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James produced a hands-on guide to kingcraft for this purpose. You must ‘study to know well [your] own craft … which is to rule [your] people’, he told his five-year-old son. The king had been writing and thinking about this for a long time. His Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’) came out that year in a tiny print-run of seven. Copies of ‘His Majesty’s instructions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince’ went to a privileged few: Prince Henry, the queen, Mar, and the man James appointed to be Henry’s tutor, Adam Newton.
Self-help guides in preparation to rule were an established genre. The most famous, still in use at this time, was Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani (‘The Education of a Christian Prince’, 1516). James VI’s book possessed a special allure, though, being written by a ruling personal monarch with vast experience of the subject.
He divided Basilikon Doron into ‘three books: the first instructing the prince on his duty towards God; the second in his duty when he should be king; and the third informing him how to behave himself in indifferent things, which were neither right nor wrong, but according as they were rightly or wrong used’. James’s writing voice enlivened the content. He could be intimate, colloquial, shrewd and humorous, but also deeply learned. When it came to publishing the book for a wider readership, in England in 1603, James revised it, allowing his subjects to see how the wise philosopher-king was nurturing the student prince for them.
God expected Henry to have a detailed knowledge of scripture, his father told him, in order to ‘contain your Church in their calling’. In James’s view, the clergy’s role was only to be custodians of his church, subservient to the king’s wishes. Henry must not let ministers overstep this mark, interfere in government, or try to limit the authority of the king. Henry should strive to cultivate a middle path in matters of faith: ‘Beware with both the extremities; as well as ye repress the vain Puritan, so [also] not to suffer proud Papall Bishops.’ The king had already experienced memorable run-ins with certain Calvinist ministers who treated the heavenly and worldly realms as distinct. In general, Henry should be ‘a loving nourish-father’ to his church, said James, echoing Isaiah 49:23, where ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers’.
A poet, philosopher and one of the most intelligent rulers in Christendom, James wanted his son to be as scholarly as him. In matters of secular government, Henry must ‘study well your own laws’, and recommended as further reading Xenophon and Caesar on statecraft. Henry’s tutors agreed, but had their own preferred exemplars; in time they would expose the prince to them, to the king’s displeasure.
James encouraged Henry to study mathematics, which would allow him to fulfil the prime function of monarchy: the management of national security and foreign policy – or, when and how to make war. For this, maths would improve his mastery of ‘the art military, in situations of Camps, ordering of battles, making fortifications, and the placing of batteries’. A good commander could calculate the range and elevation for firing artillery and placing of infantry, and understand engineering issues such as where to mine walls for maximum destruction.
Although Basilikon Doron was a practical manual on kingcraft, James touched on the theory of monarchy, as expanded upon in his recent long essay: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. The king nuanced the Calvinist theory of predestination when he told Henry there was nothing you could do to earn the right to rule; God’s will destined Henry to be king. Kings preceded the creation of all councils, including parliaments and church. Thus, on every count the king’s power was pre-eminent.
This was the voice of a personal and absolute monarch speaking: one in whom supreme power rested, without any necessity to work through parliaments or councils. King Henry IX will be a type of ‘little god’, said James, adapting Psalm 82:6: ‘I have said, ye are gods’, there to exercise imperial power. Nonetheless he must earn his subjects’ respect – as ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.
Lofty and earthy, this was a classic Jamesian image of kingship, congruent with his True Lawe of Free Monarchies (subtitled The reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his natural Subiectes), in which James made an apology for the theory of the divine right of kings and absolutism, the monarch’s ‘imperium’. Since they were quasi-divine beings, said James, kings could not be punished by subjects if they were weak or wicked.
In the last resort, a monarch was ‘free’ to do as he liked. Only God could tip monarchs off the ‘sliddriest’ bench into the abyss if they failed to rule well. A king’s duty was more onus than honour. His first duty was to be a good ruler. If Henry kept that in mind, he would avoid the loathing of God and men.
FIVE
Tutors and Mentors (#ulink_e2236cc9-b5fc-5c61-a08e-232a47adf79b)
‘STUDY TO RULE’
To shape this ‘little god’, James and Mar appointed the humanist scholar Adam Newton, an Edinburgh baker’s son, as principal tutor. Newton had been the only commoner to receive Basilikon Doron in 1599. Henry now sat in the schoolroom in the Prince’s Tower at Stirling, where his father and Mar had sat twenty-five years before, when they had been nurtured by a luminary of the Calvinist renaissance, the aged, godly and abusive George Buchanan. Buchanan might well have thrashed James senseless for proposing the unassailability of absolute monarchy.
Buchanan’s own political writings legitimised not merely resistance, but prescribed overthrow, even tyrannicide, for ungodly monarchs. Extreme Calvinism and the idea of a contractual, not absolute, monarchy often went hand in hand. James thought Buchanan was a ‘vain Puritan’, violently overstepping his calling, and he had feared him. The beatings the boy-king suffered were on occasions frenzied. Once James left the schoolroom and took control of government, he banished Buchanan and burned his books.
As well as tutoring the king, Buchanan had mentored the godly Melville, author of Prince Henry’s baptism poem. Henry’s newly appointed tutor, Adam Newton, had in turn been mentored by Melville. Newton was as demanding as the king’s tutors had been, but kind. Henry’s servants remembered that ‘next his parents, he was always most loving to his schoolmaster … notwithstanding that … Newton did always prefer his own duty and his Highness well-doing before the pleasing of his fancies’.
After receiving his degree, Newton had travelled to France to hear Huguenot philosophers debate the politics of rightful resistance to a king. The philosophy of contractual monarchy argued that a monarch must rule by the consent of the people, for the benefit of the whole commonwealth. If not, he should be resisted, perhaps removed. In exchange for good governance, the people submitted to his rule, and gave their loyalty, even to death. Honouring this implicit ‘contract’ sanctioned the ruler’s supreme power over their subjects and safeguarded their liberties. Newton went to teach this political vision at the prestigious St Maixent college in Poitou, north of La Rochelle. He believed in monarchy as a system of rule, but in a contractual not imperial version. Yet he served a king whose theories on the nature of monarchy allowed no resistance to the will of the ‘little god’ monarch, no matter how bad he was.
Henry’s guardian, the Earl of Mar, appeared to embrace some of Buchanan and Newton’s political vision. In one council meeting, Mar censured fellow nobles for saying they would ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’. ‘It was not well that they should not freely give their advice as Councillors,’ said Mar, ‘which the King well allowed of.’ Although James VI welcomed advice and debate, he never felt bound by any of it. The godly Mar envisaged king and well-born advisers ruling together in council, through the legislature, for the good of the realm as a whole. It was hard to imagine Newton or Mar working to shape a future Henry IX who believed his councillors should ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’.
From these first days in the schoolroom, Prince Henry was exposed to at least two potentially incompatible sets of ideas about who he was, what he should believe, his attitude to monarchy and how he should act.
Newton was not left alone to educate Henry. Walter Quin, an Irish poet, was sent for to assist him. Quin came with the blessing not only of King James of Scotland but also of the Earl of Essex over four hundred miles away in London. Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth I’s principal favourite, a significant power in the country and a military commander in Ireland. In his poems praising James VI, Walter Quin urged the king to let a man of great Renaissance virtue guide him onto the English throne. He surely had Essex in mind.
Essex meanwhile courted James and tried to persuade Elizabeth of the need to settle the succession in favour of the Scottish king and his progeny. However, Elizabeth would not listen to his counsel, to the earl’s fury. Essex firmly believed strong councillors secured an absolute monarch. These councillors must criticise when they saw their sovereign acting in error, against the good of the whole commonwealth.
As well as tutors of all kinds, Henry needed body servants. Mar brought in his first cousin, David Murray of Gorthly, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Murray’s high forehead and thick red hair and beard framed small bright eyes, giving him the look of an alert, friendly squirrel. A full-lipped mouth twitched upwards in a smile, all set in a long, rectangular face. A Renaissance soldier-poet, Murray was also a godly Calvinist, like most of the Mar clan. As overseer of the prince’s bodily needs, Murray slept on a truckle bed in Henry’s chamber. No man saw more of the boy.
James sent David Foulis to work with Murray and take charge of Henry’s wardrobe. Foulis had first come to James’s court as a pageboy. Later, he would be entrusted with taking the king’s communications to Elizabeth. Now, as ‘an ancient friend’ of the Essexians, he acted as go-between in the secret correspondence between James and Essex. His role allowed him easy access to intelligence on the prince and his household, which he then sold on to the English earl and his camp.
In the letters, Essex’s codename was ‘Plato’ and the king ‘Tacitus’. James might have wondered why he was Tacitus. The Roman historian was a source of great fascination for the Essexians and Henry Savile, who tutored Essex’s son, was a renowned translator of his writings. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Tacitus’s works analysed the virtues of Rome under the Republic, where power resided in a strong council of elected individuals representing the flower of the whole community, under an elected leader. In comparison, Tacitus had reservations about the imperial era in Rome under the rule of the Caesars: absolute rule by non-elected emperors, ‘free’ to be unaccountable for their actions, if they wanted. Referring to James VI as ‘Tacitus’ suggested the Essex group dreamt that Stuart rule would inaugurate a Tacitus-influenced English political system: strong council with virtuous rule, and the security of a hereditary monarchy.
Mar facilitated and encouraged regular communication between Prince Henry’s schoolroom and Essex House, the Earl of Essex’s power base near Westminster. In this arrangement Mar boasted of his own importance as guardian of the heir and future King of Scotland and England. Essex confided to Mar that his faction’s support for the Scottish king might possibly lead to arms, forcing Queen Elizabeth to name James as her successor in Parliament. The imprimatur of parliamentary legal consent mattered to Essex’s group. For them, only a strong buffer of constitutional safeguards, legitimised in Parliament, guaranteed the Crown’s authority. Issues such as the succession must then, Essex House concluded, include parliamentary participation. Although, Essex believed MPs had to be guided by Parliament’s steering group, the Privy Council, staffed mainly by politically and militarily active aristocrats.
The Cecil faction, Essex’s rivals for Elizabeth I’s favour, also wanted to serve a monarch exercising absolute or ‘imperial’ powers, but contained by the due process of law and counsel by virtuous men of honour. The chivalric soldier in Essex would go further, fatefully, than any of the Cecil group in an attempt to bring this to fruition. For now, Essex suggested Mar come to London for private discussions.
This, then, was the complex, multifaceted and intensely ideological environment in which Henry began his formal education at the age of four: writing the alphabet; reading classical masters of Latin grammar; studying the elements of rhetoric; learning French, and a bold italic hand to express himself in. If James thought his own character had been adversely affected by the brutality and instability of his childhood, then perhaps Henry’s more temperate personality – described as showing ‘sparks of piety, majesty, gravity … using a mild and gentle behaviour to all, chiefly to strangers’ – reflected the kinder setting in which the boy was being raised. He shared his classroom with some of Mar’s seven boys, and the earl’s five daughters lived close by. Henry grew up with plenty of other children, but not his siblings.
Henry’s handwriting was seen as reflecting the quality of the king in training, and the esteem he felt for the recipient. A scrawled letter, half illegible in a childish hand, found to be full of spelling mistakes when it could be deciphered at all, insulted the person and country receiving it. Henry sat in the Prince’s Tower and practised italic script over and over. Cicero said you could not think well if you did not have a solid grounding in morally edifying texts, and good handwriting. So Henry filled his notebooks with lines of rrrrrs and ssssses. He perfected phrases before they went into the final copy of a letter. Typical child, he covered pages of his exercise books with his signature, practising his joyful twirls and flourishes –, Henricus, Henricus, Henry, Henry – for illustrious addressees.
By the age of six, he was initiating exchanges with foreign states and rulers. The first official letter he wrote in 1600 was to the Dutch States General and Maurice of Nassau, commander of the Protestant Dutch troops in their rebellion against Catholic Spain. In it he thanked them for their good opinion of him in his tender years. Henry promised these ‘first fruits of his hand’ showed ‘his interest in serving them … hereafter in better offices’. The Dutch were already paying the 500 crown annuity promised at his baptism, though it went straight to the king’s coffers. Henry would repay their faith in him, by coming to serve in the field, and learn the military arts from Maurice himself.
The king appointed a court favourite Sir Richard Preston to school the prince in the military arts. Preston had fought for the Dutch with the Earl of Leicester and Leicester’s brother, the late Sir Philip Sidney, both English heroes of international Calvinism. Many of Prince Henry’s household, and the Essexians in London, shared a belief that Scottish Calvinism and the Church of England were parts of a greater body: the united European community of Protestants. With a touch of knights on a quest about them, such individuals felt honour-bound to defend any fellow Protestant state threatened by a Catholic power. Subsequently Preston, ‘a gentleman of great accomplishments in mind and body’, became a follower of Essex.
As Preston trained Henry, it was quickly observed how well the young prince ‘began to apply himself to, and to take pleasure in, active and manly exercises, learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, shoot with the bow and gun, toss the pike, &c., being instructed in the use of arms’. Preston tutored Henry in the honour code of ‘Protestant martial Virtue’ he espoused. By May 1599, Preston occupied a ‘“Praetorian” role’, as ‘captain over all the officers in the King’s Household’.
Veterans of Europe’s religious wars, men such as Preston, recounted poems and stories, and introduced the prince to the latest innovations on the modern battlefield. Henry learned, while tales of siege trenches, training and army camp life replayed in his and his followers’ imaginations. Soon ‘no music being so pleasant in his ears as the sounding of trumpet and the beating of drum, the roaring of the cannon, no sight so acceptable, as that of pieces, pistols, or any sort of Armour’, he wanted to be practising his martial skills all the time. The young prince attacked a plate of strawberries, holding up his two spoons. ‘The one I use as a rapier,’ he chattered, ‘and the other as a dagger.’ Looking on, the men around him proudly shared these anecdotes: signs their education was taking root.
Henry also grew up with a keen sense of the threats to his father’s kingdom. He saw the bodies of rebels rotting on gibbets as he trotted in and out of Stirling Castle. He knew how some of ‘the great ones’ in Scotland plotted to seize him and take him away. Sitting on his pony with his friends, watching the king and Mar hunt stags, someone asked Henry if he loved to hunt animals as much as his father.
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but I love another kind of hunting better.’
‘What manner of hunting?’ they asked.
‘Hunting of thieves and rebels with brave men and horses,’ and adding: ‘such thieves as I take shall be hanged, the great ones higher than the rest.’
By the age of seven, Henry was seeking to improve his essays by imitating classical masters, composing epistles in Latin in different styles. In the first instance Adam Newton, a master of style, would compose them and Henry transcribe them. But as he grew, Henry began to pick out anything that caught his eye. Newton gave him Cicero’s De Officiis. Henry annotated it, heavily, underlining unusual words and phrases and copying them out to help him remember. He numbered the stages of a Ciceronian argument so he could learn how to debate. He marked up phrases he liked – often those where Cicero advocated active participation in public life.
Henry took care when writing to address both his parents. In one letter he thanked them for various gifts, enquired after their health and assured them of his own excellent and busy life. He also sent his father some verses.
In reply the king chastised him: ‘Ye have rather written than dyted it’ (copied not composed it). As a father, James was easy and loving. As kingmaker, he was harder to please. ‘I confess I long to receive a letter from you that may be wholly yours,’ James continued, listening for that golden tone – son to father, as well as Prince Henry to the King’s Majesty. ‘Nothing will be impossible for you if you will only remember two rules,’ he told him. ‘Trust a little more to your own strength and away with childish bashfulness’, and ‘my oft repeated rule unto you, whatever ye are about, hoc age’, do not hang back – ‘Strike!’
Written exchanges between father and son could swing easily between the private and public, between the occult and the rational, even; between loving encouragement and the drawing of a moral lesson from every little thing. Henry told his father he thought a witch on trial for malefice was a fake, and that they should do something about it. James thanked his son for the ‘discovery of yon little counterfeit wench’, and further counselled: ‘You have often heard me say that most miracles nowadays prove but illusions, and ye may see by this how wary judges should be in trusting accusations without an exact trial … God bless you, my son, your loving father, James R[ex].’
Forced into the background of Henry’s life, by the turn of the century Anne of Denmark had converted to Catholicism, having most likely been introduced to the Roman religion by her close confidante, Henrietta, Countess of Huntly, the daughter of the Duke of Lennox. Anne kept up her campaign to get guardianship of her son and told Pope Clement that she would raise her children as Catholics – though how she would do that when they were firmly ensconced in three different Protestant households was hard to see. She inferred James VI might grant Catholics toleration from Protestant vows of obedience if he were to ascend the English throne. The king’s own pronouncements on the subject made many Catholics believe it also. The pope wrote to James offering a large sum in exchange for having Henry in Rome and educated in the Vatican. James refused.
As queen consort, Anne explained, she had to attend ‘the rites of heretics’ with the king and asked the pope’s absolution for doing so. She did not like it, but knew she must acquiesce, due ‘to the hostile times which we have to endure’. The queen’s ‘court Catholicism’ was a form of religious dissimulation widely practised in both England and Scotland at every level of society. Most crypto-Catholics were loyal to the Protestant crowns, including many of Queen Anne’s supporters.
Anne’s conversion and secret correspondence with Pope Clement did little to advance the cause of domestic harmony between Henry’s parents. ‘The King and Queen are in very evil ménage,’ a Scottish noble reported to Cecil, ‘and now she makes to take upon her more dealing than hitherto she hath done. At public table she said to him that he was advised to imprison her, but willed him to beware what he “mintit” at.’ When James responded that she must be mad to believe such a thing, Anne replied he should find that she ‘was neither mad nor beside herself if he “mintit” at that he intended’.
By early 1603 the English saw how ‘new troubles arise daily in Scotland, but the worst of all is the domestic dangers and heart breaking that the King finds in his own house’. What discords, they wondered, would king and queen bring to London if James VI succeeded to the English throne?
England was about to suffer discords of her own. Troubled by ‘choler and grief’, Elizabeth was in steep decline. Two years earlier, in February 1601, the Earl of Essex had risen against the queen to force her to name James as her successor in Parliament. The coup failed and he was executed. Since then Elizabeth had aged rapidly. Her Privy Council was now dominated by men more concerned to caretake than develop England’s influence in Europe as Christendom’s principal Protestant state.
Some of Queen Elizabeth’s militant Protestant servants saw the coming of the Calvinist Stuarts as a chance to change this. And perhaps soon.
For, on 24 March 1603, at Richmond Palace, Elizabeth I died, departing this life ‘mildly, like a lamb’.
PART TWO
England (#ulink_63cf701e-e7c0-599b-bfce-375bd015f42a)
1603–10
SIX
The Stuarts Inaugurate the New Age (#ulink_79408b69-3fce-5193-9c92-a41ac55cbc04)
The Privy Council locked the gates of Richmond Palace, closed the ports and moved to Whitehall. Grief over the queen’s death was tempered by memories of Essex’s uprising and weariness of the Armada war in which the country was locked. The status quo needed to change. It seemed that, at the last minute, on her deathbed, even Elizabeth had acknowledged it and named James her heir. When asked by her Privy Council if she agreed that the Scottish cousin should succeed her, she was seen to move her arm to her head, which Cecil took as a sign of assent. Public mourning mixed with fear and anticipation as news of the queen’s death spread across London.
Elizabeth’s councillors wondered what English Catholics, maybe thirty per cent of the population, were planning. And, what would James VI do if he met the anticipated resistance. He might invade, backed by his powerful Danish in-laws?
The council organised to get the new dynasty – king, queen, heir, the rest of the royal children – under English protection and control. Robert Cecil proclaimed King James of England from the gates of Whitehall barely seven hours after Elizabeth’s death. As the news spread, Thomas Cecil, Lord President of the North, reassured his half-brother: ‘the contentment of the people is unspeakable, seeing all things proceed so quietly, whereas they expected in the interim their houses should have been spoiled and sacked’.
Nine days after Elizabeth died, King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Wales, and Ireland, and Queen Anne, attended a service of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh – no mourning here. James addressed his people, promising to return every three years. The following Tuesday, the king kissed his wife in front of the crowds jammed into the high street, and left. The three royal children were safe in nurseries dotted between Edinburgh and Stirling. Two others – Margaret, and Robert (who died in 1602) – had not survived infancy. The queen was pregnant again, for the sixth time.
The king wrote to Henry, apologising for not coming to tell his son in person of their great good fortune, ‘but time is so precious’. James could not relax until he had the crown of England on his head. ‘Let not this news make you proud or insolent,’ he warned his boy, ‘for a King’s son and heir were you before, and no more are you yet … Be therefore merry, but not insolent,’ he said. ‘Keep a greatness, but sine fasti,’ without giving yourself airs and graces. ‘Be resolute, but not wilful.’ He recommended the prince keep the Basilikon Doron by him, and signed off, ‘Your loving father, James R’.
It was intended that princes Henry and Charles and Princess Elizabeth would remain in Scotland for the rest of their childhoods. At a stroke, nine-year-old Henry faced a future without either of his fathers – James and Mar. An Anglophile familiar with the English court, the earl had to accompany the king, who had never been to England (let alone Wales or Ireland).
Henry turned to his mother at once, writing: ‘I will lose that great benefit I had by’ my father’s ‘frequent visitation’. So, ‘I most humbly request your Majesty to supply that lack by your presence, which I have the more just cause to crave that I have wanted it so long’, before adding forlornly, ‘to my great grief and displeasure’. The boy had never seen enough of her. However, Anne had been ordered to leave Scotland and join the king in London as soon as she was packed.
Henry hoped ‘your Majesty by sight may have, as I hope, the greater matter to love me and I, likewise, may be encouraged to go forward … and to honour your Majesty with all due reverence …’. Couched in the usual language for a prince addressing the queen, nevertheless his words are full of longing. He spoke of love, not merely honour and reverence.
He did not need to ask twice. From the battlements of Stirling, the Mar clan watched as Anne approached – attended by a trail of armed nobles, soldiers and servants. It looked to some like the long dreaded coup to seize the prince. But the queen’s ‘request’ that her son be brought out to greet her ‘prevailed not. The Lady Mar and … the Lord of Keir gave a flat denial and would not suffer the Prince to go out.’ Old Lady Minnie told the queen that if Henry ‘went with her, the Catholics would certainly abduct him, in order to have a hostage in their hands when they rose in revolt’. This was a barb, as the queen was Catholic. Anne demanded they admit her, then. The Mars regretted it, but they could not refuse entry to the queen’s grace, especially in her condition.
Once inside the castle, Anne entered the royal palace, took possession of her lodgings, just below the Prince’s Tower, and announced she would not be leaving without her son. Horrified at the turn of events, members of the Scottish Privy Council raced to Stirling to convene in the castle, resolve the crisis, and work out how to shift her.
On 10 May, a letter from Montrose, Lord Chancellor of Scotland, interrupted the king’s delirious progress south. ‘Her Majesty’s present estate and condition I refer to the bearer’s report,’ he started. Pregnant and implacable as she was, Montrose said if they could just get ‘Her Grace out of Scotland’ it might defuse ‘all fear of hazard, and danger of inconvenience’.
Back at Stirling, waiting guidance from the king, the privy councillors handled the possible ‘inconvenience’ of a kidnapping and ‘revolt’ as best they could. Lord Fyvie was given the unenviable task of persuading Anne to depart for England. Lord President of the Court of Session, Fyvie was the highest placed civil judge in Scotland. He was also a Catholic sympathiser, guardian of Prince Charles, and served Anne as baillie and justiciary of the regality of Dunfermline, one of Anne’s possessions. Tall, with a fine figure, slim eagle nose and sensitive countenance, if anyone could expect a good reception from the queen, surely it was Fyvie.
He dragged his feet as he walked across the inner courtyard and entered the queen’s presence chamber. As soon as he opened his mouth on the subject, Anne was seized by a fury fit and started to ‘beat at her belly’ in distress.
Fyvie, aghast to ‘be with her Majesty … at the very worst’, saw her fall. Bleeding ‘from the womb’, the queen’s ladies crowded round and led her away. The brain has no sense of time. Perhaps it was a kind of aftershock, dropping her back into the horror of nine years ago, giving birth to Henry here, only to lose him.
‘At such a time’, in the history of the fledgling Britain, ‘such an accident, to such a person, what could he [Fyvie] do or say?’ the Scottish council asked James. Fyvie quaked in his boots. What if she died? Someone would have to be held to account. The councillors now changed tack, going all out to appease Anne, allowing Henry free movement through the castle to visit his mother.
The atmosphere thickened with hostility. ‘Her Majesty’s passions could’ only be ‘moderated or mitigated … by seconding, following and obeying all her directions’, though of course these were ‘subject and depended wholly upon your sacred Majesty’s answers and resolutions as oracles’, they told the king. The councillors requested urgent, clear and credible orders.
Anne’s fury had erupted, Demeter-like in its scorching power. She now showed every possible manifestation of her scorn, of being denied motherhood and the guardianship of her children for almost a decade. Her passion emptied her out, and stunned all around. She miscarried the baby, a boy.
‘Physic and medicine require greater place with her Majesty at present’, than lectures on realpolitik, Fyvie carefully advised his king. The queen’s demeanour spoke much louder than any words. For days she lay motionless and silent. She could so easily haemorrhage or contract a puerperal infection, and that would be that. John Spottiswoode, her almoner, rode south to tell the king to prepare for the worst. Prince Henry, meanwhile, feared he was about to lose his mother, having just lost both father figures. The king sent Mar, of all people, home to deal with the crisis.
Eventually the queen began to recover. The castle hummed with ‘controversy and a jar anent this question of the Prince’s delivery’ once again, as it had following Henry’s birth. There ‘rests greater hatred and malice’ than ever between the Mars and the queen’s party. The risk is, the Lord Chancellor told James, that ‘if it be not prevented’ it will ‘make a greater stir in this country’. In England, so far, all the talk had been of peace and happiness, of the chance to ‘begin a new world’, said the Earl of Montrose.
But at home, Stirling had become a microcosm of all the dangers James had tried to shield Henry from – and a potential trigger point for revolution. On the eve of the union of the thrones, with the king out of the way, the queen’s faction might try to kidnap Henry, crown him and declare an independent Scotland, with the Danish Queen of Scots acting as regent.
James could not comfortably make his formal entry into London with a consort so angry and estranged it nearly killed her, and lost him his children. Half the appeal of the Stuarts was a promise of stability and continuity, taking the country away from succession battles and the threat of civil war from rival claimants. Prince Henry was vital to that promise. Two other children lived, but the boy, Charles, was a weedy child.
Anne stood firm, however. ‘The Queen’s Majesty is not minded to depart unless the prince go with her, and will no ways rest content that the Earl of Mar should accompany her,’ Montrose told the king, suggesting James relieve Mar of his duty. James appealed to his wife: ‘God is my witness that I ever preferred you to all my bairns, much more than to any subject’, including Mar. Then he spoiled it by lecturing her not to open her ears to every ‘flattering sycophant’, and ended by praising Mar as ‘an honest and wise servant for his true and faithful service to me’. He wanted Anne’s trust, but seemed to have lost it.
The queen must join him immediately and thank ‘God for the peaceful possession … of England, which, next to God, might be ascribed to the Earl of Mar’, he commanded. Someone should have advised the king to omit the last phrase. Anne responded that ‘she would rather never see England than to be in any sort beholden to him [Mar] for the same’. She was staying put, in the same country as her children, and would deny Mar access to her.
After years of politicking, Anne had the upper hand, and played it, using Henry to provoke the first crisis of the new dynasty.
English ministers looked on in dismay. The king bowed to the inevitable. He ordered the Scottish Privy Council to discharge the Mars, thanking them for their years of good service. ‘Our cousin, the Duke of Lennox’ is coming to sort it all out, he told them. This was Ludovic, son of the late Esmé Stuart. The queen trusted young Lennox. He was the brother of her favourite, Henrietta Stuart, Countess of Huntly.
A few days later, the Earl of Mar escorted Henry across the courtyard to the Privy Council sitting in the great hall where he gave the prince into ‘the charge of other Lords appointed to wait on him on his journey to England’. As the child approached Lennox, his mother and the lords of the council, he suddenly stopped, ran back and ‘embracing the said Earl, burst forth in tears’.
After she miscarried, Anne kept the foetus and placed it in a tiny coffin. This now travelled with the royal party on its slow progress south. The queen ‘brought with her the body of the male child of which she had been delivered in Scotland’, the French ambassador explained to King Henri IV, ‘because endeavours had been used to persuade the public that his death was only feigned’. Malicious tongues whispered that she was never pregnant – just psychotically manipulative.
James begged her to cheer up. ‘Leave off these womanly apprehensions, for I thank God I carry that love and respect unto you which by the law of God and Nature I ought to do to my wife and mother of my children … As for your dole weeds’ – the black mourning clothes she put on for her dead baby boy – ‘wearing it is utterly impertinent at this time’, he told her. He wanted to show the English that the Stuarts came in great splendour to spread peace and harmony, and preside over a new dawn for the nations of Britain. Instead, his queen flaunted what she saw as the consequences of their enmity. Anne’s gesture was as dramatic as it was self-dramatising. Miscarriages were traumatic, then as now, no matter how frequently they occurred. In a spectacle-loving age, living on the royal stage, extravagant personal gestures cohabited with the most rigid etiquette.
By 23 May, just over two weeks after she had stormed into Stirling, the queen rode with Henry into Edinburgh. Having been delayed by a cold, six-year-old Elizabeth now joined them from Linlithgow. The two bewildered, excited children were together for the first time. In each other’s company they found a refuge amid all the changes. Soon, Henry ‘loved her … so dearly that he desired to see her always by him’.
In Edinburgh, huge crowds gathered agog with curiosity to see their crown prince and Elizabeth. Cannon saluted them from the city’s castle. Anne ordered a new carriage from George Hendry, coachmakers. Now she had what she wanted, she cast off her black dole weeds, preferring a new dress of figured taffeta, with a velvet-trimmed white satin mantle for travelling. She dressed Henry in a royal purple satin doublet and breeches and Elizabeth in Spanish red taffeta. Even the queen’s clown was fitted with a new coat.
‘Many English ladies in coaches, and some riding on fair horse’, appeared in the Scottish capital, like a flock of exotic birds blown off course. Led by Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the beautiful Penelope Rich, sister of the late Earl of Essex, these were young women from the fringes of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Fashionable, intelligent, witty, highly cultured, and about the same age as the queen, Anne took several of the Countess of Bedford’s circle into her service immediately. She appointed Lucy to the bedchamber, the only Englishwoman to be brought so close at present.
The French ambassador observed the queen’s nature ‘was quite the reverse of’ the king’s. He liked to be private. ‘She was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue.’ Henry rode beside his mother and Elizabeth, saluting the crowds with care from a fine French horse presented to him by Lennox. The infant Charles would join them in England when he was considered strong enough. Queen Anne was doing the English Privy Council’s job for them, giving them what some of them had been bargaining for in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign – the whole Stuart royal family.
Just over the border, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the elderly ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber waited for their new mistress. Ever keen on continuity in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of his rule, James had simply reappointed them. With them they carried piles of the old queen’s dresses for Anne, and caskets of her jewels. Their grip tightened at the sight of Lucy Bedford and Lady Rich close at the new queen’s side. Anne listened as the venerable old ladies offered to dress her in her predecessor’s hand-me-downs, pin her jewels on her bosom and resume their old positions of privilege and intimacy at court. The queen thanked them, took the gifts, and sent her husband’s appointees away.
The royal party reached Althorp house in Northamptonshire on Saturday 25 June, where Ben Jonson had created a masque for the house’s wealthy owner, Sir Robert Spencer, and his esteemed guests.
Through the summer’s evening light, a willowy line of fairies and a satyr led ‘Queen Mab’ through the park and woods around Althorp, leaping and dancing towards the royal party.
‘Your father gives you here to the service of this Prince,’ the Satyr announced to thirteen-year-old Master Spencer, playing a huntsman. Prince Henry crossed from the audience into the masque to accept him. The two boys then rode off, to hunt together inside the magical world of the masque, though the two deer they killed were real enough. It was a world away from the fortified world of Stirling, protected from the public gaze.
The following day, Ben Jonson sent them all off with a blessing, addressing Henry as his:
dear Lord, on whom my covetous eye,
Doth feed itself, but cannot satisfy,
O shoot up fast in spirit as in years;
That when upon her head proud Europe wears
Her stateliest [at]tire, you may appear thereon
The richest gem, without a paragon.
Shine bright and fixed as the Arctic star …
Jonson foresaw Henry risen to his full height – Henry IX, the guiding North Star of Protestant Christendom, hanging in icy isolation. That day, ‘when slow time hath made you fit for war’, look across the narrow sea, ‘and think where you may but lead us forth’ on that day when ‘swords/Shall speak our actions better than our words’.
English glee bubbled over – a prince called Henry and a princess called Elizabeth. The age was both new and old.
SEVEN
A Home for Henry and Elizabeth (#ulink_40a3065a-4dc0-536b-a5b5-4ddc7dba1adf)
