The Cradle King (30 page)

Knowing he had lost this battle, Mar departed for England immediately. Anna spent some time convalescing after her miscarriage, and then on Friday 27 May set out for Linlithgow with Prince Henry. The train reached Edinburgh the following evening, and on Tuesday 31 May the Queen and Prince travelled to the Great Kirk in a coach, accompanied by many English ladies in coaches and on horse. ‘Great was the confluence of people flocking to see the Prince,’ reported Calderwood. The following day, about 10 a.m., Anna and Henry set out for England; Princess Elizabeth, who had been sick the night before, followed two days later.
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Prince Charles was left in the care of Lord President Fyvie at Dunfermline, where visitors found him to be ‘a very weak child’. Fyvie reported at the end of the month that Charles was ‘yet weak in body, is beginning to speak some words far better as yet of his mind and tongue nor [than] of his body and feet’.
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It may well be that the King and Queen did not expect their younger son to live.

Once they were able to observe him close at hand, early English impressions of the King were highly favourable. The verdict of the lawyer Roger Wilbraham was typical: ‘The King is of sharpest wit and invention, ready and pithy speech, an exceeding good memory; of the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew; desiring nor affecting anything but true honour.’ Before meeting him, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli had heard ‘on all sides that he is a man of letters and business, fond of the chase and of riding, sometimes indulging in play. These qualities attract men to him and render him acceptable to the aristocracy. Besides English, he speaks Latin and French perfectly and understands Italian quite well. He is capable of governing, being a Prince of culture and intelligence above the common.’ When he was granted his first audience with the new King at Greenwich in May 1603, Scaramelli provided a vivid portrait of James. ‘I found all the Council about his chair, and an infinity of other lords almost in an attitude of adoration. His Majesty rose and took six steps towards the middle of the room, and then drew back one, after making me a sign of welcome with his hand. He then remained standing up while he listened to me attentively. He was dressed in grey silver satin, quite plain, with a cloak of black tabinet [material made of silk and wool] reaching below his knees and lined with crimson, he had his arm in a white sling, the result of a fall from his horse; from his dress he would have been taken for the meanest of his courtiers, a modesty he affects, had it not been for a chain of diamonds around his neck and a great diamond in his hat.’
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Others had minor reservations. Although he came across immediately as mentally alert, ‘witty to conceive and very ready of speech’, in Sir Thomas Lake’s estimation, he was surprisingly not given to using ‘great majesty nor solemnities in his accesses’. Francis Bacon, an ambitious lawyer and courtier whose brother Anthony had facilitated relations between Essex and James and who hoped to flourish under the new regime, opined that ‘His speech is swift and cursory, and in the full dialect of his country; and in point of business short; in point of discourse large … He is thought somewhat general in his favours, and his virtue of access is rather because he is much abroad and in press than that he giveth easy audience about serious things.’ Bacon’s one reservation was that James showed a lack of foresight in calling for advice about ‘the time past than of the time to come’.
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James’s accession was somewhat marred by a terrible outbreak of plague in London necessitating the impromptu rehousing of the royal family in Winchester, at a safe distance from the capital. Although his coronation went ahead on 11 July, the ceremony was much curtailed; the planned public festivities had to be postponed, and ultimately did not take place until 15 March 1604.
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The City of London prepared for the big day with military precision. ‘The streets are surveyed,’ wrote the playwright Thomas Dekker, ‘heights, breadths, and distances taken, as it were to make fortifications, for the solemnities. Seven pieces of ground, (like so many fields for a battle) are plotted forth, upon which these Arches of Triumph must show themselves in their glory; aloft, in the end do they advance their proud foreheads.’
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These seven ‘Arches of Triumph’ – at Fenchurch, Gracious Street, the Royal Exchange, two on Cheapside, Fleet Street and Temple Bar – were the focal points for complex allegorical representations honouring James and Anna, planned and scripted by a team of highly skilled artisans led by the joiner Stephen Harrison, and dramatic poets, including Ben Jonson and Dekker himself.
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On the day itself, all of London turned out to acclaim the King, Queen and Prince as they rode through the city: ‘The streets seemed to be paved with men,’ wrote Dekker, ‘stalls instead of rich wares were set out with children, open casements filled up with women. All glass windows taken down, but in their places, sparkled so many eyes, that had it not been the day, the light which reflected from them, was sufficient to have made one.’
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But James was no Elizabeth, who had lapped up the crowds’ adulation, and given them what they wanted in return. His reluctance was quickly noticed. As Arthur Wilson recalled, ‘He was not like his predecessor, the late Queen of famous memory, that with a well-pleased affection met her people’s acclamations … He endured the day’s brunt with patience, being assured he should never have such another.’ There were, of course, other such days to come, but James made less and less effort to play his part. Afterwards in his public appearances,’ wrote Wilson, ‘the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns.’
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There had been considerable anxiety among the English Privy Council that James would have his own ideas about who should counsel him – or more pointedly, that they find themselves replaced by his Scottish favourites. So there was great relief when it became apparent that for the most part the new King was happy to keep Elizabeth’s counsellors about him. Among these, unsurprisingly, Cecil was an early confidant. The French ambassador reported in May 1603 that the Secretary ‘begins to grow great with the king, staying alone with him shut up in the
cabinet
[James’s personal closet] for three or four hours together.’
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James elected to retain all the other thirteen of Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors, promoting several men who had supported his cause over the last years, including Henry Howard, who now became Earl of Northampton, and Essex’s ally Mountjoy, who became Earl of Devonshire. But James did add five Scots to the Council: Lennox and Mar, two long-standing allies; James Elphinstoun, the Scottish Secretary; Sir George Home, who was later to become Earl of Dunbar; and Edward Bruce, who became Lord Kinloss. In practice the influence of these five men in England was negligible. Mar and Elphinstone never lived outside Scotland; Lennox was a familiar and high-ranking presence in court, but without real power; Kinloss, the only Scot to be given high office in 1603 (as Master of the Rolls), died shortly afterwards. Only Dunbar would rise, becoming in turn chief adviser for Scottish affairs, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Master of the Wardrobe.
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Despite their relative absence from the top government posts, the Scots made their presence felt in other ways. For James’s accession to the English throne produced an important shift in the style of government. Reduced to its most basic components, political influence could be measured by access to the physical presence – and therefore to the ear – of the sovereign. Under Henry VIII, the most intimate space in the royal household was the Privy Chamber, and within the Privy Chamber, there had been the even more private Privy Lodgings centring on the King’s Bedchamber. When Elizabeth came to the throne, the fact that the sovereign was now a woman, who had to be surrounded at certain times by other women rather than by her councillors, had meant that the Privy Lodgings, where she spent much of her time, were divided from the Privy Chamber by a Withdrawing Chamber; as a result the Privy Lodgings lost much of their explicitly political tone, and the Privy Chamber became more formal, but also politically influential. With James’s accession to the throne, however, there came to the English court what has been dubbed ‘the revival of the entourage’. Under the new King, it was not the Privy Chamber, but the Bedchamber and the men it contained, that became the focus of attention. The Bedchamber controlled the more intimate aspects of serving the King, while the Privy Chamber became a more formal, ceremonial space. Whereas attempts were made to keep the Privy Chamber roughly half Scots and half English, the Bedchamber was comprised almost entirely of Scottish courtiers, with the sole exception of Sir Philip Herbert. Lennox was Steward of the Household; Sir George Home, Master of the Wardrobe; John Murray, Keeper of the Privy Purse; and Sir Thomas Erskine, a cousin of Mar, Captain of the Guard. This last appointment was particularly resented, since the post had been confiscated from the popular English courtier Sir Walter Ralegh.
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It was the absolute dominance of Scots in James’s immediate household that particularly galled English commentators like Gervase Holies, who wrote of James bringing with him ‘a crew of necessitous and hungry Scots’ and filling ‘every corner of the Court with these beggarly bluecaps’, referring to the blue woollen bonnets that the Scots were traditionally reputed to wear.
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His kinsman Sir John Holies complained in 1610 that ‘the Scottish monopolize his princely person, standing like mountains betwixt the beams of his grace and us’, urging that the Bedchamber should be ‘shared as well to those of our nation as to them’.
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The exclusion from the Bedchamber had serious administrative implications. Since the household ordinances stated that ‘no person of what condition soever do at any time presume or be admitted to come to us in our Bedchamber, but such as … are … sworn of it, without our special licence, except the Princes of Our Blood’,
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some of James’s leading government officials were effectively excluded from the regular access to the King that was constantly enjoyed by his Bedchamber staff Even Secretaries of State would be granted audiences in the (outer) Privy Chamber or Withdrawing Chamber, with the King emerging from his (inner) Bedchamber for the purpose. In the words of the Venetian agent in May 1603, ‘No Englishmen, be his rank what it may, can enter the Presence Chamber without being summoned, whereas the Scottish lords have free entrée of the Privy Chamber, and more especially at the toilette.’
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When James made the journey south to London upon his accession in 1603, expectations had been high for his performance as sovereign. ‘Our virtuous King makes our hopes to swell; his actions suitable to the time and his natural disposition,’ enthused Thomas Wilson, a Cecil protégé, in June. But it was soon discovered that James’s ‘natural disposition’ led him away from what many regarded as his kingly duties. ‘Sometimes he comes to Council,’ Wilson reported, ‘but most time he spends in fields and parks and chases, chasing away idleness by violent exercise and early rising, wherein the sun seldom prevents him.’
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Or as the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli put it: ‘the King, in spite of all the heroic virtues ascribed to him when he left Scotland and inculcated by him in his books, seems to have sunk into a lethargy of pleasures, and will not take heed of matters of state. He remits everything to the Council, and spends his time in the house alone, or in the country at the chase.’
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James did not believe himself to be negligent in his style of government. Indeed, he was continuing very much in the way he had for the past two decades in Scotland. But the English had become accustomed, over some forty-five years, to a very different sovereign. Elizabeth had made herself central to decision-making on virtually every level, playing her counsellors and courtiers off against each other as though they were suitors for her affections, while demonstrating an almost pathological tendency towards procrastination. This meant that, no matter how annoying her counsellors may have found her, Elizabeth was always present, always the centre of their attention. But the new King was more often away from court altogether, in the country with his horses and his hounds.

Hunting had been a passion for James since his adolescence. Recommending a range of sports to his son Henry in his
Basilikon Doron,
it was hunting to which he gave special praise, deeming it ‘martial’ and ‘noble’, ‘specially with running hounds, which is the most honorable and noblest sort thereof’, although he acknowledged that he might well be considered ‘a partial praiser of this sport’.
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Not that James was necessarily an adept huntsman: the Lancashire gentleman Nicholas Assheton reported in his journal one afternoon of royal hunting during the August 1617 progress, during which James ‘went and shot at a stag, and missed. Then my Lord Compton had lodged two brace. The King shot again, and brake the thigh-bone.’
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It seems that such a patchy performance was not unusual. To indulge his passion, James established small hunting lodges at Newmarket and Royston within months of his accession to the English throne. These lodges were not far from London, but far enough for him to be notably absent from the mechanics of government. For whereas Elizabeth on her lengthy summer processes had been followed, albeit with reluctance, by her entire court including the Privy Council, James took off for the fields with only what one observer contemptuously dismissed as ‘his hunting crew’ in tow;
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a crew the Venetian ambassador described as ‘a few persons only, and those always the same, people of low degree, as is usual in that exercise’.
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It has been calculated that throughout his entire reign in England, James spent about half his time either at his hunting lodges or on progress, and when at the lodges, his household comprised only one or two clerks, the Guard, the Privy Chamber, and, of course, the Bedchamber.
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This was not the English way, as the Venetian ambassador noted: James was ‘more inclined to live retired with eight or ten of his favourites than openly, as is the custom of the country and the desire of the people’.
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