The Cradle King (7 page)

In the female sphere, the Countess was followed by James’s wet nurse, Helen Little – whom he later accused of being a drunkard
⁴
– and her daughter Nanis Gray, her woman servant Helene Blyth and her manservant Gilbert Ramsay. Seven ladies were appointed as rockers of the King’s cradle, with two more responsible for the King’s clothes. It was down to the ‘master household’, John Cunningham, to ensure that the ‘prescribed order’ was kept to the letter, that every household member attended ‘the ordinary preaching and prayers’, provided by minister John Dunkeson, and used the kind of ‘godly and honorable conversation’ that would serve as a model for his Majesty, who should be shielded by ‘ungodly and light behaviour’ that might ‘do hurt to his Highness’s tenderness’.
⁵
Andrew Hegy acted as ‘provisour’, or steward. Victualling the King and his household were pantryman James Cawbraith, and the kitchen team: master cook John Lyon, foreman James Murray, William ‘keeper of the weschell [vessel]’, Cristell Lamb, ‘gallepyn [turnspit] in the kitchen’ and porter Jock Slowan. Jerome Boy kept the wine cellar, and brothers George and John Boig the ale cellar. The laundry was headed by Margaret Balcomie. Three men, William Murray, William Brokkes and Alexander Fargison slept in the King’s chamber with him. Also listed are John Acutrie, a ‘Frenchman and his wife’, perhaps hired to encourage James’s early acquisition of French; James Marscell, ‘keeper of the Laidnar [Larder]’, William Fairbarne, who supplied the household with coal, an essential position given the extreme cold of the winters, and a pastry chef, Patrick Rannald. James even had his own string quartet, made up of four brothers, the ‘violaris’ (fiddlers) Mekill (Big) Thomas, Robert, James and William Hudson, with their servant William Fowlartoun. The household was kept small and tightknit for a very practical reason: to lessen the risk of James’s abduction. On 1 May 1568, Regent Moray wrote from Glasgow to require Mar ‘to remove all persons out of the Castle of Stirling, except those of his own family and retinue and such as upon life, honour and heritage will answer to the Regent’. Steward Andrew Hegy was to provide only those named in the roll. The reason for this clamp down, Moray wrote, was ‘to the present state of the country and the utmost necessity of circumspection for the safety of the King’s person and house of Stirling’.
⁶

Mary’s departure eliminated one source of tension, but the fighting continued. The Hamiltons now provided the focus for the anti-Regency forces; among their adherents were the Earls of Argyll and Atholl, Eglinton, Cassillis and Huntly. On 22 January 1570, only eighteen months after his victory at Langside, Moray was dead, killed by a shot fired from the steps of Archbishop Hamilton’s Linlithgow house by another Hamilton, James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Moray’s death came as a body blow to James’s guardian, the Earl of Mar. On hearing the news, he immediately wrote to Elizabeth in England, pressing on her the new danger this action posed to the King of Scots, and asking for her assistance.
⁷

The Regency passed to James’s grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, and in October 1570 measures were taken to heighten the security of the King. They confirmed Mar’s guardianship at Stirling, but ordered that ‘all confluence and multitude of people be restricted and helden forth of’ the castle. James was to remain at home, and ‘no ways be transported forth of the said Castle of Stirling to any other room within the realm or outwith’. Mar was commanded ‘to keep the said Castle of Stirling straitly and diligently as he will answer upon his honour and allegiance’. No armed persons should be allowed into the castle, and nobody except those who had pledged allegiance to James and Lennox. An earl or bishop might enter with a maximum of three servants; a lord two, and a baron one, and all ‘without armour’. The ‘provost, baillies, council and inhabitants of the burgh of Stirling’ were required ‘to keep watch and ward at the commandment and ordinance of the said Earl of Mar, and constable of the said Castle in his absence, at all times needful’, and ‘to search, seek and apprehend all suspect persons haunting and repairing within the said burgh and freedom of the same as well of the inhabitants thereof as others that has [sic] resisted his Highness’ authority, and to take order and surety with the said persons by warding, banishment, taking caution of them or otherwise’. In order to allow this, Lennox granted licences to Mar, and his extended family, friends and servants, exempting them from a litany of dangerous gatherings they might be expected to attend: ‘sundry oistis, armies, raids, weirs, wapinshawingis and assemblies’ (armed confrontations, armies, forays, wars, musters and assemblies).
⁸

The feuding continued, but fortunes slowly changed: Lennox managed to take the Hamilton stronghold of Dumbarton Castle, in the process sending the Roman Catholic Archbishop Hamilton to the gallows. Alarmed by this turn of events, three major Hamilton followers, the Earls of Argyll, Eglinton and Cassillis, defected. Now, the Hamilton party was left with only one major stronghold: Edinburgh Castle, held by Maitland of Lethington and Kirkaldy of Grange. Lennox concentrated his strategy on capturing Edinburgh, with Morton leading the King’s forces at Leith, but for months there was a standoff, with effectively two Scottish governments.

On Tuesday 28 August 1571, James made his first public appearance since his coronation, at the opening of the Parliament in Stirling. Sitting in his chair of honour, and wearing ‘his robe royal’, the King ‘spake these words with his own mouth’ and, according to one observer, ‘without any abashment’: ‘My lords, and ye other true subjects, we are convened here as I understand to minister justice; and because my age will not suffer me to do my charge by myself I have given power to my gudschir [grandsire] as Regent, and you to do, as ye will answer to God and me hereafter’.
⁹
A less obviously scripted moment came later in the proceedings when James spotted a hole in the ‘boardcloth’ on the table where he sat. Fidgeting, he ‘pressed to attain to the hole with his finger’, and asked the lord next to him where they were. ‘The parliament house,’ the lord answered. ‘Then there is a hole in this Parliament,’ he exclaimed.
¹⁰

‘Whether God inspired the babe with prophecy at that time or not, I will not dispute,’ wrote one commentator. ‘But in very deed, the chief leader of the Parliament was stopped with such a hole within these five days after this saying, that it conveyed him even to the death.’
¹¹
On 3 September 1571, a group of nobles from the Hamilton faction launched a surprise offensive on Stirling itself. Their plan was to capture some of the lords surrounding the King, but the plot misfired farcically. Having succeeded in holding a few men loyal to the King, including Morton, the rebels started looting Stirling’s merchants. Thus distracted, they were easy prey for a counter-attack by the Earl of Mar, who had planted men in an unfinished mansion he owned. Nevertheless, as they were driven from the marketplace, the rebels, realising they had nothing to lose, shot Lennox. The Regent, ‘shot in his entrails’, was carried into Stirling Castle in the early morning of 4 September, calling for a physician, ‘one for his soul, another for his body’. James, just five years old, looked on at his dying grandfather: later he was to claim he could never forget the sight.
¹²

Another Parliament was called, this time to decide the Regency: Mar, Morton and Argyll were the key candidates, with Mar carrying the day. Elizabeth wrote to congratulate him, assuring him ‘that surely we think none could have been named in that realm more plausible to that nation, nor more meeter [suitable] for the charge; although we know well yourself of good wisdom would have forborn it’. James’s welfare was all the more important now, she wrote, since various ‘pernicious practices’ of the one-time Queen of Scots had come to light. After her escape to England, Mary had thrown herself on the mercy of the English Queen, but Elizabeth refused to meet with her cousin until she had cleared herself of the accusations against her concerning Henry’s murder. A commission, headed by the Bishop of Ross, was set up to hear the case, with Regent Moray providing the most damning evidence against Mary, in the form of the so-called ‘casket letters’, which appeared to prove Mary’s involvement in the plot against her husband. From February 1569, she was held in fairly relaxed captivity in a series of English country houses, in the charge of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Mar could now rest assured that Elizabeth would not treat on Mary’s behalf.
¹³

Morton returned to the battle against the Hamiltons, fighting through to the summer of 1572, when a temporary truce was called. The Hamiltons knew their luck was running out. One by one, their leaders left Edinburgh Castle, and soon Morton was able to occupy the town. Mar travelled to Edinburgh to call a Privy Council meeting, according to Sir James Melville, ‘to show them the calamities that civil wars produced’. While waiting for the Council to assemble, he spent time at Morton’s estate at Dalkeith, where he was ‘nobly treated and banqueted’; but then ‘shortly after … he took a vehement sickness’. Leaving hastily, Mar rode back to Stirling, but died there on 28 October 1572. Once again, rumours of poison flared. ‘Some of his friends and the vulgar people spoke and suspected he had gotten wrong.’
¹⁴

Whatever the rumours, Morton was now the obvious choice as Regent, and he presided over the Hamiltons’ ultimate surrender in February 1573, when with the ‘Pacification of Perth’ they finally acknowledged James as King. Morton recruited English aid to capture Edinburgh Castle, and Elizabeth sent the Marshal of Berwick, Sir William Drury, with artillery and troops for a siege; the castle finally fell on 29 May. Its defenders, Grange and Lethington, were sentenced to death; Grange was hanged in public, but Lethington ‘took a drink and died as the old Romans were wont to do’.
¹⁵
Morton’s regime was secure.

*   *   *

There are very few eyewitness accounts of James in his earliest years. From the writings of Theodore de Mayerne, the French physician who treated the King late in life, we learn – presumably from James’s own recollections – that ‘between the second and fifth year he had small-pox and measles. In his fifth year for twenty-four hours he had suppression of urine, nevertheless no sand or slime was ejected.’ He also recorded that ‘the King to the sixth year of his age was not able to walk, but was carried about, so weak was he from the bad milk of his drunken nurse.’ This would tally with reports that James suffered for the rest of his life with a very poor gait, and a tendency to keep walking rather than stand still – perhaps to ease pain in his legs. In 1623, at the age of fifty-seven, James was said to suffer from ‘weakness of his knee-joints’; his legs, noted Mayerne, ‘seem not strong enough to sustain the weight of his body’.
¹⁶

The Countess of Mar would have been responsible for James’s health in his early years, but she did not hold her dominion at Stirling for long. Perhaps as early as 1569 and certainly by 1570, when James was three or four years old, the Stirling household was augmented by men who served as the King’s principal ‘preceptors’, or tutors: George Buchanan, Peter Young, ‘his pedagogues for his instruction in literature and religion’,
¹⁷
and David Erskine and Adam Erskine, the Commendators (lay abbots) of Dryburgh and Cambuskenneth, who were put in charge of his physical and social training.
¹⁸
The King shared his schoolroom with at least three other boys: Mar’s son John, the Master of Erskine, to whom James quickly gave the nickname ‘Jocky o’ Sclaittis [Slates]’;
¹⁹
his cousin William Murray of Abercairney, a nephew of the Countess, who became Lord Invertyle; and Walter Stewart, later Lord Blantyre and Lord Treasurer of Scotland.

We know a remarkable amount about James’s education, thanks to a manuscript in the British Library (Add. MS 34,275) that, in its inventory of books acquired during the 1570s, details James’s curriculum. It was a basic (if somewhat outdated) classical humanist education, but heavier than most in Greek, history and politics.
²⁰
Peter Young was charged with collecting a library for the King, often having to resort to begging to procure money to buy books. Too often, he complained to Lord Justice Clerk, his requests for further reading were met with ‘What needs his Majesty so many books, has he not enough already?’
²¹
Elsewhere Young recorded an average day in the life of the schoolboy King, when James was probably in his early teens. First thing in the morning, James would practise his Greek by reading Isocrates, Plutarch and the New Testament. After breakfast he would move on to Latin: perhaps Cicero, Livy or some more modern historian. In the afternoon, it was time for logic, rhetoric and composition exercises, and – time permitting – arithmetic or cosmography.
²²

In the margins of the inventory manuscript are recorded the young James’s wise words transcribed by Peter Young. Although James apparently complained about being forced to learn Latin before he knew the tongue of his kingdom – ‘Thay gar me speik latin ar I could speik Scotis’
²³
– it is clear from Young’s sketches that the King’s first language in the schoolroom was French. From Young’s admittedly doting notes, James seems to have had a gift for languages, and many of his prized witticisms hinge on multilingual puns and wordplay, moving between Scots, French, Latin and Greek, and quoting lines
extempore
from Terence, Xenophon and Virgil to comment on current political situations. In his precociousness there is often a cruel streak: coming across the word ‘vivifico’, James quips that it is ‘a word made by some stammerer – vi-vi-fi-co’.
²⁴
After the hapless Captain Cockburn had ‘telled a long tale with many gestures and earnestness’, James informed him, ‘I have not understood a single word of what you’ve said, and it seems to me that what Monsieur Le Regent [Morton] said is true, that your French is good for nothing, and your Scots scarcely any better.’
²⁵