The Cradle King (10 page)

James made his formal entry into Edinburgh on Friday 17 October at the West Port. He was welcomed by the town’s magistrates, and about three hundred citizens in their finery, under a magnificent purple velvet canopy. There he watched a performance based on the judgement of Solomon, deciding which of the two women claiming to be a baby’s mother was telling the truth: Solomon was later to become one of James’s favourite scriptural characters, after whom he consciously fashioned himself. After listening to a harangue in Latin by John Sharp, he progressed to the old port of the Strait Bow, where a globe hung, opening artificially as he passed to reveal a young boy who presented to the King a pair of silver keys to the town. Singers, accompanied by viol-players, sang the twentieth psalm. At the Tolbooth, which was decorated with the craft guilds’ standards, were four ‘fair young maids’ representing the cardinal virtues of Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence, all of whom made an oration. A firework Wheel of Fortune was ignited. As James processed to the Great Kirk, he was invited in by ‘Dame Religion’ to hear a sermon by James Lawson on Psalm 2: 10, exhorting James and his subjects ‘to do their duty, to enter in league and convenant with God’.

Further up the High Street at the Mercat Cross, a man in a ‘painted garment’ and a garland of flowers represented Bacchus, sitting on a puncheon, a large beer cask. He welcomed James ‘to his own town’, quashed several glasses and threw them into the crowd. According to eyewitness accounts records, some three puncheons – over two hundred gallons – of wine were used. The Salt Throne was the scene for a representation of the genealogy of the Kings of Scotland, a trumpet fanfare, and a cry of ‘Well fare to the king!’ The Nether Bow boasted a representation of James’s horoscope, ‘the conjunction of the planets, as it was in the time of his nativity’, with ‘Ptolemy’ conveniently on hand to describe the future happiness described in his stars. At the abbey, the town of Edinburgh presented James with a cupboard worth six thousand marks. The glamour of the day’s festivities overshadowed the injuries caused to several spectators by the overcrowding in the narrow streets.
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While Edinburgh looked eagerly to the King, James only had eyes for d’Aubigny. It was not long before the King’s affection for his French cousin, unguardedly and physically displayed, was public knowledge. Sir Henry Woddrington recorded how James was ‘persuaded and led by him, for he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’.
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The very openness of his affections prompted some observers to suggest that their relationship contained something more personal and intimate, or ‘inward’ in the language of the times. The clerk to the Privy Council, David Moysie, wrote how ‘his Majesty, having conceived an inward affection to the said Lord Aubigny, entered in great familiarity and quiet purposes with him’.
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Later commentators, with the dubious benefit of hindsight, have seen James’s affection for Esmé as the prototype for a whole string of relationships with men which would become a lifelong pattern. A typical example is John Hacket who wrote of ‘the sweetness of this King’s nature’ that caused ‘from the time he was fourteen years old and no more [in fact he was thirteen], that is, when the Lord Aubigny came into Scotland out of France to visit him, even then he began, and with that noble personage, to clasp some one
gratioso
[favourite] in the embraces of his great love, above all others’.
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But Hacket was not born until 1592, thirteen years after the Lord Aubigny came into Scotland, and he was accused of ‘filching’ his information from the historian William Camden, himself not familiar with Scottish affairs of this period. Moreover, James’s love for d’Aubigny was different in kind from the passions that dominated his adult life. His later loves were typically callow young men whom James attempted to mould, acting as a teacher, or father figure; but in this relationship it was d’Aubigny who played the sophisticated older man. From him, James learned of the culture of the French court, a world that his mother had been part of and different indeed from the fortress existence at Stirling. D’Aubigny seems to have reciprocated James’s love, tenderly calling James – who had been taught to fear Buchanan as
his
‘master’ – ‘mon petit maistre’.
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While d’Aubigny’s love may have been sincere, it was all too easy for opponents to see his influence as corrupting and they were only confirmed in their view by events at the Parliament that began in Edinburgh on 20 October 1579. The Kirk ministers in particular were none too happy with the direction in which James’s emotions were led. While the Parliament reiterated the act made in the first year of James’s reign concerning the Confession of Faith, establishing the Kirk, they were dismayed when, shortly after the Parliament, d’Aubigny purchased a dispensation to hold markets in Tranent on the Sabbath, and a
supersedere
to prevent him from ‘being troubled for a year for religion’, effectively an immunity from the pressures of the Kirk to conform. As ‘crafty fellows’ flocked ‘under his wings’, d’Aubigny’s powers grew. At the Parliament, he was appointed commendator of Arbroath, a post forfeited by Lord John Hamilton; soon after, he became Keeper of Dumbarton Castle – this appearing particularly sinister to the Kirk, since Dumbarton’s strategic position in the Firth of Clyde meant the castle could be used as a base to ‘allure the King, and transport him to France at his pleasure, or receive forces out of France’.
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Not all observers were so negative. The writer of a ‘Memorial of the present state of Scotland’, written on 31 December 1579, believed that the Kirk ministers were ‘resolved of Monsieur d’Aubigny’s good inclination to religion’. He confirmed James’s intimacy with d’Aubigny, but claimed that d’Aubigny had worked to consolidate Anglo-Scottish relations by telling James of the ‘idle and licentious life’ of the French King, which made Henri ‘odious’ to him. Significantly, the ‘Memorial’ also records an early instance of what was to become James’s abiding passion – to ‘delight the fields in hunting and riding’, although it also noted that his relative poverty meant that he had only a handful of horses to ride.
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In March 1580, James put pressure on Robert Stuart to resign as Earl of Lennox and gave the title to d’Aubigny. Bowing to the Kirk, James persuaded Lennox to come to Edinburgh in April ‘to be instructed by the ministers who mean to labour on him till the first of June’, to ensure his proper conversion to Protestantism; the King himself helped the worthy cause by giving Lennox copies of the Scriptures in French. By June 1580, the ministers and the Scriptures had done their work: Lennox wrote to the General Assembly announcing his conversion, and declaring that God had called him to a knowledge of his salvation. At the same time, and clearly as a reward, James admitted Lennox to the inner circle of government, the Privy Council.
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But Lennox had his most lasting impact in his rearrangement of James’s household, drawing on his experience of the French court of Henri III. He invented for himself a new and powerful office: Lord Great Chamberlain and First Gentleman of the Chamber. As Chamberlain, Lennox undertook the role of the Master Household, organising and provisioning the King’s household, while as First Gentleman of the Chamber he ensured his continued intimacy with the King. Lennox thus had a hand in government, control over the King’s household
and
the King’s ear: a remarkable concentration of power.
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Many felt threatened by the Frenchman, but it was Morton who was most at risk. Lennox became a magnet for his enemies, most notably Argyll, and Morton, feeling increasingly marginalised at court, disappeared to his country estates. The court soon descended into fearful whispering. Argyll let James know that Morton planned to kidnap him and take him to England; James was scared enough to leave his hunting and seal himself up in Stirling Castle again in February 1580. Lennox had enough influence to persuade the King to go riding to Doune a month later, but by now James had developed a decided nervousness at the sight of weapons, and just the sight of armed men among Lennox’s retinue was enough to send James galloping back home to Stirling. With endearing bluster, James recounted these incidents to the English ambassador Robert Bowes, not as examples of fear, but of incisive judgement. He would escape future attempts, he declared, and even if he did fall into enemy hands, he’d display such ‘inconstancy, perjury and falsehood’ that they’d regret ever seizing him.
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By the spring of 1580, James had regained his confidence enough to venture away from Stirling again. On 20 May, he set out on the first of what was to be become an annual ritual: a ‘progress’ through his country, moving this year through Fife and Angus before returning to Stirling in mid-August. The progress was good for James’s personal standing in Scotland since it gave his people the chance to see him in the flesh – an opportunity they had been denied for thirteen years – but it served an additional, more practical purpose: James had been informed by his Lord Treasurer that he was in debt to the tune of £40,000 to the Treasury, and since the entertainment of the King and his retinue on the progress was paid for by his lucky hosts, it was a welcome chance to save money.
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An odd incident occurred when the progress reached St Andrews in July. As the spectators were waiting for an entertainment to be played at the New Abbey, a ‘frenetic man’ known as Skipper Lindsey stepped into the empty performance space, and ‘paceth up and down in sight of the people with great gravity, his hands on his side, and looking loftily’. Lindsey was ‘rough with hair’, great tufts on his brows and ‘upon the neb of his nose’, and his bizarre appearance provoked the crowd to laughter. But when he started to speak, he gained their attention, as if he had been a preacher, as one observer put it. With a ‘mighty voice’, he spoke of how God had rescued him from his previous wicked, riotous and abusive life, and concluded that ‘God would not be miskenned by the highest’. Then, looking up to the window where James and d’Aubigny stood watching, with Morton underneath them, Lindsey warned Morton that ‘his judgement was drawing near, and his doom in dressing [was in preparation]’. Morton was reportedly ‘so moved and touched at the heart, that, during the time of the play, he never changed the gravity of his countenance, for all the sports of the play’.
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Skipper Lindsey’s words were to prove oddly prophetic.

The Kirk was still not convinced by Lennox’s protestation of faith. In July, he sent a letter to the fortieth General Assembly convened at Dundee, offering ‘free and humble offer of due obedience, and to receive your will in anything it shall please you I do’.
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These, as the Kirk chronicler David Calderwood admitted, were ‘fair offers’ but they covered ‘deep designs, as time declared afterward’. The ministers were particularly concerned that, even if Lennox were sincere in his conversion, his household was a sanctuary for staunch papists. Later in the session, Lennox tried to dislodge this fear by having one of the servants, Henry Kerr, make a passionate confession of how he had ‘lain long in blindness’ but now acknowledged the Protestant religion ‘to be the only true religion’. The ministers remained unsatisfied. When the General Assembly met again in Edinburgh in October, it presented a petition to James requesting, among other matters, ‘That order be taken with papists in the King’s house’, and Henry Kerr had to appear again to explain why there had been a delay in securing a French-speaking minister for Lennox’s household, as the Kirk had commanded.
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By the end of the year, the more hard-line of the ministers had lost patience with Lennox and his household. On 7 December 1580, Walter Balcalquall, the minister of St Giles’, gave a sermon condemning the French courtiers and what he dubbed their ‘evil fruits’. Under their wings lurked papists, he preached; papists were defended both in town and in the country. The King’s ears were polluted by a French ruffian (meaning Lennox’s servant Mombirneau); the Canongate and some houses in the High Town were defiled with whoredom, and plagued with great vanity in apparel, foolish pastimes and syphilis – or the ‘French pox’ as it was conveniently dubbed. He condemned ‘the whoredoms and adulteries of your courts; the murders, the oppressions, the cruelties, and all the rest of the vices that are in your courts’ and feared that they would repent that the French court ever came to Scotland. Unless the congregation repented, he continued, ‘it shall be easier for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of the Lord’s judgements, than it shall be for you’. Every lord must reform their own persons and their houses and court, and they must ‘travel and see that the King’s house be well reformed, that no profane nor mischant persons be found there, but such as fear the name of God’. Balcalquall had gone too far. He was called before the Privy Council, and required to submit written copies of his sermons: Balcalquall insolently provided only ‘copies of that part of [his] sermon whereof he supposeth, that either the Earl of Lennox, or any of his dependers, may take any occasion of offence’, compounding the offence; moreover, he challenged the authority of the secular Privy Council to hear such an ecclesiastical case at all. Eventually, James was forced to remit the matter back to the General Assembly of the Kirk, which unsurprisingly felt that no action was necessary.
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