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His effigy remains as a symbol of his dual nature. As his teenage body rotted in its coffin, his icon was supposed to live for ever. The eager ravages the effigy suffered reflect how well Henry had grown into his public role. By 1612, his court was recognised as an important power bloc at home and abroad. For me, he is the greatest Prince of Wales we ever had.
A recent straw poll shows how far Henry has dropped out of the national memory. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery in London staged an exhibition devoted to him. It introduced what one reviewer after another called this ‘forgotten prince’ to a wider audience. The faceless anonymity of his effigy now symbolises his disappearance. Many people do not realise his brother Charles was never born to be king – nor how bright a star Henry rose to be in the Jacobean and European firmament. This biography is driven by a passionate desire to change that.
As I set out on my researches, Westminster Abbey began work to create new galleries to house its unique collection of effigies, including what remains of Henry’s. This book is my contribution to the restoration of Henry, Prince of Wales – from forlorn worm-eaten object in a backroom, to an iconic, colourful character standing tall in his time and place, on the stage of British history.
PART ONE
Scotland (#ulink_d744b62c-4c64-5e62-8120-bc3662bea605)
1594–1603
ONE
Birth, Parents, Crisis (#ulink_c67edc0c-0f0d-5f56-9b2c-7a22339fd519)
‘A SON OF GOODLY HABILITY AND EXPECTATION’
Dawn, Tuesday, 19 February 1594. The herald left his fire, shivered up the stone steps and strode out onto the walls of Stirling Castle to announce the great news. For four years Scotland had waited for a child, a male heir, to secure the throne. At last the king ‘was blessed with a son of goodly hability and expectation’. Prince Henry Frederick Stuart’s birth gave ‘great comfort and matter of joy to the whole people’. The entire day cannonades ricocheted across the country. Scots of all ranks danced in the light of huge bonfires, as ‘if the people had been daft for mirth’.
The proud father, James VI, despatched messengers to his fellow princes of Christendom, the first sent galloping south to London. Henry was James’s gift to his childless cousin, the ageing, putative virgin queen, Elizabeth Tudor of England. The gift he expected in return was nothing less than her thrones and dominions. A prince had been born to embody the kingdoms united for the first time in history. If Elizabeth would name James VI of Scotland and the future King Henry IX her heirs, the boy could secure England’s as well as Scotland’s future.
Throughout the celebrations, Henry’s mother, Anne of Denmark,* (#ulink_80d50f85-1830-5754-8935-0cb992e13582) had remained lodged in the birthing chamber at Stirling Castle.
Landing at Leith four years earlier, fifteen-year-old Anne had made a sensational entrance: pale-skinned, reddish blonde hair, notably attractive, she rode through Edinburgh, her new husband at her side showing off his queen. Behind them the king’s oldest friends, the Mars of Stirling Castle, followed stony-faced. From the side of the highway, a flock of black-clad ministers of the Scottish Calvinist kirk eyed the daughter of Denmark – her ‘peach and parrot-coloured damask’ dress, her ‘fishboned skirts lined with wreaths of pillows round the hips’; their gaze travelling across her liveried servants, horses and silver coach – and shuddered.
In England these hard-liners – or ‘purer’ Protestants, as they saw themselves – were derided as ‘Puritans’. They called themselves the godly. Soon enough, Christian duty would compel them to open their pursed lips to censure Queen Anne and her circle for their erratic attendance at interminable sermons on sin and corruption. God made them denounce the young queen’s ‘lack of devotion to the Word and Sacrements’, and love of ‘waking and balling’ – staying up late to dance and gamble. She filled her evenings with music and elaborate court entertainments. One radical Calvinist griped that all royals were ‘the devil’s bairns’, so what could you expect? (James responded by exiling him.) The idea of Anne as utterly frivolous would prove remarkably enduring.
Anne knew herself more than equal to them. Her brother, Christian IV, ruled Denmark – the Jutland Peninsula and the islands around it. His influence extended over Norway and east across what is modern-day Sweden, Gotland and the Baltic island of Bornholm. He also ruled Iceland and Greenland. To the south, Denmark controlled the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Holstein lay within the borders of the Habsburg-dominated Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. So, one branch of the house of Oldenburg, Anne’s family, were also imperial princes, owing allegiance to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. This involved the Danes in German and imperial affairs. Off the north coast of Scotland itself, Denmark claimed the Orkneys and owned the Faroe Islands.
Anne grew up a royal princess of one of the largest Protestant political entities in Europe. Her grandfather, Christian III, converted Denmark to Lutheranism in 1536, but Denmark declined to adopt the ‘purer’ form of Protestantism – the Calvinism that Scotland came to profess under John Knox. Anne’s former suitor, Prince Maurice of Nassau, withdrew his offer on hearing that she would not convert to Calvinism in order to marry him.
Denmark’s location gave it control of the sea lanes connecting the Atlantic to the Baltic. The tolls it charged shipping to pass through the Danish Sound and trade with the Hanseatic ports, made its monarchy wealthy. When Christian IV finished modernising it, Denmark boasted ‘the largest and most efficient naval force in northern Europe’. His new nephew, Prince Henry, would grow up to cherish an equal passion for his navy.
The Danes spent as befitted Renaissance Protestant princes. Their riches and power financed cultural activity that put them at the forefront of the Renaissance. Christian’s huge architectural projects changed the face of Copenhagen, making it one of the loveliest cities in Europe. Anne and Christian’s mother, Sophie of Mecklenburg, maintained Tycho Brahe, the first astronomer in Europe to win international fame. Scholars flocked from across the Continent to meet him. Visitors to Brahe’s island home included James VI when he came to collect Anne, his betrothed, in October 1589. James passed with amazement and delight through rooms full of books, maps and spheres to help man uncover the laws of nature by which God moved the heavens. Laboratories bubbled and steamed with alchemical scientific experiments. Brahe set on his own printing press his groundbreaking book on astronomy, the foundation text for Kepler and Galileo.
Buildings and gardens, statuary and art works, developments in all branches of science, new political theory and historical awareness, were all part of that international lingua franca of the Renaissance. It was a language Anne grew up speaking as a native and passed on to all her children. Anne of Denmark was, in every way, a brilliant match for James VI of Scotland. A princess raised in this milieu; a woman who was bilingual in Danish and German; who had enough French to be able to write and converse with her new husband (who had no German); who then quickly learned Scots to a high level of idiomatic ease; who enjoyed and patronised a broad range of cultural activity, was unlikely to be the empty-headed fool of hard-line Calvinist censure.
In addition, the Scottish court soon discovered their queen possessed a strong will. Shortly after she arrived in Scotland in 1590, Anne dismissed James’s most important female attendant from her service, sixty-five-year-old Lady Annabella Murray, Dowager Countess of Mar. The king’s love and respect for ‘Lady Minnie’ ran deep. The Mars were hereditary keepers of Stirling Castle and, by tradition, the guardians of Scottish monarchs. King James had been fostered out to them when he was an infant and Lady Minnie was the only mother he knew. The king grew up with her son, Master John Erskine, whom he nicknamed Jocky o’ Sclaittis (Slates), in fond recollection of schooldays spent together.
Anne, though, discovered Lady Minnie gossiping with her friend, the wife of the Scottish chancellor: the devout old dowager regretted too loud that James had not married the more suitable Catherine, sister of French Huguenot leader, Henri of Navarre. Out both women went. In their place Queen Anne brought in her Danish friends and lively young Scots women, including the Ruthven sisters, Beatrix and Barbara, and Henrietta Stuart, Countess of Huntly. Henrietta was the Catholic wife of a Catholic earl – pure gall for the godly who believed the queen’s court was being peopled with the weak and the wicked: Lutherans and papists.
Four years later, in February 1594, Anne understood very clearly the huge political and dynastic significance of her son’s arrival. From the birthing chamber, a lady-in-waiting carried the baby to its royal nursery within the Prince’s Tower. They swaddled him and he latched onto the dugs of Margaret Mastertoun, his mistress nurse. When he gurned, Mistress Mastertoun handed Henry to one of his four rockers.
Good medical practice prescribed swaddling to keep Henry’s limbs straight, prevent rickets, and ensure strong growth. A few months later, liberated from the torment of swaddling bands, Henry started to stretch and move, but not crawl. Crawling suggested a prince too close to his animal nature, with its connotation of original and other sins. God condemned the serpent to crawl on his belly and eat dust all his days – not the crown prince. As soon as the infant could hold himself upright, Henry’s nursery maids strapped him into a wheeled and velvet-lined baby walker.
To keep him alive, four medical practitioners attended in rotation: Dr Martin, Gilbert Primrose the surgeon, Dr Gilbert Moncrieff, and Alexander Barclay, Henry’s apothecary. Infant mortality in the under twos ran at up to fifty per cent, giving a royal mother good reason to stay close and supervise. Queen Anne meant to preside over her son’s nursery, to oversee his infant japes and woes. By birth and upbringing a political animal, Anne also wanted to instil in Henry her religious, political and cultural values, not an enemy’s; and enemies, in the queen’s view, lived too close to her boy.
Anne had been horrified when James commanded her to leave her own palace and go to the Mar stronghold at Stirling to give birth. As soon as it was clear that the baby would live, the king followed Scottish royal custom. Within forty-eight hours of his safe delivery, Prince Henry was fostered out to the Earl of Mar and that ‘venerable and noble matron’ Lady Minnie. The king formally contracted Mar not to deliver the prince ‘out of your hands except [if] I command you with my own mouth, and being in such company as I myself shall like best of.
‘In case God call me at any time,’ James said, ‘that neither for the Queen nor Estates [Parliament’s] pleasure ye deliver him till he be eighteen years of age and that he command you himself.’ Henry would live out his entire infancy, childhood and youth at Stirling Castle. Anne would have to accept she would never govern Henry’s household. Her son would be raised by the high-born women of the Mar faction – the ladies Morton, Dunhope, Clackmannan, Abercairney, and the widow of Justice Clerk Cambuskynneth – and his male officers, James Ogilvie, Marshall and David Lennox, who served and ate at the ladies’ table. Over the years the boy’s intimacy with these families would build up his royal ‘affinity’. As king he would then have a powerful magnate group at his side, his most loyal supporters. None were the queen’s supporters.
Barely a fortnight after Henry’s birth, events appeared to vindicate James’s decision to isolate his son. On 5 March the Catholic earls of Bothwell, Huntly, Angus and Errol gathered in a plot to kidnap the boy. Once they had him, Huntly’s wife, Henrietta, a favourite of the queen, would reunite mother and son.
After uncovering the plan, James ordered the earls to be placed under house arrest. But in answer they came ‘against his Majesty at Holyroodhouse’. Elizabeth I instructed her cousin to put his ‘lewd Lords … to the horn as traitors’ – outlaw and hunt them down. James refused. High-handed, the English queen overrode him and sent a direct warning to the earls ‘in no case to seek the young Prince’. If the child was killed, the inheritance of England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales would be thrown into chaos, leaving the realm vulnerable to foreign claimants.
The General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church added to the complaints against James. Why did the king not simply crush those magnates seeking ‘the ruin of the state by foreign forces’? – meaning Spain and the pope. They warned of trouble arising from our ‘intestine troubles’ – the subversive activities of Bothwell, Huntly and their crew, but also Queen Anne. The French special envoy described the queen, in the wake of the removal of her son, as ‘deeply engaged in all civil factions … in Scotland in relation to the Catholics’.
Within weeks of Henry’s birth, the Scottish court split between allegiance to the king and the Mar clan, and allegiance to the queen and her faction. As much as it was an event to be celebrated, Henry’s birth threatened King James’s hard-won domestic peace. If the earls seized Henry, they could force the king to give Catholics more power in the government of Scotland and divide the nation between Presbyterian followers of the king and papist followers of the queen. It seemed as though history might repeat itself, as James was only too aware.
James’s memories of his own childhood determined that his son must stay at Stirling. In 1566, David Riccio, secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was stabbed to death in her presence – or as James put it, ‘while I was in my mother’s belly’. The king said that the in utero trauma scarred him with a ‘fearful nature’. James’s father, Lord Darnley, was suspected of conspiring with Protestant nobles, including lords Ruthven, Morton and Lindsay, in the killing; and Darnley himself was found strangled to death when James was just a few months old. Mary, Queen of Scots, then married the probable murderer of her son’s father.
James was kidnapped by a group of Protestant lords and taken to Stirling Castle, where he was crowned, aged thirteen months. He never saw his mother again. Scotland divided into two factions: the king’s men behind the infant James VI, the queen’s behind Mary, Queen of Scots. From this bitter civil war, the king’s men emerged triumphant. James’s mother, the focus of the unrest, was arrested and imprisoned. She escaped to England and was put back under lock and key by her cousin, Elizabeth, on whose mercy she threw herself. James remained with the Mars at Stirling, as civil unrest rumbled on. During one outbreak of fighting, the five-year-old king saw his beloved paternal grandfather carried past him, stabbed and dying, the old man’s blood streaming across Stirling Castle’s flagstones.
In 1587, James learnt that his mother had been beheaded on Elizabeth I’s orders. Seizing power in Scotland the moment he could, the highly intelligent and capable young king dedicated the first years of his reign to melding the factions and turbulent powers of his country into a workable whole. By the age of seventeen he had gained full control of his government.
Yet he still lived in constant fear of attack. Threats remained from within the king’s inner circle. In August 1582, the Earl of Mar had been involved in the Ruthven Raid against his former charge. Mar and his allies held James captive in an attempt to force the king to oust certain favourites, particularly the king’s French cousin Esmé Stuart. James was widely believed to be in love with Stuart, whom he had created 1st Duke of Lennox, and openly hugged and kissed him in public. Lennox was a Catholic – anathema to the devout Calvinist Mars. He converted to Protestantism but that did not convince the Scottish Calvinist elite. The Ruthven raiders ensured Lennox was exiled to France, where he died the following year. James was heartbroken.
The king and queen’s failure to have children for the first four years of their marriage had only heightened the speculation that James could not fulfil his duty to his country, to secure it through an heir. Anne reminded her husband that he was now entrusting their son to a faction that had held the king to ransom. James countered that some of the queen’s closest confidants had been at the heart of recent plots against him. In August 1600, when Henry was six, one resulted in the king’s near assassination. The king had the ringleaders, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, executed and demanded that Anne ‘thrust out of the house’ her ladies-in-waiting, Gowrie’s sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven.
Scotland’s unruly magnates were not merely power hungry. The political threats during Henry’s early childhood reflected the often violent religious conflicts dividing Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Religiously motivated wars and uprisings broke out continually throughout Christendom; assassinations and kidnappings were a common feature of those divisions. In 1584, the Calvinist ruler of the Dutch free states, William the Silent, was murdered by a Catholic fanatic. In France, the Protestant Henri of Navarre had just converted to Catholicism in order to unite France, win the throne, and try to bring to an end the religious wars and repeated attempts to assassinate him. In England, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, the late Walsingham, had regularly intercepted foreign plots against the queen.
For all these reasons, of custom and of threats to the monarchy and heir, James was adamant. Henry stayed at Stirling.
* (#ulink_73d7b48d-2050-5534-b978-355fa0e9f6d5) She called herself ‘Anna’ in Scotland, but was Queen Anne in England. James’s name for her was ‘Annie’ (sometimes ‘my own Annie’). To avoid confusion, I will refer to her as Anne.
TWO
Launching a European Prince (#ulink_89815e35-6088-581c-a928-bdef9c16cdd1)
On the issue of the prince’s christening his warring parents were as one. Henry was not the name of a Scottish king. England, though, had lived under eight Henrys to date. The last was James VI’s great-great-uncle, Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth. James’s father was also a Henry – Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Anne’s father was Frederick II. The boy would be christened Henry Frederick Stuart.
The king sent for his Royal Master of Works, William Schaw, to demolish the chapel royal at Stirling Castle and replace it with a new one worthy of Scotland’s first major Protestant royal christening. Schaw came up with a ‘scale model of Solomon’s temple’, and a little Renaissance gem. The interior reflected modern Renaissance Protestant thought and very likely the cultural dowry Anne had passed to the king. When James went to Denmark to bring Anne home, he witnessed an ebullience, sophistication and diversity of cultural and scientific activity he had never before experienced. He enjoyed Denmark and the company of his new Danish in-laws so much that he stayed for months longer than he needed to. This chapel royal seemed designed to reflect that happy period of his life.
The king asked Elizabeth I to stand godmother to Henry, bringing English queen and Scottish prince together in a quasi-parental relationship. James asked Henri IV of France to become Prince Henry’s godfather. For weeks no answer came – until Elizabeth heard that Henri IV had refused to send a representative. Elizabeth was only too aware of the politics of this gesture. Elizabeth originally intended to refuse to send a proxy. Now, she accepted James’s invitation. As a Protestant, Henri, the Huguenot King of Navarre, had been Elizabeth’s most powerful ally against the papal-backed Habsburg rulers of Spain and their cousins, the Holy Roman emperors. When Henri converted to Catholicism to unite France in July 1593, Elizabeth, still locked into war with Spain, felt bitterly betrayed. Henri was crowned king of all France the following February, the same month Henry was born, leaving Protestant England to face a newly united Catholic France twenty miles across the Channel. In the summer of 1594, therefore, Elizabeth wrote to Queen Anne, expressing ‘[our] extreme pleasure … [in] the birth of the young Prince[and] … the honourable invitation to assist at the baptism. We send the Earl of Sussex as our representative.’
The English queen’s acceptance irritated Henri IV, as it was meant to. France disliked any sign of an enlarged multiple British monarchy forming across the Channel, already recently strengthened by Anne’s Danish connections. After all, the family tree of a ruling dynasty was a European political network. Anne’s sister, Hedwig, was married to the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven men who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The Saxons were cousins of the free Dutch leader, Anne’s former suitor, Maurice of Nassau.
By July, Anne’s German relatives from Brunswick and Mecklenburg were beginning to arrive for the christening. Henry’s mother knitted her son into the top echelon of Protestant Europe’s rulers, while his father’s French blood connected him to major Catholic rulers. The Venetian ambassador reported to the Senate that ‘the Ambassadors of France, England, the States of Holland, and some German Princes … meet in Scotland at the baptism of the king’s son. The occasion is considered important on account of the understanding which may then be reached’ on how to humble the resurgent Catholic powers of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Fear of a coalition of Habsburg interests drove the abiding contemporary narrative of fear of predatory militant popery.
No less than three representatives arrived from the independent Dutch states for the christening, with twelve gentlemen and a train of thirty servants, reflecting the importance of the event. Embroiled in a prolonged war to free themselves from Spanish control, the Protestant Dutch came ‘to renew the ancient friendship between’ Scotland ‘and their own country, and to persuade’ King James to ‘enter into a general alliance against Spain’. They also brought gifts. Henry was given a ‘fair cupboard of plate’ (silver) and the promise of a hugely generous annuity of 500 crowns a year for the rest of his life.
As the event’s political stature grew, empty coffers forced James and Anne to address the tiresome issue of how to fund the grand baptism. The king turned to the Edinburgh money men, ‘to cause provision for wine and beer in great for the furnishing and entertaining’ of their guests. Thomas Foulis, goldsmith, lent the king £14,598 (Scots). James promised to repay it by November the following year. The royal couple already had a reputation for profligacy and Foulis beseeched his majesty for a more tangible guarantee than his sacred word. The king pawned ‘two drinking-pieces of gold, weighing in at fifteen pounds and five ounces of gold’. If he defaulted, then Thomas Acheson, master ‘cunyeor’ (coiner) was to ‘strike down and cunyie’ the cups into five-pound pieces of gold at the Cunzie House, the counting house, or royal mint. Foulis would take what he was owed and ‘the superplus, if any be, to make forthcome and deliver to his Majesty’s self’.
Others loaned and received their gold cup as security. A one-off parliamentary levy brought in £100,000 Scots, for ‘the incoming of the strangers to this honourable time of the baptism of the Prince, his Highness dearest son’. At the end of August and weeks overdue, Elizabeth’s proxy godparent, the Earl of Sussex, arrived, acting as if nothing could happen in Scotland until England appeared.
On the morning of 30 August 1594 the guests took their places in the chapel royal. At the east end stood the king’s chair of state, empty on a platform, cloth of gold spread all round it. Stuffed and gilded chairs received the fundaments of a series of leading foreign dignitaries, who took up their places beneath red velvet canopies adorned with the arms of each of their countries. The arms of England hung over a chair to the right of the throne, Denmark’s hung over the one to the left, and the arms of Scotland dominated the centre. Anne sat to one side with her ladies and friends.
The new pulpit dazzled with cloth of gold and yellow velvet. The black-clad Calvinist clergy sitting at a table below felt a little queasy. Their eyes found no relief from the idolatrous frippery, as they glanced from alabaster bas-reliefs to classical Greek friezes, and a huge fresco of the king in his pomp behind the altar. Calvinists insisted on the separate jurisdictions of God and state. James VI apparently did not. Rather the opposite.
Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.
A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.
The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.
At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.
Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.
Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.
Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.
The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.
Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.
Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble seafood, lay in heaps on the decks – ‘herrings, whitings, flukes, oysters, buckies, lampets, partans, lobsters, crabs, spout-fish, clams’. Sea maidens distributed the feast among the guests. From the galleries at the end of the room, the hautbois began a tune, joined by the viols, recorders, flutes, and then scores of choral voices all in deafening counterpoint to each other, singing in praise of king, queen and the prince of glorious expectation, Henry Frederick Stuart. As the music reached a crescendo, each of the thirty-six cannon unleashed a volley. The walls of the great hall thundered and echoed. The infant must have leapt from his skin.
From Stirling to St James’s Palace in London, Prince Henry would learn a humanist truism: the encounter with the ancients in whatever form you find them – in coin or word or image, in plays, masques, and pictures – will endow you with their qualities of rationality, eloquence, glory, wealth, virtue, and political wisdom. Europeans communicated through these symbolic languages. James and Anne used this language on Henry’s christening day to demonstrate the sophistication and merit of the dynasty sitting in wait for the death of Elizabeth Tudor.
Next morning the celebrations continued, as guests made their way in groups into Edinburgh. Others headed for the port of Leith and their ships. Ambassadors penned their accounts and examined the quality of the gifts of gold chains King James sent for their masters. Meanwhile a poem, ‘Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia’ (‘On the Birth of the Scoto-Britannic Prince’), by Andrew Melville, one of Scotland’s leading Presbyterian churchmen, reminded them of the true significance of Henry’s birth for Christendom:
Those who were divided by the Tweed …
The rule of Scoto-Britannic sovereignty now joins together,
United in law and within a Scoto-Britannic commonwealth,
And a Prince born of a Scoto-Britannic king
Calls them into a single Scoto-Britannic people.
To what great heights will Scoto-Britannic glory now rise
With no limits set by space and time?
By the time Elizabeth of England heard the word ‘Scoto-Britannic’ in this context for the fifth time in five lines, she was incandescent with rage. Chief minister, Robert Cecil, penned a letter on her behalf, pointing out that it verged on treason to say that James VI was ‘king of all Britain in possession’. James responded laconically that, ‘being descended as he was’ from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, ‘he could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of her Majesty’. He was Elizabeth’s closest blood male heir.
James connived in having the poem broadcast as widely as possible and authorised the Royal Printer, Robert Waldegrave, to publish it. It enjoyed wide circulation in Protestant circles across Europe and was reprinted several times in Amsterdam.
Once Henry heads the united ‘Scoto-Britannic people’, the poem thundered on, he will lead them into the cosmic conflict against the combined forces of papacy and Spain to ‘triumph over anointed Geryon’. In Roman mythology, Geryon is the triple-headed monster guarding the cattle in the Underworld. And here Geryon meant Spain. Melville addressed the infant:
Your foot tramples the triple diadem of the Roman Cerberus,
Dinning out of Hell sounds with thunders terrible
From the Capitoline Hill.
The pope was ‘the Roman Cerberus’, the attack dog guarding the gates of hell. Cerberus belonged to Geryon (Spain), who fattened him with titbits of Spanish New World wealth. Melville combined classical motifs and an Old Testament prophetic tone so beloved of godly radicals, alert for signs their God willed them to complete the religious revolution.
Lurid propaganda perhaps, yet fear of popery drenched Protestant Europe. ‘It crossed all social boundaries; as a solvent of political loyalties it had no rivals.’ The destabilising range and power of that fear was heightened by the biggest problem facing Protestant Europe right now – the revival of militant Catholicism.
Hitting back, Melville promoted Henry as Christendom’s saviour. Born in obscurity in Scotland, he would lead the Protestants of a united Europe against the sprawling gold- and silver-engorged powers of Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in a battle for the soul of the ‘nation of Europe’.
‘The holy zeal of Christians … in their struggle against the anti-Christ’ had found their future leader.
THREE
The Fight for Henry (#ulink_cd3685f1-6f86-5a88-804d-0d433da912cf)
‘TWO MIGHTY FACTIONS’
It was pleasing for James to envisage the European scale of Henry’s destiny, but he and his advisers knew it might come to nothing if the king could not ensure order and tranquillity at home – where, the English ambassador Bowes told Robert Cecil, ‘the question of the Queen and her son’, is ‘a breach working mightily’.
Some even saw Henry’s wet nurse as playing a sinister part in the drama. Everyone knew a child imbibed the nurse’s character with her milk. When a messenger told Anne that Margaret Mastertoun had ‘become dry through sickness’, she feared the worst. But the drama soon passed. Whatever illness the wet nurse had, Henry had caught it, ‘but is now well again. The King coming, the Nurse prayed pardon.’ Her milk, however, had gone. ‘The old nurse being of the Countess of Mar’s choice,’ Bowes explained, ‘some seek to impute this fault to Mar.’ If abundant breast milk equalled loyalty, the withdrawal of it implied treason. The Mars found another woman to tend to Henry, but ‘the young Prince cried for want of’ his old nurse and refused to feed. Recovering but unsettled, he preferred to go hungry and risked weakening himself further.
Anne asked that ‘the keeping of the Prince’ be moved to Edinburgh Castle, where she might personally oversee his care and prevent his nursery woes escalating into real danger. But Edinburgh, the seat of government, religion, and plots, was felt to be a more dangerous place for the prince. James refused to hand over Henry’s care to her.
The queen’s initial misery at being deprived of her son now settled into a pulsing anger. ‘Two mighty factions’ formed: the king’s supporters – including Mar, his kinsman Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone – warning that Anne, Queen of Scots, schemed with the discontented Catholic ‘[Earl] Bothwell and that crew, for the coronation of the Prince and the departure of the King’. Sir John Maitland, the Scottish chancellor, spearheaded support for the queen. ‘What the end will be, God knows,’ sighed Robert Aston, an English agent.
The king tried to get the leaders of the factions, Mar and Maitland, to reconcile before the court but found that courtiers continued to put light ‘to the coal’ of the strife, standing back to ‘let others blow at it’. This ‘is the condition of this estate … Everyone shooting at others without respect to King or Commonweal, or the safety of the young Prince’, commented Aston.
From Whitehall, Robert Cecil pondered the implications for England if King James and his obdurate consort ascended the English throne. James’s apparent disinclination to suppress dissent and put his ‘Lords … to the horn’ left a question mark against his suitability as successor. Yet the Scottish king had settled Scotland as his forebears had failed to do. The child was a healthy male and, despite the unpropitious circumstances, there were whispers at court that he might soon have a sibling: ‘by all appearances [the queen] … is with child, yet she denies it’, agent Aston reported to Ambassador Bowes.
Hostilities quickly resumed though, with James informing Anne that in pressing for the removal of the prince, her supporters ‘sought nothing but the cutting of his [the king’s] throat’. Worse, he said, her plots were not only ‘a danger to his person’, but ‘treason’. Anne collapsed under the strain. If she had been pregnant, she was not any more.
Anxiety for the health of his ‘dearest bedfellow’ drove James to see Anne at Linlithgow palace, set away from ‘the tumults of Edinburgh’. Here, James entertained ‘the Queen very lovingly … to draw her off’ her obsession. She received him well and was reported to be ‘all love and obedience’. But at supper, thinking she had her husband ‘in a good humour’, she declared that ‘it was “opened” in Scotland, England and Denmark that she had sought to have the keeping of the young Prince and that therefore it touched her honour and her credit’ as mother of the heir and queen, not to be slighted. James insisted that ‘he regarded her honour and the safety of the Prince as much as she, and would, if he saw cause, yield to her’. On both sides, love was intimate and strategic. James spoke for them all when he told Henry later: ‘a King is as one set on a stage’.
The fight to be reunited with her son drew out a relentless streak in Henry’s unhappy mother. The result, an audible rending of the fabric of the Stuarts’ domestic life, was terrible to witness. By July 1595, Anne seemed to be ‘somewhat crazed’ in her grief. She obsessed over the right ‘cause’ to make the king ‘yield to her’. She asked him to ‘convene his nobles for their advice therein … But he has utterly refused her motion and continues his promises to Mar. So this matter is “marvellous secret”,’ intelligencer George Nicolson observed with some sarcasm.
The feud turned violent when the queen’s supporters clashed with the king’s men under the walls of Stirling Castle, and Mar’s baillie, a man named Forrester, was slaughtered. ‘I fear it will very suddenly burst into bloody factions,’ Nicolson judged, ‘for all sides are busy packing up all small feuds for their advantage.’ The kirk ordained a day of fasting ‘for the amendment of the present danger’ caused by this rupture. James, meanwhile, pleaded with the queen to abandon her campaign. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’
One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting carried the stories to Denmark. Anne’s mother, Queen Sophie, unmoved by her daughter’s distress, advised that she should ‘obey the King in all things’.
In London, Cecil was told ‘there is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation between the King and the Queen’. Elizabeth I let off an exasperated rebuke to her cousin, rueing ‘to see him so evidently a spectacle of a seduced king, abusing counsel, and guiding awry his kingdom’. Her brother prince – her heir, perhaps – had let his popish lords lay out their demands, ‘turning their treason’s bills to artificer’s reckonings – one billet lacking only’, she fumed, and that is, ‘an item … so much for the cord whose office they best merited’. James did not immediately follow advice on executions from his mother’s killer, no matter how wittily expressed – though he did love wit.
A rapprochement occurred between king and queen towards the end of the year, and by early 1596 Denmark’s daughter was pregnant again. Princess Elizabeth, named in honour of Elizabeth I, was born at Falkland Palace, Fife, in August 1596. She too was quickly fostered out to the king’s allies and Henry saw nothing of his new sister. Nor would he see his baby brother, Charles, born four years later. Nor Princess Margaret, born 1598, but dead by March 1600.
Prince Henry’s first portrait dates from this time. It shows a king in miniature. About eighteen months old, in his high chair, dressed in jewel-encrusted, padded white-satin robes, with a coronet on his head, he holds a rattle as if it were a tiny sceptre. The reddish blond down on his head is baby hair. His skin is white as the moon. He resembles his mother.
FOUR
Nursery to Schoolroom (#ulink_d1cc3fe3-26d3-5b01-9b00-a73ae1e61343)
‘THE KING’S GIFT’
By 1599 James had shooed ‘the skirts’ out of Prince Henry’s lodgings and ordered diverse men of ‘good sort to attend upon his person’ instead. It was time to prepare the boy to be king.
