James I

Scotland's King of England

John Matusiak

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750986830, 9780750955621
• eBook ISBN: 9780750966719
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Few kings have been more savagely caricatured or grossly misunderstood than England's first Stuart. Yet, as this biography demonstrates, the modern tendency to downplay his defects and minimise the long-term consequences of his reign has gone too far.

In spite of genuine idealism and flashes of considerable resourcefulness, James I remains a perplexing figure – a uniquely curious ruler, shot through with glaring inconsistencies. His vices and foibles not only undermined his high hopes for healing and renewal after Elizabeth I's troubled last years, but also entrenched political and religious tensions that eventually consumed his successor. A flawed, if well-meaning, foreigner in a rapidly changing and divided kingdom, his passionate commitment to time-honoured principles of government would, ironically, prove his undoing, as England edged unconsciously towards a crossroads and the shadow of the Thirty Years War descended upon Europe.

1

Heir to Scotland’s Woe

No more tears now. I will think upon revenge.

Words attributed to Mary Queen of Scots by Claude Nau de la Boiselliere, her confidential secretary from 1575–86

In the mid-morning of 19 June 1566, Mary Queen of Scots was gratefully delivered of her first and only live-born child in a tiny closet tightly lodged in the south-east wing of Edinburgh’s ancient castle. Her labour had, it seems, been long and arduous, and ten days earlier, plainly fearing the worst, she had written her will. At that time, too, she had sent to Dunfermline Abbey for a sacred reliquary containing the skull of St Margaret, set in silver-gilt and ‘enriched with several pearls and precious stones’, which she intended to sustain her throughout the ordeal to come. Accordingly, as Mary endured the torment within her chamber’s sombre panelled walls, the remains of the saint – a Catholic queen of Scotland like herself – duly loomed above her, along with the arms of the House of Stuart and a series of embossed crowns and thistles adorning the ceiling overhead. Beside her all the while stood Margaret Asteane, her midwife, specially garbed for the occasion in a brand new gown of black velvet, not far from the royal cradle, which was likewise draped in finest fabric.

By 11 a.m., however, the midwife’s task was ended. For the queen was ‘lighter of a bonny son’ whom, she promptly predicted, ‘shall first unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England’. The boy had entered the world, like Napoleon after him, with a fine ‘caul’, or birth membrane, covering his head – an augury, it was said, of future greatness – and his mother’s lofty hopes seemed far from fanciful, since her royal cousin across the Border was, of her own admission, ‘but a barren stock’. If, therefore, Elizabeth I should now die childless, or if any plot against her life were to run its fatal course, Scotland’s queen was not only the obvious female successor in her own right, but, much more importantly still, the bearer of a healthy male heir. And the blood of Mary’s son, directly drawn from Henry VII through both his parents, was of plainly purer stock than any other rival.

All, then, was swiftly set for outward rejoicing throughout the northern kingdom, though not before Mary’s secret messenger, Sir James Melville, was safely past the Border at Berwick on route hotfoot to London. Thereafter, nobles, officers of state and common folk alike gave solemn thanks in Edinburgh’s Great Kirk, as the castle’s mighty guns – long a stirring symbol of national pride – boomed their glad approval. Deputations and messages of goodwill arrived from far and wide, further couriers were dispatched to France and Savoy, and loyal toasts were heartily raised to Scotland’s fledgling ‘Solomon’. Later that night, 500 bonfires would blaze on Scottish hillsides, as all the due and proper customs associated with any royal birth were studiously observed.

But the mask and show of celebration was mainly sham, since Mary Queen of Scots was also Scotland’s woe. It was not for nothing that she had shunned the comfort of Holyroodhouse as her birthing place and made instead for Edinburgh and the security it afforded. Nor were all the salutations she now received by any means sincere. Indeed, for most of the vested interests in her restless kingdom, the newborn child represented little more than a fresh and unwelcome complication of a political and religious situation already critically dangerous. Powerful sections of the nobility had hoped, for their own self-interested motives, that he might never be born, and the stilted congratulations of John Spottiswoode, the Lothian superintendent of the Protestant Kirk of Scotland’s General Assembly, could not conceal his misgivings that the new heir would inevitably be baptised a Roman Catholic, with all that this entailed for the reformed religion that had made such rapid strides since its apparent triumph only six years earlier. Even the child’s father, Henry, Lord Darnley, had already done his feckless yet malignant best to prevent the birth of the son who shattered his best chance of seizing the throne for himself.

It was Darnley, moreover, who had sedulously propagated the rumour that his wife’s new son was merely the bastard offspring of David Riccio, her Italian secretary and musician, whom he had helped to murder in her very presence just four months previous. Jaundiced, jealous, vain and volatile – resembling ‘more a woman than a man’ and stricken by inner demons of his own devising, which he could neither tame by infidelity nor dowse with drink – the queen’s husband was now a pox-ridden parody of the dashing blonde-haired lover who had first dazzled his bride only two years earlier ‘as the properest and best proportioned long man that she had ever seen’. Both Mary and Darnley knew, furthermore, that she too had been ‘struck with great dread’ and in ‘extreme fear’ for her life when Riccio met his end, even though, within hours of the new birth, the queen’s abject husband was once again reminding his wife of her subsequent promise to ‘forgive and forget all’.

But while the queen might dutifully forgive, forgetting was another matter. ‘What if Fawsdonsyd’s pistol had shot?’ she had asked her husband, recalling that fateful night when a gun, which had allegedly ‘refused to give fyr’, had been pressed to her own breast by one of Darnley’s accomplices. ‘What wold have become of him [the child] and me both?’ Nor could she ever entirely quash those spiteful rumours propagated by her husband that would continue to shadow her son’s legitimacy. It was vital to Mary, of course, that Darnley should swiftly undo as much of the harm he had already wrought with his loose and ill-intentioned tongue, and he was soon compelled to acknowledge the child in the presence of the queen’s half-brother, the Earl of Moray, as well as the earls of Mar, Atholl and Argyll, and her Privy Council. Yet the queen’s caustic quip to her husband that ‘he is so much your son that I fear for him hereafter’ would never entirely convince the world at large or spare her heir the barbs of ne’er-do-wells in years to come. As a child, indeed, the boy would weep in mortification at the slander, and the occasional taunts of the Scottish mob did nothing to ease his misery. ‘Come down, thou son of Seigneur Davy’, a baying Perth rabble would jeer in 1600 as he stood at the window of Ruthven House, and much later still, the King of France would chuckle at the boy who had by then become both James VI of Scotland and James I of England, dismissing his fellow ruler as ‘Solomon the son of David who played upon the harp’. There were even creeping whispers that Mary’s child had died at birth, to be replaced by a child of John Erskine, Earl of Mar – empty legends which were nonetheless given a further lease of life in the eighteenth century when the skeleton of a newborn child, ‘wrapped in a rich silken cloth … belonging to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots’, was uncovered in a wall of Edinburgh Castle’s banqueting hall next to the castle courtyard.

Yet, aside from hurtful jibes and murky tales, there was never serious doubt about the legitimacy of the child who presently occupied the royal cradle. At the time of his conception, after all, the boy’s mother was still wildly infatuated with her lawful husband – so much so, indeed, that she appeared to have sacrificed all judgement on his behalf. ‘The queen,’ wrote the English diplomat Thomas Randolph, ‘is so altered with affection towards Lord Darnley that she has brought her honour in question, her estate in hazard, her country to be torn in pieces.’ And the child’s resemblance to his father in an early portrait depicting him with a sparrowhawk on his arm remains striking. His flaxen hair, finely contoured features and, above all, his distinctive widely spaced eyes left little doubt about his parentage. Nor, in any case, was Darnley, for all his twisted bitterness, the new heir’s greatest liability. Instead, it was the very mother who had borne him, for though she was bold, courageous and gracious, with a charm and allure that still captivates across the centuries, she was also headstrong, careless and ambitious – a passionate, high-spirited and ultimately self-centred creature who yearned for adulation but could neither bridle her emotions nor curb her whims. It was she, above all, who barred the way to long-term peace within her realm and she too, who, in spite of initial successes, menaced the fortunes and security of her longed-for son.

Sent away to France in 1548 at the age of 6, after a planned betrothal to young King Edward VI of England finally proved intolerable to her countrymen, Mary had spent nearly the whole of her life abroad. In her absence, English bullying would increase Scotland’s traditional reliance on the French Crown, as the Queen Mother, Mary of Guise, herself a Frenchwoman and staunch Catholic, served as regent, holding Scotland somewhat precariously to the old religion and alliance with her homeland until her death in 1560. As part of this alliance, the absent queen had been betrothed and finally married to the dauphin, and from 1559 to 1560, the absorption of the Scottish Crown, which had eluded the English, consequently became a reality for their enemies across the Channel. By 1560, moreover, Mary Queen of Scots was not only Queen Consort of France, but rightful Queen of England in the eyes of every loyal Catholic in Europe by virtue of her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, elder sister of Henry VIII.

But the early death of her husband, Francis II, and the animosity of her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, confirmed the fickleness of Mary’s fortunes as a 19-year-old widow and drove her back to Scotland in 1561 after an absence of thirteen years, which had seen the overthrow of the Roman Catholic Church and growing division at the very heart of the Scottish political nation. For reasons of policy and for the sake of a more secure future she now moderated her direct claim to the English throne, in the hope that Elizabeth might recognise her as heiress without duress. And she remained uncommitted, likewise, to any specific party or policy in Scotland when she landed at Leith on 19 August 1561, to reclaim her realm. Indeed, Mary had announced in advance to the Scottish Parliament, the so-called ‘Estates’, that its members were free to establish whatever religious settlement they chose, though her own faith was to remain non-negotiable. She, personally, would adhere to the Church of Rome come what may – and hope, in doing so, to straddle the coming storm unruffled.

In this, however, Mary had not counted upon the influence and bitter hostility of John Knox, the most formidable of all the Calvinist missionaries from Geneva, whom Queen Elizabeth had just transferred from England under safe conduct with the deliberate intention of undermining the Catholic ‘party’ among the Scottish nobility. A thundering Scots Elijah, who had served as a French galley slave in payment for his Protestant faith, Knox now called upon his countrymen to forsake the false prophets of Baal and, in doing so, declared a single Catholic Mass more awful than the landing of 10,000 foes. Nor, above all, would he spare the sensibilities of Scotland’s newly arrived ruler. On the contrary, he would blast her as an idolatrous Jezebel and bewail her very coming. Upon her return, which was marked by a curiously ill-omened mist lasting some five days, ‘the very face of heaven’, wrote Knox, ‘… did manifestly speak what comfort was brought into this country with her: to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety.’ And sure enough, on the very first Sunday after Mary’s landing, a riotous demonstration broke out at Holyrood when Mass was said within the royal chapel for the queen and her predominantly French household.

Yet, for the first four years of her reign, it seemed that Mary might prevail. Though she was no stateswoman and her intelligence was often at the mercy of her passions, she was nevertheless dogged and determined and could often more than hold her own in the tangled world of shifting alliances and affrays that were such a notable feature of Scottish politics. And though there were restive murmurings among ‘the godly’, her secretary, William Maitland of Lethington, himself a Protestant, was able to argue convincingly that she might well be brought round to ‘sweet reasonableness’. Not least of all, there were early signs of common sense and tolerance. Other members of her council, for instance, were also staunchly Protestant and she was prepared, to her credit, to countenance the funding of the reformed church. Moreover, on the occasion of her arrival in Edinburgh, she not only accepted the gift of a vernacular bible and prayer book, but witnessed the burning of a priestly effigy unmoved. Accordingly, a calmer atmosphere soon descended. As one ardent Protestant declared, ‘At first I heard men say, “Let us hang the priest”, but after that they had been twice or thrice in the Abbey [of Holyrood, at the Queen’s Court], all that fervency was past. I think there be some enchantment whereby men are bewitched.’ And that enchantment was undoubtedly the queen herself.

Nor was Mary’s early success confined to religious affairs, for, in spite of the undoubted glamour of her court, she avoided taxation and largely paid for the regular cost of her household from the income of her French lands. She was visible, too, covering a distance of some 1,200 miles in various progresses across her realm from August 1562 to September 1563: something which demonstrated not only her vitality but also her determination to unite the nobility, the mainstay of her government. Until the very end of her reign, indeed, the backbone of her noble support, for whom John Knox remained a largely marginal figure, would hold steady. And though she was a female, she gained considerable authority from her status as both dowager Queen of France and prospective heir to the throne of England. Almost as important, she was an adult after a prolonged and troubled period of Scottish history in which the throne had been bedevilled by minority government. If, therefore, she married prudently, gained loyal and competent counsel from the men on whom she now relied, and duly circumvented the intrigues of her wily royal cousin south of the Border, the prospects were far from bleak. But her head was proud, her spirit restless and ambition welled within her. The result was the crowning disaster of her marriage to her first cousin, Henry, Lord Darnley.

The son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, whose family was closely related to the Scottish royal line, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage, Darnley appeared an ideal candidate for Mary’s hand in terms of his lineage, boasting a direct claim to the throne of England in his own right. Furthermore, though a Catholic by upbringing, he had toyed with Protestantism and was not associated initially with any dangerous cause either at home or abroad. But, although he was ‘accomplished in all courtly exercises’ and a gifted lutenist who penned elegant Scottish verses, he was also stupid and treacherous – ‘a man of insolent temper’ who swiftly alienated most of his potential allies in Scotland, though not, it seems, the queen, who had soon fallen madly in love with the ‘fayre, yollye yonge man’ and married him on 24 July 1564. Accordingly, when Mary chose the day before the wedding to declare her husband ‘King of Scots’ – a title which she could not legitimately bestow without the consent of the Scottish Estates – her proclamation was received in stony silence at Mercat Cross by all save the bridegroom’s father who offered up a sturdy cry of ‘God save his Grace!’

Thereafter, the elements of the final tragedy, which created such an unfavourable start to the life of the future James I, unfolded with a remorseless momentum. Within three weeks of her marriage, Mary’s scheming half-brother, the bastard Earl of Moray, whose considerable influence had been threatened by the queen’s marriage, came out in open rebellion in the name of the Protestant Kirk, backed by £3,000 from England’s Queen Elizabeth. And though he was eventually defeated and driven into exile south of the Border after a chaotic engagement known as the ‘Chaseabout Raid’, in which a pistol-toting Mary rode in armour and plated cap, ‘ever with the foremost’ of her troops until ‘the most part waxed weary’, the price was heavy. For the Queen of Scotland was now placed in a position of open hostility to both Scottish Protestants and her English cousin. Edinburgh, it is true, had ignored Knox’s fervent appeals and remained loyal when Moray entered the city in August, but Mary had survived rather than solved her underlying problems, and both her husband’s and her own indiscretions would multiply uncontrollably with the mutual antipathy that now exploded between them.

‘No woman of spirit’, wrote Sir James Melville, ‘would make choice of such a man’, and whether it was she who first spurned Darnley or he who rejected her remains unknown. But what began as an overwhelming infatuation on Mary’s part degenerated within six months into outright and irremediable repulsion, as Darnley cavorted with loose women and, on occasion, behaved with great brutality towards his wife. Refusing absolutely to grant him the Crown Matrimonial, which would have allowed him to rule co-equally and keep the throne in the event of her death, Mary turned increasingly for counsel and consolation to her ‘evil-favoured’ Italian minion, ‘a man of no beauty or shape’, and the altogether more dangerous James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. While Riccio – ‘that great abuser of the commonwealth, that poltroon and vile knave Davie’, as Knox graciously dubbed him – flaunted the queen’s good offices more and more injudiciously; he courted, of course, the kind of mortal disaster which duly befell him on the night of 9 March 1566. Dragged from the queen’s apartments while at supper with her at Holyroodhouse, the helpless secretary was stabbed some fifty-six times within earshot of his horrified mistress. The men responsible included Darnley himself and a motley crew of disgruntled Protestant lords, which numbered the Earl of Morton and his Douglas cronies, the old and dying Lord Ruthven and the exiled Moray, who had been loitering darkly in Newcastle with his fellow rebels awaiting the first available opportunity to conjure trouble.

Whether the intention was also to kill the queen herself or at least encourage her to miscarry from the trauma involved remains uncertain, though some accounts suggest as much. Certainly, Mary appeared to be in danger of miscarrying soon afterwards and the whole event may well have prompted what appears to have been her mental collapse the following year. But if her child was nearly lost and her judgement was to disintegrate catastrophically not long afterwards, for the time being she would show remarkable resources of inner strength and resourcefulness. With the power of Huntly in the Highlands and of Bothwell on the Borders still intact, she could, after all, fight back with every chance of victory and before the bloody night was done her cringing husband, whose very own blade had been left in Riccio’s shredded corpse, became so terrified by the possible consequences of his actions that he swiftly deserted his fellow assassins and agreed to take her the 25 miles to the safety of Bothwell’s castle at Dunbar. ‘Come on! In God’s name,’ Darnley urged along the way. ‘By God’s blood, they will murder both you and me if they can catch us … If this baby dies, we can have more.’ And when Mary’s double-dealing brother, Moray, rode in prudently late next morning, he too was graciously detached from an ill-conceived plot that had so clearly failed to achieve its purposes. A pardon and a cynical guarantee of reinstatement were all that was required.

So there had occurred, even before he was born, the first mortal threat to the future James I of England. Within a week, however, his mother was back in her capital and apparently secure. Already Riccio’s murderers were scattered in hiding or in exile and the queen’s outward reconciliation with both her husband and Moray was complete. Moreover, for the six months that elapsed from baby James’s birth to his christening at Stirling, the surface calm remained intact. Much, if not all, depended upon the child’s security, of course, for if he should fall into the hands of the queen’s enemies, the pretence of protecting the child would lend a sheen of respectability to any would-be rebel. With this in mind, therefore, James was duly whisked into the guardianship of the Earl of Mar at Stirling Castle when two months old and would remain there for the next twelve years. Mar’s family had, in fact, been frequently trusted with similar charges in the past and could claim with some justification to be the hereditary guardians of Scotland’s infant royalty, though in this case the boy was largely entrusted to the less than capable hands of a wet nurse named Helena Little. While his father detested him and his mother fought for her political life, Lady Mar, it is true, exercised a genuine, if superficial, tenderness for the child. But Little would remain both everyday overseer of his welfare and a drinker, too, it seems, who is sometimes alleged to have either dropped the prince or neglected an attack of rickets which left him with weakened legs – his right foot ‘permanently turned out’ – and a shambling, much-mocked walk for the rest of his life.

Yet, at the time of his birth, James’s health and appearance left nothing to be desired. Sir Henry Killigrew, the new English ambassador, saw the infant when he was only five days old, and described him as ‘a very goodly child’. First, he watched him ‘sucking of his nurse’ and afterwards saw him ‘as good as naked … his head, feet and hands, all to my judgement well proportioned and like to prove a goodly prince’. The new heir could, moreover, even charm his mother’s religious rivals, for on the day following his birth, John Spottiswoode was given the privilege by Mary of holding the child, whereupon he fell to his knees, utterly disarmed, and proceeded to play with him, attempting to teach the infant to utter the word ‘Amen’.

And while Spottiswoode’s request for a Protestant christening was met with resolute silence, there was nothing coy or even remotely restrained about the ceremony that did eventually follow. The child, after all, was of critical national importance and the lingering slur upon his legitimacy made it doubly necessary that his baptism at Stirling Castle, in December 1566, should be suitably splendid. For the few days involved, therefore, and in spite of the fearful strain upon the Crown’s meagre resources, the Scottish court would give free vent to its mistress’s extravagance and rival the standards of its French counterpart. Though the child’s godparents – the King of France, the Queen of England and the Duke of Savoy – were unable to appear in person, the embassies and gifts they sent with their proxies were nevertheles...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• 1 Heir to Scotland’s Woe
• 2 King and Pawn
• 3 Love and Liberation
• 4 Lessons in Life and Kingcraft
• 5 The Headsman and The King of Spain
• 6 ‘Cupide Blinde’ and Wyches’ Waies
• 7 The Wrath of Earls and Kirk
• 8 ‘King and Sovereign Lord’ of Scotland
• 9 Towards the ‘Land of Promise’
• 10 Scotland’s King of England
• 11 The King, His Beagles, His Countrymen and His Court
• 12 Religion, Peace and Lucifer
• 13 Parliament, Union, Gunpowder
• 14 Finance, Favouritism and Foul Play
• 15 Favourite of Favourites
• 16 Faraway Realms
• 17 ‘Baby Charles’ and ‘Steenie’
• 18 Dotage, Docility and Demise
• 19 Ruler of Three Kingdoms
• Source Notes and Bibliographical Information
• Plates
• Copyright