Electric Review

BOOKS: Foolish wisdom
The Cradle King by Alan Stewart

His mother’s milk
The wonder of Britain is that Scotland hadn’t failed as a state long before its government got the chance to take over England four centuries ago. From the accession of Robert III in 1390 every Scottish sovereign ascended to the throne a minor. James VI became king aged seven months, his mother Mary had herself been queen since she was one week old. Not that the crown was ever worn very securely, with murder and disposition a frequent occurrence in a badly if Godly governed country. Yet the union of the crowns that saw James VI succeed Elizabeth I as monarch of Scotland, England, Ireland (and in style at least, France) endures of course to the present day. Providence? Probably. But contingent certainly, and sustained to an inordinate degree by the fact that it was a Scotch takeover, and not an English conquest which brought the British Isles together. That statutes — governing the succession — of Henry VIII, from sixty and seventy years before resulted in this happy event has a lot to do with Cecilian cunning, and not a little to do with James’s own fecundity. And who knows, if the Scots hadn’t been quite so beastly to their sovereign during his reign there, at a time when previously peripatetic early modern courts began to settle firmly into fixed capital cities, whether the conjoined realms might not have ended up in due course being ruled from North Briton? A Britain governed from Edinburgh for the last 400 years would have been a very different looking place, and we perhaps have even more case to be thankful to Presbyterianism than we previously knew.

One obvious way in which Britain might have been aborted lies in what could have happened if Mary’s first husband, François II of France, had lived a little longer. Had an abscess in his ear not killed the young French king, who knows what manner of regents France would have installed to run Scotland after Marie de Guise’s death in 1560. That, save for this intervention of the grave, Scotland might not in fact be a French department today would surely only be because of its inevitable invasion and conquest by England at some point in the seventeenth century. Though then she would hardly have progressed to being the happy and contented home nation she is now — with Southern Ireland’s surly countenance so much more predictable a fate. With, however, the death of her husband, the teenage queen and widow departed the French court in which she had been raised and returned to her patrimony. By the time Mary returned to become a resident, albeit barely regnant ruler, Scotland had undergone what has must have been the most intensive and comprehensive reformations in Europe. One, moreover, deeply tinged not only by Presbyterian forms of church government, but by the lacerating doctrinal implications of Calvinist thought as well. These clerics were to cause her protestant (though Catholic baptised) son as much trouble as they did Mary herself.

It cannot be said that Mary either ruled or married well. Posterity doesn’t even accord her second husband, Henry Darnley, the dignity of king he himself fought so hard finally to obtain. As just one of innumerable examples of quite how badly Scottish public life was ordered in the sixteenth century, one of the notable events of what must have been the first few months of Mary’s pregnancy with James, was the return from exile of James Hepburn (Bothwell), who was in turn to become her third husband after the murder of her second one. Bothwell had originally been banished for a nameless plot to kidnap Mary, and self-evidently, the original attempt, its repetition and emulation, and its startling lack of originality as a tool of Caledonian statecraft, display the chronic ineffectuality of royal power in Scotland. Poor Darnley was so scorned that he sulked on the day of James’s christening, refusing to take part in any of the public ceremonial because too many of the ambassadors to the Scottish court had been instructed to refuse to recognise him as king. Infamously, this insecurity manifested itself as a lethal jealousy of Mary’s secretary, David Riccio.

‘Signor Davy’ had come to Scotland in the retinue of the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador, and first entered Mary’s household as a singer. By the time he had become her private secretary, he was of course accused of being on intimate sexual terms with the queen (a claim that would haunt James), in addition to propping up her distinctly unfashionable Catholicism. In order to rein in any independent displays of patronage, Mary required that all state papers had to be signed first by her, then by Darnley — but to bring efficiency to administration, she had a seal made of Henry’s signature and presented it to her extravagant courtier Riccio for his use. When Darnley and his accomplices resolved to murder Davy, King Henry insisted on one piquant detail: that he should be killed in front of Mary. To this day, at Holyroodhouse, there’s a reddish stain in the Queen’s apartment purporting to be Riccio’s blood, and 53 times in all they stabbed him. Though not before he had hid behind Mary, clinging vainly to her pregnant belly, in an effort to save his life. Scotland bumbled on, and in due course, after seeming reconciliation, Darnley and a servant were exploded. The noise woke Mary and most of Edinburgh up, but most probably was an accident, the two men first having been strangled, possibly by, or in the presence of Bothwell.

The infant James was soon placed by Bothwell’s command in Stirling Castle, apart from Edinburgh, the court and his mother (this year, 1567, was the last time the one year old saw his mother), and subject to the first in a long line of governors. Bothwell raped, then married Mary; ‘confederate’ Lords rose in Edinburgh, and without even a contested battle, defeated Mary and Bothwell. Mary broke her truce but then was defeated in the field at Carberry Hill, was compelled to abdicate by the victorious and protestant peers, and so in 1567 left Scotland, never, as it turned out, to return. Thus James became a cradle king.

A good education is a dangerous thing
Whilst James grew, the Scottish regency proceeded as per normal with its habitual quotient of murders, uprisings and revolts, but with the departure of Mary, these became ever more disputes within the context of a protestant state. His most influential tutor was George Buchanan, one of Europe’s foremost scholars, and sometime teacher of Montaigne. This was not a happy pairing, and James reacted against most of what he was taught — the constant diet of how princes could lose their legitimacy being not unreasonably trying. In the end, Scottish politics being as viperous as they were, no entrenched rival emerged to displace the infant, and as soon as was plausible, the regency gave way to personal rule by the teenage James.

As King of Scotland, James faced the same tumult all his recent predecessors had done, but with a certain personal disinclination for the more physical aspects of contemporary kingship. More bluntly, he wasn’t very brave, didn’t like crowds, was overfond of arguing for a sovereign, and, it may — or may not — have been burdensome for him to marry. He did, obviously, and to jump ahead, the issue of that marriage was clearly central to his securing the English throne: being now legitimate, male, protestant and, soon enough, with male heirs assured. His Danish bride-to-be got shipwrecked in Norway en route to Scotland, and romantically James eventually tracked her down there for a wedding, before an inebriated honeymoon in Denmark, home to Europe’s most renowned drinkers. In a life that, to be sure, had too much ‘colour’ as far as its subject was concerned, this was to be the last of his simple pleasures. Or at any rate, it was the last uninterrupted period of pleasure. James all his life, in England as in Scotland, hunted fanatically. Indeed estimates for his being in the field (and thus away from the apparatus of government) show a monarch either heroically self-indulgent, or painfully determined to govern as seldom as possible.

When Anna was eventually brought to Scotland (are the many months of James’s absence a sign of how secure he now felt on his throne, or how uncongenial it was to have to sit on it?) life resumed its usual tenor. The new queen required a coronation, and James wished her too to be anointed. The Kirk saw popery, and only assented when this act was presented as being civil rather than religious in nature. What would have become of James had not Edward VI died childless, then Mary Tudor, then Elizabeth, is impossible to say. Henry’s last will provided, in the improbable circumstances above, for the succession to go through the line of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, but more conventionally, what prevailed was descent through that of his elder sister, Margaret, and her line (she was James’s great-grandmother, having become Queen of Scotland). From Mary of Suffolk came, by chance, too much Catholicism, and too many women, so James, in Elizabeth’s twilight years became every which way more attractive to her statesmen. Yet, in those last years, the discrediting news out of Scotland continued apace. The Gowrie murder plot had James being invited by a hunting host to come and examine gold discovered mysteriously in a castle, whereupon the King was supposedly set upon by his host, but managed to break free and raise the alarm which led to his assailant’s death. As the pamphleteers were happy to point out, the inconsistencies in this episode were legion. In death Elizabeth freed James from governing in Scotland, and so 400 years ago James’s legendary, and honour-bringing, progress South began.

No fairer sight
I’m not, I’m happy to say, a member of that perfumed troop, the Stuart revisionists, and have read this book for pleasure. Alan Stewart writes marvellously well, and James has received a fair biographer who, as far as I can tell, has mastered and elucidated all the many complex elements this story entails. If the book has a solitary defect it lies in the abandonment of Scotland. Biography, I suppose, demands concentration on James, but James is of interest to us because he was a King, and a crucial one too. His Northern Kingdom is somewhat neglected after 1603. A related point could be made that between 1603 and 1625 much happened, in Ulster and the Americas, that was to become important. It would verge on an anachronistic back-reading of history to expect too much on the latter, but the plantation was, and seen to be as it was undertaken, a signal event in the governance of the three kingdoms — and could, I thought, have been addressed in slightly greater detail. Just as the Castillian unification of Spain a century earlier was the prelude to her imperial expansion, so too does the Stuart marrying of England and Scotland lay the course of ours. That caveat to one side, and in truth it’s doubtless no more than hankering after a longer book, this is a superbly well-balanced life.

Lay readers, whether of Stuart history or of theology of any sort, should be most grateful to Dr Stewart for his instructive detailing of James’s religion. This subject becomes ever more difficult to present to a dechristianised audience, and is tremendously well done here. James hugely admired Hooker and was disappointed, on coming to the English throne, to learn that he was dead. For Stewart

James’s reaction to Hooker’s writings is telling. [It] indicates James’s preferred method of theological debate — he was less concerned to return ad fontes, to interrogate the earliest sources of a particular scriptural passage, than to read the scripture in association with its accumulated interpretations . . . In practice, this meant that James tended towards an intellectual conservatism, preferring to trust the accretions of debate from the entire Christian heritage over the potentially dangerous findings of radical scholarly excavation.

Although a firm protestant, James’s youthful distrust of ministers, often literally, preaching sermons at him, and his rule, meant that he had reacted firmly against Scottish Presbyterianism’s Calvinist core. His Arminianism rejected predestination, and accepted that some Christian truths had been channelled down from the early church through the unreformed Catholic one.

The great Hampton Court Conference that led to the authorised version of the Bible was typical both of James’s undoubted scholarly wisdom, and yet still of his, if not necessarily foolishness, then his unwisdom in some things. All his life James loved to debate and pamphleteer. His Covnter-Blaste to Tabacco was, like most of what he wrote, right, as well as being formally anonymous, but equally, it was soon known to his handiwork. Jousting with impious cardinals was a task that required months of writing, and the employment of senior counsellors to this end. James’s books were, on the whole, not the best form of display his learning took. There’s an argument to made that this is the peril of cleverness in kings, but the King James’s Bible is a mighty defence.

For his religious factions in England, ‘the net effect of the Hampton Court Conference was precisely the opposite of what the Puritans wished: the imposition of a stricter orthodoxy within the Church’. Which is to say, an orthodoxy inconsistent with Calvinism, and steadily less tolerant of it. ‘In seeking conformity, James gave a name and a purpose to nonconformity’, and the Puritans lived on beyond him to trouble his son. Their vehicle, Parliament, was but one of the essential differences between the Kingdom James had learned to govern in, and the ones he now ruled from. James, with the weak Scottish thing he was used to, underestimated the power of this estate in England. Stewart though places above all else (and the place of Parliament must fit into this) the challenge James felt he faced to the exercise his authority from the law. The warp and weave and weight of English Common Law was the atypical experience for any monarch among his European peers. Did, for instance, the law ‘protect’ (for which read, constrain) the King, or did the King protect the law? James conceived of his place in the order of things being very much in line with the latter, and thus with Parliament and Puritans, so too did jurisprudence afflict him. That said, there was a greater threat than these three — and indeed, a greater threat to them than James (or, for that matter, Charles) would ever be: Catholicism.

Gunpowder, treason and plot
It’s a sign of how judicious this book is that the detail of the Gunpowder Plot is not overdone, but there’s no escaping what was the transformative event of the reign: to be witlessly modish, this was James’s September 11th. The admirable Guy Fawkes openly stated after his capture that there was no other business in it than religion. And the matter, for the sake of religion, potentially encompassed the destruction of the entire state: King, Lords, Commons, Bishops, Judges, gentry and clerks all were to go up in an instant. Such a genuine threat caused hysteria of the sort in our own time that leads to excruciatingly named legislation like the ‘USA Patriot Act’ (or in its Jacobean nomenclature, ‘An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants’). James, a man inclined by nature and circumstance to toleration, had to wonder what it meant that

Christian men, at least so called, English, born within the country . . . should practise the destruction of their King, his posterity, their country and all? [For whilst it did not follow] that all professing that Romish religion were guilty of the same, [equally] it is true that no other sect of heretics, not excepting the Turk, Jew, nor Pagan, no not even those of Calicut, who adore the Devil, did ever maintain by the grounds of their religion, that it is lawful, or rather meritorious (as the Roman Catholics call it) to murder princes of people for quarrel of Religion.

Catesby and Fawkes sealed the fate of the old religion, and this act deserves all the prominence folk memory gives it. Without the Gunpowder Plot, and the reaction that followed (the Oath of Allegiance was merely one part of the confessional state which was laid down in its wake), the late seventeenth century last gasps of Catholicism in Britain would not have met the implacable challenge they did.

The rest of the reign in England was safer failure. James’s English governments were populated by a bewildering and strictly consecutive array of favourites — Ramsey, Herbert, Carr, Villiers . . . — which led to the Household strife historians just of England find so unappealing, but which to James must have marked a far superior form of carry on to the lethal happenings of his Scottish youth. He even seemed to warm, to a degree, to the crowds, and therefore play the King that bit better. This was most apparent when, after 14 years, he made his solitary but massively successful return to Scotland. Towards the very end, there was the ludicrous jaunt of Charles and Buckingham (heir apparent and first minister), in disguise, to Madrid, to (unsuccessfully) try and woo the Infanta. James’s foreign policy was exposed and deficient at the time of his death (thanks to the actions of his son-in-law, but that’s another line to follow some other time). His death released James at last from the weight under which he wriggled all his life, but though he was hardly cut out to be the King he must have thought he should be, by the proper test of these things, he must be judged among our finest. His reign united, if not yet in the Union he wanted, the country and confirmed it in its religion. Few other countries enjoyed such peace; and Scotland has never looked back.

Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I [Chatto & Windus, £20.00, pp. 438]

John Rugby, April 3, 2003 10:57 PM