7
‘He hath oft told me the wickedness of his nobility and their evil natures, declaring himself weary of his life among them.’
Thomas Fowler, chief agent of Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network in Scotland, writing of
King James in 1589
In May 1587, more than two years before his marriage, James had made a characteristically eccentric attempt to heal his kingdom’s endemic divisions by staging a curious feast of reconciliation at Holyrood. Gathering his nobles together for what was ostensibly a celebration of his twenty-first birthday, he urged them with all the earnestness and naivety that was so typical of his nature to foreswear their feuds and hatreds by drinking three solemn pledges to eternal friendship. Thereafter, in a gesture that smacked more of dark humour than statecraft, the king delighted his capital with a procession of the entire nobility of Scotland walking two by two, each man coupled with his most notorious enemy, to take their place at banquet tables laid out by the Mercat Cross amid fireworks, salvoes of cannon fire and a lavish distribution of free wine for the onlookers who gaped with a mixture of astonishment and cynical amusement at the spectacle before them. It was, in its way, a not unlovable gesture from a king whose good intentions were rarely in overall doubt. But it was symbolic, too, of the same king’s impotence in the face of powerful forces that he lacked both the material and personal resources to quell. Within a year, there had been two unsuccessful attempts to lever his chancellor out of office and in the spring of 1589 a major rising was narrowly averted. Now, as a final straw, one of those self-same would-be rebels, who had been treated with such remarkable leniency, was firmly implicated in a sacrilegious murder plot against his sovereign master.
In many respects, the character and career of Francis Stewart Hepburn, 5th Earl of Bothwell and godson to Mary Queen of Scots, mirrored the influence of his two more famous uncles. Born in 1563, the earl was the son of John Stewart, one of the numerous bastard sons of James V – a distinction that he shared with his dead brother, the Earl of Moray. And from his uncle Moray, who had served as regent before his assassination, Bothwell derived a somewhat anomalous alliance with the Kirk, which could not afford to be overly fastidious in its choice of political champions and whose interests he strove to maintain at court, in spite of his own waywardness and his family’s stained reputation. For the mother of the current Earl of Bothwell was Jean Hepburn, sister of the Bothwell who had been Queen Mary’s notorious lover, and it was this latter uncle, rather than the erstwhile regent, whom the fifth earl most resembled in conduct and character. Fierce, dissolute, profligate and lawless, wedded to feuds and loose living, he lived, in fact, in a world of fantasy, which encompassed a vain hope that the Crown might one day be his, irrespective of the superior claims to the succession of the Lennox-Stuart families.
Not surprisingly, the king had already been greatly incensed by Bothwell’s participation in the recent revolt. But largely as a result of blind hopefulness born of weakness and superstitious fear, he had opted for mercy and reconciliation, telling the volatile earl that just as he ‘had resolved to be a reformed king, so he would have him to be a reformed lord’. As so often in such instances, however, James was merely postponing the inevitable. Bothwell’s companions in his Border district of Liddesdale were, almost to a man, thieves and murderers, and the general lawlessness and disorder that pertained there was a constant source of tension not only for James but for the English, too. In January 1591, for instance, during the trial of one of his cronies, Bothwell abducted a witness from the Tolbooth at Edinburgh, regardless of the fact that the king himself was residing in an adjoining chamber. That same night, moreover, James found himself forced to ride to Kelso in the hope of preventing a brawl in which he knew Bothwell was bound to take part. But when the earl was summoned before him the following day, James issued only threats. He had loved and favoured Bothwell, he said, only to be treated to insults in return. Unless there was a change in behaviour, the law would be enforced with full vigour.
Even so, like his uncle before him, Francis Stewart Hepburn was a man of contradictions. ‘There is more wickedness, more valour, and more good parts in him,’ wrote Thomas Fowler, ‘than in any three of the other noblemen,’ and there was no doubting either his brains or his charm, for he was handsome, dashing and eloquent. On one occasion, for example, he found himself the guest for a few nights of the Bishop of Durham, the shrewd and perceptive Tobie Mathew who made no secret of the earl’s more admirable qualities. ‘This nobleman hath a wonderful wit,’ wrote Mathew, ‘and as wonderful a volubility of tongue as agility of body on horse and foot; competently learned in the Latin language, well versed in the French and Italian; much delighted in poetry, and of a very disposition, both to do and to suffer; nothing dainty to discover his humour or any good quality he hath.’ In the early days, indeed, Bothwell’s considerable charm had made him a favourite of the king, who liked to embrace him tenderly and hang about his neck in the familiar fashion. Had he never become a symbol of aristocratic hatred for Chancellor Maitland and of Protestant loathing for the Catholic earls, it is doubtful whether he could ever have created nearly so much trouble. But his support within the Kirk increased his threat and behind the veneer of French culture, which attracted James, there remained a lingering undercurrent of terrifying unpredictability that made his involvement in the black arts wholly plausible and now rendered him an object of the king’s deepest fear and hatred.
It had not been until 15 April 1591, however, that Bothwell was finally accused of plotting with Agnes Sampson and Richard Graham against the king’s life. And he would prove a difficult man to bring to heal, for on 24 June at two in the morning, according to David Moysie, he succeeded in escaping from Edinburgh Castle, where he was being held pending his trial. Outlawed, he remained in his fortresses along the Border, sometimes spending the nights in the woods. But although the council proclaimed him a traitor, many secretly sympathised with the man who promised to be Maitland’s nemesis and who had, in any case, been charged on the evidence of witches. Certainly, the contrast between Bothwell’s treatment and the leniency accorded earlier to Huntly was widely acknowledged, while the Kirk, on the other hand, remained willing to apply a remarkable degree of tolerance to its influential ally. Emboldened, therefore, by widespread support, he flouted the king’s threats by appearing at Dalkeith, Crichton and Leith, and most blatantly of all at the Canongate in Edinburgh, where he issued a taunting challenge to the chancellor. In response, the king made a token effort to raise troops and capture Bothwell at Kelso, though his own superstitious dread of the nobleman and nagging fear of capture continued to militate against more decisive action. Without a standing army and with few dependable friends of his own, James’s position remained, to say the least, precarious. Indeed, such was the earl’s power that no appointments were made to the offices he had lost and no one accepted his forfeited estates.
On the dark night of 27 December he made a daring raid upon Holyroodhouse, along with Archibald Douglas, son of William, Earl of Morton, and some forty or fifty ‘murderers and broken men’. Forcing their way into a stable, they seized the keys of the porter and succeeded in pursuing Maitland to his chamber, while the king, whose poverty had deprived him of an adequate guard, was left to seek shelter in a remote tower as the intruders careered through the buildings amid cries of justice for their leader. As doors were broken with hammers and set on fire, it seemed yet again, then, that the king’s authority was about to be rudely shattered by a show of brute force and daring. And only when the common bell of the City of Edinburgh was rung and the local citizenry, armed with pikes, rallied to the royal cause did the attempted coup finally collapse. In the confusion, Bothwell and four of his associates fled downstairs and after killing John Shaw, master of the stables, and a number of others, made good their escape on horseback. Even then, however, the king’s embarrassment was not over, for, although Bothwell had been publicly proclaimed a traitor at the Mercat Cross, the king was reprimanded by the ministers officiating at a thanksgiving service held at St Giles only one day afterwards.
In the process, the self-same ministers had all but justified the raid, notwithstanding the fact that eight of Bothwell’s Borderers were now hanging from the palace’s walls. And the earl himself, of course, remained at large, while James and his household were forced to move for safety into cramped lodgings at the top of the city, under the shelter of the castle guns. The king’s words, it is true, were brave enough, and in a sonnet composed to commemorate the slain John Shaw he wrote of his intention ‘with deeds, and not with words to pay’. But it was easier to posture than deliver, and though he pursued Bothwell courageously enough, his bleak January chase through the Border country, where the canny, hardy earl had so many friends, was unavailing. Indeed, far from apprehending the outlaw, James nearly perished when his own horse fell and plunged him into the icy waters of the Tyne.
While Bothwell was flaunting his liberty quite openly at race meetings and football games and accepting invitations to card parties with the English Border gentry, the king’s other tormentors were also making hay. The earls of Huntly, for their part, had long been at odds with the earls of Moray, since Mary Queen of Scots had first bestowed that title upon her half-brother Lord James Stewart, the later regent, thereby depriving the 4th Earl of Moray of an earldom that he considered to be rightfully his. And to compound matters, James Stewart Doune, who had married the elder daughter of the regent and become Earl of Moray in right of his wife, had been contriving to extend his influence in the north-east of Scotland at the expense of Huntly’s family, the Gordons, thus continuing the policy followed earlier by the queen’s half-brother. Handsome and high-spirited, Doune was the ‘Bonny Earl’ of the famous ballad, ‘comely, gentle, brave and of a great stature and strength of body’, beloved by both Kirk and people as the heir and son-in-law of the former ‘good’ regent.
He too, however, would now fall victim to the kind of bloody retribution in which Huntly specialised so avidly. For when the Queen of England’s representative, Lord Worcester, came north in 1590 with a belated wedding present, to confer on James the Order of the Garter, he also brought with him some of Huntly’s treasonable correspondence that had been intercepted by English intelligence. It was widely known, too, that Huntly and his confederate, the Earl of Errol, had remained in continuous touch with Spain, even in 1590 when they had not yet been formally pardoned for their last act of defiance which had ended at the Bridge of Dee. In spite of all, though, James had nevertheless pressed ahead with a formal pardon for Huntly in December of that year, and by early 1592 was resolved, or so he claimed, to settle the earl’s outstanding feud with Moray. By calling the latter to his mother’s castle at Donibristle on the northern bank of the Firth of Forth, the king intended, ostensibly, to reconcile the two contending nobles by little more than the magic of his own personality. The result, however – both sadly and predictably – was one of Scotland’s most spectacular and notorious aristocratic murders.
Certainly, there was no shortage of speculation at the time that James himself had duped Moray into attendance at Donibristle and thereby connived in his death. The king’s dislike for all connected with ‘that bastard’, the former regent, remained as intense as ever, of course, and Moray’s friendship with Bothwell will have done nothing to soften relations. There were rumours, too, reflected in the ballad that celebrated him, that the earl was ‘the Queen’s love’ and had been privy to the Christmas raid at Holyrood. Add to this the evidence that Maitland was eyeing some of Moray’s lands and had procured a warrant for Huntly to arrest him as a Bothwell partisan, and the case suggesting an orchestrated assassination is far from implausible.
If, moreover, James himself was not in fact directly involved, the timing of his invitation could not have been more conducive to Huntly’s purposes. For on 7 February 1591, while accompanying the king on a hunting trip with an escort of forty horsemen in the vicinity of Donibristle, Huntly absented himself on the pretext of pursuing a group of Bothwell’s accomplices who were known to be close by. In the encounter with Moray that actually followed, however, the earl and his clansmen held the castle all day until it was finally set ablaze and he was left with no option but to flee from the inferno towards the shore – his hair and helmet plume, it was said, in flames. Thereafter, he was finally dispatched among the rocks by Huntly himself who delivered a killing dagger blow to the face. ‘You have spoilt a better face than your own’, the handsome victim is said to have declared before he expired.
Yet the deed in itself was still not one that appears to have troubled James unduly, for he was capable of a striking indifference to injustice or suffering when his own affections were not directly involved. At the same time, of course, the assassination was wholly in keeping with a long-standing culture of political violence in Scotland, with which James was already all too familiar, and in addition to liking Huntly and despising Moray, he also needed the former’s strength in the north of the kingdom to counterbalance both Bothwell and the Kirk. But any wishful thinking on James’s part that the martyring of a popular Protestant hero by Scotland’s premier papist might somehow pass unmarked was soon disproven, as Moray and his dead friends lay in state in Leith church and the earl’s bloodstained shirt was paraded on a spear around the Highlands amid the growing clamour for clan war. In the meantime, for further dramatic effect, his mother made her own demand for vengeance, presenting James with a picture of her murdered son and a musket ball plucked from his body.
The subsequent treatment of Huntly, moreover, only added fuel to the flames that had already consumed Donibristle. Having placed himself voluntarily in the king’s custody at Blackness, he was yet again indulged and released almost immediately amid howls of disapproval from both Presbyterian ministers and common people alike. ‘Always,’ James told Huntly, ‘I shall remain constant,’ while Maitland rather than the king was left to incur the main blame of the rioting Edinburgh mob. ‘Since your passing from here,’ James informed Huntly, ‘I have been in such danger and peril of my life as since I was born I was never in the like, partly by the grudging and tumults of the people, and partly by the exclamation of the Ministry whereby I was moved to dissemble.’ But while such dissembling came naturally to James, on this occasion it counted for little as rumours of his involvement in the murder mounted. Above all, there was talk that when Moray’s kinsman, Andrew Stewart, 2nd Lord Ochiltree, attempted assistance, he had found the ferry to Donibristle barred by the king’s express order from all but Huntly.
If so, then James had clearly miscalculated grievously. On the one hand, England’s Queen Elizabeth was not slow to repeat her familiar warnings that no good could come from clemency to Catholics, and least of all a wholly wild card like Huntly. Balancing rival forces was, of course, a key art of political management, but when Huntly and Bothwell were the counterweights involved, no happy outcome was ever conceivable. And now relations with the kingdom to the south worsened significantly, as James complained to Elizabeth of his English pension and how she was not ‘content as freely to pay it as freely ye promised it’. Equally gallingly, the queen showed no inclination to stem the flow of unofficial assistance tendered to Bothwell, who had now been gifted a popular cause to fight for and the wholehearted backing of the Kirk to wage it. Even with his connection to the black arts, he was nevertheless viewed as what one minister, John Davidson, termed a ‘sanctified plague’ whose divinely ordained mission was to cause the king to ‘turn to God’ and deliver Scotland from the papist scourge. Far from damaging him, then, the loss of Moray would actually render Bothwell the bane of James’s life for at least two more years to come.
Certainly, in June 1592 the turbulent earl was once more snapping at the king’s heels – this time with a midnight attack upon Falkland Palace involving 300 men and a battering ram, during which James had to withstand a seven-hour siege before help arrived. Furthermore, when two of Bothwell’s accomplices, the Lairds of Logie and Burley, were subsequently arrested in early August, even this would prove a source of vexation to the king. For Logie’s escape on the night of his interrogation was apparently achieved with the help of his sweetheart Margaret Vinster, one of the queen’s Danish maids. Leading her lover through the royal sleeping-apartments at Holyrood in the dead of night, Vinster, we hear, ‘conveyed him out at a window in a pair of sheets’. And such was James’s dejection at his betrayal by those so near to him that he not only had his first recorded quarrel with his wife, but, more significantly, entered another of those phases of dejection to which he was always prone, ‘lamenting his estate and accounting his fortune to be worse than any prince living’. Indeed, he would spend the rest of that summer and autumn fleeing from place to place in dread of Bothwell, and was further weakened in August when Maitland, finally bowing to the raft of opposition existing at court, retired temporarily to his estates at Lethington.
In the summer of 1593, moreover, Bothwell came again, and this time successfully. By now, he had enlisted almost all the leading Stewarts to his cause – Lennox, Atholl and Ochiltree – and when Lady Atholl allowed a raiding party to slip into Holyroodhouse between eight and nine in the morning of 24 July there followed the familiar royal surrender. Half-dressed and trapped in his bedchamber, James was finally confronted by Bothwell in person, emerging from behind the hangings in the king’s ante-room and ‘craving mercy and pardon most humbly’ but carrying nevertheless a naked sword which he laid at the king’s feet. Nor could James’s apparent boldness in telling the kneeling earl that he could not, like Satan dealing with a witch, obtain his immortal soul, conceal his actual impotence. For, in spite of his brave words and cries of ‘treason’, he found himself forced all the same into what was arguably the most humiliating capitulation of his entire life. Compelled on the one hand to dismiss his friends at court, the king was also left to agree a compromise whereby Bothwell himself would withdraw from court in return for an acquittal at his forthcoming witchcraft trial and an additional pardon for all other offences.
When, furthermore, a crowd of armed citizens soon gathered around the palace, they were duly informed by the king, leaning from his window in thoroughly unkingly fashion, that all was well. Pretending that the band of Bothwell’s ruffians now escorting him everywhere were being employed at his own request, James then duly acquitted Bothwell of witchcraft on 10 August notwithstanding the fact that the earl’s chief accuser, Richard Graham, had already insisted upon his involvement up to the very time that he himself was executed in February. Worse still, the verdict of outlawry previously proclaimed three times against the earl at the Mercat Cross was soon formally revoked. With greater bravado than ever Bothwell then wrote in triumph to Queen Elizabeth, whom he addressed as ‘Most Renowned Empress’, expressing his hope that he might become Lord Lieutenant of Scotland and assuring her how, with continued help, he could ‘manage the estate about the king’.
Yet, like other subverters of royal will before him, Bothwell’s sway and swagger concealed weaknesses of his own that would grow increasingly apparent in the longer term. Not least of all, the uneasy confederation of malcontents that he had conjured around him would eventually demonstrate tensions of its own, as hidden rivalries resurfaced, mutual suspicion crept in and the inherent need for stable monarchical authority became apparent once more. Furthermore, Bothwell’s agreement to abandon the court in return for his acquittal and pardon proved a costly error, since it allowed James to improvise a middle party to protect him from both the earl himself as well as Huntly’s supporters. Lennox and Mar, for example, were easily detached from their temporary ally, and Maitland was now reconciled with a group of his former adversaries, including Glamis, the treasurer, Lord John Hamilton, one of the greatest of all the nobles, and the Catholic Homes and Maxwells, with whom Bothwell was at feud along the Border. Such an alliance could not last for long itself, of course, but it enabled James to slip away from a parliament at Stirling to the security of Loch Leven and subsequently raise an army of sufficient strength to banish Bothwell once again.
The delinquent earl’s campaign of force and fury had, in any case, no real substance of policy behind it beyond his own self-aggrandisement and the general contempt for Maitland that would ultimately evaporate with the chancellor’s death in 1595. Bothwell’s final rebellious fling in 1594 was therefore little more than a swansong – the act of an increasingly frustrated man who had no more imaginative cards in his pack. By now, his usefulness to the Queen of England was largely spent and the paltry subsidy of £400 that she offered to assist his latest adventure was wholly inadequate to the task, though in April he would drive a force of royal cavalry back upon Edinburgh, leaving the king, as David Calderwood observed, to retire into the city ‘at full gallop with little honour’. This initial setback was only the prelude, however, to an altogether more decisive rally on James’s part as 1,000 Edinburgh citizens, aided by three great cannon from the castle, turned out to resist Bothwell’s assault. After a short engagement which cost the king’s forces no more than twelve men killed, Bothwell promptly disbanded his army and withdrew to England, where he was this time promptly disavowed by Elizabeth.
The ultimate folly was yet to come, however, as Bothwell now threw in his lot with none other than Huntly, which guaranteed at a single stroke the loss of any residing sympathy from the Kirk. For at this time Huntly was further mired by his involvement in one more Catholic intrigue, dating back to the end of 1592. The conspiracy of the so-called ‘Spanish Blanks’ had been hatched, it seems, by two Jesuits, James Gordon and William Crichton, and involved a heady project to land a force of 30,000 Spaniards from the Netherlands, of whom 5,000 were to establish Catholic control in Scotland, while the rest marched south to England. Since the plan contained no provision whatsoever for securing the necessary sea lanes, the immediate danger posed by the plan was actually negligible. But the Scottish messenger, George Ker, who was arrested while embarking for Spain, was in possession of mysterious blank papers signed by Huntly, Angus, Errol and Sir Patrick Gordon of Auchindoon committing them to some unspecified, but no doubt dastardly, compact with the enemy. The upshot was another largely futile punitive campaign in the north, in which James got as far as Aberdeen and hanged a few peripheral players, while the main culprits went into hiding in Caithness.
Throughout 1593, in fact, the king continued to treat the conspirators with extraordinary leniency. Plainly despairing of his ability to bridle them, he had admitted to Sir Robert Bowes, the English ambassador, that Huntly, Errol and Angus were three of the most powerful nobles in the kingdom and that ‘if he should again pursue them and toot them with the horn he should little prevail’. In summer, the parliament which was expected to pass an act of forfeiture against the conspirators’ lands did not do so, and, in November, James obtained from a sparsely attended convention of nobles held at Edinburgh an Act of Oblivion by which the guilty earls were forgiven their involvement in the conspiracy of the Spanish Blanks on condition that they made a formal submission to the Kirk – which was never in fact forthcoming. To obtain the Act, James was, it seems, quite willing to manipulate the convention blatantly and, ultimately, even to tamper with the text of the submission itself. In consequence, the whole clergy raved and the Synod of Fife excommunicated the earls without consulting the king, while Elizabeth added to the chorus of disapproval by dispatching a stinging letter in which she rued the sight of a ‘seduced’ king and a ‘wry-guided’ kingdom.
So it was, then, in the summer of 1594, that Bothwell and Huntly finally found themselves consorting in the most consummately unholy alliance of all. On Midsummer Eve, indeed, the Catholic earls, buoyed by common cause with Bothwell and assurances of Spanish help, held a great feast with dancing and drinking to celebrate their impending triumph, notwithstanding the fact that at the time of Bothwell’s raid at Leith, James had already issued a solemn pledge to his subjects that could not be easily repudiated. ‘If ye will assist me against Bothwell at this time,’ he had pleaded, ‘I promise to prosecute the excommunicated lords so that they shall not be suffered to remain in any part of Scotland.’ And now, faced with Bothwell’s escalating defiance, even James could not avoid a more decisive response. Drawing his strength not from the nobility, but from the lairds, the burghs and the Kirk, the king therefore prepared for a punitive expedition, and by sheer good fortune resulting largely from the Crown’s inherent advantage as the only potential source of long-term order, it at last proved possible to cut the cancer. For unlike his enemies, James had always been able to rely ultimately upon a feudal army to contain any threat for a month or two at any given moment, and it was this advantage which now rendered him well placed to employ such a contingent for offensive purposes.
In September 1594, therefore, a royal force led by the king himself and accompanied by Andrew Melville, whose presence confirmed the Kirk’s determination to deal with Huntly once and for all, duly marched into Aberdeenshire. And though the royal army received an early reverse on 3 October when the young Earl of Argyll’s advance detachment was defeated in a minor skirmish, known rather more grandly than it deserved as the ‘Battle of Glenlivet’, Huntly’s men had no stomach for a further encounter with the main force following close behind. Instead, they returned once more to the wilds of Caithness and, at the Kirk’s insistence, agreed to the destruction of their dwellings. In the process, Huntly’s fortified stronghold was blown up, along with Errol’s in Buchan and another half-dozen Catholic fortresses, after which, within only a few months, James duly obtained an agreement whereby Huntly and Errol accepted exile abroad, leaving only Angus to lurk, albeit impotently, among his Highland cronies.
Bothwell, meanwhile, had also escaped to Caithness after Huntly purposely delayed in surrendering him to the king, and a certain Edinburgh merchant named Francis Tennant refused to betray him. Yet it was not long before Bothwell, too, settled for exile in Europe and a later career mirroring, in many respects, that of his more famous uncle. While the last husband of Mary Queen of Scots fell into the hands of Scandinavian enemies and died imprisoned and insane, his deranged young successor would, it is true, manage to retain his freedom. But by April 1595, he was in France without friends or means, since his Scottish estates had been forfeited to powerful neighbours, and before long, like many an unsuccessful rebel unlucky enough to evade the more merciful retribution of the executioner’s blade, he faced lingering loneliness, ignominy and penury. Journeying forlornly through Spain and Italy, he would eventually die in poverty in Naples in 1612.
By contrast, Huntly once more returned to Scotland and yet again enjoyed the king’s boundless clemency. He remained, of course, a tool of sorts for James to juggle against the Kirk and a grubby diplomatic counter to hold in reserve in his dealings with Elizabeth, but the absence of more decisive punishment remains profoundly puzzling. His return to Scotland in 1596 was, in fact, accompanied the following year by his reception into the Kirk at the king’s insistence. Yet even James’s further decision to reward him with a marquisate would not ensure his religious compliance in the longer term. For, while he conformed in James’s lifetime, he would nevertheless choose to die a Catholic in 1636. And it was only fitting, perhaps, that a man who had both milked and abused royal favour so consistently should have staged this final gesture of defiance upon his deathbed. Insofar as he had ever been defeated in any really meaningful sense of the term, Huntly had, after all, been largely vanquished by default – a victim not so much of the king’s strength or political wisdom as of his own latent weakness and eventual lack of options. The king he could shake with ease, the Crown ultimately he could not.
The same, moreover, was true of the nobility in general and James’s apparent ‘victory’ over them, for although his authority would never again be flouted quite so flagrantly, James triumphed over his aristocratic enemies as much by luck and circumstance as by judgement. Bothwell, for his part, had ruined himself by his own outrageous behaviour, while Huntly and his henchmen were chasing a vain Catholic cause that had long since had its day in Scotland. As a result, their peers were largely tired of a stream of disorder, subsidised too often from abroad, which could only harm both Scotland’s and their own interests in the longer term. Ultimately, indeed, Bothwell and Huntly had not only demonstrated the futility of politics by kidnapping, but served to underline the central importance of monarchy in a Scottish context. More, in fact, was to be gained from partnership with the Crown than opposition at a time when James’s succession to the throne of England appeared to be drawing closer and as James, in any case, employed the lands once held by Rome to coax compliance. Above all, however, it was the growing political leverage of the kingdom’s emerging middle classes – the very lairds, burgesses and moderate clergymen who had rescued James on more than one occasion – that persuaded even the most die-hard advocates of noble rule that their interests were best conserved by co-operation rather than conflict.
In the event, it was more radical sections of the clergy who still potentially posed the most fundamental challenge to the king’s authority, and at Maitland’s instigation every effort had been made to achieve an accommodation between Church and state. Shortly after his return from Denmark, for example, James was encouraged not only to visit the General Assembly to thank God that he had been born into the Scottish Kirk, but to deride its Anglican equivalent, which had already been bitterly attacked by the likes of James Melville for its ‘bell-god bishops’ who were anxious to advance the cause of episcopacy in Scotland. ‘As for our neighbour Kirk in England,’ the king declared, ‘it is an evil said Mass in English, wanting nothing but the liftings.’ Nor did he entirely buckle under Elizabeth’s pressure to prevent the Kirk from extending support to English Puritans, three of whom – John Udall, Robert Waldegrave and John Penry – had sought asylum in Scotland.‘There is risen both in your realm and mine,’ Elizabeth protested:
a sect of perilous consequence, such as would have no kings but a presbytery and take our place while they enjoy our privilege. Yea, look well unto them. I pray you stop the mouths or make shorter the tongues of such ministers as dare presume to make orisons in their pulpits for the persecuted in England for the Gospel.
But while prayers for English Puritans were indeed forbidden and Penry was expelled in accordance with Elizabeth’s wishes, James moved slowly and retained Waldegrave as his printer. As a further gesture towards the Kirk, he would also continue to intercede on behalf of Thomas Cartwright and other English Puritans during 1591.
In the wake of Huntly’s assassination of Moray, Maitland and James seemed especially keen to placate the Kirk, with the result that in May 1592 Parliament had been encouraged to agree a string of concessionary measures. The so-called ‘Golden Act’, for instance, had fully and clearly established ecclesiastical government by presbyteries, synods and General Assembly, while a law of 1584, which confirmed the status of bishops, was now rescinded.
Nor were James’s actions altogether as surprising as they may at first seem. Though he feared and hated any threat to his own primacy in secular affairs and equated incursions on his ecclesiastical authority as the first step on a broader slippery slope, he had been raised and educated nevertheless within the structure of the Kirk, and respected both the institution itself and the Calvinist theology upon which it was based. He was also, by nature, averse to confrontation where compromise might be attainable and, with Maitland’s guiding hand, it was still conceivable that the Kirk could itself be finessed into compliance. The process, of course, might well be long and fraught, as was demonstrated later in 1592 when an Act asserting the royal supremacy led to a string of attacks from the pulpit, while the king himself ‘chafed and railed’ against the ministers after a law to silence them was rejected. But if the Kirk could be bought off ultimately by substituting the term ‘presbyter’ for ‘bishop’, might not the Crown’s control of secular affairs continue unchallenged?
All depended, in fact, upon a firm stand against Catholicism, and the goodwill of key personnel at the summit of the Kirk’s hierarchy: neither of which would be forthcoming. Indeed, James’s lame response to the affair of the Spanish Blanks appeared to be one more demonstration of his indecision and ambivalence regarding his treasonous Catholic subjects, and left his Presbyterian ministers demanding condign punishment not only for the Catholic earls involved, but for the entire body of Scottish Catholics who took it for granted that the king himself had been a party to the plot. At the time of George Ker’s arrest, after all, a private memorandum drawn up by James had been found among his papers in which the king discussed the scheme’s merits as a means of assisting his succession to the English throne. And although the memorandum concluded that any invasion of England was impractical at that time, its inclusion in a portfolio bound for Spain nevertheless offered fertile ground for speculation. Nor did James altogether rule out dealings with the Spanish in his efforts to achieve his dynastic ambitions. ‘In the meantime,’ he noted:
I will deal with the Queen of England fair and pleasantly for my title to the Crown of England after her decease, which thing, if she grant to (as it is not impossible, howbeit unlikely), we have attained our design without stroke of sword. If by the contrary, then delay makes me to settle my country in the meantime and, when I like hereafter, I may in a month or two (forewarning of the King of Spain) attain to our purpose, she not suspecting such a thing as she does now, which, if it were so done, would be a far greater honour to him and me both.
At this very time, meanwhile, the Kirk was once more firmly under the influence of the man whose fire-breathing capabilities exceeded, by reputation, even those of John Knox. For since March 1586, Andrew Melville had been back at his post at St Andrews where he would continue for the next twenty years. By 1590, indeed, he had become the university’s rector. A veteran of Calvin’s Geneva, and an expert not only in theology but in Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac and Rabbinical languages, Melville had already fled to England to escape a treason charge in November 1584, but returned within twenty months to champion the liberties of the Scottish Kirk against all encroachments of the government. And from that time forth his opportunities multiplied. Not least of all, James’s Act of Annexation of 1587, which had appropriated episcopal temporalities to the Crown, had contributed significantly to the decline of the very episcopacy upon whose continued existence he staked so much. In principle, the measure had represented a sensible attempt to win the sympathy of the General Assembly, but the subsequent action of the Catholic earls and James’s weak-kneed response meant that no such sympathy could ever be sustained.
More worryingly still, James’s Act of Oblivion in 1593, which forgave Huntly for his involvement in the affair of the Spanish Blanks, merely reinforced Melville’s primacy. Indeed, while James continued to insist upon employing the Catholic earls as a counterweight to his Presbyterian clergy, so Melville’s leadership of the Kirk became not only increasingly critical but, if anything, even more radical. The king, it is true, was caught in a vicious circle. Yet it was one at least partly of his own making, since it was dictated not only by politics but by his ongoing personal favouritism for Huntly. Leniency towards Scottish Catholicism resulted too, no doubt, from James’s wish to enlist the support of Catholics south of the Border in his quest for the English succession. However, his eventual decision to allow Huntly and Errol to return from exile in the summer of 1596 would stretch far beyond the bounds of subtle signal-sending to potential sympathisers south of the Border. On the contrary, it would needlessly flout all political common sense, and flagrantly inflame those very forces within the Kirk that he most feared – the self same forces indeed that he would help to entrench in the absence of Maitland’s moderating influence after the latter’s death in October 1595.