Читать книгу James I - Charles Williams - Страница 5

Table of Contents

About two in the afternoon the father of the child, the Lord Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, sometimes called the King, came into the chamber where his wife lay. He had been brought with her to the Castle of Edinburgh only for this moment, and had been lodged in the Castle to await it, along with other great persons—the Lord John Erskine, Earl of Mar, Captain of the Castle; the Lord James Stuart, Earl of Murray, the Queen’s half-brother; two or three territorial chieftains, such as the Earls of Argyle and Atholl; the Queen’s ladies. The Captain of the Queen’s Guard, the Lord James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, was discreetly lodged a little farther away from his mistress, in the town at the foot of the Castle. It was Wednesday, the 19th of June 1566, when the Queen’s pains began; betwixt ten and eleven that morning, after some danger, she had been delivered of a male child. Now she sent for the father to do his part: publicly to acknowledge his paternity and the legitimacy of the child. He was to do it before the company in the chamber, and through them before the kings and queens of Europe, before the Pope, before John Knox and the other ministers of the Reformed Kirk of Scotland, before the Scottish families related to the royal line, branches of the Stuarts and the Hamiltons, even before his own father, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, and himself. In the future neither he nor any one else should be able to deny the child’s rights.

The Queen had no other desire or need of her husband. The passion in which she had married him a year before, and had then under his power conceived, perished soon after the marriage. Since then she had but once been captive to him, and then but for a few minutes, and at that but a physical, not a spiritual, prisoner; in the February now four months gone. He had held her by his arm around her while his confederates had, from her very supper-table, dragged her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, to his death; one of them, Andrew of Feardonside, had even pointed a pistol at her own person. She had been compelled to make use of Darnley afterwards in order to escape from the band of them, and now she was determined to make use of him once more in order to counter the slander that the child was David’s. Legitimate, it was the strong support of her claim to the Crown of England; with it, she offered her Catholic supporters in that country not a single person but a dynasty. It was for the sake of the young dynasty that she sent for her husband. She was twenty-four and he twenty-one.

He came in; Mary of Scots lay in her bed and waited for him. When he was by: “My lord,” she said, “God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you.”

He reddened; he bent and kissed the child. The Queen took it in her arms, discovering its face to all present, and said again: “My lord, here I protest to God, and as I shall answer at the great day of judgment, this is your son and no other man’s son. And I desire all here, both ladies and others, bear witness.” She could not stop; she added across the child: “For he is so much your son that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.” Before he could say anything she looked away again to one of her gentlemen, Sir William Stanley. “This is the son,” she said, “who, I hope, shall first unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England.”

Sir William knew, as they all knew, the tales of the perilous health of the Queen of England and the prospects of her perilous throne. He answered: “Why, madam, shall he succeed before your Majesty and his father?”

The Queen said: “Because his father has broken to me.”

Darnley, harassed as she meant him to be, broke out: “Sweet madam, is this the promise you made to forgive and forget all?”

“I have forgiven all,” the Queen said; “I will never forget. What if Feardonside’s pistol had shot? What would have become of him and me both? Or what estate would you have been in? God only knows, but we may suspect.”

“Madam, these things are all past,” Darnley said.

The Queen answered: “Then let them go,” and with that for dismissal she let him also go. But she did not forget; she had not forgotten when, eight months later, she in turn went out from his bedside on that last evening of his life, and paused as she went to say: “It was just this time last year when David was slain.” Nor, for all her precautions, did the world forget, either kings or crowds, for though “these things” never hampered the child in his claim to either of the kingdoms his mother desired for him—he was to have them both, and to have them, by Fate and his own choice, at her cost—yet years afterwards they served for laughter and abuse, as when Henry IV. of France jested at “Solomon, the son of David,” or the populace of Perth cried out: “Thou son of Seigneur Davie, come down!”

It was, as she feared, the worse for him that he seemed to have in him much of his father’s weak, wandering, and egotistical spirit. But it was the worse for her that he had also, under it, much of her resolution and capacity. He inherited from both of them, and there was in him something else, some twist and check of nature that seems to receive and continue the spectacle of that February night. It is an often-repeated, and rather doubtful, tale that the flashing of steel before the eyes of his mother as the conspirators seized Rizzio gave him a lifelong aversion from naked swords. His fear of steel has been exaggerated. But there was another fear which had in it a fascination for him—the fear of unseen powers and supernatural hosts of darkness, such a thrill of horror and defiance as went through the Queen’s body when she looked up from the lit supper-table to see in the darkness of the doorway the grotesque figure of the Lord Ruthven who led the band of murderers, tall, old, emaciated by sickness, with a gown cast over his armour, looking down terribly on her friend. There was also in him a physical longing for a personal love and a fascination by it, which (natural as it is) possesses a nervous excitement, a clutch of possession, as if from some communicated knowledge of the friend whose fingers had had to be torn from the Queen’s skirts while she yearned for his salvation in vain. His secrecy, his cunning, his vigilant caution, seem to prolong, after a vaguer manner, the hostility with which his mother strained against his father’s arm, the cunning she exercised through the hours of the night and the day till she had lured her husband to abandon his companions and be her escort to his own murder.

Whether from that night or from other causes, the child of whom the foreign ambassadors wrote admiringly to their sovereigns was a twisted growth in the Stuart line. He was the gibe of life at their house, its beauty and tragedy. He was to take himself seriously and be everlastingly comic; to think himself touched with “sparkles of Divinity”—thus finally ousting any suspicion of Rizzio in his blood—and to be everlastingly taken as an example of the lack of divinity; to be indifferently honest and suspected of the foulest crimes; to be indifferently continent and become a byword for the most sentimental incontinence. He was the forfeit that his house paid to existence for their romantic glory, being the one member of it to whom the word could, in no sense whatever, be applied.

The child was born. The General Assembly of the Reformed Kirk of Scotland, in high session upon the dangers which threatened the pure Presbyterian religion, heard of it. They sent one of their number, John Spottiswoode, Superintendent of Lothian, to congratulate the Queen, and to desire that the Prince should be baptized according to the Reformed rite. Of this the Queen said nothing, but she caused the child to be brought; the Superintendent briefly prayed over him, and with a good humour rare in the ecclesiastics of the day, told the baby to say Amen. The joke lasted, for the Queen called the Superintendent her “Amen,” and when the Prince was grown he took it over—he called him “my Amen.”

The child was born. Letters went to foreign Courts announcing it. A politician of Scotland, Sir James Melville, mature, intelligent, and pragmatic, was chosen to carry the news south to the Court which it affected most of all. Both France and Spain, in their growing rivalry, took an acute interest in him. But England was bound to have more than an interest; her Government was bound to find him a continual preoccupation. It was historic; English Governments had always been preoccupied with Scottish heirs. But this boy was something more than the heir of Scotland: he was the heir to England. There was a story that Mary of Scots had once, with her train, been in an Edinburgh house where was a picture of Elizabeth. The courtiers had disputed whether it were like the Queen of England till Mary interrupted them: “No; it is not like her, for I am the Queen of England.” It was not, however, in such terms that Sir James carried the news, but discreetly as became queen and sister communicating such joyful tidings to queen and sister. Four days later Cecil, hearing it privately from him, went into the hall at Greenwich where the Court was dancing. Elizabeth—then thirty-three—was also dancing. He went up to her and whispered in her ear. She stopped abruptly and sat down, her cheek on her hand. In the immediate silence of the Court she broke out with the news to her people and to herself: “The Queen of Scots is leichter [lighter] of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock.” It was a moment of which she never quite lost the sharpness; she could never quite forgive James for being there, and never with equanimity contemplate his being where she so long had been. In the hours during which she suffered a divided heart over Mary’s fate, there was always the knowledge that Mary’s son must defeat her at last. Yet, could she have foreseen the comparisons of the histories between him and her when he too was dead, she might have felt that she was the victor over both her rivals in the end.

The next day, when Sir James made his official visit, she had recovered. She assured him, meeting him in her finest clothes, smiling and delighted, that she had recovered, upon the news, from a sickness that had held her a fortnight. Sir James enlarged upon the difficult delivery, telling her how Mary had wished she had never been married. “This I said,” he explains, “to give her a little skar to marry, by the way.” Elizabeth listened sympathetically; she would not have been scared from marrying by such simple efforts. Sir James invited her, in his sovereign’s name, to stand as godmother, and to come in person; it would give her the opportunity to see Mary which she had often desired. Elizabeth promised to act, but doubted if her affairs would permit her presence; she promised a noble embassy. Presently Sir James came to the underlying matter of his audience. He proposed the immediate official declaration of Mary Stuart as “second person,” heir-presumptive to the English throne, saying that he was sure the Queen of England had only delayed it until the birth of a child of Mary’s body ratified the succession. The birth of a child of Mary’s body! He went on to argue that the declaration would settle the minds of many in both countries who desired to see the matter put out of doubt; he undertook that Mary would never seek any right or place in England but by Elizabeth’s forwarding. Twenty-one years later, in a more agitated moment, Elizabeth found her true answer to that enticement, on behalf of the son then as on behalf of the mother now: “By God’s passion, that were to cut my own throat!” Mary indeed need do nothing; there were plenty to seek and give her right and place in England by Elizabeth’s foundering, in deposition or death. The Queen answered mildly and sweetly now; she was sure the birth of the Prince would be a great spur to the most skilful lawyers to use greater diligence in trying out the matter. She herself was of opinion that Mary’s claim was just, and hoped that so the lawyers would decide. Sir James pointed out that when last he was in England Elizabeth had been saying the same thing; would it not be delightful if he, who had brought one kind of joyful news south, could bear those other joyful news north? Elizabeth, wanting no more of the conversation, told him she hoped to satisfy the Queen of Scots when the embassy went to the baptism. Sir James was dismissed; the next day two grooms-in-waiting brought him the gift of “a fair chain.” With that for himself, and another message for his Queen, he set out again. Francis Walsingham was soon to take charge of the affairs of Scotland.

The other message Sir James bore was a letter from his brother, Sir Robert, then ambassador in London. If the anxiety of the loyal English had been heightened by the birth of the child, the anxiety of the loyal Scots was not much lessened. The more sedate diplomats knew that their own Queen was an uncertain quantity. Sir Robert permitted himself an appeal, at the end of a paper of advice, that her Majesty, seeing the great mark she shot at, should be more careful and circumspect, that since her desires were now so nearly obtained, they should not be overthrown “for lack of secresie, gud handling and prencely behaviour.” The letter was delivered, but now, though the Melvilles did not know it, the uncertain quantity had endured the intrusion of two more certain elements—the spectral memory of Rizzio’s death, the living presence of the Lord Bothwell. Mary went unhappily in a Court and a land overnetted with violence, and by the end of the year she was sick with anger and love. The child had been sent to Stirling Castle, which was to be his home for twelve years. As if to leave the whole stage free for him, his mother and his father played out their parts swiftly, before he could walk or speak or know them. He was left to himself, except for the necessary guardians, and even there his mocking fortune found him. It is said that the woman who suckled him was a drunkard; alternately, it is said that he endured “some ill treatment” in his infancy, by which his legs were left weak afterwards, and he was always inclined to shamble through his palaces. Meanwhile his mother and father were concerned with loves and crowns and quarrels and creeds.

They found little joy. Darnley, despised and neglected, drifted about from place to place. He thought of leaving the country; his wife forbade it. She herself caused scandal by riding thirty miles and thirty miles back in one day to visit the Lord Bothwell, who had been wounded in a fight on the borders of which he was Warden. Sir Robert Melville’s advice was divided against itself: it was a princely deed, but it was not good handling. She fell into illness and despair; from the fever she recovered, not from the despair. She remained “in a deep grief and sorrow,” wrote the French ambassador, “nor does it seem possible to make her forget the same. Still she repeats these words, ‘I could wish to be dead.’ We know very well that the injury she received is exceeding great, and her Majesty will never forget it.” “There were,” said Sir James Melville, “overfew to comfort her.”

Preparations had to be made for the baptism of the child. His physical health, between them, might be injured, but his spiritual state was a matter of high political, as well as private, necessity. In December he was to be born again into the Church of Christ: with Catholic rites, the arrangements for which were put in the hands of the Protestant Bothwell. The magnificent sponsors—the Protestant Queen of England, the Catholic King of France, the Catholic Duke of Savoy—were preparing their presents and dispatching their proxies. This union of the Churches was sardonically reflected in a still wider union which occurred in December at Craigmillar, near Edinburgh, when Mary found some few to promise her a dangerous comfort. Bothwell was there, and her brother Murray, the defender of the Kirk, and Huntly, the Catholic lord of the north, and Maitland of Lethington, the Secretary and sceptic. They conferred together; they laid before the Queen proposals for dealing with her husband—divorce or nullity, on the grounds of consanguinity, since there had been some irregularity in the Papal Bull of dispensation for the marriage of cousins, or of treason, or of adultery. The Queen insisted that whatever was done must carry no peril to her child’s legitimacy; sooner than risk that she said she would endure all torments and abide all perils. The succession must be secure, and the further succession over which the agitated Commons in England were daring to trouble their Queen, desiring once more her own marriage. Bothwell, in answer, said his own father and mother had been divorced, yet he had come to his inheritance; why should not the Prince do the same? Maitland went farther; he promised that those present, “the principal of your Grace’s nobility and Council,” should find a means to rid her of him, without prejudice to her son. He added the immortal sentence that though “my lord of Murray be little less scrupulous for ane Protestant than your Grace for a Papist, I am assurit he will look throw his fingers thereto.” The Queen protested that she would have nothing done to hurt her honour or her conscience; better leave things as they were till the goodness of God provided a remedy; perhaps what they thought would do her service would turn to her hurt and displeasure. Maitland left God to mind His own business and keep out of theirs: “Madam, let us guide the matter amongst us, and ye shall see nothing but good, and approved by Parliament.” The cool voice came from an intellectual world beyond the turmoil of her love, her hate, and her belief. To that reposeful and alien intelligence, and to Bothwell’s ardent strength, she left all. Half-acquiescing and half-rejecting, she left them, the conference broke up, and on the appointed day the mother and father were both with their child in Stirling.

But while the child and the mother were the centres of magnificence, the father moved on the outskirts, between it and the dark. Presents were offered to the mother from the great gossips: from the Queen of England, by the Earl of Bedford, a golden font, weighing 333 ounces, decked with precious stones; from the King of France a necklace of pearls and rubies, with two most beautiful ear-rings; from the Duke of Savoy a large fan with jewelled feathers, worth four thousand crowns. The father tried in vain to get speech with the French ambassador, M. du Croc. He sent three times, but Du Croc had instructions from his king, and at last Darnley received the answer that the ambassador said his apartment had two doors, and if the King entered it by the one, he himself would be compelled to go out by the other. Meanwhile the special proxy of France, the Comte de Brienne, himself carried the Prince from his room to the chapel between two rows of gentlemen, holding every one a pricket of wax. After him went Atholl, carrying the great sierge of wax; the Earl of Eglinton carried the salt, the Lord Sempill the rood, and the Lord Ross the basin and laver. The Earl of Bedford, a strict Puritan, refused to enter; he, with the other Reformed lords, including Bothwell, stood at the door. He gave the Queen’s illegitimate sister, the Countess of Argyle, a ruby worth five hundred crowns to act in his stead. She did (and was afterwards forced by the Assembly of the Kirk to do penance in time of preaching for this subservience to Papistry). There was one other notable absentee: Darnley was not within. The Archbishop Hamilton, with three bishops and other ecclesiastics, officiated in pontifical habits “such as had not been seen in Scotland these seven years.” By the sacramental water and the sacramental formula of fifteen centuries the child was regenerated. He was restored to his spiritual integrity and the kingdom of God militant upon earth; the tragic harlequinade of religion that had already begun to surround him could not alter the act of Christendom. He was received into salvation.

The Christian names given him were Charles James—Charles being the name of the King of France, and James that of “the good kings of Scotland, his predecessors,” who had been closely allied to France. They were the choice of the Queen, who had herself by her first marriage been for so short a time Queen of France. He was proclaimed Prince and Steward of Scotland, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles, Baron of Renfrew. Latin elegiacs by George Buchanan, humanist and Kirk convert, before now the tutor and afterwards to be the accuser of the Queen, were sung. A letter from the Pope, saying that he had conceived great joy over the birth of the child, brought his prayers for increase of joy to the mother, and preservation of grace and bestowal of divine gifts to the child. Long afterwards one person—Charles James himself—believed the second part of those apostolic prayers to have been granted. The first, every one knew, was wholly denied.

In the evening there were masques and triumphs, again with a note of prophecy. They were designed by the Queen’s servant Bastian, already concerned with his own approaching marriage in February. It cannot yet have been settled that the festival of his marriage was to be the reason for his mother to leave Kirk o’ Field and return to Holyrood before the slaying of the father. Bastian displayed his skill, and the associates in the new plot watched it. There came in, running before the meat when it was brought, satyrs, with long tails and whips. The English gentlemen in attendance on Bedford were sitting in the hall. The Scottish satyrs, observing them, put their hands backward and wagged their tails derisively. The English, in high dudgeon and with a good deal of noise, rose from the table and, as a protest, sat down on the floor behind it. One was heard to threaten that, saving the Queen’s presence, he would put a dagger into Bastian’s heart. Mary and Bedford, hearing the disturbance, interfered and appeased the angry Southerners. The Prince (it is to be hoped) was in bed, but some such satirical tail-wagging was to go on for years under his rule before his Highness succeeded in appeasing the two nations, and in other days the wagging of copes before the angry North was to help to bring his son to his death.

The second birthday ended. Charles James had entered into natural and supernatural life. There was to be a third which should peculiarly combine both; so he was to believe, and so some others. But for that he had to wait another seven months—fourteen in all between the first and the third. The grand company of splendour dissociated. His mother, attended by Bothwell, rode off to spend Christmas with the Lord Drummond at Drummond Castle. His uncle, the Earl of Murray, beginning the process of preparing his fingers, went off with the religious Earl of Bedford to St. Andrews. His father wandered away, still solitary, to his own father’s house at Glasgow; there he fell ill of the smallpox. In January Mary was writing of his reported intention to seize the person of the Prince and rule in his name. She did not, she said, altogether believe the reports, though she knew that he, his father, and their folk were willing to give trouble. “But God moderates their forces well enough.”

Man moderated them further. Another of those strange “bonds” or agreements was in preparation of which, the whole period is so full. There had been one against Rizzio; there would be others for and against Bothwell. It would not do to say that there was then no political cause and effect. But our knowledge is still so limited, and their subtlety was so great, that we are left with a sense, greater than intelligence admits, of gazing at a number of violently discrete moments rather than at a series of logically consecutive moments. We can trace logical connections, but we can never be sure we are right. Bonds, associations, movements, are unrelated except by the dim and passionate destiny that rules all. Moment after moment expands with its stillness of sinister preparation or its violence of action, and disappears, and when the next rises in its turn everything is changed. These great persons exist discontinuously; to us, as to themselves (we seem to think), they live in their immediate knowledge of passion, and the flood of their passion withdraws into darkness and then hurls itself again towards us in another manner under a different sun. In the next century the darkness lifts; we can understand the movements of the tides. The execution of Charles I. is comprehensible; in the execution of Mary there remains a mystery, in the explosion of Kirk o’ Field a deeper mystery. The curious figure of James stands at the change of the centuries. The splendour of the Renascence homo is becoming the clarity of the seventeenth-century gentleman. In those earlier lives we are conquered by shocks of vision. Their drama is ostentatious and spectacular; so are their lives, but each with its core of night. Cecil, Walsingham, Maitland—these, and a few others, exist continuously, by their steady prolongation of purpose; the rest in moments, many perhaps, but always moments. It is from apparent discontinuity to apparent continuity that James is the transition. After him, the great moment disappears except by an accident of logic ending in a spectacle, as in the execution of his son. But before him the spectacle leaves its real logic concealed, as in the execution of his mother.

The child was brought to Edinburgh. The rush of his parents to destruction grew quicker. They came, both of them together, to Edinburgh, Darnley still ill. He was lodged in Kirk o’ Field, the Queen went to Holyrood. A year after David was slain, Kirk o’ Field went up in fire. Mary, professing that neither she nor her son was safe, delivered him to the custody of the Earl of Mar, who held him safely at Stirling again. There the Earl heard news after news—heard of the placards against Bothwell fastened by night on the Tolbooth, of the demands for justice by Lennox, father of the murdered man, of his wife’s reasonable answers, of Bothwell holding Edinburgh with four thousand men and Lennox gathering three thousand, of Lennox forbidden to bring more than his personal household to Edinburgh when he came to the trial of the accused Bothwell, of Lennox refusing to come. In April he heard of the trial, where no witnesses could be offered and no verdict but of acquittal found; of honours showered by the Queen on Bothwell, of his triumph, of the meeting of the Estates of Scotland. He heard of the great supper at Ainslie’s tavern where the high lords pledged themselves to stand by Bothwell if, for his infinity of good qualities, the Queen should be moved to choose him as a husband. On the 21st of April the Queen, without the Lord Warden and Lord Admiral Bothwell, appeared before the Castle, come to visit her son. There was a reason for the visit besides motherhood, though the Lord Mar did not know of it till three days afterwards. But he was wary of his charge; he would allow only two women to follow their mistress into the princely presence. Rumours went abroad of the meeting between Mary and her child. She had gone to kiss him; he had pushed her away, and tried to scratch her with all his little strength. It is likely enough that the small Charles James tried to push away a strange woman when he found her kissing him; babies do. But the English agent wrote to Cecil, apparently in complete seriousness, of impossible things. The Queen had given him (at ten months old) an apple, which he had refused to take. It was thrown to a greyhound and her whelps, all of which ate it and presently died. She had brought a sugar-loaf also, which was “judged to be very ill compounded.” This it is to have agents who gather for their letters news more startling and more incredible than is found in any of the sober papers of our modern age. A witch in the north had prophesied—Bothwell would die within the year; Mary would have two more husbands, and in the time of the fifth would die by fire.

But before that necromantic fire was well heard of, the Queen had left Stirling, to be met and seized by Bothwell, hastily divorced from his wife, and soon afterwards married to his sovereign. They returned to Edinburgh, and from there messages came to Stirling demanding the delivery of the child. Mar, having his charge from the Estates of Scotland, refused, but he grew anxious of the strength that Bothwell could bring, and he heard more rumours that Bothwell had sworn, could he once get the Prince in his hands, he “would warrant him for avenging his father’s death.”

Mar negotiated, encouraged by Sir James Melville. The split in the House of Stuart was already begun. Bothwell and Mar prefigured the schism between Mary and Charles James. The serious honesty of the Earl to his charge began the seclusion of the son from the mother which was to end in her final seclusion from him at Fotheringay. There, at any rate, was continuity. Mar argued that there was no place, outside Stirling, sure enough to hold the Prince if he were yielded up. He was reminded of Edinburgh Castle. He allowed of Edinburgh, but he had another objection. Being (they said) a bad dissembler, he had to make his objections out of such facts as he could find. Fortunately in Scotland then there were always facts to which objection could be taken. He said he could not trust the governor of Edinburgh Castle. But already the discussion was becoming irrelevant, and the great bond of Ainslie’s tavern already negligible. The lords were gathering against Bothwell. Mar knew it; very soon Bothwell and the Queen knew it. The idea of seizing the child was abandoned; the lovers fled to Dunbar.

Of all this anxiety on his behalf Charles James knew nothing. The routine of his life went on—after he had endured the single incursion of the strange woman who had tried to kiss him. He never saw her again, though as he grew older he heard of her often enough. He heard of her for the last time, except as a memory, twenty years after at Fotheringay; when he did, he knew that part of his royalty was at last quite finally his, and did not make any grand outcry beyond bidding the preachers pray for her. But at present she could not come, though she begged to, because she was shut up in the Castle of Lochleven, while Bothwell lurked in the Orkneys, and there she signed her renunciation of the Crown. Instead of her, there came, one day in July, many masculine visitors. The Castle was full of armed men. Charles James found himself carried about into another place—the church near by. The men-at-arms were at their posts; the Castle guns were ready. In the church there was movement and voices; a man with reddish hair, inclining his body and laying his hand on the Book of the Gospels, read in the child’s name the long oath of the King of Scots. It was James Douglas, Earl of Morton, selected for that service because of his other great services to the royal house of Scotland—he had held Holyrood for the conspirators while they slew Rizzio and threatened the Queen, he had signed the bond to stand by Bothwell and had then besieged him, he had put himself on the Council of Regency named in the paper the Queen had signed. In the name of Almighty God he read: how he—James, Prince and Steward of Scotland—would serve “the Eternal, my God, to the uttermost of my power ... maintain the true religion of Jesus Christ ... abolish and gainstand all false religion ... rule according to the will and command of God ... and according to the lovable laws and constitutions received in this realm.... The rights and rents, with all just privileges, of the Crown of Scotland I shall preserve and keep inviolate.... I shall forbid and repress, in all estates and all degrees, reiff, oppression, and all kind of wrong. In all judgments I shall command and procure that justice and equity be kept to all creatures, without exception ... and out of all my lands and empire I shall be careful to root out all heretics and enemies to the true worship of God that shall be convicted by the true Kirk of God of the foresaid crimes.”

The Earl finished the oath. The ceremony again went on. They set over the small head the ancient Crown of Scotland; they brought up the other royal hallows—the “honours of the realm”—and laid the small hand on the sceptre and the sword. They gave way to Adam, Bishop of Orkney, who had three months before married Mary to Bothwell, and he anointed the child. They swore their oaths of allegiance. The ceremony drew to a close; the instruments of royalty were borne back to the Castle, each by one of the great lords, and with them went the Lord John Erskine, Earl of Mar, bearing the chief instrument of royalty, the little body that had received the unction and the homage, incarnated Majesty, James the Sixth of Scotland. John Knox preached on the event that same day in the church of Stirling, from the text, “I was crowned young.”

It was his third birthday; now he was man, and Christian, and King. What those three things meant to him is his biography; what they meant to others is history. He set out, from those immingling nativities, under the charge of the lords. Before him, in due course, lay Edinburgh and London. Shakespeare and Bacon were to be his servants; Harvey his physician, Donne his chaplain. Ben Jonson was to write him masques, and Lancelot Andrewes arguments. He was to be the patron of the great English book that declared the coming of the Prince of Peace, and to see himself as a prince of peace, bringing rest to the afflicted churches and nations. But war in Europe and war in England were to open over his grave; the gossips were to spice their scandalous talk with his name; and afterwards everybody was always to laugh or shudder at him for ever.