The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart
Sarah Fraser
Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous.NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never HadHenry Stuart, Prince of Wales was once the hope of Britain. Eldest son to James VI of Scotland, James I of England, Henry was the epitome of heroic Renaissance princely virtue, his life set against a period about as rich and momentous as any.Educated to rule, Henry was interested in everything. His court was awash with leading artists, musicians, writers and composers such as Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. He founded a royal art collection of European breadth, amassed a vast collection of priceless books, led grand renovations of royal palaces and mounted operatic, highly politicised masques.But his ambitions were even greater. He embraced cutting-edge science, funded telescopes and automata, was patron of the North West Passage Company and wanted to sail through the barriers of the known world to explore new continents. He reviewed and modernised Britain’s naval and military capacity and in his advocacy for the colonisation of North America he helped to transform the world.At his death aged only eighteen, and considering himself to be as much a European as British, he was preparing to stake his claim to be the next leader of Protestant Christendom in the struggle to resist a resurgent militant Catholicism.In this rich and lively book, Sarah Fraser seeks to restore Henry to his place in history. Set against the bloody traumas of the Thirty Years’ War, the writing of the King James Bible, the Gunpowder Plot and the dark tragedies pouring from Shakespeare’s quill, Henry’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale: the story of a man who, had he lived, might have saved Britain from King Charles I, his spaniels and the Civil War with its appalling loss of life his misrule engendered.
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COPYRIGHT (#ub3b57da1-b2da-52aa-9601-7e702768554d)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Sarah Fraser 2017
Cover image shows detail from Henry, Prince of Wales with Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex in the Hunting Fieldc. 1605 by Robert Peake (active 1580–1635) Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017
Sarah Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Maps by Martin Brown
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007548101
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007548095
Version: 2018-02-13
DEDICATION (#ub3b57da1-b2da-52aa-9601-7e702768554d)
For my sons, Sandy and Calum
CONTENTS
Cover (#u884786a3-80a5-578f-980c-3454fddcff17)
Title Page (#udcd210e1-cc69-5553-b91a-1eb5f6661b7d)
Copyright (#uf80e9848-3c4e-5c7e-93da-72ec6cc04088)
Dedication (#u8c0e02b4-cba0-5593-ae06-e9a7ebadba25)
House of Stuart Family Tree (#ucb81e37f-d7b4-5efb-bc9b-19371242ad5d)
Maps (#uc2b40ca5-356e-533d-b1c0-3357ff028bca)
Conventions and Style (#u44bae989-6606-5af7-9931-97e324e92847)
Preface: Effigy (#uee511a1f-c384-5e56-98c8-0b0f9fc16b19)
PART ONE: SCOTLAND, 1954–1603 (#ua5d86acf-3aa1-5797-b887-5056c715f335)
1 Birth, Parents, Crisis: ‘A son of goodly hability and expectation’ (#u4310fc6e-29e7-52a4-b2c2-4345eee238cb)
2 Launching a European Prince (#u1a364700-f1eb-5f64-bca2-0111b9bd87fb)
3 The Fight for Henry: ‘Two mighty factions’ (#u8a664999-81ba-5146-8a44-5893a498fa21)
4 Nursery to Schoolroom: ‘The King’s Gift’ (#u6c8bef63-da0a-5835-97ea-370958af8718)
5 Tutors and Mentors: ‘Study to rule’ (#u2ab7065e-5ec3-5714-9e73-3d65de652064)
PART TWO: ENGLAND, 1604–10 (#u7503159a-d086-5311-a25e-282159b39dd3)
6 The Stuarts Inaugurate the New Age (#ub364674c-2386-507b-b59e-da33772e9a55)
7 A Home for Henry and Elizabeth: Oatlands (#u59979851-feb8-5ff7-81af-6c229294c9b6)
8 The Stuarts Enter London: ‘We are all players’ (#udced9ade-efb5-5d94-9f72-477af7417b58)
9 Henry’s Anglo-Scottish Family: Nonsuch (#u4b632b05-1ee3-5790-ad0e-9ac2aa9ad76a)
10 Henry’s Day: ‘The education of a Christian prince’ (#u679a46fd-4882-5af1-91dc-419815c557f2)
11 Union and Disunion: ‘Blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains’ (#u686eff89-17c9-5d65-a9dd-2495abe5c083)
12 Europe Assesses Henry: ‘A prince who promises very much’ (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Collegiate Court of St James’s (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Money and Empire: ‘O brave new world’ (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Friends as Tourists and Spies: ‘Traveller for the English wits’ (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Henry’s Political Philosophy: ‘Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power’ (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Favourites: ‘The moths and mice of court’ (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Henry’s Supper Tables: Lumley’s library and tavern wits (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Henry’s Foreign Policy: ‘Talk for peace, prepare for war’ (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Heir of Virginia: ‘There is a world elsewhere’ (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE: PRINCE OF WALES, 1610–12 (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Epiphany: ‘To fight their Saviour’s battles’ (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Prince of Wales: ‘Every man rejoicing and praising God’ (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Henry’s Men Go to War: Jülich-Cleves (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Henry Plays the King’s Part: King of the Underworld (#litres_trial_promo)
25 From Courtly College to Royal Court (#litres_trial_promo)
26 Court Cormorants: Henry and the king’s coterie (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Humour of Henry’s Court: Coryate’s Crudities (#litres_trial_promo)
28 Marital Diplomacy: ‘Two religions should never lie in his bed’ (#litres_trial_promo)
29 Supreme Protector: The Northwest Passage Company (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Selling Henry to the Highest Bidder: ‘The god of money has stolen Love’s ensigns’ (#litres_trial_promo)
31 A Model Army: ‘His fame shall strike the Starres’ (#litres_trial_promo)
32 End of an Era: ‘My audit is made’ (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Wedding Parties: ‘Let British strength be added to the German’ (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Henry Loses Time: ‘I would say somewhat, but I cannot utter it!’ (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Unravelling: After 6 November 1612 (#litres_trial_promo)
36 Endgame (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Illustration Credits (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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CONVENTIONS AND STYLE (#ub3b57da1-b2da-52aa-9601-7e702768554d)
Spelling and punctuation, unstable in this period, are modernised to assist comprehension, and to prevent interruption of the narrative by lexical curiosities that might catch the eye and distract from the narrative flow. Even James VI and I revised his Basilikon Doron for publication to ease readability.
Contractions are expanded (thus mistie becomes Majesty). The spelling of proper names has been standardised. For example, Henry also spelled his name ‘Henrie’, but I have opted here for Henry. Individuals born with several titles, or those who changed name on receipt of them, can be a particular problem for the biographer writing for a non-specialist audience. Cecil was not the monolith ‘Salisbury’ when James VI negotiated in treasonable secrecy with Secretary Robert Cecil to inherit Elizabeth’s thrones. I note in media res when an important change has taken place and from then on, I use the new name. With regard to place names, ‘Great Britain’ as a term for the multiple Stuart territories is a bit of an anachronism, but I use it as it is so apposite. Place names are modernised and standardised (thus Finchingbrooke becomes Hinchingbrooke).
For dates, the year begins on 1 January not 25 March (as it did on this side of the Channel).
British currency was in pounds, shillings and pence: £s. d. One English pound was worth £12 Scots. To understand what a particular amount would represent today you can add two zeros to the figure, to get a rough approximation.
PREFACE
Effigy (#ub3b57da1-b2da-52aa-9601-7e702768554d)
‘How much music you can still make with what remains’
– ITZHAK PERLMAN
In the conservation room at Westminster Abbey lies the wreck of a life-sized wooden manikin, stretched out on a white table. This is what remains of Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales.
Recalling a cast of the nameless dead at Pompeii, the figure’s mute appeal touched me. Its ruined state tells of Henry’s importance, but also what happened to his legacy. After Henry died, visitors ransacked this likeness for relics – someone even stole his head. His effigy was unique in 1612. Up until then, they were made to honour monarchs and their consorts, not their offspring.
Who was Henry Stuart, to earn this effigy, and the state funeral that went with it – itself unprecedented in England, in scale and magnificence?
This book sets out to recreate Henry, an important but almost forgotten piece of history’s puzzle. Restoring Henry in his time and place reveals paths running through his court, from Elizabeth I to the Civil War, to a Puritan republic, and the British Empire in America; but also, to the transformation of the navy into a force achieving global domination of the high seas, and the breaking down and recreation of Britain’s armed forces into a world-class fighting machine.
Henry re-founded the Royal Library, amassing the biggest private collection in England. He began to create a royal art collection of European breadth – paintings, coins, jewellery and gem stones, sculpture, both new and antique, on a scale no royal had attempted before. These went on to become world-class collections under his brother, Charles I, and form the backbone of the British Library and the Queen’s Royal Collection today. Henry began the grandest renovations of royal palaces in his father King James VI and I’s reign, and mounted operatic, highly politicised masques. His court maintained a dozen artists, musicians, writers and composers. Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, George Chapman and Inigo Jones all created work for him. He responded with enthusiasm to the vogue for scientific research, putting time, money and men into buying state-of-the-art scientific instruments – telescopes and automata that tried to model the heavens. He financed ‘projects’ – business schemes – to try and extract silver from lead, and make furnaces more fuel efficient.
Henry and his circle’s curiosity and ambition reflected the era’s desire to sail through the barriers of the known world. He persuaded his father the king to let him begin a full-scale review and modernisation of Britain’s naval and military capacity. He was raised in the ancient culture of chivalry, but welcomed active servicemen from the front line of Europe’s religious wars. Henry’s court was where the latest developments in the art of warfare were received and developed. He became patron of the Northwest Passage Company, established to find a sea route across the top of America and open up the lucrative oriental trade to British merchants. He and his court were important promoters of the project to realise the decades-long dream of planting the British race permanently in American soil. Whatever we think of colonialisation now, such men transformed the world.
As a man and prince, Henry saw himself to be European as much as British, using as one of his mottoes the expansionist ‘Fas est aliorum quaerere regna’, ‘It is right to ask for the kingdoms of others’. At his death aged eighteen, he was preparing to go and stake his claim to be the next leader of Protestant Christendom in the struggle to resist a resurgent militant Catholicism. He was a devout, Puritan-minded Protestant. In the arena of politics, there is a case for seeing Henry’s court as a significant waystation between the abortive aristocratic uprising in 1601 – when the 2nd Earl of Essex sought to force Queen Elizabeth to name James VI of Scotland as her heir in Parliament – and the regicides who shivered in the Palace of Westminster’s Painted Chamber, ready to sign the death warrant of Henry’s little brother, Charles I, in January 1649. By the time of Henry’s death, you could see the prince and his court positioning themselves at the front line of so much that came to define Britain in its heyday.
I am aware that when I say, Henry did this, and Henry did that, one question arises at once. Who was Henry?
Henry was a son, brother, friend, master, patron. ‘Henry’ was the crown prince. The inverted commas around his name allude to the medieval idea of the king’s two bodies – ordinary man and the monarchy, the Crown. The natural man decayed and died. The Crown merely suffered a demise and passed to the next bearer. Crown Prince Henry possessed a physical body and a body politic. He was a boy and the crowns united: the first Prince of Wales born to inherit the united kingdoms of Britain.
His legacy stretched beyond his death to the conflagration coming in 1618. The Thirty Years’ War would be the longest, bloodiest conflict in European history until the First World War in 1914. It tore Europe apart, and Henry had been determined to drag England towards involvement in it. What did that imply about his character?
He was only nine when he came to England. For nearly a decade in Scotland and nearly a decade in England some of the most influential men, and women, of the Jacobean age wanted to shape the character of the future king and his monarchy. Who he responded to, and to whom he did not, suggests what kind of king he would have made.
His effigy remains as a symbol of his dual nature. As his teenage body rotted in its coffin, his icon was supposed to live for ever. The eager ravages the effigy suffered reflect how well Henry had grown into his public role. By 1612, his court was recognised as an important power bloc at home and abroad. For me, he is the greatest Prince of Wales we ever had.
A recent straw poll shows how far Henry has dropped out of the national memory. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery in London staged an exhibition devoted to him. It introduced what one reviewer after another called this ‘forgotten prince’ to a wider audience. The faceless anonymity of his effigy now symbolises his disappearance. Many people do not realise his brother Charles was never born to be king – nor how bright a star Henry rose to be in the Jacobean and European firmament. This biography is driven by a passionate desire to change that.
As I set out on my researches, Westminster Abbey began work to create new galleries to house its unique collection of effigies, including what remains of Henry’s. This book is my contribution to the restoration of Henry, Prince of Wales – from forlorn worm-eaten object in a backroom, to an iconic, colourful character standing tall in his time and place, on the stage of British history.
PART ONE
Scotland (#ulink_d744b62c-4c64-5e62-8120-bc3662bea605)
1594–1603
ONE
Birth, Parents, Crisis (#ulink_c67edc0c-0f0d-5f56-9b2c-7a22339fd519)
‘A SON OF GOODLY HABILITY AND EXPECTATION’
Dawn, Tuesday, 19 February 1594. The herald left his fire, shivered up the stone steps and strode out onto the walls of Stirling Castle to announce the great news. For four years Scotland had waited for a child, a male heir, to secure the throne. At last the king ‘was blessed with a son of goodly hability and expectation’. Prince Henry Frederick Stuart’s birth gave ‘great comfort and matter of joy to the whole people’. The entire day cannonades ricocheted across the country. Scots of all ranks danced in the light of huge bonfires, as ‘if the people had been daft for mirth’.
The proud father, James VI, despatched messengers to his fellow princes of Christendom, the first sent galloping south to London. Henry was James’s gift to his childless cousin, the ageing, putative virgin queen, Elizabeth Tudor of England. The gift he expected in return was nothing less than her thrones and dominions. A prince had been born to embody the kingdoms united for the first time in history. If Elizabeth would name James VI of Scotland and the future King Henry IX her heirs, the boy could secure England’s as well as Scotland’s future.
Throughout the celebrations, Henry’s mother, Anne of Denmark,* (#ulink_80d50f85-1830-5754-8935-0cb992e13582) had remained lodged in the birthing chamber at Stirling Castle.
Landing at Leith four years earlier, fifteen-year-old Anne had made a sensational entrance: pale-skinned, reddish blonde hair, notably attractive, she rode through Edinburgh, her new husband at her side showing off his queen. Behind them the king’s oldest friends, the Mars of Stirling Castle, followed stony-faced. From the side of the highway, a flock of black-clad ministers of the Scottish Calvinist kirk eyed the daughter of Denmark – her ‘peach and parrot-coloured damask’ dress, her ‘fishboned skirts lined with wreaths of pillows round the hips’; their gaze travelling across her liveried servants, horses and silver coach – and shuddered.
In England these hard-liners – or ‘purer’ Protestants, as they saw themselves – were derided as ‘Puritans’. They called themselves the godly. Soon enough, Christian duty would compel them to open their pursed lips to censure Queen Anne and her circle for their erratic attendance at interminable sermons on sin and corruption. God made them denounce the young queen’s ‘lack of devotion to the Word and Sacrements’, and love of ‘waking and balling’ – staying up late to dance and gamble. She filled her evenings with music and elaborate court entertainments. One radical Calvinist griped that all royals were ‘the devil’s bairns’, so what could you expect? (James responded by exiling him.) The idea of Anne as utterly frivolous would prove remarkably enduring.
Anne knew herself more than equal to them. Her brother, Christian IV, ruled Denmark – the Jutland Peninsula and the islands around it. His influence extended over Norway and east across what is modern-day Sweden, Gotland and the Baltic island of Bornholm. He also ruled Iceland and Greenland. To the south, Denmark controlled the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Holstein lay within the borders of the Habsburg-dominated Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. So, one branch of the house of Oldenburg, Anne’s family, were also imperial princes, owing allegiance to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. This involved the Danes in German and imperial affairs. Off the north coast of Scotland itself, Denmark claimed the Orkneys and owned the Faroe Islands.
Anne grew up a royal princess of one of the largest Protestant political entities in Europe. Her grandfather, Christian III, converted Denmark to Lutheranism in 1536, but Denmark declined to adopt the ‘purer’ form of Protestantism – the Calvinism that Scotland came to profess under John Knox. Anne’s former suitor, Prince Maurice of Nassau, withdrew his offer on hearing that she would not convert to Calvinism in order to marry him.
Denmark’s location gave it control of the sea lanes connecting the Atlantic to the Baltic. The tolls it charged shipping to pass through the Danish Sound and trade with the Hanseatic ports, made its monarchy wealthy. When Christian IV finished modernising it, Denmark boasted ‘the largest and most efficient naval force in northern Europe’. His new nephew, Prince Henry, would grow up to cherish an equal passion for his navy.
The Danes spent as befitted Renaissance Protestant princes. Their riches and power financed cultural activity that put them at the forefront of the Renaissance. Christian’s huge architectural projects changed the face of Copenhagen, making it one of the loveliest cities in Europe. Anne and Christian’s mother, Sophie of Mecklenburg, maintained Tycho Brahe, the first astronomer in Europe to win international fame. Scholars flocked from across the Continent to meet him. Visitors to Brahe’s island home included James VI when he came to collect Anne, his betrothed, in October 1589. James passed with amazement and delight through rooms full of books, maps and spheres to help man uncover the laws of nature by which God moved the heavens. Laboratories bubbled and steamed with alchemical scientific experiments. Brahe set on his own printing press his groundbreaking book on astronomy, the foundation text for Kepler and Galileo.
Buildings and gardens, statuary and art works, developments in all branches of science, new political theory and historical awareness, were all part of that international lingua franca of the Renaissance. It was a language Anne grew up speaking as a native and passed on to all her children. Anne of Denmark was, in every way, a brilliant match for James VI of Scotland. A princess raised in this milieu; a woman who was bilingual in Danish and German; who had enough French to be able to write and converse with her new husband (who had no German); who then quickly learned Scots to a high level of idiomatic ease; who enjoyed and patronised a broad range of cultural activity, was unlikely to be the empty-headed fool of hard-line Calvinist censure.
In addition, the Scottish court soon discovered their queen possessed a strong will. Shortly after she arrived in Scotland in 1590, Anne dismissed James’s most important female attendant from her service, sixty-five-year-old Lady Annabella Murray, Dowager Countess of Mar. The king’s love and respect for ‘Lady Minnie’ ran deep. The Mars were hereditary keepers of Stirling Castle and, by tradition, the guardians of Scottish monarchs. King James had been fostered out to them when he was an infant and Lady Minnie was the only mother he knew. The king grew up with her son, Master John Erskine, whom he nicknamed Jocky o’ Sclaittis (Slates), in fond recollection of schooldays spent together.
Anne, though, discovered Lady Minnie gossiping with her friend, the wife of the Scottish chancellor: the devout old dowager regretted too loud that James had not married the more suitable Catherine, sister of French Huguenot leader, Henri of Navarre. Out both women went. In their place Queen Anne brought in her Danish friends and lively young Scots women, including the Ruthven sisters, Beatrix and Barbara, and Henrietta Stuart, Countess of Huntly. Henrietta was the Catholic wife of a Catholic earl – pure gall for the godly who believed the queen’s court was being peopled with the weak and the wicked: Lutherans and papists.
Four years later, in February 1594, Anne understood very clearly the huge political and dynastic significance of her son’s arrival. From the birthing chamber, a lady-in-waiting carried the baby to its royal nursery within the Prince’s Tower. They swaddled him and he latched onto the dugs of Margaret Mastertoun, his mistress nurse. When he gurned, Mistress Mastertoun handed Henry to one of his four rockers.
Good medical practice prescribed swaddling to keep Henry’s limbs straight, prevent rickets, and ensure strong growth. A few months later, liberated from the torment of swaddling bands, Henry started to stretch and move, but not crawl. Crawling suggested a prince too close to his animal nature, with its connotation of original and other sins. God condemned the serpent to crawl on his belly and eat dust all his days – not the crown prince. As soon as the infant could hold himself upright, Henry’s nursery maids strapped him into a wheeled and velvet-lined baby walker.
To keep him alive, four medical practitioners attended in rotation: Dr Martin, Gilbert Primrose the surgeon, Dr Gilbert Moncrieff, and Alexander Barclay, Henry’s apothecary. Infant mortality in the under twos ran at up to fifty per cent, giving a royal mother good reason to stay close and supervise. Queen Anne meant to preside over her son’s nursery, to oversee his infant japes and woes. By birth and upbringing a political animal, Anne also wanted to instil in Henry her religious, political and cultural values, not an enemy’s; and enemies, in the queen’s view, lived too close to her boy.
Anne had been horrified when James commanded her to leave her own palace and go to the Mar stronghold at Stirling to give birth. As soon as it was clear that the baby would live, the king followed Scottish royal custom. Within forty-eight hours of his safe delivery, Prince Henry was fostered out to the Earl of Mar and that ‘venerable and noble matron’ Lady Minnie. The king formally contracted Mar not to deliver the prince ‘out of your hands except [if] I command you with my own mouth, and being in such company as I myself shall like best of.
‘In case God call me at any time,’ James said, ‘that neither for the Queen nor Estates [Parliament’s] pleasure ye deliver him till he be eighteen years of age and that he command you himself.’ Henry would live out his entire infancy, childhood and youth at Stirling Castle. Anne would have to accept she would never govern Henry’s household. Her son would be raised by the high-born women of the Mar faction – the ladies Morton, Dunhope, Clackmannan, Abercairney, and the widow of Justice Clerk Cambuskynneth – and his male officers, James Ogilvie, Marshall and David Lennox, who served and ate at the ladies’ table. Over the years the boy’s intimacy with these families would build up his royal ‘affinity’. As king he would then have a powerful magnate group at his side, his most loyal supporters. None were the queen’s supporters.
Barely a fortnight after Henry’s birth, events appeared to vindicate James’s decision to isolate his son. On 5 March the Catholic earls of Bothwell, Huntly, Angus and Errol gathered in a plot to kidnap the boy. Once they had him, Huntly’s wife, Henrietta, a favourite of the queen, would reunite mother and son.
After uncovering the plan, James ordered the earls to be placed under house arrest. But in answer they came ‘against his Majesty at Holyroodhouse’. Elizabeth I instructed her cousin to put his ‘lewd Lords … to the horn as traitors’ – outlaw and hunt them down. James refused. High-handed, the English queen overrode him and sent a direct warning to the earls ‘in no case to seek the young Prince’. If the child was killed, the inheritance of England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales would be thrown into chaos, leaving the realm vulnerable to foreign claimants.
The General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church added to the complaints against James. Why did the king not simply crush those magnates seeking ‘the ruin of the state by foreign forces’? – meaning Spain and the pope. They warned of trouble arising from our ‘intestine troubles’ – the subversive activities of Bothwell, Huntly and their crew, but also Queen Anne. The French special envoy described the queen, in the wake of the removal of her son, as ‘deeply engaged in all civil factions … in Scotland in relation to the Catholics’.
Within weeks of Henry’s birth, the Scottish court split between allegiance to the king and the Mar clan, and allegiance to the queen and her faction. As much as it was an event to be celebrated, Henry’s birth threatened King James’s hard-won domestic peace. If the earls seized Henry, they could force the king to give Catholics more power in the government of Scotland and divide the nation between Presbyterian followers of the king and papist followers of the queen. It seemed as though history might repeat itself, as James was only too aware.
James’s memories of his own childhood determined that his son must stay at Stirling. In 1566, David Riccio, secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was stabbed to death in her presence – or as James put it, ‘while I was in my mother’s belly’. The king said that the in utero trauma scarred him with a ‘fearful nature’. James’s father, Lord Darnley, was suspected of conspiring with Protestant nobles, including lords Ruthven, Morton and Lindsay, in the killing; and Darnley himself was found strangled to death when James was just a few months old. Mary, Queen of Scots, then married the probable murderer of her son’s father.
James was kidnapped by a group of Protestant lords and taken to Stirling Castle, where he was crowned, aged thirteen months. He never saw his mother again. Scotland divided into two factions: the king’s men behind the infant James VI, the queen’s behind Mary, Queen of Scots. From this bitter civil war, the king’s men emerged triumphant. James’s mother, the focus of the unrest, was arrested and imprisoned. She escaped to England and was put back under lock and key by her cousin, Elizabeth, on whose mercy she threw herself. James remained with the Mars at Stirling, as civil unrest rumbled on. During one outbreak of fighting, the five-year-old king saw his beloved paternal grandfather carried past him, stabbed and dying, the old man’s blood streaming across Stirling Castle’s flagstones.
In 1587, James learnt that his mother had been beheaded on Elizabeth I’s orders. Seizing power in Scotland the moment he could, the highly intelligent and capable young king dedicated the first years of his reign to melding the factions and turbulent powers of his country into a workable whole. By the age of seventeen he had gained full control of his government.
Yet he still lived in constant fear of attack. Threats remained from within the king’s inner circle. In August 1582, the Earl of Mar had been involved in the Ruthven Raid against his former charge. Mar and his allies held James captive in an attempt to force the king to oust certain favourites, particularly the king’s French cousin Esmé Stuart. James was widely believed to be in love with Stuart, whom he had created 1st Duke of Lennox, and openly hugged and kissed him in public. Lennox was a Catholic – anathema to the devout Calvinist Mars. He converted to Protestantism but that did not convince the Scottish Calvinist elite. The Ruthven raiders ensured Lennox was exiled to France, where he died the following year. James was heartbroken.
The king and queen’s failure to have children for the first four years of their marriage had only heightened the speculation that James could not fulfil his duty to his country, to secure it through an heir. Anne reminded her husband that he was now entrusting their son to a faction that had held the king to ransom. James countered that some of the queen’s closest confidants had been at the heart of recent plots against him. In August 1600, when Henry was six, one resulted in the king’s near assassination. The king had the ringleaders, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, executed and demanded that Anne ‘thrust out of the house’ her ladies-in-waiting, Gowrie’s sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven.
Scotland’s unruly magnates were not merely power hungry. The political threats during Henry’s early childhood reflected the often violent religious conflicts dividing Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Religiously motivated wars and uprisings broke out continually throughout Christendom; assassinations and kidnappings were a common feature of those divisions. In 1584, the Calvinist ruler of the Dutch free states, William the Silent, was murdered by a Catholic fanatic. In France, the Protestant Henri of Navarre had just converted to Catholicism in order to unite France, win the throne, and try to bring to an end the religious wars and repeated attempts to assassinate him. In England, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, the late Walsingham, had regularly intercepted foreign plots against the queen.
For all these reasons, of custom and of threats to the monarchy and heir, James was adamant. Henry stayed at Stirling.
* (#ulink_73d7b48d-2050-5534-b978-355fa0e9f6d5) She called herself ‘Anna’ in Scotland, but was Queen Anne in England. James’s name for her was ‘Annie’ (sometimes ‘my own Annie’). To avoid confusion, I will refer to her as Anne.
TWO
Launching a European Prince (#ulink_89815e35-6088-581c-a928-bdef9c16cdd1)
On the issue of the prince’s christening his warring parents were as one. Henry was not the name of a Scottish king. England, though, had lived under eight Henrys to date. The last was James VI’s great-great-uncle, Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth. James’s father was also a Henry – Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Anne’s father was Frederick II. The boy would be christened Henry Frederick Stuart.
The king sent for his Royal Master of Works, William Schaw, to demolish the chapel royal at Stirling Castle and replace it with a new one worthy of Scotland’s first major Protestant royal christening. Schaw came up with a ‘scale model of Solomon’s temple’, and a little Renaissance gem. The interior reflected modern Renaissance Protestant thought and very likely the cultural dowry Anne had passed to the king. When James went to Denmark to bring Anne home, he witnessed an ebullience, sophistication and diversity of cultural and scientific activity he had never before experienced. He enjoyed Denmark and the company of his new Danish in-laws so much that he stayed for months longer than he needed to. This chapel royal seemed designed to reflect that happy period of his life.
The king asked Elizabeth I to stand godmother to Henry, bringing English queen and Scottish prince together in a quasi-parental relationship. James asked Henri IV of France to become Prince Henry’s godfather. For weeks no answer came – until Elizabeth heard that Henri IV had refused to send a representative. Elizabeth was only too aware of the politics of this gesture. Elizabeth originally intended to refuse to send a proxy. Now, she accepted James’s invitation. As a Protestant, Henri, the Huguenot King of Navarre, had been Elizabeth’s most powerful ally against the papal-backed Habsburg rulers of Spain and their cousins, the Holy Roman emperors. When Henri converted to Catholicism to unite France in July 1593, Elizabeth, still locked into war with Spain, felt bitterly betrayed. Henri was crowned king of all France the following February, the same month Henry was born, leaving Protestant England to face a newly united Catholic France twenty miles across the Channel. In the summer of 1594, therefore, Elizabeth wrote to Queen Anne, expressing ‘[our] extreme pleasure … [in] the birth of the young Prince[and] … the honourable invitation to assist at the baptism. We send the Earl of Sussex as our representative.’
The English queen’s acceptance irritated Henri IV, as it was meant to. France disliked any sign of an enlarged multiple British monarchy forming across the Channel, already recently strengthened by Anne’s Danish connections. After all, the family tree of a ruling dynasty was a European political network. Anne’s sister, Hedwig, was married to the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven men who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The Saxons were cousins of the free Dutch leader, Anne’s former suitor, Maurice of Nassau.
By July, Anne’s German relatives from Brunswick and Mecklenburg were beginning to arrive for the christening. Henry’s mother knitted her son into the top echelon of Protestant Europe’s rulers, while his father’s French blood connected him to major Catholic rulers. The Venetian ambassador reported to the Senate that ‘the Ambassadors of France, England, the States of Holland, and some German Princes … meet in Scotland at the baptism of the king’s son. The occasion is considered important on account of the understanding which may then be reached’ on how to humble the resurgent Catholic powers of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Fear of a coalition of Habsburg interests drove the abiding contemporary narrative of fear of predatory militant popery.
No less than three representatives arrived from the independent Dutch states for the christening, with twelve gentlemen and a train of thirty servants, reflecting the importance of the event. Embroiled in a prolonged war to free themselves from Spanish control, the Protestant Dutch came ‘to renew the ancient friendship between’ Scotland ‘and their own country, and to persuade’ King James to ‘enter into a general alliance against Spain’. They also brought gifts. Henry was given a ‘fair cupboard of plate’ (silver) and the promise of a hugely generous annuity of 500 crowns a year for the rest of his life.
As the event’s political stature grew, empty coffers forced James and Anne to address the tiresome issue of how to fund the grand baptism. The king turned to the Edinburgh money men, ‘to cause provision for wine and beer in great for the furnishing and entertaining’ of their guests. Thomas Foulis, goldsmith, lent the king £14,598 (Scots). James promised to repay it by November the following year. The royal couple already had a reputation for profligacy and Foulis beseeched his majesty for a more tangible guarantee than his sacred word. The king pawned ‘two drinking-pieces of gold, weighing in at fifteen pounds and five ounces of gold’. If he defaulted, then Thomas Acheson, master ‘cunyeor’ (coiner) was to ‘strike down and cunyie’ the cups into five-pound pieces of gold at the Cunzie House, the counting house, or royal mint. Foulis would take what he was owed and ‘the superplus, if any be, to make forthcome and deliver to his Majesty’s self’.
Others loaned and received their gold cup as security. A one-off parliamentary levy brought in £100,000 Scots, for ‘the incoming of the strangers to this honourable time of the baptism of the Prince, his Highness dearest son’. At the end of August and weeks overdue, Elizabeth’s proxy godparent, the Earl of Sussex, arrived, acting as if nothing could happen in Scotland until England appeared.
On the morning of 30 August 1594 the guests took their places in the chapel royal. At the east end stood the king’s chair of state, empty on a platform, cloth of gold spread all round it. Stuffed and gilded chairs received the fundaments of a series of leading foreign dignitaries, who took up their places beneath red velvet canopies adorned with the arms of each of their countries. The arms of England hung over a chair to the right of the throne, Denmark’s hung over the one to the left, and the arms of Scotland dominated the centre. Anne sat to one side with her ladies and friends.
The new pulpit dazzled with cloth of gold and yellow velvet. The black-clad Calvinist clergy sitting at a table below felt a little queasy. Their eyes found no relief from the idolatrous frippery, as they glanced from alabaster bas-reliefs to classical Greek friezes, and a huge fresco of the king in his pomp behind the altar. Calvinists insisted on the separate jurisdictions of God and state. James VI apparently did not. Rather the opposite.
Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.
A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.
The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.
At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.
Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.
Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.
Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.
The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.
Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.
Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble seafood, lay in heaps on the decks – ‘herrings, whitings, flukes, oysters, buckies, lampets, partans, lobsters, crabs, spout-fish, clams’. Sea maidens distributed the feast among the guests. From the galleries at the end of the room, the hautbois began a tune, joined by the viols, recorders, flutes, and then scores of choral voices all in deafening counterpoint to each other, singing in praise of king, queen and the prince of glorious expectation, Henry Frederick Stuart. As the music reached a crescendo, each of the thirty-six cannon unleashed a volley. The walls of the great hall thundered and echoed. The infant must have leapt from his skin.
From Stirling to St James’s Palace in London, Prince Henry would learn a humanist truism: the encounter with the ancients in whatever form you find them – in coin or word or image, in plays, masques, and pictures – will endow you with their qualities of rationality, eloquence, glory, wealth, virtue, and political wisdom. Europeans communicated through these symbolic languages. James and Anne used this language on Henry’s christening day to demonstrate the sophistication and merit of the dynasty sitting in wait for the death of Elizabeth Tudor.
Next morning the celebrations continued, as guests made their way in groups into Edinburgh. Others headed for the port of Leith and their ships. Ambassadors penned their accounts and examined the quality of the gifts of gold chains King James sent for their masters. Meanwhile a poem, ‘Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia’ (‘On the Birth of the Scoto-Britannic Prince’), by Andrew Melville, one of Scotland’s leading Presbyterian churchmen, reminded them of the true significance of Henry’s birth for Christendom:
Those who were divided by the Tweed …
The rule of Scoto-Britannic sovereignty now joins together,
United in law and within a Scoto-Britannic commonwealth,
And a Prince born of a Scoto-Britannic king
Calls them into a single Scoto-Britannic people.
To what great heights will Scoto-Britannic glory now rise
With no limits set by space and time?
By the time Elizabeth of England heard the word ‘Scoto-Britannic’ in this context for the fifth time in five lines, she was incandescent with rage. Chief minister, Robert Cecil, penned a letter on her behalf, pointing out that it verged on treason to say that James VI was ‘king of all Britain in possession’. James responded laconically that, ‘being descended as he was’ from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, ‘he could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of her Majesty’. He was Elizabeth’s closest blood male heir.
James connived in having the poem broadcast as widely as possible and authorised the Royal Printer, Robert Waldegrave, to publish it. It enjoyed wide circulation in Protestant circles across Europe and was reprinted several times in Amsterdam.
Once Henry heads the united ‘Scoto-Britannic people’, the poem thundered on, he will lead them into the cosmic conflict against the combined forces of papacy and Spain to ‘triumph over anointed Geryon’. In Roman mythology, Geryon is the triple-headed monster guarding the cattle in the Underworld. And here Geryon meant Spain. Melville addressed the infant:
Your foot tramples the triple diadem of the Roman Cerberus,
Dinning out of Hell sounds with thunders terrible
From the Capitoline Hill.
The pope was ‘the Roman Cerberus’, the attack dog guarding the gates of hell. Cerberus belonged to Geryon (Spain), who fattened him with titbits of Spanish New World wealth. Melville combined classical motifs and an Old Testament prophetic tone so beloved of godly radicals, alert for signs their God willed them to complete the religious revolution.
Lurid propaganda perhaps, yet fear of popery drenched Protestant Europe. ‘It crossed all social boundaries; as a solvent of political loyalties it had no rivals.’ The destabilising range and power of that fear was heightened by the biggest problem facing Protestant Europe right now – the revival of militant Catholicism.
Hitting back, Melville promoted Henry as Christendom’s saviour. Born in obscurity in Scotland, he would lead the Protestants of a united Europe against the sprawling gold- and silver-engorged powers of Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in a battle for the soul of the ‘nation of Europe’.
‘The holy zeal of Christians … in their struggle against the anti-Christ’ had found their future leader.
THREE
The Fight for Henry (#ulink_cd3685f1-6f86-5a88-804d-0d433da912cf)
‘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.
FOUR
Nursery to Schoolroom (#ulink_d1cc3fe3-26d3-5b01-9b00-a73ae1e61343)
‘THE KING’S GIFT’
By 1599 James had shooed ‘the skirts’ out of Prince Henry’s lodgings and ordered diverse men of ‘good sort to attend upon his person’ instead. It was time to prepare the boy to be king.
James produced a hands-on guide to kingcraft for this purpose. You must ‘study to know well [your] own craft … which is to rule [your] people’, he told his five-year-old son. The king had been writing and thinking about this for a long time. His Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’) came out that year in a tiny print-run of seven. Copies of ‘His Majesty’s instructions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince’ went to a privileged few: Prince Henry, the queen, Mar, and the man James appointed to be Henry’s tutor, Adam Newton.
Self-help guides in preparation to rule were an established genre. The most famous, still in use at this time, was Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani (‘The Education of a Christian Prince’, 1516). James VI’s book possessed a special allure, though, being written by a ruling personal monarch with vast experience of the subject.
He divided Basilikon Doron into ‘three books: the first instructing the prince on his duty towards God; the second in his duty when he should be king; and the third informing him how to behave himself in indifferent things, which were neither right nor wrong, but according as they were rightly or wrong used’. James’s writing voice enlivened the content. He could be intimate, colloquial, shrewd and humorous, but also deeply learned. When it came to publishing the book for a wider readership, in England in 1603, James revised it, allowing his subjects to see how the wise philosopher-king was nurturing the student prince for them.
God expected Henry to have a detailed knowledge of scripture, his father told him, in order to ‘contain your Church in their calling’. In James’s view, the clergy’s role was only to be custodians of his church, subservient to the king’s wishes. Henry must not let ministers overstep this mark, interfere in government, or try to limit the authority of the king. Henry should strive to cultivate a middle path in matters of faith: ‘Beware with both the extremities; as well as ye repress the vain Puritan, so [also] not to suffer proud Papall Bishops.’ The king had already experienced memorable run-ins with certain Calvinist ministers who treated the heavenly and worldly realms as distinct. In general, Henry should be ‘a loving nourish-father’ to his church, said James, echoing Isaiah 49:23, where ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers’.
A poet, philosopher and one of the most intelligent rulers in Christendom, James wanted his son to be as scholarly as him. In matters of secular government, Henry must ‘study well your own laws’, and recommended as further reading Xenophon and Caesar on statecraft. Henry’s tutors agreed, but had their own preferred exemplars; in time they would expose the prince to them, to the king’s displeasure.
James encouraged Henry to study mathematics, which would allow him to fulfil the prime function of monarchy: the management of national security and foreign policy – or, when and how to make war. For this, maths would improve his mastery of ‘the art military, in situations of Camps, ordering of battles, making fortifications, and the placing of batteries’. A good commander could calculate the range and elevation for firing artillery and placing of infantry, and understand engineering issues such as where to mine walls for maximum destruction.
Although Basilikon Doron was a practical manual on kingcraft, James touched on the theory of monarchy, as expanded upon in his recent long essay: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. The king nuanced the Calvinist theory of predestination when he told Henry there was nothing you could do to earn the right to rule; God’s will destined Henry to be king. Kings preceded the creation of all councils, including parliaments and church. Thus, on every count the king’s power was pre-eminent.
This was the voice of a personal and absolute monarch speaking: one in whom supreme power rested, without any necessity to work through parliaments or councils. King Henry IX will be a type of ‘little god’, said James, adapting Psalm 82:6: ‘I have said, ye are gods’, there to exercise imperial power. Nonetheless he must earn his subjects’ respect – as ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.
Lofty and earthy, this was a classic Jamesian image of kingship, congruent with his True Lawe of Free Monarchies (subtitled The reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his natural Subiectes), in which James made an apology for the theory of the divine right of kings and absolutism, the monarch’s ‘imperium’. Since they were quasi-divine beings, said James, kings could not be punished by subjects if they were weak or wicked.
In the last resort, a monarch was ‘free’ to do as he liked. Only God could tip monarchs off the ‘sliddriest’ bench into the abyss if they failed to rule well. A king’s duty was more onus than honour. His first duty was to be a good ruler. If Henry kept that in mind, he would avoid the loathing of God and men.
FIVE
Tutors and Mentors (#ulink_e2236cc9-b5fc-5c61-a08e-232a47adf79b)
‘STUDY TO RULE’
To shape this ‘little god’, James and Mar appointed the humanist scholar Adam Newton, an Edinburgh baker’s son, as principal tutor. Newton had been the only commoner to receive Basilikon Doron in 1599. Henry now sat in the schoolroom in the Prince’s Tower at Stirling, where his father and Mar had sat twenty-five years before, when they had been nurtured by a luminary of the Calvinist renaissance, the aged, godly and abusive George Buchanan. Buchanan might well have thrashed James senseless for proposing the unassailability of absolute monarchy.
Buchanan’s own political writings legitimised not merely resistance, but prescribed overthrow, even tyrannicide, for ungodly monarchs. Extreme Calvinism and the idea of a contractual, not absolute, monarchy often went hand in hand. James thought Buchanan was a ‘vain Puritan’, violently overstepping his calling, and he had feared him. The beatings the boy-king suffered were on occasions frenzied. Once James left the schoolroom and took control of government, he banished Buchanan and burned his books.
As well as tutoring the king, Buchanan had mentored the godly Melville, author of Prince Henry’s baptism poem. Henry’s newly appointed tutor, Adam Newton, had in turn been mentored by Melville. Newton was as demanding as the king’s tutors had been, but kind. Henry’s servants remembered that ‘next his parents, he was always most loving to his schoolmaster … notwithstanding that … Newton did always prefer his own duty and his Highness well-doing before the pleasing of his fancies’.
After receiving his degree, Newton had travelled to France to hear Huguenot philosophers debate the politics of rightful resistance to a king. The philosophy of contractual monarchy argued that a monarch must rule by the consent of the people, for the benefit of the whole commonwealth. If not, he should be resisted, perhaps removed. In exchange for good governance, the people submitted to his rule, and gave their loyalty, even to death. Honouring this implicit ‘contract’ sanctioned the ruler’s supreme power over their subjects and safeguarded their liberties. Newton went to teach this political vision at the prestigious St Maixent college in Poitou, north of La Rochelle. He believed in monarchy as a system of rule, but in a contractual not imperial version. Yet he served a king whose theories on the nature of monarchy allowed no resistance to the will of the ‘little god’ monarch, no matter how bad he was.
Henry’s guardian, the Earl of Mar, appeared to embrace some of Buchanan and Newton’s political vision. In one council meeting, Mar censured fellow nobles for saying they would ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’. ‘It was not well that they should not freely give their advice as Councillors,’ said Mar, ‘which the King well allowed of.’ Although James VI welcomed advice and debate, he never felt bound by any of it. The godly Mar envisaged king and well-born advisers ruling together in council, through the legislature, for the good of the realm as a whole. It was hard to imagine Newton or Mar working to shape a future Henry IX who believed his councillors should ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’.
From these first days in the schoolroom, Prince Henry was exposed to at least two potentially incompatible sets of ideas about who he was, what he should believe, his attitude to monarchy and how he should act.
Newton was not left alone to educate Henry. Walter Quin, an Irish poet, was sent for to assist him. Quin came with the blessing not only of King James of Scotland but also of the Earl of Essex over four hundred miles away in London. Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth I’s principal favourite, a significant power in the country and a military commander in Ireland. In his poems praising James VI, Walter Quin urged the king to let a man of great Renaissance virtue guide him onto the English throne. He surely had Essex in mind.
Essex meanwhile courted James and tried to persuade Elizabeth of the need to settle the succession in favour of the Scottish king and his progeny. However, Elizabeth would not listen to his counsel, to the earl’s fury. Essex firmly believed strong councillors secured an absolute monarch. These councillors must criticise when they saw their sovereign acting in error, against the good of the whole commonwealth.
As well as tutors of all kinds, Henry needed body servants. Mar brought in his first cousin, David Murray of Gorthly, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Murray’s high forehead and thick red hair and beard framed small bright eyes, giving him the look of an alert, friendly squirrel. A full-lipped mouth twitched upwards in a smile, all set in a long, rectangular face. A Renaissance soldier-poet, Murray was also a godly Calvinist, like most of the Mar clan. As overseer of the prince’s bodily needs, Murray slept on a truckle bed in Henry’s chamber. No man saw more of the boy.
James sent David Foulis to work with Murray and take charge of Henry’s wardrobe. Foulis had first come to James’s court as a pageboy. Later, he would be entrusted with taking the king’s communications to Elizabeth. Now, as ‘an ancient friend’ of the Essexians, he acted as go-between in the secret correspondence between James and Essex. His role allowed him easy access to intelligence on the prince and his household, which he then sold on to the English earl and his camp.
In the letters, Essex’s codename was ‘Plato’ and the king ‘Tacitus’. James might have wondered why he was Tacitus. The Roman historian was a source of great fascination for the Essexians and Henry Savile, who tutored Essex’s son, was a renowned translator of his writings. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Tacitus’s works analysed the virtues of Rome under the Republic, where power resided in a strong council of elected individuals representing the flower of the whole community, under an elected leader. In comparison, Tacitus had reservations about the imperial era in Rome under the rule of the Caesars: absolute rule by non-elected emperors, ‘free’ to be unaccountable for their actions, if they wanted. Referring to James VI as ‘Tacitus’ suggested the Essex group dreamt that Stuart rule would inaugurate a Tacitus-influenced English political system: strong council with virtuous rule, and the security of a hereditary monarchy.
Mar facilitated and encouraged regular communication between Prince Henry’s schoolroom and Essex House, the Earl of Essex’s power base near Westminster. In this arrangement Mar boasted of his own importance as guardian of the heir and future King of Scotland and England. Essex confided to Mar that his faction’s support for the Scottish king might possibly lead to arms, forcing Queen Elizabeth to name James as her successor in Parliament. The imprimatur of parliamentary legal consent mattered to Essex’s group. For them, only a strong buffer of constitutional safeguards, legitimised in Parliament, guaranteed the Crown’s authority. Issues such as the succession must then, Essex House concluded, include parliamentary participation. Although, Essex believed MPs had to be guided by Parliament’s steering group, the Privy Council, staffed mainly by politically and militarily active aristocrats.
The Cecil faction, Essex’s rivals for Elizabeth I’s favour, also wanted to serve a monarch exercising absolute or ‘imperial’ powers, but contained by the due process of law and counsel by virtuous men of honour. The chivalric soldier in Essex would go further, fatefully, than any of the Cecil group in an attempt to bring this to fruition. For now, Essex suggested Mar come to London for private discussions.
This, then, was the complex, multifaceted and intensely ideological environment in which Henry began his formal education at the age of four: writing the alphabet; reading classical masters of Latin grammar; studying the elements of rhetoric; learning French, and a bold italic hand to express himself in. If James thought his own character had been adversely affected by the brutality and instability of his childhood, then perhaps Henry’s more temperate personality – described as showing ‘sparks of piety, majesty, gravity … using a mild and gentle behaviour to all, chiefly to strangers’ – reflected the kinder setting in which the boy was being raised. He shared his classroom with some of Mar’s seven boys, and the earl’s five daughters lived close by. Henry grew up with plenty of other children, but not his siblings.
Henry’s handwriting was seen as reflecting the quality of the king in training, and the esteem he felt for the recipient. A scrawled letter, half illegible in a childish hand, found to be full of spelling mistakes when it could be deciphered at all, insulted the person and country receiving it. Henry sat in the Prince’s Tower and practised italic script over and over. Cicero said you could not think well if you did not have a solid grounding in morally edifying texts, and good handwriting. So Henry filled his notebooks with lines of rrrrrs and ssssses. He perfected phrases before they went into the final copy of a letter. Typical child, he covered pages of his exercise books with his signature, practising his joyful twirls and flourishes –, Henricus, Henricus, Henry, Henry – for illustrious addressees.
By the age of six, he was initiating exchanges with foreign states and rulers. The first official letter he wrote in 1600 was to the Dutch States General and Maurice of Nassau, commander of the Protestant Dutch troops in their rebellion against Catholic Spain. In it he thanked them for their good opinion of him in his tender years. Henry promised these ‘first fruits of his hand’ showed ‘his interest in serving them … hereafter in better offices’. The Dutch were already paying the 500 crown annuity promised at his baptism, though it went straight to the king’s coffers. Henry would repay their faith in him, by coming to serve in the field, and learn the military arts from Maurice himself.
The king appointed a court favourite Sir Richard Preston to school the prince in the military arts. Preston had fought for the Dutch with the Earl of Leicester and Leicester’s brother, the late Sir Philip Sidney, both English heroes of international Calvinism. Many of Prince Henry’s household, and the Essexians in London, shared a belief that Scottish Calvinism and the Church of England were parts of a greater body: the united European community of Protestants. With a touch of knights on a quest about them, such individuals felt honour-bound to defend any fellow Protestant state threatened by a Catholic power. Subsequently Preston, ‘a gentleman of great accomplishments in mind and body’, became a follower of Essex.
As Preston trained Henry, it was quickly observed how well the young prince ‘began to apply himself to, and to take pleasure in, active and manly exercises, learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, shoot with the bow and gun, toss the pike, &c., being instructed in the use of arms’. Preston tutored Henry in the honour code of ‘Protestant martial Virtue’ he espoused. By May 1599, Preston occupied a ‘“Praetorian” role’, as ‘captain over all the officers in the King’s Household’.
Veterans of Europe’s religious wars, men such as Preston, recounted poems and stories, and introduced the prince to the latest innovations on the modern battlefield. Henry learned, while tales of siege trenches, training and army camp life replayed in his and his followers’ imaginations. Soon ‘no music being so pleasant in his ears as the sounding of trumpet and the beating of drum, the roaring of the cannon, no sight so acceptable, as that of pieces, pistols, or any sort of Armour’, he wanted to be practising his martial skills all the time. The young prince attacked a plate of strawberries, holding up his two spoons. ‘The one I use as a rapier,’ he chattered, ‘and the other as a dagger.’ Looking on, the men around him proudly shared these anecdotes: signs their education was taking root.
Henry also grew up with a keen sense of the threats to his father’s kingdom. He saw the bodies of rebels rotting on gibbets as he trotted in and out of Stirling Castle. He knew how some of ‘the great ones’ in Scotland plotted to seize him and take him away. Sitting on his pony with his friends, watching the king and Mar hunt stags, someone asked Henry if he loved to hunt animals as much as his father.
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but I love another kind of hunting better.’
‘What manner of hunting?’ they asked.
‘Hunting of thieves and rebels with brave men and horses,’ and adding: ‘such thieves as I take shall be hanged, the great ones higher than the rest.’
By the age of seven, Henry was seeking to improve his essays by imitating classical masters, composing epistles in Latin in different styles. In the first instance Adam Newton, a master of style, would compose them and Henry transcribe them. But as he grew, Henry began to pick out anything that caught his eye. Newton gave him Cicero’s De Officiis. Henry annotated it, heavily, underlining unusual words and phrases and copying them out to help him remember. He numbered the stages of a Ciceronian argument so he could learn how to debate. He marked up phrases he liked – often those where Cicero advocated active participation in public life.
Henry took care when writing to address both his parents. In one letter he thanked them for various gifts, enquired after their health and assured them of his own excellent and busy life. He also sent his father some verses.
In reply the king chastised him: ‘Ye have rather written than dyted it’ (copied not composed it). As a father, James was easy and loving. As kingmaker, he was harder to please. ‘I confess I long to receive a letter from you that may be wholly yours,’ James continued, listening for that golden tone – son to father, as well as Prince Henry to the King’s Majesty. ‘Nothing will be impossible for you if you will only remember two rules,’ he told him. ‘Trust a little more to your own strength and away with childish bashfulness’, and ‘my oft repeated rule unto you, whatever ye are about, hoc age’, do not hang back – ‘Strike!’
Written exchanges between father and son could swing easily between the private and public, between the occult and the rational, even; between loving encouragement and the drawing of a moral lesson from every little thing. Henry told his father he thought a witch on trial for malefice was a fake, and that they should do something about it. James thanked his son for the ‘discovery of yon little counterfeit wench’, and further counselled: ‘You have often heard me say that most miracles nowadays prove but illusions, and ye may see by this how wary judges should be in trusting accusations without an exact trial … God bless you, my son, your loving father, James R[ex].’
Forced into the background of Henry’s life, by the turn of the century Anne of Denmark had converted to Catholicism, having most likely been introduced to the Roman religion by her close confidante, Henrietta, Countess of Huntly, the daughter of the Duke of Lennox. Anne kept up her campaign to get guardianship of her son and told Pope Clement that she would raise her children as Catholics – though how she would do that when they were firmly ensconced in three different Protestant households was hard to see. She inferred James VI might grant Catholics toleration from Protestant vows of obedience if he were to ascend the English throne. The king’s own pronouncements on the subject made many Catholics believe it also. The pope wrote to James offering a large sum in exchange for having Henry in Rome and educated in the Vatican. James refused.
As queen consort, Anne explained, she had to attend ‘the rites of heretics’ with the king and asked the pope’s absolution for doing so. She did not like it, but knew she must acquiesce, due ‘to the hostile times which we have to endure’. The queen’s ‘court Catholicism’ was a form of religious dissimulation widely practised in both England and Scotland at every level of society. Most crypto-Catholics were loyal to the Protestant crowns, including many of Queen Anne’s supporters.
Anne’s conversion and secret correspondence with Pope Clement did little to advance the cause of domestic harmony between Henry’s parents. ‘The King and Queen are in very evil ménage,’ a Scottish noble reported to Cecil, ‘and now she makes to take upon her more dealing than hitherto she hath done. At public table she said to him that he was advised to imprison her, but willed him to beware what he “mintit” at.’ When James responded that she must be mad to believe such a thing, Anne replied he should find that she ‘was neither mad nor beside herself if he “mintit” at that he intended’.
By early 1603 the English saw how ‘new troubles arise daily in Scotland, but the worst of all is the domestic dangers and heart breaking that the King finds in his own house’. What discords, they wondered, would king and queen bring to London if James VI succeeded to the English throne?
England was about to suffer discords of her own. Troubled by ‘choler and grief’, Elizabeth was in steep decline. Two years earlier, in February 1601, the Earl of Essex had risen against the queen to force her to name James as her successor in Parliament. The coup failed and he was executed. Since then Elizabeth had aged rapidly. Her Privy Council was now dominated by men more concerned to caretake than develop England’s influence in Europe as Christendom’s principal Protestant state.
Some of Queen Elizabeth’s militant Protestant servants saw the coming of the Calvinist Stuarts as a chance to change this. And perhaps soon.
For, on 24 March 1603, at Richmond Palace, Elizabeth I died, departing this life ‘mildly, like a lamb’.
PART TWO
England (#ulink_63cf701e-e7c0-599b-bfce-375bd015f42a)
1603–10
SIX
The Stuarts Inaugurate the New Age (#ulink_79408b69-3fce-5193-9c92-a41ac55cbc04)
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.
SEVEN
A Home for Henry and Elizabeth (#ulink_40a3065a-4dc0-536b-a5b5-4ddc7dba1adf)
OATLANDS
The family reunited with the king at Easton Neston, sixty-five miles north of London. By the time the Stuarts reached Windsor Castle at the end of June, their train numbered over five thousand, a scale unseen for decades. Lady Anne Clifford, aged thirteen, and her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, killed three horses in their dash to reach the royal family and get a toehold near them. There ‘was some squaring at first between our English and Scottish Lords, for lodging and other such petty quarrels; but all is passed over in peace’. All the Stuarts had to do to repay this fervid reception, was satisfy the expectations of everyone in England who mattered.
At Windsor, James created a host of Garter Knights, the highest order of chivalry, to celebrate his accession. One of the first was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, freed from the Tower where he had been imprisoned since 1601 for rising with his friend, the late Earl of Essex. For all the talk of continuity, this really was a new age – mixing English, Scots, European family and elites, and rehabilitating the disgraced Essexians.
Prince Henry kneeled with Lennox, the earls of Mar and Pembroke, a proxy for James’s brother-in-law the King of Denmark, and the German Duke of Württemberg. When the prince stood up again, the Garter insignia – a gold-enamelled Protestant St George, thrusting the sword of truth down the maw of the Catholic hellfire-breathing dragon – rested on his breast. Princess Elizabeth and Anne Clifford watched from behind a screen. Lady Anne overheard ‘the earls of Nottingham and Northampton highly commended [Henry] … for diverse his quick witty answers, Princely carriage, and reverend performing his obeisance at the altar’. The earls’ flattery was normal court discourse, but it showed the ease with which Henry was able to play his public role at such a young age. Six weeks after leaving Stirling, Prince Henry had walked onto a stage of oppressive magnificence – and one he could never leave.
The Stuarts’ increasingly grand and numerous progress towards the capital stalled at Windsor. Plague had broken out in London once more, forcing the king and queen to abandon plans for a great coronation. They slipped to Westminster to be crowned on 25 July, where their new subjects were forbidden from approaching them, and then rode away as fast as they could. The court and council followed in their wake, setting up temporary government wherever the king chose to stop.
James was obliged to establish a royal household for the prince and princess in a hurry. He was advised to choose Oatlands palace in Surrey, some ten miles upriver from Hampton Court, though in an alien kingdom he cannot have had any real idea where it was.
With the king unable to settle and establish his own court, Henry immediately took on some of his father’s public duties. At Oatlands he met with the Venetian Secretary, to receive the Republic’s congratulations on James I’s succession. ‘He is ceremonious beyond his years,’ Scaramelli wrote of the prince.
When the Secretary asked him how he filled his days in England, Henry opened up. ‘Through an interpreter he gave me a long discourse on his exercises, dancing, tennis, the chase’ – in lengthy, excited detail. ‘He then conducted me … to visit the Princess. I found her surrounded by her Court under a canopy. They both said they meant to learn Italian.’
Italian delegate and British royals charmed each other. King James’s tutor, Buchanan, had extolled the Venetian constitution, recommending it as a model to his followers. Buchanan’s student, Melville, would have passed the approval to his student, Adam Newton, who passed it to Prince Henry. Yet, Venice was a republic, and Henry the son and heir of a man proclaiming vocally and in print, the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy.
The plague outbreak was the worst for a generation. Travellers carried it from London out into the countryside. The Lord Chamberlain and the Lord High Steward moved the royal couple on, and on – with the Privy Council and the law courts still following behind.
Soon Oatlands fell victim to anxiety over the plague, forcing Henry and his train to follow his father’s court. Elizabeth was moved to new guardians, the Haringtons, parents of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, at Coombe Abbey in Northamptonshire. ‘I most kindly salute you,’ Elizabeth wrote to Henry when she was settled, ‘desiring to hear of your health, from whom, though I am now removed far away, none shall ever be nearer in affection than, your most loving sister, Elizabeth.’ Henry replied with a gift, a verbal message, but also ‘these few lines … I beseech you to accept, as witnesses of my tender dutiful affection … and that by our absence shall [not] be diminished but rather with our years shall be increased … I rest, your loving brother, Henrie’. The formal register of all royal communication masked, but could not prevent, a sense of the deep mutual affection coming through the rhetoric.
Elizabeth thanked him by return. I shall keep these ‘delightful memorials of your brotherly love in which assuredly (whatsoever else may fail) I will endeavour to equal you, esteeming that time happiest when I enjoyed your company … As nature has made us nearest in our love together, so accident might not separate us from living together.’ She always hoped they would live together again.
By December 1603 the number of plague cases each week was falling. On the 23rd, Robert Cecil wrote from Hampton Court, ‘where now the King, with the Queen and the Prince are safely arrived, thank God’.
James had confirmed Cecil in his position as Secretary of State, and raised him to the peerage as Baron Essendon. The king sought to balance Cecil’s power by bringing in two Howards, the earls of Northampton and Suffolk respectively. James was soon calling the three men his ‘trinity of knaves’. The two Howards benefited by the serendipity of being that object beloved by James, ‘an ancient pearl’ of the nobility, as well as having been consistently pro-Stuart before 1603. Northampton was renowned as a man of ‘subtle and fine wit, of good proportion, excellent in outward courtship, famous for secret insinuation and fortuning flatteries, and by reason of these qualities, became a fit man for the condition of these times’. He shared James’s eye for good-looking young men, and was a pedant and flatterer. A Catholic, his support for the Stuarts originated with James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne. Northampton reverenced the monarchy as divinely appointed, though how he managed to assume high office without swearing the Oath of Allegiance to James and abjuring the pope, was another matter. He must have fudged it somehow. The man wore many masks, and probably played with conviction the role of each one he donned. After years of disappointment, his moment now came with the accession of the Stuarts. Both courtier and councillor, Northampton pursued his own fortune, and government reform. Men like Northampton typified the kind of expert opinion a new ruler could use.
The court settled to enjoy their first British Christmas. Henry threw himself into it. At one moment during the dancing of ‘galliards and corantos … the young prince was tossed from hand to hand like a tennis ball’. The first dynastic marriage of the new era was celebrated – between Philip Herbert, brother of the Earl of Pembroke, and Lady Susan Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. Henry and his Danish uncle, the Duke of Holstein, ‘led the bride to church … The marriage dinner was kept in the Great Chamber, where the Prince, the Duke of Holstein and the great Lords and Ladies accompanied the bride.’ Henry sat next to her at the wedding feast, chatting amiably.
In addition, ‘we are to feast seven Ambassadors: Spain, France, Poland, Florence, and Savoy, besides masques, and much more’, Cecil told a friend, already exhausted by the stamina required to socialise and network at night, and work by day. The names were geopolitical. Some had been in England for months, waiting for the king to return and settle. Cecil longed for Christmas to end so he could get on with the business of government: ‘I protest I am not thoroughly reconciled, nor will not be till we meet at Parliament.’ Whoever was absent on that day, Cecil said, ‘I will protest they do it purposely because they would say, “No” to the Union.’
The plague had delayed the real work of beginning to understand the new sovereign. Having united the crowns, the king now sought the full union of England and Scotland.
The court had its first chance to see who King James really was when he summoned the moderate Calvinists of the English Church, the Puritan Calvinists, and the Roman Catholics to a conference at Hampton Court on 14 January 1604. There they would thrash out the shape of the Jacobean Church.
The Catholics arrived feeling sure the king would lift the penalties against the public profession and practice of their faith. As far as they understood it, James, through the late Earl of Essex, had agreed to remove anti-Catholic legislation, in exchange for Catholic support for James’s candidacy for the throne.
The Puritans arrived feeling even more confident. They anticipated the Calvinist king of a properly reformed Presbyterian Scotland would purify the Elizabethan Church of its papist residues. For them, salvation came only through predestination: God’s will. It could not be earned by attending church ceremonies and rituals of piety, or doing good deeds, as the idolatrous papists and moderates sitting opposite them believed. You got to heaven through faith alone, and constantly proving your faith in God’s goodness by your pious way of life. They knew the Church of England had stalled part way along the path to the international Protestantism of Calvin. God’s appointment of James of Scotland to the English throne was a sign that He knew it as well. James came to perfect the Reformation.
Henry entered the royal presence chamber and sat by his father, the lords of the Privy Council looking on. The king told the conference he did not come ‘to make innovations’ in religion ‘but to conform’. There was ‘one religion’ as ‘by the law maintained’, said James. This law required conformity to the Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth’s was a national church, generally Calvinist in doctrine but closer to Catholicism in church structure and the rules governing ceremony and forms of worship. The moderates were pleased. Henry knew his father was being consistent with the advice of Basilikon Doron, that the monarch should rule an inclusive church from the middle ground.
The godly Puritans heard, with horror, the king inform them that the English Church only needed upgrading, not further reformation. Investment in education and proper salaries for preachers would produce an intelligent, high-quality clergy. James insisted on retaining ceremonial conformity in the church. He wanted to hear no more extempore preaching odysseys from Puritan clergymen, less open-ended examinations of the Bible with speculative exegesis on its meanings – and no interfering in politics from the pulpit. No theorising would be tolerated about a contract theory of monarchy, or the rightful resistance to a failing monarch; or the explorations of the idea of separate realms and jurisdictions of church and state that had bedevilled his relations with the Scottish kirk.
Worse for the Puritans, James told them that the Roman Catholic Church was still ‘our Mother Church’. Everyone had to grow up and leave ‘mother’ at some point; James believed Catholics were immature. Prone rather to delusion than sedition, they had believed too many of the fairy tales the Mother Church told them in order to keep them obedient.
James foresaw the established church and English Catholics on shared ground ‘in the midst’ of a ‘general Christian union’ to match the new union of crowns. A lot of this was hard for even the predominantly moderate Puritan clergy to swallow. It was the king’s vision of the harmony all Christendom might aspire to, if they just followed his lead. Catholics need only renounce the error of maintaining the pope’s supremacy to the king. Given this, James saw no need to lift the penalties against them. The Catholic representatives left bitterly disappointed, feeling used and deceived.
As for the Puritans, the king denied they were a church; they were merely ‘novelists … a private sect lurking within the bowels of the nation’. Recalling the radical Scottish clergy, they were too arrogant ‘to suffer any superiority’ to their own authority, he said. Therefore, they could not ‘be suffered in any well-governed Commonwealth’. The hard-line Calvinists departed in furious frustration.
Puritans and Catholics should have read Basilikon Doron. It was now widely available after all. James believed the church needed containing not empowering.
If a Calvinist king could not meet Puritan needs, and their queen was a crypto-Catholic, the Puritans would have to look elsewhere. Given the godly character of Henry’s senior servants, men such as his tutor Adam Newton and the soldier-poet David Murray, some radical clergy began to orientate towards a prince still young enough to be moulded in their own image of him.
EIGHT
The Stuarts Enter London (#ulink_dcb7cc44-4fa7-5097-819d-ac4a52cac340)
‘WE ARE ALL PLAYERS’
Eleven months after Elizabeth I’s death, the Stuarts had not even made their official entry into London. As the plague petered out, the day was fixed for the Ides of March, to be followed by the state opening of the first Parliament.
Fields and wooded parks divided the two Londons – the cities of London and Westminster. The City of London resounded with the clatters and bangs of hundreds of ‘mechanicians … carpenters, joyners, carvers and other Artificers sweating at their chisels’, energy levels kept up by a ‘suck [on] the honey dew of Peace’. On 15 March the royal family emerged from the Tower, their palace in the City. Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker created the pageant, and Dekker’s company of actors was now Henry’s: the Prince’s Men. To celebrate, Dekker was collaborating with Middleton on a play for their ten-year-old master – The Honest Whore. Jonson, burly, with a square bruiser’s head, dismissed Dekker as ‘a dresser of plays about town’, but they put aside professional rivalries to produce a politicised vision of the new united kingdoms of Britain as an earthly paradise.
The royal procession left the Tower around midday. Henry rode in front of his father, men on foot and mounted nobles in between them, accompanied by the prince’s friends and leading household officers. The prince gazed about, ‘smiling, as overjoyed, to the people’s eternal comfort’. This was just how the late queen Elizabeth had comported herself among her people in the capital. Henry now turned and ‘saluted them with many a bend’. They shouted and cheered ‘fair Prince’ Henry to the skies, riding ‘in glory … as in the abridgement of some famous story’. To them, he was his father and forebears in miniature. In Henry, the poet Michael Drayton identified ‘every rare virtue of each king/Since Norman William’s happy conquering’.
A five-hour parade lay ahead of them. The king sat on his favourite white filly under a canopy of silk and cloth of gold, ‘glittering, as late washed in a golden rain’. Horses and men seemed made of gold. Courtiers great and small, household officers of all ranks, filed into place.
Shakespeare and his fellow actors, now the King’s Men, had received four yards of scarlet cloth to make up their livery for this day. They began to march. As the King’s Men they were also grooms of the chamber in ordinary. At court functions, they came in as ushers. The court resembled a huge three-decker ship, rocking, unsinkable. Courtiers clambered up, fell overboard, conspired against others, flattered and bantered and vied for favour. Hide-bound by ritual to honour each other to their faces, they hid, spied, informed, gave and broke their word just out of sight. It was rich, brutal and elegant. Shakespeare and his friends waited and watched. What a trove of royal material – a cacophony of information to feed into plays about kings, the nature of monarchy and empires.
From the Tower to Temple Bar (gate), labourers had gravelled the muddy, filth-strewn streets, and railed them to separate the crowds from the nobility. Along the road, the City’s Worshipful Companies waited in their liveries with their ‘streamers, ensigns and bannerets’ blowing. The conduits of Cornhill, Cheap and Fleet Street ran with claret. ‘Diverse music’ flowed from every arch, heightening the party atmosphere and making the wine ‘run faster and more merrily down into some bodies’ bellies’.
The Stuarts processed along Cheapside, lined with the gold-workers’ shops and jewellery merchants they would soon patronise. Near Fleet Street they passed the Mitre and Mermaid taverns. Close to the Inns of Court, these taverns attracted many of the artists, thinkers, radical lawyers, MPs and clerics who would soon be drawn to Henry’s circle, to eat and talk about their employers, their work, and plans for their country’s future, when their hopeful young master was called to the thrones.
Between the Tower and Westminster, the pageant passed under seven arches in all, some over seventy feet high. From the top of the second arch, Genius addressed Queen Anne, praising her birth and virtues, and ‘that fair shoot … your eldest joy, and top of all your store’, Henry. After solitary Gloriana, the English revelled in the myth of a royal family. After the Virgin Queen, pure and alone, came marriage, earth, offspring, fecundity and growth, security of succession. Richard Martin MP welcomed the king on behalf of Members of Parliament and lawyers. He praised the ‘fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient kings … your princely offspring’, deliberately tracing the Stuart descent from the Tudors.
When Henry reached the sixth arch by the conduit on Fleet Street, it looked like ‘some enchanted castle guarded by ten thousand harmless spirits’. It was a ‘tower of pleasure’. In the middle a huge globe rotated slowly, ‘filled with all the degrees and states that are in the land’. Astraea – one of the traditional symbols of Elizabeth I – sat on top, her garment thickly strewed with stars, a crown of stars on her head, a silver veil covering her eyes.
Near Astraea stood Envy, eating the heads off adders. Her ‘rank teeth the glittering poisons chew’ and swallowed, as blessings descended on Henry and his family. The City celebrated ‘the attractive wonder of man’s majesty’ after a loved but barren woman’s majesty: ‘Our globe is drawn in a right line again/And now appear new faces and new men.’
Yet, the presence of Envy and her sisters showed that the Stuarts had enemies. They had inherited Elizabeth’s wars, religious divisions and potential assassins, along with her thrones. The previous year, while the Stuarts rode from here to there, outrunning the plague, two Catholic conspiracies – the Main and Bye plots – had been unearthed, resulting in the first religiously and dynastically motivated executions and imprisonments of the new era. Sir Walter Ralegh had become entangled in one. He was sentenced to death, but sent to the Tower until James made up his mind whether to kill or free him.
In a private letter, Father Tesimond, a disenchanted Catholic priest, gloomily concluded it was Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the king’s ‘numerous progeny’, that really guaranteed this Protestant succession. Tesimond’s colleague, Father Garnet, a prominent English Jesuit, concurred. The king secured the present, ‘but the son that follows him’ was more important in the long run. Over the hill at thirty-eight – an average male life expectancy in 1600 – James might die any moment. However, James’s heir was in place and being educated for the job. The peaceful transition to the new dynasty made clear to the discontented: the cause of other claimants was a dead issue.
The final arch at Temple Bar marked the meeting point of the City and Westminster. Here the City of London handed the royals over to the court and politicians. Beneath the arch the god ‘Janus’ hung the arms of the new kingdom: a life-sized lion and unicorn rampant, made of brass, gold and silver gilding.* (#ulink_d5feb379-8e2e-5e45-9914-b18b4a6aea8d) The dedication read: to ‘Janus Quadrifrons’, word-play perhaps for James needing four faces (and eight eyes), each one to watch over one of the countries he ruled. This extraordinary union had come about peacefully, after centuries of conflict between the English and Scots. At Whitehall, James’s government had started to work on ending the war with Ireland, and the king and Cecil were negotiating to bring the Armada war to a close.
Towards the end of the day, the court retired to Whitehall to feast and celebrate the new British monarchy. Up the road in the City, the people fell to looting the allegorical world. They hauled down the arches as if it were a revolution, and carried off the chipped, gaudy paintwork, to raise fires and mend houses.
The Stuarts had at last taken possession of Elizabeth’s palaces and hunting lodges, furniture, books, gems, tapestries and jewels. James also inherited her policies and her factions in court, church and state – all competing for power and favour. He reappointed many of Elizabeth’s ministers and lower-ranking officers. He inherited expectations as well as wealth and status. But Henry was new. He had to be settled in a manner suitable for a role hardly anyone remembered – that of crown prince. The last had been Edward VI, born in 1537.* (#ulink_75cbdde6-72b0-5f15-836d-c3c63f3a5a35) Cecil now set to work, consulting old household books from Henry VIII’s time, to find the protocols for creating the crown prince’s household.
* (#ulink_0403c095-887d-5954-8faf-55456c80495c) The arms hang today in the Guildhall.
* (#ulink_e6a89f2f-c0c5-5cb8-8815-01c37e5b393f) Nottingham was born in 1536, his cousin Northampton in 1540; Edward VI inherited in 1547, so even men like these remembered nothing useful of Edward’s time as Prince of Wales.
NINE
Henry’s Anglo-Scottish Family (#ulink_acb45a7b-4fed-59d7-8a0b-81c9e7704bef)
NONSUCH
James set up his son’s first permanent English home at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Built by Henry VIII for his son, the future Edward VI, Henry VIII demanded it rival the greatest French Renaissance palaces: there would be none such anywhere in the world. Six hundred and ninety-five carved stucco-duro panels decorated the facades and inner court of the palace. They extended over 850 feet long, rising from sixteen to nearly sixty feet high in places. Gods and goddesses lolled and chased each other across the walls. Soldiers in classical uniforms battled for their lives, frozen for ever in their moment of triumph or death.
The panels overlooking the gardens featured depictions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Stucco-duro polished easily to a high marble-like sheen: Nonsuch dazzled in sunlight. Other scenes illustrated to the heir the duties of a Christian prince. One panel showed Henry VIII and Edward seated among gods and mythical heroes. Divinities watched over them, blessing the Tudor dynasty. All in all, it was the ‘single greatest work of artistic propaganda ever created in England’. James instinctively knew it was the right setting in which to nurture the first ever Prince of Wales of the united kingdoms. The king had given Nonsuch to the queen, as one of her royal palaces.
Topping the massed bulk of the octagonal towers at each corner of the southern facade, enormous white stone lions bore Prince Henry’s standard in their paws. Mouths frozen in a snarl, their fierce eyes followed Henry and his friends as they hunted, practised feats of arms on foot and horseback, readying themselves to defend, attack, defeat, rule. The boys chased each other through gardens laid out by the keeper of Nonsuch, Lord Lumley, around fountains where water squirted out of the goddess Diana’s nipples, and past tall marble obelisks with black onyx falcons perched on top. Amongst all the treasures, Lumley’s most prized possessions were his books. He had built up the greatest private library in England and now offered an unparalleled collection of teaching materials to Henry’s circle.
The king confirmed Adam Newton in his post as Henry’s principal tutor, and Walter Quin to assist. Newton prevailed on the prince to ask the king to give the vacant, lucrative post of the deanery of Durham to him. (Newton was establishing himself at court by marrying into the Puckerings, an important Elizabethan political family.) Henry did so, writing to his father, the prince said, not because I think ‘your Majesty is unmindful of the promise he made at Hampton Court’ that the Dean’s position would go to Newton in due time, but because I want to ‘show the desire I have to do good to my master’. Henry’s bookish father wanted his son to esteem his tutor. Henry’s letter jogged his father’s memory. Newton got the post of Dean of Durham.
In his domestic sphere, David Foulis retained his place as cofferer in charge of Henry’s wardrobe. David Murray became the prince’s Gentleman of the Purse, and remained in the bedchamber as Groom of the Stool. The affectionate, constant presence of men such as Newton, Foulis and Murray helped give Henry’s new life in England stability. His parents came and went, but these men abided continuously, and seemed to love and honour each other.
They bickered like a family too. Newton and Murray ‘did give [the prince] liberty of jesting pleasantly with’ them, initiating banter. Playing shuffleboard, Newton saw Henry swapping his coins to see if a different one gave him an edge. He told Henry he ‘did ill to change them so oft’. Taking a coin in hand, he told Henry to watch. Newton would ‘play well enough without changing’. He shoved his penny – and lost.
‘Well thrown master,’ Henry crowed.
Newton pushed himself back from the table. He ‘would not strive with a Prince at shuffleboard’, he said.
‘You Gown men,’ Henry countered, ‘should be best at such exercises, being not meet for those that are more stirring’ – such as archery, or artillery practice, or preparing to lead men into war.
‘Yes,’ Newton said, ‘I am. Fit for whipping of boys.’
‘You need not vaunt of that which a ploughman … can do better than you,’ Henry laughed.
‘Yet can I do more,’ Newton eyed him. ‘I can govern foolish children.’
Henry looked up ‘smiling’, and acknowledged that a man ‘had need be a wise man that would do that’.
The king and Privy Council extended Henry’s ‘Scottish family’ to reflect the prince’s enlarged British identity. James appointed an Englishman, Sir Thomas Chaloner, to replace the Earl of Mar and run Henry’s household. Determined to maintain her connection with Henry, the queen gave Nonsuch and all her private estates over to Chaloner’s management. As governor, after the king and council, Chaloner had the last word on who came and went and lived at Nonsuch. Before 1603, Cecil had trusted him to carry Elizabeth’s pension to James in Scotland, and Cecil’s own secret correspondence about the succession. Awarding Chaloner this high office, the king expressed his confidence in him, rewarding Sir Thomas for those long, perilous journeys.
Chaloner had grown up with Cecil at the intellectual, godly college set up by Cecil’s father, the great statesman Lord Burghley. Cecil knew what a great house should look like, and how it should run. Chaloner shared the contemporary obsession with alchemy and chemistry; he maintained a good friendship with the magus John Dee, and corresponded with the Dutch inventor, Cornelius Drebbel, encouraging him to come to England and have Henry patronise him. Chaloner’s scientific endeavours would lead to the discovery of alum on his estate in Yorkshire. He obtained a licence to exploit the mineral, which was widely used in shaving, to treat sores and halitosis, to make glues, and in the purification of water.
Chaloner married Elizabeth, daughter of the late William Fleetwood, Queen Elizabeth’s Recorder of London. Chaloner’s father-in-law had been a Puritan-inclined MP. A committed royalist, Fleetwood nevertheless upheld the place of Parliament against Crown encroachments on its powers, citing Magna Carta to prove his case. Like his Fleetwood in-laws, Chaloner inclined to a more godly Protestantism than James would have liked. He understood the chance fortune had just handed the Chaloners, to build up a base among those jockeying for a place around the heir. He persuaded the king and Cecil to appoint his brother-in-law, Thomas Fleetwood, into Henry’s service as the prince’s solicitor. He encouraged Henry’s cofferer, David Foulis to marry Cordelia, another Fleetwood daughter.
Before he entered royal service, Chaloner had fought in France under Leicester, the ‘Captain-General of the Puritans’. He had tutored Leicester’s illegitimate son, Robert Dudley, and worked as an agent in France and Italy for the 2nd Earl of Essex. Chaloner brought all this experience to his new job.
Something about the prince’s first British entourage recalled the heyday of Elizabethan Protestant internationalism in the 1580s and ’90s, under Leicester, Sidney and Essex, with the group’s ‘militarised ideal of active citizenship … which emphasised the rewards of honour through virtuous service’ to the monarch and commonwealth. It seemed that Henry would soon be drinking in the heady brew of an honour cult of old blood, ceremony and magnificence, blended with humanism, Puritan-leaning religious and political values, and a pronounced martial bent. This was always likely given the character of Henry’s Scottish household, and the Scots who had accompanied him to England.
Time would tell. In the first instance though, Nonsuch was a boys’ home. The prince needed a clutch of new friends to grow up with, the best advancing him to help him rule in God’s good time. On his way south from Scotland, James had embraced Robert Devereux, son of the executed Essex, greeting him as ‘the eternal companion of our son’, and restoring the Essex title to him. The young earl had carried James’s sword during the official entry to London and was now sent to live with Henry. The king confirmed Cecil’s son, William Cecil’s, place here. Newton’s new young brother-in-law, Thomas Puckering, also gained admission.
Two of Chaloner’s five boys, William and Edward, stayed. Two other Chaloners, Thomas and James, came and went continually, joining in the hunts, martial exercises, the equestrian training and dancing. Lord Treasurer Dorset’s grandson, Thomas Glenham, came with Dorset’s nephew, Edward Sackville, arriving shortly after. Thomas Wenman appeared with his luggage trunks and tutor (Wenman’s uncle, Sir George Fermor, a veteran of Cádiz 1596, had hosted the king a few months earlier at Easton Neston). The aristocratic and the more favoured boys were educated with Henry. Others became retainers, halfway between servant and friend.
Queen Anne managed to insert into the prince’s household the relatives of her favourite ladies-in-waiting, Lucy Bedford and Penelope Rich. Lady Rich was the 3rd Earl of Essex’s aunt. Lucy Bedford’s brother, John Harington, son of Princess Elizabeth’s guardians, was sent to Henry. Against the king’s wishes, the queen appointed the nephew and heir of the late Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Sidney, to be her Lord High Chamberlain and Surveyor General. Robert Sidney’s late brother was the poet and Puritan soldier, Sir Philip Sidney. Robert Sidney’s son came to live with Henry. Sidney and young Essex were cousins by marriage. (The 2nd Earl of Essex had married Philip Sidney’s widow.) Though Henry’s new family contained many different surnames, a dense mesh of blood, religion, and politics connected them beneath the skin.
Through these boys, Anne acquired a constant stream of news and contact with her son when she desired it. Since Henry’s household communicated continually with the king, Anne could also tap into the real heart of power: her husband’s court at Whitehall. Henry went ‘often to visit’ his mother, to ‘show his humble and loving duty towards Her Majesty’. Sometimes the queen might be busy and not admit him: he would wait ‘a long time, in vain’, before returning disappointed to his palace.
At other times, mother and son spent weeks at a time in each other’s company. In the summer of 1605, Anne and Henry stopped at Oxford on a summer progress in order to meet with the king and enrol Henry at Magdalen College. Anne and Henry watched plays and listened to music together. At the university Henry attended debates on a bewildering range of subjects, including: ‘Whether saints and angels know the thoughts of the heart’; and the political problem of ‘Whether a stranger and enemy, being detained in a hostile port by adverse winds, contrary to what had been before stipulated in a truce, may be justly killed by the inhabitants of that place’. Students and academics debated ‘Whether gold can be made by art?’ – touching on the alchemical question. Another day, the psychologically curious issue of ‘whether the imagination can produce real effects’ was discussed in its relationship to mind over matter, fantasies, and questions about the real power of magic, charms, spells, and dreams.
In the early days of Henry’s new life in England, a painting appeared that captured its general ambience. It is a hunting picture. Henry stands centre canvas, a friend kneels by him, with the prince caught in the act of drawing his sword from his scabbard. A stag lies by Henry’s feet, neck exposed for the crisis of the kill. The artist, Robert Peake, made two versions. It was the first ever painting to give a glimpse of a royal in action. In one version, John Harington looks up at Henry. In the other, it is young Essex. The king was devoted to the hunt, so he would have liked the ostensible subject. Yet, the boys’ clothes are the green-and-white livery colours of the Tudors, not the red-and-white of the Stuarts. In the centre of the painting, Henry’s St George Garter badge dangles at his chest, capturing the prince as a Protestant knight, prepared to kill for his cause. By contrast, his father’s portraits showed a regal, peaceful sovereign. James never liked to be immortalised in arms.
Many of Henry’s new friends arrived with their own private tutors. Dr Gurrey accompanied Essex; James Cleland, Scotsman and friend of Adam Newton, taught John Harington; Mr Bird tutored young Sidney, until Sidney stabbed his tutor, and both had to leave – the boy’s father apologising profusely to the king and queen. Thomas Wenman’s tutor was the poet William Basse. Huguenot immigrant, friend of Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont, Basse collaborated with Shakespeare. They came across each other during their attendance on prince and king, as well as in the greater world outside palace walls.
In the schoolroom, Chaloner employed Peter Bales to give Henry a neat hand. Bales taught Henry for nearly two years before he dared petition Cecil for remuneration. A former Essexian, his unpaid service worked his passage back into favour. The Earl of Rutland introduced Robert Dallington as another unpaid tutor, who might be given a wage if he made himself useful for long enough. A brilliant scholar, Dallington had been imprisoned by Elizabeth I, along with Rutland and Bales, in 1601 when they rose with Essex. These floating tutors, along with various senior aristocrats, would be able to educate Henry’s whole person about his role and his history.
From the other side of the religious divide, the crypto-Catholic Howards, led by the earls of Suffolk and Northampton, generated a connection to Nonsuch through boys like Rowland Cotton, now admitted to serve Henry. Rowland’s father, Sir Robert Cotton, MP and the most eminent antiquary in England, was Northampton’s friend and client.
The other high-placed Howard, Lord High Admiral Nottingham, had no children to place around Henry. Instead he commissioned a model ship, twenty-five feet long, as a gift. He told shipwright Phineas Pett to sail it up to Limehouse and anchor it ‘right against the King’s lodgings’. After lunch on Thursday, 22 March 1604, Nottingham led Henry and his friends on board. Pett ordered the little ship to weigh anchor, ‘under both topsails and foresail’, and they sailed downriver as far as St Paul’s Wharf.
It was love at first sight. The speed and power of a ship moving under him, and the freedom out on the water, thrilled Henry. He took a great silver bowl of wine in his hands, named his first ship the Disdain (how fighting men and ships reacted to danger) and drank to her. All his young friends drank after him. Then Henry walked over to the side of the vessel, leaned out and poured the rest of the wine into the Thames as a libation, tossing the bowl in after it.
Northampton lavished flattery on Henry, as he did the king. The prince was a Renaissance prodigy, he said, matching ‘Mercury with Diana … study with exercise’.
TEN
Henry’s Day (#ulink_3c96c43d-e3d9-5154-b7ab-2d001b2f091f)
‘THE EDUCATION OF A CHRISTIAN PRINCE’
At Nonsuch, Adam Newton and his team of tutors continued the curriculum begun at Stirling, scholars and schoolboys sitting below Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus Writing. Henry’s Latin grammar book contained the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Erasmus’s Christiani hominis institutum (‘A Christian man’s practice’). Anthologies of the masters of grammar and rhetoric included Plautus, Cicero, Sallust, Horace, Demosthenes, Seneca, Virgil, and Tacitus. By the age of ten, Henry could tell his father he had been reading ‘Terence’s Hecyra, the third book of Phaedrus’ Fables and two books of the selected Epistles of Cicero’. Unlike James, Henry did not seem to have read Greek texts in the original, but in Latin translations. Since every royal male had to be articulate and literate in Latin, it was an easier way to tackle Greek writers.
Henry thanked his mother in French for a copy of Guy de Faur’s Quatrains, poems on how to wield power and do so morally. Based on a Latin original, Henry’s poet, Sylvester, translated them from French into English. Henry translated them back into Latin, saying they ‘deserved to be imprinted in the minds of men’. Perfectly pitched for the black-and-white morality of a ten-year-old mind, the poems clearly impressed him. A ‘good part’ of them, he told the king, was ‘most powerfully written for the education of princes’. Maybe no scholar, he was no dunce.
Henry, however, never showed his father’s great and deep love of learning. One of James’s tutors, Peter Young, said James at about this age cleansed his thoughts first thing in the morning, by asking God’s blessing on his studies. Then, before anything to eat and drink, he read the Bible in Greek, or Isocrates, and learned Greek grammar. After breakfast he turned to Latin: Livy, Justin, Cicero, or Scottish histories. After dinner, he practised compositions. The remainder of the afternoon he gave over to arithmetic, cosmography (which included geography and astronomy), dialectics and rhetoric. In adolescence, the king knew by heart much of the Bible and reams of classical verse. As James I he was one of the few contemporary writers of European renown, thanks to books such as Basilikon Doron, recognised as a major contribution to the hot European debate over the nature and root of sovereignty.
At Nonsuch, after morning prayers, Henry studied for only about two hours at his desk, before leading his friends outdoors. He passed as much of the day as he could ‘hawking, hunting, running at the ring, leaping, riding of great horses, dancing, fencing, tossing of the pike, etc. In all which he did so far excel as was fitting for so great a Prince … he would many times tire all his followers before he himself would be weary.’ The Venetian ambassador thought the prince attended to his books ‘chiefly under his father’s spur, not of his own desire’. One day, Henry and his friends used up so many cannon balls and gunpowder they were told to stop. That practical part of his education the prince would have worked at ceaselessly, but the household could not afford it.
If Henry and his father did not share academic interests, outside the schoolroom they attended sermons, discussing them afterwards, shared official duties and hunted together. ‘Since he was but two years old,’ the prince ‘knew and respected the King his father above all others … Yea, his affection to his Majesty did grow with his age,’ wrote one of the king’s court. When James fell from his horse, Henry was said to have thrown himself off his pony and rushed to him in distress.
Visiting Henry in Lumley’s fabulous library, James asked his son what was his favourite verse, from any book he was studying? Unhesitating, Henry took the Aeneid, found his page, read the Latin, and then translated: ‘We had a king, Aeneas called, a juster was there none/In virtue, or in feats of war, or arms, could match him one.’ Aeneas was one of the legendary founders of Rome. Had James come to found a new Rome in London? Henry complimented his father with qualities the boy deemed attractive – piety, justice, martial excellence, civic responsibility and valour in arms to build the new Rome.
Adam Newton, curious to know how Henry felt and saw the world, asked him to choose a sentence he really liked out of the hundreds the tutor gathered as teaching materials. Henry flipped through until he found Silius Italicus: ‘Renown is a furtherer of an honest mind’. Elsewhere translated as ‘Glory is the torch of the upright mind’, Henry adopted it as one of his mottoes. It could not be more different from the king’s: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’.
‘Thou doest thy father’s forces lead,/and art the hand, while he is the head,’ David Murray’s poet friend, Sir William Alexander, concluded after seeing Henry. You shall ‘shine in valour as the morning star’. It filled old soldiers like Alexander with joy ‘to see thee young, yet manage so thine arms’. Whatever Northampton might have claimed about the prince matching ‘study with exercise’, others saw that Henry acted as if he honed his virtue more by feats of arms than philosophy.
Although he did ‘have Minerva’s mind’ as well as ‘Bellona’s hands’, Henry more often honoured the goddess of war than intellect.
Henry’s expanded role in public life required his household to remove to London every so often, leading James to give over St James’s Palace to his son. The king ordered new stables and barns to be built for Henry’s official Westminster residence. No official residence was available for Prince Charles when he arrived in the summer of 1604, and Henry gave up his lodgings at Whitehall for his delicate young brother, though Charles often came to stay with Henry for long periods. The king did his best to give his children what he had missed: a secure family life.
‘Sweet, sweet brother, I thank you for your letter … I will send my pistols by Mr Newton,’ Charles told Henry when they were apart. ‘I will give anything that I have to you: both my horse, and my books, and my pieces, and my cross bows, or anything that you would have. Good brother, love me, and I shall ever love and serve you, Your loving brother to be commanded, York.’ He seemed to adore his brother. Their tone swung from formality – when Charles was ‘York’ – to the emotional declaration: ‘I will give anything I have to you’, only, ‘Good brother, love me’. Henry must have loved both his siblings to elicit this kind of response.
The king encouraged his sons to practise dancing, ‘though they whistle and sing to each other for music’ when they could not get hold of a musician. The children sometimes fooled around. Their dancing master, frustrated by the failure of some of Henry’s friends to keep time as he taught them, said ‘they would not prove good soldiers, unless they kept always true order and measure’. Dancing connected Henry to the martial arts.
‘What then must they do,’ asked Henry, ‘when they pass through a swift-running water?’ and then have to find their own feet, and keep their own ‘measure’, not merely march in time.
Still, the old man kept telling them off for carelessness.
‘Remember, I pray you,’ Henry appealed to him, ‘that your self was once a boy.’
The prince’s preference for a life of action over learning and contemplation irritated James. On occasions, the king ‘admonished and set down’ Henry for his lacklustre academic performance and resorted to ‘other demonstrations of fatherly severity’ as well. Maybe he smacked him. James threatened that if Henry did not do better, as a Christian prince must, he would leave the throne to Charles, ‘who was far quicker at learning and studied more earnestly’. When Newton berated his precious charge, Henry responded that he had had enough improving for one day. ‘I know what becomes a Prince!’ he said. ‘It is not necessary for me to be a Professor,’ like you, ‘but a soldier and a man of the world. If my brother is as learned as they say, then we’ll make him Archbishop of Canterbury.’
Sibling rivalry never seemed to enter his relationship with Elizabeth. When she stayed nearby, they rode together for hours every other day. After they parted again, she could not resist trying to maintain the intimacy. ‘My letters follow you everywhere. I hope you find them as agreeable as they are frequent,’ she sighed wryly. ‘I know they don’t contain any important subject matter that could make them recommended.’ Henry reassured his sister: ‘Your kind love and earnest desire that we may be together. I … assure you that, as my affection is most tender unto you, so there is nothing I wish more than that we may be in one company … But I fear there be other considerations which make the King’s majesty to think otherwise, to whose well seeming we must submit ourselves.’ Security, duty and ritual placed strict constraints on his freedom.
If the scope and intensity of his academic education fell short of his father’s expectations and an illustrious Tudor past, Henry’s piety seemed of a piece with some of his forebears. His household listened to sermons several times a week. All members of the royal family attended sermons, arguing afterwards about how it lighted them on the road to salvation, the meaning of life. But the prince was thought to need his own chaplains, to encourage him to work for the salvation of his soul.
The king asked James Montagu, dean of the chapel royal, for the names of men who might be suitable to serve Henry. An active, evangelical Calvinist, Montagu was first cousin to John Harington and Lucy Bedford and former first master of the Puritan seminary at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Montagu’s personal beliefs and family connections made the godly hope he would place more ‘evangelical’ than moderate ‘preachers around Prince Henry’ at St James’s.
Cambridge-educated Puritan, Henry Burton, petitioned to serve the prince and was given a position of the highest importance, as Clerk of the Closet, the prince’s principal chaplain and keeper of his conscience. Burton sought royal service in the belief that God had chosen the Stuarts to continue the great work of perfecting the true Calvinist faith on earth in England. He wrote a tract for Henry on the Antichrist, naturally identifying it as the pope. Henry kept the work on his shelf. Essex’s tutor, Dr Gurrey, persuaded Joseph Hall, a renowned Puritan ‘neo-Stoic’ – a philosophy which attempted to combine Christianity and Stoicism – to preach to Henry’s circle. Henry liked him and asked him to preach again.
Hugh Broughton joined the household as tutor to young Rowland Cotton. Renowned for his immense Hebrew scholarship, Broughton devoted three works of divinity to Henry. Yet, in spite of his scholarly brilliance, James had not invited him to help create the new version of the Bible the king had commissioned, since Broughton was known to be a cleric of pronounced Puritan sympathies. Broughton preached an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer before Henry. It earned him a place as another of his preachers.
As at Stirling, Henry’s Calvinist clergy encouraged him to review his conscience daily in private acts of self-examination, comparing how his thoughts and actions lived up to the model of simplicity, plainness and purity Christ offered in the Bible. Not easy for a royal Stuart, it was the kind of intense self-examination Shakespeare had put Hamlet through.
The moderate clergy of the Church of England also recommended the private measuring up of one’s behaviour against Christ’s teaching; but they advocated a ceremony- and ritual-based religious practice as well. Bishops in ornate vestments presided over the regular ritual consumption of the body and blood of Christ in host and wine. Sublime religious music accompanied the great mythic drama of this holy communion. The whole royal family joined with the established church to celebrate feast days such as the Accession Day of the monarch, Armada Day, the Epiphany, Christmas and Easter. Nothing galled the Puritans more than the official church’s contented drift towards replacing the veneration of Catholic symbols with royalist and nationalist ones.
A jingle began to circulate. If:
Henry the 8 pulled down abbeys and cells,
Henry the 9 will pull down Bishops and bells.
Treasonous in its inference of the death of King James, this piece of Puritan doggerel anticipated the rule of Henry IX to be very different to that envisioned by his parents – closer perhaps to the brutal iconoclast phase of Henry VIII’s reign. How far this reflected who Henry really was, was impossible to see at his young age. He absorbed input from all sides.
For now, the daily life of Henry’s household established it as an extension of the king’s court, illustrating its policies, exploring its possibilities. But beyond that, Nonsuch already contained the potential to be what a Prince of Wales’s household so often is – an alternative source of power.
To give Henry some experience in the business of war and foreign affairs – and after his small ship proved such a hit – James assigned apartments at Nonsuch to the Earl of Nottingham. Lord High Admiral from 1585 to 1619, including the whole period of the Spanish Armada war, Nottingham possessed a breadth of court, government and military experience few others could boast. In 1604 he had just returned from leading a huge delegation to Madrid to negotiate a peace treaty to end the war. Nottingham was available to mentor Henry, informally, about diplomacy, his future navy, or anything else that came up touching on the business of being a king.
The navy was a private fleet, maintained by the monarch out of his own income. After taking ownership of the Disdain, Henry questioned Nottingham exhaustively on the building and equipping of ships; the comparison of the royal navy with the great fleets of the privateers; how he would fight and win sea battles like the Cádiz raid and the Armada; how he would avoid defeat; how the navy could be used to defend merchant shipping against attack; how he might mount expeditions to discover new lands and claim them for England and himself, and enrich his people.
Nottingham wrote that the prince and his friends went ‘a fishing at my house in Carshalton’, near Nonsuch, and also ‘hunted afterwards in Beddington Park’. But the Lord High Admiral soon begged for release from his service, ‘weary with waiting on the Prince’. He had run his long race at court, and perhaps wanted to step back a bit.
Henry soon wanted his own shipwright, and swore Phineas Pett, builder of the Disdain, into his service. Corrupt in his handling of naval supplies, like so many royal naval personnel, few thought that Pett would stop his extensive appropriation of building materials for his private use now he entered royal service, especially now he had far greater scope to abuse his privileges.
In the summer of 1604, Henry sailed downriver from Nonsuch for the most important European event of the year: the signing of the Treaty of London. On 28 August, England and Spain finally agreed peace terms after nearly two decades of warfare. The Spanish had tried to make it a condition of the peace that James withdrew his support from the rebel Dutch. James refused. England still saw itself as a mainstay in European Protestantism.
The Spanish delegation and the royal family attended a special service in the royal chapel at Whitehall. ‘The altar was covered in silver gilt and on it stood the Gospels in English’ – not Latin, the vernacular Bible being the bedrock of Protestantism. ‘After some hymns in praise of peace had been chanted’ – again in English – ‘Secretary Cecil handed a copy of the treaty to the Constable and read aloud the oath by which both the King and Prince bound themselves to the observation of the terms … the King and Prince meanwhile laying their hands on the Gospels.’
Death so often mocked the best intentions in a second of haemorrhage, clot, or bacterial invasion. Spain needed to look beyond James and know the future Henry IX bound himself to honour this peace. The Constable of Castile, chief Spanish negotiator, asked for an audience with the prince. Henry consented.
First the prince danced for him, then he took the constable down into the gardens of St James’s Palace. There he practised at push of pike and rode for him, giving the constable a first feel for what problems or possibilities England might breed up in the years to come. Henry was precociously poised, ‘with a most gracious smile’ but ‘a terrible frown’. His staff thought their prince never ‘tossed his pike better than in presence of his Majesty and great Ambassadors’. The constable gave Henry a beautifully caparisoned pony, and advised Madrid to keep open nascent negotiations for a marriage contract between Prince Henry and the Spanish infanta. If nothing else, it would make Anglo-French and Anglo-Dutch relations less cordial. Both of those countries were already irritated by the peace agreement.
At the feast to celebrate the treaty, Spain and England proposed toasts and exchanged gifts so excessive the Venetian ambassador felt ill at the scale of it all. ‘Taxis [a Spanish minister] is making presents every day and one hears of nothing else just now,’ Niccolo Molino complained. ‘It is said that he has spent upwards of two hundred thousand crowns in jewels, and that money has been given as well. The Spaniards are lauded to the skies; for in fact this is a country where only those that are lavish are held in account,’ he said. ‘Since my arrival in this court ten months ago, I have heard of nothing so often as presents.’ The bribe and bonus culture thrived in a glut of sweeteners. ‘Great nobles and members of the Privy Council make [no] … scruple about accepting them, and scoff at those who hold a different view.’ Only fools entered politics without believing it would make their fortune. Public service and self-service walked hand in hand. James returned the extravagant gift-giving. Power had to be seen to be power.
ELEVEN
Union and Disunion (#ulink_0764f090-2617-5909-8ba5-6b86004c0e2c)
‘BLOW YOU SCOTCH BEGGARS BACK TO YOUR NATIVE MOUNTAINS’
By the beginning of November 1605, the whole royal family, bar Elizabeth, came together in London for the state opening of the next session of Parliament. Taken as a family the Stuarts had proved to be an act more than able to step into Elizabeth I’s shoes – which partly accounted for Catesby, Throckmorton, Fawkes and their discontented Catholic friends’ decision to kill them all, except the girl. The rest dead, they could forcibly convert Princess Elizabeth to Catholicism, set her up as a puppet, and offer her to a Catholic prince. With most MPs and Lords also dead, they could establish a Catholic-dominated Parliament.
The opening of Parliament was scheduled for 6 November 1605. The day before, acting on a tip-off, a search party revealed Guy Fawkes in a cellar under the great hall at Westminster nursing thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.
Prince Henry and his parents were ‘a dangerous disease’, Fawkes said. It required ‘a desperate remedy’ to ‘blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains’. King James had betrayed them. In Scotland he let them believe he would ease the penal laws against Catholicism when he succeeded to the throne of England. He had not done it. Racist anti-Unionism overlapped with religious loathing.
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