AFTER ELIZABETH
The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James
LEANDA DE LISLE

DEDICATION

For Peter,Rupert, Christian and Dominic,my cornerstones.

EPIGRAPH

‘If you can look into the seeds of time,And say which grain will grow and which will not’,

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

GENEALOGY

MAP

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1 ‘The world waxed old’ The twilight of the Tudor dynasty

CHAPTER 2 ‘A babe crowned in his cradle’ The shaping of the King of Scots

PART TWO

CHAPTER 3 ‘Westward … descended a hideous tempest’ The death of Elizabeth, February–March 1603

CHAPTER 4 ‘Lots were cast upon our land’ The coming of Arthur, March–April 1603

CHAPTER 5 ‘Hope and fear’ Winners and losers, April–May 1603

CHAPTER 6 ‘The beggars have come to town’ Plague and plot in London, May–June 1603

PART THREE

CHAPTER 7 ‘An anointed King’ James and Anna are crowned, July–August 1603

CHAPTER 8 ‘The God of truth and time’ Trial, judgement and the dawn of the Stuart age

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Q AND A WITH LEANDA DE LISLE

LIFE AT A GLANCE

TOP FIVE, BOTTOM FIVE

A WRITING LIFE

ABOUT THE BOOK

A LETTER TO THE READER BY LEANDA DE LISLE

READ ON

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE …

FIND OUT MORE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTE

NOTES

PRAISE

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

GENEALOGY

The Descendants of Henry VII

The Royal Houses of Portugal and Spain

The House of Talbot

The House of Cavendish

MAP

PART ONE

‘There are more that look, as it is said,to the rising than to the setting sun’

Elizabeth I

CHAPTER ONE
‘The world waxed old’
The twilight of the Tudor dynasty

SIR JOHN HARINGTON arrived at Whitehall in December 1602 in time for the twelve-day Christmas celebrations at court. The coming winter season was expected to be a dull one, though the new Comptroller of the Household, Sir Edward Wotton, was trying his best to inject fresh life into it. Dressed from head to toe in white he had laid on dances, bear baiting, plays and gambling. The Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, lost up to £800 a night – an astonishing sum, even for one who, according to popular verse, ruled ‘court and crown’. Behind the scenes, however, courtiers gambled for still higher stakes. Harington observed that Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, was sixty-nine and although she appeared in sound health ‘age itself is a sickness’.¹ She could not live forever and after a reign of forty-four years the country was on the eve of change.

To Elizabeth, Harington was ‘that witty fellow my godson’. Courtiers knew him for his invention of the water closet, his translations of classical works, his scurrilous writings on court figures and his mastery of the epigram, which was then the fashionable medium for comment on court life. In the competition for Elizabeth’s favour, however, courtiers were expected to reflect her greatness not only in learning and wit but also in their visual magnificence. They did so by dressing in clothes ‘more sumptuous than the proudest Persian’. A miniature depicts Harington as a smiling man in a cut silk doublet and ruff, his long hair brushed back to show off a jewelled earring that hangs to his shoulder. Even a courtier’s plainest suits were worn with beaver hats and the finest linen shirts, gilded daggers and swords, silk garters and show roses, silk stockings and cloaks.²

This brilliant world was a small one, though riven by scheming and distrust. ‘Those who live in courts, must mark what they say,’ one of Harington’s epigrams warned, ‘Who lives for ease had better live away.’³ Harington, typically, knew everyone at Whitehall that Christmas, either directly or through friends and relations.⁴ Elizabeth herself was particularly close to the grandchildren of her aunt Mary Boleyn, known enviously as ‘the tribe of Dan’. The eldest, Lord Hunsdon, was the Lord Chamberlain responsible for the conduct of the court. His sisters, the Countess of Nottingham, and Lady Scrope, were Elizabeth’s most favoured Ladies of the Privy Chamber. But Harington also had royal connections, albeit at one remove. His estate at Kelston in Somerset had been granted to his father’s first wife, Ethelreda, an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. When Ethelreda died childless the land had passed to John Harington senior. He remained loyal to Elizabeth when she was imprisoned following a Protestant-backed revolt against her Catholic sister Mary I, named after one of its leaders as Wyatt’s revolt, and when Elizabeth became Queen she rewarded him with office and fortune, making his second wife, Harington’s mother Isabella Markham, a Lady of the Privy Chamber. It was the hope of acquiring such wealth and honour that was the chief attraction of the court.

Harington once described the court as ‘ambition’s puffball’ – a toadstool that fed on vanity and greed, but it was one that had been carefully cultivated by the Tudor monarchy. With no standing army or paid bureaucracy to enforce their will the monarchy had to rely on persuasion. They used Arthurian mythology and courtly displays to capture hearts, while patronage appealed to the more down-to-earth instincts of personal ambition. Elizabeth could grant her powerful subjects the prestige that came with titles and orders; the influence conferred by office in the Church, the military, the administration of government and the law; there were also posts at court or in the royal household. She could bestow wealth with leases on royal lands and palaces, offer special trading licences and monopolies or bequeath the ownership of estates confiscated from traitors.⁵ Those who gained most from Elizabeth’s patronage were themselves patrons, acting as conduits for the Queen’s munificence.

Harington and his friends worked hard to ingratiate themselves with the great men at court, often spending years, as he complained, in ‘grinning scoff, watching nights and fawning days’.⁶ When a great patron fell from grace a decade of personal and financial investment could be lost. The precise standing of all senior courtiers was therefore tracked and discussed by gossips and intelligencers. Every tiny fluctuation in their fortunes stoked what one observer described as, ‘The court fever of hope and fear that continuously torments those that depend upon great men and their promises.’⁷ The ‘fever’ reached a pitch when the health of the monarch was a cause for concern since their death could mean a complete revolution in government.

Harington arrived at court having completed, on 18 December, his Tract on the Succession to the Crown – a subject on which the pulse of the nation was now said to ‘beat extremely’ but which was strictly forbidden. As Harington had recorded in his tract, Elizabeth had ‘utterly suppressed the talk of an heir apparent’ in the year of his birth, 1561, ‘saying she would not have her winding sheet set up before her face’. Her concern, he explained, was ‘that if she should allow and permit men to examine, discuss and publish whose was the best title after her, some would be ready to affirm that title to be good afore hers’.⁸

Forty years earlier there had been those who had claimed that Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a superior claim to the English throne; others that it belonged to her Protestant cousin Catherine Grey. Both claimants had since died: Catherine in a country house prison in 1568, Mary on the executioner’s block in 1587. But their sons, James VI of Scotland and Lord Beauchamp had succeeded them as rivals to her throne, together with more recent candidates such as James’s cousin, Arbella Stuart, and the Infanta Isabella of Spain. The dangers to Elizabeth were such that the publication of any discussion of the succession had been declared an act of treason by Parliament only the previous winter. Her advancing age meant, however, that an heir would soon have to be chosen, if not by her, then by others.

Harington had dedicated his tract to his preferred choice, James VI, the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots. As the senior descendant of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, and her first husband, James IV, he was Elizabeth’s heir by the usual dynastic rules of primogeniture, but James was far from being the straightforward choice that this suggests.

The Stuart line of the Kings of Scots was barred from the succession under the will of Henry VIII, which was backed by Act of Parliament. James was also personally excluded under a law dating back to the reign of Edward III precluding those born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm of England’. His hopes rested on the fact that the claims of his rivals were equally problematic. Elizabeth had declared Catherine Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, illegitimate, and, as men had delved ever deeper into the complex question of the right to the throne, the numbers of potential heirs had proliferated. By 1600 the sometime writer, lawyer and spy Thomas Wilson had counted ‘twelve competitors that gape for the death of that good old princess, the now queen’.⁹ Spain, France and the Pope all had their preferred candidates while the English were divided in their choice by religious belief and contesting ambitions.

Courtiers feared that the price of Elizabeth’s security during her life would be civil war and foreign invasion on her death – but the future was also replete with possibilities. A new monarch drawn from a weak field would need to acquire widespread support to secure their position against their rivals. That meant opening up the royal purse: there would be gifts of land, office and title. Harington’s tract was a private gift to James made in the hope of future favour. The gamble was to invest in the winning candidate – for as Thomas Wilson observed ‘this crown is not likely to fall for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted’.¹⁰

The Palace of Whitehall, built by Cardinal Wolsey and extended by Henry VIII, sprawled on either side of King Street, the road linking Westminster and Charing Cross. On the western side were the buildings designed for recreation: four covered tennis courts, two bowling alleys, a cockpit and a gallery for viewing tournaments in the great tiltyard. Up to 12,000 spectators would come to watch Elizabeth’s knights take part in the annual November jousts held to celebrate her accession. When the jousts were over the contestants’ shields were hung in a gallery, where, that summer, the visiting German Duke of Stettin-Pomerania had been directed to admire the insignia of Elizabeth’s last great favourite, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. He had broken fifty-seven lances in the course of fighting fifteen challengers during the Accession Tilts of 1594. There was, however, much more to Essex than his prowess at the tilt. He had represented the aspirations of Harington’s generation, born after Elizabeth became Queen and kept from office by her stifling conservatism.

Elizabeth is still remembered as the Queen who defied the Armada in 1588, and the figure of Gloriana as encapsulated in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene the following year. But as one court servant warned, this was to see her ‘like a painted face without a shadow to give it life’¹¹. Elizabeth had reached the apogee of her reign in the 1580s. Thereafter came a decline that lasted longer than the reigns of her siblings, Mary I and Edward VI, put together. Her victory over the Armada was tarnished by the costs of the continuing war with Spain and the woman behind the divine image had grown old. To Essex’s vast following of young courtiers Elizabeth was a dithering old woman, dominated by her Treasurer Lord Burghley and his corrupt son, Sir Robert Cecil. Her motto ‘Semper Eadem’ (I never change), once perceived as a promise of stability, came to be taken as a challenge.

When Burghley died in August 1598, Essex hoped to become the new force in Elizabeth’s government but within weeks a long simmering rebellion in Ireland had turned into a war of liberation. Essex, as Elizabeth’s most experienced commander, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and sent to confront the rebel leader, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Instead, in September 1599, in defiance of royal orders, Essex arranged a truce and returned to court. Elizabeth was furious and as Essex fell into disgrace he turned his hopes to finding favour with the candidate he hoped to succeed her. In February 1601 he led 300 soldiers and courtiers in a palace revolt to force her to name James VI of Scotland her heir and overthrow Robert Cecil together with his principal allies, Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh. The revolt quickly failed and the Earl was executed, but Essex remained a popular figure in national memory. Stettin’s journal records that ballads dedicated to Essex were being ‘sung and played on musical instruments all over the country, even in our presence at the royal court though his memory is condemned as that of a man having committed high treason’.¹² They mourned England’s ‘jewel … The valiant knight of chivalry’, destroyed, it was said, by the malevolence of the Cecil faction.

Brave honour graced him still,Gallantly, gallantly,He ne’er did deed of ill,Well it is known But Envy, that foul fiend,Whose malice ne’er did endHath brought true virtue’s friendUnto his thrall.¹³

Beneath the smiles of the courtiers as they played cards that Christmas lay the deep bitterness of old enemies; those who had admired Essex and those who had rejoiced in his downfall.

The gallery above the tiltyard where Essex had jousted was linked to the second group of buildings through a gatehouse over King Street. Here, in the Privy Gardens, thirty-four mythical beasts sat on thirty-four brightly coloured poles overlooking the low-railed pathways. The buildings had a similarly fairy-tale quality. They were decorated in elaborate paintwork, the Great Hall in chequerwork and the Privy Gallery in black and white grotesques. The theme of these distorted animal, plant and human forms extended into the interior where they were highlighted with gold on the wood pillars and panelling. The visiting Duke of Stettin thought the ceilings rather low and the rooms gloomy. Elizabeth’s bedroom, which overlooked the Thames ‘was very dark’ with ‘but little air’. Nearby in Elizabeth’s cabinet, where she wrote her letters, Stettin observed a marvellous silver inkstand and ‘also a Latin prayer book that the queen had written nicely with her own hand, and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father’.¹⁴

Harington had been granted an audience with the Queen soon after his arrival at Whitehall. As usual he was escorted from the Presence Chamber, where courtiers waited bareheaded to present their petitions, along a dark passage and into the Privy Chamber where his godmother awaited him.¹⁵ A mural by Hans Holbein the Younger dominated the room. The massive figure of Henry VIII stood, hand on hips, gazing unflinchingly at the viewer. His third wife Jane Seymour, the mother of his son Edward VI, was depicted on his left and above him his mother, Elizabeth of York, with his father, Henry VII. The mural boasted the continuity of the Tudor dynasty, a silent reproach to the childless spinster Harington now saw before him. Contemporaries remarked often on Elizabeth’s similarity to her grandfather. When she was young they saw it in her narrow face and the beautiful long hands of which she was so proud. As she grew older she developed her grandfather’s wattle, a ‘great goggle throat’ that hung from her chin.¹⁶ But she did not now look merely old. She appeared seriously ill.

Harington was shocked by what he saw and frightened for the future. Elizabeth had been increasingly melancholic since the Essex revolt, but he was now convinced that she was dying. He confided his thoughts in a letter to the one person he trusted: his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at home in Somerset caring for their nine children.

Sweet Mall,

I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity, too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery. Dear Mall, How shall I speak what I have seen, or what I have felt? – Thy good silence in these matters emboldens my pen … Now I will trust thee with great assurance, and whilst thou dost brood over thy young ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in the court …¹⁷

Elizabeth received Harington seated on a raised platform. Her ‘little black husband’ John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose plain clerical garb contrasted so starkly with her bejewelled gowns and spangled wigs, was beside her.* It was believed that Elizabeth used her glittering costumes to dazzle people so they ‘would not so easily discern the marks of age’, but if so, she no longer considered them enough. Increasingly afraid that any intimation of mortality would attract dangerous speculation on her successor she had taken to filling out her sunken cheeks with fine cloths and was also ‘continually painted, not only all over the face, but her very neck and breast also, and that the same was in some places near half an inch thick’.¹⁸ There were some things, however, that make-up could not hide. When Elizabeth spoke it was apparent that her teeth were blackened and several were missing. Foreign ambassadors complained it made her difficult to understand if she spoke quickly. But during Harington’s audience this was not a problem; her throat was so sore and her state of mind so troubled that she could barely speak at all.

The rebellion in Ireland that had cost Elizabeth so much in men, money and peace of mind was near its end. The arch rebel Tyrone was offering his submission, but it brought Elizabeth no joy; memories of Essex’s betrayals were crowding in. She whispered to Whitgift to ask Harington if he had seen Tyrone? Harington had witnessed Essex making the truce with Tyrone in 1599 and later met him in person. He still trembled at the memory of Elizabeth’s fury with him about it when he had returned to England, and he now answered her carefully, saying only, ‘I had seen him with the Lord Deputy.’ At this, Elizabeth looked up with an expression of anger and grief and replied ‘Oh, now it mindeth me that you was one who saw this man elsewhere,’ and she began to weep and strike her breast. ‘She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in sooth her heart seemed too full to lack more filling,’ Harington told his wife.

As the audience drew to a close Elizabeth rallied and she asked her godson to come back to her chamber at seven o’clock and bring some of the light-hearted verses and witty prose for which he was famous. Harington dutifully returned that evening and read Elizabeth some verses. She smiled once but told him, ‘When thou dost find creeping time at thy gate, these fooleries will please thee less; I am past my relish for such matters. Thou seeest my bodily meat doth not suit me well; I have eaten but one ill-tasted cake since yesternight.’¹⁹ The following day Harington saw Elizabeth again. A number of men had arrived at her request only to be dismissed in anger for appearing without an appointment: ‘But who shall say that “Your Majesty hath forgotten”?’ Harington asked Mall.

No one dared to voice openly the seriousness of Elizabeth’s condition, but Harington did find ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.²⁰ He told his wife he had attended a dinner with the Archbishop and that many of Elizabeth’s own clerics appeared to be ‘well anointed with the oil of gladness’. But the spectacle of Elizabeth’s misery amidst the feasting pricked Harington’s conscience. In his Tract on the Succession he had wasted no opportunities to dwell on the unpopularity of her government and to contrast her failings as an aged Queen with James VI’s youth, vigour and masculinity. Now he could not suppress memories of all the kindness she had shown him, ‘her watchings over my youth, her liking to my free speech and admiration of my little learning … have rooted such love, such dutiful remembrance of her princely virtues, that to turn askant from her condition with tearless eyes, would stain and foul the spring and fount of gratitude’.²¹

Harington’s eyes, however, tear-filled or not, remained as fixed on the future as those of everyone else, and he was comforted by the realisation that his examination of the succession issue had been completed with exquisite timing.

The question of the succession had dominated the history of the Tudor dynasty and would shape events to come. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had been a rival claimant to a reigning monarch until his army killed Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victory came at the end of a long period of civil strife in which Harington’s great-grandfather, James Harington, was allied with the losing side – an error that cost the family much of their land in the north of England. Henry was fearful that such families would rise up against him if a rival candidate to his crown emerged and so he worked hard to achieve a secure succession. He had two sons to ensure the future of his line and he bolstered his claim by creating a mythology that anchored the Tudors in a legendary past.

Henry VII claimed that his ancestor, Owen Tudor, was a direct descendant of Cadwallader, supposedly the last of the British kings. This made the Tudors the heirs of King Arthur and through them, it was said, Arthur would return.²² Henry even named his eldest son Arthur, but the boy died aged fifteen not long after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was thus his second son, Henry VIII, who inherited the crown, as well as his brother’s bride. Henry and Catherine had a daughter, the future Mary I, but no sons. Henry saw this lack of a male heir as an apocalyptic failure fearing that the inheritance of the throne by a mere queen regnant could plunge England back into civil war. He became convinced that God had punished him for having married his brother’s wife and sought an annulment from the Pope. When the Pope, under pressure from Catherine’s Hapsburg nephew, Charles V, denied it to him, he made himself the head of the Church in England. Justifications for Henry’s new title were found in the various ‘histories’ of Arthur, but his actions had coincided with the revolution in religious opinion in Europe begun by the German monk, Martin Luther. One of Henry’s chief researchers was a keen follower of Luther’s teachings and although Henry had once written against Luther he chose to reward Thomas Cranmer’s service in ‘discovering’ the royal supremacy by making him Archbishop of Canterbury. Centuries of Catholic culture and belief were to be overturned in favour of new Protestant ideas as Henry divorced Catherine, declared Mary illegitimate and married ‘one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn’, as the Abbot of Whitby called her.

The Reformation changed England forever. The simple fact that the country was no longer part of the supra-national Roman Church encouraged a stronger sense of separateness from the Continent and enabled Henry to develop a full-blooded nationalism to which his dynasty was central. Elizabeth, the child of this revolution, was not, however, her father’s heir for long. Anne Boleyn was executed before she was three years old and Elizabeth, already a bastard in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was declared illegitimate by her father in order that any children of the marriage to his new love, Jane Seymour, should take precedence over her, as she had once done over her sister, Mary. When Jane Seymour had her son, Edward, in 1537, it seemed to Henry that the question of the succession was answered. As Henry had no further children by the three wives that succeeded Jane Seymour he eventually restored Elizabeth and Mary in line to the succession after Edward, in default of Edward’s issue or any further children by his last wife, Catherine Parr. His decision was confirmed in the Act of Succession in 1544 – the year before Elizabeth had made her father the gift of the prayer book that the German Duke saw on her desk.

The Act of Succession allowed the King to alter the succession by testament, that is, in his will. This was significant for Henry’s will wrote into law who Elizabeth’s heirs should be if all his children died without issue. Henry had sought Elizabeth’s heirs amongst the descendants of his sisters, Margaret of Scotland and Mary Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk. Margaret, the eldest, had married James IV of Scotland, who was killed fighting the English at Flodden in 1513. Their son, James V, died after losing a later battle against the English and left his infant daughter, Mary Stuart, as Queen of Scots. She should have been Elizabeth’s heir under the laws of primogeniture, but Henry’s will disinherited the Stuart line in favour of that of the Suffolks in vengeance for the Stuart enmity to England and the Scots’ refusal to marry their Queen to his son.

Harington’s tract explained that the Scots had feared that if Mary Stuart married Prince Edward their country would have become a mere province of England. In the winter of 1602/3 the English had similar concerns that if James VI of Scotland inherited the throne their country might be subsumed into a new kingdom called ‘Britain’. Machiavelli had argued that changing a country’s name was a badge of conquest and Harington warned James that ‘some in England fear the like now’. The name Britain had an unpleasantly Celtic ring and people believed that the creation of a new united kingdom could nullify English Common Law.

Many believed that James was also precluded from the succession by the medieval law excluding heirs born outside ‘the allegiance of the realm’.²³ Edward VI had drawn attention to this law in drawing up his will in 1553, which had also excluded the Stuart line. Harington’s tract attempted to counter it by arguing that Scotland was not really a foreign country at all, since all Englishmen considered it ‘subject to England in the way of homage’. But it was a view with which James himself was unlikely to concur.*

Elizabeth had inherited the throne in 1558, following the death of her Catholic half-sister, Mary I. As a woman the twenty-five-year-old queen fitted awkwardly into the chivalric legend of the Tudors being the heirs to Arthur but Elizabeth proved adept at reshaping it. From the day of her coronation, where she greeted the crowds with ‘cries, tender words, and all other signs which argue a wonderful earnest love of most obedient servants’, Elizabeth worked to build an image that was at once feminine and supremely majestic. She became the mother of her people, the wife married to her kingdom, the unobtainable love object of the knights and nobles; a Virgin to rival the Queen of Heaven to whom medieval England had once been dedicated, the summation of the dynasty’s mythology.

Even in 1558, however, courtiers were considering the vital question of who would succeed her. The last three reigns had seen violent swings in religious policy, from Henry VIII’s Reformation, to the radical Protestantism of Edward VI, to the Catholicism of Mary. No one had believed Elizabeth would be able to bring stability to a kingdom still bitterly divided by religion unless she produced an heir to guarantee the future of her Protestant supporters: men such as Elizabeth’s closest adviser, William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, who had sat on Edward VI’s Privy Council, but lost his post when Mary I succeeded him. A petition urging Elizabeth to marry was drawn up by the House of Commons on the first day of her first parliament. Her reply was that she preferred to remain unmarried. Whether she intended this to be her last word on the subject is questionable, but, in the event, the dangers of making a bad or divisive choice would always outweigh any advantages of love and companionship. Fear and jealousy arose in one quarter or another whenever a potential bridegroom looked to be a likely candidate for her hand. Harington, however, could not see that Elizabeth’s decision might be a consequence of their own prejudice that a woman was invariably ruled by her husband. Instead he shared the widespread view that her disinclination to marry was the result of some personal failing.

Harington claimed that Elizabeth had a psychological horror of the state of marriage and ‘in body some indisposition to the act of marriage’, but he admitted that she had made the world think that she might marry until she was fifty years old and ‘she has ever made show of affection, and still does to some men which in court we term favourites’.²⁴ These flirtations or dissimulations took some of the pressure off her to produce an actual spouse, but in the absence of one she was continually pushed to name a successor. It was only with hindsight Harington realised that Elizabeth had given her definitive answer, that she would never name an heir, in August of 1561, the year when she was confronted by the claims of her Suffolk heir, the Protestant Lady Catherine Grey, and her Catholic Stuart rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 10 August Elizabeth had learnt that the twenty-year-old Catherine was heavily pregnant and that the father was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Now in his sixties, he was then young, dark and handsome; more significantly he was also a descendant of Edward III and the heir of Edward VI’s uncle, the Protector Somerset, who had ruled England during Edward’s early minority. A marriage between such a couple would be a very suitable royal match – too suitable from Elizabeth’s perspective since any son of such a union would have become her de facto heir and a possible rival. It was to Elizabeth’s horror then, that Catherine confessed they had wed in a secret ceremony in December 1560. Angry and fearful Elizabeth had her sent to the Tower and Hertford joined her soon after.

While Elizabeth was considering what to do next, an envoy arrived at court from the likely beneficiary of this fiasco, her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. In 1561 James’s mother was a charming, willowy, eighteen-year old, who at five foot eleven towered over most of her contemporaries. She had been raised the adored daughter of the French court destined to be Queen of France and at sixteen that destiny was fulfilled when she married Francis II. Francis, however, had died the previous December and that August she had returned to the violent country of her birth. Scotland had undergone its own Reformation the previous year, making Mary the Catholic Queen of a Protestant country. It was a possible template for her future as Queen of England and Mary’s emissary, William Maitland of Lethington, hoped that Elizabeth’s anger with Catherine Grey would encourage her to name Mary her heir. Instead Elizabeth announced that she would never name her successor.

‘I was married to this kingdom, whereof always I carry this ring for a pledge’, she informed Maitland, pointing to her coronation ring, ‘and howsoever things go I shall be queen of England so long as I live, when I am dead let them succeed who have the best right.’²⁵ Maitland had stayed at court hoping to change Elizabeth’s mind, but in the days that followed she had only expanded on her motives for refusing to name an heir. ‘I know the inconstancy of the people,’ she told Maitland, ‘how they loathe always the present government; and have their eyes continually set upon the next successor; and naturally there are more that look, as it is said, to the rising than to the setting sun.’ She recalled how malcontents had looked to her when Mary I was on the throne and concluded such men might now feel differently towards her. A prince, she warned, could not even trust ‘the children who are to succeed them’.²⁶ She would certainly not trust those of Catherine Grey or Mary, Queen of Scots.

On 21 September 1561, Catherine gave birth in the Tower to a son, Edward, Lord Beauchamp, heir to the throne under the will of Henry VIII and under English law. Elizabeth was, however, already working towards the destruction of his claim. Catherine and Hertford were closely questioned about their marriage. It emerged that the only witness to the ceremony and the only person who knew the name of the priest, had subsequently died. There was, therefore, only the couple’s word that they had been married and that was hardly likely to be enough. Their son was declared illegitimate by a church commission later that autumn.*

Over the next four decades Elizabeth’s own former illegitimacy kept alive the hope that Beauchamp’s might also be reversed, and William Cecil would remain an advocate of Beauchamp’s claim until his death. But Elizabeth’s actions had undoubtedly damaged the Suffolk cause and its immediate effect was to strengthen that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Elizabeth’s brush with smallpox in 1562 reminded the Protestant elite that their wealth and power were entirely dependent on her life and the Commons once again drew up a petition begging Elizabeth to marry. It drew attention to the dangers of civil war and foreign invasion if England were to be disputed among rival claimants of different religions after her death; France – where Huguenots and Catholics were fighting a savage civil war – illustrated just how grim that fate would be. Elizabeth assured them that there was time for her to marry, but in 1565, it was the Queen of Scots who made a dynastic marriage and with the English crown in mind.

Mary Stuart’s husband, the twenty-year-old Henry Darnley, was descended from Margaret Tudor through her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. He was, therefore, second only to Mary herself in the line of succession. His English birth was a significant bonus as it went some way to answering objections about Mary’s foreign birth. Harington used it to counter fears that James VI would give official posts and royal land to Scots, arguing: ‘It is without all question that he which is … by both his parents descended of English blood will in England become English and a favourer chiefly of Englishmen’ – a popular argument amongst James’s supporters. Whatever the dynastic advantages of the marriage, however, it would prove fatal for Mary. Darnley was a handsome youth: six foot one, fair-haired, ‘beardless and lady faced’, but he was also insufferably arrogant and the strain of playing second fiddle to his wife soon proved too much for him. He began to drink heavily and conducted several affairs. Mary, anxious not to give him any real power, refused to grant him the crown matrimonial and instead invested her trust in her personal secretary, the Italian musician David Riccio.

In March 1566, when Mary was six months pregnant, the jealous Darnley and a group of nobles came for her secretary. They walked into the tiny room off the Queen’s bedchamber where she was having supper with the Countess of Argyll and Riccio, demanding he leave the room. The terrified man grabbed Mary’s skirts, but with a pistol pointing at Mary’s pregnant belly, he was dragged away screaming to be stabbed to death. James had survived the trauma to his mother to be born at Edinburgh Castle on 19 June 1566, between nine and ten in the morning. A caul was stretched over James’s face in what has traditionally been seen as a sign of good fortune. The first sign of it came later that morning when his father recognised his legitimacy with the seal of a kiss, but a rapid series of events had followed that endangered his life and then that of his mother.

When James was nine months old Darnley’s house was destroyed by gunpowder and his body was found strangled in grounds nearby. Three months later Mary married his suspected murderer, the Earl of Bothwell. The scandal triggered a revolt led by her Protestant Lords, including Bothwell’s former ally in the murder of Darnley, James Douglas, Earl of Morton. It ended with her thirteen-month-old son put on her throne in her place, to be raised a Protestant. Mary fled to England in May 1568. Elizabeth had warned that a prince could not even trust the children who were to succeed them, but she could hardly rejoice at being proved right. Catherine Grey had died only four months earlier. Her younger sister, known as ‘crookback Mary’, was in custody after secretly marrying Thomas Keyes, the Sergeant Porter.* But Elizabeth was now confronted with a far greater threat than that posed by the Grey sisters, for here was a queen regnant and no mere subject.

William Cecil dissuaded Elizabeth from helping Mary regain her throne and since Elizabeth could not risk allowing Mary to leave for Europe, where she might have raised support for an invasion force, she was left with no choice but to keep her cousin imprisoned in a succession of great houses in the English Midlands. There she became a focus for Catholic discontent fuelled by envy of Cecil’s power and influence. Mary was barely south of the border before the great Catholic families of the north, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, backed the Duke of Norfolk’s secret bid to marry her and return with her to Scotland. Elizabeth discovered the plan and the earls, fearing execution, led the north in rebellion in November 1569. It was crushed with great savagery and in its wake a still greater disaster fell on English Catholics. Pope Pius V issued a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from their obedience to her.*

A divide that had existed since the Reformation began widening once more. The Pope’s bull allowed William Cecil – Lord Burghley from 1571 – to paint Catholics as traitors by virtue of their faith. New laws were immediately introduced to prevent Catholics entering Parliament and they began to be ousted from local power in towns and counties. This appeared to be justified when, late in 1571, Mary and Norfolk were discovered to be involved in a plot to depose Elizabeth with the possible backing of a Spanish invasion. Norfolk was executed for his role and Elizabeth was put under pressure from her Councillors to behead Mary as well. She refused to set a precedent of regicide but the Protestant elite was soon fearful that the Catholic threat was growing ever greater.

In 1574, a new breed of secular priest (the equivalent of today’s diocesan priests) arrived in England as missionaries from the continent. Protestant hopes that Catholicism would die out were dashed and the reaction was ferocious, with the first of many priests to be executed dying in 1577. In June 1580 the Jesuits arrived in England spearheaded by Robert Persons and Edmund Campion. The pair would convert such important figures as the Queen’s champion Robert Dymoke and set up a printing press to disseminate Catholic literature and propaganda. Professional priest hunters were quickly put on their trail and in 1581 Persons was forced to flee back to the continent. Campion, however, was caught. ‘In condemning us,’ he told his judges, ‘you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient priests, bishops and kings, and all that was once the glory of England.’ He was hung, cut down while still alive, drawn of his bowels, castrated and quartered.

Campion’s terrible death marked the beginning of the harshest yet period of repression. Those Catholics who refused to attend Protestant services – known as recusants (from the Latin recusare, to refuse) – faced ever more ruinous fines, while priests and those who harboured them were executed every year for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. This did not stamp out Catholicism. Even three generations after the Reformation, Wales and the north of England remained predominantly Catholic. The west of England had a substantial Catholic minority and as much as 20 per cent of the entire nobility and gentry were Catholic. But it did radicalise Catholics and it also gained the sympathies of many young Protestant courtiers. The explosion of opinion and argument that followed the Reformation not only led to wars of religion, but also to the sceptical humanism of the late Renaissance. By 1602 it was illustrated in the works of Shakespeare and Montaigne, and found political expression in Henri IV’s secular state in France and a desire in English court circles for toleration of religion.

Harington, who although a Protestant, had many Catholic friends and relations, would refer to Campion’s death in his Tract with the comment that ‘men’s minds remain rather the less satisfied of the uprightness of the cause; where racks serve for reasons’.²⁷ It was, however, the older generation who remained in power in the 1580s and they remained convinced that the persecution was a matter of personal survival.

In 1584 Burghley and Elizabeth’s then Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, took steps to block Mary’s accession, drafting a so-called ‘Bond of Association’ whose members agreed to murder Mary if Elizabeth’s life was threatened. The wording indicated that if James VI claimed the throne his life would also be forfeit. Burghley had hoped to follow this with a neo-republican law that would bring a Great Council into effect on Elizabeth’s death with the power to choose her successor. Elizabeth put paid to that scheme, but in 1585 she did agree to sign a statute which decreed that anyone who plotted against her – or whose supporters plotted against her – would lose their right to the throne.²⁸ It was often used against James’s claim for in 1586 Mary was at last found in correspondence with a rich young Catholic traitor called Anthony Babington. In essence Babington and his co-conspirators were accused of planning a Catholic uprising backed by an invading army financed by Spain and the Pope. Elizabeth was to be deposed and assassinated. Here at last was the means for Burghley to dispose of Mary and, with the help of Walsingham, he seized it with both hands.

Mary was tried and convicted of her involvement in the Babington plot and in February 1587, at three strokes of the axe, the Protestant James VI became the leading Stuart candidate for the throne. The majority of Catholics conceded that all hope for the restoration of Catholicism had died with Mary, Queen of Scots. But some others – idealists, zealots and leading Jesuits – remained determined to have a Catholic monarch, if necessary by force of arms. And already the numbers of Elizabeth’s possible heirs were increasing.

Mary, Queen of Scots made Philip II of Spain a written promise that she would bequeath him her right to the English succession the year before her execution. In the event she never did so, but her death left him the leading Catholic candidate for the succession. As a descendant of John of Gaunt and Edward III he had English royal blood, as king of the greatest power in Europe he had the might to back his right, and in 1587 he was already building the Armada with which he intended to invade England.

Elizabeth needed allies in Europe, but at fifty-four she was too old to gain them by offering her hand in a marriage alliance. She had therefore introduced a new candidate for the succession: James’s English-born first cousin, the eleven-year-old Arbella Stuart, who remained a serious rival to his claim. Her father, Charles Stuart, was the younger brother of Mary, Queen of Scots’s husband, Henry Darnley. She was therefore a great-great-granddaughter of Margaret Tudor. Her mother was the daughter of a courtier called William Cavendish whose formidable wife, known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, remained her guardian.

Bess had been a friend of Catherine Grey and she had used the example of Catherine’s marriage to plan that of her daughter Elizabeth with Charles Stuart. They too were married in secret, but Bess made sure that this union had plenty of witnesses. It never paid out the prize of a male heir, but Arbella was legitimate, royal and English born. When Arbella was orphaned at the age of six in 1581, Bess – who was then married to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury – took her in and gave her a Protestant education suitable for a future ruler. Elizabeth, in addition to seeing her as a pawn in European politics, saw her rather as a useful counterpoint to James’s ambitions and she was the focus of considerable curiosity when Elizabeth invited her to court early in the summer of 1586. Elizabeth was then based at Burghley’s palace, Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, where the Earl of Essex had begun to supplant Sir Walter Ralegh as the Queen’s favourite.

Arbella arrived at court accompanied by her Cavendish aunts and uncles, a slim, full-faced girl with dark blonde hair and slightly bulging blue eyes. Elizabeth allowed her the honour of dining in the Presence Chamber and courtiers showered the eleven-year-old with attention. Essex had talked to Arbella loudly of his devotion to the Queen and Burghley invited her to supper. Arbella went accompanied by her youngest uncle, Charles Cavendish, who reported all that passed in a letter to his mother.²⁹ Ralegh, whose fate would later become strangely bound up with Arbella’s, was sitting next to Burghley, the elder statesman with his long grey beard, Ralegh, dark and sleek, ‘long faced and sour-eye lidded’.³⁰ Cavendish was struck by how polite, even ingratiating, Ralegh was with Burghley: the fading favourite needed a powerful ally to match the support that Essex had in his stepfather, Elizabeth’s first and greatest love, the ageing Earl of Leicester.

Burghley ‘spoke greatly in Arbella’s commendation, as that she had the French and the Italian; danced and writ very fair’ and wished ‘she were fifteen years old’. Cavendish then saw him whisper in Ralegh’s ear. Ralegh replied in his distinctive low voice and Devonshire accent ‘it would be a happy thing’.³¹ The two men appeared to be discussing a possible marriage. The name soon circulating as the most likely groom was that of Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, Philip II’s Lieutenant in the Spanish Netherlands, and, like him, a descendant of John of Gaunt. Elizabeth hoped that personal ambition might dull Parma’s effectiveness in the coming invasion. She also hoped that the promise of marrying Arbella to a Catholic might salve feeling about the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and, with this in mind, she advertised to the French ambassador’s wife that Arbella ‘would one day be as I am’. The ambassador duly reported the conversation home, observing that Arbella ‘would be the lawful inheritress of the crown if James of Scotland were excluded as a foreigner’.³²

Childish and spoilt Arbella was delighted ‘that it pleased her Majesty to … pronounce me an eaglet of her own kind’, but she would soon discover that her position depended on the prevailing political climate. When the Armada was defeated in August 1588, Arbella ceased to be seen as useful, though she failed to sense the change in her circumstances and continued to play the role of Elizabeth’s heir. On one notorious occasion she insisted on taking precedence over all the other ladies at court. Elizabeth seized on it as an excuse to order her to return home to Derbyshire.

In December 1591 Burghley began pursuing fresh attempts for a settlement with Spain. Burghley had always been the most enthusiastic advocate for peace and his chief rivals from the war party, Leicester and Walsingham, were now dead (Leicester had died in September 1588 and Walsingham in November 1591). New plans were made for Arbella’s marriage to Farnese and in order to underscore her importance in the line of succession she was invited back to Whitehall for the Christmas celebrations.

Harington recalled that Arbella had matured into an attractive young woman. He often admired her elegance of dress, ‘her virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music’.³³ Elizabeth, however, began to fear that a party was building behind her and, according to Harington, Essex or his followers had made some ‘glancing speeches’ that suggested she had cause for concern. When the Duke of Parma died the following December, Elizabeth let the marriage plans drop. The friendship with Farnese was now of no use to her and she decided to put the eighteen-year-old Arbella back in her Derbyshire box. She would not be invited back to court during Elizabeth’s lifetime. While Arbella’s name continued to be mentioned in connection with the latest political gossip – a Catholic plot to kidnap her, a new husband who had been found for her – it was only as a bit part in a much bigger story.

In 1593, the first year of Arbella’s exile, the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Essex was appointed to the Privy Council. The average age of his fellow councillors was almost sixty, with the sclerotic Burghley holding a position of unrivalled authority. The only other young member was Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, who had been appointed to the Privy Council in 1591 when he was twenty-eight. Just as Leicester had marked Essex out as his heir, so Burghley was grooming Cecil for his. A contemporary described Cecil as having a ‘full mind in an imperfect body’.³⁴ He was short – no more than five foot two – and hunchbacked. His face was almost feminine with large, vivid eyes that suggested his quick wit. Elizabeth would sometimes refer to Cecil as her ‘pygmy’ and sometimes as her ‘elf’. Others preferred the sobriquet ‘Robert the Devil’.

Unfailingly polite, watchful and measured, Cecil had been raised a courtier from infancy. He was therefore completely familiar with the complex network of human relations that bound people at court by blood, marriage, love, friendship, honour and dependency and he was precisely attuned to its mores. Here the normal rules of morality did not apply. Harington complained you ended up a fool at court if you didn’t start out a knave – but this did not trouble Cecil. As one discourse argued: ‘The courtier knows the secrets of the court, judges them not, but uses them for his particular advantage.’³⁵ Essex did his best to push his young clients forward for high office, but as Elizabeth’s old Councillors died she preferred to leave their posts vacant than replace them, arguing that younger men were too inexperienced – and Burghley was no keener on finding new talent than the Queen. He surrounded himself with fifth-rate men who could pose no threat to him. In this stagnant pool corruption flourished.³⁶

Burghley’s servant John Clapham admitted that ‘purveyors and other officers of [the Queen’s] household, under pretence of her service, would oft-times for their own gain vex with many impositions the poorer sort of the inhabitants near the usual places of her residence’. And it wasn’t only the poor who suffered. ‘Certain it is,’ he recalled, ‘that some persons attending near about [the Queen] would now and then abuse her favour and make sale of it, by taking bribes for such suits as she bestowed freely.’³⁷ There had always been bribery: since official salaries were very low it was expected, but the scale shocked court and country alike. Burghley claimed to be dismayed by it, but his son was well known for his predilection for taking large bribes and Burghley himself covered up or ignored financial scandals involving his appointees at the Treasury and the Court of Wards. Some cost the crown tens of thousands of pounds.³⁸ This mismanagement, combined with the problems of an outdated system of taxation, encouraged Elizabeth’s carefulness with money to become obsessive. As the Jacobean Bishop Godfrey Goodman later wrote, the ageing queen ‘was ever hard of access, and grew to be very covetous in her old days … the court was very much neglected, and in effect the people were weary of an old woman’s government’.³⁹

Harington’s tract complained that a few servants got everything and he had observed even then that ‘envy doth haunt many and breed jealousy’.⁴⁰ The old Catholic chivalric families, who had lost most to the ‘goose-quilled gents’ in the Cecilian elite, remained particularly resentful and they joined their Protestant peers in turning to Essex as the new leader of the nobility. Essex’s stepfather, Christopher Blount, was a Catholic, but his own religious allegiance was advertised by his having a Puritan chaplain. The term ‘Puritan’ had been coined as an insult, implying extremist views and the Puritans referred to themselves simply as the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestant or as ‘the Godly’.* Some had all the bullying fanaticism we associate with the term. There was a joke recorded in the winter of 1602 – 3 that a Puritan was ‘a man who loved God with all his soul and hated his neighbour with all his heart’.⁴¹ But what attracted Essex was their integrity.

Even the Jesuit Robert Persons admitted: ‘The Puritan part at home in England is thought to be most vigorous of any other … that is to say most ardent, quick, bold, resolute, and to have a great part of the best captains and soldiers on their side.’⁴² Many Puritans hoped for political reforms that would sweep away corruption in public life, as well as for religious changes on Calvinist lines. Elizabeth had expected and even hoped that Essex and Cecil would hold differing views and attitudes. She had often used the arguments between Leicester and Burghley to give her the freedom to choose her own path. But Essex and Cecil became more than mere rivals in the Council. They dominated opposing factions with Cecil shoring up his father’s pre-eminence and his agenda of peace with Spain while Essex promoted the aggressive foreign policy previously advocated by Leicester.

Essex often tried to bully and badger Elizabeth into accepting his policies, but his view that she ‘could be brought to nothing except by a kind of necessity’ was not the best way to gain her trust. It became increasingly clear to Essex that Elizabeth was becoming more, rather than less, reliant on Burghley and the only hope for change would lie with her successor. The first determined attempt to browbeat the Queen into naming her heir had come in February 1593 when the Puritan MP Peter Wentworth petitioned Elizabeth to name her successor. Her reply was to put him in the Tower.

Harington recalled how from his cell Wentworth wrote ‘to tell [the Queen] that if she named not her heir in her life her body should lie unburied after her death’.⁴³ He remained in the Tower for four years until his death, all the while stubbornly refusing to keep silent on the issue of the succession – a promise that would have given him his liberty.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface of public life, opposing groups continued to make frantic efforts to secure the succession. The question, after all, was not merely one of who would inherit the throne but who would be the leading men in their government. In the autumn of 1593, Catholic exiles approached Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby (a junior descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Brandon). Derby was known to have Catholic sympathies and the group appeared to hope that he would accept the role of a candidate for the succession. Derby, however, took their letter to the Queen. The incident had all the hallmarks of an attempt by Robert Cecil to ‘waken’ a plot with agents provocateurs, a much-used method of gaining kudos with Elizabeth and destroying enemies, particularly Catholics. Derby’s action may have saved him from the scaffold, but within a few months he was dead anyway, having endured a violent sickness in which he produced vomit coloured ‘like soot or rusty iron’.⁴⁴ The description indicates bleeding in the stomach and the rumour was that he had been poisoned.* Some said the Jesuits had murdered Derby in revenge for his betrayal of them, others that the Cecils had arranged it in order to clear the path for Beauchamp. Elizabeth had become dangerously ill with a fever and the issue of the succession had taken on a new urgency.

Renewed efforts were being made to have the decision on Lord Beauchamp’s legitimacy reversed and the following year Sir Michael Blount, the Lieutenant of the Tower, was caught stockpiling weapons for Beauchamp’s father the Earl of Hertford in the event of Elizabeth’s death. The Earl was put in the Tower with his son. The Cecils and Hertford’s brother-in-law, the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard of Effingham (later the Earl of Nottingham), worked hard for their release, which came remarkably quickly in January.

Essex was by now firmly allied to James with whom he had been in correspondence since 1594.† The King’s candidature appealed to Essex on several levels. The first was that he was a man. Essex once voiced the view that ‘they laboured under two things at this court delay and inconstancy which proceeded chiefly from the sex of the Queen’.⁴⁵ Secondly James, unlike Beauchamp, was indisputably royal. Thirdly James disliked the Cecils, blaming Burghley for his mother’s death, and resenting his championship of Beauchamp’s cause; and lastly, but significantly, it was believed he could attract support from across the religious spectrum. James had already shown himself to be sympathetic to the Puritan cause. In 1590, for example, he had ordered that prayers be said in Scotland for those in England suffering for the ‘purity’ of religion. Catholics, meanwhile, saw James in terms of his being the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom they regarded as virtually a martyr. Some hoped that he might convert when he left Scotland and there was widespread belief amongst Catholics and Protestants that, at the very least, he would offer Catholics toleration. Harington observed that James had never been subject to a papal excommunication and ‘had no particular cause to persecute any side for private displeasure’. James’s accession, therefore, offered a golden opportunity to ‘establish an unity, and cease the strife among us if it be possible’.⁴⁶

Perhaps the most effective enemy of this vision of religious freedom came, however, from amongst the Catholics themselves: the former missionary Robert Persons. Since Campion’s death, Persons had risen to be Prefect of the English Jesuits and was usually resident in Rome where he was described as a courtly figure, of ‘forbidding appearance’. To Persons any Catholic hopes of toleration were a threat to the higher goal of a total restitution of Catholicism and he was now to use his talents as a brilliant propagandist to change the whole basis of arguments on the succession. In November 1595 a book entitled A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England appeared in England published under the pseudonym ‘R. Doleman’.* It took advantage of the fact the Tudors had failed to assert the strict hereditary principle to claim that ‘ancestry of blood alone’ was not enough to gain a crown. A monarch should have all the attributes of honour necessary to majesty and, the book argued, there was no such candidate within the Tudor family. The Doleman book took advantage of every consideration ever raised against the Tudor candidates, crystallised popular prejudices and added new disqualifications. Readers were invited to reflect that in the Suffolk line, Beauchamp and Lord Derby had damaged their royal status by marrying the daughters of mere knights (the daughters of Sir Richard Rogers and Sir John Spenser respectively).⁴⁷ Beauchamp and Derby were, therefore, simply not royal enough to command respect. Of the senior Stuarts, Arbella was said to be of illegitimate descent because Margaret Tudor’s second husband, the Earl of Angus, had another wife living at the time their marriage, while James was disqualified under the Bond of Association. The book further argued that James’s Scots nationality made him a particularly undesirable choice – and here Persons had hit on a raw nerve.

Historically, Scotland was ‘the old, beggardly enemy’, and although the Scottish Reformation of 1560 had ended three centuries of armed conflict the English still despised their impoverished northern neighbour.⁴⁸ For many, the idea of a Scot becoming King of England suggested a ridiculous reversal of fortune. Doleman played up to these feelings, claiming that there was no possible advantage to England in joining with an impoverished country whose people were known for their ‘aversion and natural alienation … from the English’ and for their close ties with England’s Irish and French enemies: James would fill English posts with Scottish nobles and might even oppress the English with foreign armies.

Furthermore, Doleman warned, while some claimed that England and Scotland shared the same religion, the truth was that Scottish Calvinism was ‘opposite to that form which in England is maintained’, with its rituals and bishops. If James became king the nobility would find the church hierarchy torn down and themselves subject to the harangues of mere Church ministers.⁴⁹ His words echoed something the Earl of Hertford had once said of the Puritans: ‘As they shoot at bishops now, so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.’⁵⁰ The fact that episcopacy had been abolished in Scotland in 1593 added credence to the claims.

Having thus dismissed all the Tudor candidates as unworthy, the Doleman book announced that in seeking a successor to Elizabeth ‘the first respect of all others ought to be God and religion’.⁵¹ If this seems a strange argument now it is worth remembering that the rights of the present royal family have been based on this premise since the reign of William and Mary. It held still greater force at a time when kings were believed to rule by divine right.

The Doleman book accepted that each faith would prefer to choose a monarch of their own religion, but it expressed no doubt that a Catholic choice would win through since Catholics were strengthened by the persecution ‘as a little brook or river, though it be but shallow … yet if many bars and stops be made therein, it swells and rises to a great force’.⁵² It was a belief shared within the Protestant establishment. Even Walsingham had once observed that the execution of Catholics ‘moves men to compassion and draws some to affect their religion’. The book’s comments were not, however, designed to spread dismay amongst Protestants, so much as to attract the attention of Catholics. Doleman informed Catholics that they were not only bound to choose a Catholic candidate as a religious duty, they were also blessed with an excellent choice: Philip II’s favourite daughter, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her claim through her father (and thus Edward III) was strengthened by that of her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, a descendant of the Dukes of Brittany to whom William the Conqueror had pledged feudal obedience.

The book claimed Isabella also had the personal attributes necessary in a great monarch. She was ‘a princess of rare parts both for beauty, wisdom and piety’ and, as she came from a rich kingdom, she was less likely to ‘pill and poll’ her English subjects than a poverty-stricken Scot.⁵³ The arguments made the Infanta a powerful and believable candidate overnight. As a final touch Persons mischievously dedicated the book to Spain’s leading enemy at court: the Earl of Essex – he who had attracted such a large Catholic following. ‘No man is in more high and eminent place or dignity,’ Doleman wrote; ‘no man likes to have a greater part or sway in deciding this great affair.’

In his Tract Harington recalled that, as the pivotal year of 1598 opened, the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge ‘did both light on one question that bewailed a kind of weariness of the time, mundus senescit, that the world waxed old’.⁵⁴ The Privy Council was half the size it had been at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign and Burghley was so old and ill he had to be carried into meetings in a chair. He still pursued the cause of peace with Spain without success and the costs fell on a country burdened by a growing population and a series of harvest failures. As food prices rose, wages fell, men impressed for the war returned to vagrancy and theft and sedition increased. There were reports of the poor claiming that Philip II of Spain was the rightful King of England and that life had been better under his wife Mary I. The greatest danger for Elizabeth, however, was the discontent at court.

Years of simmering resentment between the Cecil and Essex factions reached boiling point in June when Philip II was dying and there were new hopes of peace. Burghley was keen to press ahead with negotiations with Spain. There was another terrible famine and he warned of ‘the nature of the common people of England [who are] inclinable to sedition if they be oppressed with extraordinary payments’. Essex, however, realised the power of Spain was waning and wanted to push home the advantage. The Queen supported the Cecils, and Essex’s irritation with her came out into the open in dramatic fashion at a Council meeting attended by Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Admiral and Sir Francis Windebank, Clerk of the Signet. The pretext for the argument was the choice of a new deputy for Ireland. Elizabeth’s choice was Essex’s uncle and principal supporter in Council, Sir William Knollys. Essex tried to dissuade her. When he knew he had failed he lost his temper and as the others looked on with horror, Essex suddenly revealed his pent-up contempt for the Queen, turning his back on her with a scornful look. Furious, Elizabeth hit him around the head and ordered him to be gone and be hanged. His hand went to his sword. Admiral Nottingham grabbed him and Essex checked himself, but he swore that he would not have put up with such an indignity from Henry VIII himself.

As Elizabeth absorbed the implications of her favourite’s behaviour Burghley left court for Bath hoping to recover his deteriorating health. Harington was also making use of the medicinal waters when Elizabeth sent Lady Arundel with a cordial for Burghley’s stomach along with a message, ‘that she did intreat heaven daily for his longer life – else would her people, nay herself stand in need of cordials too’. Burghley’s death, shortly afterwards on 4 August, came as a crushing blow to the Queen; all the more so when it was followed within weeks by the massacre of her troops at Yellow Ford in Ireland. For a decade the administration in Ireland had tried to curtail the power of Ulster’s greatest chieftain, the Earl of Tyrone, feudalising land tenure and centralising power. Tyrone had kept his freedom of action for a time by bribing corrupt officials and fighting proxy wars through followers he claimed he could not control. He had even seduced and married the young sister of Ulster’s chief commissioner Sir Henry Bagenal in an attempt to trap him in a blood alliance. This phoney war had ended on 16 August as Tyrone led an all-out fight for liberation, leaving Sir Henry Bagenal amongst the 2,000 loyalist dead.

The events that followed haunted Harington, as they did the Queen. Essex and his army had reached Dublin in mid-April 1599. The Irish Council advised him against attacking Tyrone in Ulster before the late summer and so he led the army south into Leinster, ‘the heart of the whole kingdom’, before going on into Munster. It was an arduous and bloody campaign. Harington wrote home thanking God, ‘that among so many as have been hurt and slain … and some shot even in the very ranks I was of, I have escaped all this while without bodily hurt’. Essex furthermore was no longer the confident, handsome young soldier he had once been. At thirty-two his hair had grown thin and he had to wear it short, except for one long lock behind his left ear, which he tucked into his ruff. His once round and amiable face was pinched, ‘his ruddy colour failed … and his countenance was sad and dejected’.⁵⁵ He suffered terrible headaches – possibly a symptom of syphilitic meningitis – certainly his sense of judgement was abandoning him.

When Essex heard that his military successes were ignored at court and that he was being criticised for his failure to take on Tyrone directly, he considered bringing the army back from Ireland. He intended to use it to force Elizabeth to name James her heir and dispose of Cecil, Cobham and Ralegh once and for all, but his friend, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his stepfather, Sir Christopher Blount, dissuaded him. Instead Essex made the fateful decision to make a truce with Tyrone against royal orders and return to court to secure royal support for his military strategy. In the months that followed Essex’s subsequent arrest, his supporters had approached James asking him to invade England in support of the Earl. While James worked to raise the necessary funds they published pamphlets justifying Essex’s actions in Ireland. In the autumn of 1600 Elizabeth responded to these paper darts by stripping the Earl of his right to collect a tax on sweet wines. It left him facing financial ruin and Harington had looked on aghast as Essex shifted ‘from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly, as well proves him devoid of good reason or right mind’. He had guessed what lay ahead: ‘The Queen well knows how to humble the haughty spirit; the haughty spirit knows not how to yield.’⁵⁶

Increasingly unstable, Essex was ready to accept the most paranoid theories about Cecil. He knew his rival must be looking for a stronger candidate than Lord Beauchamp, whose candidature had been seriously weakened by the Doleman book. The Jesuit Robert Persons believed that Cecil was interested in Arbella’s claim. Cecil’s wife had died in 1598 and there were rumours in Europe that he even wanted to marry Arbella. Essex, however, became convinced that Cecil was plotting to place the Infanta Isabella on the throne together with her husband and co-ruler of the Netherlands, the Archduke Albert.* He reasoned that Cecil was the leading exponent of peace with Spain and his suspicions were raised further by the mysterious appearance of Cobham and Ralegh at a peace conference that took place in Boulogne in July 1600. They had not been sent in any official capacity and Essex was convinced they were acting with Cecil to make a secret deal with the Infanta and her husband.

Essex’s paranoia was fuelled by those around him, notably his sister Penelope Rich and his secretary, Henry Cuffe. The latter pointed out that Cecil was placing men he could trust in the crucial offices on which the defence of the realm rested. Ralegh had been given the governorship of Jersey in September 1600, ‘there to harbour [the Spaniard] upon any occasion’. Meanwhile, ‘In the east, the Cinq Portes, the keys of the realm,’ were in the hands of Lord Cobham, ‘as likewise was the county of Kent, the next and directest way to the Imperial city of this realm’. The navy and Treasury were in the hands of Cecil’s allies, Admiral Nottingham and Lord Buckhurst, and Cecil had ‘established his own brother, the Lord Burghley’ as President of the North.⁵⁷ Essex ignored the obvious point, made by the intelligence gatherer Thomas Phelipps, that Cecil was too closely associated with the persecution of Catholics to risk promoting a Catholic claim. Instead he decided to pre-empt Cecil’s supposed plans and seize the court.

On 7 February 1601, one of Essex’s inner circle of friends, the Welshman Sir Gilly Merrick, paid Shakespeare’s company 40 shillings to perform Richard II, the story of a feeble and indecisive king who allows the country to go to rack and ruin and is deposed by a glorious subject who then becomes king himself. Cecil had introduced Essex to Shakespeare’s play during a brief reconciliation in 1597 and it had since become something of an obsession with the Earl. This was doubtless what Cecil intended: it was part of his modus operandi to give his enemies the rope with which they later hanged themselves.

The next day, a Sunday, 300 armed men gathered in the courtyard at Essex’s house. About a third of the rebels were soldiers who had served alongside Essex at one time or another. Many were Catholic, and they included several names later associated with the Gunpowder Plot: Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham. Others were Puritan; some, like Sir Henry Bromley, with City connections. A few were blood relatives of Essex. Most strikingly, however, the rebels included what the courtier John Chamberlain called the ‘chief gallants’ of the time: the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, Lords Lumley and Monteagle amongst them, united, above all, by hatred of Cecil.

Essex led his followers through Ludgate towards Paul’s Cross. A small black taffeta bag containing a letter from the King of Scots hung around his neck. The streets were too narrow for the rebels to ride their horses and so they walked, brandishing their swords and crying out: ‘For the Queen! For the Queen!’ People came out from their tall, narrow, shop-fronted, timber and plaster houses and crowds began to gather – but no one came forward. Essex, sweating freely, shouted that Ralegh, Cobham and Cecil were plotting to put the Infanta on the throne and murder him, but the people simply gaped and ‘marvelled that they could come in that sort in a civil government and on a Sunday’.⁵⁸ They did not hold Elizabeth responsible for the actions of her officials, as the court did.

At noon Essex paused at the churchyard of St Paul’s. He had intended to make a speech but by the time he reached it he knew the revolt had failed. Within a fortnight Elizabeth had signed a warrant for Essex’s execution. She had it recalled, but if she was waiting for her one-time favourite to beg for mercy he did not oblige. When the final warrant was signed his only request was to be executed in the privacy of the Tower, so as not to stir up the multitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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