Behind the Palace Doors (11 page)

James VI of Scotland, son of the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded his cousin Elizabeth I in 1603 and established the Stuart dynasty in England as James I. Thus the two kingdoms were ruled under one crown (although it would take another century before England and Scotland were officially joined to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707). Before ascending the English throne, James endured a very turbulent childhood in Scotland, where he reigned since he was just over a year old
.

The christening of the infant Prince James at Stirling Castle seemed to bode well for a brilliant future. Representatives of the great European powers were gathered at the ceremony, bearing rich gifts. Charles IX of France, the child’s godfather, sent a necklace of pearls and rubies. His godmother and cousin, Elizabeth I of England, whose throne James was destined to inherit, sent a gold baptismal font. The chapel at Stirling, where in 1543 the baby’s mother, Mary, had been crowned queen of Scotland at just nine months old, glowed with torches, gilded cloth, and hopeful prayers for Scotland’s future King James VI (and England’s James I).

But all was not well at Stirling that December day in 1566.
The castle, rising high on a crag above the plains of central Scotland, had a dark history dating back centuries. It was there, among many bloody episodes, that James II had the corpse of the Earl of Douglas, whom he had just murdered, contemptuously tossed out of a window in 1452. And it was where the baby prince, whose baptism was being celebrated with feasts, masques, and fireworks, would grow up “nourished in fear,” as the French ambassador the Marquis de Fontenay Mareuil later wrote.

Indeed, all the royal pomp and ceremony surrounding the christening was an illusion, masking seething hatreds and murderous conspiracies. The child’s father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was not even present at the grand occasion. Instead, he remained holed up in his room at Stirling, estranged from his wife, the queen, who had grown to despise him, and nursing his many resentments.

When he married the Queen of Scots in 1565, Darnley had been given the title of king but none of the power he craved. Spoiled and weak, he bitterly resented the influence of David Rizzio, the queen’s Italian secretary, and was lured into a plot to kill him. Queen Mary was six months pregnant with James when Rizzio was dragged away from her, screaming for his life, and stabbed more than fifty times before his mutilated corpse was dumped down a flight of stairs.

To be rid of the queen’s upstart secretary was the main reason for Rizzio’s murder, but Darnley also hoped that his wife would miscarry from the trauma of witnessing the violent demise, for he didn’t believe the child she was carrying was his. Yet despite his father’s evil intent, James survived. Years later, in a speech to the English Parliament after the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605,
^*
King James stated that his “fearful nature” could
be traced “not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth: and while I was in my mother’s belly.”

Darnley had fallen so low in the queen’s estimation “that it is heartbreaking for her to think that he should be her husband,” wrote Mary’s secretary of state, William Maitland, “and how to be free of him she sees no out gait [way out].” It just so happened, however, only two months after the baptism of Prince James at Stirling, Mary did find a convenient way out of her miserable marriage. Darnley was found dead outside the house where he was staying, Kirk o’ Field, which was destroyed in an explosion. Suspicions that the queen had been complicit in her husband’s murder were only inflamed when she married the chief suspect, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, only three months later.

Just before her ill-advised wedding, the queen went to see her baby son, James, at Stirling—some believed with the intention of snatching him away. It was the last time mother and child would ever see each other. Mary had sacrificed her credibility and the confidence of her people by marrying Bothwell. She was imprisoned and forced to abdicate in favor of her only son, who was crowned king in the Protestant church just outside the gates of Stirling Castle. He was thirteen months old.

Scotland was in chaos at the time of James VI’s accession, torn by religious wars and savage rivalries among nobles. The young king was the pawn everyone wanted to control. He was not yet four when his uncle the Earl of Moray, then serving as regent, was assassinated and replaced by the boy king’s paternal grandfather, the Earl of Lennox. The following year, during a clash at Stirling between the Catholic supporters of the king’s
deposed mother and reform Protestants, Lennox was slaughtered. James would later say that his conscious life began the morning he saw his grandfather’s bloody corpse being carried past him through the castle gates.

Stirling Castle was effectively the boy’s prison. He would not leave it until he was eleven, as it was deemed too dangerous. Between episodes of horror, like the violent death of his grandfather, the young king’s life at the castle was dreary and loveless. He slept in a bed of black damask, with black-bordered pillows—not exactly the cheeriest of settings for a child all but orphaned.

His chief tutor, George Buchanan, had a virulent hatred for James’s mother, now imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth (see
Chapter 6
), and authored a tract that condemned her as both an adulterer and a murderess. Interspersed with lessons in languages, history, and mathematics were Buchanan’s unrelenting efforts to indoctrinate the king against the deposed Queen of Scots. He was often abusive to the boy, calling him “the true bird of the blood nest from which he sprang.”

On one occasion, as Buchanan was beating young James, the wife of his guardian intervened. “How dare you?” the indignant woman demanded. “How dare you lay your hands on the Lord’s anointed?”

“I have whipped his arse,” Buchanan snarled back. “You can kiss it if you like.”

Miserable as life was at Stirling, it was there that King James, aged thirteen, fell in love for the first time when his much older cousin Esmé Stuart arrived from France. For the pale boy, deprived of love or affection since infancy, legs deformed by rickets, this handsome, sophisticated Frenchman was a dream—even if the dream was married, with four children, and well over two decades James’s senior. “No sooner did the young King see him,” reported one observer, “but in that he
was so near allied in blood, of so renowned a family, eminent ornaments of body and mind, [he] took him and embraced him in a most amorous manner.”

Having served as a gentleman of the bedchamber for the flamboyantly homosexual Henry III of France, the older man was well versed in the seduction of kings and was prepared to return all his younger cousin’s amatory feelings.

“James grew up with a passionate desire to love and be loved in the romantic sense,” wrote his biographer Antonia Fraser, “to worship something beyond himself, something fairer, more physically perfect than the stunted prodigy’s body with which he had been endowed.”

The king was certainly not shy about the physical expression of his feelings for Esmé, whom he dubbed Duke of Lennox. Sir Henry Woddrington noted how James was “persuaded and led by him, for he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him.”

The Scottish nobility, and particularly the Church (or Kirk, as it was called), were not quite as enamored of the Duke of Lennox as James was. Many believed he was an agent of the French government, sent to corrupt the king and restore Roman Catholicism to Scotland. The influence he had over the young monarch troubled them deeply, and Lennox was demonized from the pulpit.

One preacher denounced him for “raising of uproars in the Kirk, troubling of the common wealth, the introducing of prodigality and vanity in apparel, superfluity in banqueting and delicate cheer, deflowering of dames and virgins, and other fruits of the French court, and vexing of the commons of the country with airs.” Worst of all, though, he “made the King the author of all these faults, and labored to corrupt him.”

Elizabeth I of England was worried about the pernicious
influence of Esmé Stuart as well, convinced, she wrote, that he would “make some ready way, by colour of division and faction, to bring strangers, being Romanists, into the realm, for his party, and, consequently, by degrees, to alter religion, yea, in the end, to bring the person of the young King in danger.”

A group of nobles took it upon themselves to seize King James and force him to dismiss his favorite. The Earl of Gowrie intercepted the king as he was hunting outside Perth and invited him to come back to his castle. The next morning, as James went to leave, he found the gates barred, his exit blocked. Realizing he was trapped, with no alternative but to obey, the young king burst into tears of anger and frustration.

“Better that bairns [children] should weep than bearded men,” one of the king’s captors said mockingly.

James was forced to expel Lennox from Scotland, and to write his love a letter of strong rebuke, accusing him of “inconstancy and disloyalty.” Lennox responded before he left for France: “Whatever may befall, I shall always be your ever faithful servant, and although there might be still this misfortune, that you might wish to banish me from your good graces, yet in spite of all you will always be my true master, and he alone in this world whom my heart is resolved to serve.”

Within a year, Esmé Stuart was dead. His last wish was that his embalmed heart be sent to James, which it was, without Lennox’s widow ever knowing. The king lamented the loss of his first love in a poem in which Esmé is feminized and represented as a phoenix; “betwixt my legs herself did cast,” seeking shelter from the savage attacks of envious nobles.

Esmé Stuart was no more, but he had awakened in James his lifelong passion for men. Being king, he did have to marry a woman to produce an heir. But he didn’t have to like it. With disarming candor at the time of his marriage to Anne of Denmark, he wrote, “As to my own nature, God is my witness I could have abstained longer.”

King James VI and I expressed many of his most firmly held beliefs in the books he wrote. For example, he promulgated the divine right of kings in
The True Law of Free Monarchies
and
Basilikon Doron
and railed against smoking in
A Counterblaste to Tobacco.
Then there was
Daemonologie,
in which the king encouraged the persecution of witches in Scotland. James was inspired, he wrote, by “the fearful abounding, at this time and in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil.”

King James, famous for the Bible that bears his name, ignored many of the injunctions contained in the good book—like the one against sleeping with other men. He did, however, zealously heed one scriptural admonition found in Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

After an extended sojourn in Denmark, where he may have been educated about the dangers of witchcraft, the king returned to Scotland in 1590 with a new queen and an appetite for burning witches. Given his feelings about marriage, and women in general, it seems somehow fitting that the deeply misogynistic
monarch would, at the time of his nuptials, become a rabid witch hunter.