ELEVEN
‘BLOW YOU SCOTCH BEGGARS BACK TO YOUR NATIVE MOUNTAINS’
By the beginning of November 1605, the whole royal family, bar Elizabeth, came together in London for the state opening of the next session of Parliament. Taken as a family the Stuarts had proved to be an act more than able to step into Elizabeth I’s shoes – which partly accounted for Catesby, Throckmorton, Fawkes and their discontented Catholic friends’ decision to kill them all, except the girl. The rest dead, they could forcibly convert Princess Elizabeth to Catholicism, set her up as a puppet, and offer her to a Catholic prince. With most MPs and Lords also dead, they could establish a Catholic-dominated Parliament.
The opening of Parliament was scheduled for 6 November 1605. The day before, acting on a tip-off, a search party revealed Guy Fawkes in a cellar under the great hall at Westminster nursing thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.
Prince Henry and his parents were ‘a dangerous disease’, Fawkes said. It required ‘a desperate remedy’ to ‘blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains’. King James had betrayed them. In Scotland he let them believe he would ease the penal laws against Catholicism when he succeeded to the throne of England. He had not done it. Racist anti-Unionism overlapped with religious loathing.
The scale of this terror plot was unprecedented. It aimed to destroy the whole political nation. Henri IV of France congratulated James and Henry on their escape. ‘No Prince is safe against traitors,’ he said. The French king was well placed to comment, having suffered over twenty attempts to assassinate him so far.
Shaken, Henry and his father rode to Parliament four days later. How nerve-racking for the boy. Who, behind the smiling faces and sugary words, hated him enough to want to kill him?
The discovery on 5 November showed Henry a darker portrait of his family, their subjects and the countries he was being trained up to rule. Yet, the sense of fellowship, loyalty, and relief among all of them on the 9th, when Parliament eventually opened, was palpable. It was one of those rare occasions when everyone knew they were all in it together. James and Henry, showing courage by coming, calmed the agitated spirits. The king insisted the plot was the work of a fanatic minority. Most Catholics were loyal to the established state religion. They all praised God for protecting them, to do His work.
‘I don’t doubt that you have given thanks to the good Lord, for the deliverance he gave us, as I have also done,’ Princess Elizabeth wrote to Henry; ‘But I want to join my wishes with yours and say with you: if God is for us, who will be against us; under His guard I fear nothing man can do.’
Fighting talk, but her guardian, Lord Harington, reported how disturbed the girl was. Her imagination worked round and round the thing. What sort of queen should I have been, she asked, dragged up to greatness over the bodies of all those she loved?
James ordered a nationwide service of thanksgiving to God for their escape. In November 1606, on the first anniversary of the plot, the royal family gathered to hear a sermon by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes praising their deliverance as ‘our Passover’. Andrewes recalled the Jews, the chosen race, were also saved by God’s intervention, parting the Red Sea to let them pass into safety. The Stuarts owed God a ‘yearly acknowledgment to be made of it through all generations’: 5 November became another holy day of observation in the church calendar. For the rest of his life, Henry ‘would never after suffer himself to be prevented by any business from being present at the sermon appointed to be preached every Tuesday, that day of the week, on which the plot was intended to have been executed’ – except for one equally black day to come.
Henry had seen the shadow his world threw. It was a dark old age of suspicion, plots and revenge. So many plays and pamphlets and sermons spoke of conspiracies and dangers. Everyone – Protestants, Catholics, the contract monarchy men and the absolutists – suspected each other of wishing to bring down the state. Many held up Henry, the attractive male heir, as the image of the new age of light, order, civility. It gave his people pleasure to repeat to him and to themselves, how young, fresh, bright, and ‘hopeful’ he was – and they were. Yet, the Main and Bye plots of 1603 and the Powder Treason of 1605 showed Henry how fast disappointed men turned to violence to compensate their thwarted dreams.
Dr Lionel Sharpe, Puritan chaplain to the late Earl of Essex, wrote to alert Henry to the dangers of popery – in case it did not occur to the prince that thirty-six barrels of gunpowder illustrated that not everyone loved him. ‘Beware of the Vipers, or, to speak freely, of the Jesuits,’ Sharpe said. There could be no negotiating with these fanatics – it must be victory, or death. Henry ‘attended himself prayers and sermons at set times’, daily, which ‘tied his servants thereunto’. He also despatched a message to Sharpe offering him a place in his household as a chaplain.
To help prepare Henry for his role as defender of the faith, Robert Cecil sent his nephew, Sir Edward Cecil, to attend the prince. A soldier, Cecil was currently serving with Maurice of Nassau. Sir Edward began to stay with Henry’s household during the winter months, when poor weather forced a cessation of hostilities, and added his experience of fighting for international Calvinism against the forces of popery to Henry’s military education.
After the Powder Plot, letters poured in to Henry from Protestant princes and sympathisers across the Continent, expressing their horror and offering support. Young Frederick, heir to the Elector Palatine – the senior Protestant elector of the Holy Roman Emperor – congratulated Henry on ‘the miraculous delivery God sent from Heaven, at the same time that hell and its instruments were plotting your ruin’. Two years Henry’s junior, Frederick assured Henry of his service, when ‘you are called, if it please God, to defend the Truth against these assaults of the father of lies’. Perhaps we should be grateful, Frederick said: this ‘has made us’ boys ‘recognise early the spirit that possesses them, and the falsehood they wish to establish, in the end to hate and detest all our lives that which we have known from our infancy’.
Henry’s maternal uncles and cousins – Christian IV of Denmark, the Landgrave of Hesse, the dukes of Holstein and of Brunswick – sent letters. This vast extended family of European cousins wrote to each other continually. Attacks on one, attacked them all.
The impact of the Powder Plot could be seen in the tone of Henry’s written school work. Newton asked Henry to analyse an account by the Latin historian, Justin, of young Cyrus the Great of Persia’s rise to power. Henry summarised each section, and attempted a translation. He was full of praise for the war-like Semiramis, legendary Queen of Babylon: you would have thought she was a man, she so ‘feigned her sex by great deeds’, Henry wrote. But he criticised Semiramis’s pacific son, who ‘grew old in the company of women’, degraded by his corrupt counsellor, Sardanapalus, and lost his country. This counsellor had shamed his own manhood, he wrote, by becoming ‘another example of a womanly soul in a man’. Rising twelve when he made this analysis, the son of the self-proclaimed Rex Pacificus concluded that ‘often one may see women take upon themselves manly spirits, while womanly men bear effeminate souls’.
By effeminacy, Henry and his circle meant weakness in general. Perhaps Henry had the martial virtue and ‘manly spirits’ of the legendary defender of Protestant Europe, the late Queen Elizabeth, in mind. Perhaps he had picked up court gossip about ‘effeminacy’ among the king’s coterie and then connected it with his father’s pacifism. Effeminate counsellors weakened the prince’s ‘virtue’. Virtue – the Renaissance quality Henry would strive to cultivate in every aspect of his life – conferred vigour and power to act with force and effectiveness, and even some cunning. Virtue gave you a critical, enquiring spirit, and led to developing a passion for scientific enquiry and accuracy. Virtue could also lead you to acts of glory, honour, fortitude, and good fortune. Effeminate weakness was, to most Jacobeans, including Prince Henry and his circle, a form of tyranny and misgovernment.
In his studies, Henry said he saw how his own role was ‘born by another person’ from the past: Cyrus the Great. He concluded God rescued the infant Cyrus from the threat of death as ‘our sign and example, of how wonderful the power of the fates is, and how great the goodness of God, in preserving those he has destined for greatness in public affairs’. Cyrus rose to unite Persia and Media.
Henry knew of Cyrus from the Old Testament as well. Isaiah prophesied Cyrus was the child born to rebuild the New Jerusalem and free the Chosen People from captivity. This was the Puritan image of England and the English under a godly king. They could build the New Jerusalem here, and complete the renewal of the faith that had been held captive by a partial reformation. Henry sensed Providence at work, hovering over his life. It gave meaning to the trauma of 5 November 1605.
As Christmas 1606 approached, nerves jangled beneath the jollity. Whitehall teemed with over a thousand souls, eyes shifting to see whose hand in his doublet fingered an assassin’s blade, and who visited the court Catholics. ‘Every day something new about the plot comes to light and produces great wrath and suspicion,’ said the Venetian ambassador, Molino. ‘Both Court and City are more than ever in a bubbub, nor can they quiet down, and everyone is armed and ready for any event.’
The authorities claimed to have found a paper among the imprisoned plotters’ effects. Chillingly, it listed all Scots’ houses in England. ‘The prisoners said that it was intended, after the explosion of the mine, to massacre all the Scottish in this country.’ The conspirators hated to see ‘the share which their natural enemies now had in government. The publication of this news has increased the hatred between the two nations, and rendered them quite irreconcilable.’ Molino heard that ‘many Scots are thinking of returning home, for they fear … a general massacre may take place’.
The Earl of Mar, whom James had named to the English Privy Council in 1603, and who was now the only Scottish member of the seven-man commission to investigate the Powder Plot, met the king in private. All the adulation, the fairyland of magnificence and power that had dropped into their laps in 1603 contained this racial and religious hatred in its viscera. Prince Henry must be sent ‘to reside in Scotland’, the old friends decided; ‘in this way [the king] … hopes to secure his family. For it is clear that there are many who hate not only his person, but his whole race.’
At Stirling, the Mars prepared to revert to the original scheme. Henry would have to leave Nonsuch, his family and new friends, and live out the remainder of his minority isolated behind the fortress walls of Stirling, hundreds of miles from danger.
When in August 1606, Shakespeare staged his new play, Macbeth, before the court, it suggested neither Henry, nor the future of the united kingdoms, would be any more secure moved to Scotland. The play contrasted – chauvinistically – a superstitious, faction-blighted Scottish world, with peace promised to the heirs of the murdered Banquo’s line after they left Scotland. Shakespeare was alluding to the legend of Banquo’s son, Fleance, who was said to have fled to Wales in the wake of his father’s assassination, and married a daughter of the Prince of Wales. Their son founded the House of Stuart. The Stuarts’ mythic destiny descended from Banquo through Fleance to James and Henry, rightful kings of the empire of Britain, in London.
If James and Mar reassembled the Scottish home of Henry’s early years, they would reassemble the circumstances that had let factions of discontented Catholic earls plotting to seize or murder the king, and kidnap the prince. This might threaten Henry. It could also turn the wunderkind male heir into a threat to the fragile new union.
Should the English wish to imagine how bad it could get if this spirited and stubbornly wilful boy returned to Scotland, Shakespeare showed them that too. Towards the end of 1606 he premiered King Lear and sounded a warning note about divided kingdoms.
At the beginning of the play King Lear is dividing up his realm between his daughters. Lear wants to retire and spend his time hunting (as King James did, absenting himself from Whitehall for half of the year) and visiting his children, who now have to take on the authority and duties of the Crown. A brutal civil war erupts, as two of his daughters fight for domination.
The logic of the play endorsed a unified British empire under one politically attentive king. Not a Britain where, for example, an ambitious Prince of Wales in Scotland might formulate foreign and religious policies at odds with England. Henry IX, it was hoped, would lead Protestant Europe, but not if he destroyed himself or his own country in civil war first.
James’s solution to this threat, presented as early as 1604, was complete union of the crowns in his person – incorporating the legislatures and churches under one settlement. With Henry at his side in Parliament, the king had outlined his vision for the complete union of legal systems, parliaments and religions. This union would create a single multi-race nation: Britons.
Henry listened as his father proposed fundamental change, clothed in the conventional metaphors of natural order. James presented his well lived-in, middle-aged body as ‘the Union of two ancient and famous kingdoms’: ‘What God hath conjoined, let no man separate … I am the husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife.’ He had brought a new nation into being: Great Britain. Henry was the first offspring of this union after the birth of Britain. James ordered the Earl of Nottingham to design a new flag for the royal navy to reflect the new nation – a Union Jack (Jack being a diminutive of James).
Many attentive MPs heard in the king’s utterances the tectonic plates of the four diverse kingdoms grind against each other. Some members’ reactions told James the revolutionary scale of his proposals – if he had ears to hear it. England was her laws, they said. Merging the legal systems of the multiple realms of Britain would abolish English laws, and so, in effect, abolish England. As for racial integration, if their national borders came down to permit free movement of peoples between the several nations, and if the most important immigrant family are suddenly your divinely appointed rulers, then what did it now mean to be English, or Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or British? What about the thousands of Huguenot migrants, or the Dutch refugees of religious conflict? It would not be enough to say Britain was their home. They must be British. By which they meant, English.
James’s proposals made them fear for the public realm. What would it be and what was it that everyone would agree to defend? What were the tests of citizenship of this new realm – the Oath of Allegiance to James? Allegiance to his Church of England? Allegiance to the international Calvinist Church? What if one territory tried to overlay and dominate the other? And what economic rights did all these countries and new subjects have – the same as the English? If Henry was too young to grasp the finer nuances of his father’s speech, he was already educated enough to grasp some essentials.
Henry’s response to the king’s plans for union came in the form of a masque, commissioned from Ben Jonson. Called Hymenaei – ‘Marriage’ – ostensibly it celebrated the marriage of Henry’s good friend, Robert Devereux, the 3rd Earl of Essex, to Frances Howard, daughter of one of James’s chief ministers, the Earl of Suffolk. Devereuxs and Howards viciously opposed each other during Elizabeth’s reign. The union of a scion of the Puritan cause, Essex, with a scion of the crypto-Catholic faction, Frances Howard, reflected the mindset of a pacific, union king.
Jonson said the voices of his masque ‘sound to present occasions’, but ‘their sense … does or should lay hold on more removed mysteries’. Serious messages gave substance to entertainments, without which they were just magnificent froth. Masques were performed by the court, to the court, for one night only. Good quality ones explored the bonds between the sovereign and political elites, offering the court and Crown some perspective on itself, and on contemporary politics.
Within the conceit of talking about the wedding, Jonson addressed issues dominating national debate: union, legitimacy, peace, harmony. The goddess Hymen stood. She nodded to the married children, and then dived in to laud the ‘union more than ours’. Hymen hailed ‘the King, and priest of peace!’ and his ‘empress’, and the ‘prosp’rous issue’ of their union: Henry.
Hymen played on a startling image of James and his multiple realms:
May all those bodies [the four countries] still remain
Whom he [James], with so much sacred pain
No less hath bound within his realms
Than they are with the Ocean’s streams.
The sea bound them within James’s sacred body politic.
Jonson called on James’s self-image as Union and elaborated on it until he conjured a vision of James’s kingship as a painful reconceiving of independent subjects and separate countries within him. By a kind of alchemy, James’s period of gestation transforms them, till the king gives birth to them, reborn as one people (in 1603), the outline of whose body is the coast, bound by the ‘Ocean’s streams’.
The masque trafficked some very ambitious images of sovereignty – where the king impregnates himself and then births his people, the people of the Union: Britons. Its logic had travelled far beyond the teenage newlyweds at the centre of it, to praise a union that some had tried to kill the king and prince in order to break.