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THREE

The Fight for Henry

‘TWO MIGHTY FACTIONS’

It was pleasing for James to envisage the European scale of Henry’s destiny, but he and his advisers knew it might come to nothing if the king could not ensure order and tranquillity at home – where, the English ambassador Bowes told Robert Cecil, ‘the question of the Queen and her son’, is ‘a breach working mightily’.

Some even saw Henry’s wet nurse as playing a sinister part in the drama. Everyone knew a child imbibed the nurse’s character with her milk. When a messenger told Anne that Margaret Mastertoun had ‘become dry through sickness’, she feared the worst. But the drama soon passed. Whatever illness the wet nurse had, Henry had caught it, ‘but is now well again. The King coming, the Nurse prayed pardon.’ Her milk, however, had gone. ‘The old nurse being of the Countess of Mar’s choice,’ Bowes explained, ‘some seek to impute this fault to Mar.’ If abundant breast milk equalled loyalty, the withdrawal of it implied treason. The Mars found another woman to tend to Henry, but ‘the young Prince cried for want of’ his old nurse and refused to feed. Recovering but unsettled, he preferred to go hungry and risked weakening himself further.

Anne asked that ‘the keeping of the Prince’ be moved to Edinburgh Castle, where she might personally oversee his care and prevent his nursery woes escalating into real danger. But Edinburgh, the seat of government, religion, and plots, was felt to be a more dangerous place for the prince. James refused to hand over Henry’s care to her.

The queen’s initial misery at being deprived of her son now settled into a pulsing anger. ‘Two mighty factions’ formed: the king’s supporters – including Mar, his kinsman Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone – warning that Anne, Queen of Scots, schemed with the discontented Catholic ‘[Earl] Bothwell and that crew, for the coronation of the Prince and the departure of the King’. Sir John Maitland, the Scottish chancellor, spearheaded support for the queen. ‘What the end will be, God knows,’ sighed Robert Aston, an English agent.

The king tried to get the leaders of the factions, Mar and Maitland, to reconcile before the court but found that courtiers continued to put light ‘to the coal’ of the strife, standing back to ‘let others blow at it’. This ‘is the condition of this estate … Everyone shooting at others without respect to King or Commonweal, or the safety of the young Prince’, commented Aston.

From Whitehall, Robert Cecil pondered the implications for England if King James and his obdurate consort ascended the English throne. James’s apparent disinclination to suppress dissent and put his ‘Lords … to the horn’ left a question mark against his suitability as successor. Yet the Scottish king had settled Scotland as his forebears had failed to do. The child was a healthy male and, despite the unpropitious circumstances, there were whispers at court that he might soon have a sibling: ‘by all appearances [the queen] … is with child, yet she denies it’, agent Aston reported to Ambassador Bowes.

Hostilities quickly resumed though, with James informing Anne that in pressing for the removal of the prince, her supporters ‘sought nothing but the cutting of his [the king’s] throat’. Worse, he said, her plots were not only ‘a danger to his person’, but ‘treason’. Anne collapsed under the strain. If she had been pregnant, she was not any more.

Anxiety for the health of his ‘dearest bedfellow’ drove James to see Anne at Linlithgow palace, set away from ‘the tumults of Edinburgh’. Here, James entertained ‘the Queen very lovingly … to draw her off’ her obsession. She received him well and was reported to be ‘all love and obedience’. But at supper, thinking she had her husband ‘in a good humour’, she declared that ‘it was “opened” in Scotland, England and Denmark that she had sought to have the keeping of the young Prince and that therefore it touched her honour and her credit’ as mother of the heir and queen, not to be slighted. James insisted that ‘he regarded her honour and the safety of the Prince as much as she, and would, if he saw cause, yield to her’. On both sides, love was intimate and strategic. James spoke for them all when he told Henry later: ‘a King is as one set on a stage’.

The fight to be reunited with her son drew out a relentless streak in Henry’s unhappy mother. The result, an audible rending of the fabric of the Stuarts’ domestic life, was terrible to witness. By July 1595, Anne seemed to be ‘somewhat crazed’ in her grief. She obsessed over the right ‘cause’ to make the king ‘yield to her’. She asked him to ‘convene his nobles for their advice therein … But he has utterly refused her motion and continues his promises to Mar. So this matter is “marvellous secret”,’ intelligencer George Nicolson observed with some sarcasm.

The feud turned violent when the queen’s supporters clashed with the king’s men under the walls of Stirling Castle, and Mar’s baillie, a man named Forrester, was slaughtered. ‘I fear it will very suddenly burst into bloody factions,’ Nicolson judged, ‘for all sides are busy packing up all small feuds for their advantage.’ The kirk ordained a day of fasting ‘for the amendment of the present danger’ caused by this rupture. James, meanwhile, pleaded with the queen to abandon her campaign. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’

One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting carried the stories to Denmark. Anne’s mother, Queen Sophie, unmoved by her daughter’s distress, advised that she should ‘obey the King in all things’.

In London, Cecil was told ‘there is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation between the King and the Queen’. Elizabeth I let off an exasperated rebuke to her cousin, rueing ‘to see him so evidently a spectacle of a seduced king, abusing counsel, and guiding awry his kingdom’. Her brother prince – her heir, perhaps – had let his popish lords lay out their demands, ‘turning their treason’s bills to artificer’s reckonings – one billet lacking only’, she fumed, and that is, ‘an item … so much for the cord whose office they best merited’. James did not immediately follow advice on executions from his mother’s killer, no matter how wittily expressed – though he did love wit.

A rapprochement occurred between king and queen towards the end of the year, and by early 1596 Denmark’s daughter was pregnant again. Princess Elizabeth, named in honour of Elizabeth I, was born at Falkland Palace, Fife, in August 1596. She too was quickly fostered out to the king’s allies and Henry saw nothing of his new sister. Nor would he see his baby brother, Charles, born four years later. Nor Princess Margaret, born 1598, but dead by March 1600.

Prince Henry’s first portrait dates from this time. It shows a king in miniature. About eighteen months old, in his high chair, dressed in jewel-encrusted, padded white-satin robes, with a coronet on his head, he holds a rattle as if it were a tiny sceptre. The reddish blond down on his head is baby hair. His skin is white as the moon. He resembles his mother.