The Cradle King (11 page)

Just as Lennox came under the strongest attack from the Kirk, he accelerated his campaign against Morton. He sought out the support of Captain James Stewart of Bothwellmuir, the second son of Lord Ochiltree. Stewart was a well-educated and much travelled man who had spent some time fighting against the Spanish in the occupied Netherlands; he had returned to Scotland in 1579, and in October 1580 became one of the Gentlemen of the King’s Bedchamber.
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On 31 December the Privy Council was in full session when Stewart burst into the Council chamber, threw himself on his knees in front of the King, and accused Morton of having been ‘art and part’ in the murder of King Henry. Since this intervention was in fluent and passionate Scots, Lennox could pretend to be in complete ignorance of what was happening. Despite his earnest protestations of innocence, Morton was arrested and imprisoned, first in Edinburgh Castle and then later in Dumbarton.
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With Morton’s fall came the rise of his accuser, James Stewart, who was appointed to the Privy Council in February 1581 and then advanced to the Earldom of Arran on 22 April 1581. Lennox and Arran together were a significant force, and soon acquired an influential party including John Maitland of Thirlestane, Lord Maxwell, Lord Seton, Ker of Ferniehurst and Robert Melville of Murdocairnie.
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The influence of Lennox and Arran changed James’s opinions on many subjects – and most notably started to undo the indoctrination attempted by Buchanan, now ill and unable to regain his hold over the Prince. James Melvill wrote that ‘it was a pity to see so well a brought up Prince till his bairnhead [childhood] was past, to be so miserably corrupted in the entress of his springal age [as he entered his adolescence], both with sinistrous and false information of all proceedings in his minority, and with evil and most dangerous grounds and principles in government of Kirk and Commonweal’. The King’s attitude towards the Kirk ministers was the most obvious casualty. ‘Then was he made to think worst of the best men that ever served in this Kirk and Country,’ wrote Melvill, ‘to think the whole manner of Reformation of Religion to have been done by a privy faction, turbulently and treasonably; to suspect the noblemen and whole ministry that stood for the cause of Religion and his crown against his mother’s faction; yea, to take course against them, and put at them as his unfriends [enemies].’ Significantly for James’s long-term political beliefs, Melvill writes, the newly promoted Arran ‘put the opinion of absolute power in his Majesty’s head’. This notion was promulgated for him by the sympathetic Bishop of St Andrews, Patrick Adamson, who pronounced, ‘That a Christian King should be the chief governor of the Kirk, and behoved to have Bishops under him, to hold all in order, conform to antiquity and most flourishing estate of the Christian Kirk under the best emperor, Constantine.’ The discipline proposed by the Kirk of Scotland, he continued, was incompatible ‘with a free kingdom and monarchy, such as was his Majesty’s in Scotland’.
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In this attitude lay the seeds of a war of attrition between King and Kirk. When in 1582 the Kirk commissioners led by Andrew Melvill, delivered their ‘griefs and articles’ to the King and his Privy Council, they found a new and vocal opponent in Arran. When the articles were read, Arran (or ‘Captain James’ as James Melvill insists on calling him) threatened ‘with thrawin brow, and boasting language’: ‘What! who dare subscribe their treasonable articles?’ Andrew Melvill answered, ‘We dare, and will subscribe them, and give our lives in the cause!’, and seizing the pen from the Council Clerk, signed the articles, as did all the other ministers. When Lennox and Arran saw this ‘boldness’, they understood ‘that the Kirk had a back, and became afraid; and, after some calmer language, dismissed them in peace’.
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As the King’s new regime found opposition in the Kirk, it also came under attack from England. Elizabeth lobbied vigorously for Morton’s release and tried to turn James against Lennox. The previous September, the English ambassador Robert Bowes had refused to deliver his commission to the King and Privy Council unless Lennox left the room, on the grounds that Lennox was ‘a stranger’ (foreigner).
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At that point, James was in no mood to hear anything against his friend, and Bowes’s attempts failed. Now Elizabeth tried sending another envoy, Thomas Randolph, to secure Morton’s release, but again to no avail. When Randolph requested that Morton be properly tried, James pointed out sharply that ‘he meddled not with the Queen of England and her subjects, nor execution of justice upon them’.
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Despite the unwelcome response, Randolph was reluctantly impressed by the boy’s skill. ‘Though he be young,’ he wrote home, ‘he wants neither words nor answers to anything said to him.’
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But for all James’s bravado, Scotland was afraid of England. Rumours, almost certainly without foundation, of an English threat started to circulate. On 11 February, a proclamation called all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty to prepare themselves for war. The following week a convention of estates (a Parliament-like gathering with tax-granting but limited judicial powers) granted a tax of £40,000 if war broke out. The official reason given was to repress thieves, wrote Calderwood, ‘but the true intent was, to be in readiness, if there were any invasion made by England’. While fears were heightened, Lennox sealed the King off. The outer gate of the Abbey Close was guarded by a troop of men led by Arran, and the numbers of men allowed in strictly limited. The nobility muttered angrily that Lennox was controlling them, and that he had turned the King’s palace into a ‘warhouse’. But all the security was not enough to stop the usual proliferation of libels. Calderwood recorded how, on 1 February, ‘libels were spread in the King’s chamber, and other places’ attacking Argyll, Lord Robert and others, and displaying particular venom against Lennox, who was ‘called a feeble sow, that saw his wife deflowered before his eyes’, a clear impugning of the Earl’s masculinity that at once feminised and cuckolded him.
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In February 1581, at the Convention of Estates, Elizabeth’s ambassador Randolph formally presented her complaints to the King. The Pope, she wrote, had decided that Scotland was the key to his plan to bring England back to popery, first by sending ‘Monsieur d’Aubigny’ – Elizabeth did not acknowledge him as Earl of Lennox – ‘a professed Papist, into Scotland, under colour of his kinred [kinship] to the King, that these twenty years past never offered any service to the King, when as he had most need’. This d’Aubigny worked ‘partly by dissimulation and courting with the King, being young, and of a noble and gentle nature, and partly by nourishing and making factions among the nobility’, but especially by opposing those nobles known to be pro-English in their views. In this way he would ‘make some ready way, by colour of division and faction, to bring strangers, being Romanists, into the realm, for his party, and, consequently, by degrees, to alter religion, yea, in the end, to bring the person of the young King in danger’. This would be ‘very easy’, wrote Elizabeth, pointing out that James had appointed d’Aubigny as ‘his principal chamberlain, and possessor of his person’ on the basis of no service whatsoever. D’Aubigny’s final aim, she alleged, was ‘to get the crown also, in the end, to himself’.

The Queen then turned to herself. As d’Aubigny’s influence had increased, Elizabeth had noted ‘some alteration and diminution’ in James’s friendship towards her, although she ascribed this ‘not of the King’s own disposition’, but to him being abused by others; there had been an upsurge of violence in the Borders; Morton had been wrongly accused, and taken away without trial to a remote castle, under d’Aubigny’s custody. All of this, she concluded, was ‘sufficient to confirm the just suspicions of Monsieur d’Aubigny’s intention to become the principal minister of the Pope and his adherents, for to reduce that realm to the servitude of Rome, whereof himself from his birth had been a professed vassal’. Even though now, for reasons of pragmatism, d’Aubigny ‘affirmed by words, to be somewhat otherwise changed’, she pointed out, ‘some of his company brought with him, and yet secretly cherished by him, do remain still Papists’. Given this danger, she called on the Scottish nobility to preserve ‘the young King, her dear brother’ from ‘the dangerous practisings and seducings of all cunning Papists’, and offered her aid in money and men against the influence of Monsieur d’Aubigny.
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Unable to retaliate against Elizabeth, Lennox and his followers attacked her ambassador. On 13 March, Randolph found a libel affixed to his gate, allegedly from ‘We, the King’s Majesty, barons, nobility, boroughs, and commons.’ It complained that Elizabeth and Randolph brought the King ‘in contempt of his subjects, alleging him to be misruled and misguided by certain particular counsellors, and not willing to obtemper [comply with] the Queen’s Majesty your mistress’ desires’. Elizabeth had for counsellors the Earl of Leicester and Sir Christopher Hatton, it pointed out, neither of whom was so closely related to her as Lennox was to James. As for Lennox’s alleged papism, was not Elizabeth herself negotiating a marriage with the very Catholic brother of the King of France? It also accused Randolph of having secret and seditious nocturnal meetings with the pro-English Earls of Angus and Mar, turning them into ‘howlets and nightingales, who converse with you in the night’. Randolph gained audience with James, and complained that he knew the libel to have come from certain courtiers, because some of them had said similar things to him, but James gave him short shrift: Randolph should go and find the author himself.
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However, when a harquebus shot two bullets through the window in the ambassador’s bedchamber, aimed directly ‘at a place where he commonly use to sit’, it was the last straw: Randolph fled to Berwick.
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From there on, Scottish relations with England continued to deteriorate. They reached a new low point in the spring of 1582 when James refused to receive a letter from the English Queen which he knew would be full of unwelcome advice. This constituted a serious breach of etiquette: Elizabeth was furious when she heard of it, and James was forced to pen a lame letter of apology.
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In the late spring of 1581, Morton was officially charged on various counts, including ‘taking of the King’ in Stirling in April 1580; conspiring to take the King and slay Lennox in Holyroodhouse in November and December 1580, ‘when his lodging was furnished with weapons’; and again on 1 January 1581, the day after he was accused in Council. Perhaps aware that these charges were unlikely to stick, James instructed that they all be dropped except one: the concealing of his father’s murder. In time Morton confessed that he had foreknowledge of Henry’s murder and had concealed it, but continued to deny that he was ‘art and part’. When two ministers visited him the night before his execution, they asked why he had concealed the information. ‘Whom to should I have revealed it?’ he asked, ‘To the Queen? She was the doer thereof. I was minded, indeed, to [tell] the King’s father [i.e. Henry], but I durst [dared] not for my life; for I knew him to be such a bairn, that there was nothing told him but he would reveal it to her again.’ Morton was executed in Edinburgh on 2 June 1581. He spent his last night writing, and in the morning sent some ministers to the King with his letters. James ‘would not look upon them, nor take heed what they said’, it was reported, ‘but ranged up and down the floor of his chamber, clanking with his finger and his thumb’. Morton’s body was left on the scaffold until 8 p.m. and then carried to the Nether Tolbooth, where his head was set on a spike. David Calderwood wrote of Morton’s passing: ‘So ended this nobleman, one of the chief instruments of the reformation of religion; a defender of the same, and of the King in his minority, for the which he is now unthankfully dealt with.’ Echoing Knox, he continued, ‘We may see how absurd it is to commit the reins of government to the hands of a child, who cannot govern himself.’
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With Morton dead, Lennox’s power was complete. On 8 August, James made Lennox ‘the second person’ of the kingdom, giving him the only dukedom in Scotland as Esmé was ‘proclaimed solemnly Duke of Lennox, Lord Darnley, Lord Torbowton, Dalkeith and Tantallan, Great Chamberlain of Scotland, Commendator of Arbroath’.
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It was during Lennox’s time at court that James developed an association with a coterie of court poets known as ‘the Castilian Band’ or ‘the brethir [brethren] to the sister nine’, the Muses.
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They took as their leader Alexander Montgomerie, ten years the King’s elder, whom they dubbed the ‘master poet’. At various times, the coterie included Alexander Scott, Alexander Hume, James’s Master Household, Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, the musician brothers Robert and Thomas Hudson, who had served the King since his infancy, James’s distant cousin John Stewart of Baldynneis, William Fowler and the female poet Christian Lindsay. Together they tried to master poetic forms, especially the difficult sonnet, attempted translations of continental works, and debated the merits of various poetic theories. James himself developed some ‘Revlis and Cavtelis of Scottis poesie’ to guide the way in which Scottish verse should develop, quoting examples from the efforts of Montgomerie. From the few glimpses of the coterie we have, it appears to have been a serious but also highly humorous gathering, in which James seems to have taken real pleasure.