3
‘His Majesty, having conceived an inward affection to the Lord d’Aubigny, entered in great familiarity and quiet purposes with him.’
David Moysie, Memoirs of the Affairs of
Scotland, 1577–1603
Though James’s first attempt at independence had been roundly frustrated, it preceded nonetheless the onset of a marked alteration in his status – a subtle but decisive sea change in his role and influence, which saw him transformed by turns from a regent’s plaything into the outright guide and instigator of his kingdom’s affairs. By the time of his thirteenth birthday in June 1579 – within only fourteen months of Morton’s ‘triumph’ – the lords of Scotland, and in particular the former regent himself, were having to accept the inevitable: that the helpless child of yesteryear was growing older and that, for all his previous frailty, he was plainly king by God’s decree. To confirm the point officially, on 17 October James made formal entry into the capital, where he was greeted at the West Port by a pageant depicting King Solomon rendering judgement. It was his first visit in more than a decade, and provosts, baillies and councillors turned out in force to greet him, along with 300 prominent citizens clad in silks and velvet. At the port of the Strait Bow, a boy descended from a great globe to present the king with a set of massive silver keys to the city worth 6,000 marks, while Latin orations, stirring sermons and music from viols flowed as freely as the puncheons of wine at the Mercat Cross. From Canongate to Holyrood, the front of every house was draped with fine tapestries and, to cap all, further pageants celebrated the genealogy of Scotland’s kings and the favourable conjunction of the planets at James’s nativity. It was, in short, a spectacle fit for any ruler – not only a heartfelt statement of civic pride, but, much more important still, a clear-cut sign of changing times and an equally emphatic rite of passage for a freshly empowered king.
James, it is true, remained separated from most of those who had originally set him against Morton. But by no means all Morton’s enemies were gone, for the council was still an uneasy coalition which contained some, like Argyll, who were reconciled only in appearance to the present status quo. These dissenters were keen, moreover, to find a suitable replacement for Atholl – a figure acceptable to both the king and those who still favoured his mother. And across the Channel in Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny, they found not only someone to alter the entire situation in Scotland radically, but a figure who was to exercise a profound influence upon the king’s whole life. Any alternative to Morton was by now, after all, infinitely attractive and d’Aubigny’s nearness in blood to the king was a distinct recommendation, as was his right to the earldom of Lennox which made his arrival in Scotland inevitable sooner or later. The fact that he was more French than Scottish, Catholic and something of a moral reprobate into the bargain was neatly overlooked. ‘The King has written to summon his cousin the Lord d’Aubigny from France,’ the Bishop of Ross noted in a letter dated 15 May, before adding in all apparent innocence that he was ‘a man of sound judgement and marked prudence, a constant upholder of the Catholic religion, and one whom the king is anxious to have at his side’.
For nearly two centuries, in fact, the Lennox Stuarts had held lands and titles on either side of the Channel, rendering distinguished service as soldiers and diplomats to the kings of both France and Scotland, but especially the latter. As the son of John Stuart, brother of James’s grandfather and former regent, the Earl of Lennox, Esmé Stuart was therefore first cousin to Lord Darnley. And although his ostensible aim upon his arrival in September 1579 was the re-establishment of his family’s Scottish position as the last male representative of his line, his real intent was altogether more sinister. As the secret agent of the Guises, he would win, he hoped, the confidence of the king, promote the cause of France and Mary Stuart – by whom he had been given ‘fourtie thousand pieces of gold, in crowns, pistolets [coins] and angels’ for use at the Scottish court – and save the Catholic faith before it was too late. Such was his gift for deception and intrigue that before long he would declare himself a convert to Protestantism and play an astonishing series of double games, not only with Guise, Mary and the Catholic powers, but with Elizabeth of England and the Scottish Kirk as well. Yet one consistent thread ran through the machinations of this fascinating but sinister figure all the while: the pursuit of personal ambition. And once established, though not unmindful of his original mission, he soon discovered that his control over the king’s affections had infinitely more to offer than the favour of France or Spain, the interests of the old religion, or, even more obviously, the vanishing hopes of the former queen.
For more than a decade the ministers of the Scottish Kirk, propped up by a body of powerful and unscrupulous nobles, had maintained a deceptive dominance in Scotland, which poorly reflected the wishes of even most Protestants. Catholicism, in fact, had collapsed largely by default under the strain of a series of weaknesses, structural and circumstantial, which had left it easy prey to its enemies. The remoteness of the centres of Catholic power in the north and west, on the one hand, coupled to the calamity of Mary Stuart’s example, the collapse of France into religious civil war and, perhaps most of all, English interference, had all taken a mighty toll, and the lands of the old Church had been readily seized, along with four-fifths of her revenues, by the ever-watchful Lords of the Congregation. But the subsequent Presbyterian settlement, pushed through by Knox and his fellow zealots, was far from universally welcome. Nor did the English alliance it entailed or its dependence upon ruffians like Morton enhance the new Kirk’s moral authority. Starved of funds and short of educated recruits, it could actually find no more than 289 ministers for Scotland’s 1,000 parishes, and in such circumstances, it was far from inconceivable that the Counter-Reformation might yet gain a foothold or that the ‘auld alliance’ with France might still be revived – especially if the king himself could first be won to d’Aubigny and then to Rome.
The dashing French courtier’s arrival could not therefore have been better timed, since James, at the age of 13, was maturing both politically and physically, if not emotionally. At that moment, as Morton’s stifling authority waned, any influence exerted over the king might indeed prove decisive, and none more so than the easy-going, affectionate glamour which Esmé Stuart exhibited in such abundance. A man of great personal magnetism around 37 years old – ‘of comely proportion’, ‘civil behaviour’ and ‘honest’ conversation – this elegant, red-bearded visitor, whose piercing black eyes spoke eloquently of his Italian ancestry, brought colour, amusement and gaiety to the dour Scottish court. He delivered civilisation and learning, too, of the kind that contrasted starkly with Buchanan’s bleak instruction and was bound to appeal to the scholarly young king. The cultural amenities at Stirling were, after all, limited to say the least. As a concession to gentility, the Scottish Parliament had funded the employment of four fiddlers at the castle and this, in effect, was the limit of James’s exposure to the frills of high refinement. D’Aubigny and his train of twenty gentlemen, however, brought with them not only grace and elegance, but respect and deference in the sharpest possible contrast to Morton’s gruff and Spartan realism. Above all, however, as events would prove, they brought intimacy and love.
James’s weak physique, shambling gait and slovenly manners left much to be desired, of course. But an earlier attack of smallpox had left him unscarred and his appearance was generally considered ‘not uncomely’. According to Sir Henry Killigrew’s description of 1574, indeed, he was ‘well grown, both in body and spirit’. Even kings, however – especially those as perceptive as James – are sometimes capable of grasping realities and reflecting upon their own limitations. And James was no physical paragon. But the newcomer who now doted upon him was all this and more – so much so that even his potential enemies were at first wholly taken with him. Sir James Melville, for instance, thought him ‘upright, just and gentle’, and though he spoke only French and made little attempt to learn ‘Scottis’, even the hard-edged Scottish nobility were soon won over, in the main, to what John Spottiswoode called his ‘courteous and modest behaviour’. And if d’Aubigny could allure even ministers of the Scottish Kirk, how much more susceptible to his attention would be the awkward, graceless youth upon whom he had set his sights?
Certainly, the Frenchman’s rise to influence was instantaneous. Indeed, by the time that James made his grand ‘entrie to his kingdome’ at Edinburgh in October, he had already insisted that d’Aubigny accompany him, and honours followed thick and fast. Given first the rich Abbey of Arbroath and a sizeable endowment from the Hamilton lands forfeited after Mary’s final downfall, he was then created Earl of Lennox in 1580 after his ineffectual uncle Robert was encouraged to renounce the title in exchange for that of March. He was admitted, too, to the council, awarded custody of Dumbarton Castle – the key to western Scotland and gateway to France – and before long had become both Lord Chamberlain, responsible for the king’s safety, and First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Most important of all, however, on 5 August 1581, he was finally made Duke of Lennox – the only duke in Scotland at that time and the first in Scottish history, apart from Bothwell, not to be a ‘prince of the blood’. ‘Lennox’s greatness is greatly increased,’ wrote Robert Bowes, ‘and the king so much affected to him that he delights only in his company.’ ‘Thereby,’ Bowes added, ‘Lennox carries the sway.’
And as the duke’s star ascended, so Morton’s, of course, continued to wane, though he remained curiously unmoved at first by the mounting threat. Predictably, the preachers of the Kirk were from the outset deeply suspicious of the ‘papistes with great ruffs and side bellows’ that Lennox carried in tow with him. But, as the king continually hung on his favourite’s shoulder and fiddled with his fine clothes and jewels as they walked together, Morton appears to have dismissed the spectacle as little more than a boyish enthusiasm – a passing fad resulting from ‘the flexible nature of the king in these tender years’. In forsaking the regency and pushing the king to the political forefront as the figurehead for his own power and policies, he had in any case burned his bridges. In October 1579, just after his triumphal entry into Edinburgh, James had presided over Parliament and formally presented himself as the governor of his kingdom in his own right. And though Morton continued to pull the strings, the prospect of any return to a regency had gone forever. More ominously, however, by May 1580 the earl had retired in frustration to his estates at Dalkeith gathering his friends about him, while the English ambassador whispered in turn of the king’s ‘great myslyknge’ for his former regent.
Nevertheless, throughout 1580 the holiday atmosphere continued, though events were steadily darkening behind the scenes. While James stayed at Holyrood, Lennox was even prepared to undertake some informal instruction in Calvinism at the king’s hands, seeing the plain advantage that such a move might yield with the Kirk’s preachers, many of whom were apparently ‘much overtaken with the conceytt of his reformation’. By May, indeed, Lennox had officially committed himself to the new faith at St Giles in Edinburgh before returning to Stirling and signing the so-called ‘Articles of Religion’ in the Chapel Royal. Naturally, his action was dismissed by many as a cynical manoeuvre. ‘Those who wish to rule,’ Mauvissière, the French ambassador in London commented at the time, ‘must learn to conceal themselves.’ But Lennox would die a Protestant and his conversion captured the king entirely – so much so that the two travelled together on progress around the kingdom that summer.
In the meantime, the impending showdown between Morton and his supplanter edged ever closer. In England, Elizabeth and Burleigh were increasingly alarmed at the prospect of Franco-Scottish reconciliation, and the queen hinted to James for the first time that he might succeed her as king, while advising him ‘rather to fear for his ambition than to comfort and delight his affection’. She encouraged Morton, too, to ‘lay violent hands’ on Lennox and sent Bowes north once again to galvanise the Protestant lords into some kind of effective action. In a secret midnight meeting with the former regent, the ambassador learned how the king was indeed beginning ‘to commend and be contented to hear the praises of France’. And as rumours of kidnapping mounted once more, James also revealed a new and curious turn of mind. When Argyll spread word that Morton was bent on abducting him to Dalkeith, the king swiftly abandoned his hunting and returned to Stirling. Lacking the resources to fund a permanent armed guard, he was, after all, sorely exposed – especially as his councillors’ attendance was irregular, since they too lacked funds and had to pay their own charges while they remained at court. But now, as Bowes noted, the king was more convinced of his ability to frustrate his enemies, since ‘into whose hands soever he should fall, they should note in him such inconstancy, perjury and falsehood’ that they would swiftly regret their action. Plainly, the king had learnt an important lesson from past experience, but in doing so he had also drawn a suspect moral conclusion for the future.
The opportunity for kidnap or any other decisive act of self-preservation on Morton’s part had, however, already passed, for he was, it seems, ‘loved by none and envied and hated by many, so that they all looked through their fingers to see his fall’. When James conducted his leisurely royal progress that summer, with Lennox and a bevy of loyal lords in attendance, Morton was left behind, laid up with a leg injury after a horse had kicked him. And when the embattled earl, ‘indifferently well recovered’, finally joined the king at St Andrews, where a convention of the Scottish Estates was due to assemble, he received a harrowing warning from the most unlikely of quarters. At a play performed before the king at the New Inns of the Abbey, a mad seaman – ‘a known phrenetick man’ who, Morton was convinced, could not have been put up to it – warned him that a plot was afoot and his ‘doom in dressing’. Always susceptible to superstitious fears, the earl remembered, no doubt, how ‘a lady who was his whore’ had already shown him ‘the answers of the oracles’ and told him ‘that the king would be his ruin’. And both the sailor and the whore would now be proven right.
Weary of his self-interest, even the Kirk had grown disillusioned with its former champion, and the English, too, who had previously seen the earl as such a worthwhile asset, now hesitated, relying on threats and intrigue when only armed assistance would do. When Bowes warned James of the dangers involved in preferring ‘any Earl of Lennox before a Queen of England’, however, and demanded that his favourite be removed from the Privy Council, the Scottish king’s alarm was nevertheless palpable, whereupon the only remaining question was how the blow to Morton might be delivered most conveniently – and profitably. For Lennox, with typical Gallic finesse, now devised a masterstroke not only to remove his enemy, but to do so in a way that suited both his French patrons and the former queen more admirably than even they might have hoped. The method would involve raising the ghost of Darnley from its sordid resting place, while the instrument for the dirty work in hand was to be not Lennox himself, but a bold, ambitious opportunist who had been hovering watchfully about the court for some years past.
The murder of the king’s father at Kirk o’ Field more than a decade earlier was, of course, fertile ground for any ill-intentioned intriguer. Still mired with mystery and wrapped in rumour, any number of candidates might plausibly be connected with the deed and countless ‘witnesses’ found to attest to order. In the event, it was Sir James Balfour, brother of the owner of Kirk o’ Field, and himself a suspect, who now came forward to furnish the evidence that finally did for Morton. Claiming to possess the bond signed by the conspirators, and assuring Lennox that Morton’s signature was on it, Balfour had provided the duke with a tool that would finally exonerate the former queen from any involvement and, in doing so, both heartily relieve her son and place the English in serious embarrassment at her current treatment. With James Stewart, Captain of the King’s Guard – a newly formed body of sixty men at arms, specially commissioned by Lennox – more than willing to undertake the task, all was set for Morton’s final erasure.
Gloriously self-assured, splendidly handsome and exuding what might best be described as a coarse variety of magnificence, Stewart, the son of Lord Ochiltree, revelled in his courage and resolution and ‘thought no man his equal’. He was, moreover, as capable as he was confident – intelligent, educated and, no less importantly, politically astute. And his connections with John Knox, who at the age of almost 60 had married his sister, also gave Stewart a cachet of sorts with the Kirk. But his swaggering conceit and single-minded brutality had already earned him the suspicion of many and hatred of some. To Sir James Melville, who detested him, he was ‘a scorner of all religion, presumptuous, ambitious, covetous, careless of the commonwealth, a despiser of the nobility, and of all honest men’. His confederates, too, were aware of his baser motives. Even Lennox, for that matter, was conscious that his henchman in what now followed was ‘eager to win credit by what means soever’.
Nor would the king pass up his own duplicitous part in the tawdry circumstances of Morton’s downfall. On 30 December, the former regent was taken hunting by James and treated cordially throughout the day. Upon their return that evening, indeed, the lily was perfectly gilded by the canny youth, who delighted increasingly, it seems, in the finer points of double-dealing. ‘Father,’ he told his quarry, ‘only you have reared me, and I will therefore defend you from your enemies.’ Whether Morton had somehow elicited the comment by expressing his concerns is unknown, but soon enough the hollowness of James’s assurance was starkly exposed. For only the next day, during a meeting of the Privy Council at which the king was personally present, Captain Stewart burst into the room, fell on his knees before his sovereign, and pointing histrionically at Morton, accused him of being ‘art and part for knowledge and concealing’ of Darnley’s murder. When, moreover, Morton dismissed him as the ‘perjured tool’ of his enemies, uproar ensued with both men grasping their swords whilst being held apart by Lords Cathcart and Lindsay.
In the meantime, Lennox had feigned incomprehension at the furious exchange conducted in a foreign tongue. But his purposes had been served to perfection. The king, now thoroughly implicated in the whole affair, made no move whatsoever on behalf of Morton, who was duly arrested and eventually removed to Dumbarton, where he became not the first to declare that ‘if he had been as upright to his God as he was faithful to his prince, he had not been brought to this pinch’. Thereafter, on 1 June 1581, he was tried and condemned in Edinburgh and executed the next day. In the process, he admitted foreknowledge and concealment, but declared Bothwell to be Darnley’s principal murderer. And though the Queen of England had sent 2,000 men to the Border to save him, her young Scottish counterpart, revelling in his newfound confidence, brazenly outfaced her. ‘Though he be young,’ wrote Thomas Randolph the English emissary, before being sent packing by a pistol shot through his window, ‘he wants neither words nor answers to anything said to him.’
Morton’s Douglas kinsmen under the Earl of Angus, meanwhile, had plotted only half-heartedly to save him, and though the condemned earl conducted himself bravely throughout his ordeal – claiming as he mounted the scaffold that he was ‘entering into the felicity of Almighty God’ – only a few members of the Kirk would ever mourn him. Indeed, the night before he was beheaded by the so-called ‘Maiden’ (an early prototype of the guillotine) that he had earlier brought from Halifax for his own nefarious purposes, he had written letters to James defending his conduct, ‘but the king would not look upon them, nor take heed what they said; but ranged up and down the floor of his chamber, clanking with his finger and thumb’.
Not surprisingly, when Elizabeth heard of James’s betrayal of his erstwhile regent her fury was undisguised, deriding him as ‘that false Scotch urchin’ from whom only ‘double dealing’ could be expected. And while the Scottish king might rightly bridle at the ‘urchin’ epithet, the second claim in the queen’s outburst was hardly deniable. The circumstances of his childhood had, of course, already taught him cunning but, in procuring Morton’s ruin, Lennox had also taught him to regard the practice of duplicity as something much more: a necessary skill and intellectual art, if not outright virtue. ‘The king’s fair speeches and premises,’ wrote an English noble, ‘will fall out to be plain dissimulation, wherein he is in his tender years better practised than others forty years older than he is.’ He ‘is holden among the Scots for the greatest dissembler that ever was heard of for his years’. And Lennox was attempting to teach him too, perhaps, that condign justice gave little cause for regret. For though James had commuted the verdict that Morton should be hanged, drawn and quartered, and was absent from the execution, Lennox’s supporters showed few such qualms. Indeed, Lord Seton ‘stood in a stair’ close by, while Ker of Fernihurst, gained the best view of all ‘in a shott over against the scaffold, with his large ruffs, delighting in this spectacle …’
To James’s credit, this last lesson was never lasting, if ever learned at all, though there were others delivered up by Lennox that would indeed prove permanent. It was under Lennox’s influence, for instance, that the king came to scorn the more radical elements of the Scottish Reformation as anti-monarchical rebels against properly constituted authority, and, more generally, to question the broadly democratic principles that George Buchanan had been so keen to imbue in him. From this time forth, the Scottish clergy became to James what the Huguenots were to his French counterparts – seditious disturbers of the peace. In that time of confusion, the king would write, ‘some fiery-spirited men in the ministry got such a guiding of the people as finding the gust of government sweet they began to fancy a democratic form of government’. He was made to think evil, wrote the minister James Melville, against those who served him best and to regard the Reformation as ‘done by a privy faction turbulently’. And in this regard Lennox would also, it seems, frequently discuss the absolutism of the King of France and emphasise its virtues, working along with Captain James Stewart, another driven by his own self-interested purposes, to encourage the king to assert his God-given authority more stridently. Suppressed and disregarded for so long, and treated hitherto like a chattel of the high and mighty – a political talisman to be controlled and brandished at convenience by contending rivals – it is easy to see how an impressionable 15 year old might well have reacted to such advice and adulation.
The Kirk, after all, had been flexing its muscles more and more stridently, and in James’s current state of growing confidence, it was hardly surprising that he should listen so readily to more gratifying alternatives. John Knox had set the mould in the first instance by affirming in his own inimitable way that the laws of God, needing no confirmation from any king or parliament, were to guide the state, and that kings who resisted the Kirk’s injunctions should be swept from office. Under the pressures of practical politics, however, Andrew Melville, who led the Kirk in James’s reign adapted the strongly theocratic emphasis in Knox’s thinking into what would become known as the ‘doctrine of the two kingdoms’, whereby secular authority should be exercised by the reigning monarch, while the clergy assumed sole responsibility for religious affairs. On this view, all spiritual authority flowed from God the Father through Jesus Christ the Mediator directly to his Kirk, by-passing entirely both king and state, since the Kirk had ‘no temporal head on earth, but only Christ, the only spiritual king and governor of his Kirk’. The king, therefore, had no higher place within the Kirk itself than any private person and must obey the clergy in all matters of the spirit.
By 1581, moreover, with the publication of the Second Book of Discipline, the authority of the secular ruler was being further undermined. For now the king was encouraged to follow the clergy’s advice even in matters that had hitherto been deemed his own. ‘The ministers,’ it was still accepted, ‘exercise not the civil jurisdiction.’ But the new departure was apparent in the proposal that they should nevertheless ‘teach the magistrate’ how that jurisdiction should be exercised, and in the further claim that ‘all godly princes and magistrates ought to hear and obey’. To compound the king’s frustration, the same radical ministers were conducting a steady assault on the authority of his bishops. Calvinism, after all, plainly asserted the equality of all pastors and called for church government through an ascending structure of presbyteries, synods and General Assemblies. Bishops in any form were, from this perspective, symbols of Roman error and instruments of royal tyranny – the king’s agents in controlling and perverting the exercise of God’s true design for his people. No monarch, however, could lightly accept such an assault upon his prerogative and, under the influence of his new friends, James was therefore quick to seize upon what he eventually termed in 1604 the ‘No bishop, no king’ principle – a notion that would have such significant long-term consequences.
It was not coincidental either that James’s relationship with his mother appeared to warm significantly after Lennox’s arrival. As a boy he had always resented Buchanan’s spiteful attacks upon her reputation and continued to exhibit a sentimental interest in her story. Now, however, he equated criticism of his mother with the more general assault upon royal authority in progress at that time, and in 1584 he prevailed upon Parliament to condemn his elderly tutor’s writings formally. Years later, too, he would advise his son to read history but not ‘such infamous invectives as Buchanan’s and Knox’s chronicles’. Nor, he urged, should his son countenance malicious words against his predecessors, since those who speak ill of a king ‘seek craftily to stain the race and to steal the affection of the people from their posterity’. He had found his most loyal servants, he added, among those who had been faithful to his mother – once again combining filial devotion with notions of loyalty to the Crown and hatred of all challenges to the political and religious hierarchy which, in his view, guaranteed order and stability throughout the body politic.
For her part, of course, Mary was still unable to acknowledge the legality of her abdication or the resulting transfer of sovereignty to her son, and Morton’s execution had only served to heighten her hopes of rehabilitation. In 1581, therefore, she proposed the so-called ‘Association’ whereby James, who had not hitherto been recognised by the Catholic powers of Europe, should ‘demit’ the Crown to her, after which she would immediately bestow it upon him again with her full blessing. As a result, he would be universally acknowledged as King of Scotland and become joint sovereign with her while ruling the country in their joint names. And this was not all, since the former queen also suggested that her abdication be formally annulled, that James be crowned anew and that her supporters be pardoned. Catholics were to be granted liberty of worship and it was clear, too, that no important decision was to be delivered without her approval. Above all, Mary asked that her son be reconciled to Rome. Only by means of the Association, she suggested, could he ever hope to secure the English throne.
It was a scheme shot through with wild improbabilities and, as such, wholly worthy of the woman who fashioned it, but the temptations it offered were not without appeal to the young king. And though the former queen was actually coldly suspicious of Lennox and the plan itself a palpable threat to his own primacy if ever implemented, the favourite had little actual option but to mask his concerns and indulge the queen’s machinations. His links to the House of Guise, after all, made it virtually impossible to reject the Association outright, and at his instigation, therefore, James now began to correspond with Mary, writing her brief but affectionate letters, which assured her that he continued to hold her in high honour and would act at all times as her obedient son. Always a lover of animals, he referred in one instance to ‘the fidelity of my little monkey, who only moves near me’, though the strength of the renewed link between son and mother should not be measured by such disarming comments. On the contrary, the king offered no concrete concessions and though he addressed his mother as Queen of Scots, he never neglected to sign himself as ‘James R’. In fact, he seems to have been playing, at Lennox’s behest, what was becoming an increasingly familiar game of gracious deception, and in doing so he now slithered into an elaborate ruse, which would allow him (in theory) to retain his options while paying lip service at one and the same time to his obligations as son.
In the meantime, however, the king’s everyday behaviour as well as his character and relationships had gradually begun to evolve upon new and questionable lines. Though swearing was something that he severely condemned in his writings, deeming it all the more reprehensible since it was a sin ‘clothed with no delight or gain’, he nevertheless developed a habit for it and sought to justify the vice in part, so long as it sprang from sudden, unpremeditated anger. Certainly, his conscience does not seem to have troubled him unduly in this respect, for when admonished by the clergy ‘to forbear his often swearing and taking the name of God in vain’, he merely replied, ‘I thank you’ – with a little laughter. Nor was this the only vice to trouble the ministers, for now, it seems, he was sometimes remiss in attending the Kirk, no longer called for preaching at dinner and supper, and disliked to hear his shortcomings rehearsed from the pulpit. He indulged too, we are told, in pastimes on the Sabbath. And though James’s sports and entertainments were mainly innocent enough, bawdy jests became another facet of his behaviour, which accorded aptly with the declining tone of the company he now kept. Lennox’s colourful French associates were as free in their language as they were in their habits, and Captain James Stewart, soon to be rewarded with the stolen title of Earl of Arran, did nothing to moderate their influence. On the contrary, his wife, a daughter of the Catholic Atholl and now the chief lady at the Scottish court, had gained a pungent reputation for licence and immorality. Formerly married to the king’s uncle, the Earl of March, she had subsequently divorced him on grounds of impotency – or, as Moysie put it, ‘because his instrument was not guid’ – though she was pregnant at the time with Stewart’s child.
Much more significantly still, however, the king’s love for Lennox was widely thought to have contained a sexual element. Indeed, it was Lennox, according to many, who first awakened James’s lifelong interest in beautiful young men. Courtiers and ambassadors were fully aware, of course, that the king was ‘in such love’ with his favourite ‘as in the open sight of the people often he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’. But the ministers of the Kirk were also ready to suggest that the relationship had passed beyond affection and that Lennox had ‘provoked’ the king ‘to the pleasure of the flesh’ and drawn him to ‘carnal lust’. And if the indignation of earnest Calvinist clergymen may be treated with due suspicion, there were other voices of the same opinion. ‘His Majesty,’ wrote the chronicler David Moysie, ‘having conceived an inward affection to the Lord d’Aubigny, entered in quiet purposes with him,’ a phrase bearing special connotations in the Scots idiom of the time. And the English clergyman John Hacket, writing many years later, reinforced the like conclusion for posterity by observing how James had clasped Lennox ‘Gratioso in the embraces of his great love above all others’.
The precise nature of the sexual relationship can never, of course, be known. But in later life, James condemnation of sodomy was certainly unwavering. Whether he accepted the biblical prohibition of this specific act only and regarded other homosexual activity as pardonable remains debatable. However, his book on kingship, Basilikon Doron, published in 1599 at a time when he was without a serious attachment to any specific male favourite, would categorise sodomy itself among those ‘horrible crimes which ye are bound in conscience never to forgive’, and thereafter he followed the same line with total and unembarrassed consistency, using the full force of English law to reinforce his opinions. Writing to Lord Burleigh, for instance, he would give a forthright directive that judges were to interpret the law rigidly and were not to issue any pardons, stating unequivocally that ‘no more colour may be left to judges to work upon their wits in that point’. And while Lennox confided to the king that he had given up his wife and children ‘to dedicate myself to you entirely’, such statements were entirely consistent with the usual conventions of the day – as, indeed, was much of the emotional excess exhibited on James’s part. Prematurely old in some respects and painfully naive in others, the king’s ability to baffle and mislead modern observers remains palpable, and even allowing for the objectivity of certain contemporary commentators, which is by no means self-evident, the precise extent of the king’s sexual involvement with Lennox remains as doubtful as ever.
In any event, the year after Morton’s death was probably the happiest of James’s life as he basked in the freedom and gaiety of the new status quo. Six pairs of fine horses, a gift from the Duke of Guise, filled him with joy, and he revelled, too, in the company of a leading light in Lennox’s entourage, a certain M. Momberneau – ‘a merry fellow, very able in body, most meet in all respects for bewitching the youth of a prince’. Not least among Momberneau’s winning accomplishments was his skill as a horseman. ‘Tuesday last,’ wrote Thomas Randolph, capturing the regular routine of James’s newly liberated existence, ‘the king ran at the ring, and, for a child, did very well. Momberneau challenged all comers. The whole afternoon and great part of the night were passed with many pleasures and great delights. The next day the king came to Edinburgh to the preaching. That afternoon he spent in like pastimes as he had done the day before.’ Meanwhile, at Leith, where he dined a few days later, a castle, derisively dubbed the ‘pope’s palace’, had been built on boats to be burnt before him for his entertainment. Horse racing on the sands followed, along with a ludicrous joust between courtiers. All, in fact, was a continual round of jollity and high spirits as James left the business of government, or what he called ‘auld men’s cummer’ to Lennox and Arran.
But such a state of affairs could not, of course, last. Predictably, the first rumours of the proposed Association between James and Mary had caused a fresh wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, in which Lennox was the principal object of suspicion. His signature of the so-called ‘Negative Confession’, which denounced ‘the usurped authority’ of the pope, ‘that Roman Anti-Christ’, had left his enemies unconvinced of the ‘frutes of his conversion’, while the composition of the pro-Lennox party in government, which contained a number of the former queen’s supporters, such as Seton, Maxwell, Fernihurst and Maitland of Lethington, only confirmed existing doubts. Worse still, the arrival of Spanish and Guisard agents during 1581 and 1582 now brought matters to a pitch, placing Lennox in the most intractable of dilemmas. For, despite the implications of the Association for his own personal influence, the mounting tide of opposition at home made the prospect of foreign assistance in a far-ranging Catholic scheme to convert the king and subdue England increasingly irresistible.
From the time of his earliest memories, in fact, James had been encouraged to set his sights upon the English succession, but for good reason Elizabeth had never acknowledged his right to the throne. When his mother, in the days of her good fortune, had pressed her royal cousin to recognise her as successor, Elizabeth had made it clear that to do so would provide a ready focus for the plots of her enemies. ‘Think you,’ she is said to have responded, ‘that I should love my own winding sheet?’ And the same reservation applied with equal force, of course, to the claims of Mary’s son. During 1581, therefore, as his own position in Scotland became increasingly fragile, Lennox suggested to James that the key to the English throne might lay not so much in Elizabeth’s approval as in her removal. If the king was prepared to compromise with his mother and accept the Catholic faith into the bargain, the rewards for both he and Lennox would be considerable. A successful Catholic invasion of England which resulted in the release by force of Mary Stuart and the deposition of Elizabeth would bring Mary and James jointly to the thrones of both Scotland and England, leaving Lennox rescued at last from his Scottish Protestant enemies.
As the plots thickened on all fronts, James meanwhile continued to exhibit both craft and coolness, committing himself to no one but entertaining overtures from, in some cases, the most unlikely of sources. In the summer of 1581, for instance, Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, dispatched two Jesuits to Scotland for a secret interview with the king, who received them cordially and gave his assurances that, though he deemed it advisable to appear pro-French in public, his heart was inclined to Spain. At the same time, however, he showed no inclination to change his religion, for early the next year the same Jesuits were mentioning a plot by Catholic noblemen to secure his conversion by force. Nor it seems, did the arrival of another Jesuit, William Crichton, yield any more progress, as Lennox’s position continued to decline steadily. Clearly, the king was prepared to probe a range of possibilities upon his favourite’s advice, but only on his own terms. And if the favourite was reduced to fear and frustration as a result, then that would have to be. For, as Mendoza made plain, Lennox’s continual troubles and terror at feeling himself in the daily presence of death were reducing him to ‘a deplorable condition’.
Even former allies now became threatening, in fact. On 22 April 1581, Captain James Stewart had been created Earl of Arran and was now firmly fixed in the king’s affections in his own right. Like Lennox, he too had good looks to recommend him, though in this case the king’s attraction was primarily psychological rather than physical, since Arran exhibited a gift for leadership and imperious mastery of events to which James’s subservient personality paid natural homage. Where Esmé Stuart offered reverence, James Stewart, by contrast, exuded raw, untempered masculinity. In some respects, the contrast between the two personalities tapped into the contrasting needs of James’s own character: on the one hand, the hankering for love and deference; on the other the wish for security and control of events. But it was still to the duke, his ‘dearest cousin’ and ‘nearest heir male’, that the king looked first and when Arran quarrelled with his rival in the winter of 1581 he found himself forbidden to attend the Chistmas celebrations at Dalkeith, which James enjoyed with Lennox instead.
Predictably, the reconciliation that occurred soon afterwards was nothing more than a matter of mutual convenience, as Lennox continued to connive with Spain and Mary, and, in doing so, courted disaster ever more freely. His schemes took no account of Franco-Spanish rivalry, and ignored both James’s deep-seated Protestantism and innate reluctance to share his throne. They underestimated, too, the very forces that had broken the king’s mother and would break him far more easily still: the volatility of the Scottish nobility and, just as important, the vengeful wrath of the Scottish Kirk. His power, after all, was based upon nothing more dependable than the doting favour of a 16-year-old king. And while James had grown in confidence and learnt some kingcraft in rapid time, he remained no match for concerted dissent and, above all, that tried and trusted trump card of Scotland’s nobility: abduction.
In attempting to encourage his Catholic allies while feathering his nest financially, therefore, Lennox now made a crucial blunder which would actually pave the way to his downfall. When Robert Montgomery, a minister at Stirling who had publicly denounced episcopal government of the Kirk, was appointed Archbishop of Glasgow under terms that left the revenues of the see in Lennox’s hands, the result was general outrage, which demonstrated all too conclusively the practical limits of royal authority. Angry deputations of ministers, threatening to excommunicate Montgomery, descended upon James, whose attempts at resistance proved painfully futile. ‘We will not suffer you,’ declared James in a forlorn attempt to outface his clergy, but the response was predictable. ‘We must obey God rather than men,’ retorted the small but fiery John Durie whom Lennox had dubbed ‘a little devil’. ‘And we pray God,’ the minister continued, ‘to remove evil company from about you. The welfare of the Kirk is your welfare; the more sharply vice is rebuked the better for you.’ Smarting and angry, the king was close to tears. But his only familiar weapons – deceit and subterfuge – were now, of course, useless. The dam had been breached and, in the process, James once again stood exposed as a raw and vulnerable youth. Nor was this the end of his chastening. For, not long afterwards, Andrew Melville preached a famous sermon in which ‘he inveighed against the bloody gully [knife] of absolute authority, whereby men intended to pull the crown off Christ’s head and to wring the sceptre out of his hand’.
Coming, as it did, at a time when James had been experiencing the first stirrings of genuine pride in his regal status, the whole experience could not have been more significant, and matters reached a harrowing crescendo when a certain ‘Seigneur Paul’, an emissary of the Duke of Guise arrived on Scottish soil. When Durie encountered the Frenchman, he responded with an act of histrionics that, for all its excess, nevertheless captured the intensity of disgust and sense of betrayal experienced by his clerical colleagues in general. Pulling his bonnet over his eyes, he declared that his eyes should not be polluted by the sight of the Devil’s messenger, and then berated James to his face – with no trace of deference or hint of restraint. James should adhere to his religion, refuse a Catholic marriage and, added Durie for good measure, keep his body unpolluted. He had, in short, misbehaved as errant children are wont to do, and now he must amend. It was a put-down of withering proportions. But what made the pill more bitter still – and the memory so indelible – was his own response. Overawed by the white heat of the minister’s invective, the king merely conceded on all points – in hushed voice and plainly broken spirits.
By now, too, the anti-Lennox faction among the nobility had grown to critical proportions. Staunch Protestants, such as Lord Lindsay and the Earl of Glencairn, were joined in conspiracy by two of Morton’s kinsmen, the Earl of Angus and Douglas of Loch Leven, as well as the new Earl of Gowrie, who had supported Lennox initially, only to balk before long at his selfishness. And when the young Earl of Mar and the 5th Earl of Bothwell lent their support, the ‘band’ of discontented nobles was complete. Emboldened by English bribes and bolstered by the Kirk’s delivery to James in July of a set of articles, denouncing his traffic with France and reliance on ‘bloody murtherers and persecutors’, the plotters shaped for action.
Nor would they have to await their opportunity long, for in the summer of 1582 James and Lennox were for once apart. The king, in fact, was hunting in Atholl, while Lennox remained in Edinburgh to preside over a court of justice in his judicial capacity as Lord Chamberlain. And on 22 August, as James was riding south once more towards Perth, he was met by Gowrie, who cordially offered him hospitality at his nearby castle of Ruthven. Suspecting that something was afoot, James ‘yet dissembled the matter’, we are told, ‘thinking to free himself the next day when he went abroad with his sports’. Next morning, however, he discovered the full extent of his predicament. For, as his departure neared, Mar and Gowrie accosted him with a list of grievances which he at first attempted to ignore. But when making for the door of the parlour in which the exchange occurred, the Master of Glamis barred his way with a leg. Storms of rage and floods of tears were unavailing. ‘Better that bairns should weep than bearded men,’ observed Glamis.
Arran, meanwhile, had foolishly chosen to ride on his own to the king’s rescue on the false assumption that he would be released on demand, whereupon he too was promptly arrested; and though Lennox ‘lurkit’ at Dumbarton throughout the autumn, ‘waiting upon opportunity’ and conceiving hopeless schemes for the king’s rescue, his cause was thoroughly lost. James, in fact, was so closely guarded that when a secret message arrived from Lennox, the bedchamber attendant who delivered it, a certain Henry Gibbe, could do so only in the privacy of the king’s ‘close stool’ or toilet. And, even then, all that James dared answer to his favourite was that he should send no more dangerous messages of this kind. In any case, only a few days after his abduction, James had been forced to sign a proclamation declaring himself a free king and wrote to Lennox ordering him to leave the country. He had, it is true, protested bitterly and continued to speak out against his oppressors. ‘His Majesty,’ wrote Sir James Melville, ‘took the matter further to heart than any man would have believed, lamenting his hard estate and mishandling by his own subjects, and how he was thought but a beast by other princes for suffering so many indignities.’ It was only with great difficulty, too, that the Ruthven lords obtained the king’s consent to a proclamation acknowledging the freedom of the Kirk. ‘He spared not to say,’ wrote David Calderwood, ‘that the ministers were but a pack of knaves, that he had rather lose his kingdom than not be avenged upon them, that the professors of France [the Huguenots] were but seditious traitors, rebels and perturbers of commonwealths.’ Yet the intensity of James’s bitterness only reflected the hopelessness of his position – a fact which Lennox, too, reluctantly accepted when he finally returned to France on 21 December. ‘And sa the King and the Duc was dissivered,’ wrote one contemporary laconically, ‘and never saw [each] uther againe.’
Before his departure, however, James had been forced to accuse Lennox of ‘disloyalty and inconstancy’ in not leaving Scotland in accordance with previous orders, and in answer the duke had penned a last message which must have made the most painful reading for the shamed and heartbroken young king. James was, Lennox declared, his ‘true master, and he alone in this world whom my heart is resolved to serve’. ‘And would to God,’ he continued, ‘my body should be cut open, so that there should be seen what is written upon my heart; for I am sure there would not be seen there those words “disloyalty and inconstancy” – but rather these, “fidelity and obedience”.’ The message, moreover, was as gratefully received as one might expect, for in the winter of 1583 James would write a long and poignant lament for his exiled loved one, entitled Ane Metaphorical Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix. As Lennox came from France, James wrote, so the phoenix flew to Scotland from Arabia; as Lennox was converted to Protestantism, so the phoenix was tamed; as Lennox experienced the enmity of the ministers of the Kirk and of Gowrie and his associates, so the phoenix; and as Lennox was exiled to France, so the phoenix flew off to Arabia and sacrificed itself on its own pyre.
By the time the verse was complete, however, Lennox was already dead. According to one report he had been suffering from an ‘affection [i.e. infection] hepatick and dissenterick’, and according to Calderwood from ‘a dysentery, or excoriation of the inner parts, engendered of melancholy, wherewith was joined gonnorhea’. As he lay on his deathbed on 26 May 1583, he had refused the last rites from the Catholic priest who came to attend him. And though his wife, Catherine, would bury his remains at Aubigny according to full Roman ritual, he had also – perhaps as the supreme compliment to his former royal master – declared his commitment to the Protestant faith. Already, of course, he had provided James with the inviolable memory of his first love and liberation, in return for which the king would exhibit a lifelong concern for his children. And now, last of all, he would bequeath his former royal master his embalmed heart.