The Cradle King (9 page)

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While he was Regent, Morton’s regime, though harsh, brought at least the illusion of stability to Scotland. After Henry’s murder, Mary’s abdication, the assassinations of Moray and Lennox, and Mar’s death (or murder, as some would have it), Scotland finally enjoyed a few years of relatively consistent rule. Laws were restored and enforced. Relations with England sweetened. Morton dealt with the perennial decline of Scotland’s finances by seizing back Queen Mary’s jewels from the Countess of Argyll (Moray’s widow, who had now remarried).

But the unity was deceptive. Storms were brewing in the Kirk. Although a committed Protestant, Morton was not about to let the Kirk get all its demands. In 1574, the minister Andrew Melvill returned to Scotland after several years on the Continent, most recently and influentially in the heart of Calvinism, Geneva. He set about reforming the Kirk along the lines of the Geneva ecclesiastical polity, giving power to a series of Church courts, headed by the General Assembly of the Kirk, while insisting on a flattening out of Church hierarchy. The victims of this were those in the upper echelons of the Church, the bishops, for whom there was now no place in the Kirk. When Morton tried to force the appointment of a new Bishop of St Andrews, he clashed with John Knox, and (according to Melvill’s nephew James) shouted angrily that ‘There will never be quietness in this country till half a dozen of you be hanged or banished!’
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But in practice, relying on Parliament not to ratify the Kirk’s anti-episcopal policy, Morton allowed Melvill a pretty free hand, and in 1578 the General Assembly, as expected, condemned episcopacy altogether.

Throughout these years, James’s name was often invoked, although his person was kept away from political and religious battles, safely ensconced at Stirling. But as he approached adolescence, there was official recognition that the King was no longer a child. The Privy Council registers for 1577 record the order that ‘Our Sovereign Lord the King’s Majesty, whom God preserve … being come to the twelfth year of his age and daily increasing by the favour of God to greater perfection and activity, as well in his person and ability of body as in his spirit and learning … in time coming shall be served and attended upon in his chamber with men, committing the care thereof to Alexander Erskine of Gogar’, the younger brother of the late Regent Mar.
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This appointment was to become significant because Erskine of Gogar truly disliked Morton. His opposition to the Regent, combined with his
de facto
control of the King’s body, meant that James’s Stirling household took on a new potential to those opposed to Morton.

The first to make use of this was the Earl of Argyll. In early 1578, Argyll was feuding with the Earl of Atholl. Morton intervened and summoned them both before the Council to answer charges of levying private war, and ignoring his summons to lay down arms. Incensed at this trespass into what they considered strictly their own business, Argyll and Atholl promptly forgot their feud and turned their combined anger on the Regent. Morton realised that much of the nobility was now against him, and decided to resign his office into the King’s hands, although ‘whether he did this upon a plain intention to denude himself, or upon plain hypocrisy’ is unclear. On 4 March 1578, he was granted an audience with the eleven-year-old James at Stirling.
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There he laid out his case, pointing out the burdens of the office, not least that all his predecessors had ‘been violently murdered’; the ‘great oppression and rebellion’ in the realm; the ‘age and weakness’ of his body; and, most importantly, that it was expected that James would ‘embrace the government upon your own person’.
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According to Peter Young, James responded to the protestation of his advanced age by quipping, ‘I wish to God that you were as young as the Earl of Angus, and as wise as you are.’
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For his part, Morton drew attention to James’s age. ‘Since I perceive increase of wisdom to grow daily in your Majesty, and that ye have, praised be God, the dutiful favour of all your subjects at this hour, I am most willing to demit my charge in your Majesty’s own hands, presently.’ James’s immediate reaction was reluctant. He was too young to govern, he said, ‘and if I were, I know not to what place I should make my resort’. Morton replied that James would ‘be well lodged in the Castle of Edinburgh, both for the good situation of the house, the pleasant sight of the fields, and the sight of the sea and frequency of ships’. This seemed to cheer the King, who agreed that he ‘would willingly condescend to that charge, providing his keepers should have the maintenance of that Castle’.
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By the time the Regent had returned to Edinburgh, intelligence of the meeting had reached Atholl and Argyll. They hurried to the King at Stirling, and as soon as they arrived James told them of Morton’s offer ‘to demit his office’. They encouraged him to accept ‘such a lawful petition’, to write to the nobility and ‘declare unto them how willing he was for to accept the regiment upon his own person’. At the age of eleven, James decided to assume government, perhaps taking as his guide his grandfather James V, who had been declared to be of age at twelve. Before Morton knew what was happening, the nobility had ‘conspired in minds and bodies against him, and voted all that the King should accept the regiment’. On 12 March 1578, his ‘acceptance of the government’ was proclaimed in Edinburgh and James directed his commissioners that ‘from thenceforth they should acknowledge no other authority but of his Majesty’.
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Government would now be conducted in the King’s name by a Council; Morton’s Regency was over.

Morton had always claimed that ‘As soon as ever His Majesty shall think himself ready and able for his own government, none shall more willingly agree and advance the same nor I.’ In practice, he was not willing to accept the invitation, and from his forced retirement at Lochleven plotted his return to power. His tool this time was James’s schoolroom friend Jocky o’ Sclaittis: John Erskine, now the Earl of Mar.
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When his father, the Regent Mar died in 1572, John was only fourteen, and so his uncle, Alexander Erskine of Gogar had been appointed guardian of his estate and Keeper of Stirling Castle – and hence of the King – during John’s minority. Now, however, Mar was twenty years old and chafing at his uncle’s rule. Morton and he came to an arrangement: Morton would support Mar’s claim to the guardianship of Stirling and James on condition that Morton would be allowed to hold sway in government. On the morning of 26 April 1578, Mar rose early at Stirling, supposedly to go hunting, and called for the keys, so that he could leave the still fiercely secured castle. When Erskine of Gogar brought the keys, he was seized by Mar’s men and pushed outside the castle gates, during which scuffle a son of the guardian was killed. For James, it was another moment of intense panic: woken by the noise, he rushed from his chamber, tearing at his hair. Hearing of the news at Edinburgh and realising what was afoot, several lords raced to Stirling to stop Morton gaining control but Mar, in the name of safeguarding the King, skilfully refused to let more than one of them enter the castle at a time. Foiled by this strategy, the lords reluctantly agreed that Mar could take charge of the King until Parliament met.

In the meantime, Morton arrived at Stirling and proposed that he should be appointed First Lord of the Council; a meeting of pro-Morton nobility agreed to move the next Parliament from Edinburgh to Stirling. On 6 July, the Privy Council issued a proclamation denying rumours that James was being held at Stirling against his will.
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When Parliament opened on 15 July, Mar was permitted to carry the sword, and confirmed as the guardian of Stirling Castle and James, but with the caveat that four of the new Council should always be in attendance on the King. This smelled bad to Morton’s enemies. They demanded that Morton be required to return to his ‘own dwelling-place’, and that James be returned to the custody of Erskine of Gogar, this time at Edinburgh Castle. It was Robert Bowes, the English ambassador, who arbitrated an agreement that Mar should maintain his custody of the King at Stirling, but that the Council should include more of the anti-Morton faction. This compromise was signed by James on 15 August.
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Mar’s powers were confirmed in March 1579 when the Council decreed that nobody should be allowed to enter Stirling Castle armed while the King was in residence, and that Mar should be allowed to make arrangements for attending the King while he was hunting.
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The traumatic attack on Stirling unsettled James, and from that date he was understandably uncertain of Morton. In the months following, he turned instead to the Council’s second lord, the Earl of Atholl. But their friendship was shortlived. In April 1579, Mar threw a banquet for the King and all the nobility as a gesture of their reconciliation. But when Atholl returned home from the banquet, he suddenly died, prompting, once again, the inevitable rumours of poison.
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In the summer of 1579, Morton’s ruthless scheme of suppression finally reached the apparently invincible Hamiltons. He invoked the ‘Pacification of Perth’ which granted a pardon to those fighting against the King, but then declared it was invalid against those implicated in the assassination of Moray. The estates of Lords Claud and John Hamilton were seized, and the young men fled the country; their father, Châtelhérault, was already dead. His widow was taken into custody, and Morton took great delight in blasting the Hamilton strongholds. Of most immediate importance to James, though, the suppression of the Hamiltons had ramifications for the succession of the Scottish throne, which now passed to the Lennoxes, the family of James’s father King Henry. Henry’s brother Lord Charles Stuart, who had become Earl of Lennox after his father’s death in 1572, died after four years, leaving one daughter, Arbella. The ex-Regent’s younger brother, Robert, Bishop of Caithness, was created Earl of Lennox in June 1578; despite being over sixty and a lifelong bachelor, he married in January 1579, hoping to father a child. But if the marriage were childless, the male line would be traced to the children of the Regent’s youngest brother John Stuart, Lord d’Aubigny, who had settled in France. First among them was Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny, and in the late summer of 1579, inspired by the defeat of the Hamiltons, he arrived in Scotland to stake his claim.
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CHAPTER FOUR

The Phoenix

E
SMÉ
S
TUART, SIXTH
Sieur d’Aubigny, arrived at Leith on 8 September 1579 and was promptly escorted to Edinburgh where he was warmly welcomed by the town’s magistrates.
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When thirteen-year-old James met him for the first time one week later in the Presence Chamber of Stirling Castle, Esmé prostrated himself before his cousin ‘desiring the King of Heaven to bless his Majesty with perpetual felicity’. Esmé was thirty-seven years old and married with four children. He was also decidedly handsome, ‘a man of comely proportions, civil behaviour, red-bearded, and honest in conversation’.
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For James, who had been betrayed by one after another of his supposed friends, Esmé seemed the perfect ally. According to a contemporary account, ‘No sooner did the young King see him, but in that he was so near allied in blood, of so renowned a family, eminent ornaments of body and mind, [he] took him up and embraced him in a most amorous manner.’
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James was smitten, but the Kirk was dismayed. It stood to reason that, as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Henri III of France, d’Aubigny must be a staunch Roman Catholic. Secret intelligence had it that d’Aubigny was ‘furthered, and sent with instructions, by the Guisians’, the faction clustered around the ultra-Catholic Duc de Guise. It was said that before d’Aubigny had embarked for Scotland he met privately with the exiled Catholic Bishops of Glasgow and Ross, planning a campaign to undo the friendship with England, revive relations with Queen Mary, and ultimately to reinstate the Roman faith in Scotland. Indeed, had he not spent six hours with the Duc de Guise himself on the very ship that was to bring him to James? And where did his money come from? His lands were heavily mortgaged, but somehow he contrived to bring 40,000 gold pieces, that could have come from nowhere but the Pope, the King of France and the Guisians, and for no other reason than to corrupt the nobility.
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His retinue did nothing to dissipate the rumours. With him came ‘a Monsieur Mombirneau, a subtle spirit, a merry fellow, very able in body, and most meet in all respects for bewitching of the youth of a Prince’. Together, wrote the Kirk man James Melvill, ‘they within few days insinuate themselves so in favour of the young King’.
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With d’Aubigny’s arrival, and perhaps not coincidentally, came James’s first entry into public life. On Tuesday 29 September, James left Stirling for the first time in eight years, headed for Linlithgow and from there on to Holyroodhouse. It was a grand procession, the King accompanied by d’Aubigny, Morton, Angus, Argyll, Montrose, Mar, and some two thousand horsemen. The Humes and the Kers with three hundred horse welcomed him at Corstorphine to the west of the city. Edinburgh burgesses stood in full armour in the Long Gate, where he dismounted and saw the castle cannons shot. After the salute, since the pageantry was unfortunately not quite ready, the King processed around the city in great pomp to Holyroodhouse.
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