The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart. Sarah Fraser

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      TWO

       Launching a European Prince

      On the issue of the prince’s christening his warring parents were as one. Henry was not the name of a Scottish king. England, though, had lived under eight Henrys to date. The last was James VI’s great-great-uncle, Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth. James’s father was also a Henry – Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Anne’s father was Frederick II. The boy would be christened Henry Frederick Stuart.

      The king sent for his Royal Master of Works, William Schaw, to demolish the chapel royal at Stirling Castle and replace it with a new one worthy of Scotland’s first major Protestant royal christening. Schaw came up with a ‘scale model of Solomon’s temple’, and a little Renaissance gem. The interior reflected modern Renaissance Protestant thought and very likely the cultural dowry Anne had passed to the king. When James went to Denmark to bring Anne home, he witnessed an ebullience, sophistication and diversity of cultural and scientific activity he had never before experienced. He enjoyed Denmark and the company of his new Danish in-laws so much that he stayed for months longer than he needed to. This chapel royal seemed designed to reflect that happy period of his life.

      The king asked Elizabeth I to stand godmother to Henry, bringing English queen and Scottish prince together in a quasi-parental relationship. James asked Henri IV of France to become Prince Henry’s godfather. For weeks no answer came – until Elizabeth heard that Henri IV had refused to send a representative. Elizabeth was only too aware of the politics of this gesture. Elizabeth originally intended to refuse to send a proxy. Now, she accepted James’s invitation. As a Protestant, Henri, the Huguenot King of Navarre, had been Elizabeth’s most powerful ally against the papal-backed Habsburg rulers of Spain and their cousins, the Holy Roman emperors. When Henri converted to Catholicism to unite France in July 1593, Elizabeth, still locked into war with Spain, felt bitterly betrayed. Henri was crowned king of all France the following February, the same month Henry was born, leaving Protestant England to face a newly united Catholic France twenty miles across the Channel. In the summer of 1594, therefore, Elizabeth wrote to Queen Anne, expressing ‘[our] extreme pleasure … [in] the birth of the young Prince[and] … the honourable invitation to assist at the baptism. We send the Earl of Sussex as our representative.’

      The English queen’s acceptance irritated Henri IV, as it was meant to. France disliked any sign of an enlarged multiple British monarchy forming across the Channel, already recently strengthened by Anne’s СКАЧАТЬ