair into England with all speed’.
‘Good news makes good horsemen’, and before James began his long progress south, a stream of interested Englishmen made their way to Holyrood, anxious to mould and influence the reign from its very beginning. Lewis Pickering, a Puritan gentleman from Northamptonshire, soon to be involved in the widespread manoeuvrings for the reform of the English Church, was one of the first to be admitted to James’s presence. Would the king look more kindly than Elizabeth on the need to banish all papist practices from the English Church? Would the Reformation in England at last be made complete by the Calvinist king? Political to his core, James would not dream of giving more than a gracious answer. Dr Thomas Neville, envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed him. Neville was one of the most passionate opponents of extreme Puritanism, and of everything Pickering represented. Would the king stand firm for the House of Bishops against all the demands of the Presbyterian clergy in England? Would he support the status quo? Surely the last thing he wanted was to turn the English Church into anything resembling the church of John Knox and George Buchanan? Again, no answer. Others clustered in their sycophancy. Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle of the regicide, came to pay his respects. ‘One saith hee will serve him by daie,’ the world-weary wit and courtier Sir John Harington wrote to a friend, ‘another by night. The women are for servynge him both day and nighte.’
James requested cash from the Privy Council and it arrived by the coachload. They sent £5,000 in gold and £1,000 in silver. Jewellery for his Danish Queen Anne arrived from London (although not the Crown Jewels which were not allowed out of the country) as well as a selection of Elizabeth’s hundreds of garnet- and pearl-encrusted dresses. Six geldings and a coach with four horses were dispatched to bring the king into England. On 5 April 1603, leaving his wife and children to follow him, James left Edinburgh for a journey through his new kingdom. It lasted over a month, spreading on through the beautiful spring weather into May. Nobility, gentlemen and chancers from north and south of the border accompanied him. It was a cavalcade. Most rode on horses. The wife of the French Ambassador was carried to London in ‘a chair with slings’, eight porters hired for the task, four to carry, four to relieve them.
The English turned out in their thousands to see the spectacle. James may have been unaware that the Privy Council had instructed them to do so and ‘if any shall be found disobedient, negligent or remisse therein, these are to let them know, that they are to sustaine such condigne punishment as their offense in that behalfe deserveth’. The gaiety had a whip at its back and the glittering pageant was an instrument of authority.
In Berwick-on-Tweed, all the guns of the border fortress town were fired at once. It was to be for the last time. The newly unified country needed no internal border fortresses and money could be saved if the garrison was dispersed. James was invited to fire one cannon himself. In Newcastle all prisoners were released except those in prison for ‘treason, murther and papistrie’. All those gaoled for debt had those debts paid off. James was hosing the money around him. In York a conduit ran all day with white wine and claret. At Worksop, the king was entertained to ‘excellent, soule-ravishing musique’ by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had hurried from Whitehall to meet him there.
James was nothing but bonhomie. The previously violent and lawless Scottish borders were to become, he announced, the ‘very heart of the Country’ in the new united empire of Great Britain, a phrase in use since the 1540s when Henry VIII and Edward VI had been anxious to unite England and Scotland, but now given a whole new Jacobean impetus. James had ordered new signets in which the rose and the thistle were to be intertwined. Unity and togetherness was his dream. An ensign for shipping was to be designed in which the Scottish saltire of St Andrew and the English cross of St George were to float side by side so that neither should have precedence over the other. There was to be a single currency in which the 20-shilling gold piece was to be called ‘The Unite’, with ‘Our picture’ on one side and ‘Our Armes Crowned’ on the other, emblazoned with the Latin motto Faciam eos in gentem unam, I shall make them into one nation. Here, in a practical and symbolic programme, the dream of authority and wholeness was, in James’s vision at least, to become reality.
The new king would soon discover, however, that seventeenth-century Englishmen had about as much love for union, whether fiscal or political, as their modern descendants. The dream of unity—an abstract, intellectualised, Scottish and hence European ideal of political togetherness—would within a year fall foul of an English conservatism which valued its own hard-won freedoms far above any high-falutin’ ideas of political unity. England was England, the rosbifs dominated parliament, civilisation stopped at the Cheviots and the English Channel and ever, alas, would it remain so.
For the time being, life was a holiday. Largesse had been pouring in an unending fountain from James’s hand. He had, in places, literally showered the streets with gold coins. Teams of the gentry were queueing up to be knighted, 237 of them in the first six weeks of the reign, 906 in the first four months, a sudden gush from the Fount of Honour, which under Elizabeth’s last years had run virtually dry.
Then, on 21 April, as the pageant arrived at Newark in Lincolnshire, James made his first mistake. It was a bad one.
In this Towne, and in the Court, was taken a cut-purse doing the deed; and being a base pilfering theefe, yet was a Gentleman-like in the outside. This fellow had good store of coyne found about him; and upon examination confessed that he had from Barwick to that place plaied the cut-purse in the Court…His Majestie hearing of this nimming gallant directed a warrant presently to the Recorder of New-warke, to have him hanged, which was accordingly executed.
What can have possessed James? Perhaps he was rattled by the presence of a thief in the midst of all this springtime hope and optimism? Maybe he assumed that the English king, so much more powerful than the Scottish, could from time to time behave with autocratic authority? Maybe, in a complex and troubled personality, it was simply a blip, an aberration? He could certainly behave very oddly at times. (Later in his reign, travelling back to Scotland, he dismounted at the border between the two countries and lay down across it to demonstrate to his courtiers how two kingdoms could exist in one person.) Whatever the cause, here in Newark he made the wrong decision.
Summary execution was not done in England, nor had it been for centuries. The government habitually tortured and executed people and displayed their heads (hard-boiled, so that the skin went black and had some resistance to the weather) on spikes at the south end of London Bridge, but none of this was done without going through the proper procedures. The Privy Council alone could authorise torture and execution. James’s summary justice made all the talk of peacemaking and constitutional kingship look hollow. The courtiers were appalled. ‘I heare our new Kinge hath hanged one man before he was tryed,’ Sir John Harington wrote. ‘Tis strangely done; now if the wynde bloweth thus, why not a man be tryed before he hath offended?’ A doubt was sown that James did not really comprehend the promised land in which he had arrived. Was the Scottish king suddenly out of his depth in the more evolved world of English politics? Was he likely to override or ignore the long established rule of the common law, of which the English were deeply proud? Harington would play it carefully. ‘I wyll keepe companie with my oves and boves, and go to Bathe and drinke sacke.’ Or so he told his friends; in fact, he had sent James an elaborate and expensive astrological lantern by which the king could tell his fortune, and composed elegant, supplicatory letters to his new sovereign. Nothing was entirely as it seemed.
The thief dead, the show went on. James appeared one day as Robin Hood, ‘his clothes as green as the grass he trod on’. At Ex
ton in Rutland he hunted ‘live hares in baskets’. Outside Stamford, visible from miles away, ‘an hundred high men, that seemed like the Patagones, huge long fellows of twelve and fourteene feet high, that are reported to live on the Mayne of Brasil, neere to the Streights of Megallane’ turned out to be ‘a company of poore honest suitors, all going upon high stilts’. Outside Huntingdon, a crowd on their knees begged James to reopen some common land which had been enclosed and denied to them. The king ignored the request. Another crowd from God-manchester greeted him with seventy ploughs, drawn by seventy plough-teams, but that too was just a show, another means, however oblique, of asking for money.
This was not the serious business, not the power-playing which would become more intense and more real once the cavalcade reached London. For now it was play-acting. For a few days, the king and the itinerant court stayed at Hinchinbrooke Abbey outside Huntingdon. It was the house of Sir Oliver Cromwell, MP, himself a loyal monarchist, drainer of the Fens, and subscriber to the planting and cultivating of Virginia. Cromwell put on a spectacular show for the new king and for the crowds, providing ‘bread and beefe for the poorest’, meat and wine ‘and those not riffe-ruffe, but ever the best of the kinde’ for the gentry. Cromwell gave the king a gold cup, ‘some goodly horses’, a pack of ‘flete and deep-mouthed houndes’ as well as ‘divers hawkes of excellent winge’. Everything was calculated to make England look like an Arcadia of riches, and James appeared to believe the propaganda.
England was salivating over James, submissive and obsequious in turns, in a way that is so unabashed that it strikes us as odd. But this too requires an act of the imagination. Submissiveness and obsequiousness were signals of the social order at work. Social differences between men were not an unfortunate result of economics or power politics, nor a distortion of how things ought to be but a sign that society was well ordered. Life, happily, was arranged on a slope as steeply pitched as a church spire. What looks to us now like the most unctuous kind of self-abasement was symbolic of civilisation. A man making a request to his superior happily knelt before him, as a straightforward sign of submission. Plaintiffs knelt in court, children to their fathers, MPs and bishops when addressing the king. When John Donne hoped he might become Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a position in the gift of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the king’s favourite, Donne wrote to him:
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