5
‘[We are] in a despair to do any good in the errand we came for, all things disheartening us on every side, and every hour giving us new advertisement that we deal for a dead lady.’
George Young, member of the Scottish embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, 10 January 1587
On 3 November 1585, the King of Scotland was once again obliged to ‘make vertue of a need’ and receive the returned Ruthven raiders in the Great Hall of Stirling Castle. Though they sank to their knees and professed their loyalty, it was surely a scene to excite mixed emotions in the young man occupying the throne. In Sir James Melville’s view, the king spoke pertly and boastfully, as if victorious over the rebels. Yet Calderwood suggests that he addressed them ‘with cheerfulness, it seemed’, thanking God that they had returned with so little bloodshed. In any event, he pardoned them and proceeded to demonstrate not only his rapidly developing adroitness by the speed with which he turned the new situation to his advantage, but the extent to which he was now – as he had been for some time – the master of policy in his kingdom. By finally accepting the overthrow of Arran and reinstating the exiled lords in Scotland, James had, indeed, freed himself from further compulsion. And the continuance of his recent measures was the firmest possible proof that he rather than his favourite had been the instigator of policy all along. The ‘Black Acts’, for example, though modified in application, were not rescinded, and when the exiled ministers returned in the wake of the lords, who now distanced themselves from religious radicalism, the king maintained the initiative. Andrew Melville, for his part, found himself ordered north to spend his time looking for Jesuits and to ‘travail, so far as in him lies, to reduce them to the true and Christian religion’, while others even more vociferous, such as John Gibson, were given short shrift. After denouncing James for maintaining ‘the tyranny of bishops and absolute power’, Gibson was swiftly dispatched to prison, but not before the king enjoyed the final word. ‘I give not a turd for thy preaching,’ he had howled in derision at the hapless minister.
Nor, when James pressed forward with the Anglo-Scottish treaty was he succumbing to external pressure. Though the arrival in January 1586 of a resident French ambassador, M. de Courcelles, was consciously designed to assert his independence, alliance with England remained his first best option, and was actually the most assured means of nullifying once and for all any potential threat from the old Gowrie faction. For, by becoming England’s ally, James would curb at once the baleful effects of that country’s interference in Scottish politics, which had led to his abduction at Ruthven in the first place. He had, moreover, already shown his teeth over Gowrie’s execution, so that the earl’s former associates were more than grateful to receive their lands anew, in spite of their past misdeeds. And the loss of Arran was never, in any case, the blow to royal prestige – let alone the emotional trauma - that Lennox’s departure had represented. Indeed, James had become increasingly concerned in his own right about the chancellor’s over-mighty posturing and may even have tacitly encouraged Gray in his machinations. Much more importantly still, Arran’s removal left the way clear at last for the promotion of John Maitland of Thirlestane, the gifted and comparatively selfless statesman, who eventually succeeded to the vacant chancellorship in July 1587: a man who was more ready than most to shun the limelight and more able than any to harness the king’s talents while masking his weaknesses.
All was set fair, then, for the effective restoration of royal authority with considerable smoothness and in exceptionally quick time. James’s former enemies were, after all, not so much a compact party as a coalition drawn from discordant elements, united for a brief space of time only by a common hatred of Arran. While Angus, Mar and Glamis had headed the coup which restored them to power, the returning exiles also included Lord John Hamilton, an old adherent of Mary though a Protestant, his younger brother, Lord Claud, a Catholic, and the Catholic Border chieftain, Maxwell. Other Catholics joined the council, too, alongside men like Maitland, Gray and Sir Lewis Bellenden, who were all retained from the previous government. In consequence, there was a healthy balance which gave the king, for the time being at least, an unexpected degree of independence – especially when it is remembered that most of his former enemies were heavily preoccupied with restoring their private fortunes. Indeed, to humour the king they even yielded precedence to his new young favourite, Ludovic Stuart, the 10-year-old son of Lennox, whom James had recently brought over from France. No guard was placed about the king as he hunted to his heart’s content, and in matters of state, too, he would be crossed more rarely than ever before.
By the summer of 1586, moreover, James even had reason to believe that Scotland’s age-old enmity with England, which had hitherto proved so damaging to his kingdom might well be ending. His power to negotiate the most advantageous terms had been limited, in fact, by his keenness for official recognition as heir to the English throne, though the most that Elizabeth would offer was a ‘firm promise in the word of a queen’ that she would never bar him from ‘any right or title that might be due to him in any time present or future’, unless ‘by manifest ingratitude she should be justly moved and provoked to the contrary’. Plainly, the Queen of England was still intent upon exerting the maximum control over James’s actions – and for good reason, too, since any assurances given to James while his mother lived involved tacit acceptance of her own place in the succession. But on 5 July, notwithstanding such snares and limitations, the treaty of alliance was indeed formally signed, and James could congratulate himself, it seemed, at another sign that his earlier difficulties were at long last reaching resolution.
The unforeseen complication which now presented itself therefore left James both stricken and dumbstruck, for at the very moment the alliance was being sealed, the final act of his mother’s sad drama was about to begin. Her complicity in the Babington Plot had been painstakingly monitored by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Walsingham, and on 3 August her papers were seized and she was duly arrested along with her secretaries. Such was his surprise that James had no idea at first of Mary’s full predicament. As late as October he was assuring the French ambassador that she was ‘in no danger’ and should henceforth meddle with nothing beyond prayer and service to God, though he acknowledged that ‘as for the conspiracy, she must be content to drink the ale she has brewed’. From his perspective, this was likely to entail little more than closer confinement. Mary’s servants, on the other hand, should be hanged, new ones appointed, while she herself should be ‘put in the Tower or some other manse and kept from intelligence’. Even by Christmas, moreover, he seemed unable to comprehend that Mary’s execution was a distinct possibility, though she had already been brought to trial at Fotheringay on 11 October and sentenced to death before the month was out. Certainly, the thought that he had signed away his mother’s life for a pension of £4,000 only months earlier would never occur to him.
Nor was James much inclined to disturb his personal relations with Elizabeth on his mother’s behalf. ‘The only thing he craves is her life,’ wrote Roger Aston, an Englishman in his service. But reports from Archibald Douglas, the Scottish representative in London, whom James had appointed in spite of his implication in the murder of Darnley, gradually seem to have taken effect. Douglas, along with Sir William Keith, a young member of the royal household who acted as the king’s messenger, had been instructed by James to pursue two objectives: ‘the one to deal very earnestly both with the Queen and her councillors for our sovereign mother’s life’, the other to ensure that his title to the English Crown ‘be not pre-judged’. On 22 November, however, Douglas informed the Master of Gray that Mary was ‘in extreme danger of her life’ and Gray’s response reveals his master’s growing concern – as much for himself as for his mother. ‘The king nor no man ever believed that the matter would have gone so far,’ wrote Gray, before pointing out James’s concern not only for his mother but ‘the opinion of all his people’ and the implications for his ‘honour’. And James was indeed largely hamstrung, for, as Douglas had reminded him, the English Parliament’s Bond of Association rendered any interference on his part a most risky undertaking, since it might easily be employed against him if any suspicion arose that he was party to Mary’s plottings. In effect, therefore, he was faced with an excruciating choice between his mother’s life and his hopes for the English throne.
But the pressure was raining in upon James from other quarters, too. That Elizabeth should threaten violence against a Scottish queen was wholly abhorrent to his nobles who assumed automatically that Mary’s death would at once bring war with England and alliance with her enemies. The Earl of Bothwell, who shared, it seems, his ill-fated uncle’s knack for plain speaking, told James that if he countenanced his mother’s execution, he would deserve to be hanged next day – at which the king is said to have laughed and suggested that he would prepare for that. Lord Claud Hamilton, on the other hand, swore that he would burn Elizabeth’s kingdom as far as Newcastle if Mary was injured, and even an enemy of the former queen, like Angus, declared that Mary would be fully justified in slitting Elizabeth’s throat. Clearly, when national pride and the old enemy were involved, even the Scottish elite, famous for their blood feuds and divisions, could unite. And this meant only further trouble for their king, since his other subjects, too, were deeply embittered by the presumption of Mary’s captors. ‘I never saw all the people so willing to concur in anything as this,’ wrote Gray. ‘All men drive at him.’
Under the growing pressure, James’s temper seems, in fact, to have compromised his judgement and he adopted a curiously provocative tone in the first letter of formal protest that he dispatched for Elizabeth’s attention on 27 November. Sovereign princes like his mother, ‘descended of all hands of the best blood in Europe’ could not, he affirmed, be judged ‘by subjects’ mouths’ and on this basis it was to the Queen of England’s discredit that ‘the nobility and counsellors of England should take upon them to sentence a Queen of Scotland’. Much more strongly still, he reminded Elizabeth that, while her father had stained his reputation ‘by the beheading of his bedfellow’, that particular ‘tragedy’ was ‘far inferior’ to what she was now contemplating. There were further references, too, to James’s personal predicament and an ambivalent suggestion that he wished only to protect the English monarch’s name and interests north of the Border. ‘I desire you to consider,’ he appealed, ‘how my honour stands engaged, that is her son and a king, to suffer my mother an absolute princess to be put to an infamous death.’ ‘Guess ye,’ he added, ‘in what state my honour will be in, this “unhappe” being perfected; since, before God, I already scarce dare go abroad for crying out of the whole people; and what is spoken by them of the Queen of England it grieves me to hear, and yet dare not find fault with it except I would dethrone myself, so is the whole of Scotland incensed with this matter.’
Far from helping matters, however, the letter succeeded only in infuriating Elizabeth. Above all, the reference to Henry VIII’s ‘bedfellow’, her mother Anne Boleyn, raised an altogether unmentionable subject and, in consequence, she was said to have taken ‘such a chafe as ye would wonder’. Indeed, according to Douglas who delivered the letter on 6 December, she ‘conceived such a passion as it was a great deal of work to us all … to appease her’. Nor were the after-effects of her rage in any way to James’s advantage. Keith, his messenger, was now informed that if he ‘had not delivered unto Her Majesty so strange and unseasonable message as did directly touch her noble father and herself’, she would have delayed proceedings against the Queen of Scots, but now would not do so if any emergency should arise. Equally significantly, Elizabeth refused to receive a new delegation of two Scottish noblemen and decided instead that the Queen of Scots’ case could only be presented to her by two commoners. In doing so, she ensured that James’s final embassy on behalf of his mother would lack the prestige of nobility to lend it weight.
James, then, had clearly miscalculated and, in the meantime, the fact that his baiting of Elizabeth had been framed in a private letter did nothing to convince his subjects of his resolve. Worse still, his determination to defend his mother was, in any case, effectively non-existent. Indeed, on 3 December, the day that James’s letter arrived in London, Douglas had conferred informally with the Earl of Leicester in his carriage and left little doubt of the king’s real intentions. After offering to support his claim to the English Crown, Leicester had at first made clear the advantages accruing to James in the event of his mother’s death. Then, without further ceremony, he had asked Douglas directly whether Mary’s execution would put paid to the alliance between the two countries. The response was negative. The treaty, said Douglas, was the king’s policy and he would not break it unless the English forced his hand – an implicit but unmistakable reference to his right to succeed Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, the official delegation that James had dispatched in accordance with Elizabeth’s conditions was making its way to London, though Douglas’s private discussion with Leicester had already largely undermined its mission. The two non-noble ambassadors stipulated by Elizabeth were Gray and Sir Robert Melville of Murdocairney, a steadfast partisan of Queen Mary, assisted by George Young, a member of the king’s household and Sir Alexander Stuart, a dubious and fickle character who, along with Douglas, would eventually help to hammer the final nails into the queen’s coffin. The plan, in fact, was to present the most cogent plea for Mary’s life to date, assuring the Queen of Scots’ abstinence from further political intrigue and guaranteeing Elizabeth’s deliverance from further conspiracies. This time, moreover, there was to be no risk of offence. ‘If neither of the overtures aforesaid be thought sufficient,’ wrote James, ‘ye shall with all instance press our dearest sister to set down by advice of her wisest and best affected counsellors such form of security as she and they shall think sufficient’, making clear that ‘we will not only yield for ourselves but also do our best endeavour to obtain the performance thereof’. For good measure, the ambassadors were to ‘protest before God’ that ‘the life of our dearest sister is no less dear unto us in all respects than the life of our dearest mother or our own’.
On 15 December, James had also written to the Earl of Leicester, having learned only the day before of Douglas’s dialogue with him. He knew therefore that unless he directly contradicted the impression that Leicester had been left with, his mother would die. But he knew, too, that to break the alliance with England would not only remove all hope of the English succession but throw him into a league with Spain that was potentially more damaging still. The prospect of Spanish victory was, after all, far from guaranteed and if it did indeed occur, dependence on his new Catholic ally was inevitable – with all that this would entail for the religious harmony of his realm. Both alternatives were heavy indeed, but one, as James realised, nevertheless remained preferable. Given that his ambassadors were already, in all likelihood, ‘dealing for a dead lady’, since Elizabeth’s chief ministers had in effect staked their own lives by condemning Mary, he would salvage what he could from a lost cause and look through his fingers at his mother’s fate. ‘I am honest, no changer of course, altogether in all things as I profess to be’, he informed Leicester, before declaring how ‘fond and inconstant’ he would be ‘if I should prefer my mother to the title’.
Whether this last statement was meant to imply that he had no intention of ‘preferring’, i.e. supporting, his mother’s claim to the title or whether he was referring to the choice between his mother’s life and his own claim to the succession remains unclear. But such ambivalence is unlikely to have been coincidental and the impression remains that James was content for Leicester to retain the impression given earlier by Douglas. In any case, the letter was not genuinely indicative of the callous indifference of a son to his mother’s plight. Instead, it was little more than a resigned footnote to a drawn-out saga that had already all but run its course. The end, if not the ending, had long been sealed in fact. And James was left with little more than empty gestures and hollow professions, concluding his communication with Leicester by pointing out once more how ‘my honour constrains me to insist for her life’, though ‘my religion ever moved me to hate her course’.
There followed another letter to Elizabeth, delivered by Gray and Melville, which was another exercise in dutiful posturing. Employing precisely the kind of bold language that the decorum of abject submission demanded from a monarch in such circumstances, James spoke this time of the divinity of kings, whose sacred diadems were not to be profaned, and suggested once more that rulers were beyond the condemnation of their subjects. Elizabeth should, he said, beware the revenge of his mother’s supporters and send her abroad under guarantees of future good behaviour. Alternatively, Mary might be encouraged to sign a bond committing her to a traitor’s death if implicated in any further conspiracies. But James, as well he knew, was whistling in the wind and his choice of Gray as ambassador, when the latter had already betrayed the Queen of Scots on a previous mission, did little to hide the fact.
Gray and his partner, Melville, were in any case fighting a losing battle against the very men who were intended to assist them. Sir Alexander Stuart, for instance, lost no time in claiming to possess instructions superior to theirs and, together with Douglas, was soon informing Elizabeth that his royal master would accept Mary’s death and ‘with tyme digest the worst’ – an impertinence which later so infuriated James that, according to Courcelles, he fell into a ‘marvellous choler’ and vowed to hang Stuart upon his return ‘before he put off his boots’. But for all the displays of royal anger and fits of wounded conscience, Stuart’s only fault had been to say what the king himself could not, as Elizabeth remained impervious to James’s ‘earnest suite’ and ‘friendly advice’. Indeed, when Gray suggested that Mary, in return for her life, should transfer to her son the right to the English Crown, Elizabeth did not hold back. ‘By God’s passion,’ she exclaimed, ‘that were to cut my own throat, and, for a duchy or an earldom to yourself, you or such as you would cause some of your desperate knaves to kill me.’ When, likewise, the Scottish ambassadors appealed for a reprieve of firstly fifteen days and then eight, the response was unyielding. ‘Not for an hour,’ declared the queen.
One further letter followed in which James recited the familiar mantra: if Elizabeth knew of his grief and his problems in Scotland, she would spare him this ordeal. Princes, he repeated, were not subject to earthly censure, while Sir Alexander Stuart was to be condemned for exceeding his authority. Elizabeth should consider, too, he added, the ‘almost universal hatred’ that his mother’s execution would evoke among other rulers. Yet such implicit threats were wholly unavailing, and when the Queen of England hesitated at the last to sign her cousin’s death warrant, it was her own private misgivings rather than fear of James that made her do so. When, moreover, the warrant was finally sealed in February she contrived, in any case, to confer the blame for ‘that miserable accident’ upon her hapless secretary William Davison – irrespective of the fact that she had spent a week attempting to persuade Mary’s gaoler Sir Amyas Paulet to arrange the death in secret. ‘God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity to shed blood without law or warrant,’ Paulet had responded. But the axe duly fell on 8 February – the very day that Gray and Melville received the official thanks of the king’s council for their efforts in England.
Accounts of James’s reaction to the news of his mother’s death vary markedly, in fact. One contemporary eyewitness, Ogilvie of Powrie, suggested in a letter to Archibald Douglas that the king was apparently indifferent to the report that reached him. ‘The king,’ we are told, ‘moved never his countenance at the rehearsal of his mother’s execution, nor leaves not his pastime and hunting more than of before.’ David Calderwood, meanwhile, who was a child at the time and therefore not on hand to witness events, suggested that the king could not suppress his delight that his rule in Scotland was now at last unchallenged. ‘When the king heard of the execution,’ wrote Calderwood, ‘he could not conceal his inward joy, howbeit outwardly he seemed sorrowful.’ That night, it seems, he expressed his satisfaction at being ‘sole king’ – a comment which left Maitland so ashamed that he ordered a gaggle of onlooking courtiers from the room. Yet not all descriptions reflect quite so poorly upon James’s lack of sensitivity. Moysie, for instance, suggests that he ‘was in great displeasure and went to bed without supper’ and rode to Dalkeith next morning ‘desiring to be solitaire’. And when he was later given a moving description of his mother’s final moments by one of her ladies-in-waiting, he was said to have been ‘very sad and pensive all that day and would not sup that night’.
An English spy, on the other hand, reported that James reacted ‘very grievously and offensively and gave out in secret speeches that he would not digest the same or leave it unavenged’. And the sense of outraged dignity that the king often exhibited certainly seems to have manifested itself in some angry talk about the Queen of England in the period that followed. He suggested in private, for instance, that he would not allow himself to be intimidated by an old woman, who was so unloved by her subjects and in such perpetual fear of assassination that she fled at the approach of strangers. ‘He protesteth,’ wrote one observer, ‘though he be a mean king with small ability, he would not change fortune with her, choosing rather to live securely among his subjects than to seek after the blood of his people of contrary religion as she does.’
As always, however, James’s frothy talk gave way to clear-cut deference when dealing with Elizabeth in person, and his response to her letter excusing herself of Mary’s death was a further example of the one-sidedness of their actual relationship. In acknowledging her ‘long professed goodwill’ to his mother, for instance, he also accepted Elizabeth’s ‘solemn attestations of innocency’ and ‘unspotted part’ in the death of the one whom he merely referred to as ‘the defunct’. Not even the slightest veiled hint of disapproval, let alone reprisal, was delivered, and there was no suggestion either that relations between the two rulers would remain anything other than cordial in time to follow. Instead, James merely concluded with the familiar reference to his hopes for the succession: ‘And, as for my part, I look that ye will give me at this time such full satisfaction in all respects, as shall be a mean to strengthen and unite this isle, establish and maintain the true religion, and oblige me to be, as before I was, your most loving.’
Overly extravagant professions of grief might well, of course, have opened James to the charge of hypocrisy, but if the king’s correspondence with his English counterpart suggested a rational and pragmatic acceptance of political realities, his subjects’ response to the death of their former queen was altogether less thin-blooded. The ministers of the Kirk did not, of course, regret her passing. Indeed, when James had exhorted them to pray for her safety, a certain John Cowper needed to be hauled from his pulpit as he railed against him to his face. Inspired, or so he claimed, by the spirit of God, Cowper prophesied trial and tribulation for all who lived in Edinburgh and foretold that the day of calamity when it came would be ‘a witness against the king’. When, moreover, the ministers had finally agreed to offer prayers for the former queen, their objective had been not her delivery from death, but only that she ‘should become a profitable member of Christ’s Kirk’.
Yet there were those, among the nobility especially, who were more inclined to express outrage at Mary’s treatment. When James chose, for instance, to follow the custom of wearing a ‘dule weid’ (mourning garment) of dark purple, he was told by Earl Francis of Bothwell that his only ‘dule weid’ should be a suit of armour until the Queen of Scots was avenged against a kingdom that had harried Scotland for the last three centuries. Likewise, at a Parliament in July 1587, Maitland made an impassioned plea for retribution – after which each and every one of the attending nobles swore on bended knee to assist James in military action. And while James the poet remained studiously silent on the subject of his mother’s death, other quills were busily at work, one of which – wielded by an outraged Scots versifier, who was wise enough to remain anonymous – promised nothing less than the gift of a noose for the Queen of England:
To Jesabel that English heure [whore]
receive this Scottish cheyne,
As presages of her gret malhoeur
for murthering of our Quene.
Such, indeed, was the clamour that James had little option other than to countenance some token gestures against his kingdom’s time-honoured oppressors. Even when Sir Robert Carey first brought news of the execution, he had been refused passage beyond Berwick, where he was met by Peter Young, and now James was prepared to take the cynical step of consenting to the temporary imprisonment and banishment of Gray who became the scapegoat for the government’s failure to save Mary. He also wrote lamely to Henry III of France, to Catherine de Medici and to the Duke of Guise to appeal for aid in avenging his mother, and retained the Archbishop of Glasgow as an ambassador to the French court - while refraining, predictably, from signing or dating his appointment. Nor did his correspondence with Henry III prevent him from cultivating the friendship of the French king’s arch-enemy, Henry of Navarre. Though he had promised the king that no Scot would serve in the armies of Navarre, the promise was at once broken when he allowed Sir James Colville of Easter Wemyss to raise a company of soldiers for precisely that purpose. And it was at this time, too, for good measure, that James chose to entertain the Huguenot poet, Guillaume Sallust du Bartas, at the Scottish court with no expense spared, irrespective of the fact that the poet came as an unofficial envoy for Navarre’s cause.
Plainly, then, James’s gestures were no less hollow in the wake of his mother’s death than they had been all along, albeit justifiably, perhaps, in light of his limited resources and equally limited options, though his subsequent quest for the English Crown – not to mention his hungry pursuit of his English pension and the English estates of the Lennox family which Elizabeth had annexed – often seemed less than becoming. To remove all suspicion of evil after the infernal proceedings against his dearest mother, he proposed, for instance, that Elizabeth should give him the requisite lands in northern England, along with the title of duke. But the queen remained coldly dismissive of his desire for material advantage. Though it eventually averaged the stipulated £4,000 per year, James’s pension was paid only irregularly and when, on one occasion, he managed to screw the sum of £2,000 from her special envoy, William Ashby, Elizabeth later repudiated the payment on the grounds that Ashby had exceeded his authority in agreeing to it. As such, a quip recorded by a Spanish diplomat was much to the point. For when the Spaniard related to an English counterpart how the wound to James’s honour could only be healed by a declaration that he would succeed Elizabeth, the Englishman was said to have replied that ‘this was rather a point of profit than of honour’.
But it was not so much repartee as the growing Spanish threat that was soon preoccupying James and diverting his subjects’ attention away from the treatment of their erstwhile queen. Although he had initially intended to make Mary Queen of Scots the lawful Catholic ruler of England, King Philip’s position had altered fundamentally during the last months of her life as he decided to press Spanish claims to the English throne on the strength of Mary’s alleged will, the existence of which was never proven, and his own somewhat tenuous descent from Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt. In consequence, the queen’s execution had been met with no small relief in Madrid, as Philip now pushed forward with plans to place the crown of England upon the head of his own daughter. In fact, on 11 February 1587, four days before Mary was actually beheaded, he wrote to the Count of Olivares, his ambassador at the papal court, revealing his intentions plainly. ‘You will impress upon His Holiness,’ he informed Olivares, ‘that I cannot undertake a war in England for the purpose merely of placing upon the throne a young heretic like the King of Scotland, who, indeed, is by his heresy incapacitated to succeed. His Holiness must, however, be assured that I have no intention of adding England to my own domains, but to settle the crown upon my daughter, the Infanta.’
Nor was James’s prospective loss of the English throne his only fear, for if England were conquered by Spain, Scotland would be bound, as an English envoy had once reminded him, to follow close behind. And there were, of course, powerful interests within the Scottish kingdom that might be ready to assist such a turn of events. The Catholic nobility in the north, led by the Earl of Huntly, head of the great clan of Gordon, and his supporters, Crawford and Montrose, had grown to considerable strength, and by 1588 were hatching plans, along with Lord John Maxwell and Lord Claud Hamilton in the south, to welcome a Spanish army and force James’s conversion. Yet the king, in spite of the obvious dangers, would remain loath to tackle Huntly and his associates, for though the earl had been educated in France as a Roman Catholic, he was nevertheless James’s kinsman through the marriage of two of his forebears and had signed the Presbyterian confession of faith in 1588. More importantly still, he had helped free James from the Ruthven raiders and become an object of considerable affection to the king, who, with characteristic lack of inhibition, was sometimes seen to kiss him in public – ‘to the amazement of many’.
There were considerations of policy, too, firmly underpinning James’s indulgence towards the Catholic lords in general, since they enhanced his bargaining power with Elizabeth, formed a counterpoise against the Kirk, and offered hope of survival in the perfectly likely event of Spanish victory. He was even, it seems, prepared to meet with their spies in an attempt to hedge his bets. Robert Bruce, for example, met the king on three occasions and suggested that he was willing to negotiate with Philip. The same was said, for that matter, by a Spanish agent from the Netherlands named Colonel Semple, who was subsequently permitted to move freely around Scotland, plotting at leisure. Nor, of course, would this be the last occasion that James was prepared to flirt with Rome, for, long after the current crisis of imminent invasion had passed, he would pursue a similar approach in the hope that English Catholics would support his quest for their kingdom’s Crown.
Early in the same year, however, he published a short meditation on selected verses of the Book of Revelation which confirmed his unwavering commitment to the Protestant faith by ‘commenting of the Apocalypse’ and setting out ‘sermons thereupon against the Papists and Spaniards’. After all, 1588 had been ushered in by an ominous tide of baleful prophecies, and the final book of the New Testament, with its lurid descriptions of the end of times and compelling reflections on the fragility of all earthly power, had, in any case, always been a particular source of fascination to him. ‘Excellent astronomers,’ observed David Calderwood, foretold that the year would be ‘fatal to all estates’. ‘And if the world did not perish,’ he added, ‘yet there should be great alterations in kingdoms and empires, so that thereafter it should be called the year of wonders.’ In Spain, too, as preparations for the Armada proceeded apace, 1588 was deemed to be ‘pregnant with misfortune’. In such circumstances, nothing, it seems, could have been a more fitting subject for the royal pen than the loosing of Satan and the rise and fall of empires. And the villain throughout is the papal Antichrist – the king of locusts, the beast rising from the sea and the woman in scarlet sitting upon the waters.
If, however, any further proof were required of James’s inherent hostility to Rome, he was not long in providing it, for, around the same time, he saw fit to challenge James Gordon, the Jesuit uncle of the Earl of Huntly, to a public disputation at court. Over five long hours, in fact, James held his own with both rigour and the utmost courtesy, leaving his rival to reflect afterwards that no one could ‘use his arguments better nor quote the Scriptures and other authorities more effectively’ than the king. And while one of his courtiers, flushed with pride at his sovereign’s knowledge, suggested that even the most learned papist in Europe would never trip him, Mendoza, too, the Spanish ambassador, acknowledged James’s performance. ‘I hear,’ wrote the Spaniard, ‘that after the disputation the king said in his chamber that Gordon did not understand the Scripture, which is a fairly bold thing to say, except that the king has the assurance to translate Revelation and to write upon the subject as if he were Amadis of Gaul.’
When the day of reckoning arrived, moreover, and the Spanish Armada conducted its vain enterprise upon England, James remained faithful to his alliance with Elizabeth throughout. Though he had offered her ‘his forces, his person and all that he commanded against yon strangers’, his assistance was in fact never more than moral, but he had stirred no coals upon either the Border or in Ireland and could fairly record that Spanish forces ‘never entered within any road or haven within his dominion, nor never came within a kenning near to any of his coasts’. Nor, typically, was he stinting in his estimation of the significance of the English victory. Indeed, in a meditation upon the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Kings that he penned soon afterwards, James suggested that the victory over Spain was far greater even the David’s victory over the Philistines – though his personal gains were predictably limited, as Elizabeth remained silent on the succession issue and, in August, refused him the payment of further money previously promised by William Ashby. ‘I am sorry to know from Scotland,’ wrote the exiled Master of Gray, ‘that the king our master has, of all the golden mountains offered, received a fiddler’s wages.’
Meanwhile, the news for James at home in 1589 was no more pleasing either. In February, the English intercepted letters signed by the Earl of Huntly and his associates, which expressed their regret at the failure of the Armada and promised their assistance to King Philip in the event of any future invasion attempt. The plan, in fact, was to bring the Duke of Parma over from the Netherlands with a force of 6,000 men as a prelude to a joint invasion of England, and Elizabeth’s response was predictable. ‘Good Lord! Methinks I do but dream,’ she protested, in a letter that left her embarrassed counterpart no choice other than to act, though in what would prove to be, under the circumstances, an astonishingly half-hearted manner. For, after removing Huntly from the captaincy of the royal guard and imprisoning him in Edinburgh Castle, the king went on to dine with him only the next day. Rather than serving up condign punishment, James also wrote pathetically to the traitor to the Protestant faith whom he believed he had converted only the year before. ‘Are these,’ he inquired lamely, ‘the fruits of your new conversion?’ And within days, Huntly was not only released but restored to his former position – an action which provoked Maitland to threaten resignation until James reversed his decision yet again, dismissing the earl once more and ordering him to his estates in the north.
It was Maitland, indeed, whom Huntly had blamed for his fall in the first place and it was Maitland, too, who, since his appointment as chancellor, had become the butt for the animus of a noble class sensing that the days of its free play with the Crown might well be numbered. He was, wrote Spottiswoode, ‘a man of rare parts … learned, full of courage, and most faithful to his king and master.’ ‘No man,’ Spottiswoode added, ‘ever carried himself in his place more wisely, nor sustained it more courageously than he did.’ The brother of Sir William Maitland of Lethington, Sir John Maitland of Thirlestane had at first been an adherent of Mary’s and had entered the king’s service during Lennox’s time of influence when the former queen’s supporters had been welcome. Thereafter, his rise had been steady, becoming secretary to the king in 1584, vice-chancellor in 1586 and chancellor a year later – an office that he would hold until his death in 1595. And in demonstrating his efficiency and good sense, there was much about him in personal terms that appealed to the king. Not least of all, he wrote English and Latin verse, possessed a sharp Scots tongue, loved raillery and sarcasm, and mingled grave affairs of state with jests and facetiousness. But it was policy and politics that rendered him so invaluable, and his judicious mix of firmness, pragmatism, devotion to duty and loyalty that distinguished him so markedly from his predecessors. Despite his indifference to the religious disputes of the age he urged upon the king the necessity of better relations with the Kirk, and though he bitterly resented Mary’s death he saw clearly that moderate friendship with England was essential to Scotland’s interests.
More importantly still, perhaps, the chancellor stood for rigorous administration and the firm reassertion of monarchical authority through a series of reforms which, if successful, would modernise and strengthen the whole fabric of government. Tough new measures were intended to purge the kingdom of lawlessness and crime, while James was also encouraged to assume a much more prominent role. At home, too, reforms to the royal chamber and household not only curtailed expense but enhanced the king’s dignity – something that was also to be encouraged, albeit with only limited success, by tightening the notoriously lax rules governing access to the royal presence. The Borders, Highlands and Western Isles were to be pacified, and the ‘ordinary and daily’ council of the king, as well as the Court of Session, were to be shorn of noble influence, even if this meant packing them with his friends and relatives, most of whom were lairds like himself.
And it was for precisely this reason, of course, that Maitland found himself surrounded by such a formidable ring of noble foes. The office of chancellor had long been one that the nobility regarded as their perquisite, so that his comparatively low-born origins only added to the anger caused by his policies. In Bothwell’s view, indeed, he was nothing more than a ‘puddock stool [toadstool]’ in contrast to the ancient cedars of the traditional ruling caste, and James was therefore pressed to govern ‘with his nobility in wonted manner, not by private persons hated’. Both Catholic and Protestant lords despised the chancellor, in fact, and in such circumstances it was imperative that the king should have done everything possible to protect him from the individual he had recently offended so grievously. For, though a man of no great ability, Huntly had developed nevertheless into a competent military leader. And quite apart from his ambition and disloyalty, beneath the earl’s superficial charm, there lurked an even darker side that the king had so far neatly ignored. It was Huntly, after all, who butchered the Earl of Moray in a foul murder and made a pastime of summary justice. Not content with roasting alive two cooks from an enemy clan as an example to all, the turrets of his castle at Strathbogie were proudly adorned with the severed limbs of those who crossed him.
Yet even after James had deprived Huntly of the captaincy of his guard and dismissed him to his lands in the north in accordance with Maitland’s ultimatum, he still found it impossible to break the knot of friendship cleanly. On the contrary, his intention, it seems, was to maintain both Huntly and Maitland in some inexplicable state of balance, and merely by the exercise of his own influence bring them somehow to accept each other. ‘The King,’ wrote one of the English government’s informants, ‘hath a strange, extraordinary affection to Huntly, such as is yet unremoveable … The Chancellor is beloved of the king in another sort, for he manages the whole affairs of this country …The king had a special care to make and keep these, his two well-beloved servants, friends, but it never lasted forty days without some suspicion or jar.’ And Huntly had surrounded the king with his friends at court, not the least of whom was the king’s current ‘best-loved minion’ and ‘only conceit’, Alexander Lindsay, younger brother of the Earl of Crawford. Eventually ennobled as Lord Spynie in 1590, ‘Sandie’, as the king called him, was actually a mediocre figure of few political ambitions in his own right, but he had been made vice-chamberlain and, though the emotional connection between the two was comparatively limited, was known to be James’s ‘nightly bedfellow’.
With influences such as these at work, it was not entirely surprising therefore that James should cling so doggedly to Huntly and his circle. ‘There is not one in the chamber or of the stable,’ the English intelligencer Thomas Fowler told Lord Burghley on 28 March 1589, ‘which two sorts of persons are nearest attending on the king’s person, but are Huntly’s […] and the Chancellor cannot mend it, for the king will not change his mind, he loves them so well.’ Even before the earl left Edinburgh, therefore, James foolishly insisted upon hunting in his company and only narrowly escaped capture when he awoke in panic the morning after a banquet and left the scene of danger in haste. A few weeks later, moreover, while spending the night in the countryside outside the capital, he was suddenly warned of Huntly’s approach in the company of Errol and Crawford. All three, it seems, were marching down from the north with a view to appre-hending him, while Bothwell, who had joined the enterprise in the hope of ruining Maitland, was advancing from the Border. Ultimately, in fact, it was only the chancellor’s timely intervention that saved the day. For at midnight the king took flight and by 3 a.m. was safe in Maitland’s house in Edinburgh, after which Bothwell retired to Dalkeith and the Catholic earls to Perth.
It would take an outright act of rebellion, therefore, before James could be stirred to some semblance of decisive action. Yet now, faced with absolutely no alternative, he reacted with surprising vigour in what would prove to be the only military action in which he directly participated. Assembling his Protestant nobles and supporters in the south, he mustered his forces in Edinburgh and marched north so rapidly that within two weeks he was approaching Aberdeen where, at the Bridge of Dee, Huntly and his 3,000 or so supporters prepared for battle. Indeed, throughout the brief campaign James’s personal involvement was exemplary. When it was rumoured, for example, that the royal army was about to be attacked by night the king responded with commendable resolve. ‘That night we watched in arms,’ wrote a member of the expedition, ‘and his Majesty would not so much lie down on his bed, but went about like a good captain encouraging us.’ And in other respects, too, James warmed to the task with surprising energy and commitment, as his officers pressed in upon him with information, advice and requests. ‘These people,’ wrote Fowler, ‘must have free access to the king’s presence. If there were no more but the continual disquiet of such a throng from morning to night and their entertainment, it were too much toil for any prince; but he must visit their watches nightly, he must comfort them, be pleased with them passing from place to place, that day or night the good king has little quiet or rest. He hath watched two nights and never put off his clothes.’
James’s efforts would ultimately prove needless, however, as Huntly’s followers lost heart and melted away into the hills. Nor would James sustain the resolve that had largely carried the day. Instead, the opportunity to follow up a worthy bloodless victory with a long-overdue assertion of his regal authority was sacrificed yet again for sentiment’s sake and the fond hope that clemency might heal rather than chafe his kingdom’s wounds. It was true, of course, that his position was still less than entirely secure. When James finally entered Aberdeen, for example, his men remained weary from forced marches and the ravages of Highland weather, and supplies were low. Huntly, moreover, was still at large, and without a captive ringleader, the king could hardly return to his capital in triumph. Overreaction on his part would also surely lead to calls for vengeance later.
But the line between moderation and weakness is a thin one and if discretion is always laudable, hesitancy and appeasement are rarely so – especially when the seeds of further disruption remain intact. The king’s decision to offer Huntly a secret deal was therefore as unwise as it was typical. So long as he surrendered himself, James told the earl, he would be treated mercifully, and this he did, along with Crawford and Bothwell. In consequence, what might have represented a defining triumph for the king became another lesson that treason was a low-risk enterprise, especially when the culprits were objects of affection for the man they sought to control. Tried for treason and found guilty, the rebels were merely placed in leisurely confinement until, a few months later, they were released – much to the exasperation of the Kirk, the chancellor and the Queen of England, though much to the comfort and pleasure of one particular malcontent who still awaited his moment.