The Cradle King (27 page)

In Galloway’s account, it was the evil Gowrie who led James, ‘a most innocent lamb, from his palace to the slaughterhouse’, in the expectation of ‘dinner, a cold dinner, yea, a very cold dinner, as they knew who were there’. ‘Now, judge ye, good people,’ he continued, warming to his theme, ‘what danger your David was in, whom, as an innocent lamb, he was closed up betwixt two hungry lions thirsting for his blood, and four locks betwixt him and his friends and servants, so that they might neither hear nor hearken unto him.’ His delivery against these odds was nothing short of a miracle that could only be ascribed to God. Galloway had proof. His source was not the King, but the very man who ‘should have been the doer of the turn’ – the mysterious armed man. ‘He is living yet, he is not slain, a man well enough known to this town: Andrew Henderson, chamberlain to my Lord of Gowrie.’ Galloway brandished a letter of confession from Henderson: ‘any man that would see it, come to me, and see if they can know his hand writ, for their satisfaction.’
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‘This is the verity,’ concluded Galloway, ‘which will satisfy any good subject: for as these rumours that go, that the King was a doer and not a sufferer, a pursuer and not a pursued, it is not true nor likely.’ Did they really think that, if James had had such a plan, he would have gone to the very place where Gowrie was so well liked, with only ten men to keep him company, men who were all friendly with Gowrie, like Lennox ‘his godbrother’ and Mar ‘his godfather’, who gave him his name when he was baptised. Men who refused to believe the King would ‘perish in their incredulity. There are evidences enough of this verity. Now, what am I that speak these things? One, as I protest before God, who loved the Earl of Gowrie better than any flesh in the earth except his Majesty.’
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Few were convinced by Galloway – ‘partly’, as Calderwood writes, ‘because he was a flattering preacher’, but partly because Henderson was the fourth man to have been unmasked as the ‘armed man’. An early proclamation identified him as Oliphant, ‘a black grim man’. But later he was named as Leslie, and then again as Younger. Younger was at least a Gowrie servant, but he had been safely in Dundee on 5 August. When he heard that he was implicated, Younger started out for Falkland, but was slain before reaching Edinburgh by an overeager captain named Harry Bruce. Patrick Galloway assured James: ‘Now, sir, the man which should have helped to have done the deed, he could not be gotten alive, but there he lieth dead.’ Galloway then set up his friend Gowrie’s chamberlain Andrew Henderson as the armed man. Unfortunately, Henderson was no ‘black grim man’, but ‘a man of lower stature, ruddy countenance, and brown bearded’. Even James, asked while hunting the day after the attack whether Henderson was the armed man, said ‘it was not he, he knew that smaike [ruffian] well enough’.
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Within a week, reported George Nicolson, ‘it is begun to be noted that the reports coming from the King should differ’: the third man in the chamber was given several names, and had apparently disappeared, or been killed; that the mortally wounded Thomas Cranston had signed a declaration clearing the Ruthvens; that Alexander Ruthven was wearing only a silk cut doublet, and that he was unarmed, or found with his dagger still sheathed; that the Earl of Gowrie was found to have no arms on him ‘save a rapier or two with him’. ‘The matter,’ concluded Nicolson, ‘is judged to be otherways than the King reports.’ The increasing suspicion could only be curbed, he suggested, if the King would give some of the conspirators ‘out of his hands to the town and ministers to be tried and examined for the confessing and clearing of the matter to them and the people upon the scaffold at their execution’. If this failed to happen, ‘a hard and dangerous conceit will enter and remain in the hearts of the people and of great ones (how fair soever they carried it to the King) of him and his dealings in this matter’.
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By the end of August, according to Sir Henry Brouncker, ‘the suspicion of the King’s plot upon this poor Earl increases daily’.
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Why would the Ruthvens invite the King to their house to murder him – where they would be held responsible? Why did the King not allow someone else to check out the pot of gold story? Why didn’t they go immediately to the treasure? If the King suspected treason, why did he go with Alexander? If the Earl knew the King was coming to dine, why did he go to dinner before the King came? Why was there not a better welcome prepared? Why did the King go unarmed, if Alexander had a sword? How could James have pulled Alexander ‘that was thrice as strong’ to the window, bring him out of the study, and drive him back to the door of the turnpike? (A miracle, admitted Galloway.) Why was Alexander not kept alive? He could have been taken after the first blow.
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The Privy Council was offended by the ministers’ reluctance to toe the line, and reported ‘hardly of them’ to the King.
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On 12 August, the ministers appeared before James, who demanded that they explain why they had disobeyed his orders. The ministers replied that they could not speak about the particulars about the dangers the King had been in, because they had no proof of them. ‘How are ye yet persuaded?’ the King asked Robert Bruce. ‘Ye have heard me, ye have heard my minister, ye have heard my Council, ye have heard the Earl of Mar touching the report of this treason: whether are ye yet fully persuaded or not?’

‘Surely, sir,’ replied Bruce, ‘I would have farther light, before I preached it, to persuade the people. If I were but a private subject, not a pastor, I could rest upon your Majesty’s report, as other do.’

‘Are
ye
fully persuaded?’ demanded the King, turning to James Balfour.

‘I shall speak nothing to the contrary, sir,’ Balfour replied.

‘But are ye not persuaded?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

William Watson made the same answer, and Walter Balcalquall said that ‘he would affirm all that Mr David Lindsay preached in pulpit, in presence of his Majesty’, which was founded on James’s own report. James was not satisfied. ‘Think ye that Mr David doubted of my report?’ Lindsay was sent for, and confirmed that he was ‘persuaded in conscience’ of this treason. Was this enough to persuade Balcalquall, James demanded? ‘Sir, I would further time and light,’ the minister replied.

‘Are
ye
fully persuaded?’ James asked John Hall. ‘I would have the civil trial going before, sir, that I may be persuaded,’ replied Hall. Peter Hewatt claimed that ‘I suspect not your proclamation’. But do you believe it, James persisted? ‘The President heard what I said the last Sabbath’, replied Hewatt, but James had to hear with his own ears. ‘Sir, I believe it,’ said Hewatt at last.

Thanks to their answers, Hewatt and George Robertson were spared censure. The other ministers were forbidden to preach anywhere in Scotland, required to quit Edinburgh within forty-eight hours and to keep a distance of ten miles from the city, all under pain of death.
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In time, four of them capitulated, and were allowed to return to Edinburgh, but only after suffering the humiliation of travelling around the country and giving repeated public performances of their submission. Finally, only Robert Bruce – the only Kirk man that James had trusted enough to place on his Privy Council during his sojourn in Scandinavia – stood firm, and that stand led to his permanent banishment from Scotland on pain of death. ‘I see, Mr Robert,’ said the King, ‘that ye would make me a murderer. It is known very well that I was never bloodthirsty,’ he claimed. ‘If I would have taken their lives, I had causes enough. I needed not to hazard myself so.’
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Against all odds, James turned the bizarre Gowrie incident into his most successful attack on the Kirk. As even Calderwood had to acknowledge, ‘This occasion was gripped at to overthrow the minister at Edinburgh’ because the Kirk had ‘crossed the court in all their evil proceedings, and was a terror to the session, nobility, and others of the land.’ Now, after 5 August, ‘the King and Council usurped the place and authority of the Kirk’. To James Melvill, it was ‘a sacrilegious sentence’ that ‘usurping Christ and his Kirk’s place and authority, deposit [deprived] them from preaching the Gospel within his country for ever; which was a hundred times war nor [worse than] if by form of civil process he had hanged them’.
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The Kirk was not the only victim. James had also triumphed over the Ruthvens, whose humiliation did not end with their deaths. James swore ‘to root out the whole house and name’.
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The bodies of the two young men were set upon gibbets, quartered, and subjected to public display at the cross in Edinburgh. As traitors, the Ruthvens forfeited all their estates and honours; Gowrie’s sisters were instantly banished from court; and William and Patrick Ruthven fled to Berwick, to seek shelter in England. In November a Parliament decreed that, ‘as the name of Ruthven should be extinguished in all time thereafter’, so the place that was now unhappily named Ruthven should be reborn as ‘Huntingtower’. For saving the King’s life, the young John Ramsay was knighted, and later created Earl of Holderness. On the anniversary of the event, any favour Holderness cared to request was granted.
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Revising his
Basilikon Doron
for publication, James included a new dig at the family: ‘virtue or vice will oftentimes with the heritage, be transferred from the parents to the posterity’, he had written; ‘witness the experience of the last house of Gowrie’, he added. To his brother-in-law Christian IV of Denmark in November 1605 he recalled the occasion ‘when by the favour of the divine power we on the fifth day of August in the year 1599’ – James’s chronology seems to have gone astray here – ‘[we] escaped the impious and wicked hands of traitors bent on our destruction’.
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Even as late as 1623, James noted in a letter he was writing to his son Charles and his then favourite Buckingham that he was writing ‘upon the good fifth day of August’ – still a day of public thanksgiving.
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Initial reports suggested that the alleged plot brought the King and Queen closer: ‘The Queen makes exceeding much on the King and is glad of his happy deliverance’, reported Nicolson a week after the attempt.
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But James’s ruthless eviction from her household of two of the ladies ‘in chiefest credit’ with Anna, Barbara and Beatrix Ruthven, put a different complexion on the case for the Queen.
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In August, her younger daughter Margaret died, and it was erroneously reported at the same time that she had miscarried her current pregnancy.
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Sir George Home, who had become ‘the only man of all other most inward with the King’, took it on himself to advance a theory concerning the Gowrie plot, suggesting that the Queen might have been involved. It was impossible to prove. ‘What the Queen’s part was in the matter,’ wrote Roger Aston, ‘God knows. The presumptions were great both by letters and tokens, as also by her own behaviour after the deed was done.’ James could not be convinced, and was concerned only, in Aston’s words ‘to cover her fully. She has now won so far in to the King by her behaviour towards him as no man dare deal in that matter further. She does daily keep the preaching and entertains the King in a more kind and lovinger sort than ever she did before. She now will obey the King in whatsover, and his will shall be obeyed.’
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Other reports were less sanguine about Anna’s new obedience. By mid-October, according to the deputy governor of Berwick, ‘the Queen of Scots is very narrowly looked unto, and a strait watch kept about her’. It was even reported that after she had given birth, ‘she shall be kept as a prisoner ever after, and the King will no more come where she is. It is said that the Queen says plainly that she will be utter enemy to all that were at the murder of Gowrie save the King himself.’
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It was reported that there was ‘an open diffidence’ between James and Anna, which one correspondent put down to ‘the discovery of some affection between her and the Earl Gowrie’s brother’, Alexander, which had been ‘the truest cause and motif of all that tragedy’.
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Matters came to a head at the dinner table in late October, in a display of what the Master of Gray called the ‘very evil menage’ of the King and Queen. Anna burst out that she knew that James intended to imprison her, but warned him to beware what he minded at for she was not the Earl of Gowrie. He responded that he thought she was mad. He would find she was neither mad nor beside herself, she flashed back, if he did what he intended.
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James laid the blame for her behaviour on her advanced pregnancy.
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Despite this embarrassing public scene, however, the royal couple were soon reconciled, perhaps as a result of the birth on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline, of another son, Charles – by a coincidence, Anna was happily not able to witness the hanging and quartering of the Ruthven brothers’ corpses in Edinburgh’s marketplace the same day.
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