Читать книгу After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James - Leanda Lisle de - Страница 10

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is said to have written Macbeth to flatter James. It certainly did not flatter Scotland. The play, which was first performed in 1606, depicted a violent, medieval country inhabited by witches. It was supposedly set in the eleventh century but as Shakespeare knew, many at the English court believed the picture held true of the Scotland of their day – and not without some reason. For the most part Scottish society was divided between feudal lairds and their tenantry. What meagre surpluses the land produced were used to feed the lairds’ private armies before any remainder could be traded in the towns. These consequently remained small and trade was underdeveloped, while an inordinate amount of energy was expended on the detection and killing of witches. There were, however, signs of growing wealth and improvement.¹

The thirty-six-year-old James VI had been King of Scotland for almost as long as Elizabeth had been Queen of England, and his reign had brought a measure of peace to what had been a notoriously volatile country. In 1598 legislation was carried through the Scots parliament that encouraged the resolution of feuds through the royal courts. With it the tradition of the feud began to die out and by January 1603 James’s efforts were culminating in the resolution of one of the last of the great feuds: that between George Gordon, the sixth Earl of Huntly, and Huntly’s enemies, the Earls of Argyll and Moray. A marriage between their children was set for the following month. This lessening civil disorder had allowed trade to improve and in the towns stone houses were gradually replacing those of wood. Although witches were being strangled and burned in numbers never remotely matched in England, this too was considered an advance. Medieval Scotland had been comparatively lax with its witches, the true danger they posed having only been revealed by modern theological works to which Scotland’s highly educated King had himself contributed. Meanwhile at court, thanks in part to James’s patronage, Scotland had become a centre of cultural importance for poetry and music. There were also developments in the sciences, with John Napier of Merchiston, the discoverer of logarithms, already working on his inventions.²

That January, 1603, James’s court was at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital was modest in size but dramatic in appearance, as the Earl of Essex’s former secretary Fynes Moryson described:

The City is high seated, in a fruitful soil and wholesome air, and is adorned with many noblemen’s towers lying about it, and abounds with many springs of sweet waters. At the end towards the East is the King’s palace joining to the monastery of the Holy Cross, which King David the first built, over which, in a park of hares, conies and deer, a high mountain hangs, called the chair of Arthur. From the King’s palace … the City still rises higher and higher towards the west, and consists especially of one broad and very fair street … and this length from the East to the West is about a mile, whereas the breadth of the City from the north to South is narrow, and cannot be half a mile. At the furthest end towards the West, is a very strong castle which the Scots hold unexpugnable … And from this castle, towards the West, is a most steep rock pointed on the highest top, out of which this castle is cut.³

Holyrood itself was also striking, with its grey stone courtyards and towers emulating the chateau of Chambord. It was reported to be in an ‘altogether ruinous’ state in 1600, but repairs costing £1,307 13 shillings and 10 pence had since been carried out and it had been furnished with several new items, including gold cloth curtains, a £20 silver water pot, several velvet chairs, eight silver chandeliers and a gilded plate worth £86. James’s private chambers were on the first floor of the northwest tower, built by his grandfather James V. There was an outer chamber to the east and an inner bedchamber to the west – the door and window frames having been painted red during his grandfather’s time. Directly above these rooms were those of James’s wife, Anna, the twenty-eight-year-old youngest daughter of Frederick II of Denmark. A new brass chandelier hung outside her door.⁴

There were no Christmas celebrations as there were at Whitehall: the Kirk had abolished them when James was nine. Nor were there some of the usual court entertainments. Plays, which were an English obsession, were frowned on. There were, however, pageants and fireworks, visits to the royal lion house and hunting in the park. The structure of court life was relaxed, much closer to the informality of the French model than the English. While Harington complained that Elizabeth lived ‘shut up in a chamber from all her subjects and most of her servants’, James’s courtiers wandered in and out of his rooms quite freely, and dozens had open access to his Bedchamber. Royal meals were another striking point of comparison. Elizabeth did not eat in public. Instead a great table was set near her throne in the Presence Chamber. A cloth was laid and a courtier entered with one of her ladies. They brought the cover to the table and made elaborate obeisance. After trying the food some of it was carried through to the Privy Chamber where Elizabeth would eat and drink with her habitual restraint. Royal meals in Scotland, by contrast, were convivial affairs with plenty of wine drunk and coarse language heard.

‘Anyone can enter while the king is eating,’ the English diplomat Sir Edward Wotton reported after a visit in the winter of 1601/2; ‘the King speaks to those who stand around while he is at table … and they to him. The dinner over, his custom is to remain for a time before retiring, listening to jests and pleasantries. He is very familiar with his domestics and gentlemen of the bedchamber.’⁵ Most of these domestics had served James since he was a child – his valet William Murray had been with him since he was two.

The royal table was laden with roasted game and boiled mutton, wine and ale, but did not include any fine food that was commonplace in a great English house. Fynes Moryson complained that the Scots had ‘no art of cookery, or furniture of household stuff but rather rude neglect of both’. Most Scots ate ‘red colewort and cabbage, but little fresh meat’ and even at the house of an important courtier he found the table ‘more than half furnished with great platters of porridge, each having a little piece of sodden meat’.⁶ James, however, liked his food simple, just as he declared that he preferred ‘proper, cleanly, comely and honest’ clothes over being ‘artificially trimmed and decked like a courtesan’. His courtiers wore plain English cloth, ‘little or nothing adorned with silk lace, much less with lace of silver or gold’, and the style was French – ‘all things rather commodious for use than brave for ornament’.⁷

James particularly disliked the wearing of earrings and was impatient of the fuss required to dress long hair. He kept his own reddish locks cropped short and his suits were usually dark and adorned with nothing more than a few enamel buttons. Wotton described the King as having a youthful face – he ‘does not seem more than twenty-eight, or thereabouts’ – and of being average in height, with broad shoulders and a ‘vigorous constitution’. He would go hunting whenever he could, often spending six hours a day galloping across country with a loosened bridle. Although it was a common pursuit amongst monarchs, and one his mother had enjoyed, her former emissary, Monsieur de Fontenay, complained that James’s passion for hunting amounted to an obsession and that he put this recreation before his work. James admitted in return he did not have much stamina for business, but he claimed he could achieve more in one hour than others in a day; that he could speak, listen and watch simultaneously and sometimes do five things at once. He was certainly a mass of nervous energy. He paced his rooms ceaselessly, fiddling with his clothes, hating to stay still even for a moment. An Englishman later described James’s twitching as resembling that of a man sitting on an anthill.⁸ But if James was unable or unwilling to concentrate on routine administrative work, Fontenay had to agree with the King that his mind was exceptionally quick:

Three qualities of mind he possesses in perfection: he understands clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory. His questions are keen and penetrating and his replies are sound. In any argument, whatever it is about, he maintains the view that appears to him most just, and I have heard him support Catholic against Protestant opinions. He is well instructed in languages, science, and affairs of state, better, I dare say than anyone else in his kingdom. In short he has a remarkable intelligence, as well as lofty and virtuous ideals and a high opinion of himself.⁹

James’s childhood friend, the Earl of Mar – whom James nicknamed ‘Jocky o’Sclaittis’ – had been telling the English court that the King’s body was as agile as his mind, but, as fit as James was, this was very far from the truth. Sir Edward Wotton tactfully described the lower half of James’s body as ‘somewhat slender’. In fact his legs were so weak he could barely walk before the age of seven and he never did so normally. Fontenay observed he had an ‘ungainly gait’ and others mention he meandered in a circular pattern and leant on the shoulder of one of his courtiers as he walked. The muscles in James’s face and mouth also appear to have had some weakness and his manner of eating and drinking was judged crude. One infamous memoir claims that James had ‘a tongue too large for his mouth, which made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth’.

Such descriptions suggest that James may have suffered from cerebral palsy, caused by damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after his birth.¹⁰ But there is another aspect to the kind of brain damage James suffered that has not previously been explored. About 60 per cent of individuals with cerebral palsy have emotional or behavioural difficulties. James’s restlessness, his inability to concentrate on routine administrative work, his hyper-concentration on what did interest him, his passion for a high stimulation activity like hunting are all characteristic of the contentious Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which, like cerebral palsy, is said to have a neurological basis.

James’s mother endured a long and difficult labour and it is possible that this is when the brain damage occurred. Many contemporaries, however, believed that his disabilities were caused in utero at the time of Riccio’s murder. The trauma to his mother might indeed have been sufficient to have damaged James – and whatever the true cause of his disabilities he had to live with the psychological effects of being told that this was the case. The childhood that had followed James’s birth was steeped in danger and he might easily have emerged from it as a brute, but despite having physical defects to remind him of the possible effects of violence on him, Wotton saw: ‘In his eyes and in the outward expression of his face … a certain natural goodness,’ and the English courtier Roger Wilbraham later claimed James had ‘the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew’. His experiences had filled with him less with anger than the desire to resolve conflict. He chose the Old Testament King Solomon as his role model and picked as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Beati Pacifici’, Blessed Are the Peacemakers.

James was convinced it was his destiny to unite the old enemies, the crowns of England and Scotland. He sometimes pointed out the lion-shaped birthmark on his arm said to fulfil the words of a Welsh prophecy, quoted by Harington in his Tract on the Succession: ‘a babe crowned in his cradle; marked with a lion in his skin; shall recover again the cross; [and] make the isle of Brutus whole and imparted … to grow henceforward better and better’.¹¹

In James’s mind the phrase ‘recover the cross’ referred to his intention to heal religious divisions. First James intended to reform the Church of England on lines that would satisfy all except the most extreme conservatives and Puritans, for example, by developing a preaching ministry, but keeping the hierarchy of bishops. His ultimate ambition, however, was to encourage the reform of the Church of Rome and make it acceptable to moderate Protestants. It was the divisions in Christendom that lay at the heart of so much conflict across Europe and he hoped that differences could be thrashed out at a Grand Council. James often said that he revered the Catholic Church as the mother church – comments that fuelled Catholic hopes that he might convert – but he also saw it as ‘clogged with many infirmities and corruptions’.¹² Chief amongst them was the office of the papacy and he had described the Pope as the Antichrist. ‘Does he not usurp Christ his office, calling himself universal bishop and head of the church?’, he once asked.¹³ He intended to do what other Protestants had failed to and knock the triple crown from the Pope’s head, reducing him to the rank of the first bishop of the church, ‘but not head or superior’.¹⁴

James, as he was wont to remind people in later years, was a ‘cradle king’, crowned at the age of thirteen months on 26 July 1567. The Protestant lords who had overthrown his mother placed their infant king in the guardianship of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, the father of his childhood friend Jocky o’Sclaittis, whom he had at his side in 1603. It was at Mar’s castle, perched on a sheer rock face above the town of Stirling, that James spent his formative years. The omens for James’s survival in this fortress had not been good. Harington quoted a popular saying in his Tract: ‘A king in Scotland … die[s] rarely in his bed’. The Stuart crown he had usurped was as weak as the Tudor crown was strong. There had been a succession of child kings and despised women rulers and the great lairds retained the military power that had been stripped from the English nobles by the Tudors. James’s book of instruction on matters of kingship, the Basilikon Doron, dedicated to his eldest son in 1598, recalled them as robber barons who drank

in with their very nourish milk, that their honour stood in three points of iniquity; To thrall by oppression the meaner sort that dwells near them … to maintain their servants and dependers in any wrong … and for any displeasure that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbour, to take up plain field against him; and (without respect to God, King or commonweal) to bang it out bravely, he and all his kin against him and all his.¹⁵

Scotland was riven by private wars as well as religious differences and the usurping of Mary’s crown had offered opportunities to settle many old scores as well as new ones. All save one of James’s regents were to die violently. The first, Mary, Queen of Scots’s illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated in the streets of Linlithgow on 22 January 1570, when James was three. The murder apparently pleased Mary so much that thereon she paid her brother’s assassin a yearly pension. Her old enemy, James’s paternal grandfather the Earl of Lennox, was however named the next regent as Scotland descended into civil war. Battles raged around Stirling as by night the four-year-old James slept in a bed draped in black damask, a picture of his grandfather James V on the wall, and by day he was coached by his two Calvinist tutors. The junior of these, Peter Young, remained close to James. He had been a kindly and encouraging teacher to a bright and sensitive pupil. But James’s senior tutor had proved a brutal master.

George Buchanan was the finest Latin scholar in Europe: a poet, dramatist, humanist and founding father of Presbyterianism, he arrived at Stirling a man with a mission. The ink was barely dry on his tract Detectio Mariae Reginae, a vitriolic attack on the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he was determined to raise a very different type of monarch. In this he succeeded, but at a price. He instilled in James learning that surpassed that of any other monarch in Europe, but he used the rod to do it. He espoused high, democratic ideals of kingship, but he despised courtly manners and regarded women with contempt. He allowed James to grow up as timorous as his mother was bold, as boorish as his mother was refined, as contemptuous of women as she was charming to men. James ended up resenting Buchanan and much of what he stood for, but he was every inch his pupil. Inspired by Buchanan’s example James had written several impressive theological and political works, in which his theories on the divine right of kings countered Buchanan’s quasi-republican view that kings took their authority from the people and could be lawfully deposed – views that James had come to believe were a recipe for instability.

After just a year of Buchanan’s tutoring James had been ready to open the Scottish parliament with an address in Latin. The events that followed were to be imprinted on his memory. He once said that he had learnt to speak Latin before he learnt Scots and even aged five he spoke it with confidence. His voice was naturally loud and in 1603, after years of speech-giving his language was often grave and sententious, but then it doubtless still had the squeak of a small boy. After his speech James had sat amongst the lairds, squirming in his chair until his sharp eyes and probing fingers discovered a hole, either in a tablecloth or the roof over his head. He then made the childish observation: ‘This parliament has a hole in it!’, words that were to be flung back at him as prophetic when only days later his grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, was brought into the castle dying of wounds received in a raid by his mother’s supporters.¹⁶ James never forgot his grandfather lying with his bowels cut open and, perhaps because of talk of his having foreseen it, he had developed a keen interest in the supposed gift of foresight.¹⁷

But Lennox’s bloody death was not the only murder James had witnessed at Stirling. The old Earl of Mar had held the regency for only a short time before it passed on to the Earl of Morton, one of James’s father’s murderers. He held it until a few months before James’s twelfth birthday, when on 4 March 1578, two great Highland Earls, Argyll and Atholl, appeared at Stirling Castle dressed in full armour. They informed James that in Scots tradition he was now of age and should abolish the regency. James’s remarkable education and royal status had ensured he never suffered from undue modesty and he was already quite willing to take on the full mantle of a king, but Morton proved reluctant to relinquish his power without a fight. On 26 April 1578 James was woken in his room at Stirling Castle by the sound of clashing steel in the hall. Morton and James’s former playmate, twenty-year-old Jocky o’Sclaittis, had returned to seize the castle and James. Possession of the person of the monarch brought with it authority and the threat of kidnap had been a constant one until very recently. As James had watched the fight he witnessed Mar’s uncle trampled to death. Terrified, he tore at his hair, shouting that ‘the Master was slain’, but the fight continued until it concluded in victory for Morton and Mar.¹⁸

James had problems sleeping for some time afterwards, and for the rest of his life he trembled at the sight of armed men. It would be a mistake, however, to label James a coward, as many Englishmen later would. As a teenager he learned to use his intellect and cunning to manipulate the fearsome warriors who wished to control him, developing a close and secretive side to his otherwise expansive character and growing perversely proud of a talent to deceive.

In 1579 Buchanan had left James as he arrived with a treatise for the boy to ponder on. De jure regni apud Scotos promulgated the Presbyterian view that God had vested power in the people who could resist and depose the monarch if he ruled tyrannically or failed to promote the ‘true’ religion. That September, however, a new and long-lasting influence had entered James’s life – one who represented everything Buchanan detested: James’s Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny.

D’Aubigny was a handsome, red-bearded father of four in his late thirties. He had returned from the court in France to deal with a dispute over the title and estates of the Lennox earldom and the newly adolescent James was fascinated by his sophisticated relative. He would stay up late with him, drinking and joking. D’Aubigny reciprocated with displays of affection and James, who had no other close family, became passionately devoted to him. D’Aubigny’s influence expanded rapidly. He reorganised James’s court and household on the French model and encouraged his interest in poetry. James in turn lavished money and titles on him, ostensibly converting him to Protestantism and eventually making him Duke of Lennox.

The English agent, Sir Henry Widdrington, had looked on appalled at Lennox’s growing power, convinced that he was using his conversion as a cover for plotting with the Catholic powers. He sent letters south warning that James was ‘altogether persuaded and led’ by Lennox, so that ‘he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, often times he will clasp him about the neck, with his arms and kiss him’. The Kirk went further and later declared that ‘the Duke of Lennox went about to draw the King to carnal lust’.¹⁹

Beyond seventeenth-century descriptions of James’s ‘lascivious’ kisses with his favourites, the exact nature of the sexual activity James enjoyed with Lennox and later male favourites is unknown. But the view of one (admittedly hostile) witness – that a man who showed so little restraint in public was unlikely to do so in private – seems a reasonable one.²⁰ James was a tactile man and the chief arguments against his having been a practising homosexual fail to convince. The first is that seventeenth-century Protestants regarded sodomy with ferocious disapproval and that James himself condemned it to his son as a sin so horrible ‘that ye are bound in conscience never to forgive [it]’.²¹ Homosexual sex is not, however, limited to sodomy, and James was also well known for his blasphemous oaths and his failure to live up to much advice he gave his son. The second argument is that James’s marriage to Anna had demonstrated physical passion (as proven by her frequent pregnancies). But while it is notable that James had no great male favourites during the period in which he was fathering children, it is also evident that after the birth of his last child Sophia in 1606, his attraction for young men reasserted itself and his sexuality became a matter of significance in English political life, with the appearance of Robert Carr in 1607 and then George Villiers in 1614.²²

It is not known whether the English court knew of James’s sexual preferences in 1602/3, or if so, precisely how it was regarded. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no real concept of ‘homosexuality’; sex between men was simply viewed as an act of depravity, along with all other sexual acts that took place outside marriage. It was, however, understood that some men had a particular taste for it. Burghley would have passed on everything he knew about James to his son Cecil before his death in 1598 and although there is no reported gossip on the matter in the winter of 1602/3, there are hints in comments by Sir John Harington and Sir Edward Wotton, who each praise James’s ‘chastity’ with regard to women. Harington could not resist pointing out that it was thought a little strange that James had no mistresses, confessing that in England to call a courtier chaste, ‘specially if it were afore his Mrs’, was considered an insult worthy of a stabbing. If anything was suspected, however, such worldly courtiers were unlikely to be shocked. The Earl of Essex’s closest friend, the Earl of Southampton, enjoyed the sexual companionship of both men and women without earning great opprobrium.

What really mattered to courtiers was how a king’s sexual preferences impacted on politics. Wotton and Harington praised James’s ‘chastity’ because in not keeping mistresses he was not creating bastards to rival his legitimate children. Male lovers, however, could hold direct power in a way that a mistress could not, and the power that Lennox held foreshadowed that of James’s later favourites in England. Safe in the knowledge of James’s devotion, Lennox had moved against the regent Morton, a trusted ally of England. Elizabeth had made a formal approach to James demanding that he get rid of ‘the professed Papist’, Monsieur d’Aubigny, but although James was usually wary of offending Elizabeth, on this he stood his ground.

James’s stance sealed Morton’s fate and the last regent was executed during the summer of 1581, ostensibly for his part in Darnley’s murder. ‘That false Scots Urchin!’ Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed when the news of Morton’s death reached her, ‘what can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!’

The following year the sixteen-year-old James was kidnapped by allies of the Kirk led by William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie and son of Patrick Ruthven whose servant had held the pistol to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots during the Riccio murder. The captured king had been forced to look on as Lennox fled into exile in France where he died in 1583. But in due course James had used his cunning to escape his captors and effect a counter coup with Gowrie’s rivals. Gowrie, having been initially pardoned, was executed in May 1584, after attempting to stage a second coup; leading Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee to England and the Scottish parliament ordered all copies of Buchanan’s De jure regni, with its arguments against the divine right of kings, to be handed in to the authorities so that they could be purged of offensive material.²³

It was at this time that Monsieur de Fontenay, Mary, Queen of Scots’s emissary, had visited James’s court. Fontenay thought the eighteen-year-old king ‘for his years the most remarkable Prince who ever lived’. But he also described a very damaged individual, ‘an old young man’, both wary and childishly self-indulgent. There were three aspects of James’s personality that particularly concerned the Frenchman: James’s arrogance, fanned by his superior education, blinded him to his ‘poverty and insignificance’ on the world stage. He was ‘overconfident of his strength and scornful of other princes’ – a characteristic that was still truer of him in 1603 when he had two decades of successful rule in Scotland behind him. Lastly, Fontenay made his observations about James’s addiction to hunting. The sport seems to have given him a sense of release from his disabilities matched by no other physical pursuit, other than sex, but his attachment to it was as uncontrolled as his love for his favourites and this incontinence was evident in other aspects of James’s life.

He regularly spent money he did not have (a common problem in adults with ADHD). Elizabeth, not known for her generosity, bailed out her profligate neighbour in a series of payments totalling around £58,000, from 1586 to 1603.²⁴ He also appeased his lairds with gifts of titles without concern that he might degrade their value: by 1603 Scotland had as many nobles as England, though a population only a quarter of the size.²⁵

Mary, however, was also curious to know not only about her son’s character but also his religious views. It was evident that he felt his mother’s chief enemies, Presbyterians such as Buchanan, had also proved dangerous to him, and she hoped that James might invite her back to Scotland. Fontenay, however, forewarned her that although James had indeed grown to dislike his Presbyterian ministers and regarded the Kirk as the chief threat to royal rule, he despised the Pope and showed no obvious affection for her. Mary nevertheless remained desperate to believe that James would recognise her right to be sovereign of Scotland if she offered to legitimise the title of king that he had usurped from her. She made contact with her son to argue that such a deal was greatly to his advantage since the Catholic powers would then support his candidature for the English succession. But in 1585 she discovered James had made an agreement with Elizabeth that made him a pensioner of the English crown^* and left her in her prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire. Terrified that she was going to be left in England to be murdered under the Bond of Association, Mary threatened to disinherit him. He never contacted her again. The following year Sir Francis Walsingham began gathering the evidence to convict Mary of involvement in Babington’s plot against Elizabeth. Only the threat that James would break Scotland’s treaties with England and turn to France or Spain to avenge his mother’s death could have saved her. But while James pleaded for Mary’s life after her conviction, he never threatened to break Scotland’s treaties with England. He may have rested his hopes on Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit regicide, but he was certainly prepared to take the risk that his mother would be killed. While Elizabeth did not want to take responsibility for Mary’s death she had asked Mary’s gaolers to murder her so that she could cast the blame there. When they refused she signed Mary’s death warrant and then she suspended it as she redoubled her efforts to have Mary killed under the Bond of Association. Burghley, however, ignored her orders and convened a meeting of the Privy Council to ensure that the warrant was put into effect. James learned the grim details of his mother’s death first hand when her servants returned to Scotland.

After eighteen years confined to a series of houses in England, Mary’s elegant frame had become thick set and her face hung with double chins. But her courage and dignity remained. On 8 February 1587 in the fire-lit hall of Fotheringay, she approached the scaffold smiling, having cast herself in the role of a Catholic martyr with ‘an Agnus Dei about her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and a pair of beads at her girdle with a golden cross at the end of them’.²⁶ The death of a common traitor nevertheless awaited her, and it was not to be a dignified one.

Mary’s French physician, Monsieur Bourgoing, recorded in his journal that once she had been blindfolded and her prayers said she had lifted her head ‘thinking she would be decapitated with a two-handed sword (according to the privilege reserved in France for Princes and gentlemen)’. Henry VIII had granted such a privilege to Anne Boleyn and, when Elizabeth’s life had been under threat in the aftermath of the Wyatt revolt against Mary I, she had expressed the hope that if it came to it, she would be executed in the same manner. But Mary, who had been a Queen of France, was led to the block and butchered with an axe, ‘like those with which they cut wood’, Bourgoing noted with disgust. It took the nervous executioner three strokes to take off Mary’s head and when his companion raised it up, with the shout ‘God save the Queen’, he found himself, in a moment of grim farce, holding a chestnut wig, as her grey head rolled on the floor.

Mary’s weeping servants had stayed after the official witnesses left the room and watched the executioners strip the stockings from Mary’s corpse (it was usual for the executioners to sell any clothes from the corpse of their victims; even their hair could be cut from their heads). As the men pulled and ripped, Mary’s little dog, a Skye terrier, dashed out from under her skirts. ‘The poor creature, covered with blood, rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively,’ Bourgoing recalled. Confused, it had lapped at the pools of blood on the floor before being taken away.²⁷

After Mary’s servants had finished recounting their story James was silent, and he quickly retired to his room. He had once said that Scotland could never be without faction while Mary was alive, but the manner of her death was a bitter humiliation for him and for his country: a high price to pay for Elizabeth’s crown. With his noblemen demanding vengeance, James immediately cut all contact with England. South of the border, meanwhile, Elizabeth went into mourning; Burghley was banned from her presence and Sir William Davison, who had delivered the death warrant, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth then sent her cousin Sir Robert Carey to Scotland with a letter in which she swore that she had signed Mary’s death warrant only on the understanding that it would be put into effect in the event of the arrival of an invasion force. But Carey was stopped at the Scottish border and was forced to wait for days before James agreed to see him.

The storm did pass, however, as Elizabeth and James knew it would. James accepted Elizabeth’s story, with English money sweetening the pill. Elizabeth for her part forgave Burghley, but not Davison, whom she made the scapegoat for what had occurred.

James seized the opportunity offered by Mary’s death to heal the divisions in Scotland. Thereafter he had rewarded and protected his mother’s servants and in the Basilikon Doron James advised his son that he had found those who served his mother amongst his most loyal subjects.²⁸ It was a lesson he would carry with him to England.

James had chosen the future Queen of Scots and England with care. In 1589 Anna was a Protestant princess, with a generous dowry comprising £150,000 and various territories including the Orkney and Shetland Isles pawned to Scotland in the previous century. A miniature had also shown the fourteen-year-old to be very pretty, with fair hair and ivory skin. There had been an exchange of letters in French during which the lonely James fell so in love with his future companion that when the ship bringing her to Scotland was caught in storms and forced to head to Norway, he set sail to fetch her, committing ‘himself and his hopes Leander-like to the waves of the ocean, all for his beloved Hero’s sake’.

As soon as he arrived in Norway, James had made his way along the coast by ship and horse until he reached Oslo and the bishop’s palace. There he dashed to see Anna ‘with boots and all’. The minister David Lindsay, who was with James, declared her ‘a princess both godly and beautiful’. Anna was tall for her age with a determined set to her chin, and James was immediately ‘minded to give the Queen a kiss after the Scottish fashion, which the Queen refused as not being the form of her country; but after a few words privily spoken between his majesty and her, familiarity ensued’.²⁹ The royal couple were married the following Sunday before travelling to Denmark to enjoy a second wedding and several months of honeymooning amongst Anna’s relatives. It was here, amidst the rich and sophisticated Danish court, that James was introduced to the modish European theories on witchcraft he later expounded in his Daemonologie, a treatise he published in support of the persecution of witches.

The Danish admiral who had escorted Anna to Norway had blamed the storms on the wife of a Copenhagen burgess with whom he had quarrelled. She confessed under torture that she was a witch and was burnt alive in September 1590 along with several others whom she had named. The Kirk had long been obsessed with witchcraft, but they had been unable to persuade James to take an interest in it until he returned from Denmark. Investigations however, now lead to the unmasking of a coven in Berwick which, it was claimed, had plotted to kill the King. James attended the trials and was astonished to hear the accused witches describe what he believed to be private conversations he had had with Anna in Norway. The first of the great waves of witch killing in Scotland had soon followed.

Anna had also found herself subject to the Kirk’s disapproval, with her Lutheran faith proving to be an early source of friction. Even her coronation as Queen of Scotland proved a controversial affair. James’s coronation had been the first Protestant coronation in Scotland, but it was rushed and had kept many Catholic features. Anna’s offered an opportunity to design a more purely Protestant ceremony and the ministers of the Kirk were anxious to get rid of the anointing, which they condemned as a ‘Jewish’ ritual. James was equally determined to keep it since it reflected his view that kings drew their rights from God and not the people. When he threatened to ask one of his remaining bishops to carry it out they gave way, but tensions remained when the coronation took place in the Abbey church of Holyrood on 17 May 1590.

The ceremony began with a grand procession of trumpeters and nobles. James followed, dressed in deep red, with five earls carrying his long train. Behind them came Anna. She joined James on a throne placed on a raised platform. Hymns were sung and, later, after a short oration by the minister Robert Bruce, the moment came for the anointing.³⁰ A witness recorded that ‘the Countess of Mar went up to the queen and bared a little of the queens right arm and shoulder. Robert Bruce immediately poured the queen’s oil onto her bare arm and shoulder’. Anna was then taken away and dressed in new robes of red velvet and white Spanish taffeta before being returned to her seat. ‘Silence was called for. Then his majesty had the crown delivered to her … Immediately afterwards his majesty delivered the sceptre to Robert Bruce that he might pass it to the queen.’ As he did so he acknowledged Anna as queen and pledged obedience, but his speech concluded, ‘we crave from your majesty the confession of the faith and religion which we profess’. Anna had been promised the free exercise of her Lutheran faith, but from that moment it was apparent that she would be pressured into accepting the lower church Protestantism of Scottish Calvinism.³¹ Anna, however, proved to be very much her own woman.

The Duc de Sully described Anna’s character as ‘quite the reverse of her husband’s; she was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue’.³² Even at just fifteen and unable to speak Scots,^* Anna had made her presence felt. She had been raised in one of the most prestigious kingdoms in Europe and she encouraged a new formality at James’s court. ‘Things are beginning to be strangely altered,’ it was reported; ‘Our Queen carries a marvellous gravity, which, with the reserve of her national manners, contrary to the humour of our people, has banished all our ladies clean from her.’³³ Anna also made it plain that she enjoyed traditional courtly pursuits and she quickly earned herself the sobriquet the ‘dancing queen’, as well as the anger of the Kirk, who condemned her ‘night waking and balling’.³⁴

James, however, found that Anna had a warm and generous temperament and the early years of the marriage were happy ones, with Anna joining him hunting and him indulging her love of fashion and jewellery. In January 1603, her wardrobe included gold on peach gowns with silver sleeves and her hair was habitually adorned with Scottish pearls strung on coronets worn on the back of the head. Every New Year, James added new jewels to the collection of ‘my dearest bedfellow’: necklaces fringed with diamond drops, jewelled flower and butterfly brooches and a large number of diamond ciphers. Her favourite was A for Anna – the name she always used, although James preferred to call her ‘my Annie’.³⁵ She quickly learned to write as well as speak Scots and by the time she was eighteen she was also politically active. A member of the Mar family later complained that Anna’s friends ‘generally happened to be of a contrary party to those whom the King thought his faithfulest friends’. James, however, recognised that she was uniquely placed to intercede for those who felt cut off from royal favour and he demonstrated that he appreciated her role by listening to, if not always agreeing with, her opinions.³⁶

Gradually it was noticed that Anna had become close to her French-educated courtiers: she had depended on them for conversation before she learnt Scots and she appreciated their refinements, as did James. Many were Catholic and, although Anna had sworn an oath at her coronation to ‘work against all popish superstition’, she was reported to be leaning towards Catholicism as early 1593.³⁷ The Countess of Huntly, who gave her a Catholic catechism, was believed to be the main source of influence. The Countess was part of a group that backed the reunification of the Churches and Anna may have been aware that this was an area that interested her husband. In any event the Countess’s conversation doubtless made an attractive contrast to the lectures Anna received at the hands of the Kirk. The turning point in Anna’s religious life came in about 1600 when the chaplain she had brought with her from Demark became a Calvinist.

Since Anna could not tolerate becoming a Calvinist herself she sacked her chaplain and turned to her Catholic friends for advice. They smuggled the Jesuit priest Robert Abercrombie into a secret room to give Anna instruction. She duly visited him for three days and on the last she heard mass and received the sacrament as a Catholic. Anna later described to Abercrombie how James confronted her about rumours of her conversion when they were in bed together, asking if it was true that she had ‘some dealings with a priest’. She had immediately confessed. ‘Well, wife,’ James apparently told her, ‘if you cannot live without this sort of thing, do your best to keep things as quiet as possible; for, if you don’t, our crown is in danger.’³⁸ James’s response, if accurately reported, seems a remarkably mild one, but he must have been as aware of the potential benefits of his wife’s conversion to his image abroad, as he was of its dangers to his popularity at home.

Since the publication of the Jesuit-penned Conference About the Next Succession, James had sought to deflect interest from the candidacy of the Infanta Isabella. He hinted to English Catholics, to the Vatican and to the new King of France Henri IV, that he would offer toleration of religion in England and that he might even convert. Anna’s own conversion added considerable credence to his claims and according to the Duc de Sully she became ‘deeply engaged in all the civil factions, not only in Scotland in relation to the Catholics, whom she supported and had even first encouraged, but also in England’.³⁹ Robert Abercrombie was allowed to stay in Scotland until 1602, during which time Anna received the sacrament from him a further nine times. She would come to him early in the morning whilst the rest of the household slept and he recalled that afterwards she would stay and talk with him and that ‘sometimes she expressed her desire that her husband should be a Catholic, at other times her son should be educated under the direction of the Sovereign Pontiff’.⁴⁰ It was, however, the Mar family and not Anna who was raising James’s heir – a matter over which she felt deep resentment.

Prince Henry, the first of James and Anna’s children, was born in February 1594 and soon after Anna had discovered that James intended for Henry to be raised at Stirling Castle, as he had been. It meant that if anything happened to James during Henry’s minority the Earl of Mar would become regent of Scotland instead of Anna, which was the norm in Europe. James was once overheard trying to explain to Anna that he was concerned that ‘if some faction got strong enough, she could not hinder his boy being used against him, as he himself had been against his unfortunate mother’.⁴¹ Anna refused to accept this and pleaded with James to change his mind, reminding him how she had ‘left all her dear friends in Denmark to follow him’.

Anna usually got her way but on this James flatly refused to yield; he even gave written orders to Mar that he was to keep Prince Henry until he was eighteen unless he himself instructed otherwise.⁴² In 1596 Anna gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who was sent to be raised by Lord and Lady Livingstone, along with her younger sister, Margaret, who died at the age of two. James and Anna’s second son, Charles, was born in 1600 and subsequently placed with Lord Fyvie. In May 1602 a third son, Robert, followed but died four months later. These sad separations may have served to sour the royal marriage, but it was, above all, Anna’s lasting hatred for the Mar family that explains her reaction to that mysterious episode in Scottish history, the Gowrie affair: an episode that concluded in the destruction of all significant opposition to James and the Mar faction.

By the autumn of 1599 James had become desperately worried that he was about to lose his chance of inheriting Elizabeth’s throne. His principal supporter at Elizabeth’s court, Essex, was under house arrest. Essex’s followers had warned him that Sir Robert Cecil would destroy his claim to the succession once Essex was out of the way, and there was evidence to support their view. In 1598 an English Catholic called Valentine Thomas had hinted in a confession that King James of Scotland had asked him to assassinate the Queen. The 1585 statute precluding those who plotted against Elizabeth from the succession was still extant and James was convinced that Cecil was behind Thomas’s confession, just as Lord Burghley had been behind the statute, which had been aimed at his mother. Elizabeth assured James that she did not believe Thomas, but when she ignored his demands for a public statement of his innocence, James listened to Essex’s supporters in their call for him to raise an army to back plans to overthrow the Queen.

That October James told his parliament that he ‘was not certain how soon he should have to use arms but whenever it should be, he knew his right and would venture crown and all for it’.⁴³ It had proved difficult, however, to raise the money for such an army. James’s financial situation, which had begun to improve three years earlier, was once again in desperate straits.^*

James was forced to raise new taxes and debase the coinage, but there was a danger that the Kirk would move to take advantage of growing public anger. James had infuriated the Kirk with plans to reintroduce episcopacy – an answer to Jesuit accusation that he would introduce a presbytery to England. It had also learnt that his Basilikon Doron raged about the power they had wielded in his youth. In November 1599 the Master of Gray wrote to Cecil that between the anger of the poor and that of the Kirk ‘there was in men’s breasts such a desire of reformation that nothing lacked save one gallant man for uniting grieved minds’.⁴⁴ The ministers had already settled on the twenty-two-year-old John Ruthven, third Earl of Gowrie, and the minister Robert Bruce was sent to fetch him from France where he was studying. By this time James appeared to have forgiven the Ruthven family for their role in the attack on his mother during Riccio’s murder and for the exile of his beloved Lennox. Several of the children of the first Earl of Gowrie, who led the Ruthven raid, were now in the royal household and Anna counted three of the sisters of the third Earl amongst her ladies-in-waiting.^† She was especially fond of the eldest, Lady Beatrice, and their brother, nineteen-year-old Alexander, was a favourite of both James and Anna’s. Gowrie had, however, willingly agreed to the Kirk’s request, first travelling to England, where he arrived at Elizabeth’s court on 3 April 1600.

The English ambassador to Paris had written a ringing commendation of Gowrie for Cecil. He was ‘exceedingly well affected both to the common cause of religion and particularly to her majesty’, and, ‘one of whom there may be exceedingly good use made’. Gowrie had spent time in secret conferences with both the Queen and Cecil before arriving back in Edinburgh in May 1600. A huge crowd of supporters welcomed him, but James, watching, was overheard making the observation that there had been a still larger crowd for the execution of Gowrie’s father. Within three months Gowrie was dead, slain in his own house by the King’s men.

James’s explanation of these deaths was almost literally unbelievable. He insisted that on 5 August 1600 Alexander Ruthven had lured him from a day’s hunting to Gowrie House in Perth, claiming his brother had captured a man carrying a large amount of foreign gold. As the rest of the hunting party ate their dinner with Gowrie, Alexander had tricked James into following him until he came to a room ‘where a man was, which the King thought had been the man had kept the treasure’.⁴⁵ Alexander then grabbed James and drew his dagger saying that James had killed his father and now he would kill him. James pleaded for his life, but Alexander replied that words could not save him and ordered the man in the room to kill him. The man had seemed unwilling and a struggle followed during which James was spotted screaming for help at the window. His men dashed to his aid and killed first Alexander and then Gowrie as he fought to revenge his brother.

James ordered the Kirk’s five Edinburgh ministers to repeat this story to their congregations so that they might thank God for his deliverance, but they refused. Robert Bruce, the minister who had crowned Anna, and fetched Gowrie from France, made it clear he believed James had plotted to kill the brothers, either because of his hatred for the family, or because Anna was having an affair with one of them (there was talk that she had a flirtation with Alexander). James’s reply to these accusations was blunt and compelling: ‘I see Mr Robert,’ he told Bruce, ‘that ye would make me a murderer. It is known very well that I was never blood-thirsty. If I would have taken lives, I had causes enough; I need not to hazard myself so.’⁴⁶ James was certainly not the kind of man to place himself in the middle of a violent situation.

When the ministers persisted in refusing to accept James’s story he had them replaced: four later capitulated and were forced to tour the country offering their humble submission in public places whilst the fifth, Robert Bruce, refused and was sent into exile. The Kirk was informed that thereafter, 5 August was to be celebrated as a national holiday with special services to give thanks for the King’s survival.

At home and abroad, however, people remained unconvinced by James’s version of events. The English ambassador Sir William Bowes thought that James, finding himself alone with Alexander – ‘a learned, sweet and artless young gentleman’ – had made some mention of the boy’s father ‘whereat the youth showed a grieved and expostulatory countenance’. James had taken fright and shouted for help, and after the boy was killed, he made up his story to conceal his embarrassment.⁴⁷ More recent theories have suggested that Alexander offered James sexual favours or the cancellation of a debt to lure him from his protectors and kidnap him. When James had realised what was happening he shouted in terror that he was being murdered. The Kirk certainly had strong motives for supporting another kidnap attempt and there was a suggestion at the time that England was involved^*. Gowrie’s servants were, however, severely tortured in an effort to uncover a conspiracy and all denied any knowledge of one. The man whom James had seen in the tower swore he had just been told to go there and wait upon events. An explanation for this comes from Gowrie’s tutor, William Rynd, who reported that he had once heard young Gowrie say that the best way for a man to keep a plot secret was to keep its existence to himself. But it is possible that James did indeed plot against the Ruthvens. In London in the winter of 1602 a character named Francis Mowbray appeared claiming that he had evidence of the Ruthvens’ innocence. He was handed over to James that January and died in February 1603 having fallen, it was reported, from the window of his cell in an escape attempt.

Whatever the truth behind the Gowrie mystery the significance of it lies in James’s determination to use the incident to demonstrate that neither Kirk nor nobleman would be able to control him as they had done in the past, and those that tried would suffer for it. His action against the remaining members of the Ruthven family began immediately. As soon as the King’s party returned to Falkland Palace that night he had the three Ruthven sisters thrown out into the driving rain, despite Anna’s protests. She refused to believe the Ruthvens had attempted to kill her husband and saw the event entirely in terms of a triumph for the Mar faction. She stayed in bed for two days afterwards, refusing to eat or speak. When she eventually did so she shouted at her husband to beware how he treated her for she was not the Earl of Gowrie. On another occasion she ‘hoped that heaven would not visit her family with the vengeance for the sufferings of the Ruthvens’. James, aware that Anna was pregnant, took her abuse without complaint, but he was not deflected from his pursuit of vengeance.

On 6 August a party of men were sent to seize the surviving Ruthven brothers, William and Patrick, who were still only schoolboys. They escaped over the border and in June 1602 were said to be hiding in Yorkshire. James complained to Elizabeth and, with some reluctance, she agreed to have them banished. William fled abroad early in 1603 leaving Patrick behind. In Scotland, meanwhile, in the autumn of 1600, the decaying corpses of John and Alexander were tried for treason. They were found guilty, the Ruthven estates and honours were forfeited and their name proscribed. On the day their bodies were being gibbeted, quartered and exposed throughout the country, Anna gave birth to the future Charles I. James hurried to Dunfermline where she was lying with her child and in the New Year he presented Anna with a jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds. There were those amongst the Mar faction who wanted her imprisoned for her support for the Ruthvens, but James would hear none of it, ‘but … does seek by all means to cover her folly’, a witness reported.⁴⁸

That January 1603 Sir Thomas Erskine, the Captain of the Guard, warned James that Anna had smuggled Beatrice Ruthven into her rooms at Holyrood and talked to her for hours just feet from where he slept. Beatrice left laden with gifts to support her in exile in England. James was shaken and angry but again he refused to punish Anna. He simply ordered workmen to seal up ‘all dangerous passages for coming near the King’s chamber.’ There were other matters to think about than the Ruthvens, as the question of the succession had returned to centre stage.

The aftermath to the Gowrie conspiracy had found James’s ally at Elizabeth’s court, the Earl of Essex, still disgraced and Secretary Cecil with total domination over the Privy Council. In December 1600, however, Cecil’s agents made an unexpected gesture of reconciliation. They claimed that ‘the Earl of Leicester or Sir Francis Walsingham were the only cutters of [Mary Stuart’s] throat’.⁴⁹ James had ignored them. Aware of the unpopularity of Elizabeth’s government, he was convinced that she would soon be facing an uprising and in February 1601 he sent the Earl of Mar and a diplomat named Edward Bruce to aid Essex in his plans to raise a revolt.^* But by the time Mar and Bruce arrived in London, Essex had already been tried and beheaded.

James’s fear was that Cecil would now use the Essex revolt to achieve what the confession of Valentine Thomas had failed to do, namely link him directly to a plot against Elizabeth. Fortunately the black bag containing his last letter to Essex, which the Earl wore on the day of the revolt, had disappeared. It was probably destroyed either by Essex himself or the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, who soon offered James his loyalty. With no solid evidence against him, James sent instructions for Mar and Bruce to ask the ‘present guiders’ in England to declare that he was untouched by any actions against the Queen. They were to offer his future favour to those courtiers who supported him and his eternal displeasure to those who did not. He was particularly keen for the message to get through to Cecil who, he observed, ‘is king there in effect’. With Essex dead, however, the kaleidoscope of faction was shifting once more. Cecil made clear to the envoys that he had every intention of backing the Stuart cause. The rules of primogeniture underpinned the laws of inheritance to which the entire political elite was subject and the majority had never been comfortable with overturning them, still less now when James’s dynastic rivals were particularly weak. Even a foreigner like the French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, had observed that ‘it is certain the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman’; that ruled out James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and Ferdinando Derby’s daughter, Lady Anne Stanley. Meanwhile the claim of Lord Beauchamp had been all but destroyed by the Doleman book and his failure to marry someone of suitable status.

Essex was right to believe that Cecil had needed to have a rival candidate to James in the late 1590s. The evidence suggests Cecil had considered marrying Arbella to Beauchamp’s elder son Edward Seymour, so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary Tudor. His ally, Beauchamp’s father, the Earl of Hertford, had certainly done so and Cecil’s interest in the match may have been behind the rumours in Europe that he wanted to marry Arbella himself. But Elizabeth would never have permitted a Seymour–Stuart union and the sensible thing for Cecil to do now that Essex was dead was to present himself to James as his greatest champion and suggest that Essex had really wanted the crown for himself. This appears to be exactly what he did. Bruce and Mar were delighted to have caught such a fish and tactfully dropped James’s demands for a public statement of his innocence of any plotting against the Queen. Instead they organised a code to enable Cecil to correspond in secret with the Scottish King. Names were to be represented by numbers: James, for example, was 30 and Cecil 10.

Cecil insisted that absolute secrecy be maintained over their correspondence for, as he later put it, ‘if Her Majesty had known all I did … her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.⁵⁰ He had a narrow escape from being discovered only that summer. Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, later described how the Queen was walking in Greenwich Park when she ‘heard the post blow his horn’. She asked that the bag of letters be brought to her and Cecil, knowing that it would contain letters from Scotland, fell on his knees and begged her not to look at them. He told her that if she did people would think ‘it to be out of a jealousy and suspicion of him’ which would leave him disgraced and unable to continue working for her effectively.⁵¹ Elizabeth chose not to look in the bag, but Cecil remained so nervous of discovery that he risked insulting his future Queen by asking James not to tell Anna of their correspondence.

Cecil’s first letter to the King assured him that Elizabeth was a dynastic legitimist, not at all inclined to ‘cut off the natural branch and graft upon some wild stock’, but he warned that Elizabeth would perceive any demand for a public recognition of his right as a threat. Furthermore if he invaded England as Essex had suggested all Englishmen would unite against him. James was happy to agree to Cecil’s requests, but in turn he required that Cecil work with two Englishmen he trusted. The first, Lord Henry Howard, was the embittered younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, beheaded for plotting to marry James’s mother – and thus a member of a family who had proven their loyalty to the Stuart cause. The second was Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, who like Howard was a Catholic, though Elizabeth had famously said of him that he ‘reconciled what she believed to be impossible, a stiff papist to a good subject’. Where Howard was a brilliant academic but a tedious companion, Worcester was handsome and charismatic – the perfect courtier – and when Elizabeth had sent him to Scotland in 1590 to congratulate James on his marriage he had impressed the King so much that they had remained in contact thereafter.

James hoped that as a leader of the English Catholics Worcester was well placed to reconcile his coreligionists to the King’s inheritance. Cecil had therefore helped engineer Worcester’s promotion to the Privy Council in the summer of 1601, along with two other new members: Arbella Stuart’s maternal uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Cecil’s protégé, Sir John Stanhope, an old enemy of Shrewsbury’s.^* Howard assured James that Shrewsbury had only been picked because Elizabeth felt she had to respond to complaints that the nobility were under-represented on the Council, adding bitchily that Elizabeth never listened to his advice on anything. In fact James and Cecil recognised the need to have an ally within the Arbella camp on the Council and Cecil had chosen Stanhope as his counterweight. Thomas Wilson’s State of England described how Cecil maintained a tradition of pairing rival with rival in all the great offices of state so that ‘each having his enemies eye to over look him, it may make him look more warily to his charge, and that if anybody should incline to any unfaithfulness … it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head’. They in turn were supported only by ‘base pen clerks … that cannot conceive his master’s drifts and policies’.⁵²

As Thomas Wilson observed, Cecil was like his father ‘of whom it was written that he was like an aged tree that lets none grow which near him planted be’.⁵³ It was already clear that it would be more difficult for Cecil to maintain his political hegemony under James, but he was determined to cut two of his old allies down to size: his former brother-in-law, Lord Cobham and Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. One of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour, Meg Radcliffe, had predicted years before that the anti-Essex alliance would break up after the Earl’s death and so it was proving. Cobham and Ralegh were not of any further use to Cecil; if anything, they were a liability, unpopular with almost everybody. The women of the court detested Lord Cobham, an ill-tempered individual later described by a courtier as ‘but one degree from a fool’ and the men loathed Ralegh whom they considered an arrogant upstart.

Born the younger son of a mere tenant farmer from an old but impoverished Devonshire family, Ralegh had caught Elizabeth’s attention early in the 1580s. According to one telling story, Ralegh had been called before the Privy Council to explain why he had fallen out with his commanding officer in Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton. Ralegh was already an experienced soldier, having spent his teenage years fighting for the Protestant cause in France. Wilton, however, was a notorious one. His infamy rested on his having ordered the cold-blooded killing of 600 mainly Italian and Spanish prisoners at Smerwick Fort, just north of Dingle Bay. Even in an era of endemic violence this massacre had shocked: ‘Truly I never heard of such a bloody barbarous action, as the Lord Grey … committed in Ireland upon the Spaniards’, the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later recalled, ‘for whereas they had submitted himself to their mercy, he put some four or five hundred of them [in effect the whole number] into a yard, weaponless; and then were soldiers sent in with clubs, bills and swords, and slew everyman of them.’⁵⁴

This massacre was not, however, the subject of Ralegh’s complaints to the Council. The boy who had seen the horrors of the wars in France did not become the man to blanch in Ireland. Ralegh was one of two officers who had led the companies that carried out the killings. Ralegh was instead at the Council table to present his own ideas about winning the war in Ireland and, as the writer John Aubrey described it, he ‘told his tale so well, and with so good a grace and presence that the Queen took especial notice of him, and presently preferred him’. Elizabeth liked to surround herself with a particular type of man – ‘proper men’ was how Aubrey put it and Ralegh exemplified this ideal, as one contemporary recalled: ‘For touching his shape and lineaments of body, they were framed in so just a proportion and so seemly an order, as there was nothing in them that a man might well wish to have been added or altered. In such gifts of the mind as the world generally esteems, he not only excelled most, but matched even the best men of his time.’⁵⁵

The Queen had showered Ralegh with gifts and honours: the estates of the young Catholic traitor who had given the Babington plot its name, a prized knighthood and the Bishop of Durham’s crumbling palace in London. Ralegh renovated it and made it the centre of an intellectual circle that discussed science and religion. From here he also planned his great expeditions, including that which founded the first English colony in the New World at Roanoke Island. Elizabeth bestowed the name Virginia on it and all things from the New World became fashionable, from smoking tobacco in silver pipes to eating potatoes, which were considered an aphrodisiac. Ralegh, who was said to ‘love a wench well’, had little need of sexual fillips, but he had disadvantages as a courtier. Being an outsider he had no network of powerful relations to protect his interests. He had befriended Lord Cobham because he was an immensely rich peer with all the social contacts he himself lacked. He might, however, have acquired more friends with better judgement if his sarcasm and ‘damnable pride’ had not earned him so many enemies. It was said ‘He was commonly noted for using of bitter scoffs and reproachful taunts which bred him much dislike’ and ‘was so far from affecting popularity as he seemed to take a pride in being hated of the people’.

Ralegh took great pleasure in annoying those less quick-witted than himself and even ignored religious sensibilities, teasing the pious by ‘perverting the words and sense of Holy Scripture’. Many assumed he was an atheist, something considered almost synonymous to being evil.⁵⁶ There was considerable relief therefore when Essex replaced Ralegh as Elizabeth’s favourite in 1587, and no little delight when he fell into disgrace in May of 1592 after he married one of Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour behind the Queen’s back, and then lied to her about it. It was Cecil who had eventually smoothed Ralegh’s path back to royal favour. In 1597 he had returned to his former post as Captain of the Guard and thereafter he had proved a ruthless ally of Cecil’s in the factional struggle with Essex. He had even suggested that Cecil murder Essex in January 1600 when there appeared to be a danger that the Queen might accept him back in favour.

The beginnings of the split between the old allies came the following summer when Ralegh and Cobham turned up uninvited at the peace conference of Boulogne – the event that had convinced Essex that Cecil was seeking to come to an accommodation with the Archdukes of the Netherlands, the Infanta Isabella and her husband Albert. In fact, as Cecil complained to a friend, they had kept him ignorant of their activities.⁵⁷ What they appear to have been involved in were unilateral negotiations concerning a collection of treasure known as the ‘Burgundy jewels’. It had belonged to ancestors of the Archdukes who once ruled the ancient Kingdom of Burgundy, a traditional ally of England against France. The jewels had been given to Elizabeth in pawn by the Dutch rebels in exchange for a loan of £28,000, a fraction of the value of the treasure, and Albert and Isabella were desperate to redeem them.⁵⁸ They hoped that paying generously would help pave the way for better relations with England and perhaps even lead to a revival of the old Anglo-Burgundian alliance – something that might have appealed to Ralegh who recognised, as Essex did, that Spanish power was in decline. The debts of the Spanish crown were escalating and the population dropping, with plague and famine killing hundreds of thousands. Their new king, Isabella’s half-brother Philip III, was a slow, fat, pink-skinned man, incapable of energising his country and the national mood was encapsulated in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the hero who tilted at windmills. France by contrast was emerging as a great power. Henri IV had restored royal authority after decades of civil war and the peace made with Spain in 1598 allowed French trade to flourish. ‘France,’ Ralegh had warned in 1600, ‘is already one of the greatest kingdoms in Europe, and our farthest friend.’⁵⁹

But Ralegh’s actions were not all about politics. He was also keen to make money and Cobham, whom Elizabeth had employed to negotiate for peace with the Archduke’s emissary the Count of Aremberg since 1597, was easy to manipulate. In the event, however, the negotiations came to nothing and Ralegh only succeeded in losing Cecil’s trust.

The first indication of Secretary Cecil’s anger came in 1601. After Cecil’s wife died in 1598, the Raleghs had often taken care of his son, William. The boy adored Ralegh, whom he called his ‘captain’, but he was now taken away from their home for good. Cecil, however, was careful to disguise his ill will towards his erstwhile allies: ‘in show we are great’ he told a friend, ‘and all my revenge shall be to heap coal on their heads’.⁶⁰ Cobham and Ralegh were therefore shocked to find that their names were not amongst those invited to join the Privy Council in the summer, though Ralegh still hoped that he would be made a Councillor when Parliament opened in November 1601.⁶¹ Just before then an opportunity arose for the two friends to make contact with James, as Cecil had done.⁶²

James’s latest envoy Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, son of his beloved Esmé, had arrived at Dover. Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, was there to attend on him. He seized the opportunity to express to Lennox his wish to forward James’s claim, but unfortunately he then boasted about it to Cecil who, after listening to his excitable brother-in-law, delivered an icy warning. He told Cobham that if James informed Elizabeth of what he had done he would be in terrible trouble. Cobham protested that he had only spoken from excessive zeal, to which Cecil piously retorted that he hoped the Queen would outlive him and that no dealings with James would thus be necessary. Cobham and Ralegh were desperate to retain the Queen’s favour, which appeared to be mysteriously evaporating, and it was a shaken Cobham who relayed Cecil’s words to Ralegh. He fell straight into the Secretary’s trap. Instead of pursuing Lennox, Ralegh told Cecil that Lennox had approached him, but that he had told him that he was ‘too deeply engaged … to his own mistress’ to seek favour elsewhere.⁶³ Come November, however, Ralegh still did not have a place on the Privy Council and it was an embittered figure that took his seat in parliament that month.

As Cecil spelt out Elizabeth’s requests for subsidies to support the war in Ireland to parliament, Ralegh made sarcastic interventions. Infuriated, Cecil resolved to blacken Ralegh and Cobham’s names with James, telling Howard these ‘two hedgehogs … would never live under one apple tree’ with him.⁶⁴ Howard was happy to do the dirty work and the Scottish King was soon complaining about the ‘ample, Asiatic and endless volumes’ that Howard sent him on the wickedness of Ralegh, Cobham and a third figure, an old friend of Ralegh’s, Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland. ‘You must remember,’ Howard wrote on 4 December 1601, ‘that I gave you notice of the diabolical triplicity that is Cobham, Ralegh, and Northumberland, that meet every day at Durham house …’ He claimed they had hatched a plan, that ‘Northumberland … a sworn enemy to King James’, should pretend to Cecil that he supported his candidature. This ploy had failed, Howard continued, so Northumberland had told his wife: ‘He had rather the King of Scots was buried than crowned.’⁶⁵

Northumberland’s marriage to one of Essex’s sisters was an unhappy one and it seems she was content to betray her husband’s confidences – or even to invent stories against him – and she wasn’t the only wife to do so. Howard found another useful instrument in Cobham’s wife, the widowed Countess of Kildare. Born Frances Howard, she was the daughter of Cecil’s ally the Earl of Nottingham and had married Cobham in 1600 – as the tenth richest man in England he had one obvious attraction to an ambitious woman. Like several other Howard women of the day, Lady Kildare (it was usual to keep the name of your first husband in cases where the first husband’s title was superior) was beautiful but scheming, and she had a reputation as a vicious gossip. Essex had once labelled her ‘the spider of the court’, and whether she intended to harm her husband or not, she provided Howard with plenty of ammunition against him, complaining that he and Ralegh frequently railed against James’s title. Cecil’s letters to James supported Howard’s efforts, praising the ‘wisdom and sincerity’ of ‘faithful 3 [Howard]’, and assuring James that if he did not ‘cast a stone into the mouths of these gaping crabs [Cobham and Ralegh] they would not stick to confess daily how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to be under your sovereignty’.⁶⁶

As James absorbed these missives, Howard began to suggest to Cecil ways in which Ralegh and Cobham might be finished. Elizabeth was extremely anxious about the unpopularity of her government and Howard suggested that she be encouraged to be suspicious of Cobham and Ralegh and ‘taught the peril that grows unto princes by protecting, countenancing or entertaining persons odious to multitudes.’⁶⁷ Ralegh and Cobham soon felt the deepening royal chill and struggled to retrieve the Queen’s good opinion, on one occasion complaining to Elizabeth that the prisoners from the Essex revolt were being treated too leniently and on another drawing up a paper supporting her decision not to name an heir.⁶⁸ Such actions took them further from any hope of James’s favour and Howard intended that in the longer term other matters could be used against them. Howard had discovered that Cobham and Ralegh had decided to divide their labours so that if the policy of peace with Spain prospered Cobham would benefit, if war, then Ralegh. Howard hoped that Spain could be used to bring them both down: ‘The glass of time being very far run, the day of the queen’s death may be the day of their doom’ he wrote to Cecil in June 1602.⁶⁹ Northumberland, however, was going to prove more difficult to destroy.

The thirty-eight-year-old Northumberland was an unconventional figure with an equally unconventional background. His father, Thomas Percy, the eighth Earl, had faced execution for his involvement in the 1569 revolt of the Northern earls, but was found dead in his cell from gunshot wounds. It was said to be a suicide, although some had suspected murder. Either way his escape from the executioner saved his vast estates from being forfeited to the crown under the rules of attainder, and young Northumberland inherited land stretching over eight counties across England and Wales. His immense wealth had allowed him to stand apart from the Cecil and Essex factions during the 1590s, which was as well since he cared for neither of them. He saw Cecil, who was descended from Welsh farmers, as a social upstart, and felt no commensurate warmth for Essex whose enemy, Ralegh, shared his interests in navigation, astronomy and mathematics.

Science was a risky area for study at a time when it was confused with magic and Howard had deliberately laced his letter to James with references to diabolic meetings at Durham House to stir up James’s horror of the occult. To Howard’s dismay, however, James was anxious to gain the support of a man who might otherwise have blocked his route south and in the winter of 1602/3 they were in close contact. Northumberland used his links with James to defend Cobham and Ralegh from accusations of disloyalty to James’s cause, but he did not to wish to be too closely associated with them and told James that Ralegh ‘will never be able to do you much good nor harm’: in other words, that he was expendable. Northumberland had a much bigger agenda than Ralegh’s career to consider – the cause of toleration of religion. While Northumberland was content to conform in religious matters, Catholicism remained strongly rooted in the north of England where he had most of his land base and he saw himself as a natural protector of Catholics.

As Elizabeth’s health deteriorated Northumberland offered James a detailed analysis on how toleration would help achieve a bloodless and successful accession. According to Northumberland, there were two outstanding questions that concerned James’s supporters: ‘Would he succeed peacefully without opposition?’ and ‘Would he invade England and try and seize the crown before Elizabeth was dead?’

Northumberland explained to James that widespread fear of a Scots invasion sprang from the knowledge that the Scots had invaded England in the past, that they had many allies amongst England’s traditional enemies and that England was vulnerable. Large numbers of her military men were employed in Ireland, in the Netherlands and on the high seas, while in England itself, ‘all men are discontented in general [and] … look rather for the sun rising than after the sun setting’. In his Tract to the King Harington had suggested that things were so bad a Scots invasion might succeed, but Northumberland warned James that even if it did, a small country like Scotland would never be able to maintain its domination of its richer southern neighbour. It would be best for James to wait for nature to take its course with Elizabeth for ‘it is most certain young bodies may die, but old ones must out of necessity’.⁷⁰ Once Elizabeth was dead, Northumberland was certain James’s cause would prove a powerful one:

When we look into your competitors at home we find the eyes of the world, neither of the great ones nor the small ones, cast towards them, for either in their worth they are contemptible, or not liked for their sex, wishing no more Queens, fearing we shall never enjoy another like to this.⁷¹

Northumberland acknowledged, however, that James’s candidature had two obvious problems. The first was that he was Scots. He warned – as Harington had – that ‘the better sort’ feared James might give public office to the Scots while ordinary people found ‘the name of Scots is harsh in the ears’. He advised therefore that James enter England as an Englishman; if he succeeded in keeping ‘the better sort’ happy ordinary people would also accept him ‘and the memories of the ancient wounds between England and Scotland will be cancelled’.⁷²

The second potential source of serious opposition James might face, Northumberland wrote, was from the Catholic population. Harington had told James that ‘a great part of the realm, what with commiseration of their oppression, and what with the known abuses in our own church and government, do grow cold in religion and in the service of both God and prince’.⁷³ Northumberland confirmed ‘their faction is strong, their increase is daily’. Indeed so many young men were being drawn to the Catholic seminaries on the Continent that there were now too many English priests to be supported at home. The numbers of converts were also growing and were found even in the families of the most bitter enemies of Catholicism: Leicester’s son became a Catholic, as would Walsing-ham’s daughter, while the children of recusant-hunting bishops such as the Bishop of Durham, Tobie Matthew and John Thornborough had already done so.⁷⁴ Northumberland admitted that ‘the purer sort’ of these Catholics – those influenced by the Jesuits – preferred the candidature of the Infanta Isabella to that of James. ‘I will dare say no more,’ Northumberland concluded, ‘but it were a pity to lose so good a kingdom for not tolerating a mass in a corner.’⁷⁵ The unspoken advice was clear enough: the moderates needed to be encouraged – but James already knew that well enough.

The English Jesuits, led by their Principal, the Somerset-born Robert Persons, were the most determined and dangerous opponents of James’s succession. They had been behind the Doleman book on the succession and in February 1601 they had persuaded Philip III to promote the candidature of the Infanta Isabella despite her own opposition to it.

Three main issues governed the Spanish Council’s outlook in matters of foreign policy, and as the Jesuits were aware, their relations with England affected them all: the first – the Dutch rebellion in the Netherlands – was backed by England; the second – trade in the Indies – was frequently interrupted by English privateers; the third – the threat posed by France – had been countered in earlier centuries by an Anglo-Spanish alliance. It was vitally important therefore for Spain to have a friendly monarch on the English throne. The Infanta and Albert believed this would be best achieved by peaceful relations with whoever naturally succeeded Elizabeth; but Scotland was a traditional enemy of Spain and the Jesuits had persuaded the Spanish Council that if they did not provide a candidate themselves the English Catholics would support James in return for toleration and that would be a disaster for Spain. Philip III followed their advice and the Infanta’s objections were overruled.

Spain’s invasion of Ireland in September 1601 followed. Intended as a stepping stone to an invasion of England, it proved to be a military fiasco and in December Spanish forces were obliged to surrender to Essex’s replacement in Ireland, Lord Mountjoy. By the early summer of 1602, however, the Spanish Council had devised new plans to invade England in the following March and started laying groundwork, giving the soldier and spy Thomas Wintour a large sum of money (100,000 escudos) to try to buy the loyalty of discontented Catholics. Within weeks, the Archduke Albert had admitted he was in touch with James and had offered his support in the hopes of future friendship. Clearly the Catholic campaign for the English throne required a new and more convincing candidate.

In Rome, English and Welsh Catholics were still petitioning the Pope to consider a marriage between Arbella Stuart and a member of the Farnese family, to whom she had been linked before the death of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, in December 1592. Others suggested she marry the young Earl of Arundel whose father had died in the Tower and who was considered a Catholic martyr.⁷⁶ Even Robert Persons accepted that a new candidate was required, one that might fulfil the Pope’s desire to choose one on whom Spain, France and the Vatican could all agree – and here he had a stroke of good fortune. Henri IV had always been a strong advocate of James’s claim. The Scots King had a French grandmother, their countries were traditional allies and Henri had hoped to gain goodwill from the Pope by encouraging James to grant toleration of religion to Catholics, as he had offered it to Protestants in France. Henri’s attitude, however, underwent a revolution in the summer of 1602.

After discovering that Cecil was working for James, Henri had realised that if James became king, it might mean a settlement between Spain and England, a cause that had always been close to Cecil’s heart. Although France and Spain were at peace, it was an uneasy one and Henri spent half his revenue on defence. Not only did he fear better Anglo-Spanish relations, but under James the English and Scots crowns would be united and France would lose the benefits of the Auld Alliance, which he called France’s ‘bridle on England’. In October 1602 Spanish spies reported home that Henri IV of France was ‘no less worried about the King of Scotland than we are’. Robert Persons approached the leader of the curia’s French faction, Cardinal D’Ossat, and urged him to encourage the opening of discussions between Spain, France and the Papacy. The Pope meanwhile had issued a secret brief to his nuncio in Flanders ordering all English Catholics to oppose any Protestant successor to Elizabeth, ‘whensoever that wretched woman should depart this life’.

Alarmed by the prospect of Jesuit plots in England, James wrote a furious letter to Cecil in January, attacking his pursuit of peace with Spain. If any treaty were achieved, he complained:

it would no more be thought odious for any Englishman to dispute upon [i.e. argue for] a Spanish title; … the king of Spain would … have free access in England, to corrupt the minds of all corruptible men for the advancement of his ambitions … and lastly, Jesuits, seminary priests, and that rabble, with which England is already too much infected, would then resort there in such swarms as the caterpillars or flies did in Egypt, no man any more abhorring them.⁷⁷

He demanded to know why Cecil had not carried out a royal proclamation issued in November ordering the expulsion of all priests from England.

I know it may be justly thought that I have the like beam in my own eye, but alas it is a far more barbarous and stiff-necked people that I rule over. Saint George surely rides upon a towardly riding horse, where I am daily struggling to control a wild unruly colt … I protest in God’s presence the daily increase that I hear of popery in England, and the proud vaunting that the papists make daily there of their power, their increase and their combined faction, that none shall enter to be king there, but by their permission.⁷⁸

Cecil tried to put James’s mind at rest. He insisted he was indeed ferocious in his pursuit of Jesuits – ‘that generation of vipers’ – and if he was reluctant to see the secular Catholic priests ‘die by dozens’ it was because by and large they shared moderate Catholic opinion. Many were loyal to James’s candidature and they were useful tools against the Jesuits. Why, some secular priests had published pamphlets accusing the Jesuits of treason and were even prepared to betray them to their deaths.⁷⁹ Unconvinced, James replied with what amounted to an order:

I long to see the execution of the last edict against [the priests], not that thereby I wish to have their heads divided from their bodies but that I would be glad to have both their heads and their bodies separated from this whole land, and safely transported beyond the seas, where they may freely glut themselves on their imagined Gods.

James explained that he was not interested in ‘the distinction in their ranks, I mean betwixt the Jesuits and the secular priests’. Both were subject to the Pope, he pointed out, arguing that if the secular priests appeared harmless it actually made them more dangerous.⁸⁰

On 20 January 1603 the Spanish Council finally submitted their recommendations on the succession issue to Philip III. They suggested that an English candidate should be chosen because it would satisfy the ‘universal desire of all men to have a King of their own nation … whilst the King of France will have reason to be satisfied, and to refrain from helping the King of Scotland, as it cannot suit him for Scotland and England to be reunited’. The Marquis de Poza added that if the English could not agree on a Catholic candidate ‘it would be better to have any heretic there rather than the King of Scotland’. The Count de Olivares agreed:

the worst solution of the question for us may be regarded as the succession of the King of Scotland. He is not only personally to be distrusted, but the union of two kingdoms, and above all the increment of England … with the naval forces she possesses, would be a standing danger to your Majesty in a vital point, namely the navigation to both Indies. To this must be added the hatred which has always existed between the crowns of Spain and Scotland and the old friendship of the latter with France.

The Council noted that there was a faction within the curia that believed James might be converted. It recommended that English Catholics might be informed that the truth was otherwise. They pointed out that James was notoriously dishonest and Henri IV’s ambassador was complaining that it was being made difficult for him to hear mass in Edinburgh. Furthermore: ‘There is a strong belief that he consented to the killing of his mother, and at least he manifested no sorrow or resentment at it.’⁸¹ They advised that their new candidate should support religious toleration for Protestants and observed that Catholics and Protestants shared ‘a common ground of agreement … their hatred of the Scottish domination’, and concluded that ‘the greatest aid to success will be … the liberal promises made to Catholics and heretics, almost without distinction, particularly to other claimants and their principal supporters, who should be given estates, incomes, offices, grants, privileges, and exemptions, almost, indeed, sharing the crown amongst them’ – as James was already doing.

The Council then emphasised to Philip that the means of approaching France had to be decided immediately, ‘in case the Queen dies before we are fully prepared. If this should happen we should not only be confronted with the evils already set forth, but the Catholics, who have placed their trust in your Majesty, will be handed over to the hangman and religion will receive its death blow’.⁸² Orders were made ‘that the building and fitting out of high ships should be continued with high speed, and also that the [military] efforts already recommended to be made in Flanders should proceed …’

News of a build-up of Spanish forces had already reached England. On 17 January, an English courtier wrote to a friend that a former prisoner in Spain had described military preparations and that the Queen’s ships had captured several vessels heading to Spain laden ‘with arms and munitions’.⁸³

There was also shocking news about Arbella Stuart emerging at court. That Christmas she had at last attempted to escape from her grandmother’s house, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. It was said that she had planned a marriage with Edward Seymour, the senior grandson of the Earl of Hertford and Catherine Grey. Hertford had betrayed her plan and Cecil had tried to assure James that, as far as he knew, Arbella was no Catholic, just a lonely spinster. Courtiers in England now anxiously prepared for whatever violence lay ahead. Northumberland added fifty-three war horses to his stables. The Earl of Hertford reinforced the gateways to his house and erected defensive structures. Bess of Hardwick’s elder son, Henry Cavendish, began stocking Chatsworth with new pikes and other arms.⁸⁴ Cecil, meanwhile, busily began shoring up his personal financial position. Even the prospect of a peaceful Stuart inheritance did not make his future secure. James might sack or demote him after he had served his purpose and if that occurred he would be brought down by the weight of his debts. The building of his new grandiose palace on the Strand had almost bankrupt him. Harington had heard a rumour in the summer that Cecil was being forced to sell Theobalds, the fabulous palace in Hertfordshire that his father had left him. Cecil denied it, but the Secretary of State was in a delicate position and the easiest way for him to make money was to take it from the crown.

Cecil had never been above making money from Elizabeth in morally dubious ways: when he offered his ship the True Love for an official expedition to the Azores in 1597 he had charged the Queen twice for the victuals. He now sold her his unprofitable estates for £5,200 and acquired the valuable royal Great and Little Parks of Brigstock in Northamptonshire behind the back of Elizabeth’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, the lessee. His action, he hoped, would offer some security of income, whatever lay ahead.

As James looked on watchfully from Scotland the final duel between Cecil and Persons for the English crown was about to begin.

* The Treaty of Berwick, signed in July 1586, entitled James to an annual pension of £4,000; James seems to have interpreted it as recognition of his claim to the English throne.

* The dialect of northern English spoken in the south and north-east of Scotland. This was not the uneducated brogue some English appeared to think, but rather the language of some of the most beautiful poetry of the day.

* The improvement followed the employment of a committee of eight Exchequer auditors known as the Octavians. They had taken control of all areas of royal finance and reduced James’s handouts to courtiers. A group of disappointed courtiers had, unsurprisingly, united in determination to get rid of them and James had eventually done so – but for a price. The legislation he had sought to encourage the resolution of feuds through the royal courts was passed in June 1598 and with it the tradition of the feud began to die out.

† John Gowrie’s elder brother, James, the second Earl, died in 1588.

* It is notable that one of Gowrie’s first actions in Scotland had been to oppose James’s proposal to raise the taxes to pay for an army in the Scots parliament.

* The latter was to be made Lord of Kinloss on 22 February 1603, a mark of his continued importance.

* The origin of Shrewsbury and Stanhope’s enmity was a long-running dispute over whether the Stanhopes had a right to build a weir on the River Trent. Such questions were considered matters of honour as they reflected on a family’s status within their county and the argument had run to bloodshed on more than one occasion. The most recent incident had taken place in 1599. Stanhope and a band of twenty armed and mounted men had attacked Mary Shrewsbury’s favourite brother, Charles Cavendish, his two attendants and his page. Cavendish and his men had fought off Stanhope’s party, killing two or three of their assailants and wounding two others, but Cavendish had been left injured with a bullet in the thigh. Even in Elizabethan England, where duels and brawls were commonplace, such an incident was scandalous, but the hatred it created clearly had its uses to Cecil.