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‘The king’s impatience for his love and lady hath so transported him in mind and body that he is about to commit himself, Leander-like, to the waves of the ocean …’
William Ashby to Elizabeth I, 23 October 1589
Though 1589 had begun with threats, intrigue and calls to battle, by spring the tide had turned and happier thoughts had scope at last to blossom. With varying degrees of seriousness, the king’s marriage had been discussed since 1582, but now, after the merits of various Catholic and Protestant princesses had been duly weighed and pondered, two alone stood out as fitting candidates: the Calvinist Catherine of Navarre and the Lutheran Anne of Denmark. Those who regarded tight-knit community of religion with the Kirk of Scotland as essential to the maintenance of a united front against the Counter-Reformation supported the case for Catherine, while those who were broadly anti-Catholic, yet more pragmatically concerned with preserving commercial links between Scotland and Denmark, naturally backed her Danish rival. Nor was the king prepared to dally further in making his choice, even though it had been generally acknowledged until now that he ‘never regards the company of any woman, not so much as in any dalliance’. At first, in fact, it was to be a question of form and duty rather than a matter of a young man’s yearning. ‘God is my witness,’ the king admitted at the time, ‘I could have abstained longer than the weal of my country could have permitted, [had not] my long delay bred in the breasts of many a great jealousy of my inability, as if I were a barren stock.’ But before long, as fresh horizons opened and new adventure beckoned, all would be headlong love and reckless courtship.
Even so, the choice of bride had not been straightforward. Marriage to a daughter of the Danish king, Frederick II, had been one of the earliest options to be discussed and during the spring of 1587 an embassy headed by the king’s former tutor, Peter Young, and the wealthy merchant, Sir Patrick Vaus of Barnbarroch, had been empowered to negotiate the terms, though talks finally faltered over the perennial bugbear of the princess’s dowry. A French marriage, on the other hand, was supported by both Chancellor Maitland and a majority of Scottish nobles, and had influential enthusiasts across the Channel too, including the poet du Bartas who had urged the match unofficially during his earlier visit to Scotland. Yet once again there were pitfalls, since Henry of Navarre, Catherine’s brother, was initially fighting to become King of France and hoped for Scottish assistance. In the meantime, moreover, he remained relatively penurious and, like Frederick in Denmark, proved reluctant to supply the kind of hefty financial settlement for which James thirsted.
Ultimately, however, a decisive combination of policy, pressure and personal attraction had swung the balance in Princess Anne’s favour. Denmark was, after all, an orderly, well-established and Protestant kingdom which had largely escaped the religious tensions engulfing Europe and served as a convenient bridge for Scottish alliance with the Protestant princes of north Germany. Furthermore, Anne seemed to have the edge over her rival in terms of both age and beauty. In September 1587, William Melville of Tongland had been sent to France to inspect Catherine and returned with ‘a good report of her rare qualities’. But while Anne was eight years younger than James, Catherine was eight years older, and though prudent, virtuous and capable of offering good counsel, might therefore prove less than perfectly biddable in her dealings with a considerably less experienced husband. Worse still, it was said that ‘the sister of Navarre was old and crooked and something worse if all were known’. And when the worthy burgesses of Edinburgh, ‘having their most necessary trade with the Easterlings’, decided to press the case for a Danish match by rioting in May 1589 and actually breaking in upon Maitland’s chambers with threats of death amid fears that he was about to prevail once more with the king and seal a marriage to Catherine, the die was finally cast. James, it seems, had already ‘conceived a liking in imagination’ for Anne, and now his imagination could be given full vent.
The passion for the 15-year-old princess which presently consumed him had not, however, been apparent from the outset. According to Sir James Melville, the king had agonised at length over his decision, arming himself with portraits of the two princesses and making up his mind only after ‘fifteen days’ advertisement and devout prayer’. When, moreover, Young and Vaus had opened negotiations in 1585, the king was hoping mainly for the hand of King Frederick’s elder daughter, Elizabeth, but when asked what should be done if the princess were betrothed already, James’s sound business sense swiftly prevailed. ‘Forfend the omen,’ he exclaimed, ‘but if it happen, ask for the other.’ And the fears of James’s ambassadors were indeed well founded, for, as they soon found upon arrival, the Duke of Brunswick had already been promised Princess Elizabeth’s hand. Only when the Danes had finally convinced the Scots that, though Elizabeth ‘was the more beautiful’, Anne was nevertheless far from unlovely and for her age taller and more fully developed than her sister, were negotiations allowed to go forward.
Even at this point, however, the deal was far from done. When James’s representative, George Keith, the Earl Marischal, sailed for Denmark in mid-June, he went with a series of Scottish demands that remained excessive. In addition to a dowry of £1,000,000 (Scots), he was to ask that the Danes offer naval and military assistance should Scotland be invaded or James had cause to fight for a foreign title due to him by just inheritance. Furthermore, Denmark was to abandon its ancient claim to the Orkneys and join an anti-Catholic league, along with Scotland and other Protestant states. Such, indeed, was the scale of Scottish demands that only the increased influence of the Danish Queen Mother, Sophia, after King Frederick’s death the year before, saved the match at all. Five hundred tailors and embroiderers had, it seems, been at work on Princess Anne’s trousseau for the best part of three months, and her bridal coach – fashioned throughout from silver rather than iron parts – was already underway. The proud mother refused, therefore, to see her efforts sacrificed at the last, and, as she pushed and the would-be bridegroom pined, Scottish demands not only abated but virtually disappeared.
In succumbing to Cupid’s dart, therefore, James finally conceded that he ‘would not be a merchant for his bride’, and settled in August for a dowry of 75,000 thalers. But his generosity, gracious though it may have been, did not befit his straitened circumstances. The king, remarked Thomas Fowler, ‘has neither plate nor stuff to furnish one of his little half-built houses, which are in great decay and ruin. His plate is not worth £100, he has only two or three rich jewels, his saddles are of plain cloth. He is served with six or seven dishes of meat but eats but of two; no bread but of oats, and cares not what apparel.’ And Fowler’s gloomy observations were echoed by another of his counterparts. ‘Surely Scotland was never in worse state to receive a Queen than at present,’ commented William Ashby, ‘for there is not a house in repair.’ A tax of £10,000, raised by the Scottish Parliament for the marriage, had already been spent and fears grew that the Danish princess might arrive before James’s wedding garments had been prepared – leaving him no alternative, ultimately, but to scrounge the necessary funds from England. ‘It is now time to give proof of affection,’ he wrote to Burghley in London. ‘No time must be lost, for tempus deals most straitly with me.’ The result was a grudging gift of £2,000 worth of plate and £1,000 from the Queen of England, who, for her own good reasons, was already infuriated by his decision to choose the Danish princess over the French.
In the event, James’s concerns about his loved one’s premature arrival proved unfounded. For although the marriage was celebrated by proxy in Copenhagen on 9 August 1589, and she set sail for Scotland on 1 September, her passage was swiftly halted by raging west winds. Three times, in fact, her ship the Gideon was forced to turn back, and at the tempest’s height the young princess herself had narrowly escaped death when three cannon broke loose from their housings and careered back and forth across the deck. Two clergymen on board, Drs Knibbe and Kragge, had been urged to pray for calm and safety, and when their prayers went unanswered, Peter Munk, the Danish admiral, assumed that the weather was witches’ work. For prior to the journey he had quarrelled with the husband of a woman reputed to be skilled in the black arts, and now felt impelled to seek safe haven in a Norwegian fjord.
James, meanwhile, waited with increasing anxiety as the same storms prevented news of his bride from reaching Scotland. Indeed, as the days lengthened into weeks he became deeply alarmed, ordering public prayers for Anne’s safekeeping and retiring to Craigmillar near Edinburgh to ponder her fate in isolation. ‘The king, as a true lover, wholly passionate and half out of patience with the wind and weather, is troubled that he hath been so long without intelligence of the fleet and thinketh every day a year till he see his joy and love approach.’ By 8 October, moreover, the same lovelorn king had dispatched a messenger of his own to determine her whereabouts, and convey to her a tender note in French – the language that Anne had been learning rather than Scottish to communicate with him. He wrote to his ‘only love’ of ‘the fear which ceaselessly pierces my heart’ and ended by ‘praying the Creator’ to grant her a ‘safe, swift and happy arrival upon these shores’. There were verses, too, in which he compared his plight to Leander and lamented the ‘full manie causes suire’ that now increased his ‘woe and caire’.
Ultimately, it was only on 10 October that James finally received word of Anne’s safety in Oslo, and it was now, beside himself with a mounting surge of chivalry, romance and raw impatience, that he decided to opt for bold solutions. His Lord High Admiral the Earl of Bothwell would achieve by Scottish seamanship what the Danes had failed to do and bring Anne home with minimum delay. James, moreover, would accompany him, just as his grandfather had braved the Channel to bring home Madeleine de Valois, his first queen. He would ‘commit himself and his hopes Leander-like to the waves of the ocean, all for his beloved Hero’s sake’, and prove his manly credentials at last. The ‘nakedness’ caused by his lack of parents and siblings, he admitted somewhat extraordinarily in the proclamation announcing his decision, had always left him weak before his enemies. Likewise, ‘the want of the hope of the succession breeds disdain’. So he would seize the opportunity to prove once and for all that he was ‘a true prince’ and no ‘irresolute ass who could do nothing of himself’. Nor, he claimed, should Maitland continue to be blamed ‘for leading me by the nose, as it were, to all his appetites, as if I were an unreasonable creature or a bairn that could do nothing of myself’.
What the king had not counted upon, however, was the cost of such an expedition, and it was left to Maitland to volunteer to foot the bill as a means, no doubt, of compensating for his earlier opposition to the marriage. Neither was James unduly concerned about the potential political consequences of his adventure. In the aftermath of Huntly’s abortive rising that spring and two unsuccessful ‘bands’ to remove Maitland from office in 1588, Scotland was still hardly at rest, and it was for fear of concerted opposition to his decision to absent himself from his troubled kingdom so needlessly that James kept his planned departure secret from his councillors. By now, after all, his bride’s safety had been confirmed, and her arrival was hardly likely to be long delayed with or without his intervention. South of the Border, meanwhile, Elizabeth was immediately anticipating the worst when she heard of James’s impending absence – warning her wardens of the Marches to be on the alert for trouble and sending Sir Robert Bowes north again to hold the Protestant interest together against a possible Catholic coup de main.
In the event, the queen’s worst fears did not materialise, since the arrangements for Scotland’s governance while James was away proved surprisingly effective under the circumstances – albeit, perhaps, with a healthy slice of good fortune. To James’s credit, administration was left in the hands of a Privy Council in which all interests were represented and in which authority was so delicately shared out among the most dangerous nobles on both sides that they would act as automatic checks upon each other. A number of key roles were also filled by men of proven ability. Melville of Murdocairney was deputed to carry out the routine duties of the chancellor, in the absence of Maitland who was to accompany the king and be thereby spared the hostile attention of both Huntly and Bothwell. Lord John Hamilton, in his turn, was given overall responsibility for military affairs and policing the Borders, while Robert Bruce, a minister of the Kirk whom James actually liked and trusted, was accorded the role of independent watchman and whistle-blower, ensuring where possible that correct behaviour prevailed and guaranteeing that loud protest would follow in the event that it did not.
Assuming, then, that no divisive issue arose during the king’s absence and that comparatively little positive action was required, such an arrangement would prove effective. Yet Bruce’s ability to calm troubled waters if discord arose remained questionable, and there remained other aspects of the plan that could hardly be justified even in the event of James’s incapacity through a genuine crisis, as opposed to the current self-imposed quandary. The president of the council was, after all, to be the 15-year-old Ludovic, son of Esmé Stuart and now Duke of Lennox in his own right. Though he was actually Scotland’s ‘Second Person’ or heir presumptive at this time and his new role was largely nominal, he was far from ideal as a figurehead at a time when the whole tenor of government, particularly in the prevailing Scottish context, was so intensely personal in nature. More problematic still, however, was the decision to install the Earl of Bothwell as his advisory associate. As wild and fractious as ever and, as events would later demonstrate, no less disgruntled, Bothwell’s inclusion as de facto conciliar head was purely the result of his arrant unwillingness to settle for anything less.
Yet James, as he now joyfully confessed, had been ‘inflam’d and ‘pearc’d’ by ‘Cupide Blinde’, so that even the tempestuous autumn seas, let alone considerations of state, would not deter him. Six ships, the largest of which was the king’s own at 130 tons, had been well provisioned with food, wine and livestock, and he therefore set sail on 22 October, reaching Flekkefjord on the southern coast of Norway six days later. Fortunately, the prevailing winds had eventually favoured his passage as much as they had hindered his bride’s, and he arrived safe and unruffled. ‘All in good health,’ reported one of the party, ‘the king’s majesty was never sick.’ But he too had at first been driven back upon the coast of Pittenweem by tempests and the last day was so stormy that his flotilla was thought to be in great hazard. Clearly, though James’s outright terror of any naked blade was already well established, his willingness to face danger on the high seas would have matched many a hardened sailor’s. The cold, moreover, was bitter and the final stage of his journey required a further voyage along the Norwegian coast to Tönsberg, which was not completed until 11 November, followed by a hard cross-country journey of more than 50 miles before he arrived in Oslo.
But in spite of his long and arduous travels, it seems James still managed to cut an impressive figure upon his arrival in Norway’s capital. Travelling in considerable pomp, accompanied by Danish, Swedish and Norwegian noblemen and preceded by heralds, he was described by eyewitnesses as tall and thin, with deep-set eyes. He was also splendidly dressed in a red velvet coat decorated with gold and a black velvet cloak lined with sable fur. Nor did he tarry in meeting – and somewhat embarrassing – his bashful bride. According to David Moysie, he made his way at once to the old Bishop’s Palace where Anne was lodged and ‘passed quietly with boots and all to her Highness’, whereupon he ‘minded to give the queen a kiss after the Scottish fashion’, only to be told by his loved one that such intimacy upon first meeting was not the custom of her own country. The rebuff was not sustained, however, and ‘after a few words privately spoken’ there did indeed pass ‘familiarity and kisses’ between them. Next morning, moreover, dressed in blue velvet bespangled with gold and preceded by local nobles and six heralds clad in suits of red velvet, he visited Anne again and spent the day in her company.
Still almost a month short of her fifteenth birthday, the princess was a tall, blue-eyed, slender, graceful girl whose white skin and radiant, golden hair were the subject of much admiration as she grew steadily towards the statuesque beauty of her adult years. Like James, she enjoyed hunting and was also amused by dressing up and acting. And though her intelligence has often been treated dismissively, her ability to speak French and her rapid acquisition of Scottish go some way to countering this view, as indeed does her eventual patronage of Inigo Jones and other artists. If, moreover, she was not politically minded, this was to prove more of a virtue than a vice from her husband’s perspective and her subsequent intrigues at the Scottish court were driven more often than not by mainly worthy motives, such as a wish to exercise greater control over the upbringing of her children. Her wish to manipulate behind the scenes declined in any case over time, and she became over the years a shrewd judge of character and a generally discreet influence, who never lapsed from faithfulness herself and was prepared, though not always patiently, to tolerate James’s relationships with good-looking young men. Certainly she could not sustain a great passion in her husband, mainly perhaps, because she never became what he most wanted throughout his life – an intellectual peer and genuine confidante with whom he could share his innermost secrets. But there was much early optimism at the match. ‘I trust,’ wrote David Lindsay, the minister of Leith, who had been brought over from Scotland to officiate at the wedding, ‘she shall bring a blessing to the country, like as she giveth great contentment to his Majesty.’
After their earlier proxy marriage, the two were finally wed in person at St Halvard’s church in Oslo on 23 November. The ceremony, lasting just over an hour, was conducted in French and included a sermon upon the significance of Christian marriage delivered by the local bishop, after which Anne left and James remained to receive the congratulations of all attending, to whom he replied in Latin. Thereafter, the wedding banquet was held in the imposing hall at Akerbus, a fortress standing in a rocky promontory in Oslo fjord. Almost one month later, moreover, on 21 January 1590, the marriage was solemnised once again in the presence of the Danish royal family in the castle of Kronborg, by which time the winter was so far advanced that James rejected the opportunity to return to his own kingdom and opted instead to accept an invitation to stay with his new relatives. Leaving Scotland to fend for itself, he travelled overland by sledge and arrived at Bohus Castle near the Swedish frontier on New Year’s Day, before being finally welcomed in state at Kronborg Castle once again on 21 January amid volleys of cannon fire lasting a whole half hour.
What had begun as an absence from his homeland intended to last some twenty days had therefore already extended to some three months, but this was still by no means the end of James’s stay. Indeed, he would remain in Denmark until late April 1590 where his new brother-in-law, the 12-year-old Christian IV, was already impressing by the tremendous pace of his hospitality. Predictably, there was much hunting and hawking, and there was also much drinking. ‘Our king made good cheer and drank stoutly till the spring time,’ wrote David Lindsay. And James made no secret of his activities, informing his current favourite, Alexander Lindsay, how he was writing to him ‘from the castle of Kronborg where we are drinking and drinking over in the old manner’. But there was also entertaining company and more intelligent conversation on offer from his Danish hosts than he had been used to in Scotland and this, too, encouraged James to prolong his stay. He was worried, indeed, that the inadequacy of preparations in his own kingdom for his return might well be an embarrassment. ‘For God’s sake,’ he urged Robert Bruce, ‘take all the pains ye can to tune our folks well now against our homecoming lest we be all shamed before strangers. Thus recommending me and my new rib to your daily prayers, I commit you to the only All-sufficient.’
In the meantime, however, James would not only revel to his heart’s content, but enjoy every opportunity both to extend the scope of his learning and display his own scholarship to best possible advantage. At Roskilde, for example, he discussed the Calvinist doctrine of predestination with Dr Nils Hemmingsen, and later treated the theological faculty at Copenhagen University to a three-hour oration in Latin, after which he received a silver goblet in honour of the occasion. At the Danish royal academy, meanwhile, he attended lectures on both theology and medicine, and was complimented on his learning by Dr Paulus, Superintendent of Sealand. Nor was James’s response anything other than honest. ‘From my most tender years,’ he replied, ‘I have been given to books and letters, which even today I willingly acknowledge.’ And finally, most famously of all, there was also an encounter between James and the intensely difficult, but brilliant, astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had lost the bridge of his nose in a duel over the legitimacy of a mathematical formula and now sported an eye-catching brass prosthetic in its place. At his castle and observatory on the island of Hven, Brahe had spent a day with James in learned discourse upon Copernican theory, which so impressed the young king that he subsequently composed a sonnet in his host’s honour.
Even the King of Scotland could not, however, remain away from his homeland indefinitely, and once a new round of festivities was concluded after the marriage of Anne’s elder sister Elizabeth to the Duke of Brunswick on Easter Day, the time for fond farewells inevitably arrived. On 21 April, therefore, James and his bride sailed from Denmark, and on 1 May they landed at Leith where they lodged in ‘the King’s Wark’, a building which doubled as both a customs house and a royal or ambassadorial lodging, while preparations were laid for the state entry into Edinburgh of a brand new Queen of Scots. In the event, James’s worries about the reception proved largely unfounded – not least because Anne had brought with her the coach of silver, drawn by eight white horses, prepared by her mother. It was in this fairytale carriage that she entered the capital on 6 May accompanied by her husband, with the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Bothwell and Lord John Hamilton riding beside her. All had co-existed in apparent harmony throughout the winter and all now played their parts with due grace and loyal flourishes.
Eleven days later, Anne was duly crowned in the Abbey Kirk of Holyrood, though the ceremony had, it seems, been the cause of not inconsiderable dispute beforehand. There had already been complaints from the Kirk that the queen had made her entry upon the Sabbath, but the main bone of contention now concerned the practice of anointment, which the more radical clergy dismissed as a pagan and Jewish custom and one more objectionable remnant of ‘popish’ superstition in need of eradication. James, however, had himself been anointed by the Bishop of Orkney and insisted that it confirmed the sacred character of kingship. Nor would the king be thwarted in his plans for the forthcoming coronation of his wife, even if it did involve the kind of impish provocation to which he now resorted. With characteristic adroitness, he selected none other than Robert Bruce to perform the ceremony and when the ministers objected that one of their own brethren should be chosen to conduct such an offensive ritual, the king’s response bore all the hallmarks of his familiar wile and wit. Firstly, he pointed out that anointing had been instituted in Old Testament times, and then – no doubt relishing his opportunity to enjoy such an elegant checkmate – he duly added that, if Bruce’s involvement was so wholly unacceptable, he would call upon a bishop to act as a replacement.
On 17 May, therefore, after sermons and orations in Latin, French and Scots, the Countess of Mar duly opened the queen’s gown and Robert Bruce poured on her breast and shoulder ‘a bonny quantity of oil’. Whereupon the king took the crown in his own hands – one of which was said to be painfully swollen by the pressure of correspondence which had given him scarcely three hours’ sleep at night since his return and left him ‘much disquieted in mind and spirit’ – and honoured his chancellor, Maitland of Thirlestane, by passing it to him to place upon Anne’s head. Having received the sceptre from Lord John Hamilton and the sword of state from the Earl of Angus, the young Lutheran queen finally swore an oath ‘to procure peace to the Kirk of God within this kingdom,’ and, notwithstanding the holy oil on her breast, to ‘withstand and despise all papistical superstitions and ceremonies and rites contrary to the word of God’. The oath, however, was little more than a formality from Anne’s perspective and carried little real conviction, it seems, for she soon grew to resent the freedom with which ministers of the Kirk deigned to instruct royalty and eventually converted to Catholicism in the 1590s, though never, it must be said, devoutly – rather, perhaps, as a diversion from some of the drearier aspects of her new existence.
Certainly, the Scottish court was not ideally suited to the new queen’s high spirits and gaiety. Her childish love for games, masques and pageants earned her an unwelcome reputation for empty-headedness and the ministers were soon condemning her ‘want of godly and virtuous exercise among her maids’, her ‘night-walking and balling’ and, most disconcerting of all, her absence from the services of the Kirk. Furthermore, her pastimes were expensive – so much so that the king was appreciating before long that her household cost more than his. And when frustration overwhelmed her, childish tantrums, spiteful words and acts of indiscretion were not always sufficiently resisted. Above all, she nurtured a smouldering resentment towards Maitland of Thirlestane for first opposing her marriage. Yet the queen was also, of course, a vivacious, naive and sometimes innocent figure in a dour and largely colourless setting, where ill-willed courtiers, embroiled in faction and intrigue, often proved more than willing to involve her in the rivalries of the moment and set her, if necessary, against her husband or his councillors.
Even when the heat of James’s ardour for his ‘Chaste Diana’ and ‘Cytherea faire’ had gradually abated and they had finally ceased to live together, he would continue to treat her with tenderness and affection. And the marriage was undoubtedly a procreative success, for Anne bore her husband seven children. Henry Frederick, a somewhat long-awaited heir was born in 1594, and two daughters followed – Elizabeth in 1596 and Margaret in 1598 – before the future Charles I arrived in 1600. Robert, Mary and Sophia were also born over the next six years, though only Henry, Elizabeth and Charles actually survived childhood, and the promising and greatly loved Prince Henry would eventually die on the cusp of manhood at the age of 18. Nevertheless, when the scale of Anne’s task in satisfying a husband of James’s complexity and outright oddity is considered, it was no small credit to her that the marriage fared as well as it did. Nor was it any discredit to James either, for his inherent sentimentality and sense of fair play continued to the end of his wife’s life. Ultimately, in fact, it was only after the birth and death of his last child that the homosexual preference of his youth seems to have reasserted itself. Until that time, there is every reason to accept Bishop Goodman’s later observation that the royal couple managed to ‘live together as well as man and wife could’ without ‘conversing’.
Yet one of the bishop’s other contentions – namely, that James was ‘never taxed nor tainted with the love of any other lady’ – is thrown into doubt by some sparse though tantalising evidence. In a letter written by Sir John Carey to Lord Burghley on 10 May 1595, for instance, there is a reference to ‘fair mistress Anne Murray, the king’s mistress’, and on 3 June Carey also reported a marriage to be solemnised in the near future at Linlithgow ‘between young Lord Glamis and the king’s mistress’. The lady concerned was once again Anne Murray of Tullibardine who did indeed go on to marry Patrick Lyon, Lord Glamis. Nor are these fleeting comments the only foundation for suspicion, since James composed a narrative poem entitled ‘A Dream on his Mistress my Ladie Glammes’, in which he dreams that the God Morpheus transports his loved one to him as he lies sleeping and finds it impossible to resist her charms, for ‘onlie mot I conquered be’. Beyond this, in fact, the records are silent, but it remains difficult to avoid the impression that the first flush of nuptial bliss may well have carried James forward to at least one extra-marital excursion with a member of the opposite sex.
Soon after his return from Denmark, however, and long before his ardour for his wife had begun to pall, the king was deeply engrossed with women of an altogether different kind. The notorious Scottish witch-hunt throughout the winter of 1590-91 may well have originated in the belief of the Danish admiral Peter Munk that the storms which forced his fleet to abandon the passage of Princess Anne to England had been raised by witchcraft. Doubtless James will have heard this opinion when he arrived to collect her in person, and the unusually stormy weather accompanying the return journey to Scotland the following spring will only have served to reinforce the conviction that malevolent powers were being invoked to harm both him and his wife. For, like other contemporaries across Europe, James displayed an implicit faith in the powers of evil and the efficacy of black magic – along with a cold terror of witches in particular – that would continue to hold even a well-trained, rational mind like his in thrall. Supplied by the devil with enchanted stones, magical powders, poisons and other even more mind-boggling paraphernalia, witches could raise storms, induce insanity, impotency or exaggerated sexual desire, raise spirits to plague mankind and even cause death. They could also (as James recorded in his own book on the subject) fly – so long as they held their breath. Their gender, moreover, made them especially susceptible to diabolical influence, since, in James’s view, Satan had seduced Eve in the beginning and been ‘the homelier with that sex’ ever since.
Towards the end of the king’s life, it is true, he was to admit some doubts, though chiefly on the question of the actual prevalence of witchcraft and the nature of confessions wrung under torture from plainly deluded persons. At some time, it seems, he had gone on to read Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, which was brave enough to express scepticism at the efficacy of the black arts. But when his own Daemonologie was published in 1597, James left no doubt that his intention was to refute the ‘damnable opinion’ of Scot, who was ‘not ashamed in public print to deny that there was such a thing as witchcraft’. And in his preface to the reader he spoke too of the ‘fearful abounding at this time, in this country, of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches and enchanters’. He wrote that he claimed, ‘not in any way (as I protest) to serve for a show of my learning and ingenuity, but only (moved by conscience) to press thereby, so far as I can, to resolve the doubting hearts of many both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practised, and that the instruments thereof merit most severely to be punished’.
Presenting his book in the form of a dialogue between the uninformed and questioning Philomanthes and the didactic Epistemon, James’s discourse encompasses the entire range of supernatural phenomena known to the ancients – ghosts, wizards, spirits, demons, possession, fairies, even werewolves – but it is most concerned with witches and their abilities. Nor had he moderated his opinions significantly by the time he became King of England in 1603. Indeed, although he eventually mitigated the ferocity of some aspects of his new kingdom’s witch trials, one of his first priorities upon his succession was to have his book republished and to follow this with a significant stiffening of the old Witchcraft Act in employment under Elizabeth I. Still seeing himself as the white knight of the biblical Book of Revelation, wielding a flaming sword of justice, his personal crusade as the terror of witches and scourge of the devil continued to serve in his view as proud testament to his love of virtue and thirst for justice, so that crimes that had previously been punishable by a prison term now became punishable by death. Furthermore, the explanation James offers in his Daemonologie for the contemporary upsurge in the practice of witchcraft is extremely significant. ‘The consummation of the world, and our deliverance drawing near,’ he wrote, ‘make Satan to rage the more in his instruments, knowing his kingdom to be so near an end.’ For James, then, as with other contemporaries, the occult was not so much a belief as an ideology in its own right, encompassing the direction of history itself, as well as his own place within it – and in the winter of 1590–91 he would find more than ample scope for indulging his fixations to the full.
The end of the sixteenth century had seen the onset of a tenacious ‘witch craze’ across Northern Europe and nowhere more so than in Scotland where the Kirk was more or less continually engaged in detecting and combatting dark forces. Deriving in part from ancient Scottish fertility rituals in which devotees worshipped an incarnate deity that appeared before them, the so-called ‘Dianic Cult’ of James’s time was said to be celebrated in midnight orgies by covens of men and women who claimed to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was perceived, moreover, as an organised phenomenon, permeating every class. In Scotland, for instance, the Ruthven family had dabbled in it for generations and their activity had certainly added to James’s aversion to them. But it was the exposure of a far-reaching occult conspiracy in East Lothian that now fired the king’s interest so keenly that for almost a year he would work at little else than ‘the sifting out of them that were guilty’ – attending some of the more important examinations in person and, at one point, even making one of the key participants, a maidservant from Tranent called Geilie Duncan, play to him the tunes she had piped for the Kirkyard dances on All Hallows’ Night at North Berwick.
It appears, then, to have been the king’s trip to Denmark, and conceivably his discussions with the theologian Hemmingsen, author of the well-known treatise on witchcraft Admonitio de Superstitionibus Magicis Vitandis that turned James’s interest in the occult into something of a more consuming passion culminating in the publication of his own Daemonologie in 1597. Though references to Satan are plentiful in his early published works, for instance, he made no direct statements at all on the subject of witchcraft before 1590. But throughout the North Berwick witch trials – and especially from April 1591 when the evidence mounted that James had been the object of a concerted satanic conspiracy involving some 300 individuals of various social ranks – his involvement reached a peak. In all, three or more organised covens were said to have been working against the king and his marriage with all the usual tools and tricks of the craft: toads hanged and roasted to extract their venom ‘for his Higness’ destruction’; cats bound to the severed joints of dead bodies cast into the sea; magical practices upon the king’s bed linen that he and it might waste away together; and finally the fashioning of a waxen image to be melted slowly in a fire to ensure an agonising death.
James listened, it seems, with all the credulity that might have been expected from any contemporary, but also exhibited a particularly acute fascination with some of the more outlandish and curious features of the spectacle. A bewitched man, for example, was said to have capered and shrieked before the king ‘to the great admiration of his Majesty’, while one of the witches, Agnes Sampson, ‘a renowned midwife’, whispered things he had said to the queen on their wedding night, at which he ‘swore by the living God that he believed all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same’. There were tales, too, of the devil incarnate for James to pore over. According to Sir James Melville, the witches met by night in the kirk of North Berwick, ‘where the devil, clad in a black gown, with a black hat upon his head, preached unto a great number of them out of the pulpit, having light like candles round about him’. ‘His face,’ Melville recorded, ‘was terrible’ - his nose ‘like the beak of an eagle’, his eyes ‘great’ and ‘burning’ – and his limbs were hairy, ‘with claws upon his hands and feet like a griffin’. ‘He spoke,’ we are told, ‘with a hollow voice.’
Certainly, James was prepared on occasion to countenance some of the more notorious excesses associated with witchcraft investigations of the period. When, for example, Agnes Simpson was examined by the king in person at Holyroodhouse, she was fastened to the wall of her cell by a ‘witch’s bridle’, an iron instrument with four sharp prongs forced into the mouth, so that two prongs pressed against the tongue and two others against the cheeks. She was also kept without sleep, and thrown to and fro with a rope around her head before confessing to fifty-three indictments against her and suffering subsequent death at the stake. Likewise, a local schoolmaster at Saltpans by the name of Dr John Fian, who was accused of being a coven leader, was subsequently tortured with both the rack and ‘the boot’, and by having needles inserted under his fingernails before the fingernails themselves were eventually torn out with pincers.
Above all, though, it was the case of Barbara Napier, widow of Earl Archibald of Angus, that best demonstrates the king’s tenacity in rooting out and punishing what he himself considered ‘the highest point of idolatry, wherein no exception is admitted by the law of God’. When Napier had the good luck to be acquitted with the help of influential friends like her brother-in-law, the Laird of Cairschoggil, on the pretence that she was pregnant, James was not prepared to let the matter rest. On the contrary, when he learned of her escape from being ‘put into a great fire’, he insisted that her jurors be arrested and tried for delivering a false verdict. At issue in part, of course, was the credibility of the king’s justice, which James correctly emphasised in making his decision. For the practice of corrupting juries and witnesses, and flouting due process on grounds of kinship and friendship was a long-established evil in Scotland – one, said James, that ‘here bairns suck at the pap’ – and he made clear that it must be dealt with ‘not because I am James Stuart and can command so many thousands of men, but because God hath made me a king and judge, to judge righteous judgements’.
Yet the same conviction that witchcraft was a living, potent force also firmly underlay the king’s determination that Barbara Napier must pay the ultimate price for her sacrilege. ‘We are taught,’ James told her jurors, ‘by the laws both of God and men that this sin is most odious; called Maleficium or Veneficium, an ill deed or a poisonable deed, and punishable likewise by death.’ ‘As for them who think these witchcrafts to be but fantasies,’ he continued, ‘I remit them to be catechised and instructed in these most evident points.’ And although the number of executions resulting from the North Berwick witch trials remains uncertain, Napier was only one among some seventy in all who found themselves prosecuted. She, along with Geillie Duncan, Dr Fian, Agnes Sampson and Euphemia MacCalzean, daughter of Lord Cliftonhall, the well-known judge, were each executed for conspiring to bring about the death of the king, who had only, it seems, survived against all odds. When, according to one confession, the devil inquired of the witches whether their magic was proving effective, he was disappointed ‘and because a poor old silly ploughman named Grey Meill chanced to say that nothing ailed the king yet, God be thanked, the Devil gave him a great blow’. When, moreover, the witches sought the devil’s explanation for the king’s unexpected survival, the Devil could offer only one explanation, which he chose to deliver, curiously enough, in French. ‘Il est,’ retorted the Prince of Darkness, ‘un homme de Dieu.’
In the meantime, a sea captain called Robert Grierson, who was also implicated, had died as a result of torture before he could be formally tried. But it was the alleged involvement of none other than Francis Stewart Hepburn, 5th Earl of Bothwell, which gave the entire case a new and altogether more sinister significance. For on the evidence of various suspects it was suggested that Agnes Sampson had proposed the king’s destruction at the earl’s request, and that a waxen image melted before the devil at Acheson’s Haven near Prestonpans had been the result. Indeed, on 5 May 1591, in what seems to be an increasingly manipulated statement to be used for political ends, Bothwell was specifically incriminated by Geillie Duncan and others as the one who commissioned and provided funds for the making of the wax image to be used to destroy the king. As the image was passed from hand to hand, it was said, all present uttered the following words: ‘This is King James the Sixth, ordained to be consumed at the instance of a nobleman – Francis, Earl of Bothwell.’
Nor was this the only claim of its kind. The king was to be destroyed, said one defendant, ‘that another might rule in his Majesty’s place and the government might go to the Devil’. And there was talk, too, of the English queen’s involvement with Bothwell’s treachery after the unfortunate Grierson had let slip that ‘it would be long before the gold came out of England’. When, moreover, the warlock Richard Graham, who had already produced a garbled Latin conjuration invoking syphilis upon the king, agreed to tell all he knew about the earl, so long as he was granted the protection of Edinburgh Castle’s walls, the scene was well and truly set for what would prove to be the prelude to a final and decisive reckoning between the King of Scotland and his turbulent nobles.