Читать книгу James I - Charles Williams - Страница 6

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The lords had received during these months of militancy signs of the care which other Governments had for the Prince. The Queen of England caused her agent to propose that he should be brought to England for safety; she sent word to Mary at the same time, pointing out “how much good may ensue to her son to be so nourished and acquainted with our realm “—so much (Elizabeth added) that Mary ought rather to be petitioning for the removal than she herself proposing it. The King of France offered Murray almost anything he wanted if he would procure the dispatch of the Prince to France; he was said to be determined to get the child into his hands, “either by hook or by crook.” The Spanish ambassador in London, not seeing any chance of abducting the Prince for his own master, urged Cecil to secure him lest France should get him. Mary at the moment, what with Kirk o’ Field and what with Bothwell, was not popular with the Catholic sovereigns. But to have possession of the undoubted heir to Scotland and possible heir to England would be to hold a figure of very high potential value. In the end, however, none of them got him. The lords, and Murray, now on his way back to accept the Regency, realized James’s value; they kept him in Stirling under the sure vigilance of Mar; to whom presently came the final news of Mary’s escape from Lochleven, of her stand at Langside, of her flight to England, and of the sinister hospitality extended by Elizabeth. James was doubly orphaned—of his father by death, of his mother by exile. One last message she left him—in those short days of her freedom she dashed down a revocation of her surrender. The Throne was hers and not his; she, and only she, was the sovereign ruler of Scotland. By the time he knew of it he had been taught, and profoundly believed, otherwise.

James underwent three educational experiences. They were not, indeed, so markedly separate as his three birthdays, for each of them to some extent reflected and overran the others. But their intensities were different. From 1569 to 1579 he was under serious tutors, officially appointed, and learned his proper lessons, especially Biblical. From 1579 to 1582, under the influence of his first passion, he learned amorous emotions, royal emotions, and some sense of the facts rather than the bogies of the Continent and Christendom. From 1582 to 1583, in a captivity to his own servants, he learned to meet circumstantial hostility with caution and guile. After his escape from that captivity, at the age of seventeen, his education ends; his experience as a man begins. That experience itself divides naturally into two parts: formally, by his accession in 1603, at the age of thirty-six, to the Throne of England; actually, by the change in his circumstances which opened to him the relaxation and in the end the defeat of his spirit.

The Earl of Murray was Regent, having reached that position by a series of inspired absences from any spot where a murder happened to be taking place. In the history of the world no one else can have been away at the right moment quite so often as the Earl of Murray. He had lately broken his rule so far as to be present at the launching of accusations against his sister the Queen in England. But in the matter of physical or spiritual absence he could not teach Elizabeth anything. She too was never there, in any real sense, when she was wanted unless she also wanted to be. She had not been there now, either physically or spiritually. She had said, almost in so many words, that it was all very sad, and with that the raging Mary and the reluctant Murray had to be content. He returned to Scotland.

His Chancellor was the Earl of Morton, who, unlike Murray, had generally been either present or near at hand during the murders. The alliance worked admirably. Both Murray and Morton were professors of the Reformed Kirk, though even the Kirk was sometimes a little uneasy about Morton. But that was rather because of his abruptness with the ministers than because of the murders. Of Murray, however, they had no complaint. It was his nephew James who called him afterwards “that bastard who unnaturally rebelled, and procured the ruin of his owne sovran and sister.”

In August 1569 the Estates of Scotland considered their King’s education. They appointed four preceptors, two more especially tutorial: Mr. David Erskine, Mr. Adam Erskine, Mr. Peter Young, Mr. George Buchanan. The first two were known respectively as the Abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, being lay persons who had, by permission, impropriated the revenues of those foundations. They were described as “wise and modest”; certainly for nine years they took no prominent part. Peter Young was a minister, twenty-five years old, recently returned from Geneva. He was liked when he was noticed, but he was not usually noticed. The accident which sent him to Stirling as the younger coadjutor of Buchanan determined that his life should thereafter fall in pleasant places. He was afterwards made master-almoner; he was sent on a few minor diplomatic missions, especially in connection with the King’s marriage; he followed his master to England in 1603, and in 1604 was made tutor to Prince Charles; in 1605 he was knighted; in 1616—at the age of seventy-two—he became master of St. Cross Hospital, and there he died three years after his master. So steady a list of continual quiet occupations and promotions suggests a real affection between Peter Young and his pupil. He was something like James’s first love, that steady young Calvinist Master of Arts, and outlasted many later and more splendid rivals. Alas, he wrote no Memoirs!

But the chief preceptor was a very different person. No one had heard of Peter Young, but every one had heard of George Buchanan. He was a humanist with a European reputation. He had taught at Paris and Bordeaux, where young Montaigne had been one of his pupils; he had been imprisoned for heresy by the Inquisition in a Spanish monastery and released; he had been tutor to the sons of James V., of the Earl of Cassilis, of the French Marshal de Brissac. He had formally abandoned the Church for the Kirk in 1563, and had been made by Murray Principal of St. Andrews College. Once, on her first coming to Scotland, he had been a friend of the Queen’s; he had written her and her ladies little complimentary poems in Latin. They had read Livy together. In him alone of all the strong Scottish Protestants she enjoyed scholarship and poetry. But then there had come the catastrophic change. He was a man, says Melville, “of good religion for a poet, but he was easily abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted for a time.” Whether from company or from judgment he had believed the worst, and recorded still worse, of his sovereign and sometime friend. He also had returned but lately from residence in England, where he had assisted Murray’s arguments against Mary, and had stood up to swear to her handwriting in the Casket Letters.

During the first two years of his preceptorship he had another great work on hand besides the education of the son. He was busy in the detection of the mother. As the months went by he went, day by day, from proposing the Latin sentences by which he taught James to polishing the Latin sentences in which he denounced Mary. He poured into that work all the baser scandals and all the fouler fancies; it was the occupation of his leisure hours, and it was infiltrated with anger and hatred and scorn. That labour of darkness alternated with his labour of light. In the year 1571 the book was published—Detectio Mariae Reginae. It was probably at some moment when his two labours had become confused in his mind that he once called his pupil (as was reported) “a true bird of that bloody nest.”

With these four there was Lady Mar. She had a severity, but more than Buchanan she remembered the person of the King. Buchanan and she both “held the King in great awe.” The King remembered Buchanan for the rest of his life. In 1619, when he was fifty-three, he dreamed of his old master “checking him severely, as he was wont to do, and his Majesty in his dream seemed desirous to pacify him,” but he turned away “with a frowning countenance,” and repeated verses that the King, on waking, “perfectly remembered.” Buchanan did not stop at a severe countenance. There was certainly one occasion when James with other boys made too much noise, even after admonition, upon which Buchanan, who was disturbed in his reading, leapt from his chair, caught hold of the King, and thrashed him. Lady Mar, whom the cries of James brought on the scene, protested at this treatment of Majesty, and was promptly and coarsely snubbed. Against all such behaviour Peter Young, “who was loth to offend the King at any time,” seemed doubly amiable.

James learnt, and he learnt well; no doubt he had to, but the capacity and the inclination were both there. “They gar me speik Latin ar I could speik Scottis,” he said afterwards, and he was always inclined to be conceited over his correct pronunciation, which he justly attributed to Buchanan. On the other hand, Ben Jonson found fault with his manner of speaking verse; he was apt to fall into a common error—“his master, Mr. G. Buchanan, had corrupted his ear when young, and learned him to sing verses when he should have read them.” They taught him the Bible and the great texts that proved this or the other according as the wisdom of warring saints and doctors bade. They taught him history, ancient and modern, even at last the most modern history of all—of the Queen who had once dwelt with the leopards of France, and then for a little driven the unicorns of Scotland, and now lay in the castles of the lion of England; of the woman who (they said) had been art and part in the killing of his father, and had debauched herself with lovers, and had been rightly chained from her wickedness by the holy champions of God; of his mother. They taught him theology—the nature of God and of the Gospel, and the many enemies who opposed the Gospel, as the Roman Pontiff with his idolatries and the covens of witches with their necromancies. They taught him geometry and physics, logic and rhetoric, dialectic and astronomy. At times they showed him off to distinguished visitors. The Reverend James Melville and the English agent Killigrew both saw him in 1574, when he was eight. He was walked up and down by Lady Mar and made to display his capacities. “The sweetest sight in Europe for strange and extraordinary gifts of ingine, judgment, memorie, and language,” wrote Melville. Killigrew heard him translate “any chapter” of the Bible out of Latin into French, out of French into English—“a prince of great hope.”

When he was five they took him to open Parliament. In the canopy above him there was a rent. He asked what all this was; they told him the Parliament. “There is a hole in the Parliament,” he said solemnly. Parliaments were to be a great trouble to him—Parliaments in which he would find so few convenient holes. Buchanan had theories of the relation of a king to his people, of his responsibilities, duties, and subordination. He wrote another book and put them in—De Jure Regni Apud Scotos—and he dedicated it to James. It was a statement of constitutional monarchy, unexceptional in the abstract. But a constitutional monarchy presupposes a general agreement, not merely on the monarch but on the constitution. It was precisely this that was lacking. The King must not, all were agreed, be an absolute monarch on his own behalf. But any one of the lords who would so soon be in his train might at any moment want to use the monarch against some one else; in which case the more absolute the monarch was the better. Potential necessities clashed with absolute needs. And even Buchanan, teaching duties and limitations, still could only teach them as duties and limitations of the central fact which created them as its own characteristics. The King had duties because he was the King. His own mind grasped that fact, and grasped also the fact that in all Scotland there was no one like him. Whatever it meant to be supreme, that he was, and he alone. If James had grown up in any sort of even occasional propinquity to his mother, if Mary had still ruled Scotland he would have met another and a greater person of this strange kind that they call Majesty. He would have endured—agreeably or disagreeably—relations with her. He might have quarrelled; he would not have been solitarily royal. But he never did. They told him he was a phœnix, and all they told him besides of the proprieties of his phœnixhood could not compensate for the lack of the physical shock of another phœnix.

Gradually there appeared another element—the wish of the phœnix. The Lady Mar and George Buchanan had held him in great awe. But, slowly, other people entered. He was invited to have preferences, and to express them. He was urged to have royal wishes. The great world of Scotland had been proceeding briskly in its activities all those ten years. The Regent Murray ruled three years, suppressing the Hamiltons, the Gordons, and the Borderers, and was assassinated. The Regent Lennox, Darnley’s father, ruled in his stead for six months, and was killed in a skirmish with the Hamiltons. The Regent Mar succeeded, leaving James at Stirling in the custody of his brother, the Master of Mar, ruled for a year or so, and died of fever. The Regent Morton succeeded, and was still governing the country, not ineffectively, by a steady process of stamping out what remained of rebels and reivers, when the shadow of Stirling began to creep slowly over his world. “There was not another Earl of Morton to stir up factions,” remarked the observant Sir James Melville. But there was something else, which the Lord James Douglas in an extremely busy and bloody life had almost forgotten: there was the other James for whom he had sworn so many remarkable things.

One day a gentleman of his household ventured a reminder. He pointed out that the Regent, in general, was both envied and hated throughout the country, and even in Stirling. Gentlemen of note were going there; the Earl of Argyle was said to have been given, “by the King’s wish,” a room in the Castle. There was feud between Argyle and Morton. Even George Buchanan was said to be very apt to speak evil of the Regent, who had once by chance bought a hackney that had been stolen from Buchanan, and would not give it up. The Regent was not usually a fearful man. But once he had a leman, who had been wise in necromancy, and made prophecies, and told him how in the end the King should be his destruction, and the doubt of that doom disturbed him now. He sent gold to Stirling, to be discreetly bestowed on any there who spoke evil of him: except, certainly, George Buchanan. The gold was taken, and the gentlemen changed their tune. Presently the King, with the inconvenient accuracy of intelligent children, noticed to his surprise that the tune had changed. He spoke of it aloud, somewhat to the scandal of his household. It was found that his memory would “check up”—the phrase is Melville’s—“any that he perceivet had first spoken evell, and then began to speak gud again.” He said something about turncoats. It was his first intricate glance into the less violent methods of governing the opinions of the King.

The Lord Regent—it would not be altogether out of tune with the tragi-comedy of Scotland at this time to call him the Chief Brigand—found that bribery had failed. He had converted the gentlemen; he had not influenced the King. He began to contemplate that chief act of brigandage which was so common—at least, as an effort—in both Scotland and England, the seizure of the person of the King. He determined to get into his power the anointed symbolical source of government; and he determined to do it before that source could, as it showed signs of doing, divert its waters down other channels. But even here he was hampered, for the Master of Mar, following the precedent set by his dead brother in dealing with the Queen, would not allow even the Regent to enter the Castle save as a private person and a guest. Followers were not allowed. The Regent yielded the point, and went as a private person.

He was introduced into the Presence. He saw before him a boy of twelve, well made, but already somewhat ungainly, incapable of standing easily, and inclined either to loll in a chair or to wander up and down the room; with large and noticeably rolling eyes, and hands that were constantly fiddling with his clothes. Before those remarkable eyes the Lord Morton began to spin an attractive web. He bowed to them a head grown old, as it were, in the service of the State—Rizzio murders, accusations against Mary, and such-like. He indicated his wish to retire in favour of personal government by James. As a preliminary he invited the King to come to Edinburgh, into the Castle there, the Regent’s own particular pet parlour. He described the parlour: the Castle was in a fine situation; there were pleasant fields, and the sea, and many ships. James was a free King; let him express his wish and he would be obeyed. Let him leave Stirling and come.

The boy fidgeted and rolled his eyes and said nothing much to the point, until after Morton had withdrawn, when he let out to his guardians that the Earl was tired of the Regency. The general discontent gathered itself into a regular confederacy. It was noticed that in certain places the arms of the House of Douglas had appeared instead of the more correct emblazonment of the royal arms. Before any further substitution could be made, Erskine and Buchanan, Argyle and Atholl, determined to strike. James lent his name. In the most solemn manner the Regent was summoned to do what he had said he was longing to do. Without the King in his own hands he did not venture on battle. He assented; at a high ceremony at the market cross of Edinburgh, proclamation was made of the resignation of the Regent, and the assumption of the government by the person of the King’s Majesty. The Chief Bandit retired to Lochleven and gave himself to gardening, making the walks even and such simple employments. The King remained at Stirling under the care of the other bandits. “All the devils in hell are stirring and in great rage in this country,” wrote the English ambassador to his Queen, but added hopefully, “yet are we in hope of some good quietness, by the great wisdom of the Earl of Morton.”

The resignation had taken place in March. Towards the end of April the nephew of the Master, the young Earl of Mar, came as he sometimes did to lodge in the Castle. He was the head of his house, and he was jealous of the authority the Master exercised by virtue of his office. The possession of the Castle and its royal inmate, the Earl felt, were his by right, and the great wisdom of the Earl of Morton had secretly agreed with him. So far the assent of the King had been attempted by persuasion or petition. It was now time for deeds. Early one morning James was awakened by an uproar in the hall. He came out of his room, and saw below him a tumult. The Master, clutching a halberd, among a few of his servants was being surrounded and pressed back by a greater crowd. The abbots who were the King’s preceptors were shouting at him; the Earl of Mar himself was there, also exclaiming. Voices were crying “Treason!”; some one went down in the mêlée, and was trampled and crushed. The brutality, the noise, the shining steel—the things his mind despised and his nerves hated—were raging and threatening. The boy clutched his head and shrieked for the Master. Argyle hurried from his room and ran down to pacify the tumult. The King was soothed, composed, and told his governor was safe. They were right; but the governor’s son died the next day of his trampling. The raid had succeeded, Morton came riding hard to Stirling, and took possession. For long, James had nightmares; the steel and the cries troubled his sleep; he woke by night shrieking of the brawl and of the armed forms that terrified his unguarded hours, and when he woke at morning the visions of his sleep yielded to the vision of the day, the presence of Morton. The Master of Mar, at whose danger he had cried out, was driven from the Castle; Morton remained. Through the early May the young King was aware by night of the brawl, by day of the victor in the brawl. Night and day presented him with two sides of a single fact, doubly repugnant to him. He had lost the Master; he had, instead, a more dominating master. The confederates, even if for their own purposes, had been urging and directing him to the assertion of himself. They had required him to profess his royalty. But the restored Regent, even though he did not formally revoke the King’s assumption of government, disallowed any further action. James was checked at precisely the moment when he had approached “the two great ends of liberty and power.” There was riding and gathering and negotiating; Parliament was held at Stirling; at last Morton and his enemies came to an agreement. The Regent, in effect if not in title, had triumphed. As if delighting in his renewed power, he became even more confident, “supposing that it lay in his power to form the Court at his pleasure; be his great substance to won as many as he thocht necessary; and be the multitude of his friends to bear out his business.” He abode “always starkest about the King.” The oracular fate which had been prophesied for him seemed to have been met and defeated, and his fear began to pass, as if Macbeth had seen Birnam Wood thronging in a mass of climbing verdure about Dunsinane, and had by the force of his own breath blown it far back from the walls.

It was the autumn of 1579. James was thirteen. Such affection as he had hitherto felt, so far as it can be traced in that remote castle, had been for Peter Young and for the Master. But now the Master was distant and Peter Young was ineffective, and only Morton abode stark about the King. In the crowd of lesser gentlemen James had taken note of one, a soldier, the son of Lord Ochiltree, of his own clan, bearing indeed his own name, James Stuart. He was a fine figure of a man, and he belonged, as far as any of those militant adventurers could belong to any, to the anti-Morton group. But his time was not yet; the secret bitterness of the boy, his sovereign, had first to be tempted by more delicate food. Some splendour, some ostentation of beauty, was needed; some rich weather to nourish royalty into flower. The boy was the child of Mary as well as of Darnley, and he was yearning for something more wonderful and more passionate than Peter Young or the rest of his Douglas and anti-Douglas Court could furnish. He went on secretly pluming himself on what he was, but all that in truth he was remained useless amid all that he was beside. He was royal and learned, but he was young, awkward, nervous, and uncertain; he needed belief. The possibility of belief arrived, that September, from France.

There disembarked in Scotland a gentleman almost of the Blood; the grand-nephew of the late Earl of Lennox, nephew to the dead Darnley, cousin of James—Esmé Stuart. In the fifteenth century an ancestor of his had helped to defeat the English in France, and had been granted the seigneury of Aubigny for his services. The new arrival was the sixth seigneur—a simple French gentleman, an accomplished French courtier. He descended upon that armed and Calvinistic court, an adorned wonder of a brilliant civilization. He came to the King of Scotland, and all the heraldic beasts of the royal coat of arms grew sleeker at his coming.

The thistle rather than the lion had hitherto been for James the emblem of his royal office, but now he began to enter into a more beautiful and more dangerous world. He himself was no lion; a mule in a lion’s skin would have been a truer description, were it not that all his uncouthness and awkwardness, his uncertain legs and large tongue, did not quite conceal a certain swiftness and ferocity of spirit. He was the son of Mary of the leopards of France, and now, called by its French mate, the leopard in him began to stir and emerge from its spiritual lair. The King was thirteen when the stranger arrived; he was sixteen when they were parted for the last time. In the short three years he had been given something more than flattery—more even than friendship; he had been given himself. As he wandered with and talked with the stranger, he beheld in a mirror the image not of the clumsy youth but of the cultured, unscrupulous, and exquisite Majesty of France or Scotland. His own nature was Stuart; he became as much open Stuart as it was possible for him to become. He clasped his friend “in the embraces of his great love”; to the free passion of that released love a later observer attributed all “the sweetness of his nature.” But that sweetness possessed now a new and dangerous spirit, felt in him by others; within a year the English agent in Scotland wrote that the lords found it wiser and safer to keep the King’s favour by yielding to the course of his affection rather than to risk the peril of plainly dissuading him from his pleasures and openly withstanding the counsels and devices of his favourites and minions.

The conquest was immediate and lasting. The stranger was a man of over thirty, sure of himself, of his culture, and of all his shining French background. He was a Catholic; physically, intellectually, spiritually, the Continent entered into the harsh castles of uttermost Thule, and the half-barbarian prince of Thule avidly welcomed it. D’Aubigny was given a suite of rooms next the King’s. By the end of the month, when the King paid his first visit to Edinburgh, the Frenchman, acknowledged Favourite, rode with him. Away in Greenwich or Nonesuch the Queen of England had her Favourites, as the King of France in Paris or Orleans had his. But no other Favourite of them all could give what this one was giving, for those sovereigns knew very well what they were, and James was only now discovering it. His eyes followed the stranger everywhere; he leaned on him and played with his clothes. Had he not been the King he would have hung about D’Aubigny’s house and haunted him with a continual presence. But he was the King; in an exquisite and thrilling union his submission and his supremacy were combined and flattered. The very man at whose feet he was ready to fall, fell humbly at his own. His master attended on him, and the self-conceit of the delighted boy received homage from his hero.

D’Aubigny found he had much to teach—among other things a certain amplitude of giving. His pupil was ready enough, for now he realized that he could give. Being the King, he had things to give—lands and titles—and being the King, he was free to give as he chose. Peter Young had of himself at least been a Calvinist and a minister, but this new friend was nothing in Scotland except by royal favour. He gave James much; he took much in return, and even in taking he gave, for he took from the King’s hand what no hand but the King’s could give.

Within the first six months the Earldom of Lennox was revived and bestowed; it had been promised to another, but that other had to be content with the Earldom of March. He was furnished with revenues and estates. He was made—at first indirectly; afterwards directly—Governor of the Castle of Dumbarton, the great key fortress of Scotland, which gave access to and from France. Before the first year of his advent was over he had become a duke: there had been, outside the royal family, but one other duke in Scotland, when, for a little while, Mary had made Bothwell Duke of Orkney. This new creation was either an acknowledgment of the Blood or an advancement to the glory of the Blood, and either way an extraordinary favour. More significant still—for himself—than all such benevolence and beneficence was the kingly display in which James indulged. He went, in 1580, on a royal progress, and the Earl of Lennox went with him. Everywhere the shows and pageants, the gifts and offerings, proclaimed the presence of the King and his elect. And all the while the earl’s tongue murmured of kingship as it was in France, and courts and learning and splendour and beauty—all as they were in France.

There was, between James and his beloved, but one rift, but one thing they did not order better in France; and that was religion. The Earl of Lennox may have regarded himself as a Catholic; James certainly so regarded him; and so, with even more horror and alarm, did the ministers and true men of the Gospel. Among the many agitations which the coming of the “parahelius”^[2] had produced in both the northern and southern kingdoms the religious was of extreme importance. The ministers of Edinburgh kept a close watch; it was said that Lennox could not open his pack in any corner but it would be “seen and published in pulpit.” It was known he had come from the Catholic House of Guise; it was asserted that he had come entirely to overthrow religion, to recover for the Roman household the Steward of Scotland, and with him the lands of his stewardship. The preachers inveighed against him and his friends—“Papistes with great ruffs and side bellies” were suffered in the King’s chambers. The King himself argued with his friend. It seems likely that Lennox would have been entirely out of his depth in theology, whereas James was fully at ease. There were few things James liked better than arguing theology; certainly he liked to win, and he disliked an obstinate heretic who would not be converted. But he liked to think the heretic had been converted by reason and not by royalty; it was more glory and more delight for the victor. By a graceful compensatory act of devotion the earl allowed himself to be converted. He indulged the King and himself with the only unity that was lacking; spiritually, as corporeally, they embraced. The Protestant mouth of the young ruler, earnestly setting forth the true meaning of a hundred texts, opened a golden pathway—of theology—to his cousin’s view. Light broke on the idolater. He allowed it to become known to the ministerial champions of the Kirk that he had seen his errors. He told them that a preacher—a French preacher—of the Reformed Religion should be procured from London to instruct him. At first some of the ministers were much impressed by this notable conversion; later, they complained to the King that nothing had been done. The King promised to excite the earl to action. But both the King and the earl found it more delightful to confine religious exposition to their own duet than that Lennox should sit away from his friend under a strange Huguenot importation.

Meanwhile the stark Morton began to be troubled by the influence of the new moon of royalty. “The flexible nature of the King in these tender years” was becoming daily more antagonized, both personally and politically. The King was never quite as flexible as his baronial psychologists thought. But at present he did not want scenes and quarrels in his presence, and the surest way of avoiding them was to be as charming as he could to every one. His conversation, his manners, were precociously flexible, but not his spirit. Even with the beloved Lennox he was firm on two things; he never thought of abandoning his Protestantism, and he never showed any inclination to take refuge in France. Lennox may not have suggested or proposed such a removal, but the fear of it agitated Morton and Morton’s friends the English. Sir Robert Bowes, the Treasurer of Berwick, was sent as a special agent into Scotland to undermine Lennox; he wrote long letters home to Burleigh and Walsingham. Morton, in a secret interview by night, complained to him that the King began “to commend and be contented to hear the praises of France, beyond his accustomed manner,” that he kept D’Aubigny’s secrets and revealed Morton’s. Bowes urged on his government the need of a judicious expenditure on pensions and bribes. He could, had he the money, purchase almost any one in Scotland, save only Peter Young and—an ominous exception—the ministers of the Kirk. The surrender of Dumbarton Castle to Lennox raised wilder fears. Through the year 1580 the English statesmen grew more despairing. Morton kept on asking for money; Elizabeth kept on refusing to give any to him or any one else. Cecil foresaw every kind of disaster; he continually prophesied catastrophe. Walsingham, out of his fervid Puritanism, beheld the Mass coming back everywhere in Scotland. Paris, or Madrid, or both Paris and Madrid, were preparing armies to land there, restore old things, and march through the postern gate on England. Elizabeth wrote letters, varying from kindly friendship to shocked maternity. She reminded him of all that she had done for him; she even allowed Bowes, in two interviews, to touch on that thing, unmentionable, yet now becoming as clear to James’s eyes as it had so long and so painfully been clear to hers—the succession. The crown that he hardly yet wore in Scotland was but a reflection of the greater crown that floated before his eyes away over the Border. There, sooner or later, was to be his future, and as his nature throve in the propinquity of Lennox it fixed itself the more obstinately on its destiny. He began to know the obstacles—the nightmares of raid and rebellion in Scotland, and the hindrances—two women, his godmother on her throne, his mother in her prison. As he grew and throve, in a double adolescence of manhood and royalty, he saw always before him the two shadowy women who claimed the crowns that were his own.

Elizabeth was to attempt to touch that nerve in him many times in the next twenty years. In the warnings against Lennox which came to him she used a phrase strangely reminiscent of her own past and her fortune. She bade him “rather to fear (for) his ambition than to comfort and delight his affection.” Ambition was too strong a word; he did not purpose all the activity it implies. She did at one time encourage Morton to “lay violent hands” on Lennox, but after the letter had gone she considered that violence, once begun, might lead anywhere—to the abduction of the King into France or the induction of the French into Scotland; she wrote the next day forbidding it. And she persistently refused to send money.

There were good reasons for this. She never wanted to spend; she had far too many necessary affairs to spend on, and far too little money to spend on all; she was never clear how far the expenditure of money in the Scottish waste of nobles might be profitable, how far the money might bind any of them to her or how far, having taken the money, they would neglect her. She had (or so Walsingham at one time thought) “a strange disposition” not to enter into any formal agreement with the Scottish government while Queen Mary was alive. “Such scruples,” he remarked, “are rather superstitious than religious.” But Walsingham was not a crowned prince and could not possess the sensitiveness of princes concerning the other members of their guild. It was not only Mary but James of whom it is tempting to think that Elizabeth had a more intuitive knowledge than any of her advisers. Perhaps, remembering her own girlhood, the imagination may be justified. She too had been a child alone among bullying or luring lords and princes; she had had affections and subdued them to her interests; she had watched the slow approach of a Crown; she had displayed everything but herself until she and the Crown were one. When all was said, there was something which the two distant cousins, in their distant palaces—the boy of fourteen and the woman of forty-seven—had in common which none of the others possessed—not Lennox nor Cecil nor Morton nor Walsingham nor Bowes: the habit of royalty in their blood. For all her letters of promises or threats, Elizabeth did not really think that James would surrender that habit to any masculine or feminine domination. She was entirely right; she was, in another sense than the religious, the spiritual godmother of James, and she knew if that spiritual kinship held that he must inevitably win, and she must inevitably lose, the Crown that was still hers. He was fourteen and she was forty-seven. Time had given him a sufficient and certain bribe; she need do no more, and they both knew it. It was not to France or Spain, Lennox or Morton, baronage or clergy, love or anger, that he would surrender his own future. Nor to that other solitary figure, his unknown mother, Mary, held in an English prison. In the end certainly a yearly pension of four thousand pounds was forced out of Elizabeth for him. But it was unnecessary, and she knew it; it was, in its way, a defeat. The battle, however, had been between her and Cecil and Walsingham; not between her and James. It was their fears which defeated her; they did not understand the spirit or tenacity of kings, or of the leopard that prowled patiently round the Northern gate.

As for Morton, she could not believe that Morton really mattered now. Bowes wrote that Morton was anxious for the King to have a personal guard. The King also wished for one. There seemed to be no money in Scotland to provide such security. Morton hinted that if Elizabeth supplied the money and he the men, the King’s person would be more adequately secured. Elizabeth did nothing. Presently, however, a guard—or the equivalent of a guard—appeared. The Earl of Lennox became Lord High Chamberlain; under him there were four-and-twenty ordinary and five extraordinary Gentlemen of the Chamber, sons of nobles. The captain of this company was James Stuart, son of Ochiltree. He also had become a close friend of the Favourite. They were at the King’s disposal; he was at theirs. It was time to deal with Morton.

The late Lord Regent, despairing of England, was beginning to open negotiations with Lennox. Bowes, after a last interview in which he solemnly warned James of his rashness in preferring an Earl of Lennox to the Queen of England, had been recalled. The Favourite, having become a Protestant, was making efforts to become a popular Protestant. He had begun “to creep into credit even with the ministers at Edinburgh.” Morton was warned publicly by a mad seaman, when he was with the King and Lennox, that his destruction was drawing near. Without Elizabeth’s aid and with the dubious support of the godly he saw no chance of laying violent hands on Lennox. But the original intention of seizing the King and murdering the Favourite became known to the intended victims. Christmas came; on the next day James took Morton out with him for a day’s hunting, and showed him a favourable kindness. It was on the last day of the year (1580) that the blow came.

The King was at Council. He lolled, attentive and expectant, in his chair; his lords were round him—Lennox, Morton, Argyle, Angus (also a Douglas), Lindsay, Cathcart, and others. The Captain of the Guard, James Stuart of Ochiltree, came into the room and fell upon his knees before the Presence. He was asked what brought him there. Still kneeling, he made answer that he had come to charge James Douglas, Earl of Morton, with high treason in that he was privy to the horrible murder of the late King Henry, his present sovereign’s dearest father. The King saw Morton come to his feet, saw him turn his eyes, after one glance at the Captain, upon himself; heard him speaking of the low degree of his accuser, of his right to despise the accusation, heard him saying something of his innocence. But he and every one there knew that the Captain of the King’s Guard would not bring such an accusation without the assent, willing or unwilling, of the King, and knew also that the King would have willingly consented to anything that promised the Earl’s overthrow. Still kneeling, the Captain asked, if the Earl of Morton were innocent, “why did he prefer his cousin Archibald Douglas to be a Senator of the College of Justice, who was known to have been an actor in that murder?” He sprang up, seizing his sword. Morton caught at his own; as they moved, the Lords Lindsay and Cathcart came between them. Morton was thrust away, out of the council-chamber, and into the chapel. Stuart retired into another room. There was a discussion; the law-officers were consulted. Morton was brought back; Stuart pushed his way back. The King received the advice of his councillors, though Lennox refused to vote against his enemy, and Angus in favour of his kinsman. At last the Earl was removed to ward in the Castle.

Elizabeth at first moved to save him. Her agents laid plots in Edinburgh; an army of two thousand men approached the Border under Lord Hunsdon; the English ambassador Randolph denounced Lennox before the Estates of Scotland. None of these methods saved the Earl. The plots fell through; the Estates were hostile; a shot was fired through Randolph’s window. None of the Scottish lords rose in arms, and Elizabeth, unprepared for an invasion in full strength, withdrew her force. On June 1 Morton was brought to trial; on June 2 he was beheaded, in full expectation (according to his own words) of entering into the felicity of Almighty God. On the steps of the scaffold was the Earl of Arran, a title just bestowed on James Stuart, Captain of the King’s Guard.

The execution of Morton was the greatest achievement of this second period of the King’s education, which lasted for little more than a year longer. During that year he enjoyed the company of Lennox and, in a lesser degree, of Arran, to his high content. The King “can hardly suffer him out of his presence,” they said of the pre-eminent Favourite. The removal of Morton had left the world freer to those other plotters who, on the whole, were more sympathetic to James, to the Catholics. Mary, in England, was attempting to operate through Spain; Lennox wished to operate through France. On both sides Catholicism was made as attractive as possible, and it was understood James was by no means indifferent. Mary had greatly offended her son by giving permission to the French envoy to address him as King. She now put forward a scheme of Association, by which he and she should reign conjointly. Jesuit priests were introduced into Holyrood. Lennox wrote to Mary, talking of an army with himself at its head. The Scottish Catholic earls would rise. The King would be converted, by grace, reason, or force. But it would make a good deal of difference whether the accent of his new creed were French or Spanish, and the conversion of Scotland by either France or Spain (could it be secured) might throw the other government on to the English side. The Scottish Catholic earls were, in a general way, willing to co-operate with whichever would foot the bill for expenses.

News of the plots in operation began to leak out. One of the Edinburgh ministers, John Durie, prophesied in his sermons against the courtiers who persuaded the King to write to France and Guise. Other ministers forced an interview with him and exhorted him to his face at great length. They offered to name godly men who could guide him, and they had the names ready. James, quite frankly, fled. He could face swords, though he never cared to use one; he could not face sermons, though as he grew older he came to like delivering them. Other troubles were the Bishop of Glasgow and the horses of the Duke of Guise. Bishops in the Reformed Kirk had been abolished; a few lingered. The King had given the bishopric of Glasgow to Lennox, who appointed a certain Robert Montgomery to be a tulchan Archbishop, the channel by which the revenue should flow in to the patron’s hands. It is said that he was scornful of Greek and Hebrew; that he condemned “the particular application” of Scripture, that he disparaged the ministerial commission to direct kings, and had even called the ministers “men of curious brains.” Durie threatened him with excommunication. The Duke of Guise sent the King a present of horses; they had hardly arrived before James found Durie on his threshold, bidding him refuse the papistical steeds; it was the will of God. James promised to obey the will of God, but he went to see the horses first, after which they disappear from history.

Some time between June 1581 and June 1582, he began indulgence in another delight. He experimented in verse. A “Song” exists which is said to be “the first verses that ever the King made,” and also “the King’s verses when he was fifteen years old.” If they are both (which seems unlikely), then Lennox was the godfather of his poetry. The “Song” runs:

Since thought is free, thinke what thou will,

O troubled hart, to ease thy paine.

Thought unrevealed can do no evill,

Bot wordes past out cummes not againe.

Be cairfull aye for to invent

The waye to gett thy owen intent.

To pleas thy selfe with thy concaite

And lett none knowe what thou does meane,

Houp aye at last, though it be late,

To thy intent for to attaine.

Thoght whiles it brake forth in effect,

Yet aye lett witt thy will correct.

Since foole haste comes not greatest speede

I wolde thou shoulde learne for to knoaw

How to make vertue of a neede,

Since that necessitie hath no law.

With patience then see thou attend

And houpe to vanquise in the end.

A little less discreetly than this suggests, the King in May 1582 took action against Durie; he compelled him to leave Edinburgh. In June the Kirk replied by excommunicating Montgomery in Glasgow Cathedral. In July, after great preaching against Lennox and Arran, a series of articles was presented to the King, protesting against his negligence of the Kirk and his friendship with “bloody murtherers and persecutors.” Arran in a rage demanded who dared subscribe such articles. Andrew Melville, Rector of St. Andrews University, one of the great Kirk leaders, cried: “We dare and will subscribe them, and render our lives in the cause.” He seized a pen, wrote down his name, passed it to another minister, and so one by one they all signed. While Edinburgh was thus in open rage, a more secret plot was arranged by the Protestant lords. Angus had interviewed Elizabeth, who had either given him money or come convincingly near it.^[3] The other lords were warned that Lennox was about to take action against them. James, for once divided from his beloved and from Arran, had gone to Ruthven Castle, belonging to the Earl of Gowrie, for the hunting. He rose on the morning of August 22, 1582, to find throngs of armed men outside the Castle. Gowrie, Mar, the Master of Glamis, Lindsay, and other lords entered his room. He was told he must remain where he was for a while. He went towards the door, meaning to leave the room; Gowrie (or, as some say, Glamis) insolently thrust his leg across it in front of him. The boy, surprised and shaken, gave way to tears of anger. The Master said callously: “Better bairns greet than bearded men.” Some one called out for a rocking-horse to be brought to the King. James uttered incoherent words of vengeance; it is by that we know his tears to have been of rage and not of fear.

He was in their hands. He was told that Arran also had been taken in an ambush. Lennox fled to Edinburgh, but without the King’s person he could do nothing. From his window, plucking at his beard, he was compelled to watch the return of John Durie, who came back in lowly pomp, received by ministers and townsfolk singing the 124th Psalm (“If the Lord had not been on our side”), and singing it with especial ardour outside the house of the Papistical stranger. The Raid of Ruthven was accomplished; the third period of the King’s education had begun.

It did not take James long to grasp the situation. He was a prisoner; he was not too secure of his life. His lovers were helpless; he was uncertain of theirs. The net was about him. Within it the leopard faded into an inner darkness; a lamb began softly to emerge. Once before he had been seized, by Mar and Morton, but then he had been very young; since then he had been the captive of passion, not of fear. Now he was captive, yet he must act. Mary and Elizabeth, France and Spain, Morton and Lennox, had all his life been plotting and dissimulating. He entered fully into that world. He spent, of necessity, almost a year in it; it was his University. By a symbolical geography he left it at St. Andrews.

It was a University in which the dour dons, unconscious of their academic office but soon to be conscious of the result, had great difficulties. Sir Robert Bowes arrived again from Berwick to hearten them. He found them mutually suspicious; agreed only on the necessity of getting Lennox out of the country; more and more reluctant to bear the expense of continually attending the royal person and maintaining the necessary force about him. They received Bowes with demands for money. Bowes, having little, gave less and husbanded the remainder for a crisis. He wrote urgently to Walsingham: let the Queen only send money, and all would be well. He had interviews with the King who, for all his young dissimulation, could not yet conceal “the great affection” that he bore towards the duke; in October, indeed, Bowes heard that he had been brought again to those angry tears by something in the behaviour of the lords—it seems, by their intended Declaration of the causes for their action: “he entered into a great passion and sorrow to behold himself and his honour, as he thought, so greatly wounded thereby.” Bowes continually urged him to put his love and trust in Elizabeth. Certainly, hereditary passion was in him, but passion which is thrillingly beautiful in a beautiful Queen becomes laughable in a provincial and awkward precocity. It had been allowed free play, and now in an unhappy freedom it was weeping for its beloved and for its own ill-luck. He was compelled, for his love’s safety and his own, to drive the beloved out of his land. He had to dry his own tears, to find his own consolation. He had to deny his passion the freedom it had so recently found. The persons of the lords were about him; the voices of the ministers in his ears; the admonitions of the English ambassador were substituted for the sweet devotion of his own duke. He was invited to love, to trust, to admire an old woman at a distance instead of a splendid masculine beauty at his side. He inhibited his display of love and sorrow. Awkwardly he sat, no longer tearful, listening with rolling eyes to the exposition of Sir Robert Bowes, who begged him to accept Elizabeth’s sympathy and support. He did so—gratefully he showed a proper disposition to turn from France and rely on England. He said that he had heard that the Queen had heard “he was by nature inconstant and dissembling”; he was anxious to remove “all such distrust” and “approve his thankful and constant mind.”

He was indeed constant to actuality. He had been brought back to Edinburgh; and there also one evening came a secret messenger from Lennox. He got into touch with John Gibbe, a page of the chamber. Gibbe whispered news of the interview in the King’s ear. The King, pretending “to go to the stool,” called Gibbe to go with him, and in that place of intimate channels listened to the duke’s messages. But for answer he only said hastily that if the duke were wise he would not thus send to him to their hurt and his danger, and as hastily went away. He had realized that Lennox could raise no party, and that, even could he, his own perilous position would not be improved. He allowed himself to become more and more placable to the lords and Bowes; as the months went by he issued orders to Lennox to yield Dumbarton and to leave the kingdom. What might happen after that was another matter. If James was ever to enjoy again the company of the Favourite, it was above all things necessary that James and his Favourite should be alive and free: he went on directing Lennox to go. At the end of December, reluctantly, Lennox went, after a little counter-conspiracy at the end of the preceding month to recover the Person, by bringing a company through the chapel up a dark stair to the gallery over the chapel while James was at supper, and introducing them into his presence when the lords in attendance had gone to their own supper. It failed, and James again accepted actuality.

The opening of the year 1583 found him still surrounded by the lords of the Raid, with Bowes’s expositions and admonitions for diversion. The departure of the Duke of Lennox had coincided with the arrival of a new ambassador from France—indeed of two new ambassadors, charged to offer James the sympathy and aid of the French king who had heard that his Scottish Majesty was held prisoner. James exhibited to them an ostensible freedom; he listened to their proposals, promises, and prophecies of the future. The English agents could not tell what to make of him. He appeared to be wholly disposed to Elizabeth, yet sometimes “the King’s own disposition and liking of this present company with him have been called in doubt upon sundry circumstances noted lately in him.” It became more and more obvious that everything depended on James’s own deliberate choice, and to fix that choice the French and English agents continually laboured. The Ruthven lords “had the wolf by the ears,” but what was to happen when they let go? Could the wolf be trusted to do what the bleat of the lamb had promised? And how long could they hold on to the growing and sometimes growling beast?

Had Mary of Scots been already dead, it is just possible that James might have accepted the French alliance. But she was not, and (what had again offended him very deeply) the French ambassador spoke to him as Majesty by permission previously obtained from Mary. The more he gave himself to the French the more likely it was that he would be subordinated to the closer of those two watching women across the frontier. Yet his only alternative was to lean towards the other. The second ambassador, defeated by the measureless swamp of the appetite of the nobles for gold and by the stone wall (which could never be eventually disguised) of James’s own Protestantism, at last departed. James went on bleating affection and devotion to Elizabeth; Bowes, worried and hampered, half-believed, half-distrusted. Lennox had gone; the lords of the Raid were at a loose end in policy. They disputed, quarrelled, left and returned. Gowrie himself was—not without cause—distrusted by his companions. They did not know in the least what to do next.

There was to be a vague “convention” of the nobility; the King was to be allowed to go on a progress and enjoy himself with hunting. Some small effort was made to remove Arran and restore the true earl (who was mad), but James demurred and deferred action. In May, Bowes had a long interview over the Association project, which James, without any need for dissimulation, thoroughly disliked: “it was,” he said, “a matter dangerous to his estate and tickle to this crown.” He let it be known that during the summer he would leave all affairs of State to “old councillors”; he would give himself up to hunting. Meanwhile he was holding other interviews with the old Sir James Melville, whom he had recalled from his retirement, and to whom he let something of his underlying spleen appear. “Other princes,” he complained, thought him but a beast to suffer so many indignities; the French ambassadors perhaps had not altogether concealed their incredulity. Melville rather discouraged change, and delivered a lecture on the state of countries during the minority of princes. But the King was fixed: “he took up a princely courage either to put himself to face liberty or to die by the way.” He did not propose, however, to die by the way. He had written to divers lords of the opposed party or of none, to come to the convention. He rode to St. Andrews, arriving there a day or two before the new lords. Certain of the Ruthven lords followed him up hastily. While the King was at supper it was suggested to him that he should walk in the Abbey yard until the castle was ready for him. But men in armour had been seen in the yard; news of them was brought; the King got himself by another way to the castle. Even in the castle on the next day it was a touch-and-go business; at the stair-heads and galleries there were other armed men of the Ruthven faction. Melville acted swiftly; many young men were introduced, belonging to the Earl of March, and as many of the townsfolk as the provost believed loyal. Gowrie wholly swayed on to the King’s side; no one quite liked to take the risk of beginning a definite rebellion in blood. The day slipped dangerously by; by night the King was safe.

The next day he made a speech. He was to be “a universal king”; that is, indifferent and equal to all his subjects. He acknowledged the good intentions of the managers of the Raid; he would overlook everything, if they would seek remission and oblivion. As a spectacular exhibition of peace, he dined with Gowrie at Huntingtower; who, after dinner, kneeling down, lamented that the King should have been detained “at that unhappy house,” on the last occasion of his being there. He himself, he said, had supposed nothing more but that a supplication was to be presented; the ensuing detention had been “a purely accidental fault.” The King forgave him; so amazing a statement could at least hardly be called dissimulation. The future was the Earl of Gowrie’s business; if the earl should slip into another accident, it might also be James’s. Meanwhile the King enjoyed his sensations, and awaited the first favourable opportunity to recall Arran to the Court.

Sir Robert Bowes was told by “discreet persons” that the King had undergone a great change. They reported that he was purposed to try what he could get from Elizabeth by fair words, while yet he would proceed in his own ways—“wherein he is thought to be so earnest of late as hardly can be withdrawn from the thing that he desireth.” The Ruthven Raid had had its lasting effect: “surely many note great alteration both in his mind and also in his face and countenance.” There was one sign of this that troubled Bowes. The King had now a trick, “far beyond his own wont,” of himself keeping the key of the coffer wherein his papers lay, “so as hitherto,” Bowes added, “I cannot get any certainty of the contents.” It was a permanent alteration; he locked his coffer; he locked the more secret coffer of his mind—the more James he. It was the picturesque conclusion of his education.

[2] “That is, when the sun finds a cloud so fit to be illustrated by his beams that it looks almost like another sun”: so, of Lennox, a late contemporary.

[3] He asked for “four thousand crowns to every earl and two thousand crowns to every baron” who armed against Lennox.