The Cradle King (48 page)

This foreign ‘familiar’ talk of James’s sodomy was alluded to once again in D’Ewes diary, on 2 October 1622, when he discussed a book that he described as ‘terrible and wholly against the King himself, accusing him of atheism, sodomy, etc…’.
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In 1615 there appeared in print what appeared to be yet another panegyric to James, entitled
Corona Regia,
supposedly written by the recently deceased Isaac Casaubon, who had spent his final years at the English court, and bearing the imprint of the King’s own printer, John Bill.
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In fact, both the authorial ascription and the printing house were fictitious: the publication was only a thinly veiled attack on James, written tongue in cheek – perhaps the most elaborated libel the King had had to face. What was regarded as the most damning passage is suggested by a copy of the book now in the British Library, in which a leaf has been torn out and a short passage on the bottom of the preceding page heavily scored.
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From another copy, we find that the censored passage gives a remarkably informed account of how James promoted a series of young, beautiful men – John Ramsay, who allegedly saved his life during the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600; Philip Herbert, who rose to become Earl of Montgomery; Robert Carr, later Earl of Somerset, and the latest favourite, George Villiers – only to drop each one when a younger, more beautiful man came along. In keeping with the text’s form of eulogy, however, the passage praises James’s policy of ‘advancing the beautiful’, because, after all, isn’t that only ‘exalting the good’?
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James reacted to this libel more passionately than to any other, launching an international search for its author, printer and publisher, assuming that the book originated in the Anglo-Catholic stronghold at Douai
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– as late as 1639 a Brussels bookseller named Jean de Perriet was claiming a reward for his identification of the guilty party.
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While the English court may have accepted the fact that James would always have a beautiful young man in his Bedchamber, it seems that James himself was far from happy to have the news broadcasted in print across Europe.

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With Somerset out of the picture, George Villiers became the undisputed focus of court life. While the old favourite waited for his trial in January 1616, the Earl of Worcester handed over to Villiers the post Somerset had coveted for himself: that of Master of the Horse. In April, he was appointed to the Order of the Garter, being installed in July, and in August he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Whaddon, Viscount Villiers. He was helped in this rise by a self-appointed adviser, Sir Francis Bacon: over the next few years Villiers and Bacon were to support each other in their careers, with Villiers providing Bacon with unparalleled access – albeit at one remove – to the King’s ear.
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To James, Villiers was ‘Steenie’, his St Stephen, because all who looked on the saint saw ‘his face as it had been the face of an angel’. The King, now fifty years old, was not shy of showing his affection for the young man. At a Twelfth Night revels, James was tiring of the conceited masque and shouted ‘Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all! Dance!’ Villiers got up and ‘cut capers’, to the delight of the court. As the Venetian ambassdor said: ‘none came up to the exquisite manner’ of Villiers who ‘rendered himself the admiration and delight of everybody’. James suddenly regained his temper, patted Villiers’s face, kissed him and embraced him ‘with marks of extraordinary affection’.
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James’s affection for Villiers provoked some tension between the favourite and Prince Charles. In March 1616 Charles saw a ring on the favourite’s hand, and took it for himself. When Villiers asked for it back the following day, Charles claimed that he could not find it. Villiers was upset and told the King, who sent for his son and ‘used such bitter language to him as forced His Highness to shed tears’. Two months later, when Charles ‘in jest’ turned a waterspout on Villiers in the garden at Greenwich, James, in a rare display of violence, boxed his ears.
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Over the next few months, however, Charles began to emerge from the too-long shadow of his beloved dead brother, Henry. He spent the end of 1617 in the country with his father, and one observer noted that Charles was making inroads into James’s affections, which might be ‘a danger for some other great person’, meaning Villiers.
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In time, though, Charles and Villiers became friends, and, in the summer of 1618, at the Prince’s suggestion held a ‘friends’ feast’ to seal their relationship. From then on the King, the Prince and the favourite became a firm triumvirate, often referring to each other by familiar, and familial, nicknames: Baby Charles, dear Dad.

By rights, if the author of
Corona Regia
is to be believed, James should have tired of Villiers sometime in 1618, and moved on, as was his wont, to a younger man. Evidently believing this to be likely, the Howards attempted to seize the King’s attention by pushing into his purview a young man named Sir William Monson. As John Chamberlain told the story, the Howards tried ‘to raise and recover their fortunes by setting up this new idol, and took great pains in tricking and pranking him up, besides washing his face every day with posset-curd’, presumably in an attempt to soften his skin. James, perhaps repelled by the olfactory side-effects of this curdled milk and ale concoction, was not taken by Monson, and very soon sent him a message to the effect that ‘the King did not like of his forwardness, and presenting himself continually about him’. In fact, Monson should absent himself from the royal presence – and preferably from the court. According to Chamberlain, this hit home not only with Monson, but with several other young pretenders, who promptly took off to the country: ‘most of our young court gallants are vanished like mushrooms’. It was also a ‘shrewd reprimand and crossblow’ to the Howards,
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but they didn’t give up hope.

The Monson incident was a salutary reminder to Villiers that his preeminence was far from assured,
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but his continued rise suggested otherwise. James appointed him Earl of Buckingham at Whitehall in January 1617, and the following month the new Earl was sworn into the Privy Council. James expressed his feelings for ‘Steenie’ in a speech to the other councillors: ‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man, and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John, and I have my George.’
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Although not a frequent attender at the Council table, Buckingham was perhaps preeminent in terms of real influence in the Jacobean court, for, like Somerset before him, he attended on James’s person constantly – which meant, in the summer of 1617, that Buckingham was the man closest to the King when James went home to Scotland.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A Salmonlike Instinct

I
T WAS NOW
thirteen long years since James had proclaimed to his people in Edinburgh in April 1603 that he would visit them ‘every three year at the least, or ofter [more often], as I shall occasion’. He’d written this in the
Basilikon Doron,
he continued, ‘and it were a shame to me not to perform that thing which I have written.’
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James’s promise to go home had not once been honoured. Scotland had, of course, known that James would be an absentee King, and from the outset James had taken measures to allow the country to function in his absence. James’s signature on a stamp was given to Sir Patrick Murray, and the Privy Council was given special power to take certain actions (such as the granting of passports, and the auditing of Exchequer accounts) that usually required royal approval. A police guard of forty men was raised to keep the peace in the King’s absence. The Scottish Privy Council were given full control of the Borders, both in Scotland and England. A system of postmasters was put in place to ensure the smooth running of the postal system between London and Edinburgh. In his own phrase, James ‘governed by pen’ from London, while leaving much of the daily business in the hands of his chief ministers in Edinburgh, first the Earl of Dunbar (until his death in 1611) and then Lord Chancellor Sir John Seton, Prince Charles’s guardian, who had been raised to become Earl of Dunfermline. The situation was never truly happy, and James was constantly urged to consider a trip home but it was not until April 1616 that his Lord Chancellor, Dunfermline, brought back from England a firm assurance that the King was planning to visit his homeland the following year.
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Within weeks, the Scottish Privy Council had authorised repairs to the King’s palaces at Holyroodhouse, Falkland and Stirling.
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Since ‘the place of his first rendezvous and longest abode during his stay in this kingdom’ would be at Holyroodhouse, it followed naturally that the nobility and his entire retinue ‘mon [must] be lodged within the Burgh of Edinburgh, the Canongate, and suburbs of the said burgh’. Lodgings and stables had to be found for five thousand men, and five thousand horse. A survey was undertaken to ensure that everything was in order for the King’s reception, and, importantly, would prove ‘seemly in the eyes of the many English nobles and gentlemen who will be in his train’. Edinburgh knew that the English were going to be scrutinising her: ‘the strangers and others that are to accompany his Majesty here will be so much the more careful narrowly to remark and espy the carriage and conversation of the inhabitants of the said burgh, the form of their entertainment and lodging.’ Therefore, strangers were to be given priority. Lodgings were to be ‘furnished with honest and clean bedding, and well washin and well smelled napry and other linens, and with a sufficient number and quantity of good vessels, clean and clear, and of sufficient largeness.’ Acts were passed for removing all the cattle in the King’s Park of Holyrood, so that it could be stocked in good time with wethers to be fattened for his arrival. Stables were to be well provided with corn, straw and hay. The streets must be clean, so that ‘no filth nor middens be seen upon the same’. The ‘idle beggars and vagabonds still swarming’ Edinburgh, Canongate and Leith, blithely unaware of the previous acts passed against them, were to be sent back to their own parishes. Since the time they didn’t spend ‘in all kind of riot and filthy and beastly lechery and whoredom to the offence and displeasure of God’, they devoted to importuning the King’s nobility, counsellors and subjects ‘with most shameful exclamations and outcries’, it was to be feared that ‘they will follow his Majesty’s Court, to the great discredit and disgrace of the country’.
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Knowing the bibulous nature of James’s retinue, large amounts of wine were imported from France – although for once afterwards there proved to be a surplus which had to be sold off cheap, much to the anguish of Scottish wine merchants.
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In making James feel at home, hunting was naturally made a matter of priority. It was solemnly proclaimed at the Mercat Cross that, since ‘his Majesty mon [must] sometime have his recreation, exercise, and pastime in the fields’, it was necessary ‘that the moorfowl, partridges, and pouttis [young fowl], within ten miles of the places of his Majesty’s abode here shall be preserved and carefully haynit for his Majesty’s pastime and game’. Therefore, it was now illegal ‘to slay any moorfowl, partridges, or pouttis, within ten miles of the Burgh of Edinburgh and other parts of his Majesty’s abode in this kingdom, during the time of his Majesty’s being within the same’: the heinous crime carried a penalty of one hundred pounds.
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Another proclamation banned ‘the slaying of his Majesty’s bucks’ in Falkland Park, with even greater penalties: an Earl would be liable to a five hundred marks’ fine.
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By the end of 1616 the Scottish Privy Council realised that, as ever, the funds available would not stretch to cover all the grandiose plans. James had to call a convention of estates in Scotland, which met in March 1617 to vote an extra tax the promise of which could be used as security to raise funds immediately.
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But by now suspicions about the King’s reasons for coming north were being openly voiced. Although the English Parliament had scuppered any immediate prospect of Union between England and Scotland, James remained resolved to do what he could to expedite the process. He believed that the single biggest stumbling block was the difference between the Church of England and the Scottish Kirk. Over recent months, he had made certain moves that the Kirk found ominous. When in May 1615 the Archbishop of St Andrews Gledstanes died, for example, James had replaced him with the compliant Archbishop Spottiswoode. Together in England, the King and Spottiswoode planned how the Kirk might be brought into line with Anglican practice. A memorandum, written in Spottiswoode’s hand only a month after Gledstanes’s death, detailed some proposals: these included a new form of service, which would eliminate spontaneous and ‘impertinent’ prayer; a new Confession of Faith ‘agreeing so near as can be with the Confession of the English Church’; the introduction of a new order for choosing archbishops and bishops (and in the meantime, if required, the order used ‘here in England’ should be employed); a uniform order for the electing of ministers; and the alteration of the forms of baptism, communion and marriage, along with the introduction of confirmation. This would have to be ‘advised and agreed upon’, of course, through a General Assembly, but the Assembly ‘must be drawn to the form of a Convocation House here in England’.
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Throughout the memorandum, the dominant theme was enforced compliance with the Anglican model. With Spottiswoode’s forceful guidance, much of this was pushed through at the August 1616 meeting of the General Assembly in Aberdeen, but there remained to be implemented important innovations that James insisted on, namely kneeling while receiving communion; observing some holy days dedicated to Christ (Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Day, Ascension and Whitsunday); episcopal confirmation, or ‘bishoping’; private baptism; and private communion to sick persons – demands which became known as the ‘five articles of Perth’. James agreed to put off the question of the five articles until his visit to Scotland – as a result many believed that his return home was little more than an excuse to force the Kirk into submission.
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