4
‘A king will have need to use secrecy in many things.’
James VI, Basilikon Doron, 1599
Though the so-called ‘Ruthven Raid’ had been conducted with minimal violence, its effect upon the king could not have been more profound. On the one hand, it had dealt a withering blow to his youthful self-esteem and newfound confidence in his own potential as a ruler. But it had also represented the grossest insult to his sovereignty – that God-given authority, as he saw it, marking him out so absolutely from each and every one of his subjects. In October, moreover, the forty-sixth General Assembly of the Kirk had described the raid as ‘a good and godly cause’, and James’s continuing captivity in the months that followed merely compounded both the insult and his fury. On one winter evening at supper, we are told, he had toasted Lennox in his captors’ presence amid stony silence, ‘wherewith the king moved after he had drunk and hurled the rest over his shoulder’. Like his mother before him, he was clearly not without the stomach for a bold gesture when desperation left him no option. And, like her too, two objectives now consumed him. One, of course, was escape, and he confided to Sir James Melville, the only associate of Lennox allowed to approach him, that he had ‘taken up a princely courage either to liberate himself fully, or die in the attempt’. The other was revenge for, as he told Sir Robert Bowes later, he would never forget how ‘greatly wounded’ his honour had been.
But if James found himself in what Bowes described, with remarkable understatement, as a ‘ticklish situation’, the quandary facing his enemies was, if anything, even more daunting. On the one hand, the Earl of Gowrie and the other so-called ‘Lords Enterprisers’, though temporarily in control, were finding, even more than Morton before them, that the king was now too old to be held under compulsion convincingly. The unwritten conventions governing royal abduction required that the act should be conducted for the king’s own good and that there should be some degree of co-operation between kidnappers and kidnapped. He would also have to be paid for and even this was not the end of their predicament, for unless the king endorsed their authority, they could make little use of it, and to gain his support in the first place, they would have to grant him the kind of additional freedom that might well lead to his escape. In short, the mouse had cornered the cat and was now faced with the consequences.
The pro-English sentiments of James’s captors were also proving of limited value. Indeed, Elizabeth’s support for the Ruthven Raid was characteristically equivocal, which was amply demonstrated by her lukewarm response to the embassy that she received in London in April 1583. With typical artfulness, the king had already written to tell her how he wished to follow her counsel in all matters of importance, since ingratitude was the vilest of vices. But without her financial support, the Lords Enterprisers could not hope to remain long in power, and they were subsequently offered only a quarter of the £10,000 they claimed to require for guarding and maintaining the king. Elizabeth was even prepared to guarantee their subservience by threatening to consider Mary’s earlier suggestion of establishing joint sovereignty with her son. In reality, of course, the Association that now briefly reappeared on the agenda remained the non-starter it always had been, not least because James was less prepared than ever in Lennox’s absence to entertain the notion, but it nevertheless demonstrated England’s coolness to the Ruthven conspirators aptly enough, and fuelled the unease which was soon steadily infecting their ranks.
The future, then, was on James’s side, and in preparation for his bid for freedom, he now adapted his behaviour accordingly. Dissimulating with all the skill that was now his trademark, he duly probed and prodded for opportunity. In early 1583, he had given his secret assurance to two French ambassadors that ‘although he had two eyes, two ears, two hands, he had but one heart, and that was French’, and in response the Marquis de Mainville busied himself in harnessing an anti-Gowrie party among the Scottish nobility. Huntly, Atholl, Montrose, Rothes, Eglinton, Seton and Maxwell all readied themselves to support the king’s escape, while James himself duly swallowed his pride and set out to exploit his enemies’ wishful thinking. Now, therefore, he ceased his ill-tempered outbursts and acts of defiance and progressively convinced the Lords Enterprisers that he was willing to remain in their hands, even conceding on one occasion that Lennox was ‘not wise’. Indeed, his stubborn sullenness gave way by degrees to feigned good humour as he exhibited a surprising graciousness even to the Earl of Gowrie himself, whom he considered to be as directly responsible for Lennox’s death as if he had murdered him outright. The duke’s privations at Dumbarton in the autumn of 1582, coupled to the rigours of the subsequent winter journey back to France, had served, or so James believed, to break his favourite’s health irreparably. But even this would not impair the king’s performance. And in playing his role to perfection, he duly seized his chance.
It was not without some irony that in allowing James the liberty of a hunting trip in June 1583, his captors made the same mistake as Lennox before them. And James’s escape plan was in essence no less straightforward than the one that had led to his capture in the first place. He was to be issued a sudden and apparently innocent invitation by his great-uncle, the Earl of March, to come to St Andrews – where other members of the anti-Gowrie faction would be on hand – and ‘make good cheer with him’. In the meantime, the need for hasty attendance was emphasised on the far from compelling grounds that the elderly earl had prepared a feast of ‘wild meat and other fleshes that would spoil’ in the event of delay. No greater artifice than this was required, it seems, and even the trip from his designated hunting spot at Falkland to St Andrews was conducted in apparently holiday spirits as the exultant king rode towards safety ‘passing his time in hawking by the way’. ‘His Majesty,’ wrote Sir James Melville, already ‘thought himself at liberty, with great joy and exultation, like a bird flown out of a cage … Albeit I thought his estate far surer when he was in Falkland.’ And though Gowrie rode hard to catch him, he was indeed too late to stop the king.
There followed a day and night of tension, as St Andrews Castle eventually teemed with armed supporters of both factions – each ready to unleash murderous riot, though neither anxious to take responsibility for doing so – until the Earl of Gowrie’s nerve finally broke. Accepting the inevitable and falling to his knees in James’s presence, the earl ‘in all humility asked pardon of the King’s Majesty … and showed himself penitent in particular in the offences he had made and uttered against the late Duke of Lennox … and above all, against his Majesty’s own person’. Reproaching him first before pardoning him, James duly savoured the occasion, though the sweetest moment of all did not arrive until the morning of 28 June when the king duly announced to his assembled nobles that he was now free from all faction and intended to rule henceforth as a ‘universall king’ in his own right, drawing them ‘to unity and concord’ and ‘impartial to them all’. Faithful and ever willing to listen to good counsel, he would forgive past offences and surround himself with wise and virtuous advisers, though decisions would be delivered ultimately according to his princely judgement alone.
There was now, wrote Sir Robert Bowes, ‘a great alteration both in his mind and also in his face and countenance’, and there was indeed no denying that Scotland had, at long last, an independent ruler with a mind of his own, for James was not only free from those who had held him captive physically. Gone, long since, was the first man in whom he had hoped to find a mentor, the Earl of Atholl. Gone too, for the time being, was his childhood companion, the factious Earl of Mar. Gone finally, though long since repudiated by his pupil, was George Buchanan who had died in October 1582 and now, like Morton and Lennox, was forever out of influence. Henceforth, as Bowes also reported resentfully, James would keep the key of the box containing his private papers himself, so that the English ambassador could not ‘get any certainty of the contents’. For the time being, too, freedom from faction at home would also free the king from subservience to England. From now on, it seemed, neither pungent letters from England’s queen or embassies from her ailing Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, could alter the fact that Scotland had, in effect, a new king – albeit, as Walsingham observed angrily, ‘a dissembling king, both with God and man,’ and one who ‘with a kind of jollity said that he was an absolute king’.
Yet James still had call for a man of strength about the throne, and that man now would prove to be the Earl of Arran, whose temporary imprisonment in the aftermath of the Ruthven Raid served as no more than a minor setback. Certainly, it had done nothing to temper either his ambition or his ruthlessness. ‘Quick, penetrating, subtle, desirous of goods and greatness, arrogant, confident and capable of many things’, Arran was ideally suited to become the king’s chosen instrument for government at this critical juncture – not only willing to wield the cudgel, but also to lift the broader burden of rule from his royal master’s shoulders. For though James was wilful and headstrong – so much so, indeed, that ‘he could hardly be withdrawn from the thing that he desired’ – and was resolute in his determination to direct policy, the daily routine of government remained repugnant to him.
The Frenchman Fontenay, who came to Scotland in 1584, considered the young king ‘too lazy and thoughtless about business, too devoted to his pleasures, especially to hunting, leaving all his affairs to be managed by the Earl of Arran’. But James, it seems, was keen to explain away any hint of indolence. Excessive work was inclined to make him ill, he claimed, but nothing of importance occurred without his knowledge, since he had spies at the chamber doors of his councillors and was told everything they said. And though he lacked endurance, he could, or so he believed, do more work in an hour than others might do in a day when he applied himself. Indeed, it was his boast that he often accomplished more than six men together. He watched, listened and spoke simultaneously and sometimes did five things at once, he said. Besides which, he had advanced only simple soldiers and gentlemen rather than high-ranking nobles, since he could easily ruin them if they proved either inefficient or disloyal. In consequence, the king remained as confident of his application as he was of his ability – and it was this naive faith in his superiority over ordinary mortals that would, of course, explain many of his subsequent miscalculations.
For the while, however, James could indulge his passions while Arran steered the ship of state. Now, for instance, his ‘vacant hours’ were spent increasingly in the company of the poet Alexander Montgomerie – a hard-drinking, witty man, whose raffish exterior hid a nature of considerable sensitivity and sweetness – and a coterie of other literary ‘brethren’, consisting of figures like Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, Alexander Scott, Thomas Hudson, John Stewart of Baldyneiss, and the poetess Christian Lindsay. To the king, Montgomerie was ‘Belovit Sanders, master of our art’, and while Lennox may well have been the first to ignite James’s love for the muse, it was Montgomerie who seems to have been most influential in guiding his pen. Yet, far from living up to the flattery heaped upon him by his ‘bretheren’ as the ‘royal Apollo’, the king’s was in fact a ‘dull Muse’, as he himself admitted, and he was actually at his most inspired only rarely – usually when writing on political themes. His famous sonnet ‘God gives not kings the style of gods in vain’ was certainly creditable enough but he remained, in general, no more than a competent spinner of verses, to the extent that his first published work, The Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie, was published anonymously in Edinburgh in 1584.
Nevertheless, the king’s reliance upon his dutiful earl remained of considerable overall benefit in personal terms. Freed at last from fear and insecurity, he found himself liberated, too, from tiresome obligations and able, in the process, to fly in whatever direction – artistic, social, recreational – his fancy took him. But more generally, his relationship with Arran was at the very best a mixed blessing, for while the latter’s drive and efficiency made up for the king’s frailties in these areas, he was generally unpopular and widely mistrusted both at home and abroad. Certainly, there could be no charges laid against Arran of the kind made previously against Lennox by the minister Andrew Melville that the king had been kept ‘in a misty night of captivity and black darkness of shameful servitude’. On the contrary, James was no puppet and Arran no ‘pseudo-regent’. Indeed, the king remained in a position of commanding partnership, employing the earl, who became chancellor in 1584, as both executor and enforcer where his own youth might otherwise have compromised his wishes. But Sir Francis Walsingham and the English as a whole were deeply suspicious of Arran’s former link with Lennox’s pro-French inclinations, and the execution of the Earl of Gowrie on 3 May 1584, ostensibly for a new act of treason, confirmed the worst fears of many Scottish noblemen. For it was believed in most quarters that Gowrie’s death was an act of revenge – a final token of retribution for the Ruthven Raid and Lennox’s untimely demise. There were ominous rumours, too, that Arran had tricked his victim into making a full confession of his second plot by a promise to obtain for him the king’s clemency, which, if true, was a shabby return for the mercy that Gowrie had earlier extended to him in the aftermath of the king’s abduction.
Subsequent to the execution, moreover, the earls of Angus and Mar and the Master of Glamis were all forced to fly to England while others were ruined, it seems, for no better reason than that they were worth ruining; some, it was rumoured, at the prompting of Arran’s capable but greedy wife who was roundly hated by the preachers and reviled as a witch. ‘These cruel and rigorous proceedings,’ wrote Sir James Melville, ‘caused such a general fear, as all familiar society and intercourse of humanity was in a manner lost, no man knowing to whom he might safely speak or open his mind.’ And it was not long either, of course, before Arran was delivering the king’s revenge upon the Kirk and its ministers, the more outspoken of whom had already fled to Berwick in anticipation.
James’s first interview with the Kirk’s leaders after his escape from the Ruthven lords had already augured ill. When they entered his presence at Falkland, he glared at them in silence for fully fifteen minutes before rising and leaving the room and eventually calling them to his cabinet. Furthermore, the exchange which followed was hardly less strained. ‘No king in Europe,’ James informed his audience, ‘would have suffered the things that I have suffered,’ and in response to complaints about developments at his court, he went on to declare that he alone might choose ‘any that I like best to be in company with me’. Equally provocatively, the king justified his stand on the grounds that he was ‘Catholic King of Scotland’ – a somewhat injudicious choice of terms, to say the least, which finally prompted the intervention of one of the more amenable ministers. ‘No brethren,’ said David Ferguson, ‘he is universal king and may make choice of his company, as David did in the 110th Psalm,’ though few of his colleagues were satisfied. ‘We will look no more to your words,’ James was informed, ‘but to your deeds and behaviour; and if they agree not, which God forbid, we must damn sin in whatsoever person.’
Even worse was to follow, however, when John Durie and Andrew Melville refused to recognise the council’s jurisdiction after being called before it to answer for their sermons. Appointed moderator of the General Assembly in 1578, Melville had led the Kirk’s onslaught against Robert Montgomery and emerged by turns as the leading and most vociferous critic of secular interference in religious affairs. Famed for his unashamed irreverence towards the ‘anointed monarch’, it was he, who in defending the principle of the ‘two kingdoms’ dismissively referred to James as ‘God’s sillie vassal’, and now he would prove no less defiant. The king, Melville pointed out, perverted the laws of God and man, and councillors possessed no authority over the messengers of a king and council far more powerful than they. Taking a Hebrew Bible from his belt, Melville then, it was said, ‘clanked it down on the board before the king and chancellor’. ‘There,’ he declared, ‘are my instructions and my warrant,’ after which he was ordered into confinement at Blackness Castle before fleeing to England.
Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that James and Arran would move to subdue the more radical elements within the Kirk, and in May 1584 the Presbyterian system in Scotland was temporarily ended by what would become known as the ‘Black Acts’. In a sweeping attempt to bring the Kirk to heel, the king was henceforward declared head of religious affairs and given jurisdiction over ecclesiastical cases. The courts and assemblies of the Kirk were now to convene only with royal permission and, more provocatively still perhaps, the authority of bishops was confirmed in preference to that of ‘pretended presbyteries’. From this point forward, moreover, all affairs of state were to be reserved purely for the judgement of the secular ruler without interference or comment from the pulpit. And to drive the message home, Arran added his own inimitable brand of subtlety. To those ministers who persisted in their objections, the chancellor’s message was clear. Their heads would be shaven as an example to all who held their sovereign ruler in contempt.
There was, however, altogether less scope for assertiveness abroad, where James and Arran found themselves forced to renew the foreign intrigues begun by Lennox. Estranged from England, menaced by exiled lords and ministers, and threatened by growing rumbles of discontent at home, the appeal of French or Spanish assistance grew increasingly irresistible, and James slithered accordingly into a further bout of diplomatic intrigue. Sir Francis Walsingham, in a fit of pique, had already told the Scottish king that his power was insignificant and that rulers as young as he were apt to lose their thrones, so when James was contacted by the Duke of Guise after his escape from captivity, his response was predictable: thanking the duke warmly for his friendship and offers of protection, James praised him as the first soldier of the age and expressed his willingness to join an enterprise to release his mother and bring vengeance upon her captors. Further appeals for help were also addressed to the Kings of France and Spain, and most surprisingly of all to the pope himself. ‘I trust,’ wrote James, clearly implying the possibility of his conversion at some later date, ‘to be able to satisfy your Holiness on all other points, especially if I am aided in my great need by your Holiness.’
But this, as the king well knew, was playing with fire, and the pitfalls of his dealings were soon painfully exposed with the appearance of a new favourite – the eminently plausible and equally treacherous Patrick, Master of Gray. As with Arran, no portrait of Gray exists. But he was a handsome, urbane and polished nobleman, who had been appointed a gentleman of the privy chamber in October 1584 and made Master of the King’s Wardrobe and Menagerie, in charge of James’s jewels, clothing and tapestries, and the employment of tailors and shoemakers. He was also fully conversant with the affairs of Queen Mary, especially in France, where he had been her agent. Indeed, he was still in her service – or so she believed at least, for he had lost faith in a Catholic assault upon England and now considered her situation hopeless. Spain, it seemed, was hesitant, the pope niggardly and Guise weighed down by domestic concerns, and if the Spanish king should actually succeed in unseating his English counterpart, he was hardly likely to bestow her throne upon the Protestant King of Scots. Thus, Gray reasoned, James should abandon his mother’s interests and ally instead with Elizabeth.
In the meantime, of course, James would continue to court his mother’s representatives, though he had already confirmed to Sir Robert Bowes that her entanglements with Catholic powers rendered her unfit to rule either Scotland or England. The Association, he told Bowes, had been offered by Mary only out of self-interest and was ‘tickle to his crown’. Yet when M. de Fontenay, the former queen’s representative, arrived in the summer of 1584, James protested loudly that he would never abandon her. On one occasion, in fact, he went so far as to summon Arran, before whom he delivered an oath in Fontenay’s presence that Scottish policy would support Mary’s cause unwaveringly – an astonishing example of James’s tendency to overact in his attempts to deceive. In fact, he fooled no one – least of all the canny Frenchman who noted nonetheless that ‘he has a remarkable intelligence, as well as lofty and virtuous ideals’. And this was not all that Fontenay said of the king, for in accepting that his mission was a failure, he also went on to present us with one of the most illuminating brief portraits of the king on record.
The envoy’s letter to the Queen of Scots was, in effect, a long and rambling report of his mission in which he attempted to offer some assurance of her son’s goodwill towards her. But the letter he addressed to his brother-in-law, Claude Nau, Mary’s secretary, was altogether more informative and bore the superscription ‘My brother, the letter which follows will remain secret between you and me’. From one other observation, too, it is clear that Fontenay was planning to furnish a full and frank account of his judgements that should not be seen by Mary herself. The king, he noted, ‘has never asked anything about the Queen, neither of her health, nor of the way she is treated, nor of her servants, nor of what she eats or drinks, nor of her recreation, nor any similar matter, and yet, notwithstanding this, I know that he loves and honours her much in his heart’. Clearly, the intention was to provide the kind of intimate pen portrait not necessarily normal or appropriate to a visit of the kind that Fontenay had just conducted, though the account that resulted was both fair and perceptive.
On the one hand, the young king’s merits were listed in full. ‘Three qualities of the mind,’ Fontenay observed, ‘he possesses in perfection: he understands clearly, judges wisely, and has a retentive memory.’ His questions were ‘keen and penetrating’, his replies ‘sound’ and ‘in any argument, be it about religion or any other thing, he maintains the view that appears to him most true and just’ – to the extent that ‘I have heard him support Catholic against Protestant opinions’. The king was also ‘well instructed in languages, science and affairs of state; better, I dare say, than anyone else in his kingdom’ … ‘In brief,’ Fontenay concluded, ‘he has a remarkable mind, filled with virtuous grandeur,’ though it was also noted that he possessed ‘a good opinion of himself’ and had a great desire to hide his deficiencies, attempting anything in pursuit of virtue. Though timid, for example, he wished greatly to be considered courageous. Nor could he bear to be surpassed by other men. Upon hearing that a Scottish laird had passed two days without sleep, the king passed three, and if ever a man succeeded in outstripping him, he abhorred them, it seems, forever.
But Fontenay furnishes us, too, with a range of comments on the king’s habits and everyday demeanour that not only picture him minutely, but came to shape the standard image of him down the centuries. We hear, for instance, how he disliked ‘dancing and music in general’, along with ‘all the little fopperies of court life’, whether they involve ‘amorous talk or curiosities of dress’. In particular, he had ‘a special aversion to ear-rings’. There is also the earliest reference on record to James’s lack of physical grace. ‘He never stays still in one place,’ commented the Frenchman, ‘taking a singular pleasure in walking up and down, though his carriage is ungainly, his steps erratic and wandering, even in his own chamber.’ And there is mention, too, of other less savoury characteristics. His manners, it seems, were ‘aggressive and very uncivil, both in speaking and eating and in his clothes and sports’, as well as in ‘conversation in the company of women’. His body, meanwhile, was ‘feeble’ – though he was not himself ‘delicate’ – and his voice ‘loud’; his words ‘grave and sententious’. ‘In a word,’ concluded Fontenay, ‘he is an old young man,’ though he loved hunting, of course, above all other pleasures, ‘galloping over hill and dale with loosened bridle’ for six hours at a time.
Most intriguingly of all, however, Fontenay explored what he considered James’s chief deficiencies as a ruler. In all, he noted ‘only three defects which may possibly be harmful to the conservation of his estate and government’. The first was his ‘failure to appreciate his poverty and lack of strength, overrating himself and despising other princes’ – common enough faults in many contemporary rulers, of course, and especially understandable, perhaps, in so young a king, though James’s reputation for extravagance would be heavily reinforced by his behaviour in later life. Then Fontenay observed how James ‘loves indiscreetly and obstinately despite the disapprobation of his subjects’, and criticised him further for being ‘too idle and too little concerned about business’. In this latter connection, the king was apparently ‘too addicted to pleasure, principally that of the chase, leaving the conduct of business to the Earl of Arran, Montrose [the treasurer] and the Secretary [John Maitland of Thirlestane]’. And here, too, the criticisms levelled against James would be raised repeatedly in years to come. In all, he emerges as a ruler of considerable intellect but one of limited political intuition: cunning but also prone to naivety; thoughtful but of limited self-awareness; proud and determined to lead but lacking in self-control and charisma – in short, a king of many commendable qualities without the hallmarks of genuine majesty.
Above all, perhaps, Fontenay had been shocked by James’s carelessness concerning money. ‘The king is extremely penurious,’ it was noted. ‘To his domestic servants – of whom he has but a fraction of the number that served his mother – he owes more than 20,000 marks for wages and for the goods they have provided.’ ‘He lives,’ said Fontenay, ‘only by borrowing.’ Yet this, we are told, in no way restricted his spending. The confiscated lands and revenues of the Ruthven lords were frittered upon courtiers and when James was quizzed about money his answers were unsatisfactory. Having claimed at first that his finances were sound, he then confessed they were not, only to add that his youth and nature made it difficult for him to fulfil his promises to be less liberal. It was hardly surprising, then, that in his official letter to Mary, Fontenay warned her against sending any money to her son.
Nor was it without irony that one of the major beneficiaries of the king’s generosity at this time was none other than the Master of Gray, who had recently received the tidy sum of 6,000 marks that had been gifted to James by the Duke of Guise. More and more influential with each passing day, Gray was now sent to England in August 1584 with the specific intention of forging an Anglo-Scottish alliance that would not only ignore but directly undermine the interests of the former queen, upon whose behalf he had supposedly been working. With the expulsion of the Spanish ambassador from London in January 1584, the English were increasingly anxious to secure their northern border, and the very choice of Gray as emissary to Elizabeth gave the clearest possible proof that James was prepared at last to abandon his mother openly, since his mission was to reveal her secrets and reach an agreement with her English rival in which she had no part. In the process, he would also reveal the existence of his own enmity with Arran, which could be exploited as Elizabeth saw fit.
When, however, Mary discovered the true nature of Gray’s dealings, she was both appalled and terrified. Fondly believing that he had been negotiating for her release, it was not until March 1585 that she discovered his treachery. Worse still, the duplicity of her son was soon equally manifest, for, upon receiving an English pension of some £4,000 a year and a gift of fallow deer, James would finally disavow the Association upon which Mary had staked so much. Politically, of course, his decision was a wise one, since the way now stood open not only for a league with England but even, perhaps, the prospect of his nomination as Elizabeth’s successor. The English Parliament’s Act of Association in 1584 had, after all, explicitly disqualified from the succession any candidate who supported armed action in favour of Mary Stuart. And there was no denying either that Mary’s dealings had been equally tainted with self-interest from the outset. When the time came, then, the choice was a clinical one. Though, as John Colville pointed out, James seemed ‘not to have lost all affection to his mother … yet (as those about him will speak) hee had rather have hir as shee is, then him self to give hir place’. Coldly informing her in 1586 that he could not ‘associate her with himself in the sovereignty of Scotland’ and that he could not in future ‘treat with her otherwise than as Queen-Mother’, James duly delivered his parting thrust. Nor, when Mary condemned her ‘ungrateful son’ and threatened to disinherit him in favour of Philip of Spain, did he offer any further justification. Instead, he offered only silence and never wrote to her again.
The Queen of England, meanwhile, was fully aware of James’s slippery tendencies. ‘Who seeketh two strings to one bow,’ she told him, ‘they may shoot strong, but never straight.’ And she knew no less certainly that any alliance with Scotland could never be confidently secured without the departure of Arran who was now increasingly exposed on all fronts. To the long list of his former enemies he had added the Catholic nobles, alienated by the negotiations with Elizabeth, and the insolence of both him and his wife had by now even upset the king. William Davison, the English ambassador ‘observed the strangeness of their behaviour towards the poor young prince, who is so distracted and worried by their importunities as it pitied me to see, and, if I be not abused, groweth full of their fashions and behaviours, which he will sometimes discourse of in broad language, showing he is not ignorant of how they use him’. Men of influence like Maitland of Thirlestane, who had initially supported Arran, were also no longer his friends, and with the Master of Gray now bolstered by English approval as well as the king’s high favour, the time of crisis was not far off.
With Gray’s return from London, his enmity with Chancellor Arran was soon spawning mutual fears of assassination, as the court sank into confusion and uproar and English agents awaited their opportunity. For all his panache and earlier bravado, Arran’s heart, in particular, began to fail him as he awaited the inevitable onslaught. Armed at all times as he went about his daily affairs distractedly, he brought armour and supplies into Edinburgh Castle, and strengthened his apartments at Holyrood. On one occasion, too, he showed that even for a soldier of such dashing reputation as he, discretion could yet be the better part of valour. Returning one night through the ill-lit alleys of the capital, he let his wife pass on up the High Street, it seems, while he, with torches extinguished and a cloak about his shoulders, stole into the fortress by a secret route accompanied by a lone servant.
When the time came, however, neither the dark, nor disguises, nor secret passageways could save Arran. Nor, for that matter, could innocence on the one occasion, perhaps, when he had done no real wrong. For when Lord Francis Russell (the son of the Earl of Bedford) was shot and killed by Sir Thomas Kerr of Ferniherst (the Scottish warden of the Middle March) during a ‘day of truce on which Scottish and English representatives were meeting to settle Border disputes’, the blame was at once ascribed to the chancellor. Since Ferniherst owed his appointment to Arran, it was easy for the latter’s enemies to accuse him of instigating the killing as a means of preventing the conclusion of the proposed Anglo-Scottish treaty. And even though Arran had actually been responsible for initiating the discussions with England’s representatives, this was conveniently ignored. Indeed, Sir Edward Wotton, the leading English negotiator, later admitted without embarrassment how he had ‘aggravated the matter not more than it deserved but as much as he could’.
The Scottish king, moreover, offered comparatively little resistance in abandoning his leading enforcer. Though greatly distressed by the incident, his concerns were at least as much for his pension and prospects for the English succession as they were for the fate of his chancellor. Wotton found him, in fact, alone and melancholy in his chamber, his eyes swollen by weeping. In discussing Russell’s murder, the king, wrote Wotton, ‘shed tears over it like a newly beaten child, protesting by his honour and crown that he was ignorant of this practice, desiring her Majesty not to condemn him for other men’s faults’. The Queen of England, he lamented, would consider him a dissembler, though he would rather lose all the kingdoms of the world than be found untrue to his word. Indeed, for twenty-four hours he neither ate nor drank nor slept before proving his good faith to Elizabeth by ordering Arran’s imprisonment in St Andrews Castle. And though the earl was released a week later on James’s orders, it was no difficult task for Elizabeth to finish the matter by agreeing to ‘let slip’ the exiled ‘Ruthven Raiders’ across the Border, where they could be guaranteed to tip the balance. On 2 November, therefore, the earls of Mar and Angus, the two Hamiltons and the Master of Glamis duly appeared before Stirling Castle with sufficient forces to compel the king to abandon his favourite once and for all.
Inside the castle there followed the usual chaotic scenes of violent recrimination in which Gray and Arran and their rival gangs squared off in the king’s presence without actually striking, since both ‘suspected falsehood in friendship’ and feared to trust his own side. Arran denounced Gray as the instigator of the exiles’ return, while Gray protested his innocence – apparently with some success, for in the morning Arran’s nerve broke and he opted to save himself by flight, closely followed by the king who, in nervous terror, attempted unsuccessfully to exit through a postern gate previously locked by Gray. In the event, the decisive factor in Arran’s submission was probably the powerful threat posed by the new Earl of Bothwell, nephew of Mary’s lover and already, with his considerable Border power, one of the key political players in Scotland. With his political career at an end, Arran had no other choice, in fact, than to head west and to settle for the obscurity that must have been so intolerable for such a one as he. In conceding that he should forfeit his earldom and the chancellorship, James did, however, protect him as best he could from the further vengeance of his enemies – until, that is, a nephew of the former regent, Morton, with a long memory and lingering sense of duty finally butchered him in 1595.