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

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СКАЧАТЬ to the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven men who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The Saxons were cousins of the free Dutch leader, Anne’s former suitor, Maurice of Nassau.

      By July, Anne’s German relatives from Brunswick and Mecklenburg were beginning to arrive for the christening. Henry’s mother knitted her son into the top echelon of Protestant Europe’s rulers, while his father’s French blood connected him to major Catholic rulers. The Venetian ambassador reported to the Senate that ‘the Ambassadors of France, England, the States of Holland, and some German Princes … meet in Scotland at the baptism of the king’s son. The occasion is considered important on account of the understanding which may then be reached’ on how to humble the resurgent Catholic powers of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Fear of a coalition of Habsburg interests drove the abiding contemporary narrative of fear of predatory militant popery.

      No less than three representatives arrived from the independent Dutch states for the christening, with twelve gentlemen and a train of thirty servants, reflecting the importance of the event. Embroiled in a prolonged war to free themselves from Spanish control, the Protestant Dutch came ‘to renew the ancient friendship between’ Scotland ‘and their own country, and to persuade’ King James to ‘enter into a general alliance against Spain’. They also brought gifts. Henry was given a ‘fair cupboard of plate’ (silver) and the promise of a hugely generous annuity of 500 crowns a year for the rest of his life.

      As the event’s political stature grew, empty coffers forced James and Anne to address the tiresome issue of how to fund the grand baptism. The king turned to the Edinburgh money men, ‘to cause provision for wine and beer in great for the furnishing and entertaining’ of their guests. Thomas Foulis, goldsmith, lent the king £14,598 (Scots). James promised to repay it by November the following year. The royal couple already had a reputation for profligacy and Foulis beseeched his majesty for a more tangible guarantee than his sacred word. The king pawned ‘two drinking-pieces of gold, weighing in at fifteen pounds and five ounces of gold’. If he defaulted, then Thomas Acheson, master ‘cunyeor’ (coiner) was to ‘strike down and cunyie’ the cups into five-pound pieces of gold at the Cunzie House, the counting house, or royal mint. Foulis would take what he was owed and ‘the superplus, if any be, to make forthcome and deliver to his Majesty’s self’.

      Others loaned and received their gold cup as security. A one-off parliamentary levy brought in £100,000 Scots, for ‘the incoming of the strangers to this honourable time of the baptism of the Prince, his Highness dearest son’. At the end of August and weeks overdue, Elizabeth’s proxy godparent, the Earl of Sussex, arrived, acting as if nothing could happen in Scotland until England appeared.

      On the morning of 30 August 1594 the guests took their places in the chapel royal. At the east end stood the king’s chair of state, empty on a platform, cloth of gold spread all round it. Stuffed and gilded chairs received the fundaments of a series of leading foreign dignitaries, who took up their places beneath red velvet canopies adorned with the arms of each of their countries. The arms of England hung over a chair to the right of the throne, Denmark’s hung over the one to the left, and the arms of Scotland dominated the centre. Anne sat to one side with her ladies and friends.

      The new pulpit dazzled with cloth of gold and yellow velvet. The black-clad Calvinist clergy sitting at a table below felt a little queasy. Their eyes found no relief from the idolatrous frippery, as they glanced from alabaster bas-reliefs to classical Greek friezes, and a huge fresco of the king in his pomp behind the altar. Calvinists insisted on the separate jurisdictions of God and state. James VI apparently did not. Rather the opposite.

      Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.

      A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.

      The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.

      At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.

      Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.

      Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.

      Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.

      The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.

      Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.

      Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble СКАЧАТЬ