The Cradle King (23 page)

Thy kindness kithed [showed] in loosing life for me

My kindnesse on thy friends I utter shall;

My perrill kindled courage into the[e],

Mine shall revenge thy saikles [innocent] famous fall.

Thy constant service ever shall remaine

As freshe with me as if thou lived againe.
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Luckily for James, news of the raid quickly reached the Provost of Edinburgh, and his advance, supported with a bevy of townsfolk, was enough to cause Bothwell and all but seven or eight of his men to flee. The incident thoroughly unnerved James, who realised that somebody close to him must be implicated, perhaps even Lennox: Bothwell and his men had entered through Lennox’s stables, and Lennox was himself notable for his absence ‘till all was ended’. But nothing could be proven against the Duke.
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The next day, James went to St Giles’ to thank the people of Edinburgh, and spoke of the benefits he had given to Bothwell, and how he showed his gratitude by seeking to kill him, first by poison and witchcraft, and now directly in this attack. But Bothwell still commanded considerable loyalty, and public sympathy for James’s predicament was notably lacking. The following day, 29 December, one of the King’s own chaplains, the veteran Kirk minister John Craig, delivered a sermon before James in which he claimed that the King ‘had lightly regarded the many bloody shirts presented to him by his subjects craving justice’, so God ‘had made a noise of crying and fore-hammers to come to his own doors’. James insisted that the congregation stay after the sermon, so he could purge himself. If he had thought that his feed-servant (meaning the preacher) would deal with him in that manner, James declared, he ‘would not have suffered him so long in his house’. But James’s grand pronouncement was drowned out by the crowd, and Craig left without hearing it.
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A formal proclamation was made against Bothwell on 10 January 1592, officially condemning him as one of the faction of Huntly’s Brig o’ Dee revolt in April 1589. Three days later, James galloped to Haddington, where a sighting of Bothwell had been made, but succeeded only in endangering his own life, when his horse fell into the Tyne: he was saved from drowning only when a yeoman pulled him out by the neck, his courtiers not daring to dive into the water.
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Thoroughly spooked, James left Holyroodhouse for Edinburgh, but his popularity had been severely damaged. Matters worsened two months later when James was implicated, probably without foundation, in the vicious murder of one of Scotland’s most popular young Protestant heroes, the Earl of Moray, by Huntly, whom James had so long protected. Huntly was caught up in a long-standing feud between his family, the Gordons, and the Morays, dating back to the reign of James’s mother. Mary had created her half-brother Lord James Stewart (who later became James’s Regent) Earl of Moray, an earldom which the fourth Earl of Huntly had hoped to gain. On Moray’s death, the title had passed to James Stewart of Doune, husband of Regent Moray’s eldest daughter, and had fuelled his ambition to extend his influence in the north-east of Scotland, which would hit at the Gordons’ powerbase.
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James decided that he had to sort out this squabble once and for all. He ordered that Moray and Huntly should come to arbitration. The enemies made their way south, but arbitration was the last thing on Huntly’s mind. On 7 February 1592, Huntly suddenly and unexpectedly crossed the Forth, turning up at Donibristle, Moray’s mother’s castle, where Moray was temporarily lodging, and put the house to the torch. Moray tried to flee, but ran straight into Huntly’s path, and was murdered in a cave. This bloody end soon became the stuff of legend. One account told of how Moray ran towards the river, his hair and the plume of his helmet in flames, and that Huntly killed him with a dagger blow to the face. The handsome Moray allegedly died saying, ‘You have spoilt a better face than your own.’ Rumour spread that James had ordered the murder, and one ballad embellished it with the suggestion that Moray, ‘a braw callant [brave gallant]’, was the true love of Queen Anna, and ‘micht ha’ been a king’.
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When James went hunting the following day near Innerleith and Weirdie, he caught sight of the fire, but was apparently ‘nothing moved’. Unsurprisingly, ‘the people blamed him as guilty’, citing his hatred of Moray as a supporter of Bothwell, and more generally hating the house ‘for the Good Regent’s sake’. James’s involvement remains obscure: even the ballad claiming Moray as Anna’s lover makes it clear that James ‘forbade’ Huntly to slay Moray, suggesting that the King knew of the plot but did not approve the murder. James called half a dozen ministers to his presence and ‘did what he could to clear himself’, so that they could spread the message to the people; they replied that if he wanted to clear himself, he should hunt down Huntly. James certainly did nothing substantive against Huntly, writing to the Earl to claim that ‘Always I shall remain constant’, and indeed the official proclamation insisted only on the King’s innocence – James said he was like David, when Abner was slain by Joab – and said nothing of pursuing Huntly.
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Whatever the truth, both James and Maitland were encouraged to keep away from Edinburgh, the Chancellor moving to Lethington, while the King wandered the country, pretending to chase Bothwell. In May, in an attempt to win round the Kirk, James called another Parliament, probably at Maitland’s instigation. After the promises at his homecoming from Denmark, action against Arran’s 1584 ‘Black Acts’, one of which had controversially confirmed the status of bishops, was now long overdue. In its place, the May 1592 Parliament now passed a ‘Golden Act’ by which the Kirk was finally allowed to develop its ecclesiastical polity, and official recognition was given to their system of Sessions, presbyteries, synods, and the General Assembly. On one level, this bypassing of the episcopacy was a triumph for the Kirk. But James insisted on keeping another of the 1584 Acts which asserted his royal supremacy, and suggested to the Parliament that they pass an Act which would take action against attacks against him in sermons. When Parliament refused, James ‘chafed and railed against the ministers’.
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Worse was to come: Bothwell was not finished. On 27 June 1592, he launched a midnight attack on James at Falkland Palace. With three hundred men and a battering ram, he attempted to break down the palace gates. James locked himself in a tower, which the Earl continued to besiege until morning, before fleeing again. This time it was self-evident that James had been betrayed by men close to him, a realisation that sent the King into a depression, ‘lamenting his estate and accounting his fortune to be worse than any prince living’, since he was destined to ‘die in himself’ – betrayed to his death ‘by the means of those who are nearest to him and most trusted’.

One of his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, a young laird named John Wemyss, was accused of dealing with Bothwell and put under arrest. Wemyss’s lover, one of Anna’s Danish maids named Margaret Vinstarr, contrived a daring escape for Wemyss through Holyrood’s royal bedchamber, ‘where the King and Queen were in bed’, and let him out at a window ‘where she had prepared cords for his escape’. This incident led to James upbraiding Anna, causing her, and himself, to end up in tears,
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but it was reported that she refused to dismiss Vinstarr, announcing that ‘she will rather go to Denmark than part with Mistress Margaret or any others [of] her domestic servants’.
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Once again, the King’s nervousness sent him moving from one residence to another through the summer and into the autumn; still dogged by Anna, Maitland found himself so unpopular by September that he gave up life at court altogether, and retired to the west of Scotland with friends.
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The King’s lack of action against Huntly was to damage him still further. In the autumn of 1592 another Spanish plot was uncovered. More correspondence with Spain was intercepted, this time blank pieces of paper presigned by Huntly, Errol, Sir Patrick Gordon of Auchindoun and their new ally, the tenth Earl of Angus, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism. A Scottish Catholic named George Kerr was apprehended as he was about to set sail for Spain, and found to be carrying the so-called ‘Spanish blanks’; he confessed under torture that a Spanish invasion, of 30,000 Spanish troops joining 15,000 Scots raised by the conspirators, was being planned under the leadership of the Scottish Jesuit Father William Crichton, now resident in Spain, and that the blank pieces of paper were designed to carry details of the plot. The Kirk reacted with horror to the relevations, with most of their alarm directed at the King himself. James had shown himself to be incapable of taking decisive action against Huntly, despite his repeated and proven acts of treason. Perhaps, it was whispered, the King himself was involved? One document among the ‘Spanish blanks’ seemed to suggest this was a real possibility: a memorandum in which, it appeared, James listed the arguments for and against a possible invasion of England by Scotland in the summer of 1592, concluding firmly that such a plan was impossible. The reasons given for this impossibility are interesting. The current disorderly state of Scotland, it was argued, meant that James could not be sure of conquering his own country, let alone the major power to the south. He certainly could not leave Scotland to lead an army into England, since he would be giving the already troublesome nobles
carte blanche
to undermine his tenuous grip on government. If he were to invade England, it would have to be some time off in the future, and he would do it with as little aid as possible from overseas powers. ‘In the meantime,’ James wrote, ‘I will deal with the Queen of England fair and pleasantly for my title to the Crown of England after her decease, which thing, if she grant to (as it is not impossible, howbeit unlikely), we have attained our design without stroke of sword. If by the contrary, then delay makes me to settle my country in the meantime and, when I like hereafter, I may in a month or two (forewarning of the King of Spain) attain to our purpose, she not suspecting such a thing as she does now, which, if it were so done, would be a far greater honour to him and me both.’ What the memorandum suggests is that James was willing to give an ear to plans to attack England, and to evaluate them, not from a moral highground, but from practical exigency.
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Once again, James could not bring himself to be anything but lenient to Huntly, but this time the Kirk was adamant that the King had to act against this blatant Catholic threat. Accordingly, James mustered his forces and marched north to Aberdeen in February of 1593, but it was clearly only for show: as soon as Huntly and his allies retreated towards Caithness, James gave up the chase. A few token gestures – taking bonds of good behaviour, some garrisons staking out strategic locations – fooled nobody. When he seized the rebels’ estates, only to hand them over to their friends, the English ambassador Lord Burgh wrote that James had only ‘dissembled a confiscation’; compounding this interpretation, the July 1593 Parliament failed to pass the expected act of forfeiture against Huntly and his followers. James’s lack of real action may have been as much due to fear as to love of Huntly: James confided to Bowes that Huntly, Errol and Angus were three of the most powerful nobles in Scotland, and ‘if he should again pursue them and toot them with the horn he should little prevail’.
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Seeing how the Kirk was turning against the King, Bothwell took his chance. In a bizarre turn of events, he now pledged his support to the Kirk, and they reciprocated in kind, minister John Davidson ingeniously explaining that Bothwell was a ‘sanctified plague’ who had been sent to cause James to ‘turn to God’, and away from the papists.
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Elizabeth, too, saw the potential of the rebel Earl as a possible magnet for anti-Catholic activism. Her efforts were not appreciated by her loving cousin, as James made clear to her ambassador, Lord Burgh: ‘Touching that vile man,’ he said of Bothwell, ‘as his foul offences towards me are unpardonable and most to be abhorred for example’s sake by all sovereign princes, so we most earnestly pray her [Elizabeth] to deliver him in case he have refuge anymore within any part of her dominions, praying you to inform her plainly that, if he be received or comforted in any part of her country, I can no longer keep amity with her but, by the contrary, will be forced to join in friendship with her greatest enemies for my own safety.’
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To the Queen herself, he protested that he would rather be a slave in the galleys of the Turk than demonstrate leniency towards a man who had dishonoured him. Elizabeth could hardly think him so ignorant of the honour of a prince, he continued, unless she thought that he, James, had been bewitched by Bothwell and turned into an ass. For once, Elizabeth was moved by the passion of his protest, and wrote a letter in which she partially apologised.
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But the threat from Bothwell still remained. At Holyroodhouse on 24 July, James was preparing to dress, when he heard a disturbance in the chamber next to his own. Rushing in, undressed as he was, he was confronted by Bothwell kneeling next to his drawn sword – a sign that Bothwell considered that he had control of Holyroodhouse, but would not use his power to harm the King. James, always nervous of weapons, was reluctant to trust to such a fine distinction. He shouted that ‘Treason’ was afoot, and rushed to Anna’s bedchamber, only to find the door bolted. Turning back to the outlaw, he screamed that Bothwell might take his life, but would not, like Satan dealing with a witch, obtain his immortal soul. He, James, was a sovereign king, only twenty-seven years old: he would rather die than live out his life in captive shame. James believed not only that Bothwell had been helped by the witches of North Berwick, but that Bothwell had satanic powers of bewitchment – to which James was immune. Bothwell flamboyantly offered him his sword, urging him to strike him down – but luckily James’s response wasn’t required. At the moment, other courtiers entered, and James changed tactic, calming the situation and agreeing to bargain with them. Their discussion ended in a compromise: Bothwell agreed to withdraw from court until he came to trial on the witchcraft charges. The trial, it went without saying, would acquit the Earl; James would then pardon Bothwell for all his other offences, but in exchange, Bothwell would withdraw from court life. Aware of a crowd gathering outside, James appeared at a window to assure them that nothing was amiss.
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