The Cradle King (49 page)

To combat the rumours, in December 1616 James wrote to his Privy Council in Scotland outlining the reasoning behind his proposed visit.
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Reminiscent in some ways of his missive to the same Council in 1589, making the case for his imminent departure for Denmark, the letter’s defensive tone reveals much of James’s true concerns about the possibility, whether real or imagined, of attacks on him. He was alarmed, he wrote, that on his arrival in Scotland he would meet with ‘any unwelcome coldness of a number of our good subjects in that country’, deriving from ‘a prejudged opinion in many of our people’s hearts grounded upon false rumours, either maliciously or foolishly spread, anent [concerning] the causes and errands of our intention to repair thither at this time’. He wanted to take this opportunity to present ‘an ingenuous and sincere profession unto you of the motives inducing us to resolve upon our journey’. The ‘main and principal motive’ he declared, ‘we are not ashamed to confess’ was ‘that we have had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soil and of our birth and breeding. And this salmonlike instinct of our mind restlessly, both when we are awake, and many times in our sleep, so stirred up our thoughts and bended our desires to make a journey thither that we can never rest satisfied till it shall please God we may accomplish it.’ This desire was joined to the practical opportunity to ‘discharge our kingly office the time we are there’ by hearing and resolving suits that required his presence.

Only then did James come to the crux of his letter, concerning fears that he would make ‘alterations or reformations’ of his government ‘either ecclesiastical or civil’. He asked his subjects to ‘have that settled confidence in our honesty and discretion that we will not so much as wish anything to be done there which shall not tend to the glory of God and the weal of that commonwealth and all our good subjects therein’. They should ‘not only for your own parts harbour no prejudged conceit of our intentions upon the grounds of these idle rumours, but also make this our sincere declaration come to the ears of our other good subjects, that we may have comfort of such a joyful meeting there with our people as we for our part shall ever deserve’. Anxious to show their gratitude, the Scottish Privy Council decided that the letter should be placed in the Council’s Register Books, ‘there to remain as a perpetual remembrance of his Majesty’s love, kindness, and affection to this country’.

James and his retinue set out north in mid-March 1617, travelling between ten and twenty-one miles a day, with stops of one or two nights at estates up the east coast.
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Leaving English government largely in the hands of Sir Francis Bacon, now Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, James took with him some of his most trusted servants: the Duke of Lennox, the Earls of Arundel, Southampton, Pembroke, Montgomery, and, of course, Buckingham; John Murray of Lochmaben, and Viscount Fenton. The sizeable train included a clutch of bishops and ministers, including the Bishops of Ely, Lincoln and Winchester and the up-and-coming William Laud, on hand to push the King’s ecclesiastical reforms.
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Each venue welcomed the King with the usual celebrations, and provided the requisite hunting ground. There were other occasional treats: an Easter Sunday sermon by Andrewes at Durham Cathedral, a horse race, and a ‘cocking’ (cockfight), where the King ‘appointed four cocks to be put on the pit together, which made his Majesty very merry’. James, in return, performed his kingly duties. On Sunday 30 March, at Lincoln Minster, he reportedly healed fifty people of ‘the King’s Evil’, scrofula, by the laying on of hands, and fifty-three more on Tuesday 1 April at St Catherine’s.
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Despite suffering from a bad back after another riding accident, James was in high good humour, as Buckingham reported back to Bacon in London: ‘his Majesty, God be thanked, is in very good health, and so well pleased with his journey, that I never saw him better, nor merrier.’
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On Tuesday 13 May, James crossed the Tweed and entered his motherland for the first time in over fourteen years.
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Travelling via Dunglass, Seton and Leith, he made his entry into Edinburgh on the afternoon of 16 May to great acclaim. It seemed that his years in England had finally taught him some skills in relating to his people: as David Calderwood noted, ‘he made his entry on horseback, that he might the better be seen by the people; whereas before, he rode in the coach all the way’.
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Seeing their King, John Hay claimed in his speech of welcome, ‘our eyes behold the greatest human felicity our hearts could wish, which is to feed upon the royal countenance of our true Phoenix, the bright star of our northern firmament, the ornament of our age’.
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The somewhat numbing succession of speeches, eulogies, poems and celebrations, in multiple languages, was captured for posterity in a handsome folio memorial volume entitled
The Muses’ Welcome.
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Not everyone was impressed by Scotland. One English courtier, Anthony Weldon, summed up his feelings. ‘First, for the country I must confess it is too good for those that possess it, and too bad for others to be at the charge to conquer it. The air might be wholesome but for the stinking people that inhabit it, the ground might be fruitful had they the will to manure it. Their beasts be generally small, women only excepted, of which sort there are none greater in all the world.’ There might well be ‘great store of deer’, Weldon admitted, but he was yet to see any: ‘I confess all the deer I met withal was dear lodgings, dear horsemeat, dear tobacco and English beer.’ The efforts of the Edinburgh magistrates went largely unappreciated by Weldon – ‘there is great store of fowl, as foul houses, foul sheets and shorts, foul linen, foul dishes and pots, foul trenchers and napkins’ – with one exceptional success: ‘corn is reasonable plentiful at this time, for since they heard of the King’s coming, it hath been as unlawful for the common people to eat wheat, as it was in the old time for any but the priests to eat the shew-bread; they prayed much for his coming, and long fasted for his welfare’.
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But another anonymous English courtier was impressed by the Scots’ efforts, as he reported to Bacon in London: ‘The country affords more profit and better contentment than I could even promise myself by reading of it. The King was never more cheerful in both body and mind, never so well pleased; and so are the English of all conditions. The entertainment very honourable, very general, and very full; every day feasts and invitations. I know not who paid for it. They strive, by direction, to give us all fair contentment, that we may know that the country is not so contemptible but that it is worth the cherishing.’
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It was not only the English who were carefully scrutinising the meeting of the two countries. The Scottish ministers were on their guard for signs of James’s intentions towards the Kirk. They did not have to wait for long. On 17 May, according to David Calderwood, by now a leading figure in the Kirk, ‘the English service was begun in the Chapel Royal, with singing of choristers, surplices, and playing on organs’.
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The Whitsun communion service on 8 June at Holyroodhouse, where James was staying, was celebrated according to the English fashion, with most of the bishops and several courtiers following the King’s lead by celebrating communion kneeling. Those who did not follow suit were soon officially ordered to conform, and by the following Tuesday, the Edinburgh minister William Struthers preached in Holyrood chapel before James, ‘and observed the English form in his prayer and behaviour’.
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Shortly after, a scandal was provoked when one of the Guard who had died was buried ‘after the English fashion’ by the Dean of St Paul’s, Valentine Carey. Carey asked all those assembled to recommend with him the soul of their deceased brother unto Almighty God. This, reported the newsgatherer John Chamberlain, ‘was so ill taken, that he was driven to retract it openly, and to confess he did it in a kind of civility rather than according to the perfect rule of divinity’. When the corpse was about to be laid in the ground, William Laud donned a surplice, again causing outrage among the Presbyterians. When it came time for communion, one Scottish bishop, Chamberlain continued, refused to take it while Laud remained kneeling.
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On 13 June, a diocesan synod held at Edinburgh appointed commissioners to declare to James that they ‘could not descend’ to the five articles proposed by the King.
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They stressed the danger to the General Assembly: in England, during Parliament, there was no national Assembly, as there was in Scotland: ‘there meeteth only a certain number of the inferior clergy, who sits below in the House of Convocation, like ciphers, giving naked consent of obedience to these things which are decreed by the bishops in the over house.’
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James avoided these tensions for a while by taking a couple of hunting trips, but he had to face the music when Parliament opened in Edinburgh on 17 June, with the King ‘riding in pomp’ from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the Tolbooth; Buckingham, who had recently become the first Englishman to be admitted on to the Scottish Privy Council (five more were to follow during the visit), was singled out as the only English peer to ride with the King.
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For once, James made a speech that avoided most of the bones of contention, and did not mention religious doctrine at all. But James still offended his Scottish audience by doing ‘England and Englishmen much honour and grace’. There was nothing he ‘studied’ harder for, both ‘sleeping and waking’, as to ‘reduce the barbarity’, as he put it, of Scotland to ‘the sweet civility’ of England. He hoped that his Scottish subjects would now be as ‘docible’ to the good features of English culture as they were ‘teachable to limp after’ its bad elements, namely ‘to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes, to take tobacco, and to speak neither Scottish nor English!’
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James attended Parliament every day of its three weeks’ tenure. An English observer, reporting to Bacon in London, told of how James ‘doth strive to shape the frame of this Kingdom to the method and degrees of the government of England’. Despite ‘a momentary opposition (for his countrymen will speak boldly to him)’, his campaign had ‘in part been profitable’. While total success was elusive, James had ‘won ground in most things, and hath gained Acts of Parliament to authorize particular Commissioners to set down orders for the Church and churchmen, and to treat with Sheriffs for their offices by way of composition.’ But James would not trust those commissions. Everything was to have ‘an inseparable reference to his Majesty. If any prove unreasonably and undutifully refractory, his Majesty hath declared himself, that he will proceed against him by the warrant of the law, and by the strength of his royal power.’
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These were James’s last days in his birthplace, and there, on 19 June, he celebrated his fifty-first birthday.
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Over the next few weeks he toured the country. James visited the celebrated coalworks at Culross belonging to Sir George Bruce, younger brother of the Earl of Kinross. The coalworks extended to an area which, at high tide, was under the sea. James, determined to see the works below ground but unfortunately ignorant of this detail, emerged from the coalpit on to a loading platform to find himself apparently surrounded by the sea, in the middle of the Forth. He was reportedly ‘seized by an immediate apprehension of some plot against his liberty or life’ and yelled out ‘Treason!’ His guide quickly reassured the King that he was perfectly safe, and the royal party made a hasty retreat to dry land.
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The King moved on to Stirling on 30 June, where he was greeted by the Commissar Robert Murray with a eulogy to both James and Stirling, as the place of his nurture:

This town, though she may justly vaunt of her natural beauty and impregnable situation, the one occasioned by the labyrinths of the delightsome Forth, with the deliciousness of her valleys, and the herds of deer in her park: the other by the stately rock on which she is raised; though she may esteem herself famous by worthy founders, re-edifiers, and the enlargers of her many privileges, – Agricola (who in the days of Galdus fortified her), Kenneth the Second (who here encamped and raised the Picts), Malcolm the Second, Alexander the First, William the Lion; yet doth she esteem this her only glory and worthiest praise, that she was the place of your Majesty’s education, that these sacred brows, which now bear the weighty diadems of three invincible nations, were empalled with their first hair. And that this day the only man of Kings, and the worthiest King of men, on whom the eye of heaven glanceth, deigns (a just reward of all those cares and toils which followed your cradle) to visit her.
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