ONE
‘A SON OF GOODLY HABILITY AND EXPECTATION’
Dawn, Tuesday, 19 February 1594. The herald left his fire, shivered up the stone steps and strode out onto the walls of Stirling Castle to announce the great news. For four years Scotland had waited for a child, a male heir, to secure the throne. At last the king ‘was blessed with a son of goodly hability and expectation’. Prince Henry Frederick Stuart’s birth gave ‘great comfort and matter of joy to the whole people’. The entire day cannonades ricocheted across the country. Scots of all ranks danced in the light of huge bonfires, as ‘if the people had been daft for mirth’.
The proud father, James VI, despatched messengers to his fellow princes of Christendom, the first sent galloping south to London. Henry was James’s gift to his childless cousin, the ageing, putative virgin queen, Elizabeth Tudor of England. The gift he expected in return was nothing less than her thrones and dominions. A prince had been born to embody the kingdoms united for the first time in history. If Elizabeth would name James VI of Scotland and the future King Henry IX her heirs, the boy could secure England’s as well as Scotland’s future.
Throughout the celebrations, Henry’s mother, Anne of Denmark,* had remained lodged in the birthing chamber at Stirling Castle.
Landing at Leith four years earlier, fifteen-year-old Anne had made a sensational entrance: pale-skinned, reddish blonde hair, notably attractive, she rode through Edinburgh, her new husband at her side showing off his queen. Behind them the king’s oldest friends, the Mars of Stirling Castle, followed stony-faced. From the side of the highway, a flock of black-clad ministers of the Scottish Calvinist kirk eyed the daughter of Denmark – her ‘peach and parrot-coloured damask’ dress, her ‘fishboned skirts lined with wreaths of pillows round the hips’; their gaze travelling across her liveried servants, horses and silver coach – and shuddered.
In England these hard-liners – or ‘purer’ Protestants, as they saw themselves – were derided as ‘Puritans’. They called themselves the godly. Soon enough, Christian duty would compel them to open their pursed lips to censure Queen Anne and her circle for their erratic attendance at interminable sermons on sin and corruption. God made them denounce the young queen’s ‘lack of devotion to the Word and Sacrements’, and love of ‘waking and balling’ – staying up late to dance and gamble. She filled her evenings with music and elaborate court entertainments. One radical Calvinist griped that all royals were ‘the devil’s bairns’, so what could you expect? (James responded by exiling him.) The idea of Anne as utterly frivolous would prove remarkably enduring.
Anne knew herself more than equal to them. Her brother, Christian IV, ruled Denmark – the Jutland Peninsula and the islands around it. His influence extended over Norway and east across what is modern-day Sweden, Gotland and the Baltic island of Bornholm. He also ruled Iceland and Greenland. To the south, Denmark controlled the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Holstein lay within the borders of the Habsburg-dominated Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. So, one branch of the house of Oldenburg, Anne’s family, were also imperial princes, owing allegiance to the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. This involved the Danes in German and imperial affairs. Off the north coast of Scotland itself, Denmark claimed the Orkneys and owned the Faroe Islands.
Anne grew up a royal princess of one of the largest Protestant political entities in Europe. Her grandfather, Christian III, converted Denmark to Lutheranism in 1536, but Denmark declined to adopt the ‘purer’ form of Protestantism – the Calvinism that Scotland came to profess under John Knox. Anne’s former suitor, Prince Maurice of Nassau, withdrew his offer on hearing that she would not convert to Calvinism in order to marry him.
Denmark’s location gave it control of the sea lanes connecting the Atlantic to the Baltic. The tolls it charged shipping to pass through the Danish Sound and trade with the Hanseatic ports, made its monarchy wealthy. When Christian IV finished modernising it, Denmark boasted ‘the largest and most efficient naval force in northern Europe’. His new nephew, Prince Henry, would grow up to cherish an equal passion for his navy.
The Danes spent as befitted Renaissance Protestant princes. Their riches and power financed cultural activity that put them at the forefront of the Renaissance. Christian’s huge architectural projects changed the face of Copenhagen, making it one of the loveliest cities in Europe. Anne and Christian’s mother, Sophie of Mecklenburg, maintained Tycho Brahe, the first astronomer in Europe to win international fame. Scholars flocked from across the Continent to meet him. Visitors to Brahe’s island home included James VI when he came to collect Anne, his betrothed, in October 1589. James passed with amazement and delight through rooms full of books, maps and spheres to help man uncover the laws of nature by which God moved the heavens. Laboratories bubbled and steamed with alchemical scientific experiments. Brahe set on his own printing press his groundbreaking book on astronomy, the foundation text for Kepler and Galileo.
Buildings and gardens, statuary and art works, developments in all branches of science, new political theory and historical awareness, were all part of that international lingua franca of the Renaissance. It was a language Anne grew up speaking as a native and passed on to all her children. Anne of Denmark was, in every way, a brilliant match for James VI of Scotland. A princess raised in this milieu; a woman who was bilingual in Danish and German; who had enough French to be able to write and converse with her new husband (who had no German); who then quickly learned Scots to a high level of idiomatic ease; who enjoyed and patronised a broad range of cultural activity, was unlikely to be the empty-headed fool of hard-line Calvinist censure.
In addition, the Scottish court soon discovered their queen possessed a strong will. Shortly after she arrived in Scotland in 1590, Anne dismissed James’s most important female attendant from her service, sixty-five-year-old Lady Annabella Murray, Dowager Countess of Mar. The king’s love and respect for ‘Lady Minnie’ ran deep. The Mars were hereditary keepers of Stirling Castle and, by tradition, the guardians of Scottish monarchs. King James had been fostered out to them when he was an infant and Lady Minnie was the only mother he knew. The king grew up with her son, Master John Erskine, whom he nicknamed Jocky o’ Sclaittis (Slates), in fond recollection of schooldays spent together.
Anne, though, discovered Lady Minnie gossiping with her friend, the wife of the Scottish chancellor: the devout old dowager regretted too loud that James had not married the more suitable Catherine, sister of French Huguenot leader, Henri of Navarre. Out both women went. In their place Queen Anne brought in her Danish friends and lively young Scots women, including the Ruthven sisters, Beatrix and Barbara, and Henrietta Stuart, Countess of Huntly. Henrietta was the Catholic wife of a Catholic earl – pure gall for the godly who believed the queen’s court was being peopled with the weak and the wicked: Lutherans and papists.
Four years later, in February 1594, Anne understood very clearly the huge political and dynastic significance of her son’s arrival. From the birthing chamber, a lady-in-waiting carried the baby to its royal nursery within the Prince’s Tower. They swaddled him and he latched onto the dugs of Margaret Mastertoun, his mistress nurse. When he gurned, Mistress Mastertoun handed Henry to one of his four rockers.
Good medical practice prescribed swaddling to keep Henry’s limbs straight, prevent rickets, and ensure strong growth. A few months later, liberated from the torment of swaddling bands, Henry started to stretch and move, but not crawl. Crawling suggested a prince too close to his animal nature, with its connotation of original and other sins. God condemned the serpent to crawl on his belly and eat dust all his days – not the crown prince. As soon as the infant could hold himself upright, Henry’s nursery maids strapped him into a wheeled and velvet-lined baby walker.
To keep him alive, four medical practitioners attended in rotation: Dr Martin, Gilbert Primrose the surgeon, Dr Gilbert Moncrieff, and Alexander Barclay, Henry’s apothecary. Infant mortality in the under twos ran at up to fifty per cent, giving a royal mother good reason to stay close and supervise. Queen Anne meant to preside over her son’s nursery, to oversee his infant japes and woes. By birth and upbringing a political animal, Anne also wanted to instil in Henry her religious, political and cultural values, not an enemy’s; and enemies, in the queen’s view, lived too close to her boy.
Anne had been horrified when James commanded her to leave her own palace and go to the Mar stronghold at Stirling to give birth. As soon as it was clear that the baby would live, the king followed Scottish royal custom. Within forty-eight hours of his safe delivery, Prince Henry was fostered out to the Earl of Mar and that ‘venerable and noble matron’ Lady Minnie. The king formally contracted Mar not to deliver the prince ‘out of your hands except [if] I command you with my own mouth, and being in such company as I myself shall like best of.
‘In case God call me at any time,’ James said, ‘that neither for the Queen nor Estates [Parliament’s] pleasure ye deliver him till he be eighteen years of age and that he command you himself.’ Henry would live out his entire infancy, childhood and youth at Stirling Castle. Anne would have to accept she would never govern Henry’s household. Her son would be raised by the high-born women of the Mar faction – the ladies Morton, Dunhope, Clackmannan, Abercairney, and the widow of Justice Clerk Cambuskynneth – and his male officers, James Ogilvie, Marshall and David Lennox, who served and ate at the ladies’ table. Over the years the boy’s intimacy with these families would build up his royal ‘affinity’. As king he would then have a powerful magnate group at his side, his most loyal supporters. None were the queen’s supporters.
Barely a fortnight after Henry’s birth, events appeared to vindicate James’s decision to isolate his son. On 5 March the Catholic earls of Bothwell, Huntly, Angus and Errol gathered in a plot to kidnap the boy. Once they had him, Huntly’s wife, Henrietta, a favourite of the queen, would reunite mother and son.
After uncovering the plan, James ordered the earls to be placed under house arrest. But in answer they came ‘against his Majesty at Holyroodhouse’. Elizabeth I instructed her cousin to put his ‘lewd Lords … to the horn as traitors’ – outlaw and hunt them down. James refused. High-handed, the English queen overrode him and sent a direct warning to the earls ‘in no case to seek the young Prince’. If the child was killed, the inheritance of England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales would be thrown into chaos, leaving the realm vulnerable to foreign claimants.
The General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church added to the complaints against James. Why did the king not simply crush those magnates seeking ‘the ruin of the state by foreign forces’? – meaning Spain and the pope. They warned of trouble arising from our ‘intestine troubles’ – the subversive activities of Bothwell, Huntly and their crew, but also Queen Anne. The French special envoy described the queen, in the wake of the removal of her son, as ‘deeply engaged in all civil factions … in Scotland in relation to the Catholics’.
Within weeks of Henry’s birth, the Scottish court split between allegiance to the king and the Mar clan, and allegiance to the queen and her faction. As much as it was an event to be celebrated, Henry’s birth threatened King James’s hard-won domestic peace. If the earls seized Henry, they could force the king to give Catholics more power in the government of Scotland and divide the nation between Presbyterian followers of the king and papist followers of the queen. It seemed as though history might repeat itself, as James was only too aware.
James’s memories of his own childhood determined that his son must stay at Stirling. In 1566, David Riccio, secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was stabbed to death in her presence – or as James put it, ‘while I was in my mother’s belly’. The king said that the in utero trauma scarred him with a ‘fearful nature’. James’s father, Lord Darnley, was suspected of conspiring with Protestant nobles, including lords Ruthven, Morton and Lindsay, in the killing; and Darnley himself was found strangled to death when James was just a few months old. Mary, Queen of Scots, then married the probable murderer of her son’s father.
James was kidnapped by a group of Protestant lords and taken to Stirling Castle, where he was crowned, aged thirteen months. He never saw his mother again. Scotland divided into two factions: the king’s men behind the infant James VI, the queen’s behind Mary, Queen of Scots. From this bitter civil war, the king’s men emerged triumphant. James’s mother, the focus of the unrest, was arrested and imprisoned. She escaped to England and was put back under lock and key by her cousin, Elizabeth, on whose mercy she threw herself. James remained with the Mars at Stirling, as civil unrest rumbled on. During one outbreak of fighting, the five-year-old king saw his beloved paternal grandfather carried past him, stabbed and dying, the old man’s blood streaming across Stirling Castle’s flagstones.
In 1587, James learnt that his mother had been beheaded on Elizabeth I’s orders. Seizing power in Scotland the moment he could, the highly intelligent and capable young king dedicated the first years of his reign to melding the factions and turbulent powers of his country into a workable whole. By the age of seventeen he had gained full control of his government.
Yet he still lived in constant fear of attack. Threats remained from within the king’s inner circle. In August 1582, the Earl of Mar had been involved in the Ruthven Raid against his former charge. Mar and his allies held James captive in an attempt to force the king to oust certain favourites, particularly the king’s French cousin Esmé Stuart. James was widely believed to be in love with Stuart, whom he had created 1st Duke of Lennox, and openly hugged and kissed him in public. Lennox was a Catholic – anathema to the devout Calvinist Mars. He converted to Protestantism but that did not convince the Scottish Calvinist elite. The Ruthven raiders ensured Lennox was exiled to France, where he died the following year. James was heartbroken.
The king and queen’s failure to have children for the first four years of their marriage had only heightened the speculation that James could not fulfil his duty to his country, to secure it through an heir. Anne reminded her husband that he was now entrusting their son to a faction that had held the king to ransom. James countered that some of the queen’s closest confidants had been at the heart of recent plots against him. In August 1600, when Henry was six, one resulted in the king’s near assassination. The king had the ringleaders, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, executed and demanded that Anne ‘thrust out of the house’ her ladies-in-waiting, Gowrie’s sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven.
Scotland’s unruly magnates were not merely power hungry. The political threats during Henry’s early childhood reflected the often violent religious conflicts dividing Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Religiously motivated wars and uprisings broke out continually throughout Christendom; assassinations and kidnappings were a common feature of those divisions. In 1584, the Calvinist ruler of the Dutch free states, William the Silent, was murdered by a Catholic fanatic. In France, the Protestant Henri of Navarre had just converted to Catholicism in order to unite France, win the throne, and try to bring to an end the religious wars and repeated attempts to assassinate him. In England, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, the late Walsingham, had regularly intercepted foreign plots against the queen.
For all these reasons, of custom and of threats to the monarchy and heir, James was adamant. Henry stayed at Stirling.
* She called herself ‘Anna’ in Scotland, but was Queen Anne in England. James’s name for her was ‘Annie’ (sometimes ‘my own Annie’). To avoid confusion, I will refer to her as Anne.