The Cradle King (16 page)

Finally, on 4 March, via Archibald Douglas, the Scottish court received a full and gory written account of Mary’s execution. According to Courcelles, ‘the King would not abide to hear [it] read out’, and ‘would not seem to believe it’ until he received news from Carey. When Young returned with official confirmation of the execution the following day, James sent him back immediately to fetch Elizabeth’s letters, and retired to Dalkeith, ‘with very small company, greatly grieved with the death of his mother, which he taketh infinitely at heart’, in Courcelles’ words. After a hasty trip to Edinburgh to pass on Carey’s confirmation of the fact, Young returned to Berwick to tell Carey that James ‘was not to receive any strangers at this time, but if he had any letter from her Majesty’, he would accept it passed through his courtiers. Carey, however, had instructions to hand over the letters only directly to the King.
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He sent an agent to Scotland who reported that ‘as yet the King would receive no ambassador, partly by reason of his heaviness and sorrowing for his mother, and also for that he is not resolved that the Queen is as sorry for his mother’s death as he was informed she was’. Moreover, the agent reported, James claimed he would be unable to control the vengeful instincts of the Scottish people, who were ‘wickedly bent and evilly given’.
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When cries of protest came from England, James denied that he had refused to receive Elizabeth’s letter, for it would be against equity and law, he added barbedly, to ‘refuse to admit a trial’ or to ‘condemn a person unheard’. ‘As for any proofs she has given of her innocency yet,’ he continued, ‘we remit it to her own judgement whether she has yet satisfied the world to her honour in that matter, or not.’
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Eventually, a meeting with Carey was fixed at Foulden, near Berwick, on 14 March, with Sir Robert Melville representing James. Carey presented Elizabeth’s letter, now a month old. The Queen wrote of ‘the extreme dolor that overwhelmeth my mind for that miserable accident which far contrary to my meaning hath been befallen’. She claimed ‘how innocent I am in this case … if I had bidden do it I would have abiden by it.’ She was ‘not so base-minded’ to deny something she had done. ‘I am not of so base a lineage nor carry so vile a mind; but as not to disguise fits most a king, so will I never dissemble my actions, but cause them show even as I mean them.’
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Carey was left to make Elizabeth’s excuses: that, despite the ‘daily persuasions of her Council’, she had ‘never thought to put the Queen your mother to death’. However, she had ‘news every day both out of Spain and France, of ships and men preparing for the overthrow of her Majesty and the delivery of your mother’; rumours in her own court of men landing in various parts of the realm, followed by reports that Fotheringay had been ‘broken open and the Queen escaped away’. All these ‘bred jealousy in her Majesty’s head’ and led her ‘to suspect the worse’. So she ordered a warrant to be made, sealed and delivered and handed it to her Secretary, Francis Davison; but Davison showed it to some others who ‘without more questions asking, called the whole Council together, straight determined her death, and sent present expedition for the performing of it’. Davison was now in the Tower of London ‘and will hardly escape her high displeasure’. Carey reported all this is writing, ‘which if I could declare unto your Majesty so well, and set it down so lively as I heard her speak it with so heavy a heart, and so discontented a countenance, I think verily you would rather pity her unpleasant life (which ever since she hath endured) than blame her for the fact, which she never consented unto’.
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James’s reply to Elizabeth was short and to the point. Since, he wrote, ‘ye purge yourself of yon unhappy fact’, and considering her ‘rank and sex, consanguinity and long professed goodwill to the defunct’, and her oft-protested innocence, he dared not wrong her by judging dishonourably her ‘unspotted part’ in the affair. Not everyone would make such a generous interpretation, he hinted, hoping that her ‘honorable behaviour’ in times to come might ‘fully persuade the whole world of the same’. For his own part, he looked to her for ‘a full satisfaction’ which would ‘be a mean to strengthen and unite this isle, establish and maintain the true religion, and oblige me to be, as of before I was, your most loving and dearest brother’.
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Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer Burghley complained to Carey of James’s ‘strange course’, and let it be known that Elizabeth thought these a ‘strange kind of speeches’, so ‘repugnant’ from the previous friendship between the two sovereigns, that she intended not to reply, but to wait until the King reverted to his usual tone. The King of Scots, Burghley continued, appeared to intend ‘to suspend his former manner of intelligence until he may be better satisfied of her Majesty’s innocency’, implying that the English Queen, who was answerable to no one but God, was somehow on trial. Surely, Burghley persisted, ‘the word and writing of a Christian prince uttered with a free conscience in the sight of God’ was enough?
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Secretary Walsingham weighed in, writing a long discourse to Maitland, now Chancellor, that argued strongly that James should not consider revenge or allying with France or Spain.
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Burghley hoped, in a letter to Archibald Douglas, that James should not listen to counsel from ‘passionate pleasing men’ that would lose him ‘the hearts of great numbers living’, that is, the English, would vouchsafe for him ‘more good than his mother’s life could have done if she had continued’. After all, the Lord Treasurer pointed out, Mary ‘by nature was to die before him, and cannot be recovered’.
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An outbreak of trouble on the Borders, which James did little to quell, increased English fears. Time and again, rumours of an immediate invasion made the rounds in Berwick, which prepared itself for an assault.
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Elizabeth sent one of her most senior advisers, Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon (father of Sir Robert Carey who had brought the news of Mary’s death) to attempt to salvage the broken relationship. In July, James made his demands: he wanted a formal letter, signed by Elizabeth, acknowledging him as ‘lawful and nearest successor to the Crown, failing her bodily succession’. In addition, as a token ‘to remove all kind of suspicion of her evil meaning, specially after the infernal proceeding against his dearest mother’, she should make him a donation of ‘some lands in England, chiefly in the north parts, of ample and sufficient revenue, with the title of Duke’.
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He also demanded the right to be consulted about the marriage of Arbella Stuart, the daughter and heir of his uncle, Lord Charles Stuart. Arbella was his nearest rival to the English throne, and although as the daughter of a younger son her claim was clearly subordinate to his as son of an elder son, she had the crucial advantage of having been born and bred in England, which many argued was a prerequisite for an English sovereign.
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James felt that Elizabeth needed to exonerate herself from ‘yon unhappy fact’, but his chosen penalty – material benefits to himself – compromised his moral highground. Using Douglas in London as a secondary channel of communication, he intimated that, as an alternative, he could so very easily seek revenge for his mother’s death, and take up the many offers of support from Catholic states overseas. Douglas informed the English that James was held back only by moral constraints, ‘but ye may be sure he cannot be long restrained’. James’s every move was watched. Hunsdon maintained that James had ‘no good meaning’ towards the English Queen, and that troops from France and Spain were expected in Scotland. At the close of the Scottish Parliament on 29 July, Maitland made a speech before the King and the nobility calling for ‘a revenge for the death of the Queen’; all the lords made a solemn vow on their knees ‘that they would always be ready to aid and assist him, both with the hazard of lands, lives, and goods, whensoever his Majesty should command them in that action’.
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In London, Archibald Douglas was forced to face English protests about the Parliament, and answered questions to the satisfaction of the Privy Council. Sir Lewis Bellenden, the Scottish Justice Clerk, asked for understanding in interpreting James’s actions – he had to show Scotland that he had neither abetted nor acquiesced in Mary’s execution.
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By November, Hundson was reporting that James was to receive money from Spain which would provide for a simultaneous Scottish and Spanish assault on England. Even Hunsdon, though, did not rule out the possibility of a positive end to this troubled period ‘in this dangerous time’. He advised that Elizabeth should send a letter through him – since James could not accept an openly friendly letter from England – and the letter should offer an increased pension.
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England was right to suspect that James was looking to Catholic princes. In addition to his tetchy diplomatic ballet with Elizabeth’s councillors, James was in contact with the Duc de Guise, and Henri III of France, using Mary’s death to encourage funding for Scotland.
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This was bad news to Spain who believed that James was a hopeless heretic, lost to the Catholic cause, and better off supplanted. King Philip quickly set about sabotaging James’s new Catholic overtures. With beautiful timing, Philip discovered that in fact
he
was the heir to Elizabeth’s throne, with two clean bloodlines leading back to Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt. And if that claim failed to convince, Philip announced that James’s mother had named him her heir in her last will and testament. Angry with her son in May 1586, Mary had indeed intimated to the Spanish agent Bernardino de Mendoza that she intended to make her throne over to Philip: ‘I have made the decision that in the case that my son does not conform to the Catholic religion before my death (which, I must tell you, I have little hope of as long as he remains in Scotland) to cede and give my right, by will, in the succession of this crown, to the King.’
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The will itself, much talked of, never came to light – presumably because it never existed. As Mary died, Philip urged his claims on Pope Sixtus V asking for his support in a crusade to supplant the ‘young heretic’ James and to place his daughter, the Infanta, on the Scottish throne.
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It was only in later years that James started to exhibit a real defensiveness towards the memory of the mother whose death, in all probability, he had done his share to bring about. In 1596, when Edmund Spenser brought out the second part of his epic poem
The Faerie Queene,
James made a formal objection to Elizabeth concerning the character Duessa, the murderous, treacherous, adulterous, impious woman whom many read to represent Mary, demanding that ‘Edward [sic] Spencer for his fault, may be duly tried and punished’.
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When James reached England in 1603, one of his first acts was to send a velvet pall to cover the tomb of his mother in Peterborough Cathedral; ten years later, at his order, Mary’s body was exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey, where her monument faced that of Elizabeth. ‘Our dearest mother,’ James wrote to the Dean of Peterborough, should be ‘in our Church of Westminster, the place where the kings and queens of this realm are usually interred.’
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England was further discouraged by the latest rising star in James’s court, whose ascent was aided by the fall of the Master of Gray. Soon after his return from England, Gray had been accused by Sir William Stewart that he had confessed that he and Maitland had been involved in the action at Stirling in November 1585. Gray denied ever having said this, but he was nonetheless warded in Edinburgh Castle and in May 1587 formally accused of a series of crimes, including trafficking with Spain and the Pope; planning the assassination of Maitland; counterfeiting the King’s stamp, and attempting to use it to prevent the King’s marriage; and for consenting to Mary’s death in return for rewards in England. Gray confessed to sedition, and of trying to impede James’s marriage, but at James’s intervention was saved from death and financial ruin by being permitted to enjoy the profits from his estates, while being banished from the realm.
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A sole exception to the Gray estates was the abbacy of Dunfermline, most of which the King gave to George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. Huntly was four years older than the King, and had been sixth Earl of Huntly since 1576 after his father ‘deceased suddenly one afternoon coming from the football’.
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As early as 1579, he had been identified as the key to Roman Catholic hopes in Scotland – in the words of the exiled Catholic Bishop of Ross, the Earl, then only eighteen years old, was the man on whom hopes should be pinned to ‘restore the worship of God in Scotland, one of these days’.
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As the prime landed magnate in the north, with influence in the burgh of Aberdeen and on the Moray Firth, with their deep-water ports, Huntly was seen as strategically placed to forward Catholic hopes; years spent in France only consolidated his Francophile and Catholic leanings, and his value rose as in time he became one of James’s favourites.