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‘I was alone, without father or mother, brother or sister, King of this realm, and heir apparent of England.’
James VI, 1589
On 29 July 1567, in the church of the Holy Rude at Stirling, on a craggy hillside rising to the castle, Prince James was crowned King of Scots, the sixth ruler of his kingdom to have governed with that name. With its commanding view over the River Forth and the Ochils, no fortress in Scotland boasted a more dramatic setting. A few miles to the north, rising sharply from the plain, lay the ‘Highland Line’, one of the great geological faults to which Scotland owed not only its shape but its history, while to the north-west spread the expanse of bog land, across which meagre, sluggish streams ambled off to supply the river Forth. To the south, on the other hand, spread the humbler ridge of the Campsies, though these, too, reflected the wall of the Highlands and the more imposing peaks of Ben Ledi, Ben Vorlich and Ben Lomond. All in all, no spot resonated more with Scottish prowess, Scottish pride and Scottish royalty. Bannockburn, the most decisive battle in Scottish history had been fought for the castle and the vital bridge below it, and both James IV and James V had left their indelible mark upon the place, improving its buildings and rendering the six main apartments of its royal palace comparable to any in Northern Europe. Plainly, then, Stirling was the benchmark for high Scottish culture and the clearest possible statement of Stuart legitimacy and permanence – the traditional home of the current dynasty, and the right and natural starting-point, by any standards, for the reign of the 13-month-old James VI.
Yet the new king’s inauguration was a mean and meagre affair, tainted by circumstance and shrouded in fears for the future. Staged only five days after the deposition of the former queen, it was the worst-attended coronation in Scottish history. In the opinion of one of her spokesmen, indeed, only seven lords, no more than a tenth of the Scots nobility, were present, and even the English ambassador – a fervent Protestant – was obliged to boycott the ceremony, since it was the act of an illegal regime that had challenged the sovereignty of the Crown and threatened the established order of things. As such, the Elizabethan government, which was still engaged in establishing its own respectability, could not afford to become entangled with it. This was not the only oddity, since the ceremony also involved a change of name for the monarch – something that had occurred only once before in the whole of Scotland’s past. For, as a result of its association with the French king, the king’s baptismal name of ‘Charles James’ was suitably clipped and the new monarch would henceforth be known only as James VI.
Crowned, then, not in the castle’s Chapel Royal, where his mother had been enthroned in 1542, but in the altogether humbler setting of the burgh’s parish church, the infant king found himself at the centre of a ritual which fully reflected the tensions existing in his realm. Though anointed in the style of previous Scottish monarchs, there were neither candles nor copes nor incense on hand. Nor were there fanfares or heralds to proclaim the new king in what was consciously presented as an aggressively Protestant reaction against the former regime. Latin, too, was carefully avoided; instead, all prayers were ‘in the English tongue’. It was not without irony either, of course, that the infant ruler’s crown was placed upon his head by Robert Stewart, the former Catholic Bishop of Orkney, who had last appeared in public to marry the child’s mother to Bothwell. And it was an equally curious footnote to Queen Mary’s reign that the subsequent sermon should have been preached by none other than John Knox. Taking his text from 2 Chronicles 23: 20–21, he declaimed with characteristic candour and at typical length upon the coronation of the child king Joash, whose mother, Queen Athaliah, had rent her clothes and cried ‘treason, treason’, before being taken out and slain by the sword.
To seal the transformation at the heart of government, however, it was none other than James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, who read aloud the new king’s coronation oath. Arguably the most crooked and treacherous of the whole shifty crew that had brought Mary Stuart to her ruin, it was red-headed Douglas who had held Holyrood for Riccio’s murderers and signed Bothwell’s bond against Darnley. And now it was he who pledged the king not only to maintain the ‘lovable laws and constitutions received in this realm’ and ‘to rule in the faith, fear and love of God’, but also to ‘root out all heretics and enemies to the true worship of God that shall be convicted by the true Kirk of God of the aforesaid crimes’. For his efforts on the new government’s behalf, Morton was duly nominated as chancellor in the Regency Council that now assumed power.
It was composed, said George Buchanan, the king’s future tutor, ‘of nourishers of theft and raisers of rebellion’, who were characterised by ‘insatiable greediness’ and ‘intolerable arrogance’. ‘For the most part’, it seems, its members were men ‘without faith in promises, pity to the inferior, or obedience to the superior’. ‘In peace’, moreover, they were ‘desirous of trouble, in war thirsty of blood’. But the power of Buchanan’s beloved Kirk depended on these men. Like him, his fellow preachers desired that the whole government of Scotland, civil and ecclesiastical, be subordinated to their charge, while the nobles were determined merely to maintain power and wealth for themselves. To say, therefore, that both parties were uneasy allies is an understatement of some magnitude, though their mutual dependence was unavoidable, and both were also driven to an equally distasteful dependence upon England, which most thinking Scotsmen had long been struggling to avoid. It was English intrigues and often English subsidies, after all, which had assisted the present clique of Protestant lords into power and now, as conservative and moderate opinion alike recoiled from the implications of this dependence, it was English influence that would hold their opponents at bay.
In the meantime, the infant boy who might one day serve to guarantee good order and government was entrusted once more, at Regent Moray’s behest, to the Earl and Countess of Mar. Formally appointed on 22 August, Moray had chosen the obvious candidates, since the earl in particular was a nobleman of the highest order, respected by both his own party and its opponents. And until his death in 1572, when his role was assumed by his brother, Sir Alexander Erskine, his conduct was exemplary. Like the earl himself, moreover, Erskine was another genuinely benign influence – ‘a nobleman’, observed Sir James Melville, ‘of a true, gentle nature, well-loved and liked of every man for his good qualities and great discretion, in no wise factious or envious’ – though in the countess, King James was not perhaps so fortunate. For while, as we have seen, she played his foster-mother with due conviction initially, referring to him always as ‘the Lord’s Annointed’ and occasionally objecting when he was beaten, she was nevertheless a stern enough governess in her own right – especially after her husband’s death when she continued in her post and held the king in ‘great awe’ of her. Rather more worryingly, she also continued to delegate too much of the child’s everyday care to Little, his tippling wet nurse. Though hardly the fount of all objectivity, Knox described Lady Mar as ‘a very Jesabell’ and a ‘sweet titbit for the Devil’s mouth’, and if his intention on this occasion was to highlight her connection to the former queen, it was true, nevertheless, that the king’s own feelings about the countess were always likely to have been mixed.
Certainly, the provision of the royal household, though less than extravagant, was adequate to its purposes. Four young women, for example, were employed to rock the king in his cradle – perhaps the wooden cradle of Traquair which is traditionally supposed to have been his – and there were also three gentlemen of the bedchamber, two women to tend the king’s clothes and two musicians, Thomas and Robert Hudson, though James himself exhibited no ear for music in later life. And while the Master of the Household, Cunningham of Drumwhassel, was not only Moray’s cousin but in Melville’s view an ambitious and greedy man, even he appears to have devoted himself effectively enough to the day-to-day management of the king’s domestic arrangements, which changed little throughout his early childhood. Food and drink were ample, with an allowance for the ‘King’s own mouth daily’ of two and a half loaves of bread, three pints of ale and two capons. And though most of the former queen’s furniture lay idle at Holyrood, three fine tapestries were nevertheless brought to Stirling for her son’s comfort, notwithstanding the fact that his bed in the Prince’s Tower was a gloomy contrivance of black damask, with ruff, head-piece and pillows also fringed in the same colour.
In the king’s bedchamber too, fittingly enough, hung a portrait of his ill-fated grandfather, James V, who, along with boy’s great-grandfather, James IV, had played such a key role in fashioning Stirling Castle. The latter, arguably the most heroic of all Scotland’s kings, had been killed in battle by the English at Flodden Field in 1513, and although the boy would show no such prowess whatsoever, his great-grandfather’s legacy was all around him – not only in stirring tales of his martial deeds and tragedy, but in the very walls of the castle itself. Known as ‘James of the Iron Belt’, the fallen hero of Flodden had, for instance, erected the great defensive bulwark across the main approach to the fortress around 1500 and had probably completed the royal courtyard, now dubbed the Upper Square, about the same date. James V, meanwhile, influenced by two marriages to French princesses and his own sojourn in France, imported French masons and built the palace on the south side of the square and the Great Hall. In particular, the sculpted figures of the Devil and King James himself on the south walls displayed the same French influence that had characterised the whole reign, so that while the new monarch would be reared in expectation of the English Crown, he was left in no doubt either that his roots were plainly Scottish and that the realm across the Border was both foreign and fierce.
Before he could unify his God-given kingdoms, however, James would have to grow and learn – two tasks that, in his case, were far from carefree. Before he had reached his fourth birthday, in fact, two scholars were appointed by the government to supervise the king’s education: the formidable George Buchanan, poet, humanist, historian and unyielding taskmaster, and the altogether more temperate Peter Young, a young man fresh from his studies under Theodore Beza at Geneva. Learned, gifted, and widely lauded for his accomplishments, Buchanan, on the one hand, had lengthy experience as a tutor to some of the best families in both Scotland and France, and had once been the instructor of none other than the great French essayist, Michel de Montaigne. But he was ill-suited to deal with a child scarcely out of the nursery – and especially one as nervous, excitable and overstrung as James would prove to be. Melville, for his part, described the elderly master aptly enough as a ‘stoic philosopher’ and fully acknowledged the ‘notable qualities’ of his learning and knowledge which were ‘much made account of in other nations’. There was ample recognition, too, that Buchanan was ‘pleasant in company, rehearsing on all occasions moralities, short and forceful’, ‘of good religion for a poet’ and a man of commendable frankness and honesty – someone who, as Melville put it, ‘looked not far before the hand’. Yet Buchanan was also, we are told, ‘easily abused’, ‘factious in his old days’ and, worse still, ‘extremely vengeable against any man that offended him which was his greatest fault’.
Nor, it seems, was Buchanan especially inclined to forgiveness of his royal pupil. More than sixty years older than the king and in declining health, he found his new role, at times, an irritating distraction from his own more serious studies – even though he had lobbied for the post before it became available – and in consequence occasionally vented his frustrations upon both the boy and reputation of his mother. Curiously enough, the old man had once taught Mary herself and at that time commended ‘the excellency of her mien, the delicacy of her beauty, the vigour of her blooming years, all joined in her recommendation’. But he had become Protestant in 1563 and thenceforth the schoolmaster’s antipathy to that ‘bludy woman and poisoning witch’ knew no bounds. Indeed, his scornful Detectio Mariae Regina Scotorum not only rivalled Knox’s vitriol but possibly surpassed it, ranking perhaps as one of the most powerful pieces of rhetorical invective of its day. She, who had formerly been the object of Buchanan’s elegiacs, a woman ‘of nobility rarer than all her kindred’, now suddenly degenerated, into the caricature reviled in every Edinburgh gutter – the personification of ‘intemperate authority’ whose ‘immeasurable but mad love’ for Bothwell had brought her to shame. In due course, indeed, it would be Buchanan who confirmed Mary’s handwriting in the Casket Letters before both the Scottish Parliament and Elizabeth I’s court at Westminster.
And now James would be exposed to the full blast of Buchanan’s sulphurous wrath. On one particularly notorious occasion, a boyish tussle had, it seems, broken out between the king and his playmate, John Erskine, son of the Earl of Mar, over possession of a sparrow, in the course of which the unfortunate bird met its end. When Buchanan heard of the incident, he went to work with characteristic gusto, slapping the king’s ear and adding, with all his usual venom for the former queen, that the boy himself was ‘a true bird of that bludy nest’. On another occasion, when James and Mar were somewhat noisy at their play and the master was at his books, he warned the king that ‘if he did not hold his peace, he would whip his breach’. The result was a not altogether unprecedented attempt at cheek from the king and the due delivery – ‘in a passion’ – of a thorough thrashing by Buchanan. When, moreover, the Countess of Mar came to the boy’s rescue, rebuking the old man for laying hands upon ‘the Lord’s Annointed’, Buchanan responded in style. ‘Madam,’ he replied with the kind of cudgel subtlety that could be guaranteed to thwart his protagonist in mid-flight, ‘I have whipped his arse, you may kiss it if you please.’
It is small wonder, then, that James should have recalled his tutor in considerable awe, if not outright fear. Years later, at the age of 53, he would tell one of his officials ‘that he trembled at his approach, it minded him so of his pedagogue’. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether surprising that the king should have gone on to challenge so roundly some of the political lessons that his tutor had been at such pains to instil. In 1579, when James was 13, not far from the time of his personal rule in Scotland, Buchanan wrote De Jure Regni apud Scotis (The Rights of the Crown in Scotland). Dedicated to James, the book emphasised that kings should be lovers and models of piety, bringing dread to the bad and delight to the good. But though, in Buchanan’s view, a king was the father of his people, he was also accountable to them, existing for their benefit rather than vice versa. Kings, he asserted, were bound by the power which first made them kings, which was not God, but the people. More radically still, Buchanan also taught that it was desirable not only to resist tyrants, but to punish them. Clearly, James’s later claims that kings were God’s lieutenants on earth would have appalled his former teacher. And it was not insignificant, of course, that, years later in 1584, when James had achieved his majority, Buchanan’s work was duly condemned at the king’s behest by Scotland’s Parliament.
Yet James would also boast, with full justification, of his training under a teacher of such renown. In 1603, for instance, he told Nicolo Molin, the Venetian ambassador, how his tutor had instructed him in the excellence of Venice’s constitution, and when, as King of England, an English scholar praised the elegance of his Latin, James was quick to acknowledge his debt: ‘All the world knows that my master, Mr George Buchanan, was a great master in that faculty,’ he observed. ‘I follow his pronunciation both of the Latin and the Greek, and am sorry that my people of England do not the like; for certainly their pronunciation utterly spoils the grace of these two learned languages.’ Nor, surprisingly enough, was James entirely unforgiving of his former tutor’s temperament. ‘If the man hath burst out here and there into excess or speech of bad temper, that must be imputed to the violence of his humour and heat of his spirit, not in any wise to the rules of true religion rightly by him conceived.’ Buchanan’s character was, after all, a curious mixture of opposing qualities, as James’s backchat prior to his most notorious beating and the master’s subsequent encounter with Lady Mar clearly confirm. Like other men of intellect before and after, in fact, George Buchanan was both humane and vindictive, mirthful and morose, cultured and coarse, full of prejudice, but above all fond of truth.
And there was in any case, of course, the mollifying influence of the king’s other tutor to compensate for the older man’s more pitiless approach. Born in 1544, the gentle, lovable, ‘wise and sharp’ Peter Young believed in praise and encouragement rather than the rod as the foundation of learning, and was probably James’s first real friend, bringing a note of genuine humanity to his childhood that the pupil would not, it seems, forget. Young, indeed, would remain about the king’s person to the end of the reign, by which time he had served as chief almoner, performed ambassadorial roles in Denmark, and been endowed with a long string of ecclesiastical preferments which eventually left him the Master of the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester. Whether, of course, Buchanan consciously encouraged the contrast in teaching styles with his younger protégé is unknown but, as Young’s superior, he made no effort to discourage it and spoke of his colleague in the highest terms in his Epistolae. Given Buchanan’s advancing years, moreover, Young may well in any case have undertaken the major share of teaching duties.
There were, it is true, notable gaps in the king’s upbringing. Not least of all, James ate and drank carelessly, making slovenliness almost a virtue at a time when courtly graces were widely considered the hallmark of true nobility. Doubtless, Buchanan regarded such refinements as largely unimportant and, from some perspectives, even reprobate. A king’s main business, after all, was simply to rule and to rule simply at that. Dour democrat that he was, the old man frequently reminded his pupil how affectation as well as flattery were loathsome vices, in much the same way that titles – ‘majesties’, ‘lordships’ and ‘excellencies’ – served only to erect an artificial barrier between rulers and ruled. More worryingly, however, the very rigour of the king’s education propagated at least two long-term side effects, for while the iron self-discipline of scholarship and the equally rigid spiritual constraints of Calvinism were intended to fashion a careful and conscientious ruler, the adult James was only truly diligent under compulsion and never consistently so. Nor, for that matter, could his tutors eliminate the devious secret side that became compounded by the broader circumstances of a childhood beset by political insecurity and physical threats.
Of considerable significance, too, was the fact that Buchanan’s own particular brand of pedantry and intellectual intolerance seems to have left another lasting imprint. Certainly, the young king was not without wit – albeit of the more sardonic kind often characteristic of the highly educated. Indeed, under Buchanan’s guidance, the exercise of a quicksilver, caustic tongue may well have taken the form of an ancillary education in its own right. But what might have developed into an accomplishment of sorts became in this particular case a clear-cut vice. On one occasion, the tedium and imperfection of the young Earl of Mar’s French became too much for James, who detonated with all the vigour worthy of his tutor. ‘I have not understood a single word you have said,’ declared James, adding, ‘what the Lord Regent has said of you seems to be true, that your French is nothing and your Scots little better.’ And when Peter Young reminded the king that he should never lose his temper, he was met with more irritation still. ‘Then,’ came the response, ‘I should not wear the lion on my arms but rather a sheep.’
Equally regrettable, in some respects, were the effects of James’s comparative isolation from women. Apart from the Countess of Mar, whom he affectionately dubbed his ‘Lady Ninny’, there was little female company on hand to leaven his childhood – something, it is sometimes said, that may partly explain his later, almost tragic, yearning for affection. On one occasion we hear of him thanking the countess for a gift of fruit, but apart from Lady Mar herself, who was also capable of a distinct hardness in her own right, the influence of female society was little in evidence. Significantly or otherwise, Young mentions a game of trou-madame in which the king made a small wager with several young ladies but, upon losing, brusquely displayed his irritation at having to pay the forfeit. It is tempting to speculate, too, that Buchanan’s own influence as a hard-bitten bachelor and outright misogynist may well have reinforced the strength of James’s opinions in later life about the role and station of women.
Meanwhile, the distance – both physical and emotional – between the king and his mother remained considerable. It was not only Buchanan, for instance, who impressed upon James that his sole surviving parent was a murderer and adulteress, and it was not long either before the boy realised that this alone was why he was king. More disconcertingly still, perhaps, he soon appreciated that from her exile in England, Mary remained a threat to his status, since she had never accepted her enforced abdication and had therefore never recognised her son’s assumption of the Crown. And while she hoped for reconciliation with the child she still considered her heir, the gulf between them would be carefully maintained by those controlling James’s destiny. After Mary attempted, for instance, ‘to remind him of his afflicted mother’, she explained to Queen Elizabeth in England how her efforts had been ruthlessly suppressed. She had sent him when he was 2 years old an ABC and a pony complete with saddle and bridle, but because the affectionate letter that went with them was addressed to ‘my dear son, James Charles, Prince of Scotland’ rather than to the king, they were never given to him. Two years later, moreover, the Scottish Parliament formally decreed at Stirling that there should be no contact between James and his mother, except through the Council. No feeling of tenderness or pity was therefore ever forthcoming from the boy until Mary’s head was finally severed from her shoulders, at which point he would denounce the Casket Letters as forgeries and bemoan the fate of ‘that poor lady, my mother’.
In the meantime, however, the king would continue to persevere in his studies, which, in spite of any shortcomings and for all their rigours, were not without considerable virtues. ‘First in the morning’, Young tells us, ‘he sought guidance in prayer, since God Almighty bestows favour and success upon all studies’, and having been ‘cleansed through prayer and having propitiated the Deity’, James then devoted himself to Greek, practising the rules of grammar and reading either from the New Testament or Isocrates, or from the apophthegms of Plutarch. But this, in fact, was still only the start of his daily programme, since breakfast was followed by readings in Latin, either from Livy, Justin, Cicero, or from Scottish or foreign history. After which, with dinner over, he devoted himself to composition, before spending the remainder of the afternoon, if time permitted, upon arithmetic or cosmography – which included geography or astronomy – or dialectics or rhetoric. As a result, the young king was soon able not only to compose both competent verse and accurate pithy prose in English, French and Latin, but to hold his own in argument against many much older men – especially when discourse in Latin was involved.
In the process, however, James acquired a love for rigorous logic and incontrovertible argument that would later smack of dogmatism and pedantry – and nowhere more so, perhaps, than in the field of religion where his familiarity with Calvinist theology and methods of reasoning left an indelible mark upon his general outlook. Calvin’s whole system, in fact, was based upon the notion of absolute truths derived by remorseless reasoning from infallible premises. This narrow, rigid and dialectical method, with its cast-iron approach to divinity, leaving no room for compromise, appealed to James strongly, for though he was fully versed in the humanism of the Renaissance, he was also immersed in the thinking of the medieval schoolmen and, above all, the power of the syllogism. Having thereby derived his thoughts on any matter, whether theological or secular, James could be guaranteed to hold firm against all comers, especially upon the subject of Catholicism.
At the age of 11, indeed, the king was declaiming against the Catholic controversialist Archibald Hamilton with all the vigour that one would expect from a pupil of both Buchanan and Young. The king ‘marvelled’, it seems, that Hamilton’s most well-known book ‘should be put forth by a Scotsman’. ‘I love him not so evil because he is a Hamilton,’ he concluded, ‘as that I do because he is an apostate.’ On another occasion, in speaking of the papal claim to the keys of heaven and hell, James readily quoted St Luke (6:52): ‘Woe unto you lawyers: for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye enter not in yourselves, and them that are entering ye hindered.’ He was more than capable, too, of exercising his learning at the expense of the younger of his tutors. When Peter Young punished a small fault by forbidding the king to read the lesson for the day, which was the 119th Psalm, James quoted the text very aptly: ‘Wherewith shall a young man cleanse his way?’ It was this kind of ‘smartness’ and yen for having the last word, too, which may well have encouraged some of Buchanan’s more brutal responses to his precocious young charge.
Yet James’s supreme confidence in his own opinions was by no means entirely vacuous, for rarely has a youthful royal mind been so successfully filled by his tutors, and his ‘great towardness in learning’ was widely and rightly acknowledged by those well placed to judge. ‘At this early age,’ Buchanan told the king when he was 16, ‘you have pursued the history of almost every nation and have committed many of them to memory.’ And a passing comment scribbled in one of James’s copy-books – possibly a flash of penetrating protest or at least exasperation – bears ample testimony to the intensity of his education. ‘They gar me speik Latin,’ he observed, ‘ar I could speik Scotis’. Furthermore, the Protestant minister James Melville tells in his autobiography how he encountered the king at Stirling in 1574 when he was only 8 and found him ‘the sweetest sight in Europe that day for strange and extraordinary gifts of wit, judgement, memory and language’. ‘I heard him discourse,’ said Melville, ‘walking up and down in the old Lady Mar’s hand, of knowledge and ignorance, to my great marvel and astonishment.’ Nor did Sir Henry Killigrew, who observed the king regularly, harbour any doubt whatsoever about the boy’s considerable ability. Writing to Queen Elizabeth in the same year that Melville recorded his observations, the ambassador informed the queen how the boy ‘was able extempore … to read a chapter of the Bible out of Latin into French, and out of French after into English, so well as few men could have added anything to his translation.’ The boy was, concluded Killigrew, ‘a Prince sure of great hope, if God give him life’. And in 1588 the Jesuit James Gordon would also highlight James’s intimate knowledge of biblical texts – something which both Buchanan and Young, wholly predictably, had placed at the top of their educational agenda. A chapter of the Bible was read and discussed at every meal and the effects were notable. James, said Gordon, ‘is naturally eloquent, has a keen intelligence, and a very powerful memory, for he knows a great part of the bible by heart’. ‘He cites not only chapters,’ Gordon added, ‘but even the verses in a perfectly marvellous way.’
Buchanan in particular, however, was determined to fashion a king as well as a scholar – an individual endowed with self-knowledge as well as book learning, and a grasp of the ways of the world as well as the narrower realm of the classroom. In an attempt, for instance, to halt James’s tendency to grant favour too freely and to neglect the content of requests, the master implemented a test, which involved presenting the boy with two stacks of papers that he subsequently signed without reading. As a result, Buchanan then spent the next few weeks declaring that he rather than James was actually King of Scotland. When questioned by James about his behaviour, the old scholar duly produced one of the documents previously signed by his pupil. ‘Well,’ declared Buchanan, ‘here is the letter signed in your hand in which you have handed the kingdom to me.’
Nor did the intensity of the king’s education entirely stifle his broader development. Though his childhood was comparatively solitary, he was not, for example, without companions of his own age, the closest of whom was John Erskine – the young Earl of Mar – whom he nicknamed Jockie o’ Sclaittis (pronounced slates) in recognition of his knack for mathematics. There was also John Murray, a nephew of the Countess of Mar, Walter Stewart (a distant relative) and Lord Inverhyle. And though the rough and tumble of normal boyhood games was off-putting to James, it is not insignificant, perhaps, that so many of his early portraits depict him with a hawk on his wrist or that a beautiful hawking glove was gifted to him. There were many presents of bows and arrows, too, as well as two golfing gloves. But in spite of his undoubted physical awkwardness, it was his love of horses and hunting that came to dominate his leisure. Two relations of the Earl of Mar, David and Adam Erskine (lay Abbots of Cambuskenneth) were employed to train him, and in early life he acquired a passion for stag hunting, which would never desert him, notwithstanding a loose seat in the saddle and poor hands that may have caused his near death in the summer of 1580 when his mount fell upon him. Last but not least (and somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, in light of his reputation for ungainliness), he was also a competent dancer in childhood. ‘They also made his Highness dance before me,’ observed Killigrew, ‘which he likewise did with a very good grace.’ And the encouraging hand behind this particular aptitude was, it seems, none other than the redoubtable old Buchanan himself.
But if James’s everyday circumstances were not, then, quite so pathetic and bleak as is frequently suggested, the political circumstances of his early childhood were altogether a different matter. The upheavals of Queen Mary’s reign, which had awoken old feuds and created new ones among the Scots nobility, and finally forced her into flight in 1568, were followed not by peace but by five years of civil war. Both she and her supporters refused to recognise her deposition or the legality of her son’s government, and though these wars left him untouched physically, they created nevertheless an insidious atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity, as the Earl of Moray and the three regents who followed him attempted to protect the Protestant settlement and alliance with England over twelve troubled years. One of those regents – James’s own grandfather, the Earl of Lennox – would become the victim of a sudden raid on Stirling by Marian lords, and James would recall years later how the earl was borne into the castle and died the same day. It was not for nothing, perhaps, that James was said to have been ‘nourished in fear’, beset, in his own words, by ‘daily tempests of innumerable dangers’, or that in 1605, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, he would explain that his ‘fearful nature’ had been with him ‘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’.
In August 1567 Moray had made a characteristically well-timed return from England to exploit the growing chaos in his homeland. Already invited to become regent by the rebel lords, this cold, calculating and double-dealing individual would not accept the role until he had visited his half-sister at Loch Leven, where he fuelled her fears and posed as her only saviour from trial and the subsequent ‘fiery death’, which she believed was bound to follow from the publication of her letters to Bothwell. In this way, he was able to assume the regency at nothing less than the urgent request of both sides, while also retaining the support of his patron, Elizabeth, south of the Border. ‘That bastard’, as King James called him later, ‘who unnaturally rebelled and procured the ruin of his owne sovran and sister’, then proceeded to sell the English queen the majority of those very pearls that Mary had delivered into his hands for safe-keeping, while giving most of the remainder to his wife. To complete his betrayal, moreover, one of his first acts as regent was to order that the Casket Letters be read aloud to the Scottish Parliament and their handwriting authenticated to preclude any likelihood of the former queen’s restoration.
Even so, Moray’s problems were far from over. In particular, he was forced to contend with the bitter enmity of the powerful Hamilton and Gordon families who, with their great following of warlike dependants, continued to support the queen. And when Mary finally escaped from Loch Leven in May 1568, it was they who not only welcomed her, but endorsed her revocation of the abdication and prepared to do battle with Moray and the ‘True Lords Maintainers of the King’s Majesty’s action and authority’. But notwithstanding the queen’s apparently inexhaustible supply of personal magnetism, Moray moved swiftly to corner her in the south-west before her forces could gather in overwhelming force. The result was victory for the regent at Langside, and a disastrous decision by his sister – taken against the advice of her closest advisers – to abandon the fight and cross the Border at Workington to seek sanctuary within England, where she would remain a constant, overwhelming threat to her royal cousin Elizabeth and, in consequence, face various forms of house arrest, humiliation and harsh imprisonment for the rest of her life.
In Scotland, thereafter, the queen’s cause encountered a slow death over five more years, which merely perpetuated the rancour and insecurity of the new reign. In 1573 Huntly and the Hamiltons surrendered at last, and only Edinburgh Castle held out under Kirkcaldy of Grange and Maitland of Lethington who had been forced at last to come down on Mary’s side, since she possessed the only absolute proof that he had been ‘art and part of Darnley’s murder’. That same year the walls of the castle were at last breached with guns borrowed from England and the remnants of the former queen’s support finally mopped up. Grange, one of the few truly honourable men around, was hanged, while Lethington, already a very sickly man, may well have killed himself rather than face trial.
Before that time, however, the Earl of Moray was already cold in the grave, along with two more of his successors. For all his mendacity, perhaps in part because of it, the earl remained a more than capable statesman who bolstered the king’s authority, consolidated the progress of Protestantism and sought to cement relations with Scotland’s southern neighbour by looking ultimately towards the union of the two Crowns. At the time of his coronation, James had been unacknowledged by a sizeable proportion of his subjects, but by the end of Moray’s regency, he was appreciably nearer to acceptance – not least of all because it was Moray who guaranteed that the Queen of Scots was firmly imprisoned once and for all in England. And in the meantime, the earl’s desire for peace and good government had actually won him the respect and even the love of the majority of Scottish people who dubbed him, it seems, ‘the Good Regent’. Even in the lawless Borders, for that matter, ‘there was’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘such obedience made by the said thieves to the said regent, as the like was never done to no king in no man’s day before’.
Yet if harsh times necessitated harsh government, they also spawned the kind of grudges and gangsterism that eventually brought Moray to his doom. And almost inevitably, therefore, he was assassinated at Linlithgow on 23 January 1570, by his enemy James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh who had already stalked him from Glasgow to Stirling and finally ‘pierced him with one ball, under the navel, quitt through’. Though Moray had ‘leapt from his horse and walked to his lodging on foot’, the initial optimism of the surgeons proved ill founded and he ‘gave up the ghost’, we are told, ‘that same night’, mourned as the ‘defender of the widow and the fatherless’ and revered by John Knox who preached his funeral sermon on the text ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord’. And while James himself would never accept such glowing judgements of his uncle, there was still no doubt that the king’s interests had been desperately compromised by the death.
There followed, indeed, six months of civil war and large-scale Border raids, which culminated ultimately in a muddy compromise that pleased no one. For no good reason beyond lack of alternatives, therefore, it was the king’s grandfather – the elderly, treacherous and nominally Catholic Duke of Lennox – who assumed the role of regent. Widely believed to have ordered a massacre of children many years previously, which had left him unable to endure his own conscience, the former exile and father of Darnley was thoroughly mistrusted by Protestants for his religious views, and vilified, too, by Catholics for his present opposition to Mary, which had finally earned him the assistance of England in securing his new role. Only James himself, in fact, seems to have harboured any real affection for the duke who was now widely dismissed as the ‘sillie Regent’. And in 1572 he too paid the ultimate price for Scotland’s present divisions – fatally wounded during a wild raid on Stirling, conceived by Kirkcaldy of Grange and led by the Earl of Huntly and Lord Claud Hamilton.
Leaving Edinburgh just after sunset on 3 September, the raiders reached Stirling with the first grey light of dawn, when the town was still in the silence of sleep, ‘so quiet as not a dog was heard to open his mouth and bark’. Whether their intention was to kidnap the king remains uncertain, but the violence, clamour and general disorder that followed would certainly leave their own indelible imprint upon both the boy and the man he would later become. In the initial onslaught, a dozen of the king’s lords, rudely awoken by the war cries, the clattering of horses’ hooves and the clash of weapons quickly submitted to demands that they should ‘render themselves’. Among them was Lennox. But the tide was eventually turned, first by the Earl of Morton’s resistance, who defended his burning residence until ‘two of his men were slain and the lodging filled with smoke’, and then by the Earl of Mar who sallied forth from the castle with a handful of harquebusiers and ‘set upon the attackers, who then realised that all was lost’.
Lennox, in fact, had first surrendered to David Spence, Laird of Wormeston, on condition that he be spared, but the laird’s guarantee, honestly given, proved worthless in the noisy chaos that now prevailed. ‘So afraitt that they took the flight, and going out at the port trod upon others for throng’, the raiders were attempting to make off with their captives, when a certain Captain Calder discharged his gun into Lennox’s back, leaving the valiant Wormeston, who was ‘shott through also’ with the same bullet, to be dragged from his horse and hacked to pieces, while the dying regent ‘cryed continually’ that the man ‘who had done what he could for his preservation’ should not be killed. His only other concern, it seems, was the safety of the king. ‘If the bairn be well, all is well,’ he is said to have muttered after he had been returned to the castle, slumped in his saddle, for the last time.
The king was, indeed, unharmed, though not unmoved. For the clash of naked steel, the clatter of firearms, the acrid smell of burning timber, the frenzied cries of anguish and fury, and the general buzz of danger that accompanied them had not eluded him. On the contrary, the memories of that night of gunfire and confusion would remain with him – and none more so than the image of his wounded grandfather carried directly past him to the bed where he died later that afternoon. When Lennox ‘called for a physician, one for his soul and another for his body’, it marked the end not only of his brief regency but of his grandson’s innocence, as bars now went up over the windows of his apartments and elaborate measures were devised to surround him whenever he rode out. Henceforth, more than ever, he was brought up under a blanket of suspicion and unease, for fear of what ‘the lords of the Queen, his mother’ might do at any moment. For a studious, sensitive and imaginative child, who lacked the physical resources to outface the savage, unruly men whom God had called him to govern, the prospect was truly daunting.
Within the year, moreover, the duke’s successor John Erskine, Earl of Mar was also dead. An honourable, grave and mainly peaceable man, Mar may well have died of simple exhaustion, outright desperation or a mixture of both. One contemporary suggested that the main cause of his ‘vehement sickness’ was that ‘he loved peace and could not have it’. But there were whispers, too, of poison, administered by the very man who replaced him: James Douglas, Earl of Morton – in some respects the most blackguardly of all the former queen’s enemies, but a strong ruler nevertheless who, for all his ruthlessness and lack of scruples, would eventually gain the king’s respect. Often intimidated by the fourth and last of his regents, James still acknowledged that ‘no nobleman’s service in Scotland was to be compared to Morton’s’. There may even have been a shred of affection on the king’s part for the fearsome earl, for on one occasion when Morton bemoaned his advancing years, James’s response was as kindly as it was sincere. ‘Would to God you were as young as the Earl of Angus [Morton’s nephew] and yet were as wise as you.’
For six years of Morton’s regency, moreover, James remained unmolested – at liberty to pursue his studies under Buchanan’s guidance while regaining some modicum of inner peace after the murder of his grandfather. Even his enemy, Sir James Melville, who rightly regarded Morton as avaricious and much too fond of the English, acknowledged that ‘he held the country under great obedience in an established state’. And if tyranny rather than pity or remorse was his trademark, it was only by tyranny, after all, that Scotland could for the moment be governed. Yet by the spring of 1578 a formidable coalition had formed against him, led by the Highland earls of Atholl and Argyll, and the quiet routine of the king’s schoolroom was once more rudely interrupted. Appearing at Stirling on 4 March, the two earls explained to James that they wished him to summon the nobility to judge a dispute between them and the regent, who was presently in Edinburgh. When, however, Morton responded by demanding that the king must either punish the earls or accept his resignation, his boldness backfired, since a formidable body of lords at Stirling, supported by the king’s guardian, Alexander Erskine, quickly advised the young monarch to adopt the latter course. ‘The king,’ it was said, ‘liking best the persuasions that were given to him to reign (a thing natural to princes), resolution was taken to discharge the regent of authority and to publish the King’s acceptance of government.’
But while Morton temporarily retired to Loch Leven to tend his gardens and on 8 March the 12-year-old monarch was formally installed at the head of his council table, the counter-revolution was not long in coming. Cleverly exploiting family tensions to persuade James’s former playmate, the young Earl of Mar, that his uncle, Erskine, should be supplanted, Morton had stirred an ingenious coup de main even before April was out. As Mar took control of the castle, the king was once more woken in the small hours by the clash of arms in the castle courtyard and filled with uncontrollable terror when word reached him that Erskine, whom he loved, had been killed. In fact, the news was false, though his son was trampled to death in the confusion and the king remained inconsolable. ‘He was in great fear,’ wrote Sir Robert Bowes, the English ambassador, ‘and teared his hair, saying that the Master [Erskine] was slain.’ And his distress was soon compounded by the realisation that Morton had swiftly ridden to the scene to assume control of government once more.
There followed a brief flurry of threatened civil war as Morton began to raise an army and the people of Edinburgh turned out under a banner depicting a boy behind bars, with the motto ‘Liberty I crave and cannot have it’. The king’s mother, too, was eager to interfere from her confinement in England as she intrigued with her uncle, the Duke of Guise, to remove her son to France, yet English influence remained dominant and foiled not only Mary’s madcap schemes but the prospect, too, of civil war in Scotland. Even George Buchanan featured, to the tune of £100, on Elizabeth’s list of prominent Scottish nobles and gentlemen to be bribed in her kingdom’s interest, though Peter Young alone chose to reject the £30 earmarked for him. When, therefore, the English ambassador intervened with the offer of a patched-up compromise whereby Morton gave up the regency in return for ‘first roome and place’ in the Privy Council, with Atholl next in dignity, even Argyll complied with the arrangement. Nor was there any appreciable resistance from Erskine whose earlier flash of resistance had been broken by grief at the death of his son.
On 16 April, however, there was one more dastardly footnote when Morton delivered a great banquet at Stirling to which all his current allies and erstwhile enemies were invited, among them Atholl, who left the celebration ‘very sick and ill at ease’, in much the same way that Regent Mar had left a previous banquet of Morton’s at Dalkeith. Just like Mar before him, moreover, Atholl was soon to die amid rampant rumours of poisoning. When subjected to persistent ‘rhyming libells’ that he was the culprit, the earl’s initial response was merely to hang the unlucky authors. But such was the persistence of the Countess of Atholl that he was obliged to sanction a post mortem, which proved a drama in its own right. Conducted by several eminent doctors, only one physician, a certain Dr Preston, saw fit to dismiss the charge of poisoning, though in doing so he opted for a method of proof that would cost him dear. For, as a masterful expression of scorn at his colleagues’ conclusions, he decided to lick the contents of the corpse’s stomach ‘and having tasted a little of it with his tongue, almost had died, and was after, so long as he lived, sicklie’.
Such, then, was the flavour of Scottish politics as James VI neared adolescence. Nevertheless, Morton’s rivals remained temporarily hamstrung, though the king himself had already fluttered his fledgling wings and failed to fly. Now, therefore, for one more year at least, he would have to shelter in his classroom refuge and brood upon the violence that had once more broken his slumbers. He was silent and outwardly compliant, but anxious nonetheless for change and troubled by his prospects. For, as Bowes noted in the aftermath of Morton’s coup, ‘his Grace by night hath been by this means so discouraged as in his sleep he is therefore greatly disquieted’.