The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (25 page)

The day-to-day business of government bored James and he was content to leave it to Cecil (now Earl of Salisbury) and other ministers. Besides, after his harsh childhood and the dangers he had run as a young king in Scotland, he felt entitled to enjoy himself. He indulged his passion for hunting. Often poor misshapen Salisbury had to trail round the shires trying to catch the King, weary after a day in the field and now perhaps showing the effects of the wine he had been constantly sipping, in order to get him to attend to official business. Most of the time what James wanted from his minister was money, for he was extravagant and generous, and the royal coffers of England were not as well stocked as they had appeared to be from poor Scotland. On the other hand he was happy to address Parliament, in his capacity as ‘the great schoolmaster of the realm’, and feed them with his wisdom, which his faithful Commons were less and less happy to receive. In other ways too England was not quite as satisfactory as he had expected. When he told the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a stiff, opinionated man, that he, the King, was the guardian and protector of the law, Coke replied that the case was otherwise; it was the law that protected the King. This was not an answer he could have given either Henry VIII or Elizabeth with impunity, but times were changing, and in any case James, accustomed to the rebukes of the Kirk in Edinburgh, was a less formidable figure than his Tudor cousins.

James’s court lacked the dignity and order of Elizabeth’s. Sir Walter Scott, who was uncharacteristically unjust to James, and strangely believed this most successful of Stuart kings to have been ‘the least talented’ of his line, nevertheless gives a vivid and probably accurate picture of the disorderly fashion in which James chose to live. The young hero of
The Fortunes of Nigel
is introduced to the King’s chamber, and

The scene of confusion amid which he found the King seated, was no bad picture of the state and quality of James’s own mind. There was much that was rich and costly in cabinet pictures and valuable ornaments, but they were slovenly arranged, covered with dust, and lost half their value, or at least their effect, from the manner in which they were presented to the eye. The table was loaded with huge folios, amongst which lay light books of jests and ribaldry; and notes of unmercifully long orations to Parliament, and essays on king-craft, were mingled with roundels and ballats by the royal ’Prentice, as he styled himself, in the art of poetry, and schemes for the general pacification of Europe, with a list of the names of the King’s hounds, and remedies against canine madness.
⁶

As for the royal character, Scott found James to be ‘fond of his dignity, which he was perpetually degrading by undue familiarity; capable of much public labour, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated’.

The King was indeed an oddity, but a more able and attractive one than Scott allows. Moreover, he had one other quality that is rare in monarchs. Though capable of firm, even ruthless action, when he was alarmed or his immediate interests seemed to be threatened, he was essentially kindly.

His interests were also unusually wide. He was a patron of the arts. Shakespeare’s theatre company were designated the King’s Men, and several of his plays were given command performances at court.
Macbeth
, with its fantasy about the origins of the Stuarts and its promise that as the heirs of Banquo they would reign till ‘the crack of doom’, may even have been written to please and honour the King. Moreover, in an essay on
Macbeth
and the Gowrie Conspiracy, Arthur Melville Clark suggested that:

in preconceiving much of the supernatural in his play, Shakespeare was influenced in the direction of contemporary witch-lore by the fact that King James was the author of a notable book on ‘Demonology’…that the King believed himself to have been a special target of witches and that he regarded himself as possessed of a nose for smelling out practitioners of sorcery and exposing their machinations. And that is why James was so interested in the cabbalistic characters found in Gowrie’s pockets, and why the depositions…which testify about Gowrie in relation to magic, prognostications, and amulets were published along with the official accounts of the events of 5th August; why the official account itself declared that for many generations the Ruthvens were known throughout the whole land as dabblers in the occult…Macbeth and Gowrie were both traitors and both intermeddlers with the diabolical.
⁷

But if James patronised drama –
The Tempest
, for instance, being performed on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding – the taste of the court ran rather to the lavish spectacle of the masque, gorgeous affairs with the text provided by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson, with decor and choreography by Inigo Jones. One of the most notable of these,
The Masque of Blackness
, saw Queen Anne herself blacked up and arrayed in a beautiful costume fashioned from some of the late Queen’s wardrobe of two thousand gowns. The show was set on the purely imaginary banks of the Niger and featured sea nymphs, mermen and mermaids, charming negro children dancing in the old banqueting hall in the Palace of Whitehall, transformed for the occasion into a rich landscape bordered by the sea, and under a blue silk heaven, a silver throne occupied by the moon. It was all very splendid, very popular, very expensive and very silly.

The month-long state visit of Queen Anne’s brother, Christian IV of Denmark, offered an occasion for more revelry and even greater extravagance. There was a tournament in which the Danish king rode in the lists like a medieval knight, and this was perhaps the one occasion on his visit that he was even halfway sober. For the rest there was feasting and drinking, and then more feasting and more drinking, with James and Anne matching the Dane glass for glass. It culminated in a banquet and pageant at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, James’s favourite country residence. According to the acerbic Sir John Harrington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth, a show displaying the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon saw Sheba lose her footing and collapse with the gifts she was carrying on top of the Danish king. He rose gallantly and would have danced with her, but himself fell over and had to be carried, smeared with wine, cake and jellies, to his bed. Then Faith, Hope and Charity advanced to congratulate King James on his majesty, but Hope was speechless and Faith legless. Only Charity played her part with suitable decorum, but she was followed by Victory and Peace, and they were in much the same condition as Faith and Hope. Victory dissolved into tears and when Peace found her way to the throne blocked by courtiers, themselves the worse for wear, she laid about vigorously with the symbol of her role, an olive branch.
⁸

Such was life at court in the merry days of King James.

James and Anne had seven children, of whom four died in infancy. The survivors were Henry, born 1594, who became Prince of Wales in 1603; Elizabeth, born in 1596; and ‘Baby Charles’, born 1600.
⁹
By the time he inherited the English throne, James probably no longer slept with his wife, though their relations were mostly friendly, but he was a fond and devoted father. Naturally enough his first care was for Henry as the heir to his crowns, and he wrote for him a book of instruction in the art of king-craft, and in his duties as a man and monarch. Though often pompous in the manner of the day, the
Basilikon Doron
is also full of good sense and keen observation. Among other things, James warned his son against ‘the preposterous humility of the proud Puritan’ who thinks he is entitled to lay down the law to others – including the King – while resenting any criticism of himself. ‘Laws,’ the King told his son, ‘are ordained as rules of virtuous and social living, and not to be snares to trap your good subjects’, advice that modern parliaments and bureaucrats might with advantage ponder.

Henry, like his father before him, received a good education, happily being taught in more kindly fashion than James had been by Buchanan. He was athletic and a keen sportsman, though he disappointed James by being no great enthusiast for hunting. According to the French ambassador, Henry took part ‘rather for the pleasure of galloping, than that which the dogs give him’. He was loyal to his servants, taking their side if anyone criticised them, and passionately devoted to ships and the navy. He possessed the characteristic Stuart charm, and is said to have had a delightful smile. But he was also something of a prig, and disapproved of the disorderly court his father kept. He may indeed have nursed a growing contempt for his pacific parent. He was dazzled by the last notable survivor of the heroic reign of Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh; but Raleigh, described in the Queen’s lifetime as ‘the most unpopular man in England’, was a prisoner in the Tower of London, under sentence of death (suspended), on account of his suspected involvement in a plot against James in the first year of his reign. Henry, indifferent to Raleigh’s offence, inveighed against his hero’s incarceration, remarking bitterly, ‘only my father would keep such an eagle in a cage’. Perhaps there were the makings of a feud between father and son, such as were to be characteristic of the Stuarts’ Hanoverian successors, but whereas the Georges all hated their elder sons, James remained tolerant of Henry’s independence of mind and his affection was undiminished.

In 1612, however, Henry contracted a fever after a game of tennis. Despite the attentions of the doctors – or perhaps because of the remedies they attempted, applying new-killed pigeons to his shaved head to draw out ‘the corrupt and putrid fever’ and cockerels, split open, to his feet – he died, asking only for his ‘dear sister’. It is tempting to speculate on how different the fortunes of the Stuarts might have been if Henry had lived to be king. Would this strong-willed, energetic, staunchly Protestant young man have won and held the favour of his people and Parliament, taking the country into war on the Protestant side in the great European conflict that broke out six years after his death? Would the Parliament have provided him with the means to execute the ‘patriotic’ Protestant policy they so often called for – while showing no willingness to pay for it? Such speculation belongs to counter-factual history, but is nonetheless enticing.

James’s daughter Elizabeth was, in the fashion of the time, brought up away from court, seeing her parents only occasionally. She learned French and Italian, and spent the afternoons of her childhood on horseback. She hero-worshipped her elder brother, and they sent each other letters almost every day, at times when meetings were impossible. She was waiting, as all princesses must, for marriage, for the day when some foreign match would be arranged and adult life would begin. There was a succession of suitors, among them briefly the recently widowed Philip III of Spain. He was old enough to be her father, reputed virtuous, also deeply stupid. She was spared this marriage when her father settled on a German prince, Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. (The title of elector meant that he was one of the seven princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. In fact, this election was by now little more than a formality; the title had become hereditary in the House of Habsburg.) Frederick was the same age as Elizabeth, a lively but serious young man, as befitted his position as the leader of the German Protestant Union. He was a Calvinist, but not of the most rigid sort. The marriage was arranged, but when Frederick arrived in England, where he fell in love with his bride, as he was doubtless determined to do, Prince Henry died and the wedding had to be postponed. It took place the following year, and the newly-weds sailed to the Netherlands, leaving James in tears, which, in his own fashion, he doubtless enjoyed. Ten months later Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, a boy, christened Frederick Henry. There would soon be a quiver of children, but not before the lives of the young couple were turned upside down.

Of ‘Baby Charles’, little need be said at this point. He had been a backward child, slow in learning to walk and speak, which latter he did with a disabling stammer. He was small and shy and his brother Henry declared that when he was king, he would make Charles Archbishop of Canterbury.

Meanwhile, before Henry’s death and Elizabeth’s marriage, King James had himself fallen in love. The object of his affections was a young Scotsman called Robert Ker, or Carr as he was known in England. He belonged to a cadet branch of the Kers of Ferniehurst, one of the great Border families, and he had first come to England with James as one of his ‘running pages’. But he had been sent home and then spent some time in France, where his manners acquired a degree of polish. Returning to England, he had the good fortune to break his leg falling from his horse in a tournament, and this brought him to the King’s notice. He was confined to bed, where the King visited him and was delighted. Ker was a blond, long-legged boy, deemed handsome (though his portrait suggests that his expression was foxy). He was not very bright but was possessed of an animal magnetism; at least two other people besides James were to be in love with him. James was now in his forties, a time of life when many are ready to make fools of themselves. He made Ker a gentleman of his bedchamber, a post that required him to sleep in or near the King’s chamber; in Ker’s case, one must assume, in James’s bed also. James’s interest was not only sexual. He took it on himself to repair the young man’s defective education, teaching him Latin. One observer remarked snidely that it would have been a better idea to teach him English, since the boy spoke with a strong Scots accent. But so of course did the King himself. Responsibilities and honours were showered on the young man. He acted as the King’s secretary (which enabled James to keep him about his person) and was soon raised to the peerage as Viscount Rochester. Recognised as the reigning favourite, he found courtiers eager to please and flatter him. His elevation must have seemed to him as welcome as it was surprising, always assuming he could bear James’s displays of love with equanimity. There is no evidence that he found this difficult. Queen Anne disliked Ker, which was not surprising, but James was indifferent to his wife’s opinion. All the warm sentimentality of his nature was directed at the young man, who would soon rise even further, being made Earl of Somerset.