The Cradle King (17 page)

The Kirk was dismayed, letting the King know of their ‘grief that sundry papists of great calling are promoted to offices and benefices; and that such, and others of high rank within the country, take upon them the maintenance of Papists and idolators’ – Huntly’s name headed the list of the guilty parties.
³⁰
At the July 1587 Parliament, Huntly, now a Privy Councillor, bore the sword at the opening ceremonies, and was made one of four Lords of the Articles.
³¹
By mid-August, an anonymous ‘advertiser in Scotland’ was informing Walsingham that ‘My Lord of Huntly is indeed a great courtier and knows more of the King’s secrets nor [than] any man at this present doth’;
³²
Ogilvy of Powrie reported that Huntly ‘now remains ordinarily at court, and that by his Majesty’s special command’.
³³

Whatever his motivation, James’s sudden show of favour towards Huntly turned out to be a canny move. With Mary dead, Scottish Catholics may have gained a perfect martyr, but they had lost a living figurehead: Huntly was the most obvious choice as successor, but by entering James’s circle, his potential danger might be significantly diluted. James now held the disaffected Kirk and the disaffected Catholics in an uneasy balance, made all the more tenuous by the perennial insecurity of Huntly’s relationship with the King. Scotland’s state papers of the period are littered with conflicting accounts of James’s favour towards the Earl, and Huntly’s irritation with James’s insistence on maintaining positive relations with England. More than once, Huntly made a show of leaving court to express his anger and disappointment with the King. Nevertheless, Huntly’s position at court was shored up when, on 21 July 1588, he married Lady Henrietta Stuart, one of the daughters of James’s beloved Esmé, shipped over from France at a cost of five thousand marks, voted by the Privy Council.
³⁴
James himself contributed verses to an entertainment at the wedding festivities featuring men portraying Mercury, nymphs and zani.
³⁵
At their marriage, Huntly and his wife publicly renounced Roman Catholicism and embraced the reformed faith. Thomas Fowler wrote that ‘The King, desiring to have him his familiar in court, persuaded him from papistry, and, as he thought prevailed.’ At Huntly’s subscription to the Kirk, James ‘rejoiced exceedingly’, and the Earl was subsequently ‘lodged in the King’s chamber, and had place in the King’s favour above all others’. Huntly’s
modus operandi
was very different from that of his predecessor Lennox, however. The Earl, Fowler observed, ‘never meddled in matters of state’; instead, he ‘followed [the King] in all pastime and would flatter and feed his humour in whatever exceedingly’. Indeed, continued Fowler, Huntly was ‘shallow witted. But he hath shrewd counsellors about him whose advice he follows.’
³⁶

These shrewd counsellors understood that, Catholic sympathies aside, Huntly could be the invaluable linchpin of an anti-Maitland party. Maitland’s rise – as Secretary in 1584, Vice-Chancellor and Keeper of the Great Seal in 1586, and finally Chancellor in 1587 – had been seen as a triumph for those committed to Protestantism and good relations with England, but there were many who opposed some, if not all, of these supposed achievements. Round Huntly there now coalesced a
de facto
opposition, politically conservative, supportive of the nobility against what they saw as the lower-born Maitland’s advances on their privileges, and generally drawn to France rather than England. There was indeed a Catholic tinge to the Huntly faction, which included Errol, Lennox, Crawford, Seton and Maxwell, but its politics also drew Protestants such as Atholl, Montrose and Lord John Hamilton; certain courtiers, including Bothwell, Glamis and Gray vacillated between Maitland and Huntly.
³⁷

James neatly balanced his intimate favour for Huntly with a display of his orthodox Protestantism. As part of his campaign to keep the Kirk sweet, James spent the winter months ‘in commenting of the Apocalypse and in setting out of sermons thereupon against the Papists and Spaniards’.
³⁸
The former was
A Fruitful Meditation,
published in early 1588 and expanded to five times its length as
Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle S. John
in 1616; it marked the King’s first entry into theological writing, which was later to become a passion.
³⁹
James also put his grasp of Church doctrine to public test by challenging to a debate a leading Jesuit, Father James Gordon – Huntly’s uncle, no less. The encounter turned into a marathon five-hour scholarly exchange, in which James, tellingly, displayed none of the vehemence or tantrums he was prone to when debating with Kirk ministers. At the end, the two men praised each other graciously and generously, with Gordon conceding that no man ‘use his arguments better nor quote the Scriptures and other authorities more effectively’ than James.
⁴⁰
In his chamber, however, according to Bernardino de Mendoza, James declared ‘that Gordon did not understand the Scripture, which is a fairly bold thing to say’. What could be expected though, Mendoza sneered, from a King who had ‘the assurance to translate Revelation and to write upon the subject as if he were Amadis de Gaule himself’.
⁴¹

In the spring of 1588, James was forced to turn his attention to more pressing matters. Rumours reached James that Huntly, Crawford and Montrose in the north, and Maxwell and Lord Claud Hamilton in the south were plotting to bring a Spanish army to Scotland, and to force his conversion to the old faith. In fact, Spain was not interested in Scotland, but the rumour served to bolster those still faithful to Catholicism, and to rally troops at Dunfermline and Linlithgow. At the beginning of May, Maxwell ‘passed through the country with a plaid about him, like a wayfaring man’;
⁴²
the King denounced him as a rebel, but friends still flocked to him. James soon showed himself ‘earnest to proceed against Maxwell’, and levied one hundred horse and two hundred footmen, but rumour had it that he had also ridden to Calder for secret negotiations with Maxwell and Lord John Hamilton, a charge strenuously denied by James’s entourage.
⁴³
As James advanced, Maxwell’s castles surrendered one by one until only Lochmaben remained, holding out until 9 June, when the royal forces seized the castle, hanging the captain and five garrison men, and bringing Lord Maxwell back to Edinburgh as a prisoner.
⁴⁴
The incident demonstrated to James that he should not be too complacent about his neutralisation of the Catholic threat, and from then on he was more careful: when Huntly invited him to attend a banquet at Dunfermline, James accepted readily enough; but then he panicked during the night, and left secretly and in great haste before dawn. The old nervousness, of the King ‘nourished in fear’, was back.

While the Scottish Catholics was countered with relative ease, a greater threat was on the horizon. In July, England braced herself for the Spanish Armada that her intelligencers had long reported was being prepared for an attack on her shores. At this most crucial moment, the new English ambassador in Scotland, William Asheby opted, without any authority, to offer James whatever was needed to keep him on the side of the English – promises that included an English dukedom, funds to keep a royal guard and to police the Borders, and a yearly pension of £5,000. James, predictably fired with a new enthusiasm for England, wrote to Elizabeth: ‘In times of straits true friends are most tried, now merits the thanks of you and your country, who kithes [shows] himself a friend to your country and estate; and this time must move me to utter my zeal to the religion how new a kinsman and neighbour I find myself to you and your country.’ He had therefore offered her ‘my forces, my person, and all that I may command to be employed against your strangers on whatsomever fashion and whatsomever mean as may best serve for the defence of your country. Wherein I promise to behave myself not as a stranger and foreign prince, but as your natural son and compatriot of your country in all respects.’ Calling for commissioners to confirm Asheby’s offer, he continued ‘I protest I desire not for that I would have the reward to precede the deserts, but only that I with honour, and a[ll] my good subjects with a fervent good will may embrace this your godly and honest cause, whereby your adversaries will have ado not with England but with the whole Isle of Britain.’
⁴⁵

Unfortunately for Asheby and James, by the time these offers were rashly made and enthusiastically accepted, the international political situation had altered beyond recognition. The Spanish fleet set sail from Corunna on 12 July and were in English waters within a week; England’s fleet, commanded by the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham, engaged them on the 21st. For the next ten days, the two fleets were consumed in battle, but on the night of the 28th, the Armada suffered grievous losses from English fireships, and on the following day the battle of Gravelines made England’s victory clear. The Spanish ships fled northwards, and started a slow and costly return to the homeland by circumnavigating the British Isles.

On 11 August, Asheby received two letters, portentously written in Sir Francis Walsingham’s own hand, informing him that he had committed a ‘great oversight’ ‘in the offering to the King, it being done without commission.’ In replying, Asheby threw himself on Elizabeth’s mercy, but even as he grovelled, he reiterated the urgency of an Anglo-Scottish pact: ‘What danger and utter ruin must needs follow if the minds of these two princes be not firmly knit together, all the world doth foresee.’
⁴⁶
From Paris, the disgraced Master of Gray saw James’s position with clearer eyes. ‘I am sorry to know from Scotland,’ he wrote to Archibald Douglas, ‘that the King our master has of all the golden mountains offered received a fiddler’s wages.’
⁴⁷

*   *   *

The Armada may have been crushed, but the Kirk still saw papists under every trundlebed. In January 1589, the ministers presented petitions to the King and the Council urging vigilance, and urging the King ‘to purge his house, Council, and Session, and to retire his power of lieutenantry, wardenry, and other his authority whatsomever, from all and whatsomever person avowed or suspected to be Papists’. Their insistence seemed vindicated on 27 February. James was sitting with the Lords of the Session at the Tolbooth, about to rise as usual at twelve, when a packet was presented to him by the English ambassador Asheby. He was informed that it contained matters from the Low Countries, but on retiring he discovered it was in fact a set of letters, intercepted by English agents, from Huntly and Errol among others, to King Philip II of Spain and his commander the Duke of Parma, all of them expressing regret that Philip had not thought to use Scotland as a landing point for the Armada, and requesting men and money to help invade England. Also implicated were Crawford, Maxwell, Lord Claud Hamilton, and the Protestant Bothwell.
⁴⁸

The mere fact of correspondence between Scotland and Spain was hardly shocking: James himself had written to Parma only two months earlier.
⁴⁹
But these letters laid open a treacherous negotiation of some three years’ standing with one Robert Bruce (decidedly
not
to be confused with the Kirk minister) acting as their intermediary – indeed, in early 1587, Bruce had negotiated with Parma to smuggle Spanishpaid soldiers into Scotland in the hulls of thirty grain ships. Moreover, the letters contained evidence that Spain had been funding Huntly’s party.
⁵⁰
What really mortified James was that the treachery had been uncovered by English agents, allowing their Queen to rub salt in the wound, and indeed, Elizabeth’s covering letter made no attempt to conceal her glee. She had told him before, she reminded him, that she would be his ‘faithful watch, to shun all mishaps or dangers’. Now these letters ‘of high treason to your person and kingdom’ are nothing more or less than ‘as in a glass, the true portraiture of my late warning letters’. If only he had followed her advice, instead of just reading it, ‘you might have taken their persons, received their treason, and shunned their further strengthening’. Instead, their strength ‘hath grown daily by your too great neglecting and suffering of so many practices which, at the beginning, might easily have been prevented’. ‘Good Lord!’ she continued, ‘methink I do but dream: no king a week would bear this! Their forces assembled, and held near your person, held plots to take your person near the seaside; and all this wrapped up with giving them offices, that they might the better accomplish their treason!’ Now he must listen to reason. ‘Of a suddenly [immediately] they must be clapped up in safer custody than some others have been, which hath bred their laughter.’
⁵¹

Under such pressure, James had to be seen to take action against Huntly, but the action was so mild as to be laughable. The Earl was held in Edinburgh Castle, his own choice of prison, to await trial, but his wife, servants and friends were given free access and, within a day, James and Maitland were seen going to the castle to dine with Huntly, where, according to the English agent Thomas Fowler, the King ‘entertained Huntly as well and kindly as ever, yea he kissed him at times to the amazement of many’ exclaiming that ‘he knew he was innocent’. Huntly’s friends were ‘in fury’ at his imprisonment, reported Fowler, and using ‘threatenings and proud words to many, specially to Englishmen’, who blamed James directly through his ‘fond dealing’. ‘It is thought,’ he concluded, ‘that this King is too much carried by young men that lies in his chamber and is his minions.’
⁵²
As if to mourn the loss of his favourite, James refused to go hunting while Huntly was imprisoned, and visited him every day until his release on 7 March, on which night Huntly slept in James’s bedchamber.
⁵³