The Cradle King (12 page)

The King would set tasks for his fellow aspiring poets. James suggested William Fowler translate Petrarch’s
Triumphs,
and a sonnet by the King praising his attempts survives. At dinner once, James opined that not only the Greek of Homer and the Latin of Virgil but also the high-flown French of Guillaume Salluste du Bartas were inimitable in English. Hudson begged to differ, ‘whereupon it pleased your Majesty to assign me
The Historie of Judith
as an agreeable subject to your Highness to be turned by me into English verse’, ‘corrected by your Majesty’s own hand’.
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Du Bartas, a Huguenot writer connected to the Navarre court, was perhaps James’s favourite contemporary poet, and he translated several pieces of his work. Some of the fruits of the coterie were published by the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier in Hudson’s
The Historie of Judith
(1584) and James’s
Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie
(1584) and
His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres
(1591).
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With a few exceptions, the poetry is not remarkable, but there is at least a suggestion here that James’s young life was not always the political and religious maelstrom that it can easily appear.

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Despite his supposed conversion, Lennox was keen that James establish contact with his mother, still imprisoned in England; his own early advances towards Mary had been rebuffed by the Queen, who said she didn’t trust him. Influenced by Lennox, James started to write to Mary in French, assuring her that ‘it was not with my goodwill’ that her previous letters had been returned unanswered. ‘I beg you very humbly to believe that I have never had nor will have other will than to recognise you as my mother and as the one from whom all the honour that I can receive in this world will come.’
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He begged his ‘good mother’ to ‘be helpful to me and to give me your good counsel and advice, which I wish to follow to the end to render you more certain that, in every matter wherein it pleases you to command me, you will always find me your very obedient son’.
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Early in 1581, buoyed by this new correspondence, Mary proposed to James an ‘act of Association’. Under the terms of this, she and James would be joint sovereigns of Scotland, although James would be titled King and he would rule on behalf of both of them. In October 1581, she formulated a set of instructions for the Archbishop of Glasgow to negotiate the Association.

Rifts had begun to show in the relationship between Lennox and Arran. In the formal procession to Parliament in October 1581, as Lennox carried the crown, Arran griped publicly that
he
might have carried the crown. Later that month, Arran commanded Sir John Seton to stand back while James was mounting his horse; when Seton did not obey, Arran threatened ‘to cast a baton at him, or to strike his horse on the face’. The Setons, father and sons, were ‘commanded to keep their lodging’, and Lennox, in protest at their treatment, refused to ride with the King to the Tolbooth the following day. It took two months for James to patch up the quarrel between the erstwhile friends, which he believed to have been confected by enemies of the Association.
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At the same time, Arran was becoming increasingly unpopular. He had embarked on an affair with the married Countess of March; when she got pregnant, a divorce was procured on the grounds of her husband’s alleged impotence, so that she and Arran could marry and ‘cover this adulterous fact’. On 14 March 1582, at the urgings of the Kirk, he made repentance for the illegitimate son born of the union, at Holyroodhouse in the presence of the King. A week later, James rode to Stirling to attend the child’s baptism, giving the final seal of royal approval.
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But this did not stop the murmurings against him, and, indeed, the ascendancy of Lennox and Arran was about to end.

*   *   *

Lennox was the first to fall. In the late summer of 1582, Lennox and James were apart, the King hunting in Atholl while Lennox presided over the Court of Justice in Edinburgh in his capacity as Lord Chamberlain. It was perhaps with this separation in mind that, on 22 August, the Kirk prepared a final supplication against Lennox and Arran, almost desperate in tone, for presentation to the King:

Sir, for the dutiful reverence and obedience we owe to your Highness, and for that we ever abhorred to attempt anything might seem displeasant to your Excellency, we have suffered now about the space of two years such false accusations, calumnies, oppressions and persecutions, by the moyen [means] of the Duke of Lennox, and him who is called Earl of Arran, that the like of their insolencies and enormities were never heretofore borne with in Scotland. Which wrongs, albeit they were most intolerable, yet for that they only touched us in particular, we comported them patiently, ever attending when your Highness should put remedy thereto. [But now they] have entered plainly to trouble the whole body of this common wealth …
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Although they did not know, by the time the ministers finished work on the document, the King was in no position to listen. Those nobles dissatisfied with Lennox, including Gowrie, Mar, the Master of Glamis and the Master of Oliphant, had bonded together, calling themselves the ‘Lords Enterprisers’: with Lennox away from the King, they saw their chance.
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On 22 August, the same day that the Kirk prepared their supplication, as James was riding south to Perth he was met by Gowrie, who invited him to spend the night at Ruthven Castle. James accepted (although one contemporary report has it they ‘took him unwilling’) but when he tried to depart the next morning he was prevented from leaving, and moved forcibly from Ruthven to Perth. ‘With great difficulty’ his captors extracted a proclamation from him, dated 30 August, declaring that he was not being held their prisoner, and that he had chosen to reside in the burgh of Perth until the present commotion was pacified. No one was to think that he remained in Perth ‘to be forced or constrained, for fear or terror, or against his will’, nor should they answer any ‘seditious and contrary reports’ to call to arms.

Hearing of the capture of the King in what became known as ‘the Ruthven Raid’, Lennox decided he would be safer in Edinburgh. Stripping the ‘whole tapestry and plenishing, or what was worthy to be carried’ from his residence at Dalkeith, he transported it with sixty-four horse in attendance. In Edinburgh, he convened the Town Council, claiming himself innocent of any ill doing, and pressed them to find out the King’s views on the situation. But Lennox could not win over the Kirk. Despite the Provost of Edinburgh’s pleas for the minister ‘to be sparing in his sermon’, James Lawson delivered a stinging lecture on 26 August. He declaimed against Lennox, Arran and their counsellors as ‘violators of discipline, annullers of excommunication, setters forth of proclamations to traduce the best of the nobility and ministry, setters up of Tulchan [false, titular] bishops through insatiable covetousness’.
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Lennox was singled out for his ‘raising of uproars in the Kirk, troubling of the common wealth, the introducing of prodigality and vanity in apparel, superfluity in banquetting 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’. But his worst crime was that Lennox ‘made the King the author of all these faults, and laboured to corrupt him’.
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On 30 August, James was moved again, this time to Stirling. He hoped that his captors would allow him to ride to Edinburgh the following day, and prepared to do so, putting on his riding boots. But as he was about to depart, the lords came to him and said that ‘it was not expedient that he should ride at that time, till farther order were taken with things out of order’. They gave the King a stark choice: either Lennox left Scotland, or they would. James moved to leave the room, but when he reached the door, the Master of Glamis put his leg in the King’s way. He did not break down as he so often did when crossed but, Calderwood recorded, ‘the King laid these things up in his heart, and took them heavily’.
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The Lords Enterprisers drew up a list of charges against Lennox, dated 17 September 1582, claiming that they had taken possession of the King in his own best interest: ‘Whereas the King of Scots’ good nature and virtuous education are now plainly understood to have been abused, and his royal qualities … are now obscured by the craft, subtilty, and treason of Esmé d’Aubigny and his complices.’
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Their aim was to ‘show his Majesty how all things went wrong by the misgoverning of that new counsel come lately from France’. James needed to banish his present counsellors, and ‘take him[self] to be counselled by his old nobility’.
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From his stronghold of Dumbarton Castle, Lennox issued a proclamation of his innocence on 20 September, but it was greeted with contempt. ‘Blessed be God,’ came the answer, ‘that hath so humbled that proud Pharaoh, now, in the eyes of all, that he is compelled to offer amendment to them whom before, when with humility they craved reformation, disdainfully he called “Pultrons, Mischants, False Prophets,” and shamefully handled, stroke, banished, and put oft in hazard of their lives. But I fear, if Pharaoh were freed of his plague, he should return to his wonted hardness, and do as a dog in his old vomit.’
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On 14 September an English embassy, headed by Sir George Cary and Robert Bowes, met with James at Stirling, and once again pushed the case against Lennox; two days later, letters from France were shown to the King, showing how Lennox was in league with the French. The letters told Lennox that he would be thought a coward and lose all honour if he left Scotland; he had the King’s heart still, they assured him, and would not want for assistance in Scotland. On 17 September Lennox was granted a few extra days to leave the country. James confessed to Cary and Bowes that Lennox was ‘not wise’, that he had ‘been urged to many things against his will’, and the lords’ action at Ruthven ‘was honest’. But, he added, ‘Three sorts of men have enterprised it: one meaning well, another for their own particular, the third to avoid punishment.’ The ambassadors asked if they could assure Elizabeth that Lennox would leave the country: James said they might. But James was still by no means free from attack. On Wednesday 19 September, John Craig rebuked James in a sermon for subscribing to a ‘slanderous proclamation’. James, it was reported, was reduced to tears and complained to Craig that he might have told him that privately. Craig retorted that he had often been told, but to no purpose. The Kirk’s General Assembly, meeting from 9 October in Edinburgh, was ambivalent towards the new state of affairs: they approved the enterprise of those guarding the King, but refused either to condemn or ratify the lords’ printed declaration of its causes.
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The next few weeks witnessed a tedious cat-and-mouse game. Lennox tried to buy time, while the Council urged James to hasten his departure with threats: that Lennox would be denounced as a rebel, that he would be charged with treason. As Lennox rode to Callander and Blackness, there were wild rumours that he intended to seize Holyroodhouse, where James was now residing, and take Edinburgh. But the rumours came to nothing. By 14 December, patience was running out. The Council passed an act charging Lennox to depart, and James strengthened it by composing a sharp letter, accusing the Duke of ‘inconstancy and disloyalty’ in disobeying his orders to leave Scotland.
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On 16 December Lennox replied, protesting that ‘I feel myself to be the most unhappy man in the world on seeing the bad opinion which your majesty has conceived of me, and because the persuasions of those who are now about you have made you believe that I have any other intention than to render you the obedience and fidelity which I owe you … I would never have thought that your majesty would have wished to write such words to me.’
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Two days later, he wrote again:

Whatever may befall, I shall always be your very 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. And would to God my body could be cut open, so that there should be seen what is written upon my heart; for I am sure there would not be seen there those words of inconstancy and disloyalty, but, indeed, those of ‘fidelity’ and ‘obedience’… I have such extreme regret that I desire to die rather than to live, fearing that that has been the occasion of your no longer loving me. For if this disgrace befell me, truly the punishment would be to me much greater and more grievous to bear than death, for which ever since I wish and shall wish, even until at length I know that the proof which you have of my obedience has taken from you all the bad opinions which you formed of me.
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Finally realising the King was powerless to help him, Lennox departed for France. He fully expected to return to Scotland: on 1 May 1583, Robert Bowes reported that ‘it is verily looked that Lennox shall be in Scotland before August next’, and on the 29th updated his report that the Duke planned ‘to visit the King and Scotland as soon as his body may endure travel’.
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But by the time Bowes wrote this, Lennox was already dead. On 26 May, ‘at seven of the clock’, the Duke ‘caused to write a writing to the King’s grace, showing his grace the estate he was at, desiring him to be good to his bairns, and to take upon his Grace the defence of them’. Declaring himself a Protestant, he refused the ministrations of Catholic priests – a consistency of behaviour
in extremis
that would have confounded his critics – and died that night. Ignoring his wishes, his widow Catherine, a staunch Catholic, had him buried with full Roman rites. But one part of Lennox escaped that fate. The night he died, his attendants set about performing his last wish: ‘he was bowelled, the same night, his heart taken out, the body put in a leaden kist, and after in a coach, and on the morn conveyed away secretly.’ The heart was kept, ‘to send away to the King, not suddenly, for his death will make the King’s grace melancholic’
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– and indeed James was said to be ‘much perplexed’ by the news of Lennox’s death.
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He often blamed the Duke’s early demise on the harsh conditions in which he had been held in his last months in Scotland: before Lennox went to sea, Sir James Melville wrote, ‘he was put to as hard a diet as he caused the Earl of Morton to use there, yea, even to the other extremity that he had used at court: for, whereas his kitchen was so sumptuous that lumps of fat was cast in the fire when it soked [smouldered]’, now he was ‘fain to eat of a maigre [lean] goose, skowdrit with bar stra [scorched with barley straw]’.
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In June 1583, unbeknownst to his widow, Lennox’s embalmed heart was sent to James.
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