The Cradle King (24 page)

This dramatic attempt on James inspired him to three sonnets, the self-pitying tone of which can be heard in the following:

    Shall treason then of truth have the reward

And shall rebellion thus exalted be?

Shall cloaked vice with falsehood’s fained fard

In credit creep and glister in our eye?

Shall coloured knaves so malapertly lie

And shameless sow their poisoned smitting seed?

And shall perjured infamous foxes sly

With these triumphs make honest hearts to bleed?

How long shall Furies on our fortunes feed?

How long shall vice her reign possess in rest?

How long shall Harpies our displeasure breed

And monstrous fowls sit sicker in our nest?

    In time appointed God will surely have

    Each one his due reward for to resave [receive].
⁵²

Bothwell retired from court, as agreed, and James went to work. The outlaw Earl’s power had alarmed several major players, and they now came together, overlooking previous differences: Treasurer Glamis, Lord John Hamilton, Homes, Maxwell, several members of the Douglas and Stewart families – and Chancellor Maitland, who returned to court, much to the King’s relief. In September 1593, James felt secure enough to declare that he was a free King, and to threaten Bothwell that he had to stick to his side of the bargain.
⁵³
But James still showed little real desire to rid himself of the Catholic earls led by Huntly. In November of 1593, a small convention in Edinburgh passed an Act of Oblivion for all the Catholic earls’ illegal acts, on various conditions, including that they should formally submit to the Kirk. James was heavily implicated in this manoeuvre: it was claimed that he had manipulated the nobles at the convention, and tampered with the wording of the Act. The Kirk, predictably enraged, took little notice of the Act: the Synod of Fife excommunicated the earls anyway. Elizabeth taunted James with a letter ‘in which she lamented the sight of a seduced King, an abusing Council, and wry-guided kingdom’.
⁵⁴

Amends were made in April 1594. Bothwell appeared at Leith, this time with only a small group of men, driving some of the King’s horse back to Edinburgh – James himself, according to an unsympathetic Calderwood, ‘came riding into the city at the full gallop with full honour’. The King went to St Giles’ and appealed to Edinburgh to support him: ‘If ye will assist me against Bothwell at this time, I promise to prosecute the excommunicated lords [i.e. Huntly and his followers] so that they shall not be suffered to remain in any part of Scotland.’ Bothwell realised that his honeymoon with the Kirk was over, and fled north.
⁵⁵
Shortly after, James was made aware of yet another Spanish plot involving Huntly and the Catholic earls. This time, having made his promise to Edinburgh, he could not refuse to take proper action. Crucially, he drew his support now not from the nobility, but from the lairds and the burghs. He also appealed to the Kirk for support, but their initial reaction was sceptical, telling James they would pray for him. But then news reached Edinburgh that Huntly was sheltering the fugitive Bothwell. Faced with this dangerous concentration of rebel power they were forced to act.

James’s military expedition was ready in September to march to the north-east with the Kirk represented by Andrew Melvill; the advance guard commanded by the young Earl of Argyll soon reached Aberdeenshire. A skirmish on 3 October, rather grandly known as the battle of Glenlivet, saw Huntly defeat Argyll; when James approached, the Earl put up no resistance, but refused to surrender Bothwell. Bothwell again fled for his life to Caithness, but this was to be the last time. The royal forces burned the rebels’ houses to the ground. Either exhausted, or realising his luck had turned, Bothwell fled north.

In dealing with his prisoners, James showed his true colours. To him, Huntly was never a real enemy, as Bothwell was. In March 1595, with official permission, Huntly and Errol left the country, but Huntly returned to Scotland the following year, and was officially received into the Kirk in 1597, rewinning James’s friendship and being rewarded in 1599 with the title of Marquis.
⁵⁶
While Huntly was never again to have the influence over the King that he had enjoyed in the late 1580s, he and James retained a close friendship in future years, cemented when James asked for Huntly’s son to be sent to London as a companion to his own son, Charles. Indeed, at the end of his life, James summoned Huntly to London to present him to Charles, who would be his new king, describing him as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince, assuring Charles that so long as he would cherish and keep Huntly on his side, he needed not be very apprehensive of seditious or turbulent heads in Scotland’.
⁵⁷
Bothwell’s flight this time took him abroad. He lived on for another thirty years, but never returned to Scotland. Scotland’s most seditious and turbulent head was gone.

CHAPTER NINE

Advice to A Son

I
F
J
AMES HAD
believed that marriage to Anna would stop the attacks on his masculinity he was truly misguided. Rumours in Scandinavia that Anna had conceived shortly after their wedding proved to be unfounded. The Earl of Worcester, sent by Elizabeth to welcome the new Queen in the summer of 1590, joked that Anna’s toothache was evidently ‘a token of breeding child’, but again no child was born.
¹
By the autumn of 1591, there were intimations of resentment on the part of the Scottish people: an anonymous Englishman in Berwick reported their ‘great disliking of their Queen, for that she proves not with child’.
²
And in time, the resentment spread to the King.

In the summer of 1592, James sent for several Edinburgh ministers and showed them some harshly mocking ‘contumelious verses’ that had been sent to him. James thought they must be the work of one Captain Hackerston, one of the leading followers of Bothwell, then the King’s principal bugbear. ‘Ye may see,’ James told the ministers, ‘what they mean to my life, that carry such libels about them.’ The scurrilous rhymes contained three rumours: ‘calling him Davy’s son, a bougerer [bugger], one that left his wife all the night
intactam.
’ The claim that the King was in fact the illegitimate son of Mary’s Italian secretary David Riccio was older than James himself and would never be quashed; but the other two, impugning his masculinity, struck him to the heart. Ever since Esmé Stuart had come into Scotland, it had been suggested obliquely that the King’s relations with his male favourites might cross the line into physical expression, and James himself, in his open letter to the Privy Council as he set sail to Denmark, had drawn attention to rumours that he had no desire to marry. But now he had a wife – and yet what had been only hinted at before was now spelled out in the libels. James decided to act, but he had a strange order for the ministers. ‘I thought good to acquaint you with these things, that ye may acquaint the people with them, for they have a good opinion of you, and credit you.’ And so the Edinburgh ministers were despatched to inform their flocks that the King was not the illegitimate son of David Riccio, that he did indeed consummate his marriage, that he was not a bugger. Quite what the Edinburgh congregations made of these assurances is not recorded.
³

It was with great relief, then, when it became clear in late 1593, after over three years of marriage, that the Queen was pregnant. On 19 February 1594, Anna gave birth to her first child, a son, at Stirling. James named him Henry Frederick, Henry after his father, and Frederick after Anna’s. The baptism in August was a grand affair, far more lavish than James’s precarious finances truly afforded, and attended by representatives of many European courts. As with James’s own christening, the festivities were marked by entertainments, this time with James contributing, with William Fowler, to a masque in which he starred as one of the Christian Knights of Malta, doing battle with Moors and Amazons, the latter portrayed in full female dress by several noblemen.
⁴

When Henry was only two days old, family tradition was honoured when the Earl of Mar, James’s boyhood friend Jocky o’ Sclaittis, was appointed as his guardian, with Stirling Castle as his residence. The dowager Countess of Mar, who had looked after James, was still alive, and was called on to undertake the same duties with Henry. The same restrictions of access were imposed – with the interesting addition that no enemy of the prince ‘nor their wives, bairns, or servants’ should be allowed into the castle.
⁵
While this state of affairs seemed perfectly natural to James, Anna was firmly opposed to losing her child so early. In March 1595, she asked her husband to transfer to her the keeping of Prince Henry and Stirling Castle. James was dismayed, and demanded to know who had put such a thing into her mind: of all people, Maitland was blamed. ‘There ariseth a variance at court,’ wrote one commentator. ‘The Queen would have had the prince in keeping in the Castle of Edinburgh and Buccleuch [a Border nobleman] to be captain … It was thought that the motion proceeded from the Chancellor who was now a great courtier with the Queen.’
⁶
The King thought the idea ‘perilous to his own estate’ and refused to yield, angrily swearing ‘that if he were about to die he would with his last breath command Mar to retain possession of the Prince.’
⁷

Anna refused to let the matter drop. In May, it was reported that ‘the Queen speaks more plainly than before and will not cease till she has her son.’ Court sympathies split into ‘two mighty factions’, the King’s faction at Stirling – Mar, Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone, and the Queen’s faction, including Maitland, at Edinburgh. The custody of the Prince became a sticking point in the royal marriage. ‘No good can come between the King and Queen till she be satisfied anent the Prince,’ George Nicolson wrote on 15 July, since there was a ‘division of this land into two factions almost to the parting of the King and Queen’.
⁸
Obviously fearing what his wife might do to get her son back, James wrote to Mar urging him to stick to the letter of his contract, not giving Henry to anyone without permission directly from the King’s own mouth, ‘because in the surety of my son consists my surety’. He even specified that Anna should not be given custody if James were himself to die: ‘in case God call me at any time, that neither for Queen nor Estates’ pleasure ye deliver him [the Prince] until he be eighteen years of age.’
⁹

Realising that the King would not climb down, Anna tried a more dramatic tactic. James, staying at Stirling, was told that Anna had fallen ill at Edinburgh, and wanted to see him. The King’s counsellors were immediately suspicious and advised against his going, in case some sort of attempt was made against him. Anna’s party sent her physicians to Stirling to assure James that his wife was indeed ill. James took the bait and decided ‘to set aside all occasion of suspicion, jealousy or pleasures’ and give ‘a proof of his love to his wife’ by riding to Edinburgh. Anna turned out to be ‘very merry and well disposed’, and took advantage of her husband’s rare show of concern to ask him once again for her son. This time James ‘took it in a more higher sort than before’ and replied, ‘My heart, I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’ Anna burst into tears. The following day, James said to Maitland, ‘If any think I am further subject to my wife than I ought to be, they are but traitors and such as seek to dishonour me.’
¹⁰
Realising she could not win, the Queen abandoned her campaign and publicly reconciled with Mar but it was thought permanent damage had been done to the marriage: ‘There is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation betwixt the King and the Queen,’ wrote John Colville in August, ‘each intending by slight to overcome the other.’
¹¹
Nevertheless, the King and Queen knew their duty, and Anna continued to give birth to a succession of princes and princesses: Elizabeth in 1596, Margaret in 1598, Charles in 1600, Robert in 1601, Mary in 1605 and Sophia in 1607; although Margaret, Robert, Mary and Sophia all died in infancy, fears about the succession were calmed.

The death of Maitland on 5 October 1595 eased some of the factional tension. James had relied on Maitland for many years, and wrote a sonnet lamenting his demise, that generously admitted Maitland’s contribution to James’s writing.

    If he who valiant even within the space

That Titan six times twice his course does end

Did conquise old Dame Rhea’s fruitful face