8
‘Here is a strange country. I would say a most vile people.’
Thomas Fowler, chief agent of Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network in Scotland, May, 1589
The birth of James’s first child at Stirling on 19 February 1594 was a welcome glint of sunlight amid the storm clouds surrounding him on all sides. According to David Moysie, the news was greeted with joy by ‘the whole people’, and ‘moved them to great triumph, wantonness and play … as if the people had been daft for mirth’. And though the child’s arrival opened up fresh possibilities to every plotter in Scotland seeking another target for kidnap and an alternative power source of exactly the kind that James himself had become during his mother’s reign, the king could not be anything but happy overall. For the birth not only strengthened his dynastic position in Scotland, but also improved his eligibility for the Crown of England as the father of a healthy heir. Notwithstanding the continued presence of Bothwell and ongoing preparations for the campaign against Huntly, the baptism, therefore, was to prove a particularly grand and symbolic event. In memory of his two grandfathers and with the founder of the Anglo-Scottish marital alliance, Henry VII, no doubt also in mind, the prince was to be named Henry Frederick, and by the time festivities were staged in August, enough money had been scraped from the meagre Scottish treasury to do full justice to the spectacle – the highlight of which was a masque in which James appeared as a Christian Knight of Malta, alongside the Border lord, Buccleugh, and other nobles in female garb, representing Amazons.
The christening itself, moreover, was no less colourful – and ritualistic – than James’s own twenty-eight years earlier, including to the fury of Andrew Melville and his like-minded ministers an anointing with holy oil by the Bishop of Aberdeen. But while the full-bearded clergy fumed, the king could take due satisfaction from other aspects of the event. Certainly, the exotic arrangements for the serving of dessert at the evening banquet left no doubt of James’s determination to emulate the opulence of more prestigious courts in Europe. A great chariot, 12ft long and 7ft broad, was drawn, it seems, by a single Moor, while Ceres, Fecundity, Faith, Concord, Liberality and Perseverance, dressed in silver and crimson satin, dispensed fruit from it. Then, to symbolise James’s voyage to Denmark to claim ‘like a new Jason, his new queen’, there followed a great ship 18ft long and with 40ft masts, taffeta sails and silken rigging, which discharged a volley of thirty-six cannon into Stirling Castle’s great hall before distributing all kinds of fish and shell fish ‘made of sugar and most lively represented in their own shape’. Whereupon, the choir sang a fourteen-part harmonised version of Psalm 128: ‘For thou shalt eat the labours of thine hands: O well is thee, and happy shalt thou be’.
In other respects, however, not all was quite so satisfying for the king’s ego. It had been wise of James to invite the English queen to be godmother and in spite of her notorious parsimony in present-giving, she had shown her appreciation generously enough with ‘a cupboard of silver-over-gilt, cunningly wrought’ and some massive gold cups. Much more importantly still, she would soon sharply forbid Bothwell to ‘show banner, blow trumpet, or in any way live or breathe in England’. At the baptism itself, however, Elizabeth was represented only by the young and surprisingly unsophisticated Earl of Sussex, while the French ambassador failed to turn up at all. Carried away, moreover, by an overwhelming desire to impress, the king had taken too much responsibility for the subsequent junketing at a time when he was already overstretched, and increased his burden further by attempting grandiose and ultimately fruitless negotiations with a number of his foreign guests – too many of whom had actually been invited in the first place. In consequence, many details of the event went awry, and in the midst of proceedings he was further perplexed by a malicious rumour that the Duke of Lennox was the child’s real father. While James was busy commissioning spectacular entertainments involving oversize chariots, mock ships and muscular Moors, another seed of dissatisfaction with his marriage was being vindictively sown. And within a year, in the summer of 1595, this same seed had blossomed into a full-blown quarrel between king and queen over the new prince’s custody.
It was not long after she had settled in to her new home and accustomed herself to the astonishing vicissitudes of her husband’s kingdom that Queen Anne first developed an occasional taste for political intrigue. Above all, and much to her spouse’s irritation, she had become enmeshed in all the recent combinations against Maitland. Now, however, when James decided that his son should be brought up, just as he himself had been, in the comparative seclusion of Stirling Castle, and under the guardianship of his old playfellow, the Earl of Mar, Queen Anne was given a deep grievance with which to underpin her broader misgivings. The king’s decision was in fact firmly upheld by long custom, but there was more involved in the decision than the emotional ties between mother and son or the maintenance of tradition, since Anne, as James well knew, perceived the custody of Prince Henry as a source of political leverage and an opportunity to achieve the importance that had so far been denied her. Notwithstanding Mar’s own history of wavering loyalty, the king was therefore determined to abide by his decision, irrespective of his wife’s rages and entreaties.
When husband and wife were together at Linlithgow in May 1595, she reminded him ‘how she had left all her dear friends in Denmark to follow him, and that King Christian her brother, for love of her, had ever been his sure friend’. But when Anne tried to obtain possession of her son while James was on a hunting expedition at Falkland, it was clear that she would not necessarily confine herself to moral blackmail. Returning in a furious temper, James did indeed take her to Stirling and grant her access to her son for several hours, but beyond this the king would not compromise, as a letter he dispatched to the Earl of Mar makes quite clear. ‘Because in the surety of my son consisteth my surety,’ wrote James, ‘and I have concredited unto you the charge of his keeping upon the trust I have of your honesty, this I command you out of my own mouth, being in company of those I like, otherwise for any change or necessity that can come from me, you shall not deliver him. And in case God call me at any time, see that neither for the queen nor estates, their pleasure, you deliver him till he be eighteen years of age, and that he command you himself.’
Finding her protests unavailing, therefore, Anne found her only solace in a largely irrational antipathy for Mar, which lasted for the next eight years and led her, ironically, to heal her old quarrel with Maitland and intrigue at the same time with a string of other nobles who happened to be Mar’s enemies. Maitland, meanwhile, was so devoid of friends at court that he was prepared to make common cause with the queen, albeit without benefit ultimately to either himself or her. When she claimed to be ill, moreover, her pleas that James should visit her at Holyrood fell on deaf ears, since the king had become so suspicious, even of his chancellor, that he feared being made captive, and only after her illness was proven to be genuine did James relent. Ultimately, his greeting for her was both tender and admonitory. ‘My heart,’ he told her, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’ For Maitland, however, he had only anger and reproof, declaring heatedly that ‘if any think I am further subject to my wife than I ought to be, they are but traitors and such as seek to dishonour me’. In the event, the whole affair gradually subsided as the queen’s faction departed for their homes and James and Anne headed for Falkland, apparently reconciled.
Yet 1595 marked a watershed of sorts in the royal marriage, as Anne and her husband continued to drift apart. Four years later, in his Basilikon Doron, James would make a number of revealing observations on marriage in general and his own in particular. ‘For your behaviour to your wife,’ he wrote, ‘treat her as your own flesh, command her as her lord, cherish her as your helper, rule her as your pupil, and please her in all things reasonable.’ But there were hints of the king’s experience of his own domestic quarrels: ‘… Be never angry both at once, but when ye see her in a passion ye should with reason danton [subdue] yours: for when both ye are settled, ye are meeter to judge of her errors; and when she is come to herself, she may be best made to apprehend her offence …’
True, a good deal of tenderness continued to exist between the two and James urged his heir to have the greatest respect for the woman who would eventually learn to accept even the increasingly overt homosexual dalliances of her husband. ‘If it fall out that my wife shall outlive me,’ he wrote, ‘as ever ye think to purchase my blessing, honour your mother.’ Yet, for all James’s genuine regard and sympathy, there remained a cultural, temperamental and intellectual gulf, which was bound to grow, on both sides, with long familiarity.
Maitland’s days as the king’s right-hand man were also numbered in more senses than one, for on 3 October he died – comparatively unlamented by the man whom he had striven so hard to guide and nurture. James did, it is true, compose a graceful sonnet to his former chancellor, which was carved on a marble memorial tablet above his tomb in Haddington church. There was reference to the ‘vicious men’ who rejoiced at his fall and praise, too, for Maitland’s ‘wisdom and uprightness of heart’ as well as his piety, intelligence and ‘practice of our state’. But the king had always found Maitland more inclined to lead than listen and his sorrow at the loss of a gifted servant was tempered by a distinct sense of liberation. ‘His Majesty,’ one courtier noted, ‘took little care for the loss of the Chancellor’. Shortly after Maitland’s death, moreover, James went so far as to declare that he would ‘no more use chancellor or other great men in those his courses, but such as he might convict and were hangable’. And though the last comment was partly made in jest, it was indeed more than three years before the chancellorship was finally filled.
Now James was determined and able, it seemed, to rule in his own right. Though he refused to acknowledge it, he would build upon the foundations that Maitland had laid over all of eleven years, but he was also to apply an energy and discipline to the task that the chancellor himself would doubtless have admired. Fully aware of his altered status in the wake of his victories of 1594 and 1595, James firstly wasted little time in issuing a proclamation warning all men to obey the law. ‘As he is their king and sovereign lord’, the proclamation affirmed, so the king’s subjects should know ‘that he will be obeyed and reverenced as a king, and will execute his power and authority against whatsoever persons’ as shall ‘contemn his Highness, his authority or laws’. Nor did James settle merely for words and noble sentiments. On the contrary, the registers of the council were filled from this time with rules and orders against common criminals and outlaws and those within the law who nevertheless carried ‘pistols and dags’. Feuding lairds were hauled before king and council, while, ‘at his own pain and travail’, James sought by a mixture of force and persuasion to heal long-standing enmities. It was to be, in fact, nothing less than a political coming of age for the king. And it was a time, too, when James generally succeeded in imposing his stamp upon a country that was at long last finally ready to accept it.
There were even attempts to tackle the wilder regions of the kingdom, though success here was predictably more limited. Three areas above all – the Highlands, the Isles and the Borders – had always proved resistant to the consistent imposition of law and order, and, as James would find, the geographical isolation and cultural idiosyncrasies of these areas meant that only long-term strategies were likely to be of any effect. Taken together, the Highlands and the Northern and Western Isles lie beyond the meandering ‘Highland Line’ which bisects Scotland from north-east to south-west. North of the ‘Line’, the clans pursued a pattern of life that had changed little with the centuries: pastoral, sparse, heroic and warlike. Wringing a meagre existence from primitive agriculture and fishing, the Highlanders’ private wars and feuds and raids upon their neighbours’ cattle and sheep had made them, at every social level, among the fiercest fighting men in Europe. And though many of their chieftains had acquired feudal titles from the king, the intense closeness of the clan meant that for generation upon generation the power and independence of a Huntly or an Argyll had been effectively unbreakable.
Earlier endeavours to assert some degree of centralised control had even proved counter-productive. By the time of his death in 1286, Alexander III had, for example, come close to uniting his subjects, who then included English, Norman-French and Gaelic speakers, in a common loyalty which might over time have created some degree of homogeneity. But the Wars of Independence against England, which followed Alexander’s death, actually entrenched and magnified existing differences, so that when Scotland eventually confirmed its status as a free nation, it had become firmly divided not only on broadly cultural lines, but even linguistically with the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Isles, and Scots or Anglo-Scots-speaking Lowlands. Even the decision to move the royal court to Perth in the fifteenth century and to make the town a capital for both regions proved unavailing as the political centre of Scotland shifted inexorably towards Edinburgh. It was the narrow belt of the Lowlands, after all, that contained some of the country’s richest agricultural land and witnessed the first shoots of commercial and industrial development, largely concentrated in Edinburgh itself.
To compound matters, the later Stewart kings had looked to France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia for their political alliances, and indulged in frequent enmity with England. On Scotland’s southern border, therefore, they were forced not only to tolerate but actively encourage the fierce local magnates whose task was to engage in ceaseless conflict with the ‘auld enemy’. In the process, the priorities of central government were increasingly directed eastward and southward, while the north-west of the kingdom was largely abandoned to its own devices. As such, it was hardly surprising perhaps that the last Gaelic-speaking Scottish king should have been James IV, who died fighting the English at Flodden Field in 1513, or that George Buchanan had never felt the need to teach the king’s great grandson the language. James VI, indeed, was in no doubt regarding the inherent superiority of the agrarian and trading communities of the Lowlands over their Highland cousins. ‘As for the Highlands,’ he wrote in Basilikon Doron, ‘I shortly comprehend them all in two sorts of people: the one that dwelleth on our main land, that are barbarous for the most part, and yet mixed with some show of civility: the other, that dwelleth in the Isles, that are utterly barbarous without any sort of show of civility.’
Yet James, flushed with his newfound confidence as Scotland’s outright ‘King and Sovereign Lord’, was determined, as best he could, to make his own efforts to impose the law-abiding culture of the Lowlands across his kingdom. Twice he announced his intention of visiting the Isles and Western Highlands, though lack of provisions aborted his first expedition and on the other occasion he reached no further than Glasgow and Dumbarton. Similarly, when he summoned the western chieftains to Edinburgh to render proof for their titles to land, few attended. And his efforts to tame the Isles ‘within short time’ by implanting Lowland culture through colonisation was equally unsuccessful. For, far from influencing the Islesmen, whom James scornfully compared to wolves and wild boars, the few settlers who managed to stay put were mostly absorbed into Gaelic ways and habits. Most, in fact, like those planted in Kintyre and Lochaber and on the island of Lewis as a result of an Act of 1597, became victims of botched planning and a smattering of bad luck. On the one hand, the gentleman-adventurers, who established the Lewis settlement on the present site of Stornoway, soon abandoned their project, while a further attempt to revive the project in 1605 resulted in equally dismal failure. Indeed, James’s most significant success in pacifying this part of his realm only resulted eventually from the application of ‘general bonds’, by which chieftains accepted responsibility for the conduct of their clansmen – a policy that had in fact been established even before he became king.
On the Borders, however, there was ultimately better progress, though not before the king’s wavering hand had been forced by fierce English protests about the antics of a celebrated Scottish freebooter named William Armstrong of Kinmont – more commonly known as ‘Kinmont Willie’. When Armstrong was finally apprehended by the deputy of the English Warden of the West March on a ‘Day of Truce in 1596’ and held captive at Carlisle Castle, the blue touchpaper had been lit for a major test of wills between not only the governments of England and Scotland, but between James and his notoriously feisty Border magnates. Swearing that he would avenge English treachery, the Scottish Warden, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleugh, had scaled the castle’s walls on a dark and stormy night and with a few others bore ‘Kinmont Willie’ off in his irons, whereupon the Queen of England herself ‘stormed not a little’, insisting that Buccleugh should be delivered into her hands. And though his subjects urged him to resist, James nevertheless felt compelled to detain the valiant rescuer at St Andrews before delivering him to Elizabeth as requested. Indeed, so alarmed was James at Elizabeth’s anger that in a curious display of anxiety before his council, he produced and formally entered in the register a letter she had written him some years earlier promising not to oppose his lawful right of succession. And when his second child, a daughter, was born at Dunfermline in August, he deferred to England’s queen once more by naming the girl Elizabeth.
It was no small irony, therefore, that the queen’s eventual meeting with Buccleugh suggested that James’s panic was largely unnecessary. When asked how he had dared to storm one of her castles, the Borderer responded with characteristic boldness. ‘What is there, Madam,’ he inquired ‘that a brave man dare not do?’ And far from being infuriated by Buccleugh’s quip, the queen seems to have been impressed by his courage. ‘With a thousand such leaders,’ she told her onlooking courtiers, ‘I could shake any throne of Christendom.’ It was hardly indicative of uncontrollable outrage – any more than the entire affair of ‘Kinmont Willie’ was the kind of episode that might have seriously compromised James’s succession to the English throne. In truth, the King of Scotland’s tunnel vision concerning the English Crown had on this occasion merely undermined his already limited credibility as a leader of genuine resolution, and in the immediate aftermath of his climb down, there was a significant increase in lawlessness along the Border.
Yet James was rescued once again by circumstance and good fortune, for in 1597 a joint commission drew up an Anglo-Scottish agreement, which laid the foundation for forty years of comparative tranquillity in the Border territories. With the prospect of a Scottish King of England drawing closer and with firebrands like the Bothwells well and truly spent, the era of raids and culture of military bravado and brooding bitterness seemed increasingly irrelevant, and it was agreed that a treaty should be drawn up to provide means of bringing notorious offenders to justice. With the conditions for disorder thus eradicated, James was subsequently well placed to play a vigorous role in steadily exerting the control of central government, visiting the Borders frequently and hanging large numbers of the dying breed of ruffians who had thrived for so long. And it was in these circumstances, as the turmoil receded, that men came to speak – albeit somewhat simplistically – of ‘King James’s Peace’.
In the meantime, Maitland’s place in government had been taken by a group of eight ministers, known as the ‘Octavians’: James Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino; Walter Stewart, Lord Blantyre, who had been educated as a boy at Stirling along with the king, and would eventually become Lord Treasurer; Sir David Carnegie of Colluthie; Sir John Skene of Curriehill, the Lord Justice Clerk; Thomas Hamilton, Lord Drumcairn, a shrewd and versatile, though ultimately corruptible individual, who was known by the king as ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate’ as a result of his residence in that street; John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir, who received worthy praise from John Spottiswoode as a man of ‘exquisite learning and sound judgement’; Sir Alexander Seton, Lord Urquhart, who was President of the Court of Session, and went on to become Chancellor and Earl of Dunfermline; and Sir Peter Young, the king’s former tutor. Though sometimes assumed to be of broadly middle-class origins, the Octavians were all substantial landowners and drawn in certain cases from highly respected noble families - ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate’, for instance, being a kinsman of the royally connected Hamiltons. All, moreover, were capable and experienced servants of the Crown. Some, indeed, had succeeded in helping the queen to become more solvent, and it was in their capacity as financial troubleshooters that the group were initially employed by the king.
The state of the royal treasury had already been brought home to James particularly starkly on New Year’s Day 1596, when Queen Anne’s advisers had been able to provide her with a purse containing £1,000 in gold. Keen to exploit such an opportunity to tease her husband, Anne therefore approached him, shook the purse in his face, and condescendingly delivered half its contents to him, inquiring in the process when his council would give him as much. For some time, in fact, James had been reduced to increasingly miserable shifts by his financial predicament, and the queen’s gesture was, in effect, the final embarrassment. In November 1588, indeed, the English agent, William Ashby had reported to Sir Francis Walsingham that the King of Scots was ‘so poor [that] he can neither reward nor punish’, and things had not changed since. His household had continued to be maintained from the private means of his officials, and his debts to moneylenders were common knowledge. He had long suspected, too, that that the officers of the Exchequer were making considerable profits at the expense of the Crown, though his only recourse had been to plunder the mint and debase the coinage. And without exception, his lack of personal magnetism had failed to galvanise – and in particular intimidate – those conducting his business. ‘I have been Friday, Saturday and this day waiting upon the direction of my affairs, and never man comes,’ he told Sir John Skene in an undated letter. ‘Them of the Exchequer that were ordained to take accounts, never one. The affairs of the household should have been ended this day, no man comes down … In short no tryst or meeting is kept. What is spoken this night is forgot the morn …’
But while James bemoaned the self-interest and inefficiency of those around him, he did little to curb his own extravagance and remained the root cause of his problems. ‘He gives to everyone that asks, what they desire,’ wrote Thomas Fowler to Walsingham in December 1588, ‘even to vain youths and proud fools the very lands of his crown or whatever falls, leaving himself nought to maintain his small, unkingly household. Yea what he gets from England, if it were a million, they would get it from him, so careless is he of any wealth if he may enjoy his pleasure in hunting, the weather serving.’ James, moreover, freely acknowledged what amounted to a pathological profligacy on his part. ‘I have offended the whole country, I grant, for prodigal giving from me,’ he noted to Maitland in 1591. And like many victims of addiction, he vainly professed his determination to amend. In the same letter to Maitland, he noted how ‘the two aids of the kitchen ran out yesterday and would not make the supper ready, saying condition was not kept’. The chancellor therefore was to remedy the situation. ‘Suppose us be not wealthy, let us be proud poor bodies,’ James instructed, though a true measure of his pride had already been furnished by his insistence in 1590 that the laird of Caldwell make the customary gift of a hackney, so that Queen Anne’s ladies could be transported in some kind of style, and by his earlier alleged plea to the Earl of Mar for the loan of a ‘pair of silken hose’ before he received a foreign ambassador.
As a token of the king’s new resolve, however, Glamis, the treasurer and other members of the Exchequer were now to be summarily dismissed and replaced by the Octavians in the hope that the king’s finances might receive the same much-needed attention as his wife’s. The preamble to their commission made clear that the king’s income was declining as a result of ‘unprofitable dispositions out of the property and collectory’, increased pensions, falling customs revenue in spite of increased shipping, decay of the coinage, and general neglect and improper management, ‘so that all things are come to such confusion … that there is not wheat nor barley, silver nor other rent, to serve his Highness sufficiently in bread and drink’. Furthermore, the new body was to be granted an unprecedented degree of control to achieve its stated objective of augmenting the king’s income by £100,000 – so much, indeed, that the king pledged himself to do nothing in financial matters without the consent of at least five of its members. He agreed, too, to abide by any directives they might draw up, though his zeal to place so much power in his ministers’ hands was governed, predictably, at least as much by a wish for self-preservation as by any wholehearted commitment to the kind of financial discipline that they might impose. Knowing full well the kind of general odium that his new watchdogs were bound to incur, it made sound political sense – especially to a ruler of James’s disposition – to distance the Crown from the impact of their decisions.
And the Octavians neither shirked their task nor retreated from the hostility that came their way. On 18 January 1596, the English agent Roger Aston was not exaggerating when he observed that ‘these new Checker men begin very sharp’. By the end of the month they had discharged seventy people from the king’s household and required the Earl of Mar to present a list of Prince Henry’s retainers so that his household might also be pruned. Pensions were reduced, appropriate rents were set for Crown lands, and the first general customs duty on imports in Scottish history was successfully imposed. They also tried to obtain financial assistance from the General Assembly of the Kirk, though this would prove a step too far even for their considerable drive and ingenuity. Nonetheless, for the short period that they held the reins, their impact was considerable. During 1596 and 1597, while their reforms were in effect, the expenses of the royal household averaged about £3,650 a month. However, for the half-year period from November 1598 to May 1599, by which time their restraining grip had already been removed, the average was £4,580. Likewise, the comptroller’s excess expenditure for the fiscal year 1596–97 had been merely £258 – only to rise to £3,141 during 1597–98. Indeed, during 1598–99, the year of Duke Ulrick of Denmark’s expensive and alcohol-fuelled visit, it would rise to over £26,000. Still needing to pawn his jewels occasionally, by 1598 James was in debt to two Edinburgh merchants to the tune of £160,000. Nor would he be spared the final indignity in 1599 of receiving the resignation of one of his ministers on the grounds that service to the Crown entailed almost certain financial ruin.
In fact, the Octavians would be overcome ultimately by a mixture of religious intolerance and the machinations of a somewhat amorphous opposition group known as the ‘Cubiculars’, not to mention the king’s own short-lived enthusiasm for the rigours of financial austerity. Hostility from holders of Crown land whose tenures were of dubious validity and courtiers whose pensions had shrunk or vanished altogether was of course inevitable, and chief among the disaffected was Sir George Home of Sport, Gentleman of the Bedchamber – a fat and ruthless faux bonhomme who wished to be rich and retained the king’s ear by mending his quarrels with the queen. ‘Where Sir George declares himself either a friend or an enemy,’ wrote Samuel Cockburn to Archibald Douglas in June 1596, ‘there is none to stand to the contrary.’ And though the days of deadly feuds were largely over, Home had little difficulty in exploiting Alexander Seton’s sympathy for Catholics for his own ends. Faced with outcries from the Kirk at a time when the return of Huntly and his crew was already causing consternation, James therefore decided to neutralise Seton’s moderating influence and place financial control in the hands of Lord Treasurer Blantyre – the most impeccably Protestant and mediocre of all the Octavians – with the result that the body, which had promised so much, swiftly disintegrated.
The battle with the Kirk on the other hand, far from abating, was fast approaching its climax. Even the birth of the king’s daughter on 19 August 1596, had served to highlight the growing tension, since the Presbyterian ministers did not on this occasion offer even token congratulations. Nor would the queen herself escape the wrath of indignant clergymen. Once more she lost the custody of her child when Princess Elizabeth was handed over to the excellent guardianship of Lord and Lady Livingstone – both suspected Catholics – who gave the child seven happy years of care and affection in Linlithgow Castle. But the queen could not have anticipated the remorseless assault upon her own religious beliefs, which duly rained down upon her from the pulpit of the Reverend David Black of St Andrews, who had already acquired a dubious celebrity in 1594 by damning the king’s councillors as ‘atheists of no religion’ and declaring the nobility to be ‘degenerate, godless dissemblers, enemies to the Kirk’.
At some point, in fact, the queen, who had never taken kindly to Presbyterianism nor to the freedom of the Scottish clergy in instructing her husband, had become a secret, though half-trifling, Roman Catholic under the influence of her intimate friend the Countess of Huntly, the former Lady Henrietta Stuart, sister of Esmé Duke of Lennox. And as a result, on 19 October 1596, she was openly insulted by Black who proclaimed in a sermon that ‘the devil was in the court’ and professed that though required to pray for the queen, ‘we have no cause’, since ‘she will never do us good’. To add salt to the wound, Black did not hesitate to deny that the king had any right to judge him when called before the council a month later to account for his behaviour. In the pulpit, he declared, he was subject only to Christ’s word, and answerable for that solely to ‘the prophets’, i.e. ministers or ‘the ecclesiastick senat’.
The fuel for this high-octane clash had been provided, of course, by the king’s decision to seek the return of Huntly and his confederates that summer. ‘Papists,’ James told his clergy at that time, ‘might be honest folks and good friends’ to the Crown, since his mother was a Catholic and yet had been ‘an honest woman.’ And with precisely this kind of specious reasoning, which could be guaranteed to outrage the likes of Andrew Melville, James duly obtained the assent he desired from a convention of the Estates held at Falkland in August – though the victory was not achieved without a price. Melville himself, for instance, had appeared at the convention and, in spite of the king’s command that he withdraw, proceeded to accuse the entire assembly of treason against Christ. A month later, moreover, Melville was back at Falkland for a conference, during which he ‘broke out upon the king in so zealous, powerful and irresistible manner, that howbeit the king used his authority in most crabbed and choleric manner, yet Mr Andrew bore him down’, referring to the ruler as ‘but God’s sillie [i.e. simple] vassal’ and taking him by the sleeve to tell him, ‘Sir, you are brought in extreme danger both of your life and crown’. ‘There are,’ Melville continued, ‘two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the King and his kingdom the kirk, whose subject King James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member.’
With a mixture of self-control, incredulity and cold apprehension at the prospect of a face-to-face confrontation with a zealot of Melville’s cast-iron will, James nevertheless managed to dismiss the ministers pleasantly, promising that the Catholic earls would receive no favour from him until they had satisfied the Kirk of their good intentions. But the preachers of Edinburgh, far from responding with similar latitude, merely, we are told, ‘pressed forward and sounded mightily’ – with the result that the capital was soon rocked by mayhem and disorder. On 17 December during the course of violent sermons at St Giles the cry went up for the congregation to defend itself, with the result that rioting broke out, mainly around the Tolbooth, where the king was meeting with his lords of session. In the event, the crowd was beaten back and the rioters swiftly calmed by the provost, who then hastened the king down the Canongate to the security of Holyroodhouse. But it had been another chastening experience for the king, and it was small wonder, perhaps, that he would warn his heir so forcefully about the threat posed by ‘Puritans’ within the Kirk.
‘Take heed therefore, my son,’ he wrote in Basilikon Doron, ‘to such Puritans, very pests in the church and commonweal, whom no deserts can oblige … breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure, railing without reason and making their own imaginations the square of their conscience. I protest before the great God that ye shall never find with any Highland or Border thieves greater ingratitude and more lies and vile perjuries than with these fantastic spirits.’ Yet by the time that James wrote, the threat of which he spoke was already in full retreat, for the radicals within the Kirk, like the errant nobles before them, had over-stepped the mark and finally detached themselves from their more moderate counterparts – a fact which the king, to his not inconsiderable credit, appears to have at least partially appreciated at the time. For the very next day after a rioting mob had massed outside the Tolbooth, he, his queen and the entire court, along with judges, lawyers and other government officials, removed from the capital to Linlithgow, leaving a herald to proclaim at the Mercat Cross that their departure was to be permanent, since the city was no longer fit to be a royal residence. Nobles, likewise, were ordered to withdraw to their country estates.
Far from staging an ignominious retreat, however, James had literally turned the tables overnight, for if Melville, Black and their counterparts were more than capable of outfacing their monarch in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, they lacked his political skill and, in particular, his sense of timing. Faced with certain ruin as a result of the king’s departure, the capital abandoned its preachers and within a fortnight James was back on his own terms, accompanied by a daunting troop of Border ruffians who now were more than willing to do his bidding. Not only did Edinburgh’s citizens make their peace with the king, moreover, they did so gladly, even accepting a fine of 20,000 marks without demur. Those guilty ministers who were not imprisoned, meanwhile, had no recourse but flight, leaving the Kirk largely purged of its most troublesome elements. Thereafter, a General Assembly of the Kirk called to Perth later in the year formally withdrew the extreme claims made by Melville and, by accepting representation in Parliament, acknowledged their status under the authority of the secular ruler in precisely the way that James desired. Henceforth, a clerical commission set up by the General Assembly would merely advise the king on ecclesiastical affairs rather than dictate policy in the way that had been suggested previously. Kings, it seems, were no longer ‘Satan’s bairns’ and all talk of theocracy was conveniently shelved.
Yet even this was not the limit of James’s victory, for he used this heaven-sent conjunction of circumstances to install moderate ministers of the Kirk in Parliament as ‘bishops’ – a term hitherto anathematised because of its papist connotations. He had long opposed the so-called ‘parity’ of ministers ‘whereby the ignorants are emboldened to challenge their betters’, and proposed instead to ‘advance the godly, learned and modest men of the ministry to bishoprics and benefices [and thus] not only banish their conceited parity but also re-establish the old institution of three estates, which can no otherwise be done’. ‘I mind not,’ he said, ‘to bring in papistical or Anglican bishoping; but only to have the best and the wisest of ministers to have place in Parliament.’ And in October 1600, notwithstanding Andrew Melville’s opposition to the king’s ‘Anglo-piscal, papistical conclusions’, James duly appointed three diocesan bishops to the sees of Caithness, Ross and Aberdeen. Though their influence lay only in Parliament and they had no defined function within the government of the Kirk, which remained thoroughly Presbyterian in nature, it was a triumph no less significant in its way than the taming of the earls. Now at last, perhaps, James could genuinely rule as ‘king and sovereign lord’ in the way that he had always intended. ‘Alas,’ lamented James Melville, ‘where Christ guided before, the court began then to govern all’.