The Cradle King (8 page)

The fruits of this upbringing were put on display to the English envoy Henry Killigrew when he visited Stirling in June 1574. James, he reported to Sir Francis Walsingham, was ‘well grown in body and spirit’ since Killigrew had last visited. ‘He speaks the French tongue marvellously well’ and, surprisingly to Killigrew, ‘he was able
extempore
to read a chapter of the Bible out of Latin into French, and out of French into English, so well that few men could have added anything to his translation’. This was evidently a practised party piece. Buchanan and Young, Killigrew reported, challenged him to select any chapter he liked for the King to translate, so that he knew ‘it was not studied for’. These ‘rare’ tutors also ‘made the King dance before him’, which he also managed ‘with a very good grace’. James ‘seemed very glad to hear’ from his cousin Elizabeth, ‘and could use pretty speeches, as how much he was bound to her majesty, yea, more than to his own mother’. When Killigrew left, the King ‘prayed him to thank her majesty for the good remembrance she had of him, and further desired him to make his hearty commendations to her’. James, Killigrew concluded, was ‘a Prince sure of great hope if God send him life’.
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George Buchanan was one of the leading Scottish humanists of the sixteenth century, steeped in classical and modern continental literature on politics and religion. By the time he came to tutor James, he was already an elderly man, troubled by intermittent poor health, but he was still an imposing figure. Even on a brief visit, it was evident to Henry Killigrew that there was a tension between James’s male tutors and the women of his household: ‘his schoolmasters are desirous to have him from the handling of women, by whom he is yet guided and kept, saving when he goes to his book.’
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The difference in relations between James and his mother figure, the Countess, and James and the pseudo-father figure, Buchanan, is shown vividly in the earliest surviving letters by the King. To James, the Countess is ‘Lady Minny’, an affectionate Scots word for ‘mother’.

Lady Minny,

This is to show you that I have received your fruit and thanks you therefore, and is ready for mee [more] when ye please to send them, and shal gif [give] as few by me as I may. And I will not trouble you farther till meeting which shall be as shortly as I may, God willing. And so fare ye well as I do, thanks to God.

James R.
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The letter to Buchanan refers to him as ‘pater’ (father) but the letter is in Latin, the sentences formal, the emotions expressed as if by rote.

King James to his most worshipful teacher,

George Buchanan, greeting.

Since, O my father, nothing can be more profitable or more welcome to me than your presence and, on the other hand, nothing can happen more unfortunate or more regrettable than your absence, I beseech you again and again that you will not allow me any longer to lack so great a good or to be distressed by this misfortune. Wherefore please be so good as to do your utmost, as soon as those matters are finished on account of which you set forth, to free yourself therefrom and to hasten to us; and may you come no less safe and sound than you are longed for. Farewell!
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Although Privy Council records the name Buchanan, along with Peter Young, as tutors only in 1570,
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Buchanan was manoeuvring to take this position even before the child-king was crowned. At the 14th Assembly of the Kirk, held at Edinburgh on 20 July 1567, six days before James’s coronation, the ministers subscribed articles agreeing to ‘defend and maintain’ the Prince, and to ‘defend the true religion, and set forward the work of Reformation’. But their agenda reached wider. The education of youth was a top priority. The fourth article urged ‘That none be instructers of youth, publicly or privately, but [except] these that are admitted by the Superintendents and Visitors of Kirks, being found both sound and able’, claiming education within the Kirk’s jurisdiction. The ninth article then stated ‘That wise, godly, and learned men have the charge of the education of the Prince, that coming to majority he may be, by the blessing of God, a comfortable instrument of God, being virtuously educated.’ Interestingly, this Assembly was conducted under Moderator George Buchanan.
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It was not only the Scottish Kirk that was intent on moulding James into a beacon of reformed Christianity, the perfectly educated Christian prince. The eyes of Europe were upon James as a possible successor to the Protestant Elizabeth. In 1580, when the Geneva-based Calvinist Théodore de Bèze [Beza] published
Icones,
a collection of portraits of exemplary Protestant activists, James seemed the natural dedicatee. An icon of the King in profile served as a frontispiece, with James, in armour, carrying a drawn sword in one hand, an olive branch in the other. ‘In vtrunque paratvs’ read the motto under the portrait, signifying that James was ready for war or peace. The dedicatory letter that followed offered a prayer that God would bring to perfection the faculties that James possessed for the good of his own subjects and those of many nations, and made flattering references to the two superlative Scotsmen – friends and correspondents of Beza himself – who served as the royal tutors, ‘Domino Georgio Buchanano’ and ‘Domino Petro Junio’. Among the other Scots whom Beza praised were those who had visited Geneva, John Knox and Andrew Melvill.
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Buchanan possessed very clear ideas on how a prince should behave, and published extensively on the subject. Like John Knox, he promoted the idea that a people could take up arms against a tyrant, or a ruler who didn’t follow the proper religion. Scottish history, he argued, contained a plethora of examples of bad kings who had been so dealt with by the Scottish people. These ideas were most extensively promulgated in his books
De jure regni apud Scotos
(1579) and
Rerum Scoticarum historia
(1582), both of which works were dedicated to his young charge. Among the very worst of princes, he wrote, was James’s mother Mary, who emerges in his writings as a vain, shallow, proud, ignorant, devious, conniving papist whore. This was the vision of Scotland and of his own family with which James was force-fed during his formative years. In accounts of Buchanan’s relations with James, the distaste of the tutor for his student’s family is palpable. On one occasion, James decided that he wanted to have a tame sparrow that belonged to his fellow pupil, the Master of Erskine. When Erskine refused to give it up, the two boys started ‘a struggling’, and in the scuffle the sparrow was killed, setting Erskine crying. When Buchanan discovered what the rumpus was about, he gave the King a box on the ear, and told him, ‘That what he had done, was like a true bird of the bloody nest of which he was come.’
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As this incident indicates, Buchanan did not refrain from demonstrating physically that the King was not above the law. Several anecdotes of James’s education found their way into George Mackenzie’s 1722 life of Buchanan, passed on, he claimed, from the Earl of Cromarty, who heard them from his grandfather, Lord Invertyle, James’s fellow scholar.
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These stories usually involve some physical punishment being doled out by Buchanan to James. Even at the time, Sir James Melville commented that, in his teaching methods, ‘Master George was a stoic philosopher, and looked not far before the hand’;
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and Francis Osborne famously records that, in later life, the King used to say of a high-ranking official with whom he had to deal, ‘that he ever trembled at his approach, it minded him so of his pedagogue’.
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By comparison, Peter Young was ‘gentler and loathe to offend the king at any time’, according to Melville, and allegedly allowed James a whipping boy, the supposed surrogate for the kingly buttocks who absorbed any wrath against their master; but Buchanan clearly didn’t indulge his charge this way.
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Buchanan was, in Melville’s words, ‘a man of notable qualities for his learning and knowledge in Latin poesie, much made accompt of in other countries, pleasant in company, rehearsing at all occasions moralities short and fecfull [forceful], whereof he had abundance, and invented where he wanted [lacked].’ Although ‘of good religion for a poet’, Buchanan in his old age was easily influenced by whoever he was with, which led to him becoming increasingly factious in his writings and conversations, and vengeful to those who offended him.
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Certainly, some of the teaching techniques Buchanan employed with the King were quite cruel. According to one anecdote, published by his own editor Nathan Chytraeus in 1600, Buchanan decided to quash early in life James’s tendency to grant whatever favour was asked of him, often without paying attention to what it was that was being requested. So he went to James holding two books of requests, one of which included a supplication that James might give him permission to be King for a fortnight and have complete control over Scotland. James blithely signed all the requests as usual. Buchanan spent the next two weeks telling everyone that he was King of Scotland, and one day asked James to confirm this. James was amazed. But then Buchanan showed him his signature on the petition. ‘“Well,” he said, “here is the letter signed in your hand in which you have handed the kingdom to me.” And he began to reproach the King, as a tutor reproves his pupil sternly, instructing him that he could not grant whatever was requested without careful deliberation, otherwise considerable damage to him might follow. In future, therefore, he should not grant someone his wish, unless he was fully aware of what was involved, and knew who would be the beneficiary.’
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What is most remarkable about James during these years is the degree to which he attempted to resist Buchanan’s indoctrination – although whether this was due to other influences in his life (perhaps the Countess of Mar?) or to an innate intelligence is impossible to determine. One day, for example, Buchanan set James a theme for study: the history of the so-called Lauder Bridge conspiracy that took place during the reign of James III, when the nobles were conferring secretly in Lauder Kirk about how to remove evil favourites from the King. Archibald, Earl of Angus, told the conspirators the fable of some rats that decided to attack a cat, and elected to tie a bell around its neck so that they would be able to hear it coming. But one old rat raised an objection: which of them was brave enough to put the bell on the cat? Angus proclaimed that he would ‘bell the cat’, in the process earning himself the nickname ‘Bell the Cat’. Buchanan clearly intended the story to demonstrate how a sovereign’s supposedly absolute rule and the sway of his unsuitable favourites can be successfully challenged. But this tale left a different impression on James’s mind. Late one afternoon, James was playing with the Master of Erskine, and making too much noise for his schoolmaster’s taste. Buchanan told the King to ‘hold his peace’. When this proved of no avail, Buchanan told James ‘that if he did not hold his peace, he would whip his breech’. James retorted ‘that we would gladly see who would bell the cat’ – identifying with the cat, James III, and mocking those who would challenge his authority. Buchanan understood that he had a student who would not passively receive all his teaching. ‘In a passion’, he threw down his book and whipped the King ‘severely’, all of which commotion roused the Countess. Hearing her charge cry out, she ran to the King and took him up into her arms, asking what the matter was. James told her that the master had whipped him, and she turned on Buchanan, asking how he dared ‘put his hand on the Lord’s anointed’? Buchanan replied, calmly: ‘Madam, I have whipped his arse, you may kiss it if you please.’ Here we have James’s insistence that he, as King, is beyond Buchanan’s power – who would dare bell the cat? who would dare whip the King? – and the painful realisation that his supposed kingly immunity, in fact, does not exist. It might stand as a metaphor for much of his life as King.

Perhaps realising early that James would be a difficult student, Buchanan sought to protect his own reputation. Dedicating to James a printed edition of one of his early works,
Baptistes,
in November 1576, Buchanan explained that the work strove to provoke youth ‘to the imitation of antiquity and to the study of piety’. It ‘peculiarly’ applied to James, however, ‘because it sets forth lucidly the tortures of tyrants, and even when it seems they flourish most, their miseries’. It was not only profitable for James to understand this but a matter of necessity: ‘so that you may begin to detest mature what you must always flee. Moreover, I want this little book to be a witness to posterity, if ever at any time impelled by evil counsellors or by the license of rule overcoming right education you act otherwise, that must be attributed for a fault not to your teachers but to you, who will not have conformed to their admonishing correctly.’
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In later life, James had some praise for his difficult schoolmaster. Speaking with a group of Scottish academics in 1617, the King berated English scholars for their bizarre pronunciation of Latin. James claimed to owe his superior skills to Buchanan: ‘All the world (said he), knows that my master, Mr George Buchanan, was a great master in that faculty [speaking Latin]. I follow his pronunciation both of the Latin and Greek, and am sorry that my people of England do not the like; for certainly their pronunciation utterly spoils the grace of these two learned languages; but ye see all the University and learned men of Scotland express the true and native pronunciation of both.’
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Buchanan also provided a grounding in Latin verse composition, again in a style different from the English grammar school: the poet and playwright Ben Jonson later said to James that ‘his master G. Buchanan had corrupted his case when young and learned him to sing verses, when he should have read them’.
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Buchanan’s teaching was not wasted on James – but time would show that his main achievement was to provide the King with a philosophy of the proper place of a king against which he could fight.