After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 25 February, 1601, the Lieutenant of the Tower Sir John Peyton ‘gave the Earl warning as he was in his bed to prepare himself to death’. At seven or eight he conducted him to the scaffold. Ralegh, as Captain of the Guard, was obliged to be present at the execution, but the atmosphere was so charged he withdrew to watch from a window in the Armoury. When Essex had finished praying he took off his doublet. His secretary in Ireland, Fynes Moryson, had noticed that he suffered from the cold, but no one saw him shiver in the winter air, nor did he move after the first of the three blows which it took to sever his head from his body. The long lock of hair Essex grew in Ireland was cut off and kept as a relic.*

Elizabeth was careful to show mercy to the young noblemen who had followed Essex. His friend, the Earl of Southampton, was imprisoned in the Tower where he still remained. Of the rest, only four of the principal conspirators were executed: Essex’s father-in-law, Sir Christopher Blount, another Catholic called Sir Charles Davers, his secretary Henry Cuffe and fellow Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick. Blount made amends to Ralegh and Cobham on the scaffold for accusing them of supporting the Infanta’s claim. Their names, he said, had only been used ‘to colour other matters’. He also confessed that he and others had been prepared to take things as far as the shedding of the Queen’s blood. But neither Elizabeth’s mercy, nor this confession did anything to dent the Earl’s posthumous reputation. When the official version of what had occurred was delivered in a sermon at the Cross at St Paul’s weeks later it was ‘very offensively taken of the common sort’ and the minister fled the pulpit in fear of his life.59

In subsequent months Ralegh was accused of blowing smoke in Essex’s face as he mounted the scaffold and Cecil’s life was threatened in places as far apart at Wales, Surrey and Mansfield. But although this anger was not directed against the Queen it was she who felt it most. A few years earlier a French ambassador recorded that Elizabeth had given him ‘a great discourse of the friendship that her people bore her, and how she loved them no less than they her, and she would die rather than see any diminution of the one part or the other’.60 Now she believed the bond between them was broken, a view encouraged by those in her government who did not wish to see blame cast upon themselves.

In the months following the Essex revolt Elizabeth’s health and spirits deteriorated markedly and by the time Harington saw her at court in October of 1601 she had reached a state of physical and mental collapse. She was eating little and was dishevelled and unkempt. A sword was kept on her table at all times and she constantly paced the Privy Chamber, stamping her feet at bad news, occasionally thrusting her rusty weapon in the tapestry in blind fury. Every message from the City upset her, as if she expected news of some fresh rebellion. Eventually she sent Lord Buckhurst to Harington with a message: ‘Go tell that witty fellow, my godson, to go home: it is no season now to fool it here’.61 He did as he was told and so missed the opening of Elizabeth’s last parliament, in November 1601, when she almost fell under the weight of her ceremonial robes.

The Spanish had invaded Ireland in September, hoping to take advantage of Tyrone’s rebellion and gain a stepping-stone to England. Subsidies were needed for the war and MPs soon granted them, but many of the subsequent parliamentary debates saw furious attacks launched against the granting of monopolies. During the 1590s Burghley had altered the system of royal patronage based on the leasing and alienation of crown lands in their favour in order to shift the cost of reward away from the crown. It had since fallen on ordinary people. The price of starch, for example, had tripled over the three years that Cecil had held the monopoly on it.62 He railed in the Commons against those ‘that have desired to be popular without the house for speaking against monopolies’ and Ralegh defended his monopoly in tin so vehemently that it almost brought the debate to a halt. Elizabeth, however, was sufficiently concerned by the attacks on her prerogative to promise to abolish or amend them by royal proclamation.63 When the news was announced MPs wept and cheered.

A few days later Elizabeth received a deputation in the Council Chamber at Whitehall. Once they had delivered their thanks, she took the opportunity to remind them of what was later seen as the central philosophy of her reign.

Mr Speaker, We perceive your coming is to present thanks to us. Know I accept them with no less joy than your loves can have desire to offer such a present, and do more esteem it than any treasure or riches; for these we know how to prize, but loyalty, love and thanks, I account them invaluable. And although God hath raised me high, yet this I account the glory of my crown, that I have reigned with your loves … Of myself I must say this: I never was any greedy, scraping grasper, nor a strict, fast-holding prince, nor yet a waster; my heart was never set upon worldly goods but only for my subjects good. What you do bestow on me, I will not hoard up, but receive it to bestow on you again; yea, my own properties I account to be yours, to be expended for your good, and your eyes shall see the bestowing of it for your welfare.64

They were described as ‘golden words’ but Elizabeth was only too aware that things had changed and when Parliament was dissolved in December she recalled the bitter truth of ‘so many and diverse stratagems and malicious practises and devises to surprise us of our life’.65 That spring, Elizabeth began complaining of an ache in one of her arms. A doctor suggested that her discomfort was rheumatism and might be helped with ointments. She reacted furiously, telling him he was mistaken and ordering him from her presence, but it was soon reported that ‘The ache in the Queen’s arm is fallen into her side.’ She was ‘still thanks to God, frolicy and merry, only her face showing some decay’, yet sometimes she felt so hot she would take off her petticoat while at other times she would shake with cold.66 Depression dogged her and in June Elizabeth was overheard complaining desperately to Cecil about ‘the poverty of the state, the continuance of charge, the discontentment of all sorts of people’.67 She told the French ambassador, the Comte de Beaumont, that she was weary of life. Then, sighing as her eyes filled with tears, she spoke of Essex’s death, how she had tried to prevent it and failed.68

By August Elizabeth’s pains had gone to her hip. Defiantly she continued to hunt every two or three days but a Catholic spy writing under the name ‘Anthony Rivers’ reported that a countrywoman who saw her on her progress had commented that the Queen looked very old and ill. A guard terrified the woman by warning that ‘she should be hanged for those words’. Courtiers, however, were less easily intimidated and whispers about the succession were on everyone’s lips.69 The spy described how James’s agents were working hard to gather support from powerful families offering ‘liberty of conscience, confirmation of privileges and liberties, restitution of wrongs, honours, titles and dignities, with increase according to desert etc’. Individuals were responding with shows of affection: ‘for the most part it is thought rather for fear than love’. He named Cecil as one such, adding, ‘all is but policy it being certain he loves him as little as the others’.70 It is now believed that the spy ‘Rivers’ was William Sterrell, Secretary to the Earl of Worcester, which would have placed him at the heart of Elizabeth’s court.71 His letters to Persons and others make it clear that few actively wanted a Scots king and he reported that a group of courtiers were planning to marry Arbella Stuart to Beauchamp’s seventeen-year-old elder son, Edward Seymour ‘and carry the succession that way’. To all outward appearance, however, it was business as usual.

In October 1602, Cecil entertained Elizabeth at his new house on the Strand and presented her with ten gifts, mostly jewels. She left in excellent spirits, refusing any help to enter the royal barge. As she climbed aboard, however, she fell and bruised her shins badly. It left her in considerable pain. She began to talk of moving from Whitehall to the comforts of Richmond Palace, but in the end the lassitude of depression had kept her at Whitehall where Harington had found her weeping at Christmas.

Now that Elizabeth’s godson was certain she was dying he intended to follow the Tract on the Succession sent to James in Scotland with a New Year’s gift, the traditional time for giving presents. He designed a lantern constructed as a symbol of the dark times of Elizabeth’s last years and the splendour that was to come with James’s rising sun. It was engraved with the words: ‘Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ and a little underneath, ‘After the cross, light.’72

* Elizabeth, who was conservative in religious matters, wanted a single man as her senior cleric. After Whitgift’s appointment Harington recalled how Whitgift had always cut a dashing figure. When he was Bishop of Worcester, he would arrive at Parliament attended by large numbers of retainers in tawny livery. When another bishop asked how he could afford so many menservants he quipped ‘it was by reason he kept so few women’ – a reference to the fact he had remained unmarried (Harington, State of the Church, pp. 7–8).

* Thomas Wilson had also observed that the law against foreigners inheriting the English throne need not apply to James if it ‘be alleged that the King of Scots is no alien, neither that Scotland is any foreign realm, but a part of England, all be it the Scots deny it’ (Wilson, State of England in 1600, p. 8).

* It was, perhaps, because Elizabeth was seriously ill with smallpox in 1562 that she did not think to ensure that Edward and Catherine were kept apart in the Tower. In consequence another ‘illegitimate’ child, Thomas, was born on 10 February 1563. Edward was fined £15,000 and Elizabeth saw to it that he never saw Catherine again.

* Mary Grey married in 1565. Within months it was discovered and she was placed in custody until her husband died, after which she lived an impoverished and childless life until her own death in 1578.

* The subsequent ruin of many Catholics was remembered in the 1930s as the Vatican considered how best to confront Adolf Hitler. Voices recalled the terrible effects of the bull and the Pope backed off from issuing a condemnation of Nazism (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, p. 334).

* Puritans wanted to see the restitution and continuation of Edward VI’s reforms, dispensing with ‘papist’ rituals such as the cross in baptism and instituting sermons in order to achieve a more godly church and society.

* Though the bleeding from the stomach might equally have been caused by stomach cancer or an ulcer, or a result of porphyria inherited through his mother Eleanor Brandon.

† The Earl’s followers had approached the King as early as 1589, but James had not shown any interest in Essex’s offers of loyalty until he had his place on the Privy Council.

* The name probably represented a team of writers.

* One of Philip II’s last actions had been to create the new kingdom of the Netherlands. The Spanish had been fighting the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands for twenty-five years without making progress. Philip hoped that a sovereign state that included the France-Comte of Burgundy, as well as the Netherlands south of the Maas and Waal, would be better able to defeat the Dutch rebels and would remain allied to Spain. He planned to marry Isabella to her first cousin, the Archduke Albert, who was already Governor of the Netherlands. The Act of Cession creating the kingdom was made on 6 May 1598 and that autumn, shortly after Philip’s death, the Infanta married Albert.

* His daughter, Frances Devereux, Duchess of Somerset, wore it along with his ruby earring when she sat for a portrait by Vandyke, both of which are still preserved at Ham House. Her husband was Lord Beauchamp’s younger son, William Seymour.

CHAPTER TWO

‘A babe crowned in his cradle’

The shaping of the King of Scots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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