The Cradle King (13 page)

There can be little doubt that James’s love for Lennox stood firm even as, either under pressure or for political expediency, he hastened his departure. The grief that he felt is painfully evident in a poem written after Lennox’s death, and published in 1584. While sharing the unpolished execution of his previous sonnets and translations, it was undoubtedly striking in its portrayal of his relationship with Esmé.
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‘Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix’ opened, somewhat pretentiously, with a ‘column of 18 lines serving for a preface’, in which James set out the argument in the shape of an implausible diamond-shaped votive column or urn – although there is no attempt to ally the form to the content, as there is with most ‘shaped poems’. The argument is then reprinted as a sixteen-line stanza in which first and last letters of each line spell out ‘ESME STEWART DWIKE [duke]’, leaving no doubt as to the true identity of the poem’s eponymous ‘Phoenix’/Lennox. The narrative analogy of the poem is clear enough. An exotic foreign bird – the French d’Aubigny – lands in Scotland, and attracts a great deal of admiration. In time, this admiration turns into envy led by three birds, the Raven, the Stainchell, and the Gled, perhaps standing for Angus, Gowrie and Mar.
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Their vicious attacks on the Phoenix mirror Lennox’s experiences in 1582; when the Phoenix takes refuge between the poet’s legs, they also attack the poet – the Ruthven Raid. The poem ends with the Phoenix’s flight and self-immolation: Lennox’s departure for France and eventual death. More remarkable is James’s casting of the Phoenix as female, allowing a more obvious love narrative to emerge – and the way in which he sexualises the ‘sheltering’ of the bird: the Phoenix ‘betwixt my legs herself did cast’, and the envious birds ‘made to bleed | My legs’. But for all the love that is expressed, James also registers his frustration with the Phoenix, whose death here becomes a suicide. Perhaps in order to cope with his loss or through simple pragmatism, James felt the need to blame Lennox for his own death, rather than blaming the ravenous fowl in whose clutches he remained.

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Lennox’s departure had been greeted gleefully by the Kirk, who, according to Melville, did ‘rejoice in God, and thank him for delivering King, Kirk, and Commonweal of such counsel, as set themselves plainly to pervert all’.
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But their joy was shortlived. Even as he mourned the Phoenix, James the poet had a happy announcement: ‘Part of my tale | Is yet untold. Lo, here one of her race, | A word bred of her ash: Though she, alas | … be brunt [burned], this lacks but plumes and breath | To be like her, new gendered by her death.’
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On 16 November 1583, Esmé’s son Ludovic landed at Leith. Intelligencers reported that his entourage included some forty Scots and Frenchmen, ‘who are reported altogether to be addict to papistry’. James immediately called for Ludovic to come to Edinburgh, ‘and greatly doth esteem for him, showing to take great care for his bringing up’.
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Ludovic was to have a long and distinguished career in James’s inner circle, but his success was largely due to James’s continued devotion to his dead father. Within a few months, James had issued a proclamation prohibiting men, on pain of death, from speaking of Lennox as anything other than a true Christian. The phoenix had risen from the ashes.

CHAPTER FIVE

A True Son of His Mother

A
LTHOUGH THE
R
UTHVEN
Raiders achieved their immediate objective of ejecting Lennox from Scotland, they were in truth a ragtag coalition with too many internal differences to sustain rule for long. Even during the autumn of 1582, before Lennox departed the country, James was attracting a group of noblemen who were willing to help him escape the clutches of Gowrie’s faction. This new group was led by Huntly, Atholl, Bothwell, Montrose and Seton who subscribed a bond to ‘remain with his Majesty until the abuses and enormities of the commonwealth should be redressed’.
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Their chance came in June 1583. James was at Falkland Place in Fife, and for once not heavily guarded. He turned to the trusted courtier Sir James Melville, and begged him to help him escape, a commission that Melville found ‘very unpleasant’. When James persisted, however, saying that he was determined ‘to liberate himself fully or die in the attempt’, Melville gave in and agreed to provide what assistance he could. The plan was for James to journey to St Andrews: the Earl of March could be persuaded to invite him there on the pretext that the King would eat his ‘wild meat and other fresh fleshs that would spoil in case his Majesty came not to make good cheer with him’. Sympathetic lords would be told to meet him there.
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On 27 June, the King and Melville rode out from Falkland, and were met by March and the Provost of St Andrews at Dairsie. James was elated. ‘Meeting them,’ recalled Melville, ‘His Majesty thought himself at liberty, with great joy and exclamation, like a bird flown out of a cage, passing his time in hawking by the way, after the said meeting, thinking himself then sure enough.’ Melville was not so sanguine. ‘I thought his estate far surer when he was in Falkland.’
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In time, realising that the bird had flown, the Lords Enterprisers followed in pursuit but were halted by a proclamation forbidding them to approach the King’s person: James was turning against them the very machinery that had facilitated his continued captivity at Ruthven and Stirling. Gowrie, however, was admitted into the royal presence: there, kneeling, he humbly asked for the King’s pardon, particularly for his words and deeds against Lennox.
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James started to berate Gowrie, but he soon pardoned him. In the weeks that followed, James appointed a new Privy Council, including the young Earl of Huntly, Crawford, Argyll and Montrose, as well as John Maitland of Thirlestane and Robert Melville of Murdocairnie. But it was Arran who established himself as the figurehead of the new regime. Now, as ever, he polarised opinions. To the English ambassador Sir Edward Hoby, the Earl ‘carrieth a princely presence and gait, goodly of personage, representing a brave countenance of a captain of middle age, very resolute, very wise and learned, and one of the best spoken men that ever I heard’. To Sir James Melville, who knew Scottish politics much better, ‘the Earl of Arran was a scorner of religion, presumptious, ambitious, greedy, careless of the commonwealth, a despiser of the nobility and of all honest men.’
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A measure of Arran’s steady assumption of power can be found in the fate of the Earl of Mar. Coming to court in August 1583, he failed to reconcile with Arran and was commanded to leave the country. Argyll, to whose custody he was committed, convinced him to give up Stirling Castle to Arran – but this was not enough to assuage Arran, and in January 1584 Mar was banished from England, Scotland and Ireland. By this time, he had already fled the country, but by March he had defied his banishment and was back in Edinburgh, plotting to regain control of the King.
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Hearing of yet another new regime north of the border, Elizabeth was concerned enough to despatch one of her most senior councillors, Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, to investigate. Refusing to speak with Arran, Walsingham used his time with James to hammer home the English Queen’s disapproval of what she saw as the King’s rash action in switching counsellors without consulting her. James fell into what Walsingham described to Elizabeth as ‘some kind of distemperture [sic], and with a kind of jollity said he was an absolute King, and therefore prayed Your Majesty that he might take such order with his subjects as should best like himself, and that Your Highness would be no more curious to examine the affection of his councillors than he is of yours’.
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Hearing this, Elizabeth needed no further encouragement to lend her support instead to the Lords Enterprisers. On 17 April 1584, Mar, backed by Glamis, Angus and the Lords John and Claud Hamilton, asserted his personal claim to Stirling Castle.
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With Arran at his side, James mustered some twelve thousand men and advanced on Stirling; the castle capitulated immediately, and the King hanged the captain of the garrison there as a warning. But the lords had already disappeared, fleeing to the Borders, and from there into England.
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Arran had, however, managed to capture Gowrie (who was not part of the conspiracy), and had him executed on 3 May 1584, supposedly for past crimes.

This success against the Lords Enterprisers provided James with a new confidence, and he set about consolidating his regime. Arran was appointed as Chancellor with Maitland of Thirlestane as Secretary. James also started to exorcise some ghosts of his childhood: all copies of Buchanan’s despised
De jure regni
were called in, ‘to be revised and reformed’ by the new Secretary, ‘upon pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of £200’ to anyone who was found with a copy.
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He also dealt with the Kirk. The preacher Andrew Melvill was summoned before the Privy Council to answer for a seditious sermon he had given; when he refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Council, he was forced to flee into England. It was only the start of James’s campaign. In May 1584 Arran’s government passed what the Kirk dubbed ‘the Black Acts’. These declared James head of Kirk and state, confirming his power over both spiritual and temporal estates, insisted on the authority of bishops within the Kirk, and forbade the meeting of presbyteries (which it didn’t recognise) and General Assemblies without the King’s consent.
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This was a newly assertive King James.

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During the summer of 1584, M. de Fontenay, ambassador of Henri III of France, spent some months in James’s court. Like every other ambassador, his first task was to send home a pen-portrait to his paymaster – but Fontenay possessed a rare insight into James’s character. His observations reveal to us not only the eighteen-year-old James, but the James of the next forty years. His opening remarks were wholly admiring. ‘He is, for his age, the first Prince who has ever been in this world. He has three parts of the soul in perfection. He grasps and understands quickly; he judges carefully and with reasonable discourses; he restrains himself well and for long. In his demands he is quick and piercing, and determined in his replies.’ Fontenay was particularly impressed by James’s lack of bias in debates – a characteristic that was to be of great significance later in his career when he frequently entered into public controversies. ‘Of whatever thing they dispute, whether it be religion or anything else, he believes and maintains always what seems to him most true and just, so that in several disputes on religion I have seen him take the cause for Monsieur de Fentray [a Roman Catholic] and defend him constantly against his adversaries, although they were of the same belief as he. He is learned in many languages, sciences, and affairs of state – I daresay more than all those of his kingdom. In short he has marvellous spirit – for the rest full of virtuous glory and good opinion of himself.’ Although generous, he wrote, James was highly competitive, and if he ‘saw himself surpassed in exercises he abhors them ever after’. Somewhat prudish, the King ‘hates dancing and music in general, as likewise all wantonness at court, be it in discourses of love or in curiosity of habits’ – with one particular phobia: ‘not being well about to see above all earrings’.

Fontenay did have, however, some reservations. James, he wrote, did not often ‘dare to contradict the great lords’, and yet ‘he likes very much to be considered brave and to be feared’. This he put down to the King’s ‘having been nourished in fear’ – a phrase that beautifully captures James’s cowed existence through the first eighteen years of his life. ‘His ways for want of being well instructed are very rude and uncivil in speaking, eating, manners, games, and entertainment in the company of women’ – perhaps inevitable in one raised in a remote castle full of men.

Fontenay was also one of the first to recognise and comment on James’s disability. ‘He never stops in one place, taking a singular pleasure in walking, but his gait is bad, composed of erratic steps, and he tramps about even in his room.’ This feature, remarked upon throughout James’s life, has never been properly explained – if we discount the ‘drunken wet-nurse scenario’ – but might have been exacerbated, if not caused, by a riding accident. As Fontenay notes, the King ‘likes hunting above all the pleasures of this world, remaining there at least six hours together chasing all over the place with loosened rein. He has a weak body, but is in no wise delicate. In short, to tell you in one word, he is an old young man resembling the sirens of Socrates.’

In his assessment of James’s grasp of government, Fontenay proved to be almost prophetic. ‘I have only noticed in him three things very bad for the preservation of his state and the government of the same. The first is his ignorance and lack of knowledge of his poverty and his little strength, promising too much of himself and despising other princes. The second, that he loves indiscretely and inadvisedly in spite of his subjects [against his subjects’ better interests]. The third is that he is too lazy and too thoughtless over his affairs, too willing and devoted to his pleasure, especially hunting, leaving all his affairs to be managed by the Earl of Arran, Montrose, and the Secretary. I know well that this is excusable at his young age, but it is to be feared that continuance will confirm him in this habit.’ Indeed, by the time James reached England twenty years later, the habit was unbreakable. Fontenay felt so strongly about this issue that he challenged James on the matter. James replied ‘very secretly’ that ‘he would guard well against such misfortune, because no affair of importance ever happened of which he did not know, although he did not seem to. And although he spent much of his time hunting he could do as much business in one hour as others would in a day, because simultaneously he listened and spoke, watched, and sometimes did five things at once.’ Moreover, James boasted, ‘nothing was done secretly by the lords that he did not know, by means of having spies at the doors of their rooms morning and evening, who came and reported everything to him’.