Читать книгу The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart - Sarah Fraser, Sarah Fraser - Страница 22

The Privy Council locked the gates of Richmond Palace, closed the ports and moved to Whitehall. Grief over the queen’s death was tempered by memories of Essex’s uprising and weariness of the Armada war in which the country was locked. The status quo needed to change. It seemed that, at the last minute, on her deathbed, even Elizabeth had acknowledged it and named James her heir. When asked by her Privy Council if she agreed that the Scottish cousin should succeed her, she was seen to move her arm to her head, which Cecil took as a sign of assent. Public mourning mixed with fear and anticipation as news of the queen’s death spread across London.

Elizabeth’s councillors wondered what English Catholics, maybe thirty per cent of the population, were planning. And, what would James VI do if he met the anticipated resistance. He might invade, backed by his powerful Danish in-laws?

The council organised to get the new dynasty – king, queen, heir, the rest of the royal children – under English protection and control. Robert Cecil proclaimed King James of England from the gates of Whitehall barely seven hours after Elizabeth’s death. As the news spread, Thomas Cecil, Lord President of the North, reassured his half-brother: ‘the contentment of the people is unspeakable, seeing all things proceed so quietly, whereas they expected in the interim their houses should have been spoiled and sacked’.

Nine days after Elizabeth died, King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Wales, and Ireland, and Queen Anne, attended a service of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh – no mourning here. James addressed his people, promising to return every three years. The following Tuesday, the king kissed his wife in front of the crowds jammed into the high street, and left. The three royal children were safe in nurseries dotted between Edinburgh and Stirling. Two others – Margaret, and Robert (who died in 1602) – had not survived infancy. The queen was pregnant again, for the sixth time.

The king wrote to Henry, apologising for not coming to tell his son in person of their great good fortune, ‘but time is so precious’. James could not relax until he had the crown of England on his head. ‘Let not this news make you proud or insolent,’ he warned his boy, ‘for a King’s son and heir were you before, and no more are you yet … Be therefore merry, but not insolent,’ he said. ‘Keep a greatness, but sine fasti,’ without giving yourself airs and graces. ‘Be resolute, but not wilful.’ He recommended the prince keep the Basilikon Doron by him, and signed off, ‘Your loving father, James R’.

It was intended that princes Henry and Charles and Princess Elizabeth would remain in Scotland for the rest of their childhoods. At a stroke, nine-year-old Henry faced a future without either of his fathers – James and Mar. An Anglophile familiar with the English court, the earl had to accompany the king, who had never been to England (let alone Wales or Ireland).

Henry turned to his mother at once, writing: ‘I will lose that great benefit I had by’ my father’s ‘frequent visitation’. So, ‘I most humbly request your Majesty to supply that lack by your presence, which I have the more just cause to crave that I have wanted it so long’, before adding forlornly, ‘to my great grief and displeasure’. The boy had never seen enough of her. However, Anne had been ordered to leave Scotland and join the king in London as soon as she was packed.

Henry hoped ‘your Majesty by sight may have, as I hope, the greater matter to love me and I, likewise, may be encouraged to go forward … and to honour your Majesty with all due reverence …’. Couched in the usual language for a prince addressing the queen, nevertheless his words are full of longing. He spoke of love, not merely honour and reverence.

He did not need to ask twice. From the battlements of Stirling, the Mar clan watched as Anne approached – attended by a trail of armed nobles, soldiers and servants. It looked to some like the long dreaded coup to seize the prince. But the queen’s ‘request’ that her son be brought out to greet her ‘prevailed not. The Lady Mar and … the Lord of Keir gave a flat denial and would not suffer the Prince to go out.’ Old Lady Minnie told the queen that if Henry ‘went with her, the Catholics would certainly abduct him, in order to have a hostage in their hands when they rose in revolt’. This was a barb, as the queen was Catholic. Anne demanded they admit her, then. The Mars regretted it, but they could not refuse entry to the queen’s grace, especially in her condition.

Once inside the castle, Anne entered the royal palace, took possession of her lodgings, just below the Prince’s Tower, and announced she would not be leaving without her son. Horrified at the turn of events, members of the Scottish Privy Council raced to Stirling to convene in the castle, resolve the crisis, and work out how to shift her.

On 10 May, a letter from Montrose, Lord Chancellor of Scotland, interrupted the king’s delirious progress south. ‘Her Majesty’s present estate and condition I refer to the bearer’s report,’ he started. Pregnant and implacable as she was, Montrose said if they could just get ‘Her Grace out of Scotland’ it might defuse ‘all fear of hazard, and danger of inconvenience’.

Back at Stirling, waiting guidance from the king, the privy councillors handled the possible ‘inconvenience’ of a kidnapping and ‘revolt’ as best they could. Lord Fyvie was given the unenviable task of persuading Anne to depart for England. Lord President of the Court of Session, Fyvie was the highest placed civil judge in Scotland. He was also a Catholic sympathiser, guardian of Prince Charles, and served Anne as baillie and justiciary of the regality of Dunfermline, one of Anne’s possessions. Tall, with a fine figure, slim eagle nose and sensitive countenance, if anyone could expect a good reception from the queen, surely it was Fyvie.

He dragged his feet as he walked across the inner courtyard and entered the queen’s presence chamber. As soon as he opened his mouth on the subject, Anne was seized by a fury fit and started to ‘beat at her belly’ in distress.

Fyvie, aghast to ‘be with her Majesty … at the very worst’, saw her fall. Bleeding ‘from the womb’, the queen’s ladies crowded round and led her away. The brain has no sense of time. Perhaps it was a kind of aftershock, dropping her back into the horror of nine years ago, giving birth to Henry here, only to lose him.

‘At such a time’, in the history of the fledgling Britain, ‘such an accident, to such a person, what could he [Fyvie] do or say?’ the Scottish council asked James. Fyvie quaked in his boots. What if she died? Someone would have to be held to account. The councillors now changed tack, going all out to appease Anne, allowing Henry free movement through the castle to visit his mother.

The atmosphere thickened with hostility. ‘Her Majesty’s passions could’ only be ‘moderated or mitigated … by seconding, following and obeying all her directions’, though of course these were ‘subject and depended wholly upon your sacred Majesty’s answers and resolutions as oracles’, they told the king. The councillors requested urgent, clear and credible orders.

Anne’s fury had erupted, Demeter-like in its scorching power. She now showed every possible manifestation of her scorn, of being denied motherhood and the guardianship of her children for almost a decade. Her passion emptied her out, and stunned all around. She miscarried the baby, a boy.

‘Physic and medicine require greater place with her Majesty at present’, than lectures on realpolitik, Fyvie carefully advised his king. The queen’s demeanour spoke much louder than any words. For days she lay motionless and silent. She could so easily haemorrhage or contract a puerperal infection, and that would be that. John Spottiswoode, her almoner, rode south to tell the king to prepare for the worst. Prince Henry, meanwhile, feared he was about to lose his mother, having just lost both father figures. The king sent Mar, of all people, home to deal with the crisis.

Eventually the queen began to recover. The castle hummed with ‘controversy and a jar anent this question of the Prince’s delivery’ once again, as it had following Henry’s birth. There ‘rests greater hatred and malice’ than ever between the Mars and the queen’s party. The risk is, the Lord Chancellor told James, that ‘if it be not prevented’ it will ‘make a greater stir in this country’. In England, so far, all the talk had been of peace and happiness, of the chance to ‘begin a new world’, said the Earl of Montrose.

But at home, Stirling had become a microcosm of all the dangers James had tried to shield Henry from – and a potential trigger point for revolution. On the eve of the union of the thrones, with the king out of the way, the queen’s faction might try to kidnap Henry, crown him and declare an independent Scotland, with the Danish Queen of Scots acting as regent.

James could not comfortably make his formal entry into London with a consort so angry and estranged it nearly killed her, and lost him his children. Half the appeal of the Stuarts was a promise of stability and continuity, taking the country away from succession battles and the threat of civil war from rival claimants. Prince Henry was vital to that promise. Two other children lived, but the boy, Charles, was a weedy child.

Anne stood firm, however. ‘The Queen’s Majesty is not minded to depart unless the prince go with her, and will no ways rest content that the Earl of Mar should accompany her,’ Montrose told the king, suggesting James relieve Mar of his duty. James appealed to his wife: ‘God is my witness that I ever preferred you to all my bairns, much more than to any subject’, including Mar. Then he spoiled it by lecturing her not to open her ears to every ‘flattering sycophant’, and ended by praising Mar as ‘an honest and wise servant for his true and faithful service to me’. He wanted Anne’s trust, but seemed to have lost it.

The queen must join him immediately and thank ‘God for the peaceful possession … of England, which, next to God, might be ascribed to the Earl of Mar’, he commanded. Someone should have advised the king to omit the last phrase. Anne responded that ‘she would rather never see England than to be in any sort beholden to him [Mar] for the same’. She was staying put, in the same country as her children, and would deny Mar access to her.

After years of politicking, Anne had the upper hand, and played it, using Henry to provoke the first crisis of the new dynasty.

English ministers looked on in dismay. The king bowed to the inevitable. He ordered the Scottish Privy Council to discharge the Mars, thanking them for their years of good service. ‘Our cousin, the Duke of Lennox’ is coming to sort it all out, he told them. This was Ludovic, son of the late Esmé Stuart. The queen trusted young Lennox. He was the brother of her favourite, Henrietta Stuart, Countess of Huntly.

A few days later, the Earl of Mar escorted Henry across the courtyard to the Privy Council sitting in the great hall where he gave the prince into ‘the charge of other Lords appointed to wait on him on his journey to England’. As the child approached Lennox, his mother and the lords of the council, he suddenly stopped, ran back and ‘embracing the said Earl, burst forth in tears’.

After she miscarried, Anne kept the foetus and placed it in a tiny coffin. This now travelled with the royal party on its slow progress south. The queen ‘brought with her the body of the male child of which she had been delivered in Scotland’, the French ambassador explained to King Henri IV, ‘because endeavours had been used to persuade the public that his death was only feigned’. Malicious tongues whispered that she was never pregnant – just psychotically manipulative.

James begged her to cheer up. ‘Leave off these womanly apprehensions, for I thank God I carry that love and respect unto you which by the law of God and Nature I ought to do to my wife and mother of my children … As for your dole weeds’ – the black mourning clothes she put on for her dead baby boy – ‘wearing it is utterly impertinent at this time’, he told her. He wanted to show the English that the Stuarts came in great splendour to spread peace and harmony, and preside over a new dawn for the nations of Britain. Instead, his queen flaunted what she saw as the consequences of their enmity. Anne’s gesture was as dramatic as it was self-dramatising. Miscarriages were traumatic, then as now, no matter how frequently they occurred. In a spectacle-loving age, living on the royal stage, extravagant personal gestures cohabited with the most rigid etiquette.

By 23 May, just over two weeks after she had stormed into Stirling, the queen rode with Henry into Edinburgh. Having been delayed by a cold, six-year-old Elizabeth now joined them from Linlithgow. The two bewildered, excited children were together for the first time. In each other’s company they found a refuge amid all the changes. Soon, Henry ‘loved her … so dearly that he desired to see her always by him’.

In Edinburgh, huge crowds gathered agog with curiosity to see their crown prince and Elizabeth. Cannon saluted them from the city’s castle. Anne ordered a new carriage from George Hendry, coachmakers. Now she had what she wanted, she cast off her black dole weeds, preferring a new dress of figured taffeta, with a velvet-trimmed white satin mantle for travelling. She dressed Henry in a royal purple satin doublet and breeches and Elizabeth in Spanish red taffeta. Even the queen’s clown was fitted with a new coat.

‘Many English ladies in coaches, and some riding on fair horse’, appeared in the Scottish capital, like a flock of exotic birds blown off course. Led by Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the beautiful Penelope Rich, sister of the late Earl of Essex, these were young women from the fringes of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Fashionable, intelligent, witty, highly cultured, and about the same age as the queen, Anne took several of the Countess of Bedford’s circle into her service immediately. She appointed Lucy to the bedchamber, the only Englishwoman to be brought so close at present.

The French ambassador observed the queen’s nature ‘was quite the reverse of’ the king’s. He liked to be private. ‘She was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue.’ Henry rode beside his mother and Elizabeth, saluting the crowds with care from a fine French horse presented to him by Lennox. The infant Charles would join them in England when he was considered strong enough. Queen Anne was doing the English Privy Council’s job for them, giving them what some of them had been bargaining for in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign – the whole Stuart royal family.

Just over the border, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the elderly ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber waited for their new mistress. Ever keen on continuity in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of his rule, James had simply reappointed them. With them they carried piles of the old queen’s dresses for Anne, and caskets of her jewels. Their grip tightened at the sight of Lucy Bedford and Lady Rich close at the new queen’s side. Anne listened as the venerable old ladies offered to dress her in her predecessor’s hand-me-downs, pin her jewels on her bosom and resume their old positions of privilege and intimacy at court. The queen thanked them, took the gifts, and sent her husband’s appointees away.

The royal party reached Althorp house in Northamptonshire on Saturday 25 June, where Ben Jonson had created a masque for the house’s wealthy owner, Sir Robert Spencer, and his esteemed guests.

Through the summer’s evening light, a willowy line of fairies and a satyr led ‘Queen Mab’ through the park and woods around Althorp, leaping and dancing towards the royal party.

‘Your father gives you here to the service of this Prince,’ the Satyr announced to thirteen-year-old Master Spencer, playing a huntsman. Prince Henry crossed from the audience into the masque to accept him. The two boys then rode off, to hunt together inside the magical world of the masque, though the two deer they killed were real enough. It was a world away from the fortified world of Stirling, protected from the public gaze.

The following day, Ben Jonson sent them all off with a blessing, addressing Henry as his:

dear Lord, on whom my covetous eye,

Doth feed itself, but cannot satisfy,

O shoot up fast in spirit as in years;

That when upon her head proud Europe wears

Her stateliest [at]tire, you may appear thereon

The richest gem, without a paragon.

Shine bright and fixed as the Arctic star …

Jonson foresaw Henry risen to his full height – Henry IX, the guiding North Star of Protestant Christendom, hanging in icy isolation. That day, ‘when slow time hath made you fit for war’, look across the narrow sea, ‘and think where you may but lead us forth’ on that day when ‘swords/Shall speak our actions better than our words’.

English glee bubbled over – a prince called Henry and a princess called Elizabeth. The age was both new and old.