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

James was forced to raise new taxes and debase the coinage, but there was a danger that the Kirk would move to take advantage of growing public anger. James had infuriated the Kirk with plans to reintroduce episcopacy – an answer to Jesuit accusation that he would introduce a presbytery to England. It had also learnt that his Basilikon Doron raged about the power they had wielded in his youth. In November 1599 the Master of Gray wrote to Cecil that between the anger of the poor and that of the Kirk ‘there was in men’s breasts such a desire of reformation that nothing lacked save one gallant man for uniting grieved minds’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The ministers had already settled on the twenty-two-year-old John Ruthven, third Earl of Gowrie, and the minister Robert Bruce was sent to fetch him from France where he was studying. By this time James appeared to have forgiven the Ruthven family for their role in the attack on his mother during Riccio’s murder and for the exile of his beloved Lennox. Several of the children of the first Earl of Gowrie, who led the Ruthven raid, were now in the royal household and Anna counted three of the sisters of the third Earl amongst her ladies-in-waiting.

(#ulink_cbc439f4-c6d6-5067-8871-06c91eb6b9f0) She was especially fond of the eldest, Lady Beatrice, and their brother, nineteen-year-old Alexander, was a favourite of both James and Anna’s. Gowrie had, however, willingly agreed to the Kirk’s request, first travelling to England, where he arrived at Elizabeth’s court on 3 April 1600.

The English ambassador to Paris had written a ringing commendation of Gowrie for Cecil. He was ‘exceedingly well affected both to the common cause of religion and particularly to her majesty’, and, ‘one of whom there may be exceedingly good use made’. Gowrie had spent time in secret conferences with both the Queen and Cecil before arriving back in Edinburgh in May 1600. A huge crowd of supporters welcomed him, but James, watching, was overheard making the observation that there had been a still larger crowd for the execution of Gowrie’s father. Within three months Gowrie was dead, slain in his own house by the King’s men.

James’s explanation of these deaths was almost literally unbelievable. He insisted that on 5 August 1600 Alexander Ruthven had lured him from a day’s hunting to Gowrie House in Perth, claiming his brother had captured a man carrying a large amount of foreign gold. As the rest of the hunting party ate their dinner with Gowrie, Alexander had tricked James into following him until he came to a room ‘where a man was, which the King thought had been the man had kept the treasure’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander then grabbed James and drew his dagger saying that James had killed his father and now he would kill him. James pleaded for his life, but Alexander replied that words could not save him and ordered the man in the room to kill him. The man had seemed unwilling and a struggle followed during which James was spotted screaming for help at the window. His men dashed to his aid and killed first Alexander and then Gowrie as he fought to revenge his brother.

James ordered the Kirk’s five Edinburgh ministers to repeat this story to their congregations so that they might thank God for his deliverance, but they refused. Robert Bruce, the minister who had crowned Anna, and fetched Gowrie from France, made it clear he believed James had plotted to kill the brothers, either because of his hatred for the family, or because Anna was having an affair with one of them (there was talk that she had a flirtation with Alexander). James’s reply to these accusations was blunt and compelling: ‘I see Mr Robert,’ he told Bruce, ‘that ye would make me a murderer. It is known very well that I was never blood-thirsty. If I would have taken lives, I had causes enough; I need not to hazard myself so.’

(#litres_trial_promo) James was certainly not the kind of man to place himself in the middle of a violent situation.

When the ministers persisted in refusing to accept James’s story he had them replaced: four later capitulated and were forced to tour the country offering their humble submission in public places whilst the fifth, Robert Bruce, refused and was sent into exile. The Kirk was informed that thereafter, 5 August was to be celebrated as a national holiday with special services to give thanks for the King’s survival.

At home and abroad, however, people remained unconvinced by James’s version of events. The English ambassador Sir William Bowes thought that James, finding himself alone with Alexander – ‘a learned, sweet and artless young gentleman’ – had made some mention of the boy’s father ‘whereat the youth showed a grieved and expostulatory countenance’. James had taken fright and shouted for help, and after the boy was killed, he made up his story to conceal his embarrassment.

(#litres_trial_promo) More recent theories have suggested that Alexander offered James sexual favours or the cancellation of a debt to lure him from his protectors and kidnap him. When James had realised what was happening he shouted in terror that he was being murdered. The Kirk certainly had strong motives for supporting another kidnap attempt and there was a suggestion at the time that England was involved

(#ulink_1035d03f-847c-53dd-be0f-ecd23e1e07e8). Gowrie’s servants were, however, severely tortured in an effort to uncover a conspiracy and all denied any knowledge of one. The man whom James had seen in the tower swore he had just been told to go there and wait upon events. An explanation for this comes from Gowrie’s tutor, William Rynd, who reported that he had once heard young Gowrie say that the best way for a man to keep a plot secret was to keep its existence to himself. But it is possible that James did indeed plot against the Ruthvens. In London in the winter of 1602 a character named Francis Mowbray appeared claiming that he had evidence of the Ruthvens’ innocence. He was handed over to James that January and died in February 1603 having fallen, it was reported, from the window of his cell in an escape attempt.

Whatever the truth behind the Gowrie mystery the significance of it lies in James’s determination to use the incident to demonstrate that neither Kirk nor nobleman would be able to control him as they had done in the past, and those that tried would suffer for it. His action against the remaining members of the Ruthven family began immediately. As soon as the King’s party returned to Falkland Palace that night he had the three Ruthven sisters thrown out into the driving rain, despite Anna’s protests. She refused to believe the Ruthvens had attempted to kill her husband and saw the event entirely in terms of a triumph for the Mar faction. She stayed in bed for two days afterwards, refusing to eat or speak. When she eventually did so she shouted at her husband to beware how he treated her for she was not the Earl of Gowrie. On another occasion she ‘hoped that heaven would not visit her family with the vengeance for the sufferings of the Ruthvens’. James, aware that Anna was pregnant, took her abuse without complaint, but he was not deflected from his pursuit of vengeance.

On 6 August a party of men were sent to seize the surviving Ruthven brothers, William and Patrick, who were still only schoolboys. They escaped over the border and in June 1602 were said to be hiding in Yorkshire. James complained to Elizabeth and, with some reluctance, she agreed to have them banished. William fled abroad early in 1603 leaving Patrick behind. In Scotland, meanwhile, in the autumn of 1600, the decaying corpses of John and Alexander were tried for treason. They were found guilty, the Ruthven estates and honours were forfeited and their name proscribed. On the day their bodies were being gibbeted, quartered and exposed throughout the country, Anna gave birth to the future Charles I. James hurried to Dunfermline where she was lying with her child and in the New Year he presented Anna with a jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds. There were those amongst the Mar faction who wanted her imprisoned for her support for the Ruthvens, but James would hear none of it, ‘but … does seek by all means to cover her folly’, a witness reported.

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That January 1603 Sir Thomas Erskine, the Captain of the Guard, warned James that Anna had smuggled Beatrice Ruthven into her rooms at Holyrood and talked to her for hours just feet from where he slept. Beatrice left laden with gifts to support her in exile in England. James was shaken and angry but again he refused to punish Anna. He simply ordered workmen to seal up ‘all dangerous passages for coming near the King’s chamber.’ There were other matters to think about than the Ruthvens, as the question of the succession had returned to centre stage.

The aftermath to the Gowrie conspiracy had found James’s ally at Elizabeth’s court, the Earl of Essex, still disgraced and Secretary Cecil with total domination over the Privy Council. In December 1600, however, Cecil’s agents made an unexpected gesture of reconciliation. They claimed that ‘the Earl of Leicester or Sir Francis Walsingham were the only cutters of [Mary Stuart’s] throat’.

(#litres_trial_promo) James had ignored them. Aware of the unpopularity of Elizabeth’s government, he was convinced that she would soon be facing an uprising and in February 1601 he sent the Earl of Mar and a diplomat named Edward Bruce to aid Essex in his plans to raise a revolt.

(#ulink_f39e08c5-90f8-5bc1-a576-fa67edfbd805) But by the time Mar and Bruce arrived in London, Essex had already been tried and beheaded.

James’s fear was that Cecil would now use the Essex revolt to achieve what the confession of Valentine Thomas had failed to do, namely link him directly to a plot against Elizabeth. Fortunately the black bag containing his last letter to Essex, which the Earl wore on the day of the revolt, had disappeared. It was probably destroyed either by Essex himself or the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, who soon offered James his loyalty. With no solid evidence against him, James sent instructions for Mar and Bruce to ask the ‘present guiders’ in England to declare that he was untouched by any actions against the Queen. They were to offer his future favour to those courtiers who supported him and his eternal displeasure to those who did not. He was particularly keen for the message to get through to Cecil who, he observed, ‘is king there in effect’. With Essex dead, however, the kaleidoscope of faction was shifting once more. Cecil made clear to the envoys that he had every intention of backing the Stuart cause. The rules of primogeniture underpinned the laws of inheritance to which the entire political elite was subject and the majority had never been comfortable with overturning them, still less now when James’s dynastic rivals were particularly weak. Even a foreigner like the French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, had observed that ‘it is certain the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman’; that ruled out James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and Ferdinando Derby’s daughter, Lady Anne Stanley. Meanwhile the claim of Lord Beauchamp had been all but destroyed by the Doleman book and his failure to marry someone of suitable status.

Essex was right to believe that Cecil had needed to have a rival candidate to James in the late 1590s. The evidence suggests Cecil had considered marrying Arbella to Beauchamp’s elder son Edward Seymour, so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary Tudor. His ally, Beauchamp’s father, the Earl of Hertford, had certainly done so and Cecil’s interest in the match may have been behind the rumours in Europe that he wanted to marry Arbella himself. But Elizabeth would never have permitted a Seymour–Stuart union and the sensible thing for Cecil to do now that Essex was dead was to present himself to James as his greatest champion and suggest that Essex had really wanted the crown for himself. This appears to be exactly what he did. Bruce and Mar were delighted to have caught such a fish and tactfully dropped James’s demands for a public statement of his innocence of any plotting against the Queen. Instead they organised a code to enable Cecil to correspond in secret with the Scottish King. Names were to be represented by numbers: James, for example, was 30 and Cecil 10.

Cecil insisted that absolute secrecy be maintained over their correspondence for, as he later put it, ‘if Her Majesty had known all I did … her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He had a narrow escape from being discovered only that summer. Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, later described how the Queen was walking in Greenwich Park when she ‘heard the post blow his horn’. She asked that the bag of letters be brought to her and Cecil, knowing that it would contain letters from Scotland, fell on his knees and begged her not to look at them. He told her that if she did people would think ‘it to be out of a jealousy and suspicion of him’ which would leave him disgraced and unable to continue working for her effectively.

(#litres_trial_promo) Elizabeth chose not to look in the bag, but Cecil remained so nervous of discovery that he risked insulting his future Queen by asking James not to tell Anna of their correspondence.

Cecil’s first letter to the King assured him that Elizabeth was a dynastic legitimist, not at all inclined to ‘cut off the natural branch and graft upon some wild stock’, but he warned that Elizabeth would perceive any demand for a public recognition of his right as a threat. Furthermore if he invaded England as Essex had suggested all Englishmen would unite against him. James was happy to agree to Cecil’s requests, but in turn he required that Cecil work with two Englishmen he trusted. The first, Lord Henry Howard, was the embittered younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, beheaded for plotting to marry James’s mother – and thus a member of a family who had proven their loyalty to the Stuart cause. The second was Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, who like Howard was a Catholic, though Elizabeth had famously said of him that he ‘reconciled what she believed to be impossible, a stiff papist to a good subject’. Where Howard was a brilliant academic but a tedious companion, Worcester was handsome and charismatic – the perfect courtier – and when Elizabeth had sent him to Scotland in 1590 to congratulate James on his marriage he had impressed the King so much that they had remained in contact thereafter.

James hoped that as a leader of the English Catholics Worcester was well placed to reconcile his coreligionists to the King’s inheritance. Cecil had therefore helped engineer Worcester’s promotion to the Privy Council in the summer of 1601, along with two other new members: Arbella Stuart’s maternal uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Cecil’s protégé, Sir John Stanhope, an old enemy of Shrewsbury’s.

(#ulink_23e73f12-6d7b-5832-b84f-251a438b8030) Howard assured James that Shrewsbury had only been picked because Elizabeth felt she had to respond to complaints that the nobility were under-represented on the Council, adding bitchily that Elizabeth never listened to his advice on anything. In fact James and Cecil recognised the need to have an ally within the Arbella camp on the Council and Cecil had chosen Stanhope as his counterweight. Thomas Wilson’s State of England described how Cecil maintained a tradition of pairing rival with rival in all the great offices of state so that ‘each having his enemies eye to over look him, it may make him look more warily to his charge, and that if anybody should incline to any unfaithfulness … it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head’. They in turn were supported only by ‘base pen clerks … that cannot conceive his master’s drifts and policies’.

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As Thomas Wilson observed, Cecil was like his father ‘of whom it was written that he was like an aged tree that lets none grow which near him planted be’.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was already clear that it would be more difficult for Cecil to maintain his political hegemony under James, but he was determined to cut two of his old allies down to size: his former brother-in-law, Lord Cobham and Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. One of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour, Meg Radcliffe, had predicted years before that the anti-Essex alliance would break up after the Earl’s death and so it was proving. Cobham and Ralegh were not of any further use to Cecil; if anything, they were a liability, unpopular with almost everybody. The women of the court detested Lord Cobham, an ill-tempered individual later described by a courtier as ‘but one degree from a fool’ and the men loathed Ralegh whom they considered an arrogant upstart.

Born the younger son of a mere tenant farmer from an old but impoverished Devonshire family, Ralegh had caught Elizabeth’s attention early in the 1580s. According to one telling story, Ralegh had been called before the Privy Council to explain why he had fallen out with his commanding officer in Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Ralegh was already an experienced soldier, having spent his teenage years fighting for the Protestant cause in France. Wilton, however, was a notorious one. His infamy rested on his having ordered the cold-blooded killing of 600 mainly Italian and Spanish prisoners at Smerwick Fort, just north of Dingle Bay. Even in an era of endemic violence this massacre had shocked: ‘Truly I never heard of such a bloody barbarous action, as the Lord Grey … committed in Ireland upon the Spaniards’, the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later recalled, ‘for whereas they had submitted himself to their mercy, he put some four or five hundred of them [in effect the whole number] into a yard, weaponless; and then were soldiers sent in with clubs, bills and swords, and slew everyman of them.’

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This massacre was not, however, the subject of Ralegh’s complaints to the Council. The boy who had seen the horrors of the wars in France did not become the man to blanch in Ireland. Ralegh was one of two officers who had led the companies that carried out the killings. Ralegh was instead at the Council table to present his own ideas about winning the war in Ireland and, as the writer John Aubrey described it, he ‘told his tale so well, and with so good a grace and presence that the Queen took especial notice of him, and presently preferred him’. Elizabeth liked to surround herself with a particular type of man – ‘proper men’ was how Aubrey put it and Ralegh exemplified this ideal, as one contemporary recalled: ‘For touching his shape and lineaments of body, they were framed in so just a proportion and so seemly an order, as there was nothing in them that a man might well wish to have been added or altered. In such gifts of the mind as the world generally esteems, he not only excelled most, but matched even the best men of his time.’

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The Queen had showered Ralegh with gifts and honours: the estates of the young Catholic traitor who had given the Babington plot its name, a prized knighthood and the Bishop of Durham’s crumbling palace in London. Ralegh renovated it and made it the centre of an intellectual circle that discussed science and religion. From here he also planned his great expeditions, including that which founded the first English colony in the New World at Roanoke Island. Elizabeth bestowed the name Virginia on it and all things from the New World became fashionable, from smoking tobacco in silver pipes to eating potatoes, which were considered an aphrodisiac. Ralegh, who was said to ‘love a wench well’, had little need of sexual fillips, but he had disadvantages as a courtier. Being an outsider he had no network of powerful relations to protect his interests. He had befriended Lord Cobham because he was an immensely rich peer with all the social contacts he himself lacked. He might, however, have acquired more friends with better judgement if his sarcasm and ‘damnable pride’ had not earned him so many enemies. It was said ‘He was commonly noted for using of bitter scoffs and reproachful taunts which bred him much dislike’ and ‘was so far from affecting popularity as he seemed to take a pride in being hated of the people’.

Ralegh took great pleasure in annoying those less quick-witted than himself and even ignored religious sensibilities, teasing the pious by ‘perverting the words and sense of Holy Scripture’. Many assumed he was an atheist, something considered almost synonymous to being evil.

(#litres_trial_promo) There was considerable relief therefore when Essex replaced Ralegh as Elizabeth’s favourite in 1587, and no little delight when he fell into disgrace in May of 1592 after he married one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour behind the Queen’s back, and then lied to her about it. It was Cecil who had eventually smoothed Ralegh’s path back to royal favour. In 1597 he had returned to his former post as Captain of the Guard and thereafter he had proved a ruthless ally of Cecil’s in the factional struggle with Essex. He had even suggested that Cecil murder Essex in January 1600 when there appeared to be a danger that the Queen might accept him back in favour.

The beginnings of the split between the old allies came the following summer when Ralegh and Cobham turned up uninvited at the peace conference of Boulogne – the event that had convinced Essex that Cecil was seeking to come to an accommodation with the Archdukes of the Netherlands, the Infanta Isabella and her husband Albert. In fact, as Cecil complained to a friend, they had kept him ignorant of their activities.

(#litres_trial_promo) What they appear to have been involved in were unilateral negotiations concerning a collection of treasure known as the ‘Burgundy jewels’. It had belonged to ancestors of the Archdukes who once ruled the ancient Kingdom of Burgundy, a traditional ally of England against France. The jewels had been given to Elizabeth in pawn by the Dutch rebels in exchange for a loan of £28,000, a fraction of the value of the treasure, and Albert and Isabella were desperate to redeem them.

(#litres_trial_promo) They hoped that paying generously would help pave the way for better relations with England and perhaps even lead to a revival of the old Anglo-Burgundian alliance – something that might have appealed to Ralegh who recognised, as Essex did, that Spanish power was in decline. The debts of the Spanish crown were escalating and the population dropping, with plague and famine killing hundreds of thousands. Their new king, Isabella’s half-brother Philip III, was a slow, fat, pink-skinned man, incapable of energising his country and the national mood was encapsulated in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the hero who tilted at windmills. France by contrast was emerging as a great power. Henri IV had restored royal authority after decades of civil war and the peace made with Spain in 1598 allowed French trade to flourish. ‘France,’ Ralegh had warned in 1600, ‘is already one of the greatest kingdoms in Europe, and our farthest friend.’

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But Ralegh’s actions were not all about politics. He was also keen to make money and Cobham, whom Elizabeth had employed to negotiate for peace with the Archduke’s emissary the Count of Aremberg since 1597, was easy to manipulate. In the event, however, the negotiations came to nothing and Ralegh only succeeded in losing Cecil’s trust.

The first indication of Secretary Cecil’s anger came in 1601. After Cecil’s wife died in 1598, the Raleghs had often taken care of his son, William. The boy adored Ralegh, whom he called his ‘captain’, but he was now taken away from their home for good. Cecil, however, was careful to disguise his ill will towards his erstwhile allies: ‘in show we are great’ he told a friend, ‘and all my revenge shall be to heap coal on their heads’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cobham and Ralegh were therefore shocked to find that their names were not amongst those invited to join the Privy Council in the summer, though Ralegh still hoped that he would be made a Councillor when Parliament opened in November 1601.

(#litres_trial_promo) Just before then an opportunity arose for the two friends to make contact with James, as Cecil had done.

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James’s latest envoy Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, son of his beloved Esmé, had arrived at Dover. Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, was there to attend on him. He seized the opportunity to express to Lennox his wish to forward James’s claim, but unfortunately he then boasted about it to Cecil who, after listening to his excitable brother-in-law, delivered an icy warning. He told Cobham that if James informed Elizabeth of what he had done he would be in terrible trouble. Cobham protested that he had only spoken from excessive zeal, to which Cecil piously retorted that he hoped the Queen would outlive him and that no dealings with James would thus be necessary. Cobham and Ralegh were desperate to retain the Queen’s favour, which appeared to be mysteriously evaporating, and it was a shaken Cobham who relayed Cecil’s words to Ralegh. He fell straight into the Secretary’s trap. Instead of pursuing Lennox, Ralegh told Cecil that Lennox had approached him, but that he had told him that he was ‘too deeply engaged … to his own mistress’ to seek favour elsewhere.

(#litres_trial_promo) Come November, however, Ralegh still did not have a place on the Privy Council and it was an embittered figure that took his seat in parliament that month.

As Cecil spelt out Elizabeth’s requests for subsidies to support the war in Ireland to parliament, Ralegh made sarcastic interventions. Infuriated, Cecil resolved to blacken Ralegh and Cobham’s names with James, telling Howard these ‘two hedgehogs … would never live under one apple tree’ with him.

(#litres_trial_promo) Howard was happy to do the dirty work and the Scottish King was soon complaining about the ‘ample, Asiatic and endless volumes’ that Howard sent him on the wickedness of Ralegh, Cobham and a third figure, an old friend of Ralegh’s, Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. ‘You must remember,’ Howard wrote on 4 December 1601, ‘that I gave you notice of the diabolical triplicity that is Cobham, Ralegh, and Northumberland, that meet every day at Durham house …’ He claimed they had hatched a plan, that ‘Northumberland … a sworn enemy to King James’, should pretend to Cecil that he supported his candidature. This ploy had failed, Howard continued, so Northumberland had told his wife: ‘He had rather the King of Scots was buried than crowned.’