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

What really mattered to courtiers was how a king’s sexual preferences impacted on politics. Wotton and Harington praised James’s ‘chastity’ because in not keeping mistresses he was not creating bastards to rival his legitimate children. Male lovers, however, could hold direct power in a way that a mistress could not, and the power that Lennox held foreshadowed that of James’s later favourites in England. Safe in the knowledge of James’s devotion, Lennox had moved against the regent Morton, a trusted ally of England. Elizabeth had made a formal approach to James demanding that he get rid of ‘the professed Papist’, Monsieur d’Aubigny, but although James was usually wary of offending Elizabeth, on this he stood his ground.

James’s stance sealed Morton’s fate and the last regent was executed during the summer of 1581, ostensibly for his part in Darnley’s murder. ‘That false Scots Urchin!’ Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed when the news of Morton’s death reached her, ‘what can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!’

The following year the sixteen-year-old James was kidnapped by allies of the Kirk led by William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie and son of Patrick Ruthven whose servant had held the pistol to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots during the Riccio murder. The captured king had been forced to look on as Lennox fled into exile in France where he died in 1583. But in due course James had used his cunning to escape his captors and effect a counter coup with Gowrie’s rivals. Gowrie, having been initially pardoned, was executed in May 1584, after attempting to stage a second coup; leading Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee to England and the Scottish parliament ordered all copies of Buchanan’s De jure regni, with its arguments against the divine right of kings, to be handed in to the authorities so that they could be purged of offensive material.

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It was at this time that Monsieur de Fontenay, Mary, Queen of Scots’s emissary, had visited James’s court. Fontenay thought the eighteen-year-old king ‘for his years the most remarkable Prince who ever lived’. But he also described a very damaged individual, ‘an old young man’, both wary and childishly self-indulgent. There were three aspects of James’s personality that particularly concerned the Frenchman: James’s arrogance, fanned by his superior education, blinded him to his ‘poverty and insignificance’ on the world stage. He was ‘overconfident of his strength and scornful of other princes’ – a characteristic that was still truer of him in 1603 when he had two decades of successful rule in Scotland behind him. Lastly, Fontenay made his observations about James’s addiction to hunting. The sport seems to have given him a sense of release from his disabilities matched by no other physical pursuit, other than sex, but his attachment to it was as uncontrolled as his love for his favourites and this incontinence was evident in other aspects of James’s life.

He regularly spent money he did not have (a common problem in adults with ADHD). Elizabeth, not known for her generosity, bailed out her profligate neighbour in a series of payments totalling around £58,000, from 1586 to 1603.

(#litres_trial_promo) He also appeased his lairds with gifts of titles without concern that he might degrade their value: by 1603 Scotland had as many nobles as England, though a population only a quarter of the size.

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Mary, however, was also curious to know not only about her son’s character but also his religious views. It was evident that he felt his mother’s chief enemies, Presbyterians such as Buchanan, had also proved dangerous to him, and she hoped that James might invite her back to Scotland. Fontenay, however, forewarned her that although James had indeed grown to dislike his Presbyterian ministers and regarded the Kirk as the chief threat to royal rule, he despised the Pope and showed no obvious affection for her. Mary nevertheless remained desperate to believe that James would recognise her right to be sovereign of Scotland if she offered to legitimise the title of king that he had usurped from her. She made contact with her son to argue that such a deal was greatly to his advantage since the Catholic powers would then support his candidature for the English succession. But in 1585 she discovered James had made an agreement with Elizabeth that made him a pensioner of the English crown

(#ulink_4263a68d-0be1-5a4d-a31e-73e8168d8566) and left her in her prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire. Terrified that she was going to be left in England to be murdered under the Bond of Association, Mary threatened to disinherit him. He never contacted her again. The following year Sir Francis Walsingham began gathering the evidence to convict Mary of involvement in Babington’s plot against Elizabeth. Only the threat that James would break Scotland’s treaties with England and turn to France or Spain to avenge his mother’s death could have saved her. But while James pleaded for Mary’s life after her conviction, he never threatened to break Scotland’s treaties with England. He may have rested his hopes on Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit regicide, but he was certainly prepared to take the risk that his mother would be killed. While Elizabeth did not want to take responsibility for Mary’s death she had asked Mary’s gaolers to murder her so that she could cast the blame there. When they refused she signed Mary’s death warrant and then she suspended it as she redoubled her efforts to have Mary killed under the Bond of Association. Burghley, however, ignored her orders and convened a meeting of the Privy Council to ensure that the warrant was put into effect. James learned the grim details of his mother’s death first hand when her servants returned to Scotland.

After eighteen years confined to a series of houses in England, Mary’s elegant frame had become thick set and her face hung with double chins. But her courage and dignity remained. On 8 February 1587 in the fire-lit hall of Fotheringay, she approached the scaffold smiling, having cast herself in the role of a Catholic martyr with ‘an Agnus Dei about her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and a pair of beads at her girdle with a golden cross at the end of them’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The death of a common traitor nevertheless awaited her, and it was not to be a dignified one.

Mary’s French physician, Monsieur Bourgoing, recorded in his journal that once she had been blindfolded and her prayers said she had lifted her head ‘thinking she would be decapitated with a two-handed sword (according to the privilege reserved in France for Princes and gentlemen)’. Henry VIII had granted such a privilege to Anne Boleyn and, when Elizabeth’s life had been under threat in the aftermath of the Wyatt revolt against Mary I, she had expressed the hope that if it came to it, she would be executed in the same manner. But Mary, who had been a Queen of France, was led to the block and butchered with an axe, ‘like those with which they cut wood’, Bourgoing noted with disgust. It took the nervous executioner three strokes to take off Mary’s head and when his companion raised it up, with the shout ‘God save the Queen’, he found himself, in a moment of grim farce, holding a chestnut wig, as her grey head rolled on the floor.

Mary’s weeping servants had stayed after the official witnesses left the room and watched the executioners strip the stockings from Mary’s corpse (it was usual for the executioners to sell any clothes from the corpse of their victims; even their hair could be cut from their heads). As the men pulled and ripped, Mary’s little dog, a Skye terrier, dashed out from under her skirts. ‘The poor creature, covered with blood, rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively,’ Bourgoing recalled. Confused, it had lapped at the pools of blood on the floor before being taken away.

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After Mary’s servants had finished recounting their story James was silent, and he quickly retired to his room. He had once said that Scotland could never be without faction while Mary was alive, but the manner of her death was a bitter humiliation for him and for his country: a high price to pay for Elizabeth’s crown. With his noblemen demanding vengeance, James immediately cut all contact with England. South of the border, meanwhile, Elizabeth went into mourning; Burghley was banned from her presence and Sir William Davison, who had delivered the death warrant, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth then sent her cousin Sir Robert Carey to Scotland with a letter in which she swore that she had signed Mary’s death warrant only on the understanding that it would be put into effect in the event of the arrival of an invasion force. But Carey was stopped at the Scottish border and was forced to wait for days before James agreed to see him.

The storm did pass, however, as Elizabeth and James knew it would. James accepted Elizabeth’s story, with English money sweetening the pill. Elizabeth for her part forgave Burghley, but not Davison, whom she made the scapegoat for what had occurred.

James seized the opportunity offered by Mary’s death to heal the divisions in Scotland. Thereafter he had rewarded and protected his mother’s servants and in the Basilikon Doron James advised his son that he had found those who served his mother amongst his most loyal subjects.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a lesson he would carry with him to England.

James had chosen the future Queen of Scots and England with care. In 1589 Anna was a Protestant princess, with a generous dowry comprising £150,000 and various territories including the Orkney and Shetland Isles pawned to Scotland in the previous century. A miniature had also shown the fourteen-year-old to be very pretty, with fair hair and ivory skin. There had been an exchange of letters in French during which the lonely James fell so in love with his future companion that when the ship bringing her to Scotland was caught in storms and forced to head to Norway, he set sail to fetch her, committing ‘himself and his hopes Leander-like to the waves of the ocean, all for his beloved Hero’s sake’.

As soon as he arrived in Norway, James had made his way along the coast by ship and horse until he reached Oslo and the bishop’s palace. There he dashed to see Anna ‘with boots and all’. The minister David Lindsay, who was with James, declared her ‘a princess both godly and beautiful’. Anna was tall for her age with a determined set to her chin, and James was immediately ‘minded to give the Queen a kiss after the Scottish fashion, which the Queen refused as not being the form of her country; but after a few words privily spoken between his majesty and her, familiarity ensued’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The royal couple were married the following Sunday before travelling to Denmark to enjoy a second wedding and several months of honeymooning amongst Anna’s relatives. It was here, amidst the rich and sophisticated Danish court, that James was introduced to the modish European theories on witchcraft he later expounded in his Daemonologie, a treatise he published in support of the persecution of witches.

The Danish admiral who had escorted Anna to Norway had blamed the storms on the wife of a Copenhagen burgess with whom he had quarrelled. She confessed under torture that she was a witch and was burnt alive in September 1590 along with several others whom she had named. The Kirk had long been obsessed with witchcraft, but they had been unable to persuade James to take an interest in it until he returned from Denmark. Investigations however, now lead to the unmasking of a coven in Berwick which, it was claimed, had plotted to kill the King. James attended the trials and was astonished to hear the accused witches describe what he believed to be private conversations he had had with Anna in Norway. The first of the great waves of witch killing in Scotland had soon followed.

Anna had also found herself subject to the Kirk’s disapproval, with her Lutheran faith proving to be an early source of friction. Even her coronation as Queen of Scotland proved a controversial affair. James’s coronation had been the first Protestant coronation in Scotland, but it was rushed and had kept many Catholic features. Anna’s offered an opportunity to design a more purely Protestant ceremony and the ministers of the Kirk were anxious to get rid of the anointing, which they condemned as a ‘Jewish’ ritual. James was equally determined to keep it since it reflected his view that kings drew their rights from God and not the people. When he threatened to ask one of his remaining bishops to carry it out they gave way, but tensions remained when the coronation took place in the Abbey church of Holyrood on 17 May 1590.

The ceremony began with a grand procession of trumpeters and nobles. James followed, dressed in deep red, with five earls carrying his long train. Behind them came Anna. She joined James on a throne placed on a raised platform. Hymns were sung and, later, after a short oration by the minister Robert Bruce, the moment came for the anointing.

(#litres_trial_promo) A witness recorded that ‘the Countess of Mar went up to the queen and bared a little of the queens right arm and shoulder. Robert Bruce immediately poured the queen’s oil onto her bare arm and shoulder’. Anna was then taken away and dressed in new robes of red velvet and white Spanish taffeta before being returned to her seat. ‘Silence was called for. Then his majesty had the crown delivered to her … Immediately afterwards his majesty delivered the sceptre to Robert Bruce that he might pass it to the queen.’ As he did so he acknowledged Anna as queen and pledged obedience, but his speech concluded, ‘we crave from your majesty the confession of the faith and religion which we profess’. Anna had been promised the free exercise of her Lutheran faith, but from that moment it was apparent that she would be pressured into accepting the lower church Protestantism of Scottish Calvinism.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anna, however, proved to be very much her own woman.

The Duc de Sully described Anna’s character as ‘quite the reverse of her husband’s; she was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even at just fifteen and unable to speak Scots,

(#ulink_395416be-1736-5f20-b39e-79beb13984a2) Anna had made her presence felt. She had been raised in one of the most prestigious kingdoms in Europe and she encouraged a new formality at James’s court. ‘Things are beginning to be strangely altered,’ it was reported; ‘Our Queen carries a marvellous gravity, which, with the reserve of her national manners, contrary to the humour of our people, has banished all our ladies clean from her.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Anna also made it plain that she enjoyed traditional courtly pursuits and she quickly earned herself the sobriquet the ‘dancing queen’, as well as the anger of the Kirk, who condemned her ‘night waking and balling’.

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James, however, found that Anna had a warm and generous temperament and the early years of the marriage were happy ones, with Anna joining him hunting and him indulging her love of fashion and jewellery. In January 1603, her wardrobe included gold on peach gowns with silver sleeves and her hair was habitually adorned with Scottish pearls strung on coronets worn on the back of the head. Every New Year, James added new jewels to the collection of ‘my dearest bedfellow’: necklaces fringed with diamond drops, jewelled flower and butterfly brooches and a large number of diamond ciphers. Her favourite was A for Anna – the name she always used, although James preferred to call her ‘my Annie’.

(#litres_trial_promo) She quickly learned to write as well as speak Scots and by the time she was eighteen she was also politically active. A member of the Mar family later complained that Anna’s friends ‘generally happened to be of a contrary party to those whom the King thought his faithfulest friends’. James, however, recognised that she was uniquely placed to intercede for those who felt cut off from royal favour and he demonstrated that he appreciated her role by listening to, if not always agreeing with, her opinions.

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Gradually it was noticed that Anna had become close to her French-educated courtiers: she had depended on them for conversation before she learnt Scots and she appreciated their refinements, as did James. Many were Catholic and, although Anna had sworn an oath at her coronation to ‘work against all popish superstition’, she was reported to be leaning towards Catholicism as early 1593.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Countess of Huntly, who gave her a Catholic catechism, was believed to be the main source of influence. The Countess was part of a group that backed the reunification of the Churches and Anna may have been aware that this was an area that interested her husband. In any event the Countess’s conversation doubtless made an attractive contrast to the lectures Anna received at the hands of the Kirk. The turning point in Anna’s religious life came in about 1600 when the chaplain she had brought with her from Demark became a Calvinist.

Since Anna could not tolerate becoming a Calvinist herself she sacked her chaplain and turned to her Catholic friends for advice. They smuggled the Jesuit priest Robert Abercrombie into a secret room to give Anna instruction. She duly visited him for three days and on the last she heard mass and received the sacrament as a Catholic. Anna later described to Abercrombie how James confronted her about rumours of her conversion when they were in bed together, asking if it was true that she had ‘some dealings with a priest’. She had immediately confessed. ‘Well, wife,’ James apparently told her, ‘if you cannot live without this sort of thing, do your best to keep things as quiet as possible; for, if you don’t, our crown is in danger.’

(#litres_trial_promo) James’s response, if accurately reported, seems a remarkably mild one, but he must have been as aware of the potential benefits of his wife’s conversion to his image abroad, as he was of its dangers to his popularity at home.

Since the publication of the Jesuit-penned Conference About the Next Succession, James had sought to deflect interest from the candidacy of the Infanta Isabella. He hinted to English Catholics, to the Vatican and to the new King of France Henri IV, that he would offer toleration of religion in England and that he might even convert. Anna’s own conversion added considerable credence to his claims and according to the Duc de Sully she became ‘deeply engaged in all the civil factions, not only in Scotland in relation to the Catholics, whom she supported and had even first encouraged, but also in England’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Robert Abercrombie was allowed to stay in Scotland until 1602, during which time Anna received the sacrament from him a further nine times. She would come to him early in the morning whilst the rest of the household slept and he recalled that afterwards she would stay and talk with him and that ‘sometimes she expressed her desire that her husband should be a Catholic, at other times her son should be educated under the direction of the Sovereign Pontiff’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was, however, the Mar family and not Anna who was raising James’s heir – a matter over which she felt deep resentment.

Prince Henry, the first of James and Anna’s children, was born in February 1594 and soon after Anna had discovered that James intended for Henry to be raised at Stirling Castle, as he had been. It meant that if anything happened to James during Henry’s minority the Earl of Mar would become regent of Scotland instead of Anna, which was the norm in Europe. James was once overheard trying to explain to Anna that he was concerned that ‘if some faction got strong enough, she could not hinder his boy being used against him, as he himself had been against his unfortunate mother’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anna refused to accept this and pleaded with James to change his mind, reminding him how she had ‘left all her dear friends in Denmark to follow him’.

Anna usually got her way but on this James flatly refused to yield; he even gave written orders to Mar that he was to keep Prince Henry until he was eighteen unless he himself instructed otherwise.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1596 Anna gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who was sent to be raised by Lord and Lady Livingstone, along with her younger sister, Margaret, who died at the age of two. James and Anna’s second son, Charles, was born in 1600 and subsequently placed with Lord Fyvie. In May 1602 a third son, Robert, followed but died four months later. These sad separations may have served to sour the royal marriage, but it was, above all, Anna’s lasting hatred for the Mar family that explains her reaction to that mysterious episode in Scottish history, the Gowrie affair: an episode that concluded in the destruction of all significant opposition to James and the Mar faction.

By the autumn of 1599 James had become desperately worried that he was about to lose his chance of inheriting Elizabeth’s throne. His principal supporter at Elizabeth’s court, Essex, was under house arrest. Essex’s followers had warned him that Sir Robert Cecil would destroy his claim to the succession once Essex was out of the way, and there was evidence to support their view. In 1598 an English Catholic called Valentine Thomas had hinted in a confession that King James of Scotland had asked him to assassinate the Queen. The 1585 statute precluding those who plotted against Elizabeth from the succession was still extant and James was convinced that Cecil was behind Thomas’s confession, just as Lord Burghley had been behind the statute, which had been aimed at his mother. Elizabeth assured James that she did not believe Thomas, but when she ignored his demands for a public statement of his innocence, James listened to Essex’s supporters in their call for him to raise an army to back plans to overthrow the Queen.

That October James told his parliament that he ‘was not certain how soon he should have to use arms but whenever it should be, he knew his right and would venture crown and all for it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It had proved difficult, however, to raise the money for such an army. James’s financial situation, which had begun to improve three years earlier, was once again in desperate straits.

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