The Cradle King (14 page)

In conclusion, Fontenay wrote, ‘he is a true son of his mother in many things, but principally in that he is weak in body and cannot work long at his affairs, but when he gives himself to it he does more than six others together’ – indeed ‘sometimes he has wished to force and keep himself six days continually at accounts, but that immediately after he never fails to be ill. He told me that on the whole he resembled the jennets [small horses] of Spain, who have only a brave course, otherwise the continuation carries them away.’ In one aspect, however, James’s sympathy for his mother was less than total: ‘At one thing only I am astonished,’ confided Fontenay: ‘he has never inquired anything of the Queen of her health, or her treatment, her servants, her living, and eating, her recreation, or anything similar, and nevertheless I know that he loves and honours her very much in his heart.’
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Fontenay had reason to worry about James’s affection for Mary, as the months ahead would prove only too dramatically.

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Once James’s new regime had consolidated its success at Stirling, Elizabeth had no choice but to deal directly with the King. In August 1584, she sent Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon to negotiate an alliance. England felt her position to be increasingly precarious: relations with Spain were collapsing; the Spanish ambassador had been expelled from London in January; and war with Spain was now perilously near. Hunsdon met Arran at Fouldon Kirk, near Berwick, and the groundwork was laid for future negotiations. With channels of communication to England open again, James had less time for the proposed Association with his mother. He was encouraged in this stance by a new influence in his life, Patrick, the Master of Gray, who had become friendly in France with Mary’s agent, the Archbishop of Glasgow, and soon become a trusted part of Mary’s international circle. Despite his intimacy with the Queen, Gray was a staunch Protestant, and on returning to Scotland in 1583 he started passing on intelligence about Mary to James, intelligence that inevitably lessened James’s support for his mother. In the autumn of 1584, James cut off contact with Mary.
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The next English ambassador to Scotland, in spring 1585, was Sir Edward Wotton. Now Elizabeth was talking money, offering James a pension of £4,000 per annum. It was enough to make James renounce the Association plan entirely, much to the distress of his mother, who felt betrayed. There was another effect of this shift in priorities: as James turned towards Gray and England, Arran fell out of favour. As Fontenay wrote, ‘I do not know what to say of Monsieur de Arran for fear of lying. Everyone hates him like the Devil.’
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Soon Arran found himself sacrificed to Anglo-Scottish relations. A perennial source of tension between England and Scotland were the persistent Border disputes. On 27 July 1585, Scottish and English representatives met to settle the disputes, but instead violence flared. Sir Thomas Ker of Ferniherst, the Scottish Warden of the Middle March, fell into a quarrel, shot and killed Lord Francis Russell, the son of the English Earl of Bedford. Since Ker was an Arran appointee, it was easy enough for Arran’s enemies to point the finger at Arran, and several accused him of arranging the killing to scupper relations with England. In truth it was probably an accident; but Wotton’s reaction turned it into an international incident. Desperate not to let relations with Elizabeth suffer, James wept publicly and imprisoned Arran at St Andrews. The imprisonment lasted only a week, but the damage to the Earl was done: the King had shown that he would sacrifice him if necessary. Gray hinted at this to England, and in October 1585 Elizabeth ordered the exiled lords back into Scotland, where they headed straight for Arran who was with the King at Stirling. Without time even properly to provision the castle, James was highly vulnerable. On 2 November, a considerable army appeared in front of Stirling, headed by Mar, Glamis, Angus and Lords John and Claud Hamilton. Inside, Arran accused Gray of plotting the return, but Gray managed to persuade James of his innocence. Realising he was beaten, Arran fled the following morning.

The same day, James received the rebel lords into his presence in Stirling’s Great Hall. Both sides knew that they had to negotiate. The lords fell on their knees and protested their loyalty. The King answered their supplication with good grace and agreed not to enforce so strictly ‘the Black Acts’, although they would remain on the books. He allowed exiled Kirk ministers to return to Scotland; Andrew Melvill, though, was singled out to be despatched to the north of Scotland on a wild goosechase to seek and convert Jesuits. James gave in to demands that Arran should be stripped of his chancellorship and his earldom; in return the lords agreed not to pursue him. But it was the end of Arran. Reduced once again to plain ‘Captain James Stewart’, he disappeared from public view, meeting his end in 1596 when he was murdered by a nephew of Morton, as part of a vendetta.
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The formal treaty with England was finally signed on 5 July 1586. Since the first draft contained nothing pertaining to the succession, James proposed a clause that read ‘That the Queen should in no way directly or indirectly prejudice the King’s title, or at any time give declaration of any other to succeed her in her crown and realms.’ Elizabeth replied that she did not find such a clause ‘convenient’ in the treaty, but she agreed to write a letter ‘under her hand and seal’, provided that ‘title’ was replaced by ‘pretended title’.
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Ultimately she agreed the wording ‘that nothing shall be done to the prejudice of any title he may pretend unto this crown, unless by the said King’s unkind usage towards her Majesty, which God forbid, he shall justly deserve the contrary’.
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But even as it was being signed, another simmering scandal was about to boil over. On 11 August 1586, Mary Queen of Scots was arrested on charges of conspiring to kill the Queen of England.

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Among the many facets of English Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham was a flair for intelligence. Recruiting a team of expert cipherers, linguists, agents and double agents, he could probe into virtually any underground network, even into private households. Most of his energies went into tracking down Catholic conspiracies – many of which were often supported by Spain, Rome or the Jesuits – and he knew well that Mary was a highly attractive martyr-cum-saviour figure for these plotters. For years he had been unable to implicate Mary in any particular conspiracy. Then his team unearthed the Babington Plot. Anthony Babington, a Roman Catholic, Derbyshire landowner, had once been a page in the household of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary’s gaoler between 1569 and 1585. He concocted a remarkably inept scheme that would culminate in the death of Elizabeth. Having detected the conspiracy, Walsingham swung into action, intercepting and reading correspondence between Babington and Mary before allowing it to continue to its intended destination. In this way the plot progressed, while English intelligence knew of every move.

Mary usually avoided committing her plans or views to paper, but this time she let her guard slip. Perhaps her lack of caution was in reaction to the harsher regime to which she had been subjected since early 1585, under the strict guardianship of Sir Amias Paulet. In July 1586, Mary expressed approval of the Babington Plot in a letter. At the beginning of August, the conspirators were arrested and interrogated; Mary was arrested while in Tixall Park on a staghunt – one passion she shared with her son – and her confinement was made more secure, by denying access to her secretaries, Mary’s route to the outside world.
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James’s reaction was not sympathetic. He had just signed the Treaty with Elizabeth, and Mary’s actions cast him in a bad light. The resident French ambassador in Scotland, Monsieur de Courcelles, reported James as saying that ‘the Queen, his mother, might well drink the ale and beer which herself had brewed’.
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Nevertheless, it would not look good for him to be in support of his mother’s execution, should that possibility arise. Anxious to know how to play the situation, James sent a representative to England, one Archibald Douglas, a kinsman of the late Regent Morton. Douglas had fled south in 1581, fearing retribution for his part in both King Henry’s murder and Morton’s execution. In England he had found gainful employment acting as an intelligencer for Walsingham until the spring of 1586 when he was repatriated and, in a widely condemned farce of a trial (‘the filthiest inquiry that was heard of in Scotland’),
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found not guilty of both murders. Now Douglas met Walsingham, who suggested that James should not intercede for his mother: if he did, it might be thought he approved of her actions. At the same time though, Gray told Douglas that ‘the King is very instant [importunate] for his mother’ and intended to send Gray down ‘with a commission to that effect’.
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James’s show of concern for his mother was a political necessity in Scotland. North of the border, Mary was popularly regarded as a victim of English oppression, even by those who had not liked her during her years in government. Ignoring Douglas’s advice, James decided to send another ambassador to plead for her life, and chose William Keith of Delnies, a young member of his household. On 20 October, Keith carried a letter from James to Douglas, who was representing the King in London. The letter betrays James’s desperation that his mother should not die – but for
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sake, not hers. ‘Think not that any dealing will do good if her life be lost, for then adieu with my dealing with that estate [England]; and therefore if ye look for the continuance of my favour spare no pains nor plainness in this case … and in this request let me reap the fruits of your great credit there either now or never.’
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By this time Mary’s trial was underway. Her judges included several senior English Privy Councillors gathered at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire. Mary had refused to accept that the commissioners could judge her, since they were not her peers, or that she could be charged with treason against Elizabeth, since she was not Elizabeth’s subject. ‘As an absolute Queen I cannot submit to orders,’ she declared, ‘nor can I submit to the laws of the land without injury to myself, the King my son, and all other sovereign princes.’
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Her protests notwithstanding, the trial had gone ahead. Mary initially denied any knowledge of the conspiracy, or having corresponded with Babington. But when the confessions of Babington and others were read, along with those of her two secretaries, she admitted that she had tried to bring about her own escape, and to support the cause of the Roman Church. News of the trial reached James at the end of September along with a letter from Douglas recounting a conversation with Elizabeth. The Queen had suggested that if she ‘did justice against the mother’ the net effect was ‘nothing else but [to] advance the son’. Douglas replied to Elizabeth that James ‘could not be forgetful of his own honour, whatsoever she [his mother] was’, and that he was under instructions to let Elizabeth understand that James’s ‘good nature’ would shine through despite his mother’s ‘ingratitude’. Elizabeth retorted abruptly by pointing to Mary’s past treachery: ‘if the half of that good nature had been in his mother that I imagine to be in himself, he had not been so soon fatherless’; a woman ‘that could not for his good bearing spare the father, how can any be persuaded that she will spare the son that she plainly affirms in her letters hath done her wrong?’
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Reassembling in Westminster’s Star Chamber on 25 October, the commissioners declared Mary guilty of ‘compassing and imagining since June 1st matters tending to the death and destruction of the Queen of England’. On 5 November, Keith arrived in London, bearing James’s letter, and he and Douglas secured an audience with the Queen on the 10th; Elizabeth was noncommittal, as was her wont, but promised an answer within a few days. On the 12th, however, the English Parliament urged the Queen to order the execution; four days later, Elizabeth despatched two messengers to inform Mary that she should prepare to die. Douglas reported back that the Queen was ‘in extreme danger of her life’.
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In Scotland, James was criticised for his apparent inaction: some of his councillors urged him to understand ‘what an injury it should be, if the Queen of England did put her hand in his blood; the reproach it would be to him among all Christian princes; the small account he should seem to make of his mother’s honour, and his own natural duty’. James responded ‘that he loved his mother as much as nature and duty bound him, but he could not love her conditions; for he knew well that she bare him no more goodwill than she did the Queen of England’. He knew that Mary had often tried to dethrone him and replace him with a Regent. With his own eyes, he declared, he had seen a letter from Mary to the French envoy Fontenay in which she asserted that if James did not ‘conform himself to her will, and follow her counsel and advice, that he should content himself with the Lordship of Darnley, which was all that appertained unto him by his father’. It therefore ‘behoved him to think of his own affairs’. Mary must stop her ‘practices and intelligences’, and ‘in truth, it was meet [suitable] for her to meddle with nothing but prayer and serving of God’. The bottom line, he told George Douglas, was that ‘it was not possible for him to agree with her, being of a religion contary to his’. When Douglas pointed out that Mary retained the religion she had been brought up in, just as he did his, James retorted that ‘he had been brought up among a company of mutinous knave ministers, whose doctrine he had never approved; but he knew his religion to be the true religion’.
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