The Cradle King (50 page)

Another happy moment came on 19 July at Stirling when in the Chapel Royal he received a deputation from Edinburgh University, which was alarmed by rumours that ‘all colleges were to be laid waste, except St Andrews and Glasgow’.
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They debated on such themes as ‘Ought sheriffs and other inferior magistrates to be hereditary’; ‘On the nature of local motion’; and ‘Concerning the origin of fountains or springs’. After supper, the King sent for the learned disputants: John Adamson, James Fairlie, Patrick Sands, Andrew Young, James Reid and William King. Perhaps relaxed by the supper’s wine, James decided to play with the scholars’ names, starting with Adamson as ‘Adam’s Son’, and ending with King who ‘disputed very kingly, and of a kingly purpose concerning the royal supremacy of reason above anger and all passions’. ‘I am so well satisfied with this day’s exercise,’ he told the academics, ‘that I will be godfather to the College of Edinburgh, and have it called the College of King James, for after its founding it stopped sundry years in my minority; after I came to knowledge, I held to it, and caused it to be established; and although I see many look upon it with an evil eye, yet I will have them know that, having given it my name, I have espoused its quarrel, and at a proper time will give it a royal God-bairn gift, to enlarge its revenues.’ James was so proud of his wit that he commissioned a sonnet to immortalise it, whose last couplet memorialised the tangible benefit of the exchange:

To their deserved praise have I thus played upon their names,

And will their college hence be
The College of King James.

The sonnet was then rendered in Latin three times for inclusion in
The Muses’ Welcome.
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From Stirling, James travelled to Perth, where a speech by the merchant and burgess John Stewart reminded him of the Gowrie Plot, when God ‘did give you out of the bloody hands of these two unnatural traitors within this town’.
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The trouble with the Kirk would not go away, however. At St Andrews, James sat with the Court of High Commission as three ministers were tried on 12 July for their involvement with the recent clerical protest against the proposed innovations. There James came to blows with the man who was ironically one of the most devoted documenters of his reign, David Calderwood. Calderwood took the King to task over the question of the authority of the General Assembly. When James insisted on obedience, Calderwood equivocated by talking of active and passive obedience, namely that ‘we will rather suffer than practice’. James was incensed. ‘I will tell thee, man, what is obedience. The centurion, what he said to his servants, to this man, Go, and he goeth, to that man, Come, and he cometh, that is obedience.’ For ‘carrying himself unrevently, and braking forth into speeches not becoming a subject’, Calderwood was committed to prison.
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The following day, still smarting from the encounter, James met with a group of thirty-six ministers in the chapel of St Andrews Castle and angrily demanded to know what ‘causeless jealousies’ there could be to his proposed five articles. The churchmen fell to their knees, and after being allowed to confer, begged that a General Assembly might be called to approve the articles. When James asked what assurance he could have that the Assembly would consent, the ministers replied that they could see no reason why the Assembly would not consent ‘to any reasonable thing demanded by his Majesty’. ‘But if it fall out otherwise,’ James persisted, ‘and that the Articles be refused, my difficulty will be greater; and, when I shall use my authority in establishing them, they shall call me a tyrant and persecutor.’ The ministers cried out that no one would be so mad as to say that. ‘Yet experience tells me it may be so,’ replied James wearily, ‘therefore unless I be made sure, I will not give way to an Assembly.’ At length, however, James was mollified by the ministers’ insistent assurances that the articles would be passed by the General Assembly, and agreed to hold one in late November.
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His work was almost done. At Glasgow on 27 July James attended his final meeting of the Scottish Privy Council. Travelling through south-west Scotland via Hamilton, Sanquhar, Drumlanrig and Dumfries, by 4 August he was in Carlisle.
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Regaining his good humour, James was even prevailed upon by Robert Hay, a Gentleman of his Bedchamber, to allow Calderwood bail on 28 July, although ultimately the minister was banished from Scotland.
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Once back in London, however, James resumed his antipathy towards the Kirk in which he had been raised. The General Assembly which he had reluctantly called was sparsely attended, and little headway was made in pushing through the proposed reforms. The conduct of his bishops was ‘a disgrace’, James raged by letter, threatening to impose financial penalties on dissenting ministers. ‘Since your Scottish Church hath so far contemned my clemency,’ he added in his own hand as a postscript to the Archbishops of St Andrews and Glasgow, ‘they shall now find what it is to draw the anger of a King upon them.’
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As he had previously hinted, what he could not achieve through the ministers’ acquiescence, James now imposed by law, ordering the Privy Council in January 1618 to issue a proclamation forcing the observance of religious holy days.
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Insult was added to injury when, on 24 May, James issued a proclamation that claimed that sports and games were lawful on Sundays and other holy days.
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Amid rumours that more punitive measures were to come, the final General Assembly of James’s reign met at Perth on 25 August 1618. A difficult, tense affair, it seemed at first as if no progress would be possible, especially on the question of kneeling at communion. To help matters, James had sent a letter which was read out twice ‘to move the Assembly partly with allurements, partly with persuasions’, as Calderwood put it.
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But at last, thanks mainly to the stage management of Archbishop Spottiswoode, the General Assembly approved James’s five articles.
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To what extent the articles were effectively imposed is another matter: James’s insistence in March 1620 that the punishment for disobeying the articles should be extended to laymen suggests that their success was far from wholesale.
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But the ‘salmonlike’ return to Scotland in 1617 was to be a rare last chance for James to indulge himself in domestic policy. From now on, his concerns would be on an international stage.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Peacemaker

E
VER SINCE
P
HILIP
III of Spain had sent Diego Sarmiento de Acuña to London in 1614, James had been obsessed with the idea of marrying Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta. While James was thrilled by the idea of Spain’s power, wealth and prestige, Philip saw the benefit of having England on side against a possible threat from France. During 1615, Sarmiento and other Spanish envoys elaborated the articles for a marriage treaty. In order for Charles to marry the Infanta, Spain would require some concessions to English Roman Catholics: first, an agreement not to enforce the laws against them, and, eventually, the permission for them to practise their religion. The Infanta’s household would be Spanish and Roman Catholic, and would be able to worship publicly, and be buried in Catholic graves. Her priests would be allowed to wear their robes in public. The Infanta would have to keep control over the education of her children, who would be baptised according to Roman Catholic rites, and given Catholic wet nurses. The children of the marriage would be allowed to choose their religion, but the choice to be a Catholic would not automatically bar them from the throne. James’s first reaction to these articles was hostile, but he did not throw them out altogether – much to the horror of the anti-Spanish faction that had emerged at court, led by Secretary of State Sir Ralph Winwood, the Archbishop of Canterbury George Abbot, and the Earl of Pembroke. These men called instead for war against Spain, and urged James to call a Parliament to fund it. He, of course, refused.
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James did, however, give in to another petition from Winwood, Pembroke and Abbot. It was gold that tempted the always inpecunious King. In 1595, lured by tales of the legendary Indian city El Dorado, the famed courtier and explorer Sir Walter Ralegh had reached Orinoco, and claimed it as English. But after being imprisoned by James in 1603, Ralegh had been unable to persuade the English government to allow him to capitalise on his discoveries, and Spain had made considerable inroads in the region. Now the anti-Spanish faction, led by Abbot, Pembroke and Winwood pressured James to free Ralegh from the Tower and allow him to sail to the Orinoco River, to reclaim it and its rumoured wealth for England. In March 1616 James finally relented, and Ralegh was released, in order to begin preparations for the venture. Ralegh was permitted to sail heavily armed, but only after solemnly undertaking that he would not attack any Spanish subject, on pain of death. Sarmiento protested, but James reassured him by saying that on his faith, his hand and his word, he would send Sir Walter bound hand and foot directly to Spain should he injure a single Spaniard; any Spanish gold would be returned to King Philip, and Ralegh would be delivered for hanging in Madrid.
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Ralegh’s mission was a catastrophe. Battered by gales, hurricanes and fever on board, the fleet was horribly weakened by the time it reached the mouth of the Orinoco. With Sir Walter too ill to go further, a group of boats was led up the river by Keymis and Ralegh’s nephew, George. Coming close to the Spanish settlement of San Thomé, the Englishmen were fired on during the night; in the battle that followed, Ralegh’s son Walter was killed, and the English captured the town, only to fall under siege from the Spanish. After twenty-nine days, Keymis admitted defeat, returned to tell Ralegh of his failure and then committed suicide. Unable to attempt another push up river and without the force necessary to launch an assault on any other settlement, Ralegh returned home with the dregs of his men via Newfoundland, arriving at Portsmouth on 21 June 1618. He was promptly arrested, and put back in the Tower.
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Ralegh had broken every promise he had made to the King. Sarmiento (now elevated as Count de Gondomar) insisted that James must fulfil his promise to send Ralegh to Madrid for his due punishment. According to Secretary of State Sir Thomas Lake, James was ‘very disposed and determined against Ralegh and will join the King of Spain in ruining him’; Gondomar reported home that ‘The King promises that he will do whatever we like to remedy and redress it.’
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On 21 June, the Privy Council objected as best they could without criticising the King directly: Gondomar was insolent, they said, to insist that Ralegh be hanged in Madrid, as though England were nothing more than a tributary to Spain.
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The following day, James put it to Gondomar that in fact Keymis was the guilty party, but the Spaniard was not impressed. James, he declared, could not act as judge of the case, because he himself had given Ralegh his commission, and he was surrounded on his Privy Council by Ralegh’s friends. Gondomar, sadly, had no power to punish Sir Walter himself: instead, he could only point out that Ralegh remained unhanged, and his friends on the Council were still at liberty. For once, James grew angry at Gondomar: he pulled his hat off and threw it on the floor, and, clutching his hair, screamed that this might be justice in Spain, but it was not justice in England. He would not punish a man unheard – even if an assassin were to kill the Prince of Wales, he had to be tried before he could be punished. Gondomar pressed home the case against Ralegh and at length James admitted that Sir Walter’s crimes were scarlet, and formally promised to send Ralegh to Spain for execution. When the Privy Council protested at this development, James declared that he was King, and would take whatever course he desired, ‘without following the advice of fools and of designing persons’.
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In the end, though, some degree of compromise had to be allowed to creep in. A commission of Privy Councillors was appointed to examine the case, and concluded that Ralegh planned to plunder Spanish holdings in America, contrary to his undertaking. This, they decided, demanded the death penalty. However, since Ralegh already had a death penalty hanging over him and was thus legally dead, he could not be tried on the new charge. A special commission was appointed to hear the case; it was found that the death sentence imposed for his original crime could still be carried out; Ralegh was executed; and Bacon was set to work drafting a
Declaration
justifying the King’s course of action in the case.
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James had won the day – but at great personal cost. To many of his subjects, it seemed that he had kowtowed to Spanish pressure and put to death an English national hero.