The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart

Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.

A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.

The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.

At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.

Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.

Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.

Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.

The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.

Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.

Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble seafood, lay in heaps on the decks – ‘herrings, whitings, flukes, oysters, buckies, lampets, partans, lobsters, crabs, spout-fish, clams’. Sea maidens distributed the feast among the guests. From the galleries at the end of the room, the hautbois began a tune, joined by the viols, recorders, flutes, and then scores of choral voices all in deafening counterpoint to each other, singing in praise of king, queen and the prince of glorious expectation, Henry Frederick Stuart. As the music reached a crescendo, each of the thirty-six cannon unleashed a volley. The walls of the great hall thundered and echoed. The infant must have leapt from his skin.

From Stirling to St James’s Palace in London, Prince Henry would learn a humanist truism: the encounter with the ancients in whatever form you find them – in coin or word or image, in plays, masques, and pictures – will endow you with their qualities of rationality, eloquence, glory, wealth, virtue, and political wisdom. Europeans communicated through these symbolic languages. James and Anne used this language on Henry’s christening day to demonstrate the sophistication and merit of the dynasty sitting in wait for the death of Elizabeth Tudor.

Next morning the celebrations continued, as guests made their way in groups into Edinburgh. Others headed for the port of Leith and their ships. Ambassadors penned their accounts and examined the quality of the gifts of gold chains King James sent for their masters. Meanwhile a poem, ‘Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia’ (‘On the Birth of the Scoto-Britannic Prince’), by Andrew Melville, one of Scotland’s leading Presbyterian churchmen, reminded them of the true significance of Henry’s birth for Christendom:

Those who were divided by the Tweed …

The rule of Scoto-Britannic sovereignty now joins together,

United in law and within a Scoto-Britannic commonwealth,

And a Prince born of a Scoto-Britannic king

Calls them into a single Scoto-Britannic people.

To what great heights will Scoto-Britannic glory now rise

With no limits set by space and time?

By the time Elizabeth of England heard the word ‘Scoto-Britannic’ in this context for the fifth time in five lines, she was incandescent with rage. Chief minister, Robert Cecil, penned a letter on her behalf, pointing out that it verged on treason to say that James VI was ‘king of all Britain in possession’. James responded laconically that, ‘being descended as he was’ from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, ‘he could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of her Majesty’. He was Elizabeth’s closest blood male heir.

James connived in having the poem broadcast as widely as possible and authorised the Royal Printer, Robert Waldegrave, to publish it. It enjoyed wide circulation in Protestant circles across Europe and was reprinted several times in Amsterdam.

Once Henry heads the united ‘Scoto-Britannic people’, the poem thundered on, he will lead them into the cosmic conflict against the combined forces of papacy and Spain to ‘triumph over anointed Geryon’. In Roman mythology, Geryon is the triple-headed monster guarding the cattle in the Underworld. And here Geryon meant Spain. Melville addressed the infant:

Your foot tramples the triple diadem of the Roman Cerberus,

Dinning out of Hell sounds with thunders terrible

From the Capitoline Hill.

The pope was ‘the Roman Cerberus’, the attack dog guarding the gates of hell. Cerberus belonged to Geryon (Spain), who fattened him with titbits of Spanish New World wealth. Melville combined classical motifs and an Old Testament prophetic tone so beloved of godly radicals, alert for signs their God willed them to complete the religious revolution.

Lurid propaganda perhaps, yet fear of popery drenched Protestant Europe. ‘It crossed all social boundaries; as a solvent of political loyalties it had no rivals.’ The destabilising range and power of that fear was heightened by the biggest problem facing Protestant Europe right now – the revival of militant Catholicism.

Hitting back, Melville promoted Henry as Christendom’s saviour. Born in obscurity in Scotland, he would lead the Protestants of a united Europe against the sprawling gold- and silver-engorged powers of Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in a battle for the soul of the ‘nation of Europe’.

‘The holy zeal of Christians … in their struggle against the anti-Christ’ had found their future leader.

THREE

The Fight for Henry (#ulink_cd3685f1-6f86-5a88-804d-0d433da912cf)

‘TWO MIGHTY FACTIONS’

It was pleasing for James to envisage the European scale of Henry’s destiny, but he and his advisers knew it might come to nothing if the king could not ensure order and tranquillity at home – where, the English ambassador Bowes told Robert Cecil, ‘the question of the Queen and her son’, is ‘a breach working mightily’.

Some even saw Henry’s wet nurse as playing a sinister part in the drama. Everyone knew a child imbibed the nurse’s character with her milk. When a messenger told Anne that Margaret Mastertoun had ‘become dry through sickness’, she feared the worst. But the drama soon passed. Whatever illness the wet nurse had, Henry had caught it, ‘but is now well again. The King coming, the Nurse prayed pardon.’ Her milk, however, had gone. ‘The old nurse being of the Countess of Mar’s choice,’ Bowes explained, ‘some seek to impute this fault to Mar.’ If abundant breast milk equalled loyalty, the withdrawal of it implied treason. The Mars found another woman to tend to Henry, but ‘the young Prince cried for want of’ his old nurse and refused to feed. Recovering but unsettled, he preferred to go hungry and risked weakening himself further.

Anne asked that ‘the keeping of the Prince’ be moved to Edinburgh Castle, where she might personally oversee his care and prevent his nursery woes escalating into real danger. But Edinburgh, the seat of government, religion, and plots, was felt to be a more dangerous place for the prince. James refused to hand over Henry’s care to her.

The queen’s initial misery at being deprived of her son now settled into a pulsing anger. ‘Two mighty factions’ formed: the king’s supporters – including Mar, his kinsman Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone – warning that Anne, Queen of Scots, schemed with the discontented Catholic ‘[Earl] Bothwell and that crew, for the coronation of the Prince and the departure of the King’. Sir John Maitland, the Scottish chancellor, spearheaded support for the queen. ‘What the end will be, God knows,’ sighed Robert Aston, an English agent.

The king tried to get the leaders of the factions, Mar and Maitland, to reconcile before the court but found that courtiers continued to put light ‘to the coal’ of the strife, standing back to ‘let others blow at it’. This ‘is the condition of this estate … Everyone shooting at others without respect to King or Commonweal, or the safety of the young Prince’, commented Aston.

From Whitehall, Robert Cecil pondered the implications for England if King James and his obdurate consort ascended the English throne. James’s apparent disinclination to suppress dissent and put his ‘Lords … to the horn’ left a question mark against his suitability as successor. Yet the Scottish king had settled Scotland as his forebears had failed to do. The child was a healthy male and, despite the unpropitious circumstances, there were whispers at court that he might soon have a sibling: ‘by all appearances [the queen] … is with child, yet she denies it’, agent Aston reported to Ambassador Bowes.

Hostilities quickly resumed though, with James informing Anne that in pressing for the removal of the prince, her supporters ‘sought nothing but the cutting of his [the king’s] throat’. Worse, he said, her plots were not only ‘a danger to his person’, but ‘treason’. Anne collapsed under the strain. If she had been pregnant, she was not any more.

Anxiety for the health of his ‘dearest bedfellow’ drove James to see Anne at Linlithgow palace, set away from ‘the tumults of Edinburgh’. Here, James entertained ‘the Queen very lovingly … to draw her off’ her obsession. She received him well and was reported to be ‘all love and obedience’. But at supper, thinking she had her husband ‘in a good humour’, she declared that ‘it was “opened” in Scotland, England and Denmark that she had sought to have the keeping of the young Prince and that therefore it touched her honour and her credit’ as mother of the heir and queen, not to be slighted. James insisted that ‘he regarded her honour and the safety of the Prince as much as she, and would, if he saw cause, yield to her’. On both sides, love was intimate and strategic. James spoke for them all when he told Henry later: ‘a King is as one set on a stage’.

The fight to be reunited with her son drew out a relentless streak in Henry’s unhappy mother. The result, an audible rending of the fabric of the Stuarts’ domestic life, was terrible to witness. By July 1595, Anne seemed to be ‘somewhat crazed’ in her grief. She obsessed over the right ‘cause’ to make the king ‘yield to her’. She asked him to ‘convene his nobles for their advice therein … But he has utterly refused her motion and continues his promises to Mar. So this matter is “marvellous secret”,’ intelligencer George Nicolson observed with some sarcasm.

The feud turned violent when the queen’s supporters clashed with the king’s men under the walls of Stirling Castle, and Mar’s baillie, a man named Forrester, was slaughtered. ‘I fear it will very suddenly burst into bloody factions,’ Nicolson judged, ‘for all sides are busy packing up all small feuds for their advantage.’ The kirk ordained a day of fasting ‘for the amendment of the present danger’ caused by this rupture. James, meanwhile, pleaded with the queen to abandon her campaign. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’

One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting carried the stories to Denmark. Anne’s mother, Queen Sophie, unmoved by her daughter’s distress, advised that she should ‘obey the King in all things’.

In London, Cecil was told ‘there is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation between the King and the Queen’. Elizabeth I let off an exasperated rebuke to her cousin, rueing ‘to see him so evidently a spectacle of a seduced king, abusing counsel, and guiding awry his kingdom’. Her brother prince – her heir, perhaps – had let his popish lords lay out their demands, ‘turning their treason’s bills to artificer’s reckonings – one billet lacking only’, she fumed, and that is, ‘an item … so much for the cord whose office they best merited’. James did not immediately follow advice on executions from his mother’s killer, no matter how wittily expressed – though he did love wit.

A rapprochement occurred between king and queen towards the end of the year, and by early 1596 Denmark’s daughter was pregnant again. Princess Elizabeth, named in honour of Elizabeth I, was born at Falkland Palace, Fife, in August 1596. She too was quickly fostered out to the king’s allies and Henry saw nothing of his new sister. Nor would he see his baby brother, Charles, born four years later. Nor Princess Margaret, born 1598, but dead by March 1600.

Prince Henry’s first portrait dates from this time. It shows a king in miniature. About eighteen months old, in his high chair, dressed in jewel-encrusted, padded white-satin robes, with a coronet on his head, he holds a rattle as if it were a tiny sceptre. The reddish blond down on his head is baby hair. His skin is white as the moon. He resembles his mother.

FOUR

Nursery to Schoolroom (#ulink_d1cc3fe3-26d3-5b01-9b00-a73ae1e61343)

‘THE KING’S GIFT’

By 1599 James had shooed ‘the skirts’ out of Prince Henry’s lodgings and ordered diverse men of ‘good sort to attend upon his person’ instead. It was time to prepare the boy to be king.