Behind the Palace Doors (12 page)

Scotland had largely avoided the witch persecutions that had swept Europe for centuries. But King James changed all that in the winter of 1590–91 when he encouraged a series of trials based on allegations that more than three hundred witches had gathered at various places and times to work treasonous spells against him. The king was convinced that these so-called servants of Satan conspired to kill him by raising rough seas on his voyage home from Denmark, concocting evil potions, and melting his waxen image while chanting curses.

The king was an enthusiastic participant in many of the trials—cross-examining some defendants, triumphantly heralding the tortured confessions of others, and exhorting juries to send them to the stake. He took particular interest in the case of Barbara Napier, a known associate of his enemy the Earl of Bothwell,
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who claimed in her interrogation that she was pregnant. If in fact she was, she would be spared the death penalty if convicted. James, however, wanted to see her reduced to ashes.

“Try by the mediciners’ oaths if Barbara Napier be with bairn [child] or not,” the king instructed his minister John Maitland. “Take no delaying answer. If you find she be not, to the fire with her presently, and cause bowel [disembowel] her publicly.”

James was indignant when the jury in the Napier trial failed to convict her. He was the Lord’s anointed, and
he
said she was guilty. How dare they decide otherwise! It was bad enough that the king’s sacred person had been endangered by the evil arts Barbara practiced, but as he said in a rebuke to the recalcitrant jury, the realm had been endangered as well.

The king insisted that he did not fear death personally. Rather, he was concerned for “the common good of this country, which enjoyeth peace by my life … as you may collect by mine absence, for if such troubles were in breeding whilst I retained life, what would have been done if my life had been taken from me?”

Lest anyone doubt the power of these evil women—witches who worshipped at the feet of Satan, then had sex with him—James attested to the fact that he, too, had been a skeptic. But, as detailed in a tract sanctioned by the king called
News of Scotland
, a witch by the name of Agnes Sampson took him aside and revealed “the very words which passed between the King’s Majesty and his Queen at [Oslo] in Norway, the first night of their marriage, with their answer to each other: where at the King’s Majesty wondered greatly, and swore, by the living God, that he believed that all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.”

The tract did not include the words the king spoke to his bride on their wedding night, though it’s easy to imagine that, because she was not a man, poor Anne must have found his pillow talk wanting.

King James had worked hard to root out the witches who threatened his life and the peace of Scotland, consigning scores of them to the flames. Nevertheless, there were still some who persisted in their skepticism—including the English author Reginald Scot, who with his 1584 treatise
The Discoverie of Witchcraft
set out to methodically disprove the belief that Satan had human mistresses. The king responded with his own book,
Daemonologie
, in which he set out to educate the doubters and, as he wrote, refute “the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the one called Scot an Englishman, is not ashamed in publike print to deny, that ther can be such a thing
as Witch-craft: and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees, in denying of spirits.”

Written in the form of a dialogue and divided into three parts,
Daemonologie
was little more than a rehash of the witch lore that had been circulating in Europe for centuries: tales of humans who sell their souls to the devil and in exchange are given extraordinary powers—to fly through the air, raise storms, destroy crops, and generally cause great evil.

“My intention in this labour,” James wrote, “is only to prove two things, as I have already said: the one, that such devilish arts have been and are. The other, what exact trial and punishment they merit.”

The king provided a handy means to identify witches: “So it appears God hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous impiety of the witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that have shaken off the sacred water of baptism, and wilfully refused the benefit thereof. Not so much as their eyes are able to shed tears (threaten and torture them as ye please) while they first repent (God not permitting them to dissemble their obstinacy in so horrible a crime) albeit the womenkind especially be able otherways to shed tears at every light occasion when they will, yea, although it were dissemblingly like the crocodiles.”

Six years after the publication of this edifying bit of scholarship, in 1603, James inherited the throne of England. By then his interest in witchcraft was diminishing as he became increasingly focused on the parliaments that would bedevil him throughout his reign. Yet even without the king’s personal attention, the persecution he launched in Scotland raged on for another century or so—a testament to the power of officially sanctioned superstition.

As a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, Arbella Stuart had a viable claim to the crown, which, in the bloody politics of the day, put her in a very precarious position. It was a danger Arbella failed to heed
.

King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in a peaceful transfer of power when Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. His succession had by no means been assured, however. A rival for the crown was James’s first cousin Arbella Stuart, a young woman proud of her “most royal lineage” and determined to forge her own destiny. “I must shape my own coat according to my cloth,” she once declared, “but it will not be after the fashion of this world but fit for me.” Arbella’s royalty made her drive for independence extremely dangerous. And her failure to recognize this inescapable fact led to her doom. Along the way, though, she made some impressively bold strides.

Royal blood ran thick in Arbella Stuart as a descendant on her father’s side of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s older sister (see Tudor family tree,
this page
). This “renowned stock,” as Arbella called it, made her a very valuable commodity, and her
family was determined to profit by it. Orphaned at a young age, she was left in the care of her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (popularly known as Bess of Hardwick), “a woman of masculine understanding,” as the antiquarian Edmund Lodge described her—“proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” Perhaps she wasn’t quite that bad, but Bess was indeed formidable. Four lucrative marriages in succession—the last to the Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most prominent peers in England, as well as the keeper (for a time) of the captive Mary, Queen of Scots—made Bess one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in England. She had already married her daughter Elizabeth off to Margaret Tudor’s grandson Charles Stuart (younger brother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots), and now she was eager to see her “jewel,” Arbella, become the next queen of England.

James VI had a better claim to the English crown than did his cousin Arbella. Both his parents (Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley) were descendants of Margaret Tudor. But James was born and raised in Scotland, which made him, as a foreigner, potentially ineligible to inherit. Many believed, in fact, that Arbella Stuart would be the next to rule.

Elizabeth I made no effort to clarify the issue of the succession. In fact, the spinster queen had always been notoriously cagey on the subject. Naming an heir would, she once said, “require me in my life to set my winding sheet before my eye.” Still, it looked like Elizabeth might be leaning toward Arbella when, in 1587, she called her young cousin to court for the first time—an invitation never extended to King James.

The first encounter with the mighty Elizabeth had to have been frightening for eleven-year-old Arbella. “This was the woman she had been raised to emulate, the one who held her fortune in her hands,” wrote biographer Sarah Gristwood. “What is more, she curtseyed before the terrifying figure who,
just five months before, had ordered the beheading of her royal aunt Mary [Queen of Scots], whose unburied body still lay stinking at Fotheringay.”

Arbella was given all the honors due a royal lady of her rank, even the enviable opportunity of dining right beside the sovereign. She performed so well at court that she was able to write triumphantly that the queen “by trial pronounced me an eaglet of her own kind.” Elizabeth did indeed seem impressed by Arbella. “Look to her well,” she remarked to the wife of the French ambassador. “She will one day be even as I am.”

Tantalizing as the queen’s words were—an apparent endorsement of Arbella as her successor—nothing was ever quite as it appeared with Elizabeth Tudor. In fact, she was engaged in a game of diplomatic chess, and Arbella was a mere pawn—conveniently transformed into “a near cousin of her [Elizabeth’s] own, whom she loves much, and whom she intends to make her heir and successor,” as the French ambassador perceptively put it. Arbella was dangled as a potential bride in the European power market, as Elizabeth saw fit, then withdrawn. She was also used as a check on King James in Scotland: trotted out as the one who could easily displace him in line as the next potential English monarch should he grow too confident, or dare overreact to his mother’s execution.

Blissfully unaware of these machinations, Arbella reveled in her starring role at Elizabeth’s court. Her time there was fleeting, however, and when she was no longer diplomatically useful, she was sent back to the remote Derbyshire countryside, under the ever watchful eye of her domineering grandmother, Bess. As Arbella grew into adulthood, this increasingly suffocating existence at Hardwick Hall became intolerable. “The unfortunate lady has now lived for many years, not exactly as a prisoner, but, so to speak, buried alive,” wrote the Venetian envoy.

Bess of Hardwick unintentionally offered a glimpse of her granddaughter’s bleak existence—the one she helped create—in
a letter to Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley: “Arbella walks not late; at such a time as she shall take the air it shall be near the house, and well attended on; she goeth not to anybody’s house at all; I see her almost every hour in the day; she lieth in my bed-chamber.” Little wonder, then, that Arbella was desperate to break away.

As Queen Elizabeth’s reign drew to its close, Arbella made a frantic gambit to free herself from her grandmother’s total domination and, quite possibly, to enhance her chances of inheriting the throne. She attempted to betroth herself to another royal cousin and possible candidate to become king, Edward Seymour, a direct descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary Tudor (see Tudor family tree,
this page
), and, incidentally, a great-grand-nephew of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour. The union of these two royal lines would be a potent combination but, without the queen’s consent, a treasonable one as well. And Elizabeth’s wrath was legendary when it came to such matters, as Edward Seymour’s grandmother Catherine Grey—sister of the ill-fated Jane Grey (see
Chapter 3
)—knew all too well. She had married Seymour’s grandfather, also named Edward, without the queen’s permission, and as a result, she and her husband were imprisoned in the Tower.
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It was the elder Seymour, knowing something of what a displeased queen was capable of, who wisely reported Arbella’s
potentially treasonous attempt to marry his grandson. But the reaction at court to her audacious maneuver was oddly subdued. Queen Elizabeth was fading, and Robert Cecil, who inherited his father’s position as chief minister, was eager to keep things calm as he secretly orchestrated the succession of King James of Scotland. Arbella’s foolish marital endeavors were officially attributed to unnamed “base companions,” who, “thinking it pleasing to her youth and sex to be sought in marriage,” led her astray.

Arbella was warned to “content herself to live in good sort with so dear a parent and so worthy a matron” as her grandmother. To the young woman trapped in Derbyshire, this might as well have been a death sentence. And, on the face of it, Arbella seems to have lost her mind.

Struck in what she called her “extraordinary yoke of bondage,” Arbella began writing a series of rambling and very bizarre letters that made some question her sanity. She declared, for example, that her attempted betrothal to Edward Seymour was in fact a clever ruse on her part—a piece of “honest cunning,” as she called it—to expose the plot the Seymours had hatched for Edward to marry
her
. “I thank God it fell out better than I and my dearest and best trusted could have devised or imagined though we have beat our brains out these three years,” she wrote.