James VI and I

Collected Essays by Jenny Wormald

Jenny Wormald, Miles Kerr-Peterson

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781910900253
• eBook ISBN: 9781788854795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The renowned historian Jenny Wormald was a ground-breaking expert on early modern Scottish history, especially Stewart kingship, noble power and wider society. She was most controversial in her book-length critique of Mary, Queen of Scots. Unfortunately, Jenny never got round to producing a similar monograph on a monarch she was infinitely more fond of, King James VI and I, before her untimely death in 2015. In the absence of such a book, this volume brings together all the major essays by Jenny on James. She wrote on almost every aspect and every major event of James' reign, from the famous Gunpowder Plot, the Plantation of Ulster, the Gowrie Conspiracy, to the witchcraft panics, as well as James' extensive writings. She wrote extensively on James' Scottish rule, but she was also keenly interested in James as the first king of all of Britain, and many of her essays unpick the issues surrounding the Union of the Crowns and James' rule over all three of his kingdoms. This book is an invaluable resource for any scholar on this crucial time in the history of the British Isles.

PART 1

James’s Biography and Historiography

1

James VI and I (1566–1625)

King of Scotland, England and Ireland

James VI and I (1566–1625), king of Scotland, England and Ireland, was born at Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, the only son of Mary, queen of Scots (1542–1587), and her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley (1545/6–1567).

BAPTISM AND CORONATION

James’s birth occurred three months after the conspiracy which led to the savage murder in Mary’s presence of her Italian favourite David Riccio, which she chose to believe was aimed at her own life, and that of her unborn son. She was wrong about that; no one was stupid enough to endanger the succession. But it produced the final breakdown of her marriage to the witless drunkard Darnley. Although she was careful to proclaim the child’s legitimacy publicly, in the summer and autumn of 1566 she distanced herself further from his father. The last semblance of normality in a deepening political crisis was James’s magnificent baptism in the Chapel Royal of Stirling Castle on 17 December, a brilliant court spectacle which showed that in at least one area of monarchy Mary did have considerable skill; but even this was marred by Darnley’s highly embarrassing refusal to attend, despite being resident in the castle. Apparently when James was one day old the general assembly of the kirk had sent John Spottiswoode, superintendent of Lothian, to congratulate the queen on the birth and request a protestant baptism for the infant. Given James to hold, Spottiswoode had prayed over him, and asked him to say ‘amen’; some kind of gurgling sound from the tactful child seems to have satisfied the godly minister. However, James was baptized a Catholic, with the names Charles James – the first name after his godfather Charles IX, king of France, the second the traditional name of Stewart kings. It showed the greater importance his mother attached to the French than the Scottish monarchy, as did her adoption of the Frenchified version of the family name, Stuart. No one, it appears, agreed with her; it was by the Scottish name James that he was always called.

After the baptism there was no normality. On 14 January 1567 the queen removed herself and her son from Stirling, considered too close to territory dominated by the affinity of James’s ambitious grandfather, Matthew Stewart, thirteenth, or fourth earl of Lennox, to the relative safety of the palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh. The ailing Darnley, persuaded to leave his father’s protection, was also brought to the outskirts of the city, but was murdered at Kirk o’Field on the night of 9–10 February. In March James was taken back to Stirling under the care of his governor, John Erskine, earl of Mar; one last meeting with his mother took place there on 21 April. On 15 May she made her fatal remarriage to the man widely believed to have murdered Darnley, James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, an act which temporarily united the political nation against her. Having surrendered to confederate lords (including Mar) on 15 June, Mary was incarcerated at Lochleven Castle on the 16th. Under duress and prostrated by a miscarriage, she signed a deed of abdication on 24 July, whereupon James became king. He was crowned as a protestant, still only thirteen months old, on 29 July at Stirling parish church.

THE MINORITY, 1567–C.1584

Although the circumstances of James’s accession were unusual in Scotland, the youthfulness of the new king was not. Every monarch since 1406 had come to the throne as a minor. James VI was the third successive monarch to have acceded in infancy: his grandfather James V had been eighteen months old when he became king in 1513; his mother Mary only a week old in 1542. The Stewart kings had a lamentable habit of dying young; the political nation had to cope with the consequences, and cope remarkably well it had done. During minorities the magnates had controlled the affairs of the kingdom. An absence of any aggressive or militant foreign policy meant that war was rare and thus that the Scottish crown did not bear down heavily on its subjects with endless demands for men and money. Hence political tensions were fewer, and at the beginning of James VI’s reign the Scottish localities remained autonomous, to what was by then a highly unusual degree. Ties of kinship were still fundamental, written bonds of lordship and allegiance continued to be made, and the blood feud as a force for local stability and the resolution of crime, as well as in its more literally bloody form, was still alive and flourishing.

Previous monarchs had inherited on the death of a king, but Mary remained alive to cause trouble and present a grievous political problem for a further twenty years. This was compounded by the immense problem of religious reformation, new in the minority of Mary but still evolving in that of her son. A nobility, itself divided over religion, had to find a solution to religious crisis, and following the success of the protestant party in 1559–60, increasingly had to do so in the context of a confusion of traditional foreign policy. Many of the Scottish élite became less interested in ties to the ‘auld allie’, France, as the cornerstone of that policy and began to develop at least a veneer of friendship with the ‘auld inemie’, England.

In his early years James was very much a background figure, secure in his nursery and schoolroom. The choice of his principal tutor, appointed when he was four, was obvious: George Buchanan, noted European humanist, exponent of resistance theory, and slanderer of his mother, to which attributes could be added a fair degree of sadism; beating ‘the Lord’s Anointed’ was not just a matter of discipline but of satisfaction. At the end of his life the king still had nightmares about Buchanan, although by that time, with Buchanan long dead, he could also express pride in having a tutor of great academic distinction, as he did when complimented by an English courtier on his pronunciation of Latin and Greek. But his tuition was leavened by the presence of his other tutor, the much gentler Peter Young, who later accompanied James to England, and whose son Patrick Young, a leading Greek scholar, became keeper of the king’s library. By 1583 James already had a substantial library, based partly on the remnants of Mary’s, and partly on the books his tutors bought for him (though Buchanan was apparently too mean to contribute free copies of his own works); it was heavily classical, but also included history, political theory, theology, languages, geography, mathematics – and also, for lighter reading and for sport, romances, bows and arrows, golf clubs, and hunting gloves. Not quite, then, all work and no play, although James’s daily educational routine was formidable, producing his famous remark that ‘they gar me speik Latin ar I could speik Scotis’.¹ It was an ordered existence, which despite all its harshness inculcated a love of learning which marked him out in later life as a phenomenon who went well beyond the norm of highly educated early modern kings. His passion for scholarship was utterly natural and deep-rooted.

That ordered existence was in stark contrast to the lack of order in the world outside. The united front against Mary in summer 1567 had dissolved by the end of the year. She escaped from Lochleven in May 1568; but her defeat by her half-brother James Stewart, earl of Moray, at Langside and her lunatic flight to England, which she apparently believed would inspire Elizabeth to restore her to her Scottish throne, left her supporters leaderless. Moray had become regent in 1567; and initially both sides appealed to Elizabeth, in two conferences, at York and Westminster in 1568–9. The astonishing outcome was that although Moray, with great reluctance, produced the casket letters – those letters written, or alleged to have been written, by Mary to Bothwell, making clear her involvement in the Darnley murder – Elizabeth pronounced that nothing had been proved prejudicial to Mary’s honour. But it was Moray who went back to Scotland, with £5000 of English money. It was no doubt a realistic assessment of the Scottish political situation, even if it meant Elizabeth paying for her own ambiguity. Moray himself was assassinated in January 1570, and Scotland lurched into a slogging and low-key civil war which dragged on until 1573, when Edinburgh Castle finally fell to the king’s party. By then two more of James’s regents, his grandfather the earl of Lennox (elected in July 1570) and John Erskine, earl of Mar (elected in September 1571), were dead – Lennox, like Moray, by violence; the fourth regent, James Douglas, fourth earl of Morton, came to office in November 1572.

The 1570s saw rather more political stability, and a switch away from the problem of Mary to the growing division between those who favoured an episcopal reformed church and those who, led by Andrew Melville, utterly rejected any notion of royal supremacy and episcopacy, which was to live on as the major political as well as religious issue of the 1580s and 1590s. Melville himself returned from Geneva in 1574 primarily as an educational reformer, transforming the three universities. But an educational fighter can equally be a religious fighter, and that was what, by 1578, Melville had become, picking up on the strongly anti-Erastian stance of John Knox and his fellow reformers of the 1560s, and going beyond them with his championing of presbyterianism. The struggle was in its infancy under the pro-English Morton, but it was there. Morton himself lost the regency in March 1578, in a messy coup d’état led by Colin Campbell, sixth earl of Argyll, and John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl, with the king as its figurehead, although not in his own estimation; for James, three months short of his twelfth birthday, cheerfully announced his capacity to rule, and followed this up with a spectacular entry into Edinburgh in 1579, in which God and Bacchus both featured prominently, as they would throughout King James’s life. It was in September this year that his cousin Esmé Stuart came over from France, to become the king’s first ‘favourite’. Elevated to the earldom of Lennox (the existing holder of the title, Robert Stewart, bishop of Caithness, having yielded to royal pressure to resign it) in 1580 and then raised to a dukedom in 1581, Lennox was loathed as a pro-French Catholic who enjoyed all too much of the king’s favour.

Much has been made of James as the lonely teenager desperate for affection, and no doubt this played a part. But what we are seeing here is the start of a pattern which was repeated in the case of James’s other three great favourites: George Gordon, earl of Huntly; and, in England, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. James had asserted his kingship, not his loneliness; his authority, not his dependence. Lennox, like his successors, appeared on the scene and demonstrated his usefulness, in this case in the factional struggles surrounding the king, notably in his part in Morton’s final downfall. Young though James still was, there were those who were already becoming worryingly aware that the Scottish king might well be an unpredictable force to be reckoned with. In 1578 Elizabeth had had her first unpalatable taste of James’s refusal to be browbeaten by the middle-aged and experienced monarch. His response to her furious support of Morton was a letter fulsome in its phraseology, and determined in its refusal to do what she wished. He did promise the queen that the former regent would not be executed, but he did nothing to prevent that eventuality when it occurred in June 1581. It was not Lennox’s supposed dominance which provoked Elizabeth’s impassioned outburst against ‘that false Scots urchin’ and his double-dealing,² nor the comments of her ambassadors Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and Thomas Randolph about his perspicacity, fair speeches, and talent for dissimulation, ‘wherein he is in his tender years more practised than others forty years older than he’.³ No wonder. Earlier that year Mary, queen of Scots, had once more made a bid for a return to the political limelight with her proposal for an association where she should rule Scotland as joint monarch with James. Nothing would have suited Elizabeth more than to have the scandalous and discredited queen out of England with the additional advantage of re-creating political instability in Scotland that the proposal for divided sovereignty seemed to promise. James, by contrast, saw no need for guidance from his surrogate mother of England or his real mother of Scotland; he made some personal statements of affection, and stopped decisively there. He interviewed secretly some of the Spanish agents intriguing on Mary’s behalf but gave neither help nor encouragement.

There was one final desperate effort to contain James’s burgeoning assertion of kingship with the Ruthven raid of 1582. On 28 August a group of hardline presbyterian nobles under William Ruthven, first earl of Gowrie, kidnapped the king and placed him under house arrest in Ruthven Castle. Lennox fled to France, where he died the following May, and for ten months power was exercised by the ‘raiders’, with the approval of Elizabeth and support from the city of Edinburgh and the general assembly of the kirk. But in June 1583 James escaped and declared his i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Foreword Diarmaid MacCulloch
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Miles Kerr-Peterson
• Part 1: James’s Biography and Historiography
• Part 2: James’s Rule of Scotland before the Union of the Crowns
• Part 3: James the Writer and Philosopher
• Part 4: Making of the Union of the Crowns in 1603
• Part 5: James’s Rule of Scotland after the Union of the Crowns
• Part 6: James as Ruler of Three Kingdoms
• Epilogue: ‘Tis True I am a Cradle King’: The View from the Throne
• Appendices
• Bibliographical Notes and Further Reading
• Index
• Picture Sections