King of England James I - The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Work on this book started at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and finished at the British Library in London, and I am indebted to the librarians and staff of both these great institutions. I am immensely grateful to the Folger for giving me a Short-Term Fellowship in 2000, and to Tom Healy and my colleagues at Birkbeck for allowing me generous research leave. Maggie Pearlstine and John Oates at Maggie Pearlstine Associates encouraged me throughout. At Chatto & Windus, Rebecca Carter was a supportive and challenging editor.

I could not have written The Cradle King without the insights of those scholars who have broadened and deepened our knowledge of all things Jacobean since D.H. Willsons 1956 biography of James. I learned particularly from the work of (in alphabetical order) G.P.V. Akrigg, Leeds Barroll, David Bergeron, Caroline Bingham, Antonia Fraser, Jonathan Goldberg, Maurice Lee Jr., Roger Lockyer, Maureen Meikle, Stephen Orgel, Curtis Perry, David Stevenson, Roy Strong and Jenny Wormald. For ideas, suggestions, comments and help of many kinds, I am grateful to Tom Betteridge, Warren Boutcher, Tricia Bracher, Jerry Brotton, Stephen Clucas, Erica Fudge, Donna Hamilton, James Knowles, Gordon McMullan, Steven May, David Norbrook, Alex Samson, James Shapiro, Bruce Smith, Sue Wiseman, Heather Wolfe and Elizabeth Wood.

Finally, my sincere thanks go to the friends who saw me through: Patricia Brewerton, James Daybell, Will Fisher, Eliane Glaser, Andrew Gordon, Lisa Jardine, Simon Lloyd-Owen, Lloyd Meiklejohn, Kirk Melnikoff, Chris Ross, Richard Schoch, Goran Stanivukovic, Garrett Sullivan and especially Tyler Smith.

Prologue

I N 1603, J AMES I, King of England, made a visit to one of the most southerly of his new possessions, Beaulieu, in the New Forest. All the local nobility and gentry turned out to get their first glimpse of the King of Scots who had just become their own sovereign. Among them was the eighteen-year-old John Oglander, a son of the local landed gentry. Over fifty years later, Oglander jotted down his memories of that royal visit. By then, his life was consumed by the fight to save Jamess son, the embattled King Charles. But his image of James was far from complimentary. King James I of England was the most cowardly man that ever I knew, he started. When James came to Beaulieu, he recalled, he was much taken with seeing the little boys skirmish, whom he loved to see better and more willingly than men. The pantomime of juvenile combat suited the King far better than the real, very bloody thing. He could not endure a soldier or to see men drilled, to hear of war was death to him, and how he tormented himself with fear of some sudden mischief may be proved by his great quilted doublets, pistol-proof, was also his strange eyeing of strangers with a continual fearful observation.

Why would Oglander, a staunch royalist, write such a thing? His other notes on the King were positive enough. Otherwise, he wrote, James was the best scholar and wisest prince for general knowledge that ever England had, very merciful and passionate, liberal and honest. He was a great politician and very sound in the reformed religion. He spoke much and as well as any man, or rather better. And he was the chastest prince for women that ever was, for he would often swear that he had never known any other woman than his wife. Although he was known to be excessively taken with hunting indeed, he was notorious for it he did not, or could not, according to Oglander, use much bodily action, so that his body for want of use grew defective. In Oglanders eyes, this was a King for whom theory and rhetoric were never matched by practice. If he had but the power, spirit and resolution to have acted that which he spoke, or done as well as he knew how to do, Solomon had been short of him.

For Oglander, the answer to this paradox lay in the Kings fearful nature. Throughout his life, James was noted, and lampooned, for his fear of war, weapons, loud noises and unexplained strangers. He referred to them, in his usual grandiose style, as his daily tempests of innumerable dangers. Speaking to the English Parliament after he survived perhaps the greatest threat of all, the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, he made his own diagnosis as to the cause of his fearful nature. They could be traced and dated, he told the Parliament, not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth: and while I was in my mothers belly.

CHAPTER ONE

Nourished in Fear

S COTLAND LOOKED FORWARD to a great marriage. Mary, although a widow, was still a young, captivating Queen, only twenty-three years old, a tall, auburn-haired woman. She came from ruling the sophisticated French court as the wife of King Franois II, and preferred to speak, read and write in French. The groom, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, by all accounts was an equally fine-looking man, taller than his bride, blond and elegant, and just nineteen. The French ambassador reported that it is not possible to see a more beautiful Prince, and he is accomplished in all courtly exercises.

But the ceremony almost didnt happen. As one observer noted, less than a month before the wedding, Henry did not think himself sufficiently honoured by the prenuptial arrangements Mary proposed. He wanted to reign alongside her as King, to have the Crown Matrimonial; Mary insisted that he should wait until he came of age and had gained the consent of Parliament. But Henrys insolent temper prevailed, Its a mark of how little accepted Henry was as King that to this day historians routinely refer to him as Lord Darnley.

The new King Henry was competing with a wife who had been Queen of Scots for twenty-three years, since she was a week old. The only legitimate child left by James V at his early death in 1542, Mary had spent only the first six years of her life in Scotland, under a regency government headed by James Hamilton, second Earl of Arran. Through the intervention of her French mother, Marie de Guise, Mary had left for France in 1548 to receive an education: ten years later she married the heir to the French throne. In 1554, Arran stepped aside to allow Marie de Guise to take over as Regent, and Marie did her utmost to strengthen the bond between Scotland and France popularly known as the auld alliance.

But Maries control on the country was never total. Scotland in the 1550s was witnessing the rise of a new religious movement. Protestants, inspired by the ecclesiastical reformations in Germany and England, began to form themselves into a new Church. They were encouraged by the visit of the Calvinist preacher John Knox, who returned to his homeland in 1555 and preached and celebrated communion across the country. When the Scots Parliament met in December 1557 to approve the marriage of their absentee Queen Mary with the French Dauphin Franois, the Protestant Lords took the opportunity to draw up a formal band, or alliance, pledging to further the Reformist cause in Scotland against the regime of the Regent Marie. Two years later, the same Protestant Lords, known as the Lords of the Congregation, succeeded in persuading Knox to return to Scotland permanently. By now they were beginning to wage war against the Regent and her French-maintained army. Gradually, the Lords of the Congregation, headed by James Vs illegitimate son Lord James Stewart, pushed the Regents forces back to Edinburghs port town, Leith, which they fortified in preparation for battle. English forces were sent by Queen Elizabeth to support the Protestant Lords, but the looming war never materialised. In June 1560 Marie de Guise died, and the impetus of her campaign was lost. On 6 July of that year, a peace was declared at Edinburgh, whereby both the French and the English were to leave Scotland; the English used their involvement to broker an agreement that Mary and Franois would give up their claims to the English throne. Marys half-brother Lord James Stewart took control of the country, and imposed a new Reformation on Scotland, adopting a Confession of Faith which founded a new Kirk (Church), broadly Calvinist in spirit, outlawing the saying of the Mass and rejecting the authority of the Pope.