After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

The shaping of the King of Scots

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is said to have written Macbeth to flatter James. It certainly did not flatter Scotland. The play, which was first performed in 1606, depicted a violent, medieval country inhabited by witches. It was supposedly set in the eleventh century but as Shakespeare knew, many at the English court believed the picture held true of the Scotland of their day – and not without some reason. For the most part Scottish society was divided between feudal lairds and their tenantry. What meagre surpluses the land produced were used to feed the lairds’ private armies before any remainder could be traded in the towns. These consequently remained small and trade was underdeveloped, while an inordinate amount of energy was expended on the detection and killing of witches. There were, however, signs of growing wealth and improvement.

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The thirty-six-year-old James VI had been King of Scotland for almost as long as Elizabeth had been Queen of England, and his reign had brought a measure of peace to what had been a notoriously volatile country. In 1598 legislation was carried through the Scots parliament that encouraged the resolution of feuds through the royal courts. With it the tradition of the feud began to die out and by January 1603 James’s efforts were culminating in the resolution of one of the last of the great feuds: that between George Gordon, the sixth Earl of Huntly, and Huntly’s enemies, the Earls of Argyll and Moray. A marriage between their children was set for the following month. This lessening civil disorder had allowed trade to improve and in the towns stone houses were gradually replacing those of wood. Although witches were being strangled and burned in numbers never remotely matched in England, this too was considered an advance. Medieval Scotland had been comparatively lax with its witches, the true danger they posed having only been revealed by modern theological works to which Scotland’s highly educated King had himself contributed. Meanwhile at court, thanks in part to James’s patronage, Scotland had become a centre of cultural importance for poetry and music. There were also developments in the sciences, with John Napier of Merchiston, the discoverer of logarithms, already working on his inventions.

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That January, 1603, James’s court was at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital was modest in size but dramatic in appearance, as the Earl of Essex’s former secretary Fynes Moryson described:

The City is high seated, in a fruitful soil and wholesome air, and is adorned with many noblemen’s towers lying about it, and abounds with many springs of sweet waters. At the end towards the East is the King’s palace joining to the monastery of the Holy Cross, which King David the first built, over which, in a park of hares, conies and deer, a high mountain hangs, called the chair of Arthur. From the King’s palace … the City still rises higher and higher towards the west, and consists especially of one broad and very fair street … and this length from the East to the West is about a mile, whereas the breadth of the City from the north to South is narrow, and cannot be half a mile. At the furthest end towards the West, is a very strong castle which the Scots hold unexpugnable … And from this castle, towards the West, is a most steep rock pointed on the highest top, out of which this castle is cut.

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Holyrood itself was also striking, with its grey stone courtyards and towers emulating the chateau of Chambord. It was reported to be in an ‘altogether ruinous’ state in 1600, but repairs costing £1,307 13 shillings and 10 pence had since been carried out and it had been furnished with several new items, including gold cloth curtains, a £20 silver water pot, several velvet chairs, eight silver chandeliers and a gilded plate worth £86. James’s private chambers were on the first floor of the northwest tower, built by his grandfather James V. There was an outer chamber to the east and an inner bedchamber to the west – the door and window frames having been painted red during his grandfather’s time. Directly above these rooms were those of James’s wife, Anna, the twenty-eight-year-old youngest daughter of Frederick II of Denmark. A new brass chandelier hung outside her door.

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There were no Christmas celebrations as there were at Whitehall: the Kirk had abolished them when James was nine. Nor were there some of the usual court entertainments. Plays, which were an English obsession, were frowned on. There were, however, pageants and fireworks, visits to the royal lion house and hunting in the park. The structure of court life was relaxed, much closer to the informality of the French model than the English. While Harington complained that Elizabeth lived ‘shut up in a chamber from all her subjects and most of her servants’, James’s courtiers wandered in and out of his rooms quite freely, and dozens had open access to his Bedchamber. Royal meals were another striking point of comparison. Elizabeth did not eat in public. Instead a great table was set near her throne in the Presence Chamber. A cloth was laid and a courtier entered with one of her ladies. They brought the cover to the table and made elaborate obeisance. After trying the food some of it was carried through to the Privy Chamber where Elizabeth would eat and drink with her habitual restraint. Royal meals in Scotland, by contrast, were convivial affairs with plenty of wine drunk and coarse language heard.

‘Anyone can enter while the king is eating,’ the English diplomat Sir Edward Wotton reported after a visit in the winter of 1601/2; ‘the King speaks to those who stand around while he is at table … and they to him. The dinner over, his custom is to remain for a time before retiring, listening to jests and pleasantries. He is very familiar with his domestics and gentlemen of the bedchamber.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Most of these domestics had served James since he was a child – his valet William Murray had been with him since he was two.

The royal table was laden with roasted game and boiled mutton, wine and ale, but did not include any fine food that was commonplace in a great English house. Fynes Moryson complained that the Scots had ‘no art of cookery, or furniture of household stuff but rather rude neglect of both’. Most Scots ate ‘red colewort and cabbage, but little fresh meat’ and even at the house of an important courtier he found the table ‘more than half furnished with great platters of porridge, each having a little piece of sodden meat’.

(#litres_trial_promo) James, however, liked his food simple, just as he declared that he preferred ‘proper, cleanly, comely and honest’ clothes over being ‘artificially trimmed and decked like a courtesan’. His courtiers wore plain English cloth, ‘little or nothing adorned with silk lace, much less with lace of silver or gold’, and the style was French – ‘all things rather commodious for use than brave for ornament’.

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James particularly disliked the wearing of earrings and was impatient of the fuss required to dress long hair. He kept his own reddish locks cropped short and his suits were usually dark and adorned with nothing more than a few enamel buttons. Wotton described the King as having a youthful face – he ‘does not seem more than twenty-eight, or thereabouts’ – and of being average in height, with broad shoulders and a ‘vigorous constitution’. He would go hunting whenever he could, often spending six hours a day galloping across country with a loosened bridle. Although it was a common pursuit amongst monarchs, and one his mother had enjoyed, her former emissary, Monsieur de Fontenay, complained that James’s passion for hunting amounted to an obsession and that he put this recreation before his work. James admitted in return he did not have much stamina for business, but he claimed he could achieve more in one hour than others in a day; that he could speak, listen and watch simultaneously and sometimes do five things at once. He was certainly a mass of nervous energy. He paced his rooms ceaselessly, fiddling with his clothes, hating to stay still even for a moment. An Englishman later described James’s twitching as resembling that of a man sitting on an anthill.

(#litres_trial_promo) But if James was unable or unwilling to concentrate on routine administrative work, Fontenay had to agree with the King that his mind was exceptionally quick:

Three qualities of mind he possesses in perfection: he understands clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory. His questions are keen and penetrating and his replies are sound. In any argument, whatever it is about, he maintains the view that appears to him most just, and I have heard him support Catholic against Protestant opinions. He is well instructed in languages, science, and affairs of state, better, I dare say than anyone else in his kingdom. In short he has a remarkable intelligence, as well as lofty and virtuous ideals and a high opinion of himself.

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James’s childhood friend, the Earl of Mar – whom James nicknamed ‘Jocky o’Sclaittis’ – had been telling the English court that the King’s body was as agile as his mind, but, as fit as James was, this was very far from the truth. Sir Edward Wotton tactfully described the lower half of James’s body as ‘somewhat slender’. In fact his legs were so weak he could barely walk before the age of seven and he never did so normally. Fontenay observed he had an ‘ungainly gait’ and others mention he meandered in a circular pattern and leant on the shoulder of one of his courtiers as he walked. The muscles in James’s face and mouth also appear to have had some weakness and his manner of eating and drinking was judged crude. One infamous memoir claims that James had ‘a tongue too large for his mouth, which made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth’.

Such descriptions suggest that James may have suffered from cerebral palsy, caused by damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after his birth.

(#litres_trial_promo) But there is another aspect to the kind of brain damage James suffered that has not previously been explored. About 60 per cent of individuals with cerebral palsy have emotional or behavioural difficulties. James’s restlessness, his inability to concentrate on routine administrative work, his hyper-concentration on what did interest him, his passion for a high stimulation activity like hunting are all characteristic of the contentious Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which, like cerebral palsy, is said to have a neurological basis.

James’s mother endured a long and difficult labour and it is possible that this is when the brain damage occurred. Many contemporaries, however, believed that his disabilities were caused in utero at the time of Riccio’s murder. The trauma to his mother might indeed have been sufficient to have damaged James – and whatever the true cause of his disabilities he had to live with the psychological effects of being told that this was the case. The childhood that had followed James’s birth was steeped in danger and he might easily have emerged from it as a brute, but despite having physical defects to remind him of the possible effects of violence on him, Wotton saw: ‘In his eyes and in the outward expression of his face … a certain natural goodness,’ and the English courtier Roger Wilbraham later claimed James had ‘the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew’. His experiences had filled with him less with anger than the desire to resolve conflict. He chose the Old Testament King Solomon as his role model and picked as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Beati Pacifici’, Blessed Are the Peacemakers.

James was convinced it was his destiny to unite the old enemies, the crowns of England and Scotland. He sometimes pointed out the lion-shaped birthmark on his arm said to fulfil the words of a Welsh prophecy, quoted by Harington in his Tract on the Succession: ‘a babe crowned in his cradle; marked with a lion in his skin; shall recover again the cross; [and] make the isle of Brutus whole and imparted … to grow henceforward better and better’.

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In James’s mind the phrase ‘recover the cross’ referred to his intention to heal religious divisions. First James intended to reform the Church of England on lines that would satisfy all except the most extreme conservatives and Puritans, for example, by developing a preaching ministry, but keeping the hierarchy of bishops. His ultimate ambition, however, was to encourage the reform of the Church of Rome and make it acceptable to moderate Protestants. It was the divisions in Christendom that lay at the heart of so much conflict across Europe and he hoped that differences could be thrashed out at a Grand Council. James often said that he revered the Catholic Church as the mother church – comments that fuelled Catholic hopes that he might convert – but he also saw it as ‘clogged with many infirmities and corruptions’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Chief amongst them was the office of the papacy and he had described the Pope as the Antichrist. ‘Does he not usurp Christ his office, calling himself universal bishop and head of the church?’, he once asked.

(#litres_trial_promo) He intended to do what other Protestants had failed to and knock the triple crown from the Pope’s head, reducing him to the rank of the first bishop of the church, ‘but not head or superior’.

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James, as he was wont to remind people in later years, was a ‘cradle king’, crowned at the age of thirteen months on 26 July 1567. The Protestant lords who had overthrown his mother placed their infant king in the guardianship of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, the father of his childhood friend Jocky o’Sclaittis, whom he had at his side in 1603. It was at Mar’s castle, perched on a sheer rock face above the town of Stirling, that James spent his formative years. The omens for James’s survival in this fortress had not been good. Harington quoted a popular saying in his Tract: ‘A king in Scotland … die[s] rarely in his bed’. The Stuart crown he had usurped was as weak as the Tudor crown was strong. There had been a succession of child kings and despised women rulers and the great lairds retained the military power that had been stripped from the English nobles by the Tudors. James’s book of instruction on matters of kingship, the Basilikon Doron, dedicated to his eldest son in 1598, recalled them as robber barons who drank

in with their very nourish milk, that their honour stood in three points of iniquity; To thrall by oppression the meaner sort that dwells near them … to maintain their servants and dependers in any wrong … and for any displeasure that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbour, to take up plain field against him; and (without respect to God, King or commonweal) to bang it out bravely, he and all his kin against him and all his.

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Scotland was riven by private wars as well as religious differences and the usurping of Mary’s crown had offered opportunities to settle many old scores as well as new ones. All save one of James’s regents were to die violently. The first, Mary, Queen of Scots’s illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated in the streets of Linlithgow on 22 January 1570, when James was three. The murder apparently pleased Mary so much that thereon she paid her brother’s assassin a yearly pension. Her old enemy, James’s paternal grandfather the Earl of Lennox, was however named the next regent as Scotland descended into civil war. Battles raged around Stirling as by night the four-year-old James slept in a bed draped in black damask, a picture of his grandfather James V on the wall, and by day he was coached by his two Calvinist tutors. The junior of these, Peter Young, remained close to James. He had been a kindly and encouraging teacher to a bright and sensitive pupil. But James’s senior tutor had proved a brutal master.

George Buchanan was the finest Latin scholar in Europe: a poet, dramatist, humanist and founding father of Presbyterianism, he arrived at Stirling a man with a mission. The ink was barely dry on his tract Detectio Mariae Reginae, a vitriolic attack on the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he was determined to raise a very different type of monarch. In this he succeeded, but at a price. He instilled in James learning that surpassed that of any other monarch in Europe, but he used the rod to do it. He espoused high, democratic ideals of kingship, but he despised courtly manners and regarded women with contempt. He allowed James to grow up as timorous as his mother was bold, as boorish as his mother was refined, as contemptuous of women as she was charming to men. James ended up resenting Buchanan and much of what he stood for, but he was every inch his pupil. Inspired by Buchanan’s example James had written several impressive theological and political works, in which his theories on the divine right of kings countered Buchanan’s quasi-republican view that kings took their authority from the people and could be lawfully deposed – views that James had come to believe were a recipe for instability.

After just a year of Buchanan’s tutoring James had been ready to open the Scottish parliament with an address in Latin. The events that followed were to be imprinted on his memory. He once said that he had learnt to speak Latin before he learnt Scots and even aged five he spoke it with confidence. His voice was naturally loud and in 1603, after years of speech-giving his language was often grave and sententious, but then it doubtless still had the squeak of a small boy. After his speech James had sat amongst the lairds, squirming in his chair until his sharp eyes and probing fingers discovered a hole, either in a tablecloth or the roof over his head. He then made the childish observation: ‘This parliament has a hole in it!’, words that were to be flung back at him as prophetic when only days later his grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, was brought into the castle dying of wounds received in a raid by his mother’s supporters.

(#litres_trial_promo) James never forgot his grandfather lying with his bowels cut open and, perhaps because of talk of his having foreseen it, he had developed a keen interest in the supposed gift of foresight.

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But Lennox’s bloody death was not the only murder James had witnessed at Stirling. The old Earl of Mar had held the regency for only a short time before it passed on to the Earl of Morton, one of James’s father’s murderers. He held it until a few months before James’s twelfth birthday, when on 4 March 1578, two great Highland Earls, Argyll and Atholl, appeared at Stirling Castle dressed in full armour. They informed James that in Scots tradition he was now of age and should abolish the regency. James’s remarkable education and royal status had ensured he never suffered from undue modesty and he was already quite willing to take on the full mantle of a king, but Morton proved reluctant to relinquish his power without a fight. On 26 April 1578 James was woken in his room at Stirling Castle by the sound of clashing steel in the hall. Morton and James’s former playmate, twenty-year-old Jocky o’Sclaittis, had returned to seize the castle and James. Possession of the person of the monarch brought with it authority and the threat of kidnap had been a constant one until very recently. As James had watched the fight he witnessed Mar’s uncle trampled to death. Terrified, he tore at his hair, shouting that ‘the Master was slain’, but the fight continued until it concluded in victory for Morton and Mar.

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James had problems sleeping for some time afterwards, and for the rest of his life he trembled at the sight of armed men. It would be a mistake, however, to label James a coward, as many Englishmen later would. As a teenager he learned to use his intellect and cunning to manipulate the fearsome warriors who wished to control him, developing a close and secretive side to his otherwise expansive character and growing perversely proud of a talent to deceive.

In 1579 Buchanan had left James as he arrived with a treatise for the boy to ponder on. De jure regni apud Scotos promulgated the Presbyterian view that God had vested power in the people who could resist and depose the monarch if he ruled tyrannically or failed to promote the ‘true’ religion. That September, however, a new and long-lasting influence had entered James’s life – one who represented everything Buchanan detested: James’s Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny.

D’Aubigny was a handsome, red-bearded father of four in his late thirties. He had returned from the court in France to deal with a dispute over the title and estates of the Lennox earldom and the newly adolescent James was fascinated by his sophisticated relative. He would stay up late with him, drinking and joking. D’Aubigny reciprocated with displays of affection and James, who had no other close family, became passionately devoted to him. D’Aubigny’s influence expanded rapidly. He reorganised James’s court and household on the French model and encouraged his interest in poetry. James in turn lavished money and titles on him, ostensibly converting him to Protestantism and eventually making him Duke of Lennox.

The English agent, Sir Henry Widdrington, had looked on appalled at Lennox’s growing power, convinced that he was using his conversion as a cover for plotting with the Catholic powers. He sent letters south warning that James was ‘altogether persuaded and led’ by Lennox, so that ‘he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, often times he will clasp him about the neck, with his arms and kiss him’. The Kirk went further and later declared that ‘the Duke of Lennox went about to draw the King to carnal lust’.

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Beyond seventeenth-century descriptions of James’s ‘lascivious’ kisses with his favourites, the exact nature of the sexual activity James enjoyed with Lennox and later male favourites is unknown. But the view of one (admittedly hostile) witness – that a man who showed so little restraint in public was unlikely to do so in private – seems a reasonable one.

(#litres_trial_promo) James was a tactile man and the chief arguments against his having been a practising homosexual fail to convince. The first is that seventeenth-century Protestants regarded sodomy with ferocious disapproval and that James himself condemned it to his son as a sin so horrible ‘that ye are bound in conscience never to forgive [it]’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Homosexual sex is not, however, limited to sodomy, and James was also well known for his blasphemous oaths and his failure to live up to much advice he gave his son. The second argument is that James’s marriage to Anna had demonstrated physical passion (as proven by her frequent pregnancies). But while it is notable that James had no great male favourites during the period in which he was fathering children, it is also evident that after the birth of his last child Sophia in 1606, his attraction for young men reasserted itself and his sexuality became a matter of significance in English political life, with the appearance of Robert Carr in 1607 and then George Villiers in 1614.

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It is not known whether the English court knew of James’s sexual preferences in 1602/3, or if so, precisely how it was regarded. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no real concept of ‘homosexuality’; sex between men was simply viewed as an act of depravity, along with all other sexual acts that took place outside marriage. It was, however, understood that some men had a particular taste for it. Burghley would have passed on everything he knew about James to his son Cecil before his death in 1598 and although there is no reported gossip on the matter in the winter of 1602/3, there are hints in comments by Sir John Harington and Sir Edward Wotton, who each praise James’s ‘chastity’ with regard to women. Harington could not resist pointing out that it was thought a little strange that James had no mistresses, confessing that in England to call a courtier chaste, ‘specially if it were afore his Mrs’, was considered an insult worthy of a stabbing. If anything was suspected, however, such worldly courtiers were unlikely to be shocked. The Earl of Essex’s closest friend, the Earl of Southampton, enjoyed the sexual companionship of both men and women without earning great opprobrium.