9
‘St George surely rides upon a towardly riding horse, while I am bursten in daunting a wild, unruly colt.’
James VI of Scotland, comparing the kingdom
of England with his own
Against all expectation, including his own, the King of Scotland had taken only nine months from the time of his son’s christening to be rid of all the major torments that had plagued him for so long. And for the next six years, aside from one rogue tremor of noble insolence in 1600, there was comparative peace. In the wake of Maitland’s death, moreover, there remained no single, dominating figure at the centre of politics beyond the king himself. Such, indeed, was the king’s confidence and sense of liberation that he found himself able to indulge his intellect in a spate of writing that fully reflected his determination to be master of his kingdom and of all estates within it, be they noble or clerical. In September 1598, his Daemonologie was quickly followed by a 1,000-word pamphlet entitled The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock and Mutual Dutie Betwixt a Free King and his Natural Subjects, in which he forcefully expounded what would become known to history as the principle of ‘divine right’. Then, one year later, there occurred the publication of Basilikon Doron or ‘Kingly Gift’ – the book dedicated to his infant son, into which he attempted to pack all the wisdom and understanding of kingship that he had accumulated over the previous sixteen years or so. Written exclusively for the prince and falling only accidentally into the hands of a wider readership, it was the least self-conscious, most transparently honest and pleasantest of all James’s works to read. Thus diverted, he was able at last to recover and take stock before his last, all-absorbing and defining project as King of Scotland: the acquisition of the Crown of England.
Though The Trew Law of Free Monarchies was published anonymously, its regal tone and direct and informal style left little doubt about its authorship. Aside from his Daemonologie, James had already published four books: The Essays of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584); Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun on the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Versies of Chapter XX of Revelations (1588); Ane Meditatioun upon the First Buke of the Chronicles of Kings (1589); and His Majesties Poeticall Exercises (1591). But now his aim was more directly didactic: to teach his subjects in no uncertain terms the nature of their duty to their king, and in particular the necessity of obedience and the wickedness of revolt. Nor was the simplicity of James’s language coincidental, since The Trew Law was never intended as an abstract academic treatise. On the contrary, it was meant to be understood in the most lucid, vivid and cogent way, and read in entirety without labour or ambiguity. James’s purpose, he said, was ‘to instruct and not irritate’.
Yet the tract certainly contained statements that would rightly or wrongly redound to his discredit down the centuries. Though there was nothing novel in the claim, for instance, that it was the duty of subjects to obey even tyrannical kings and to accept that, as God’s appointees, anointed rulers were open only to divine judgement, his words, like those of many a well-intentioned pedant, frequently have an unfortunate ring to them. ‘Kings are called Gods by the prophetical King David,’ he reminded his readers, ‘because they sit upon God His throne in the earth, and have the [ac]count of their administration to give unto him’. In Scotland, he argued, kings existed before any Parliaments were held or laws were made and so ‘it follows from necessity, that the kings were the authors and makers of the laws, and not the laws of the kings’. Likewise, the coronation oath involves no compact between ruler and ruled. Instead, the good king is a loving father to his people, cherishing their welfare, tempering punishment with pity, and safeguarding order and harmony for the mutual benefit of all concerned by the very inviolability of his authority. As for evil kings, their chastisement will follow in the afterlife. Indeed, they will be punished far above other men, ‘for the highest bench is sliddriest to sit upon’.
All such claims were, in fact, standard political fare for any Early Modern ruler and accepted, at least implicitly, by the vast majority of contemporary men and women. But whether James had on this occasion chosen the most judicious time to air such views is more open to question. And although the whole concept of the tract may well have sprung in part from the decidedly quixotic streak in his nature, it continues to carry with it certain uneasy resonances. In practice, James’s kingship would often prove eminently pragmatic and flexible – much more so than The Trew Law implied was actually necessary. From his own perspective, moreover, James was genuinely committed to the principles of good kingship – establishing good laws, ministering justice, advancing good men and punishing wrongdoers, ensuring peace and security, and guaranteeing sound religion. Yet ‘divine right’ was a double-edged sword for a king like James. Though it offered order, it sat ill with impatience, timidity and, above all, any lack of genuine ‘majesty’ on the part of the ruler who attempted to exemplify its virtues. And as a principle founded, or so James claimed, upon the bedrock of ancient biblical precedent, its application would need to be especially subtle at a time of such pronounced social, political and religious change.
Basilikon Doron, meanwhile, further emphasised the patriarchal nature of kingship and the virtues required by the godly ruler. Originating, or so James claimed, from a dream which left him fearing that his life would be short, the book is a moral and didactic work outlining a series of precepts for his son’s guidance. And once again the divinely ordained authority of kings features prominently. ‘God gives not kings the stile of Gods in vain’, runs the well-known sonnet opening the work. But James’s primary concern remained the 4-year-old Prince Henry’s education, or as he himself put it, ‘timeously to provide for his training up in all the points of a king’s office’. In this regard, Henry was firstly to attain a knowledge and fear of God by study of the scriptures, by prayer, by preservation of a sensitive conscience, and by learning to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials in matters of faith. It was also essential that he avoid not only pride per se but ‘the preposterous humility’ of those who demand parity in religious affairs. ‘Surely,’ James tells his son, ‘there is more pride under such a one’s black bonnet than under Alexander the Great his diadem.’
There are observations, too, on the Scottish Reformation and predictable sideswipes at the troublesome Scottish nobility. We hear, for instance, how ‘some fiery-spirited men of the ministry got such a guiding of the people at that time of confusion, as finding the gust of government sweet, they begouth [began] to fantasy to themselves a democratic form of government … and after usurping the liberty of their time in my long minority, settled themselves so fast upon that imagined democracy as they fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis: and so in a popular government by leading the people by the nose, to bear the sway of all the rule’. The prince, therefore, was not to tolerate the pretensions of these ‘fantastic spirits … except ye would keep them from trying your patience as Socrates did an evil wife’. Nor should he forget the problems associated with over-mighty subjects. For while James accepted that ‘virtue followeth oftest noble blood’ and urged his son to employ those that are ‘obedient to the law among them … in all your greatest affairs’, he could not forget the damage that had been done to the kingdom by the arrogance of some and the feuds they had waged. ‘The natural sickness that I have perceived this estate subject to in my time,’ he observed, ‘hath been a feckless arrogant conceit of their own greatness and power.’ All too often, it seems, they were prepared to ‘bang it out bravely, he and all his kin, against him and all his …’.
Slightly less expected, however, are the passages concerning warfare. The image of James as a man of peace is, of course, firmly established in popular perceptions, and rightly so. Yet when he wrote Basilikon Doron, his own expeditions against Huntly and Bothwell had recently demonstrated that, when extremity demanded, he appreciated well enough the need for any prince to wield the sword. And though his advice on warfare was conventional, it did not merely rehearse the advice of others or limit itself to generalities. ‘Choose old experimented captains and young able soldiers,’ he told his heir. ‘Be extremely strait and severe in martial discipline, as well for the keeping of order, which is as requisite as hardiness in the wars, and punishing of sloth, which at a time put the whole army in hazard.’ There was praise, too, for the renowned discipline of the Spaniards and especially the Duke of Parma’s infantry. Caesar’s Commentaries were also cited as recommended reading, ‘for I have ever been of that opinion that of all … great captains that ever were, he hath farthest excelled, both in his practice and in his precepts in martial affairs’.
The third and final section of the book, meanwhile, dealt with the ruler’s public image and everyday behaviour – matters which James considered of no small significance, since ‘a king is as one set on a stage whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold’. Though James appreciated the elegant manners of those who had resided at the French court, he nevertheless considered it preferable for his son to adopt the simpler ways of Scottish practice. Indeed, he spoke of ‘the vice of delicacy, which is a degree of gluttony’ and recommended that eating, for instance, be conducted ‘in a manly, round and honest fashion’. A king should likewise ‘keep a proportion’ in his dress appropriate to the occasion, and ‘look gravely and with a majesty’ when sitting in judgement, while remaining ‘homely’ in the private company of his servants and ‘merry’ during his pastimes. Perfume, long hair and unclipped nails were to be avoided, along with the idle company of females ‘which are no other things else but irritamenta libidinis’. The language of a king should be plain, honest, natural and brief, avoiding crudeness, and he should engage in all types of athletic exercise, especially riding, ‘since it becometh a prince, best of any man, to be a fair and good horseman’. Chess, on the other hand, was to be discouraged on the grounds that it was ‘over fond and philosophic a folly’.
Taken as a whole, Basilikon Doron is rightly considered to contain the best prose ever written by James, for in spite of certain artificialities of style it is generally fresh, natural and spontaneous, abounding in racy phrases and picturesque passages that are tinged with James’s characteristic dash of wry humour. Nor does the king’s frequent inability to follow his own advice detract from its significance. If anything, indeed, it adds to the book’s interest. Certainly, it was an immense success, and reappeared constantly in the publications on courtesy produced for the education of upper-class young men during the seventeenth century – notwithstanding the fact that it had first been printed in a secret edition of seven copies which the king distributed among his most trusted servants. Above all, he had wished to keep it from the knowledge of the clergy and later feared that passages might reach England in garbled form and cause suspicion. Yet within days of Elizabeth’s death it was on sale in London, eagerly snapped up by Englishmen and foreigners alike. Ultimately, it would be translated into most of the languages of Western Europe and remains one of the most intriguing windows into the king’s attitudes and personality.
Only two years later, moreover, a brief sketch of James and his court, penned by the English diplomat and poet Sir Henry Wotton, would offer us a further series of perspectives on the man and his ways, which are among the most well known of all contemporary descriptions. According to Wotton, he was ‘of medium stature, and of robust constitution’, ‘fond of literary discourse, especially of theology’, and ‘a great lover of witty conceits’. His speech, we are told, was ‘learned and even eloquent’ and rather more surprisingly, perhaps, he was also described as ‘patient in the work of government’ – a claim belied, of course, by his incorrigible tendency to neglect the routine tasks of administration in favour of pastimes, especially hunting. Another of his admirable qualities, it seems, was his chastity which, Wotton suggested, ‘he has preserved without blemish, unlike to his predecessors who disturbed the kingdom by leaving many bastards’. Above all, however, though James enjoyed ‘listening to banter and to merry jests, in which he takes great delight’ and was ‘extremely familiar’ with the gentlemen of his bedchamber, there was another, less personable side to him. Indeed, he was ‘said to be one of the most secret princes of the world’, Wotton informs us, and capable of ‘bitter hatred, especially against the Earl of Gowrie’ – though the king’s antipathy to this particular individual was hardly surprising in light of what had transpired only the year before.
The Gowrie conspiracy of August 1600 was, in fact, the only violent episode to disturb the peace that had descended so unexpectedly on the closing years of James’s direct rule in Scotland. But it was also, arguably, one of the most impenetrable of all the baffling mysteries associated with James’s reign, not least of all because the king alone, of all the principal persons involved, lived to tell the tale, and because his skill at concealment and subterfuge had been honed by this time to little less than an art form. As Wotton correctly realised, of course, James had already consciously drawn a veil of uncertainty over many episodes in his life, and in Basilikon Doron he had freely admitted how ‘a king will have need to use secrecy in many things’. Even some of his portraits – and none more so than that produced by Adrian Vanson in 1595 – suggest a ruler who, in spite of frequent flashes of bonhomie, possessed a deeper, warier, cannier and more circumspect side. Vanson had, in fact, been patronised by James for all of fourteen years by the time the portrait was produced, and in 1584 had succeeded Arnold von Bronckhorst as official painter to the Scottish court. One year later, he had also produced a portrait of the king for the Danish court as part of the ongoing marriage negotiations. He knew the king intimately over time and he knew the king’s circumstances: his insecurities, the indignities to which he had been subjected and the methods by which he survived them. As such, the brooding immobility of the face he painted in 1595 was surely no more of a coincidence than the suspicious watchfulness of the heavy-lidded eyes, conveying a mind full of concealed and private thoughts – a mind more than capable, too, of confounding posterity about the precise nature of what passed at Gowrie House during a summer hunting trip that had begun so routinely.
According to James’s account, he was met outside the palace of Falkland in the early morning of 5 August by Alexander, Master of Ruthven, the younger brother of the Earl of Gowrie, who related a strange tale to him. The day before, it seems, a man had been apprehended while attempting to bury a pot of gold coins in a field outside Perth. Since buried gold was forfeit to the Crown as treasure trove and since the man had been about to bury it, the implication was that the king could legitimately claim it for himself. But James, in his version of events, was too preoccupied for the time being with his day’s sport and left the matter to the local magistrates. Only later in the day, after the master’s story had been running in his mind, did he ride back to Perth, accompanied by ten to fifteen lightly-armed attendants – at which point he was met by Gowrie, who had been informed by his brother of the king’s approach, and invited to dinner at Gowrie House. There was, James suggested, a certain uneasiness and lack of cordiality in the earl’s invitation, and the poor quality of the meal itself, which consisted of moorfowl, mutton and chicken, suggested that no trouble had been taken to ensure adequate preparation for the royal visit. Even so, the king was apparently ready afterwards to accompany Ruthven to a remote turret chamber, in order to interview the mysterious captive who had been found with the treasure.
What followed from this point becomes more curious still, for as the king made his way to the turret through a series of chambers, Ruthven allegedly locked each door behind him before bringing him to a small apartment where, to the king’s horror, there was no pot of gold, but a retainer of Ruthven’s, named Henderson, clad in armour and bearing a dagger in his belt. While James’s own men were eating cherries in the garden below, awaiting his return, Ruthven, we are told, seized Henderson’s dagger, accused the king of murdering his father, and declared that he must die. Whereupon, with Ruthven’s dagger at his breast, James entered upon a long discourse on the wickedness of shedding innocent blood and thereby persuaded his assailant to consult his brother before proceeding. While he was gone, James also, it seems, managed to prevail upon Henderson who denied any foreknowledge of an assassination plot and obligingly opened a window – which would prove mightily convenient when Ruthven returned and announced to his captive once more that he would have to die. ‘By God, sir,’ Ruthven is said to have declared, ‘there is no remedy’.
In the struggle that followed, however, James claimed to have got the better of his would-be assassin, dragging him to the open window and crying for help to his attendants below, one of whom, young John Ramsey, made his way to the turret and found Ruthven on his knees before the king, his head under James’s arm, and his hand raised over the king’s face as though to stifle his cries for help. Striking him from behind, Ramsey wounded the would-be assassin severely and then called for help to Thomas Erskine and Dr Hugh Herries who subsequently finished him with their swords. Gowrie, meanwhile, was also killed after rushing upstairs in wild excitement, sword in hand, to confront his brother’s killers. Thus, it seems, were both Ruthvens done to death.
It was, however, a highly improbable story, riddled with inconsistencies and outright falsehoods, which has fed the opinion down the centuries that James himself somehow engineered the episode. Certainly, there was no love lost between the king and the handsome, 22-year-old Gowrie, who had just returned from six years of travel and study on the Continent. The earl’s grandfather, Patrick, had of course been Queen Mary’s enemy and Riccio’s assassin, while his father had been beheaded for treason following the Ruthven Raid of 1582, which had robbed him of his beloved Esmé Stuart. Before his departure abroad, moreover, Gowrie had been not only a supporter of the Kirk but a suspected sympathiser with Bothwell. And to cap the king’s resentment, he was also popular, both in Scotland and England. He had been warmly received in London upon his return from his travels, and there was even talk in certain quarters that he might come to rival James as a potential successor to the English throne. His subsequent entry into Edinburgh, meanwhile, attracted such enthusiasm that James was unable at the time to resist a stinging remark. There had been even more people present to mark the earl’s return, he quipped, than there had been at the scaffold for the execution of his father. So undisguised, indeed, was the king’s hostility that Gowrie was forced to retire briefly to his estates before returning to anger his royal master once more by opposing him at the June parliament. When it is considered, too, that James owed the earl some £80,000 and knew that he had dabbled in magic and astrology during his travels, it is not hard to appreciate why suspicions of subterfuge and skulduggery have been so prevalent down the years.
But there is another side to the story, which continues to render events largely inexplicable. The Master of Ruthven, for instance, was a handsome young man of only 19, who was a known favourite of the king, and whose sister Beatrix was one of Queen Anne’s leading ladies. Much more curious still, however, is the fact that James could have brought about Gowrie’s downfall at far less personal risk to himself. A decision to put paid to Gowrie in his own house is no more inherently plausible than the unlikely image of James overcoming him in a hand-to-hand brawl while a third party, Henderson, was seemingly close at hand. The king, indeed, explained away any involvement in plots of his own by employing precisely such an argument. ‘I see, Mr Robert,’ he said to the Edinburgh minister who refused to believe his account, ‘that ye would make me a murderer. It is known very well that I was never bloodthirsty. If I would have taken their lives, I had causes enough; I needed not to hazard myself so.’ Besides which, though James was actually wholly capable of removing his enemies by violence, he would always do so through due legal process – from the death of Morton in 1581 to the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1618.
Was Gowrie therefore guilty, after all, notwithstanding the question marks beside James’s version of events? If so, his blunders and miscalculations remain nothing short of remarkable. Above all, he appears to have made no attempt to enlist the support of other influential nobles, whose consent would have remained so crucial in the unlikely event of his success. The only incriminating evidence to this effect was in fact provided by the discredited lawyer, George Sprot, who confessed on the verge of his own execution in 1608 that he possessed letters confirming Gowrie’s plan to spirit James away to Fast Castle, Sir Robert Logan of Restalrick’s impregnable cliff-top fortress on the Berwickshire coast. But while the government made every effort to prove the complicity of others in the plot and Logan, a particularly notorious and dissolute conspirator, was eventually convicted posthumously of complicity in the Gowrie conspiracy on Sprot’s evidence, the incriminating letters concerned were clear-cut forgeries made in imitation of Logan’s handwriting. Whether, as has been claimed subsequently, they were copies of original letters that actually did exist, remains unknown.
With such a dearth of certainties, however, other more imaginative theories have occasionally emerged to exploit the vacuum. One particularly flimsy hypothesis has suggested, for instance, that James may have been responsible for the incident by committing an indecent assault on Alexander Ruthven, which he then attempted to conceal by improvising his strange account of what happened. There has also been play upon the whispers of scandal linking Ruthven’s name to Anne of Denmark, though here, too, the king could certainly have dealt with any problems more rationally and conveniently. And then, of course, rather less implausibly, there remains the possibility of a sudden and unpremeditated quarrel which spiralled out of control when the king panicked and called upon his attendants for protection. Significantly, this was the explanation accepted by Sir William Bowes, the English ambassador, who believed that James had referred to Ruthven’s father as a traitor when they were alone together ‘whereat the youth showing a grieved and expostulatory countenance’ caused the king, ‘seeing himself alone and without a weapon’, to cry ‘Treason!’ ‘The Master,’ Bowes continued, ‘abashed to see the king to apprehend it so … put his hand to stay the king showing his countenance in that mood, immediately falling upon his knees to entreat the king …’, at which point Ramsey entered and ‘ran the poor gentleman through’. James, moreover, certainly seems to have called upon Ramsey to deliver the wounding blow. ‘Strike him high,’ he is said to have cried, ‘because he has a chain doublet upon him.’
Whatever the true story, equally interesting in its own way is the speed and astonishing effectiveness with which James turned the incident to his advantage. On 7 August, two days after the deaths, the Privy Council ordered that the corpses of Gowrie and his brother should remain unburied until further investigations had been made, and also that no person of the name of Ruthven should approach within ten miles of the royal court. In the meantime, the bodies of the dead brothers were disembowelled and preserved, and on 30 October sent to Edinburgh to be produced before the bar of Parliament. Thereafter, on 20 November the Ruthven estates were declared forfeit and the family name and honours extinct. For good measure, the corpses of the earl and his brother were then hanged and quartered at the Mercat Cross – their heads being placed on spikes at the Old Tolbooth, their arms and legs likewise placed on spikes at various locations round and about Perth. Ultimately, another Act would be passed which abolished the name of Ruthven forever and laid down that the barony of Ruthven should henceforth be known as the barony of Huntingtower. Gowrie House in its turn was levelled to the ground, while 5 August was henceforth designated a day of solemn thanksgiving. Ramsey, too, was not forgotten, for he was not only knighted upon James’s eventual accession to the English throne but became Earl of Holderness.
Nor was propaganda and the skilful application of political leverage neglected. James’s account of the episode was published within the year under the title Gowrie’s Conspiracie: A Discourse of the Unnaturall and Vyle Conspiracie, Attempted against the Kings Majesties Person at Sanct-Iohnstoun [Perth], upon Twysday the Fifth of August, 1600 (Edinburgh, printed 1600, cum privilegio regis). And James followed this publication by commanding his clergy to offer public thanksgiving for his deliverance from assassination – a gesture which resulted initially in the refusal of five Edinburgh ministers to comply. Their refusal, moreover, was hardly a surprise – and least of all to a shrewd political manipulator like James – since the Ruthvens had, of course, been consistent supporters of the Kirk and the official explanation was, after all, wholly worthy of scepticism. But James was determined to make his account of events both a test of clerical loyalty and a new weapon with which to cow the Kirk. Not only were compliant clergy found to fill the places of the five recalcitrant ministers, but four soon relented, whereupon they were dispatched to various parts of the country to repeat their submissions publicly. The only figure to stand firm, in fact, was Robert Bruce, a man of great dignity and authority, and former confidant of the king, who found himself banished from Scotland on pain of death.
But even after James had obtained approval for his actions from a convention of the clergy, there remained, not altogether surprisingly, a good deal of scepticism, though the conspiracy itself, in its broader historical context, is best perceived as little more than a final, largely meaningless episode, typical of an unfortunate phase of Scottish history that was already effectively at an end. Courtiers continued to whisper of foul play, while the queen, angry at the banishment of Beatrix Ruthven, sulked in her rooms and refused to be dressed, insisting that she required the assistance of her former lady-in-waiting. And though James finally placated his wife by spending considerable sums upon a tightrope walker for her entertainment, the courts of both England and France continued to doubt and sneer. Elizabeth, for instance, upon congratulating James at his escape, remarked nevertheless that since Gowrie had so many familiar spirits she supposed that there were no longer any left in hell. In France, meanwhile, as the diary of James Melville makes clear, the king’s account of the Ruthvens’ death was met with such ridicule that the Scottish ambassador was forced to suppress it in his reports.
If, then, there really were any doubt before the events of 1600 that James was indeed ‘one of the most secret princes of the world’, the Gowrie conspiracy had clearly banished it once and for all. Yet even the closeness with which James played his hand at that time pales by comparison with his sustained efforts to ensure that he would succeed to the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I. Much of his anxiety and subterfuge was, in fact, unnecessary, for although he was a foreigner and therefore technically excluded by the common law, he remained throughout the only really plausible candidate – notwithstanding even the additional problem that Henry VIII’s will had excluded his sister Margaret Stuart’s descendants. For some time before 1592, it is true, Arbella Stuart, great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII via his daughter Margaret, had been considered one of the natural candidates to succeed Queen Elizabeth, her first cousin twice removed. But, in spite of her inherent advantage of having been born on English soil she, like the other potential candidates on offer, was effectively a non-starter, since her hereditary claim was much inferior to James’s and she displayed in any case no appreciable desire for the Crown. Already, then, between the end of 1592 and the spring of 1593, the influential Cecils – Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and his son and future successor as Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil – had turned their attention away from Arbella towards her cousin, the King of Scotland.
The other potential claimants were, moreover, even less worthy of consideration. Certainly, none of the Englishmen whose Plantagenet or Tudor blood gave them some right to consideration – Lord Beauchamp, Lord Derby and the Earl of Huntingdon – had either the prestige, character or ambition to make them acceptable, and continental options were no more inviting. For English Catholics living abroad and nurturing hopeless dreams of an imminent resurrection of the old religion in their homeland, the pretensions of Philip III of Spain, either by descent or as Mary Stuart’s nominated heir, seemed to offer some sustenance, though not even Father Robert Persons, the Jesuit responsible for English affairs at Rome and a strong Spanish partisan, seriously believed that another Spanish king could occupy the English throne. Instead, attention focused mainly upon Philip’s sister, Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, who was married to Archduke Albert and ruled the Netherlands with him. As a descendant of Edward III through John of Gaunt, her claim to the English throne had already served as a pretext for the sailing of the Armada. But even in her case the chances of success were effectively non-existent, for the 150,000 or so Catholics remaining in England were vastly outnumbered and in any case preferred patriotism to the prospect of foreign rule. Nor, for that matter, had the infanta and archduke any real desire to exchange the comfort and security of Brussels for a reckless English gamble at the longest possible odds. And Persons’ fond belief that Sir Robert Cecil was more sympathetic to a Spanish claimant than the father whom he had succeeded as Elizabeth’s leading minister in 1598 would prove to be wholly mistaken.
Unless King James foolishly alienated both the Queen of England and her leading ministers by some act of major indiscretion, his succession was therefore virtually assured. Even to Elizabeth herself, indeed, James remained the best available option, irrespective of his Scottish background and links with Mary Queen of Scots, and the same was true not only for Elizabeth’s ministers but for those of her subjects that especially cared. He was, after all, an experienced ruler who had always appeared amenable to English interests and whose accession would unite the two kingdoms, and thereby achieve, in effect, the subjugation of Scotland that had always been a long-term goal of her southern neighbour. Most important of all, however, James’s bloodline underpinned his claim more convincingly than any other alternative, and at a time when the hereditary principle was still paramount, this alone was enough. With or without Elizabeth’s direct say-so, then, the King of Scotland would soon be Scotland’s King of England, and if he were to behave as bid and promptly discard the Scottish baggage accompanying his succession, he would doubtless suffice.
In the meantime, however, such was James’s fever of anxiety and impatience that he buzzed around Elizabeth with continual requests for confirmation of her intentions and far-fetched schemes to force her hand. In 1596, for instance, he had taken offence at certain passages in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen which reflected upon his mother, and demanded at once from Elizabeth that the poet be tried and punished. He nagged the queen continually, too, to grant him the English estates of his grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, on the assumption that these would circumvent the English common law’s bar to the succession of aliens. And then there was his near obsession with the act passed by Parliament in 1584 debarring plotters against the queen from inheriting her Crown, notwithstanding the fact that he had not been involved in any of his mother’s intrigues. When, for instance, Valentine Thomas, a villainous Catholic ruffian to whom James had once unwisely granted an audience, was later arrested in England and claimed that the King of Scotland had encouraged him to assassinate Elizabeth, James’s panic far outstripped the bounds of common sense.
Though Elizabeth assured him that she did not believe Thomas’s tale and kept him quietly in prison without trial, so that his slander against the King of Scotland would not be broadcast in public, James nevertheless demanded that she erase his name from all records connected with the accusation and issue a declaration of his innocence. When she refused, moreover, James then declared not only that Thomas had been bribed into making a false confession but that he would issue a public challenge to do battle with anyone doubting his own innocence. Rather less eccentrically, he also saw fit to print the letter in which Elizabeth had expressed her disbelief in Thomas’s story and to circulate it on the Continent. Once again, however, James’s protests fell on deaf ears, since he lacked the cold conviction and depth of respect to make good his wishes. For James, as so often, did not so much threaten as bleat, and, in consequence, Thomas would remain in prison until Elizabeth’s death when he was promptly tried and executed at James’s command. Furthermore, the queen’s imperious and frequently caustic dismissal of the Scottish ruler’s protests demonstrates once more that the fundamental flaw in James’s kingship was not so much a deficiency of political acumen or even of material resources but a more intangible, though nevertheless crippling, deficiency of vigour and resolve. As long as sheer pluck and backbone remained a crucial ingredient of majesty, therefore, James would always be ultimately lacking.
Nor was pestering the only method employed by James to achieve his longed-for goal. Much more provocatively, embassies were dispatched to various Protestant courts in northern Europe to conjure up armed support for his wish to ‘be declared and acknowledged the certain and undoubted successor to the Crown’. Confident of his links with Denmark, Holland and the Protestant princes of Germany, James had been considering a league of Protestant states as early as 1585, although Elizabeth disliked his pretensions and in consequence purposely snubbed him by excluding Scotland from her own alliance with France and the Netherlands in 1596. Even so, in 1598 James dispatched his ambassadors to Denmark and Germany in what would prove to be the vain hope that a new league might be formed both to oppose the Turks and, much more importantly, prevail upon the Queen of England to name him her successor. Worse still, armaments were purchased and the Scottish Parliament of 1600 found itself faced with an apparently earnest request for the funding of an army to enforce his claim – all of which only succeeded in provoking Elizabeth’s anger and prompting the English ambassador to wonder whether James was meaning ‘not to tarry upon her Majesty’s death’. ‘He hasteth well,’ Elizabeth warned her would-be successor, ‘that wisely can abide’, before assuring him that she would favour his claim ‘as long as he shall give no just cause of exception’. But in spite of his squirming and posturing, she would not nominate him officially and thereby endure the indignity of seeing her courtiers and ministers turning away from her towards the ‘sun rising’ in the way that she herself had witnessed during the last months of her sister’s life.
Such reasoning was, of course, eminently sensible and palpably transparent – to all, it seems, but James. Indeed, it is a measure of the soundness of James’s claim to Elizabeth’s throne and the needlessness of his behaviour that she chose to countenance his harassment at all. Certainly, his embassies abroad, his dalliances with papal and Spanish agents, and his attempts to fashion a party for himself at the English court all provided the Queen of England with precisely the ‘just cause for exception’ of which she warned him, had there been any conceivable alternative. James had even, it was believed in some quarters, secretly dispatched John Ogilvy of Powrie to Rome to angle for loans and promise toleration to English Catholics if he became their king. And even if Ogilvy’s claims that he was James’s accredited mouthpiece cannot be substantiated, there is no such question mark beside Lord Robert Semple’s mission to Madrid in 1598, which sought recognition for James’s claim. Nor, for that matter, was Elizabeth likely to have been any more reassured by a mysterious letter allegedly sent to Pope Clement VIII in 1599 in which her would-be successor was said to have addressed Clement as ‘Most Blessed Father’, before signing himself the pontiff’s ‘Most Obedient Son’.
James, in all fairness, consistently denied responsibility for the letter and eventually obtained a not altogether convincing confession from his secretary, Lord Balmerino, that it had been written without the king’s consent and that his signature had been appended only by placing the document among others which had been signed hurriedly as he departed upon a hunting expedition. But it was enough to prompt a reply from Pope Clement in April 1600 in which he implored James to convert, and further fuelled concerns that the king’s penchant for double games might well be carrying him into ever deeper waters. ‘He practises in Rome, in Spain, and everywhere else, as he does with me,’ wrote Henry IV of France, ‘without attaching himself to any one, and is easily carried away by the hopes of those about him without regard for truth or merit.’ And in the meantime he was equally prepared to offer restricted toleration on his own terms to English Catholics, corresponding with one of their most influential figures, the Earl of Northampton, and in the process nullifying any residual support for the Spanish infanta’s candidacy. ‘It were a pity,’ wrote Northumberland, ‘to lose so good a kingdom for not tolerating a Mass in a corner.’ And James’s reply confirmed his correspondent’s high hopes: ‘As for the Catholics,’ he told Northumberland, ‘I will neither persecute any that will be quiet and give but an outward obedience to the law, neither will I spare to advance any of them that will by good service worthily deserve it.’
That such reassurances should be offered at a time when intolerance was everywhere the norm might well seem to confirm the view that James’s wish for compromise and moderation placed him ahead of the age in which he lived. But his contradictory signals to English Puritans suggest a ruler who was prepared to offer whatever potential supporters might wish to hear in a way that could only lead to trouble in the longer term when vague hints and outright guarantees would have to be made good. His agent in London, James Hamilton, was instructed in 1600, for instance, to assure all honest men that the king would ‘not only maintain and continue the profession of the gospel there, but withal not suffer or permit any other religion to be professed and avowed within the bounds of that kingdom’. This, it should be remembered, was the king who had already set out his stall so firmly against all ‘Puritans’, dangerously conflating in the process the considerable range of opinion and outlook encompassed by the very term. Now, however, Puritans too, it seems, were to be courted at the very time that Elizabeth was resisting their pressure at every opportunity.
Equally provocative, in any case, was James’s failure at this time to assist Elizabeth in her desperate struggle with the Earl of Tyrone’s Irish rebels, which had flared up in 1595 and would rage for the next nine years, resulting in the disaster of the Battle of Yellow Ford and the overall loss of some 30,000 of Elizabeth’s troops during the course of the whole campaign. As her ally, James sought outwardly to meet his obligation by issuing proclamations which forbade the clansmen of the Western Isles to assist the Irish rebels or trade with them. When Spanish troops landed at Kinsale, moreover, he offered England military aid. But in perceiving Tyrone as a potentially influential figure after Elizabeth’s death, James gladly entered into secret correspondence with him and consistently turned a blind eye when his own royal proclamations were ignored. In fact, the towns of south-west Scotland continued to trade with the rebels as Tyrone recruited Scottish soldiers with apparent impunity. When Elizabeth protested, moreover, James merely issued new proclamations, which again went unenforced. In the meantime, he gladly accepted Tyrone’s promises of future service when the time of reckoning finally arrived - though even with this, James’s taxing of Elizabeth’s patience was not over. Indeed, it was during her own crisis with the Earl of Essex that he came closest to breaking her forbearance once and for all.
Tenuously descended from Edward III, Robert Devereux (2nd Earl of Essex) had steadily emerged as the glittering star of the English court since the time of his arrival in 1584 and within three years had become Elizabeth I’s unrivalled favourite. Tall, handsome, brave, ardent and flamboyant, possessing a remarkable capacity for self-dramatisation, which he demonstrated as both a flamboyant courtier and impetuous soldier, he was also the stepson of the Earl of Leicester, who perhaps had been the only man that the queen had ever loved until his death in 1588. But the same peacock brilliance, which made Essex so irresistible to the ageing and increasingly careworn and disillusioned queen, also carried with it an unruly spirit. ‘The man’s soul,’ wrote the queen’s godson Sir John Harington, ‘seemeth tossed to and fro like the waves of a troubled sea.’ And surely enough, while he could dazzle as romantic hero, blaze as dashing adventurer and sparkle as generous patron to writers and artists alike, he was nevertheless spoilt, vain and headstrong: a man incapable of moderation in either his behaviour – or his ambitions. Encouraged by his mother Lettice Knollys and his sister Penelope Rich, who had inspired Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, he believed that by charming or sulking as occasion demanded, he could mould the queen to his will and prevail against those who opposed him.
Chief among these was Sir Robert Cecil who had by now succeeded his father, Lord Burghley, as Secretary of State. No man, in fact, could have presented a greater contrast to his adversary than Cecil to Essex. Immensely hardworking like his father, Sir Robert was, however, an altogether more complex and ambiguous figure than the man who both sired and reared him for high office. About 5ft 3in and suffering from a crooked back that may have resulted from being dropped by a nurse in infancy, the younger Cecil’s infirmity seems to have made him all the more sensitive to the grace and panache of Elizabeth’s courtiers, and left him curiously detached in spirit from the posturing of those around him. But while he was secretive and reserved by nature, he was also brilliantly clever – a perfect foil for Essex in all respects and someone bound, of course, for collision with him sooner rather than later. For not only were the two men so temperamentally at odds, they were also divided over the crucial political issue of the day: Essex, predictably enough, leading the war party at Elizabeth’s court, and Cecil their opponents. In consequence, the late 1590s were dominated by their rivalry.
And it was into this political maelstrom that James now chose to slither. Already, from 1592 onwards, he had made a habit of dealing with Essex rather than Burghley when he had a cause to further at the English court, for no good reason other than his conviction that the latter had been responsible for delaying the pension promised to him by Elizabeth. In due course, indeed, the association had hardened into a dubious alliance of sorts, as Essex convinced him that only he and his friends would guarantee the English throne for him upon Elizabeth’s death. It was, of course, an irresistible offer for one of James’s impatience and anxieties. But as the relationship unfolded and Essex’s own flaws became increasingly manifest, it was an offer that became more and more of a liability: so much so that before 1599 was out, Essex was hoping to oust his rivals at the English court by force, and indulge, with James’s help – ‘at a convenient time’ – in a version of the old Scottish kidnapping game, involving the Queen of England herself.
As it transpired, the wayward earl had already quarrelled seriously with Elizabeth in 1598 when she unwisely decided to give him command of her army in Ireland. The result had been a mismanaged campaign, a disorderly and unauthorised truce with the Earl of Tyrone, and Essex’s uninvited return to England. Early one morning in September 1599, moreover, he had forced an entry into the queen’s bedchamber at Nonsuch Palace before she was properly wigged or gowned, ostensibly to justify his conduct, but possibly to force her to retain him in favour – in much the same way, curiously, that Bothwell had once coerced James. Arrested and condemned by the Privy Council for his truce with Tyrone and return to England which amounted, it was said, to a desertion of duty, Essex was nevertheless merely committed at first to the custody of Sir Richard Berkeley in his own York House before being convicted and deprived of public office – largely as a result of relentless pressure from Sir Walter Raleigh and Cecil – by an eighteen-man commission in June 1600.
In the interim, however, the earl was able not only to contact James but to ply him with schemes, misinformation and treacherous promises. On Christmas Day 1600, for example, he wrote concerning Cecil and his supporters. ‘Now,’ the letter runs, ‘doth not only their corrupting of my servants, stealing of my papers, suborning of false witnesses, procuring of many forged letters in my name, and other such like practices against me appear; but their … juggling with our enemies, their practice for the Infanta of Spain, and their devilish plots with your Majesty’s own subjects against your person and life …’ The clear implication, then, was that Cecil – to whom James himself referred as ‘Mr Secretary, who is king there in effect’ – was not only favouring another candidate for the succession but had secretly encouraged the Gowrie Plot. Around the same time, furthermore, James received assurances from an agent named Henry Leigh that Essex would tolerate no successor to the English throne other than the King of Scotland who should demand a public recognition of his right. Refusing to rebuff such dangerous baits outright, James replied cautiously that he ‘would think of it and put himself in a readiness to take any good occasion’.
And as James temporised, Essex’s allies grew bolder. In February 1600, indeed, Leigh came to Scotland once more – this time with a specific plan. The new commander of England’s forces in Ireland, Lord Mountjoy, who was himself an intimate friend of Essex, would return with troops and join him in staging a coup at court, while James would gather an army on the Border and dispatch an ambassador to London to demand confirmation of his rights as heir. But whether James seriously entertained the proposal is, in fact, unclear. He had, it is true, been redoubling his efforts to increase his military strength throughout 1599 and on 1 May had ordered a grand muster or ‘wapanschowing’ and commanded his subjects to supply themselves with arms. In December, moreover, as well as in June of the following year, he had appealed for funds from the Scottish Parliament, only to be met with open derision at any suggestion that Scotland could pose any significant military threat to her southern neighbour, ‘at which the king raged’. But while two confessions at Essex’s eventual treason trial did imply that James’s tardy response to Leigh’s offer amounted to a rejection, even this must be balanced by the claim of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and someone on close terms with Essex, that the King of Scotland ‘liked the course well and prepared himself for it’.
In all likelihood, James may well have been characteristically ambivalent – hedging his bets and accumulating as many cards in his hands as possible until they inevitably tumbled from his grasp for all to see. Certainly, the scheme was never realised, for when Essex called upon Mountjoy to deliver in the spring of 1600, the latter was already reversing English fortunes in Ireland with a brilliant campaign against Tyrone and duly refused. But even at this point, James was still not free from Essex’s overtures as the earl’s irrepressible ambition and declining fortunes led him inexorably to the ultimate and fatal gamble. In August, his freedom had been granted, but the main source of his income – the sweet wines monopoly – was not renewed, and he found himself moved ‘from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion’. Accordingly, he summoned his followers to London in December, with a view to obtaining access to Elizabeth by force, driving Cecil and his other enemies from office, and summoning a parliament that would both endorse his action and recognise James as heir apparent.
This time, however, the King of Scots was not required to call his subjects to arms, but simply to send an ambassador to London by 1 February. ‘You shall,’ Essex promised, ‘be declared and acknowledged the certain and undoubted successor to this Crown and shall command the services and lives of as many of us as undertake this great work.’ For good measure, James was even sent a cypher, to be returned as proof of his acceptance, and so it was that the king’s dabbling had finally brought him to the brink. Lacking the self-assurance to reject them outright, he had flirted with Essex’s schemes and relied upon his skill at the double game to survive the brush with potential disaster. In consequence, the cypher was indeed returned, though no ambassadors made their way south at the appointed time, leaving Essex to stage his insane raid on 8 February and suffer the consequences. Blocked at Ludgate Hill by Sir John Leveson’s barricade and forced to surrender soon afterwards, he was tried for treason eleven days later and executed on 25 February – the last man to be executed in the Tower of London. Thomas Derrick, the headsman, would require three strokes to complete the job, as Sir Walter Raleigh, it was said, watched the spectacle from a window on Tower Green, puffing out tobacco smoke in sight of the condemned man.
James, meanwhile, was said to have been ‘in the dumps’ when news reached him that Essex’s rebellion had indeed gone ahead as planned, and by the time that his ambassadors – the Earl of Mar and Edward Bruce, Abbot of Kinloss – finally left for London in mid-March, their instructions had changed significantly. Now, for instance, while ascertaining whether a general rising against Elizabeth was still a possibility, they were to ‘dally with the present guiders of the court’ and tread the middle ground ‘betwixt these two precipices of the queen and the people who now appear to be in so contrary terms’. They were to request, too, that Elizabeth issue a statement that the King of Scotland had taken no part in any rising – though the ambassadors, unlike James, fully realised that such a statement would not only never be granted, but amounted in any case to an effective acknowledgement of James’s guilt. Repeatedly in March, on the other hand, James asked George Nicolson, the English ambassador in Scotland, whether he was being mentioned in the trials taking place in the aftermath of Essex’s death, while making it clear to his ambassadors that if Cecil would not assist him, he should expect no favours in the future ‘but all the queen’s hard usage of me to be hereafter craven at his hands’.
Once again, though, James was tearing his hair needlessly. For in spite of his indiscretions, Elizabeth had little choice but to suppress all mention of the King of Scotland in what transpired. Unable to accuse him of conspiracy without excluding him from the succession and thereby opening wide once more the whole knotty issue of who should follow her, she actually accepted the inevitable in precisely the way that even Sir Robert Cecil now did, too. Summoning the Scottish ambassadors to the most secret of interviews the Secretary of State offered, under the most stringent of conditions, to correspond with their ruler and to promote his interests in England. With Essex cold in the ground and James coolly in his pocket, Cecil had ultimately been more than happy to oblige, and what James may or may not have promised Essex was now, in any case, an irrelevance. Before his defeat, the rebellious earl was said to have worn a letter from James in a black bag around his neck, and to have destroyed it along with his other papers before surrendering for the last time. Ashes were therefore all that remained, and from those ashes James’s hopes were now revived and renewed.
There followed a truly remarkable secret dialogue between the King of Scotland and the very man who had appeared for so long to be the frustration of his hopes. At his trial, Essex had retracted his claims that Cecil favoured the succession of the Spanish infanta, and the final obstacle to James’s trust was effectively cleared. Elizabeth’s Secretary of State was soon offering, moreover, not only to support the King of Scotland’s claim to the throne, but to advise and instruct him in preparation for it. Carefully constructing his letters to guarantee that no treasonable content could be found in them, Cecil referred to James’s impending succession as ‘that natural day … wherein your feast may be lawfully proclaimed (which I do wish may be long deferred) …’ and went on ‘to profess before God that if I could accuse myself to have once imagined a thought which could amount to a grain of error towards my dear and precious sovereign … I should wish with all my heart, that all I have done, or shall do, might be converted to my own perdition.’ But he also spoke of Elizabeth’s tacit goodwill and assured him that he could rest secure ‘as long as we see our way clear from lively apparitions of anticipation’ – or, in other words, precisely the kind of intrigues that James had already been much too inclined to countenance.
Cecil showed his considerable shrewdness too by employing Lord Henry Howard to share with him the task of mentoring the future King of England. Mary Queen of Scots had, after all, been closely and tragically connected with Howard’s elder brother, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, who had been executed in 1572 for plotting to marry her. And although Lord Henry was now an elderly, bombastic and penurious Catholic sycophant who had little influence with Queen Elizabeth, he was nevertheless the most able member of a premier noble family, which, as Cecil rightly judged, made him altogether more appealing to James than the coterie of bellicose malcontents who had congregated around Essex. Henceforward Cecil, James and now Howard, too, would all correspond as numerical ciphers – 10, 30 and 3 respectively – easing the way for James’s eventual takeover, while continuing to hide their dealings from the existing queen. ‘The subject itself,’ wrote Cecil, ‘is so perilous to touch amongst us as it setteth a mark upon his head forever that hatcheth such a bird.’ And now, of course, the dwarfish Secretary of State, with his long, delicate hands, high white forehead and darkly piercing eyes could do no wrong in James’s mind. ‘My dearest and trusty Cecil,’ wrote James, ‘my pen is not able to express how happy I think myself for having chanced upon so worthy, so wise and so provident a friend.’
All was now sweetness and light too in James’s relationship with Elizabeth. He had been warned by Cecil ‘to secure the heart of the highest’ by ‘clear and temperate courses’ and to avoid for this reason ‘either needless expostulations or over much curiosity in her own actions’. Instead of the petulant and jibing tone of his former letters, therefore, he now consulted her as an oracle and commended her in his letters as that ‘richt excellent, richt heich and michtie princess, our dearest sister and cousin’. More importantly still, he committed himself to securing the English Crown by patience alone. ‘It were very small wisdom,’ he told the Earl of Northumberland, ‘by climbing of ditches and hedges for pulling of unripe fruit to hazard the breaking of my neck, when by a little patience and by abiding the season I may with far more ease and safety enter at the gate of the garden and enjoy the fruits at my pleasure.’ And when a doughty Scottish laird drank in his presence to the speedy union of the Crowns, declaring that he had forty muskets ready for the king’s use, he was promptly and roundly reproved.
In the meantime, James’s mind was steadily moulded by both Cecil and Howard. But it was the latter, above all, whose darker side now surfaced most sordidly. Howard possessed, in fact, a deeply flawed but brilliant intellect which had already displayed its twists and shortcomings more than conclusively. Quite apart from periods of poverty he had, in fairness, experienced other reverses too that might well have taken their toll on men of altogether worthier fibre – at one point even ‘suffering the utmost misery’ in the Fleet Prison after publishing in 1583 his Preservative Against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies, which in addition to attacking astrology also contained allegedly treasonous passages. But he was nevertheless a paid pensioner of Spain, receiving 1,000 crowns annually from the Spanish ambassador, and now wheedled his way into James’s trust by both lies and the grossest and most odious forms of flattery that Elizabeth had never fallen for. Henceforth, for instance, James would readily believe Howard’s claim that Sir Walter Raleigh, along with Lord Cobham and the Earl of Northumberland, was one of ‘a diabolical triplicity’ of wicked plotters, hatching treasons from cockatrice eggs that were ‘daily and nightly sitten on’.
By such slanders, then, Raleigh was already hopelessly compromised before James’s reign in England began, and by such murky counsels, creeping schemes and fulsome flattery did James’s ‘long approved and trusty Howard’ secure a place of prominence at the new king’s table when Elizabeth’s reign finally ended. Nor would his wait be a long one. For the queen who James had once complained seemed likely to outlive the sun and moon, was showing every visible sign of her own mortality. ‘The tallest of ruffs,’ it was said, ‘could not conceal it, the most glittering of diamonds could not overpower it; voice, action, attitude all disclosed it …’