The Cradle King (4 page)

Meanwhile, Henry’s behaviour – including drinking and ‘vagabondizing’ late at night in Edinburgh, forcing the castle gates to be opened to let him back in, and (scandalously) swimming alone in the sea and lochs – was becoming increasingly embarrassing.
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Without his knowledge, Mary escaped for a short holiday at the end of July with the Earl and Countess of Mar at Alloa; Henry followed, but soon left when it became clear he was not welcome.
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On 8 August it was reported that ‘the disagreement between the Queen and her husband rather increases’.
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Moray had noted that Bothwell had insinuated himself into the Queen’s favour and decided to use him as the means to a better end. The lords played their old trick once again, playing on Henry’s jealousy by informing that the Queen was unnaturally close to Bothwell; Henry started to observe his wife with suspicion, and then Mary was informed that her husband was jealous, and watching her like a hawk. The seed sown, the lords pushed the scenario further. The King was in danger, they informed him: the Queen was plotting his death. The King was jealous, they informed the Queen: noting Henry’s reserve towards her, she began to believe them. Soon Mary was publicly expressing her displeasure with Henry, and showing distinct sympathy to Bothwell at court, using him, it was said ‘with more familiarity than stood with her dignity’.
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With such marital uncertainty, diplomatic commentators kept a careful eye on the location of the baby Prince. When on 6 September, Mary departed for Edinburgh, she left James at Stirling in the custody of the Countess of Moray, who would, it was reported, have ‘the government of the young Prince until the Queen returns to Stirling’; shortly, a Convention of Estates would be called to appoint his more permanent guardians.
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Henry became suspicious of Mary’s closeness to her half-brother Moray, and told her that he was going to kill the Earl ‘finding fault that she bears him so much company’.
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But Mary refused to stand for Henry’s tantrums, and not only told Moray what he had said, but forced Henry to admit that the information on which he had based his threat was false. Henry was humiliated, and poured out his woes to his father. Mary would no longer sleep with him, he told Lennox, and had even suggested he take a mistress – the Countess of Moray, perhaps – ‘I assure you I shall never love you the worse.’ Such a thing was unthinkable, Henry assured his father: ‘I never offended the Queen my wife in meddling with any woman, in thought, let be in deed.’
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Lennox wrote to complain to Mary of her treatment of his son, explaining how Henry’s status was so uncertain that he had decided to ‘retire out of the kingdom beyond sea, and that for this purpose he had just then a ship lying ready’, despite Lennox’s urging him to rethink.
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When Mary received the letter, she tried to raise the subject in bed, but Henry refused to talk. Her wifely charms failing, she used her political power. On 30 September, Mary brought the King before the Privy Council and the French ambassador du Croc, and demanded an explanation of what Lennox had said. In du Croc’s account, Henry declared that no grounds had been found for the accusation that he was preparing to leave the country. He left the Presence Chamber, saying to Mary, ‘Adieu, Madam, you shall not see my face for a long space.’ Despite Henry’s claims, du Croc reported that ‘He is not yet embarked but … still holds to his resolution and keeps a ship in readiness.’
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In early October, Mary proclaimed that there would be a court of justice held at Jedburgh, and rode there with her Council. At the same time Bothwell was hurt by a pistol shot during a routine flushing out of thieves in Liddisdaill; as he lay injured at Hermitage Castle, Mary, hearing the news at Borthwick Castle, rode through Melrose and Jedburgh to be with him, and after seeing him and riding back in a single day, fell ‘dangerously sick’ at Jedburgh. One source states that Mary ‘was so heavily vexed with the hot fevers’, lying ‘from nine hours to an afternoon as she had been dead’, that her life was despaired of.
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Prayers were ordered in churches throughout the realm; on the 28th, the King, who had been ‘hawking and hunting’ with his father in the west, reached Jedburgh. But even now, ‘he was not so well entertained’ as he should have been, and he left the next day, heading back to Stirling.
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William Maitland of Lethington saw the cause of Mary’s illness as ‘displeasure’ and ‘the root of it is the King. For she has done him so great honour … and he … has recompensed her with such ingratitude, and misuses himself so far towards her, that it is heartbreaking for her to think that he should be her husband, and how to be free of him she sees no outgait [way out].’
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With hindsight, and an ample dose of prurience, later writers – and notably the anti-Marian polemicists Knox and George Buchanan – saw the cause of Mary’s illness as an adulterous passion, indulged with Bothwell on his sickbed.
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On her recovery Mary went to Kelso with Bothwell. At Craigmillar, on 20 October, Moray, Maitland, Huntly, Argyll and Bothwell urged her to divorce the King, but she refused. Another attempt by Henry to reconcile with Mary at Craigmillar fell flat, with Mary this time commanding him to return to Stirling. Despondent, Henry went to visit his father in Glasgow, where he fell ill with ‘a grievous sickness, which kept him long in danger of his life’. As his hair fell out, Mary’s enemies spread the word that he had been poisoned.
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According to Lord Herries, Moray saw the key to power as ‘government of the child’: whoever had hold of Prince James held the future of Scotland in his hands. He also realised that if the King and Queen reconciled, he would have no hope of getting hold of the Prince. Henry had to be ‘cut away’ while Mary was still angry at him, and rumours were flying about her love for Bothwell; the Queen would be blamed for the murder and Moray could take power, reasonably expecting support, under such circumstances, from Elizabeth in England. Moray and Morton fed Bothwell’s ambition, urging that the kingdom would be better off with Henry dead, so that Mary might rule alone, or marry ‘one of a higher spirit’. Soon, they were promising that if Bothwell disposed of Henry, he could count on their support in his bid to marry the Queen (and to procure a divorce for himself). ‘These jumped right with Bothwell’s vainglorious humour,’ wrote Lord Herries. ‘He thinks himself already King!’ A contract of conspiracy was swiftly drawn up; now the plotters waited for their moment.
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CHAPTER TWO

The Making of A King

A
LL THE TENSIONS
of the year of James’s birth – the religious fissures, the international feuding, a royal marriage in crisis, and an unwanted King in fear for his life – were on lavish display at the Prince’s baptism, which finally took place at Stirling on Tuesday 17 December 1566. The baptism was important to Mary to consolidate her international standing. Relations with Queen Elizabeth in England had deteriorated when Mary’s private prediction that her baby would unite the kingdoms of Scotland and England was echoed more publicly. Patrick Adamson, the minister of Ceres in Fife then travelling on the Continent, published a book in Paris praising the birth of ‘the most serene and noble prince of Scotland, England and Ireland’. This presumption infuriated Elizabeth who in November 1566 ordered her ambassador to require Mary to have the author arrested and punished, and the book suppressed. Adamson was gaoled for six months and only released when Mary interceded on his behalf.
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Shortly after James’s birth, Mary had written to the King of France, the Queen of England and the Duke of Savoy (husband of her first husband’s aunt Marguerite) to invite them to the baptism of her child. It had taken months to bring the French and English ambassadors to Stirling: despite a last-minute delay of a week, Savoy’s ambassador Moretta still didn’t manage to get there. But the baptism was to be an occasion of immense opulence, funded by £12,000 taxation, and considerable personal outlay by Mary, who dressed the leading nobles in stunning colours and sent home each ambassador and his entourage with generous gifts. They, of course, had not come empty-handed. Savoy sent a huge fan of feathers encrusted with jewels, worth some four thousand crowns. Charles IX of France supplied a necklace and earrings studded with pearls and rubies. Elizabeth’s ambassador, the Earl of Bedford, brought an exquisite gold font for James to be baptised in, ‘of two stone weight’, and decorated with jewels and enamel, ‘designed’, as one commentator noted, ‘so that the whole effect combined elegance with value’.
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(Even this gift came with its own chequered history: news of Bedford’s valuable booty had leaked out, and there was a botched attempt to steal it en route somewhere near Doncaster.)
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James was to be a prince of the Roman Catholic Church. Mary, shaken by rumours of her wavering commitment to Rome, ensured that the baptism provided a very public statement of her orthodoxy – and a great piece of theatre. The French ambassador, the Comte de Brienne, accompanied by Savoy’s proxy Monsieur du Croc and Elizabeth’s proxy as godmother, her kinswoman the Countess of Argyll, carried the baby boy down from his chamber to the Chapel Royal, through two rows of nobles and gentlemen, each of whom was holding a pricket of wax. There followed a procession in which various noblemen bore the markers of the Roman ritual: the wax candle, salt, the cross, and the ewer and basin. Reaching the chapel door, de Brienne and the Prince were greeted by the officiating priest, Archbishop Hamilton of St Andrews, and his leading bishops in full Roman regalia; and the whole college of the Chapel Royal. At the font, the Countess of Argyll held the baby while Hamilton baptised him ‘Charles James’ – ‘Charles’ for his French godfather, and ‘James’ for ‘all the good Kings of Scotland his predecessors’.
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Only in one respect did Mary depart from the usual service, as James was later fond of claiming: she refused to have ‘a pocky priest’ spit in her son’s mouth (the Archbishop was notoriously disfigured by venereal disease).
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Heralds thrice proclaimed the baby Prince by his full title: ‘Charles James, James Charles, Prince and Steward of Scotland, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles and Baron of Renfrew.’ Singing and organ-playing broke out, and the infant was permitted to remain for a while before being carried back to his apartment.
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But the occasion could not disguise Scotland’s own deep divisions. Elizabeth’s ambassador Bedford was a staunch puritan, and therefore obliged to stand outside the Chapel alongside Moray, Huntly and Bothwell.
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The Countess of Argyll was rewarded for her service by Elizabeth with ‘a ring with a stone’,
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but was forced by the Kirk to do penance for participating in the papist ritual. National honour was also at stake. At supper, Mary sat at the centre of the high table with de Brienne on her right, Bedford on her left, and du Croc at the end of the table, each of them waited on by Scottish nobles. Despite Mary’s evenhandedness, there was, according to Sir James Melville, considerable bitterness on the part of the other ambassadors because they thought that the Englishmen were being treated ‘more friendly and familiarly used than they’.
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National pride was again piqued by the dinner’s entertainment. The great humanist scholar (and later archcritic of Mary) George Buchanan provided a Latin masque, but the more memorable
divertissement
was less highbrow. One of Mary’s French servants, Bastien Pagès, devised a spectacle in which the meat was brought into the hall ‘upon a trim engine, marching as appeared it alone, with musicians clothed like maidens, playing upon all sorts of instruments and singing of music’. This was preceded by several men dressed as satyrs ‘with long tails and whips in their hands, running before the meat’. But, claimed Melville, the satyrs went too far: they ‘put their hands behind them to their tails, which they wagged with their hands, in such sort as the Englishmen supposed it had been devised and done in derision of them, deftly apprehending that which they should not seem to have understood’. Bedford’s entourage, who had wanted to dine in front of the Queen so ‘that they might see the better the whole order and ceremonies of the triumph’, now changed their minds: seeing the satyrs ‘wagging their tails or romples’, they sat themselves down on the bare floor behind the table, so that ‘they should not see themselves scorned’. One of Bedford’s retinue, Christopher Hatton, told Melville that ‘if it were not in the Queen’s presence and hall, he should put a dagger to the heart of that French knave Bastien’ – and Bastien was only doing it for spite, because the Queen made more of the English then she did of the French. Ultimately only Bedford’s diplomatic intervention managed to calm tempers.
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