10
‘Forasmuch as it has pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy, out of this transitory life, our Sovereign Lady the high and mighty Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial Realms aforesaid are come absolutely, wholly and solely to the high and mighty Prince James the Sixth, King of Scotland …’
Opening lines of a proclamation read by Sir Robert Cecil at the High Cross in Cheapside on the morning of
24 March 1603
It was in January 1603 that Queen Elizabeth had first developed a bad cold and been advised by Dr Dee, her astrologer, to move from Whitehall to Richmond – the warmest of her palaces – on what would prove to be ‘a filthy rainy and windy day’. Once there, it seems, she refused all medicine and, as the Earl of Northumberland informed King James in Scotland, her physicians were soon concluding ‘that if this continue she must needs fall into a distemper, not a frenzy but rather into dullness and lethargy’. The death on 25 February of her cousin and close confidante the Countess of Nottingham had only served to compound her illness with grief, and while all Scotland stirred in happy anticipation of her demise, the queen merely reclined on floor cushions, refusing Robert Cecil’s instructions that she take to her bed. ‘Little man,’ she had told him, ‘the word must is not to be used to princes.’ She was 69, plagued with fever, worn by worldly cares and frustrations, and dying – so that even she was forced at last to accede to her secretary’s pleas. Then, in the bedraggled early hours of 24 March, as the queen’s laboured breathing slackened further, Father Weston – a Catholic priest imprisoned at that time in the Tower – noted how ‘a strange silence descended on the whole City of London … not a bell rang out, not a bugle sounded’. Her council was in attendance and, at Cecil’s frantic request that she provide a sign of acceptance of James as her successor, she was said to have complied at last.
At Richmond Palace, on the eve of Lady Day, Elizabeth I had therefore finally put paid to her successor’s interminable agonising and on that same morning of her death Sir Robert Carey, who had once conveyed her pallid excuses for the demise of Mary Queen of Scots to King James, was now dispatched north with altogether more welcome tidings. Leaving at mid-morning and bearing at his breast a sapphire ring that was the prearranged proof of the queen’s demise, Carey had covered 162 miles before he slept that night at Doncaster. Next day, further relays of horses, all carefully prepared in advance, guaranteed that he covered another 136 miles along the ill-kept track known as the Great North Road linking the capitals of the two kingdoms. After a further night at Widdrington in Northumberland, which was his own home, the saddle-weary rider set out on the last leg of his journey, hoping to be with James by supper time, but receiving ‘a great fall by the way’ which resulted in both his delay and ‘a great blow on the head’ from one of his horse’s hoofs ‘that made me shed much blood’. Nevertheless, ‘be-blooded and bruised’, he was in Edinburgh that evening and though the ‘king was newly gone to bed’, the messenger was hurriedly conveyed to the royal bedchamber. There, said Carey, ‘I kneeled by him, and saluted him by his title of England, Scotland, France and Ireland’, in response to which ‘he gave me his hand to kiss and bade me welcome’.
James had dwelt upon the potential difficulties of the succession for so long, however, that he could scarcely credit the ease with which it appeared to be taking place and wasted no time in consolidating his position. To the very last, of course, Elizabeth had made no official acknowledgement of the King of Scotland as her heir, and until he had taken physical possession of his new realm, his fear of invasion or insurrection remained tangible. The day after Carey’s arrival, therefore, the Abbot of Holyrood was urgently dispatched to take possession of Berwick – the gateway to the south – and within a week, as his English councillors pressed him to make haste, plans for James’s transfer to London were complete. Summoning those nobles who could be contacted in the time available, he placed the government in the hands of his Scottish council and confirmed the custody of his children to those already entrusted with them. Likewise, his heir, Prince Henry, was offered words of wisdom upon his new status as successor to the throne of England. ‘Let not this news make you proud or insolent,’ James informed the boy, ‘for a king’s son and heir was ye before, and no more are ye yet. The augmentation that is hereby like to fall unto you is but in cares and heavy burdens; be therefore merry but not insolent.’ Queen Anne, meanwhile, being pregnant, was to follow the king when convenient, though this would not be long, for she miscarried soon afterwards in the wake of a violent quarrel with the Earl of Mar’s mother, once again involving the custody of her eldest son – whereupon James finally relented and allowed the boy to be handed over to her at Holyrood House prior to their joining him in London.
Before his own departure, however, James had certain other snippets of business to attend to. On Sunday 3 April, for instance, he attended the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh to deliver ‘a most learned, but more loving oration’, in which he exhorted his subjects to continue in ‘obedience to him, and agreement amongst themselves’. There was a public promise, too, that he would return to Scotland every three years – though he would ultimately do so only once, in 1617 – and a further suggestion that his subjects should take heart upon his departure, since he had already settled ‘both kirk and kingdom’. All that remained thereafter was a plea to the council for money, since he had barely sufficient funds to get him past the Border, and a series of meetings with both English officials on the one hand and a mounting flood of suitors already seeking lavish rewards and promises. In the first category, came Sir Thomas Lake, Cecil’s secretary, who was sent north to report the king’s first thoughts as he became acquainted with English affairs, and the Dean of Canterbury, who was hastily dispatched to ascertain James’s plans for the Church of England. To the second belonged a teeming, self-seeking throng. ‘There is much posting that way,’ wrote John Chamberlain, an eagle-eyed contemporary reporter of public and private gossip, ‘and many run thither of their own errand, as if it were nothing else but come first served, or that preferment were a goal to be got by footmanship’.
In the event, James’s progress south might well have dazzled many a more phlegmatic mind than his, since it was one unbroken tale of rejoicing, praise and adulation. Entering Berwick on 6 April in the company of a throng of Border chieftains, he was greeted by the loudest salute of cannon fire in any soldier’s memory and presented with a purse of gold by the town’s Recorder. His arrival, after all, represented nothing less than the end of an era on the Anglo-Scottish border. In effect, a frontier which had been the source of bitter and continual dispute over five centuries had been finally transformed by nothing more than an accident of birth, and no outcome of James’s kingship before or after would be of such long-term significance. That a King of Scotland, attended by the wardens of the Marches from both sides of the Border, should enter Berwick peacefully amid cries of approval was almost inconceivable – and yet it was now a reality for the onlookers whose forebears’ lives had been so disrupted and dominated by reprisal raids and outright warfare.
Nor did a sudden rainstorm the following day dampen the king’s spirits. The sun before the rain, he declared, represented his happy departure, the rain the grief of Scotland, and the subsequent fair weather the joy of England at his approach. Such, in fact, was his keenness to press forward into his new kingdom that his stop in Northumberland at Sir Robert Carey’s Widdrington Castle was deliberately cut short. For he departed, we are told, ‘upon the spur, scarce any of his train being able to keep him company’, and rode nearly 40 miles in less than four hours. Pausing to slay two fat deer along the way – ‘the game being so fair before him, he could not forbear’ - he rested over Sunday at Newcastle, and heard a sermon by Tobie Mathew, Bishop of Durham, with whom he joked and jested in high humour. Indeed, the urbane, serene world of the Anglican episcopacy, which so happily combined theological soundness with a proper deference for royal authority could not have been more agreeable to James. Received at the bishop’s palace by 100 gentlemen in tawny liveries, he was treated at dinner to a fine diet of delicious food and Mathew’s own unique brand of learning, humanity and worldly wisdom, which would bring the bishop considerable rewards three years later when he found himself Archbishop of York and Lord President of the Council of the North. Even before the king left next morning, moreover, Mathew’s bishopric had already recovered much alienated property, including Durham House in the Strand, which had been granted previously to Sir Walter Raleigh.
By the time that James entered York on 14 April, however, he had already found much else about his new kingdom to impress him. Above all, he was struck by the apparent richness of a land he was visiting for the first time and knew only by reputation. The abundance of the countryside, the splendour of the great mansions, the extensive parklands through which he travelled, even the quaintness of the villages scattered along his route all proclaimed the contrast with Scotland. Everything, indeed, seemed to lift James into a heady state of expectation after the rigours of his rule in Scotland. According to the eminent lawyer and Master of Requests Sir Roger Wilbraham, the king travelled onwards ‘all his way to London entertained with great solemnity and state, all men rejoicing that his lot and their lot had fallen in so good a ground. He was met with great troops of horse and waited on by the sheriff and gentlemen of each shire, in their limits; joyfully received in every city and town; presented with orations and gifts; entertained royally all the way by noblemen and gentlemen at their houses …’. But the same observer’s concerns about what might be awaiting England’s new king in the longer term were more revealing still. ‘I pray unfeignedly,’ wrote Wilbraham, ‘that his most gracious disposition and heroic mind be not depraved with ill-counsel, and that neither the wealth and peace of England make him forget God, nor the painted flattery of the court cause him to forget himself.’
And the scale of ‘painted flattery’ on offer to James, both now and later, was greater by far than anything he had experienced before. Elizabeth I, of course, had skilfully nourished the cult of her own personality. Symbolically represented as a virgin goddess – variously named Gloriana, Belphoebe, Astraea, Cynthia, Diana – she had been the object of much poetic worship. But sober statesmen, no less than poets like Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson, had also observed the convention of addressing James’s predecessor as though she were indeed a goddess. In 1592, for instance, Cecil had referred to the ‘sacred lines’ of a letter written by the queen, before going on to eulogise her ‘more than human perfection’. Now, moreover, as the king continued his journey through England, he would hear in a continual series of panegyrics, similar words which seemed to conform so closely to the theories of kingship that he himself had expressed with such conviction in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron. ‘Hail, mortal God, England’s true joy!’ ran John Savile’s poem, written to salute James upon his acquisition of his new realm.
At York, in particular, he experienced the full gust of exultation at his new status. Initially, at least, his English privy councillors had not planned to supply him with the full trappings of royalty until he had passed through the north of the country and reached Burghley in Nottinghamshire where they were due to meet him for the first time. It was true, too, that up to this point when warm and spontaneous welcomes had been the norm, James’s lack of natural dignity had actually been an asset of sorts. His talkativeness and familiarity, and above all his easy, impulsive generosity had been enough to create a favourable impression upon his new subjects. But York was a different matter and James had insisted quite correctly that he enter ‘our second city’ with appropriate solemnity and magnificence, so that by the time of his arrival on 16 April he was suitably equipped with jewels, regalia, heralds, trumpeters and men-at-arms – though at the King’s Manor where he was lodging prior to his entry, he had refused a coach. ‘I will have no coach,’ he declared, ‘for the people are desirous to see a king, and so they shall, for they shall see his body and his face.’ Nor, it seems, was he prepared to swap his shabby doublet – specially padded for protection against an assassin’s dagger – for a more elegant garment, as he appears to have been wearing it at his first meeting with Sir Robert Cecil, who finally greeted him in York on 18 April.
Cecil had made the journey north, full of his usual cares and perplexity, and troubled in particular by financial affairs and rumours that complaints from Ireland had reached the king’s ears. Yet James, it seems, was more concerned with the details of his own journey to London than with weightier matters, and after delivering a jovial greeting and confirming Cecil’s ongoing role as Secretary of State, proceeded to his main concerns. He was worried, for instance, that his arrival in the capital might coincide with Elizabeth’s funeral – an event he otherwise declined to discuss, since he had a horror of all things relating to death and dissolution. And he was equally anxious to ensure that his coronation did not occur before the arrival of his wife. Indeed, like the lucky lottery winner he was, James became wholly absorbed in the here and now, and in the process allowed his excitement, as so often, to spill over into a characteristic display of rough-hewn humour and familiarity that is unlikely to have been wholly to Cecil’s taste. Already dubbed by Elizabeth her ‘Pygmy’, the secretary became known at once to James as his ‘Little Beagle’. ‘Though you be but a little man,’ James told him, ‘we shall surely load your shoulders with business.’
Yet by the time he parted from the king to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on 28 April, Cecil had been suitably impressed, recording that James’s ‘virtues were so eminent as by my six days’ kneeling at his feet I have made so sufficient a discovery of royal perfections as I contemplate greater felicity to this isle than ever it enjoyed’. The fact that his new master had already made his first requests for money to the council may have escaped Cecil’s attention at this stage, as indeed the additional appeal for jewels and ladies-in-waiting for Queen Anne may have done. Certainly, the king had already laid down that new coins were to be minted, one side of which would join the arms of Scotland to those of his other kingdoms and declare the Latin legend, Exsurgat Deus Dissipentur Inimici – ‘Let God arise and His enemies be scattered’. And this was only to be expected. But whether Cecil had already begun to guess at the extent to which such coins would soon be slipping through his new master’s fingers is a matter of conjecture, for even by the time he reached York, the early signs of extravagance were plain for all to see.
James’s journey had already been punctuated, as might be expected, by prolonged and princely civic entertainments, as well as hunting and feasting in the great country houses through which he passed. It had been conducted, too, amidst a growing shower of royal gifts and knighthoods. But by the time the royal progress reached York, matters had become almost unmanageable. For while James had set out with a representative selection of Scottish nobles and an appropriate train of English and Scottish courtiers and officials, numbers were soon swelling as north-bound English place-hunters and impoverished Scots hurrying south for rich pickings, converged from all points of the compass to create a disorderly rabble of more than 1,000 greedy souls. Newcastle had shouldered the whole charge of the royal household for three days and York for two more. But now increasingly the burden fell on private estates like that of Sir Edward Stanhope at Grimstone Hall who extended ‘most bountiful entertainment’ to ‘all comers’ – ‘every man’ eating ‘without check’ and ‘drinking at leisure’.
Nor were desultory attempts to stem the hordes effective. Proclamations ordering home all Scots not in immediate attendance upon the king, and restraining ‘the concourse of idle and unnecessary posters’ were, for instance, largely ineffectual – not least because James’s carefree distribution of gifts, grants and favours continued unabated. The bestowal of knighthoods, for example, which had been so carefully restricted by Elizabeth I was now conducted more and more casually, so that by the time he reached London, James had delivered the title to less than 300 individuals. During the entire forty-five years of the former queen’s reign, in fact, only 878 men had been knighted, while in the first months alone of James’s reign, there were 906 such promotions. The landlord of the Bear Inn at Doncaster, meanwhile, received the lease of a valuable royal manor as reward for one good night’s entertainment. And thus the locust horde continued to swell, consuming all that came in its path and placing an intolerable strain even on such great households as the Earl of Shrewsbury’s at Worksop and Lord Rutland’s at Belvoir, not to mention the equally impressive resources of a certain Sir Oliver Cromwell at Hinchingbrooke in Huntingdonshire.
Cromwell was uncle, ironically enough, to the future Lord Protector that he eventually came to loathe, and had married the widow of the immensely rich Italian-born financier Sir Horatio Bavarino, whose wealth he had subsequently chosen to lavish in an apparently ceaseless quest for popularity. Now, however, he seems to have exceeded all expectation in terms of both the quality and range of entertainment he provided for the king. Certainly, the dinner provided for James’s entourage may well have been the best of the whole journey – ‘such plenty and variety of meats, such diversity of wines, and those not riffe ruffe, but ever the best of their kind; and the cellars open at any man’s pleasure’. But there were other treats, too, to whet the new king’s broader appetites. The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, for instance, along with the heads of the colleges, all attended James, bringing a present of books and proferring speeches and poems of welcome. And just beyond Hinchingbrooke, at Godmanchester, seventy ploughing teams were carefully drawn up, not merely to see the king upon his way, but to emphasise once more the prosperity of his new kingdom.
Nor, it seems, were such displays of goodwill anything less that heartfelt. Just before Worksop, for example, ‘there appeared a number of huntsmen all in green; the chief of which, with a woodman’s speech, did welcome him’, leaving the king, we are told, ‘very much delighted’. All the way from Sir John Harington’s house to Stamford, moreover, ‘Sir John’s best hounds with good mouths followed the game, the king taking great leisure and pleasure in the same’. And though James blundered at Newark-on-Trent by ordering that a cut-purse be hanged without trial, he generally charmed and responded in kind as only he probably could. He spoke lovingly, for instance, to Sir Henry Leigh, an honourable old knight, who presented himself ‘with sixty gallant men’ wearing yellow scarves embroidered with the words Constantia et fede. Even a fall from his horse near Burghley, which led Mayerne, his physician, to suggest that he had broken his collarbone, could not stem his enthusiasm or stifle his will to please. Perhaps, indeed, James would never again feel so entirely and satisfactorily a king as during the three weeks of his journey. With no financial restraints in place and the pressure of state affairs still in front of him, he was able to pose as what he had always wished to be in Scotland – the beneficent, affable, patriarchal dispenser of largesse and justice, responsible only to God for the welfare of a grateful and pliable realm.
And, in the meantime, the fact that James’s winning words and lofty promises would one day have to be made good continued, it seems, to elude him. ‘Nor shall it ever be blotted out of my mind,’ the king would tell his first Parliament, ‘how at my first entry into this kingdom the people of all sorts rid and ran, nay rather flew to meet me.’ But the resulting effusiveness and spontaneity on his part would come at a price. It was all too tempting, of course, to assure the mayor and aldermen of Hull that they should be ‘relieved and succoured against the daily spoils done to them’ by Dunkirk pirates, regardless of the naval expenditure involved in properly securing England’s lengthy coastline, or to earn popularity cheaply by promising ‘their hearts’ desire’ to Huntingdonshire folk, complaining of the enclosure of their land by a certain Sir John Spencer. Likewise, when 1,000 Puritan brethren presented their so-called ‘Millenary Petition’, the king could graciously offer to consider and redress their grievances without any real appreciation that English Puritans might prove just as intractable in their own way as their Presbyterian counterparts within the Scottish Kirk.
But when James arrived on the outskirts of London at Theobalds, the home of Sir Robert Cecil, his new kingdom was already dowsed in heady expectation and primed for later disappointment, even if, for the time being, the general euphoria continued. At the border of Middlesex, he had been greeted by ‘three score men in fair livery cloaks’, before meeting the Lord Mayor and aldermen, accompanied by 500 prominent citizens, all on horseback and clad in velvet cloaks and chains of gold. And by this time the crowds of common people were becoming so dense that when one observer tried to count them, he could not do so, declaring that each blade of grass had become a man. At Stamford Hill, indeed, a humble cart owner was able to charge eight groats for the use of his vehicle as a grandstand for no more than a quarter of an hour. ‘The multitude of people in highways, fields, meadows, closes and on trees were such that they covered the beauty of the fields,’ wrote John Nichols, ‘and so greedy were they to behold the countenance of the king that with much unruliness some even hazarded to the danger of death.’ Ultimately, James would have no choice but to avoid the roads on his way to the Charterhouse, where he was entertained for three days by Lord Thomas Howard and saw fit to create a further 130 knights.
But what should have been the climax of the entire trip – James’s state entry into the City of London – proved something of an anti-climax, since the death rate from the plague had risen to twenty a day and the king could only skirt the city in a closed coach to Whitehall and inspect the capital from the river on his way to the Tower. There followed, moreover, a further two months of maddening delay while the daily toll of plague victims rose to 700 to 800, and James was left to shuttle uneasily from Greenwich and back to Whitehall, prior to a trip to Windsor, where he presided over a chapter of the Order of the Garter, and a tour of some of the better-stocked deer parks of the home counties. The plague, observed Cecil, ‘drives us up and down so round, as I think we shall come to York.’ And the king, in the meantime, gave little time to official business. ‘Sometimes he comes to council,’ wrote Thomas Wilson, an author whom Cecil had been employing as a foreign intelligencer, ‘but most time he spends in fields and parks and chases, chasing away idleness by violent exercise and early rising.’
In the end, James’s state entry into the City would have to be delayed until the following spring. But the coronation could not wait so long, and the queen was duly summoned from Scotland, causing another northward flood of interested court folk. The 13-year-old Lady Anne Clifford, who was only one of those many noble wayfarers frantically traversing the Great North Road around this time, had already met the king at Theobalds where she, her mother and her aunt had been ‘used very graciously’ by him, notwithstanding the fact that she had noticed ‘a great change between the fashion of the court as it is now and of that in the queen’s time, for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine’. Presently, however, she was in headlong motion once again, recording in her celebrated diary how she and her mother killed three horses in their haste to intercept the queen, and noting that near Windsor, where James eventually met his wife, ‘there was such an infinite number of lords and ladies and so great a court as I think I shall never see the like again’.
Even so, the coronation that occurred on 25 July, the feast of St James the Great, was shorn of its usual splendour. By this time, as many as 30,000 Londoners had succumbed to the plague and Prince Henry had been sent to Oatlands near Weybridge in Surrey to avoid infection. ‘By reason of God’s visitation for our sins,’ noted one commentator, ‘the plague and pestilence there reigning in the City of London … the king rode not from the Tower through the city in the royal manner …’ The pageants in their turn were postponed until the New Year, which was probably for the best as the day was further blighted by pouring rain. And to add the general gloom, the ceremony itself would take place in a sadly empty Abbey, since any concourse of people was forbidden, and nobles and dignitaries were severely limited in the numbers of attendants they brought – an earl, whose rank normally entailed a following of at least 150 for a London visit, being allowed only sixteen, and those of humbler station proportionately less. Among the other more mournful details of the occasion was the queen’s refusal to accept Holy Communion according to the Anglican rite from Archbishop Whitgift of Canterbury and James’s less than majestic response to Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, who had already established himself as the king’s first English favourite. For when the earl flouted tradition by kissing his sovereign as he paid homage, James showed no sign of displeasure but merely tapped him on the cheek indulgently.
By the time that James and his queen set out on a tour of the southern counties shortly afterwards, there were already signs that the brief honeymoon period of the succession was rapidly waning. Royal progresses were, of course, an essential means of popularising the monarchy and maintaining links between king and kingdom. But they were also exceedingly expensive, as James’s initial journey from Edinburgh to London had demonstrated, and only the monarchy’s ancient right to requisition horses and vehicles and fix low prices for the purchase of local produce made these lavish journeyings feasible at all. Even as he reached the capital in May there were murmurs against the ‘general, extreme, unjust and crying oppression’ of ‘cart takers and purveyors’, who, as Parliament was soon to point out, ‘have rummaged and ransacked since your Majesty’s coming in far more than under your royal progenitors’. The fact was that James had already spent £10,000 on his initial journey south and literally given away another £14,000 in gifts of various kinds at a time when Queen Elizabeth’s funeral had already cost £17,000 and the outstanding debt resulting from the Irish campaign stood at £400,000. Before long, in fact, Cecil would be writing anxiously to the Earl of Shrewbury about his royal master’s spending in general. ‘Our sovereign,’ he observed, ‘spends £100,000 yearly on his house, which was wont to be but £50,000. Now think what the country feels, and so much for that.’
Another spate of hunting, banqueting, masques and pageants, however necessary in terms of conventions and expectations, was therefore bound to carry with it political as well as purely financial costs, particularly if the king’s extravagance were to continue in the longer term – which, indeed, it did. The habit of idleness formed in those early months when plague had kept him out of London was quick to take root, moreover, for after one month of bickering with his first parliament, he had gone off to hunt and left the management of the rest of the session to Cecil. And when official business followed him, he reacted testily. When, for instance, a swarm of local petitioners troubled him with pleas on behalf of nonconforming clergy and what Chamberlain termed ‘foolish prophecies of dangers to ensue’, James did not hesitate to summon the council to Northampton, with the result that the shell-shocked petitioners were summarily hauled up and rebuked for opposing the king in a manner that was deemed to be ‘little less than treason’.
Nor, it seems, was James so inclined to play to the crowds in public or revel in the limelight of official ceremonies once his coronation was finally over. Upon his entry into London, we are told, he had ‘sucked in their gilded oratory, though never so nauseous, but afterwards in his public appearances, especially in his sports, the access of the people made him so impatient that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say with curses’. Henceforth, if Thomas Wilson is to be believed, the people missed the affability of their dead queen, since the new ruler ‘naturally did not love to be looked on, and the formalities of State but so many burdens to him’. And Wilson was not the only one to suggest as much, for Sir John Oglander observed that the king would now swear with passion when told by his attendants that the people had come of love to see his royal person. ‘Then,’ said Oglander, ‘he would cry out in Scottish, “God’s wounds! I will put down my breeches and they shall also see my arse!”’
Yet if James’s improvidence and disaffection with some of the more irksome niceties of kingship were already emerging, other facets of his personality continued to create favourable first impressions with many who served him. ‘He is very facile,’ wrote Sir Thomas Lake, ‘using no great majesty nor solemnity in his accesses, but witty to conceive and very ready of speech.’ Sir Roger Wilbraham, meanwhile, observed that ‘the king is of sharpest wit and invention, ready and pithy speech and exceeding good memory; of the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew; desiring nor affecting anything but honour’. And even the critical eye of Sir Francis Bacon, while quietly hinting at certain vices and indiscretions, remained generally positive about the new King of England during his first interview with him at Broxbourne. In a letter to the Earl of Northumberland, Bacon found James to be ‘a prince farthest from the appearance of vainglory that may be’. ‘His speech,’ Bacon continued, ‘is swift and cursory, and in the full dialect of his country; and in the point of business short; in point of discourse large.’ Moreover, while he was considered ‘somewhat general in his favours’, it was also observed that ‘his virtue of access is rather because he is much abroad and in press than that he giveth easy audience about serious things’. On the whole, then, there was much praise for James’s nimble mind, his loquacity, his affable and homely manner, his good nature and his apparent virtue.
And equally favourable impressions were recorded in the observations of many foreigners. ‘The King of England,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘is very prudent, able in negotiation, capable of dissimulating his feelings. He is said to be personally timid and averse from war. I hear on all sides that he is a man of letters and business, fond of the chase and of riding, sometimes indulging in play. These qualities attract men to him and render him acceptable to the aristocracy. Besides English, he speaks Latin and French perfectly and understands Italian quite well. He is capable of governing, being a prince of culture above the common.’ Even James’s physical appearance had its share of admirers, it seems. ‘The king’s countenance is handsome, noble and jovial,’ wrote another Italian, ‘his colour blond, his hair somewhat the same, his beard square and lengthy, his mouth small his eyes blue, his nose curved and clear-cut, a man happily formed, neither fat nor thin, of full vitality, neither too large nor small.’
James’s carriage and bearing, meanwhile, were far from universally berated. At his first audience with the king in May 1603, the Venetian ambassador ‘found all the council about his chair, and an infinity of other lords almost in an attitude of adoration’. Dressed ‘in grey silver satin, quite plain, with a cloak of black tabbinet reaching below his knees and lined with crimson’, the ambassador also noted that ‘he had his arm in a sling, the result of a fall from his horse’. But no mention was made of any lack of grace or manners, and though ‘from his dress he would have been taken for the meanest among his courtiers’, we hear, too, that this was only the result of ‘a modesty he affects’. Nor, for that matter, was such modesty merely a matter of public posturing. On the contrary, James’s ability to relate informally and humanely to lesser mortals would remain in evidence long after his early courting of the crowds had begun to wane. Indeed, one of his most sentimental attachments, it seems, was eventually formed with Robin, an old keeper of Theobalds Park, who would make him presents of thrushes and blackbirds’ nests and endeared himself to the king by his ‘plain, honest and bold speech’.
There were times, it is true, when James’s penchant for the common touch crossed the borders of seemliness and decorum, and detracted from the distance and respect properly associated with genuine majesty. Among many trivial, but nonetheless awkward instances of the king’s excessive exuberance and over-familiarity was his tendency to visit newly-wed couples after their first night together, even lying on the bridal bed and quizzing the couple on what had passed. When, for instance, his favourite Sir Philip Herbert, whom he had recently created Earl of Montgomery, married the Lady Susan de Vere in Whitehall during 1604, the king was overcome by boyish high spirits as all fashionable London celebrated the event. Giving the bride away ‘in her tresses and trinkets’, the king, wrote Sir Dudley Carleton, proudly declared that ‘if he were unmarried, he would not give her, but keep her himself’. It was a fatherly and endearing comment wholly in keeping with the joy and light-heartedness of the occasion. But whether James’s behaviour was quite so appropriate next morning is rather more debatable, for ‘the king’, John Chamberlain tells us, ‘in his shirt and nightgown gave Philip Herbert and his bride a reveille-matin before they were up and spent a good time in or upon the bed, choose which you will’. The fact that Chamberlain commented upon the event and that, more importantly still, the incident had come to his attention in the first place suggests, at the very least, that James’s behaviour had once again been less than apt.
Nevertheless, the classic caricature of James, traditionally attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon, stands in stark – and largely unconvincing – contrast to most contemporary descriptions of the man. Weldon came, in fact, from a family that had long associations with the royal household and had served in his own capacity as Clerk of the Green Cloth, auditing accounts and organising the household’s travel arrangements. He had, moreover, clearly prosecuted his role effectively, since he was knighted for his efforts, before losing his job, it has always been suggested, in deeply embarrassing circumstances. According to the usual account, he had written an unpleasantly satirical account of the Scots, which subsequently fell into the king’s hands when it became carelessly mixed up with official papers. In consequence, even though the king granted him a small pension after his dismissal, Weldon, we are told, apparently went on to pen his famous portrait, The Court and Character of James I, although his responsibility for the work is not as certain as is often assumed, since it was not actually credited to him until after his death in 1648 when anti-Stuart feeling was at its height. Curiously, too, the work which allegedly provoked James to sack Weldon – A Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland – was actually published six years beforehand.
In any event, the description supplied by The Court and Character of James I certainly gained currency across the centuries. The king, it suggests, was ‘of middle stature, more corpulent through his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his clothes ever being made large and easy, the doublets quilted for stiletto proof, his breeches in pleats and full stuffed’. Thus derives the classic picture of a timorous and suspicious monarch, padding his clothing against assassin’s knives and pistol shots, ‘his eye large, ever rolling after any stranger come into his presence, in so much as many for shame have left the room, as being out of countenance’. We hear, too, of those physically unprepossessing images of the king that have always been so closely associated with him. His beard, in Weldon’s account, was ‘very thin’ and ‘his tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him drink very uncomely’, while his skin was ‘as soft as taffeta sarsnet, which fell so, because he never washed his hands, only rubbed his finger ends slightly with the wet-end of a napkin’. The king’s legs, in their turn, were very weak, ‘having as was thought some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born’, with the result that he was ‘ever leaning on other men’s shoulders’. And his walk was ‘ever circular’ – ‘his fingers ever in that walk fiddling about his cod-piece’.
According to this account, James was also somewhat intemperate in his use of alcohol – with a particular liking, it seems, for ‘Frontiniack, Canary, high country wine, tent wine and Scottish ale’ – though he was seldom drunk, since he had a ‘very strong brain’. ‘He naturally loved not the sight of a soldier, nor of any valiant man’, the account continues, ‘and was crafty and cunning in petty things’, and though he was ‘infinitely inclined to peace, it was more out of fear than conscience’. ‘Wise in small things, but a fool in weighty affairs’, he was, we hear, ‘very liberal of what he had not in his own grip, and would rather part with £100 he never had in his keeping than one twenty shilling piece within his own custody’. Yet he was ‘constant in all things (his favourites excepted)’ and ‘had as many ready witty jests as any man living, at which he would not smile himself, but deliver them in a grave and serious manner’. ‘In a word,’ the account concludes, ‘take him altogether and not in pieces, such a king I wish this kingdom have never any worse, on the condition, not any better, for he lived in peace, died in peace, and left all his kingdoms in a peaceable condition, with his own motto: Beati Pacifici [Blessed are the Peacemakers].’
Whether all this amounted to a species of character assassination in the way that many later authorities came to accept, is perhaps debatable – not merely in terms of the accuracy of the author’s claims, but more importantly still, perhaps, in terms of his work’s tone. This, after all, was said to be a king who, apart from being a peacemaker, ‘loved good laws and had many made in his time’ – hardly the kind of declaration that might be expected from a slighted hatchet-wielder. There is no denying, of course, that Sir William Sanderson in his Aulicus Coquinariae: or a Vindication in Answer to a Pamphlet entitled the Court and Character of King James (1650) suggested that the author, whom he considered to be Weldon, had later disowned the work ‘which with some regret of what he had maliciously writ’, he had ‘intended to the fire’ before ‘it was since stolen to the press out of a ladies closet’. But the eleven-page pamphlet remains, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning – more maligned for its supposed subjectivity than any real malignity it actually directed at James himself. That it is a caricature is beyond dispute, but like all successful caricatures it may well have captured more of the essence of the man than it is often credited for. And even if Weldon was indeed the author and carried the grudge for which he is charged, grounds for grievance need not necessarily entail outright ill will. Nor, in the grand scheme of things, can he be said to have exacted his vengeance especially cruelly.
Certainly, some of James’s most telling flaws are left unexplored – one of which was his susceptibility to the very ‘painted flattery’ of which Sir Roger Wilbraham had spoken. Upon his succession, he had passed at once from the brusque and often insolent frankness of his Scottish homeland to the altogether more obsequious conventions of a highly sophisticated court. And unlike the chisel-tongued nobles and ministers of his other kingdom, Cecil was only one among many who now addressed him in terms of the deepest deference, while the likes of Henry Howard grovelled unashamedly. For Howard, in particular, the king was ‘your resplendent Majesty’, the sun itself – sacred, peerless, wise and learned – and with such a flow of adulation to confirm the king’s opinion of his exalted status, it was not long before ceremonies discarded by the former queen now began to reappear once more. An early medal struck in his honour had already borne the title Caesar Caesorum [‘Caesar of Caesars’], but before long the Venetian ambassador was observing how ‘they are introducing the ancient splendours of the English court and almost adoring his majesty, who day by day adopts the practices suitable to his greatness’. State dinners at which the nobility served the king on bended knee – ‘a splendid and unwonted sight’ – now became increasingly common, while a flood of eulogistic verses flowed with regularity from the pens of Henry Petowe, Samuel Rowlands and Anthony Nixon. ‘The very poets with their idle pamphlets,’ wrote John Chamberlain, ‘promise themselves great favour.’
Even more unfamiliar to James – and equally intoxicating – was the lavish praise heaped upon him by the English clergy. Bullied and derided by the most vocal elements of the Kirk, he now found a halo of holiness placed around his head by bishops who were more than prepared to accede to his claims as God’s direct representative on Earth. ‘God hath given us a Solomon,’ declared Bishop James Montagu, ‘and God above all things gave Solomon wisdom; wisdom brought him peace; peace brought him riches; riches gave him glory.’ Indeed, Montagu continued, the king surpassed Solomon, since he had been steadfast in the true religion longer than Solomon had reigned, nor had he been immoderate in his dealings with women. And to gild the lily further, there were frequent comparisons with the Roman Emperors Constantine and Theodosius, not to mention Israel’s very own sweet singer, David. In the same way that David had united the laws of Judah and Israel, it was proclaimed, so James had bonded the rival kingdoms of England and Scotland.
All in all, then, it was small wonder that James basked in the veneration that now came his way and gave full vent to the inherent sense of his own celebrity that had hitherto been so roughly and so frequently challenged north of the Border. When Roger Aston, a Scottish envoy who had been sent ahead to England upon Elizabeth’s death was asked how his master felt about his succession, the answer could not have been more clear-cut or apt. ‘Even, my lords,’ came the reply, ‘like a poor man wandering about forty years in a wilderness and barren soil and now arrived at the land of promise’. Not long afterwards, moreover, James himself would be remarking how little he could find to alter in the state of England, ‘which state, as it seemed, so affected his royal heart that it pleased him to enter into a gratulation to Almighty God for bringing him into the promised land where religion was purely professed, where he sat among grave, learned and reverend men, not as before, elsewhere, a king without a state, without honour, without order, where beardless boys would brave him to his face’.
James, of course, could smile at some of the excessive adulation heaped upon him. After losing heavily at cards on one occasion, he commented wryly upon both his predicament and those who would render him near-infallible. ‘Am I not as good a king as King David?’ he declared, ‘As holy a king as King David? As just a king as King David? And why should I then be crossed?’ Likewise, he wasted no time in denying the time-honoured claim of English monarchs that they could treat the disease of scrofula merely by touching the affected parts. The age of miracles, he said, was past and he shrank from the ritual whereby the king would place his hands upon the ulcerous sores of those brought before him – a practice, James felt, that savoured far too much of Roman superstition. On one occasion, indeed – ‘finding the strength of the imagination a more powerful agent in the cure’ – he was actually prepared to belittle the ceremony publicly. When entreated by a foreign ambassador to perform the cure upon his son, the king, it seems, ‘laughed heartily, and as the young fellow came near him he stroked him with his hand, first on one side and then on the other, marry without Pistle or Gospel’.
Yet when it came to his new kingdom, James experienced no such doubts about either his powers or his potential or, for that matter, his need to tread carefully, ‘inasmuch’, wrote one Englishman, ‘as he imagined heaven and earth must give way to his will’. As one of his first measures, he did not hesitate, for instance, to install Lord Edward Bruce of Kinloss as Master of the Rolls for life, though the outcry was so great that no other Scot was ever again accorded such high judicial office. More embarrassingly still, even before he had reached London, James attempted unsuccessfully to appoint his old tutor, Peter Young, Dean of Lichfield, notwithstanding the fact that the post was not legally his to give. And these were not the only examples of how his glorious entry into England created what amounted to a curious euphoria that compromised his judgement and heralded the onset of unsettled times ahead. Though the Gowrie Plot was an event of minimal significance south of the Border, the anniversary of its failure, Tuesday 5 August, was nevertheless now set aside in England as well as Scotland as a holy day of feasting and thanksgiving, while special ‘Tuesday sermons’, in which, among other things, the Almighty was urged to ‘smite the king’s enemies upon the cheekbone, break their teeth, frustrate their counsels and bring to naught all their devices’ became a regular feature of the court’s routine. There was, indeed, even an attempt – albeit unsuccessful – to foist these crude examples of royal propaganda upon both of the kingdom’s universities.
Plainly, then, James’s limited understanding of his new realm was exacerbated by the false impressions with which he was bombarded upon his arrival. Now, of course, he was free forever from the perpetual fear of kidnapping and assassination, from contending with clan feuds and the individual jealousies of Scottish noblemen, from the maddening pretensions of the Kirk, and the galling sense of unimportance in the great world of European politics that had been his lot hitherto. But far from entering the ‘land of promise’ – a land described by a Venetian nobleman in 1596 as ‘the most lovely to be seen in the world, so opulent, fat and rich in all things, that you may say with truth poverty is banished’ – James did not perceive the broader picture. From at least one perspective, of course, he cannot be wholly blamed for this, since England was not only in a state of latent tension, but also in the midst of a series of rapid and painful transitions. Unbeknown to any Italian visitor, it seems, 1596 was also a year of spiralling inflation, widespread agricultural distress, a crippling slump in trade and a heated dispute between Queen Elizabeth and the impoverished south coast ports over the levy of ship money. For even if England was from some perspectives a comparatively rich and splendid inheritance, the Crown itself was poor. Equally importantly, Elizabethan government was founded upon an intricate system of balances and compromises between ruler and ruled that could only be ‘caught rather than taught’.
Yet James had neither the time nor, more importantly still, sufficient inclination to learn anew the subtleties of kingship. ‘As the king is by nature of a mild disposition and has never really been happy in Scotland,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘he wishes now to enjoy the papacy, as we say, and so desires to have no bother with other people’s affairs and little with his own. He would like to dedicate himself to his books and to the chase and to encourage the opinion that he is the real arbiter of peace.’ But if James desired the Olympian status of a pope in his new kingdom, it would come at a cost, for, though his judgement was often sound, it was sometimes dangerously rash at critical moments. More importantly still, the personal style of government he unwaveringly pursued was only likely to succeed, insofar as the reigning monarch possessed the necessary charisma and majesty, and commanded the love of his or her subjects. Intelligence, high principles and good intentions were actually no more a guarantee of sound leadership at the start of the seventeenth century than they are today. And it was now – after the welcoming, the junketing and the initial friendly posturing were finally done - that James would have to set his stamp upon his restive realm.