The Cradle King (39 page)

James’s newfound passion for debating the false doctrine soon found itself a public form of expression. Paul V put forth two breves, or papal letters (the first on 12 September 1606, the second on 13 August 1607), asserting that English Catholics could not take the Oath ‘with safety of their salvation’. Then in September 1607, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine wrote to the English Archpriest George Blackwell, reproving him for taking the Oath, which he claimed was tantamount to abjuring allegiance to the Vicar of Christ. He wrote of how the papacy had the right to take action against secular princes it regarded as heretical. According to his later editor, the cleric and scholar James Montagu, James decided that such challenges must not pass unchallenged, and set about to demonstrate to his Catholic subjects ‘that the taking of this oath was so far from endangering their souls, as that it intended nothing but civil obedience, and without touching any point of their conscience, made the State secure of their Allegiance’.
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He decided to write a formal response to Bellarmine’s letter.

What began as an intellectual pastime soon became an obsession. The Venetian ambassador observed that ‘The King as a most learned prince embarks right willingly on this subject and shows a kind of rivalry with the Cardinal [Bellarmine], who has here the reputation of being the most learned champion on the papal side.’
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James set himself merely to sketch out directions for the argument, and appointed Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, to undertake the writing, but soon got carried away. ‘I know not how it came to pass; but it fell out true,’ recalled Montagu, ‘the King’s pen ran so fast, that in the compass of six days, his Majesty had accomplished that, which he now calleth his
Apologie.
’ Passing it to Bancroft, now Archbishop of Canterbury, and Andrewes, now Bishop of Ely, the story continues, as ‘brief notes’ to be expanded, the clerics agreed that James’s writing was ‘so sufficient an answer both to the Pope and Cardinal’, that no further work was needed. James was persuaded to put it in print ‘but was pleased to conceal his name’.
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In truth, the process was less speedy. James, in the country at Royston and Newmarket, spent most of the winter of 1607–8 cooped up with his books, appearing only at mealtimes. His only reading companions, according to the French ambassador, were Montagu and ‘a minister whom he called specially from the city to furnish him with memory and material’.
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Montagu read out to James all four volumes of Bellarmine’s ecclesiastical writings, while the King ‘weighed the objections and answers of that subtle author and sent often to the libraries in Cambridge for books to examine his quotations’.
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By February 1608, the
Apologie
was finished, and promptly published as
Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus. Or An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance
with translations in Latin and French, for international consumption. James boasted proudly that he had given Bellarmine a sound thrashing. Others were less sanguine: Northampton and Salisbury, it was said, ‘wished that he had not printed’ the book, and were relieved to be able to dissuade him from another planned book responding to the Jesuit Robert Parsons, who had attacked both James and Salisbury in print.
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James, well aware that the
Apologie
was bound to elicit a response, resolved that if the Pope and Bellarmine ‘would not rest in his answer, and sit down by it’, acknowledging the Oath in the spirit it was intended, as ‘a point of allegiance and civil obedience’, then he would be forced to publish the
Apologie
again, but this time ‘in his own name with a preface to all the princes in Christendom; wherein he would publish such a Confession of his Faith, persuade the princes so to invindicate their own power, discover so much of the mystery of iniquity unto them; as the Pope’s bulls should pull in their horns, and himself wish he had never meddled with this matter’.
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Preparing to rebuff the inevitable response, James continued to read and write constantly. The French ambassador de la Boderie wrote in March 1608 of how the King was stockpiling ammunition so he could respond promptly to the criticism he knew his book would receive. ‘That will only put the author in his element,’ de la Boderie mused, ‘for this is the science of which he knows the most and in which he most delights.’
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True to form, Bellarmine and Parsons responded enthusiastically, mocking James’s efforts and subjecting him to the full blast of their immense learning, Bellarmine in a Latin
Responsio
under the pseudonym of Matthaeus Tortus (one of his chaplains); and Parsons in an English piece entitled
Judgement of a Catholicke Englishman.
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The King, reported de la Boderie, was ‘extremely irritated’;
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to Henri IV of France, James claimed the books ‘were filled with a thousand injuries against my book, but also do not spare my own person’.
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But he was most irked by that fact that he had been wrongfooted: Bellarmine had included in his
Responsio
something very damaging: a description of a letter ostensibly written in 1599 from James in Scotland to Pope Clement VIII, in which the King suggested that he could still be converted to the Roman Catholic faith.
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Although the letter was genuine, a scapegoat was required to clear the King from this heinous imputation, and he chose his Scottish secretary James Elphinstoun, now Lord Balmerino. Balmerino was summoned to Royston, and over the course of two interviews with the King (and, although Balmerino didn’t know it, in the presence of concealed witnesses), he admitted, first, that he had himself drawn up the letter but with James’s knowledge, and, later, that he had drawn up the letter himself without James’s knowledge. The Privy Council were now called in to clear up the only remaining mystery – how the royal signature came to be on the letter. James left nothing to chance in clearing his name. As he protested to Salisbury, ‘I pray you to think that never thing in this world touched me nearlier than this doth. God knows I am and ever was upright and innocent. But how the world may know it I look to hear your advice after his examination.’ He provided the councillors with the right questions and pleaded with them to come up with the right answer: ‘Though ye were born strangers to the country where this were done, yet are ye no strangers to the King thereof, and ye know if the King of Scotland prove a knave the King of England can never be an honest man; work therefore in this as having interest in your King’s reputation.’ Finally, Balmerino swore before God and the angels that he had thrust the letters in front of James just as he was about to go out hunting, and the King had signed without knowing what it was. The scenario seemed probable enough: many a Privy Councillor had been forced to do the same. When informed of Balmerino’s statement, James suddenly remembered how nine years ago, as he was about to go hunting, papers had indeed been pressed on him to sign. His memory was a miracle, he declared. ‘For my part, I may justly say that the name given me of James included a prophetical mystery of my fortune, for’ – punning on ‘James’ as ‘Jacobus’ in Latin – ‘as a Jacob I wrestled with my arms upon the 5 of August for my life [the Gowrie Plot] and overcame; on the 5 of November I wrestled and overcame with my wit [the Gunpowder Plot]; and now in a case ten times dearer to me than my life (I mean my reputation) I have wrestled and overcome with my memory.’
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And so James satisfied himself that, while his signature was on a letter to the Pope, he himself had never written to the Pope. The sacrificial Balmerino was sent to be tried in Scotland and sentenced to death, but through a secret leniency deal was allowed to die shortly after in peaceful retirement.
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James was clear-headed enough to realise that he required assistance for his next foray into religious controversy, even with the mountain of material he had compiled. Officially suppressing Bellarmine’s book until his reply was ready for public view, James called on his bishops for assistance, and embarked on a nine-month period of collaborative intellectual endeavour. Lancelot Andrewes compiled a weighty
Responsio ad apologiam cardinalis Bellarmini.
William Barlow parried Parsons with
Answer to a Catholike Englishman (so by himself entituled)
(Parsons’ response did not come into print until after his death). John Barclay was to prepare an edition of his father William Barclay’s unpublished manuscript
De potestate papae
on the power of the papacy: Barclay senior had been a Catholic, but his tract argued that the Pope should limit himself to a spiritual jurisdiction, and abandon his claims to temporal power, which were damaging the Church, an argument that was music to James’s ears.
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As for James himself, Montagu writes of how he once again, ‘with the like celerity, in the compass of one week, wrote his
Monitory-Preface
’.
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Certainly, by November 1608 James had reportedly finished a draft of his response, and passed it on to Andrewes to lard with supporting evidence from the Church Fathers.
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But the King could not leave Andrewes alone, and the Bishop’s work turned into a Penelope’s web, according to the French ambassador: no sooner had Andrewes finished a portion and shown it to the King, than ‘so much is found that must be rewritten that the poor Bishop has more difficulty in making corrections than he had in writing his composition in the first place’.
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Working on the treatise ‘from morning to night’,
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James gradually called in more churchmen and academics for their advice, and he was still redrafting, revising and checking as the work went to the printers in early 1609.

James’s apparent perfectionism was all for nought. When the book finally appeared, on 1 April, it was riddled with every kind of error. James, ‘infuriated’, called for the printer’s blood;
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calming down, he had all copies of the book called back in, by a royal proclamation that blamed the printers for being over-hasty. James now devoted all his attention to the revision of the book, working simultaneously on the Latin, French and Italian translations (the Italian never came to fruition). Four bishops were called in, alongside Sir Henry Savile, the Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Thomas Wilson, the Keeper of State Papers, and John Barclay. As John Chamberlain reported, the King was uncharacteristically ‘so wholly possessed and over-careful about his book that till that be finished to his liking he can brook no other sport nor business’.
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Finally, the revised book appeared in May 1609, but hopes that the ‘correcting’ of the text would moderate its violence were soon dashed.

The new
Monitory Preface
was in fact longer than the
Apologie
it prefaced. Dedicated to Rudolf II ‘and to all other right high and mighty kings, and right excellent free princes and states of Christendom’,
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it aimed to draw the attention of Christian secular rulers to the dangers posed by the temporal power of the papacy. Some of it was temperate enough, reiterating James’s willingness to see the Pope as the first priest among priests. But, as ever with James, too much was brought down to the personal level, with a slew of autobiographical references earnestly making the case for his orthodoxy. Elsewhere, though, earnestness was swapped for a mocking, dangerously irreverent humour. James couldn’t believe that the Blessed Virgin ‘hath no other thing to do in heaven, than to hear every idle man’s suit and busy herself in their errands; whiles requesting, whiles commanding her son, whiles coming down to kiss and make love to priests, and whiles disputing and brawling with devils’. Turning to images, he inquires how could we paint God’s face, ‘when Moses (the man that ever was most familiar with God) never saw but his back parts?’ He leaves the question of whether purgatory exists for others – ‘how many chambers and anti-chambers the Devil hath, they can best tell that go to him’ – but just in case, asks Bellarmine to let him know, whether ‘that fair green meadow that is in purgatory have a brook running through it’, so that ‘in case I come there, I may have hawking upon it’.
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James proudly bound his books in velvet and cornered them with gold for delivery to his European brother-kings. But no amount of velvet could muffle the book’s shrill carping tone. The Pope, naturally enough, issued a public edict outlawing James’s book. The Inquisition of Venice prohibited its publishing there, causing a ‘great fray’ between the authorities and James’s ambassador to Venice.
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The Duke of Savoy refused to receive his copy; the Grand Duke of Florence gave his to his confessor, who burned it; Count Fuentes had it cut into pieces; and one Italian prince was quoted as exclaiming, ‘Vade retro Satana, di tal farina non mangio io pane’ (Get thee behind me, Satan, I shall eat no bread of that flour). Even Henri IV of France, once an ally of the King of Scots, dismissed it, throwing his copy on to a table and protesting that bookwriting was no occupation for a king, and James would have better spent his time doing something else.
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But James had no intention of doing anything else. As late as November 1611 the great scholar Isaac Casaubon, now resident in England, was complaining that ‘The King is now so entirely taken up with one sort of book that he keeps his own mind and the minds of all about him occupied exclusively on the one topic. Hardly a day passes on which some new pamphlet is not brought before him, mostly written by Jesuits, some on the martyrdom of Saint Garnett, the sufferings of the English Catholics, or matters of that description. All these things,’ he concluded dismally, ‘I have to read and give my opinion upon.’
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