The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart. Sarah Fraser
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Название: The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart
Автор: Sarah Fraser
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007548095
isbn:
Anxiety for the health of his ‘dearest bedfellow’ drove James to see Anne at Linlithgow palace, set away from ‘the tumults of Edinburgh’. Here, James entertained ‘the Queen very lovingly … to draw her off’ her obsession. She received him well and was reported to be ‘all love and obedience’. But at supper, thinking she had her husband ‘in a good humour’, she declared that ‘it was “opened” in Scotland, England and Denmark that she had sought to have the keeping of the young Prince and that therefore it touched her honour and her credit’ as mother of the heir and queen, not to be slighted. James insisted that ‘he regarded her honour and the safety of the Prince as much as she, and would, if he saw cause, yield to her’. On both sides, love was intimate and strategic. James spoke for them all when he told Henry later: ‘a King is as one set on a stage’.
The fight to be reunited with her son drew out a relentless streak in Henry’s unhappy mother. The result, an audible rending of the fabric of the Stuarts’ domestic life, was terrible to witness. By July 1595, Anne seemed to be ‘somewhat crazed’ in her grief. She obsessed over the right ‘cause’ to make the king ‘yield to her’. She asked him to ‘convene his nobles for their advice therein … But he has utterly refused her motion and continues his promises to Mar. So this matter is “marvellous secret”,’ intelligencer George Nicolson observed with some sarcasm.
The feud turned violent when the queen’s supporters clashed with the king’s men under the walls of Stirling Castle, and Mar’s baillie, a man named Forrester, was slaughtered. ‘I fear it will very suddenly burst into bloody factions,’ Nicolson judged, ‘for all sides are busy packing up all small feuds for their advantage.’ The kirk ordained a day of fasting ‘for the amendment of the present danger’ caused by this rupture. James, meanwhile, pleaded with the queen to abandon her campaign. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’
One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting carried the stories to Denmark. Anne’s mother, Queen Sophie, unmoved by her daughter’s distress, advised that she should ‘obey the King in all things’.
In London, Cecil was told ‘there is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation between the King and the Queen’. Elizabeth I let off an exasperated rebuke to her cousin, rueing ‘to see him so evidently a spectacle of a seduced king, abusing counsel, and guiding awry his kingdom’. Her brother prince – her heir, perhaps – had let his popish lords lay out their demands, ‘turning their treason’s bills to artificer’s reckonings – one billet lacking only’, she fumed, and that is, ‘an item … so much for the cord whose office they best merited’. James did not immediately follow advice on executions from his mother’s killer, no matter how wittily expressed – though he did love wit.
A rapprochement occurred between king and queen towards the end of the year, and by early 1596 Denmark’s daughter was pregnant again. Princess Elizabeth, named in honour of Elizabeth I, was born at Falkland Palace, Fife, in August 1596. She too was quickly fostered out to the king’s allies and Henry saw nothing of his new sister. Nor would he see his baby brother, Charles, born four years later. Nor Princess Margaret, born 1598, but dead by March 1600.
Prince Henry’s first portrait dates from this time. It shows a king in miniature. About eighteen months old, in his high chair, dressed in jewel-encrusted, padded white-satin robes, with a coronet on his head, he holds a rattle as if it were a tiny sceptre. The reddish blond down on his head is baby hair. His skin is white as the moon. He resembles his mother.
FOUR
‘THE KING’S GIFT’
By 1599 James had shooed ‘the skirts’ out of Prince Henry’s lodgings and ordered diverse men of ‘good sort to attend upon his person’ instead. It was time to prepare the boy to be king.
James produced a hands-on guide to kingcraft for this purpose. You must ‘study to know well [your] own craft … which is to rule [your] people’, he told his five-year-old son. The king had been writing and thinking about this for a long time. His Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’) came out that year in a tiny print-run of seven. Copies of ‘His Majesty’s instructions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince’ went to a privileged few: Prince Henry, the queen, Mar, and the man James appointed to be Henry’s tutor, Adam Newton.
Self-help guides in preparation to rule were an established genre. The most famous, still in use at this time, was Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani (‘The Education of a Christian Prince’, 1516). James VI’s book possessed a special allure, though, being written by a ruling personal monarch with vast experience of the subject.
He divided Basilikon Doron into ‘three books: the first instructing the prince on his duty towards God; the second in his duty when he should be king; and the third informing him how to behave himself in indifferent things, which were neither right nor wrong, but according as they were rightly or wrong used’. James’s writing voice enlivened the content. He could be intimate, colloquial, shrewd and humorous, but also deeply learned. When it came to publishing the book for a wider readership, in England in 1603, James revised it, allowing his subjects to see how the wise philosopher-king was nurturing the student prince for them.
God expected Henry to have a detailed knowledge of scripture, his father told him, in order to ‘contain your Church in their calling’. In James’s view, the clergy’s role was only to be custodians of his church, subservient to the king’s wishes. Henry must not let ministers overstep this mark, interfere in government, or try to limit the authority of the king. Henry should strive to cultivate a middle path in matters of faith: ‘Beware with both the extremities; as well as ye repress the vain Puritan, so [also] not to suffer proud Papall Bishops.’ The king had already experienced memorable run-ins with certain Calvinist ministers who treated the heavenly and worldly realms as distinct. In general, Henry should be ‘a loving nourish-father’ to his church, said James, echoing Isaiah 49:23, where ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers’.
A poet, philosopher and one of the most intelligent rulers in Christendom, James wanted his son to be as scholarly as him. In matters of secular government, Henry must ‘study well your own laws’, and recommended as further reading Xenophon and Caesar on statecraft. Henry’s tutors agreed, but had their own preferred exemplars; in time they would expose the prince to them, to the king’s displeasure.
James encouraged Henry to study mathematics, which would allow him to fulfil the prime function of monarchy: the management of national security and foreign policy – or, when and how to make war. For this, maths would improve his mastery of ‘the art military, in situations of Camps, ordering of battles, making fortifications, and the placing of batteries’. A good commander could calculate the range and elevation for firing artillery and placing of infantry, and understand engineering issues such as where to mine walls for maximum destruction.
Although Basilikon Doron was a practical manual on kingcraft, James touched on the theory of monarchy, as expanded upon in his recent long essay: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. The king nuanced the Calvinist theory of predestination when he told Henry there was nothing you could do to earn the right to rule; God’s will destined Henry to be king. Kings preceded the creation of all councils, including parliaments and church. Thus, on every count the king’s power was pre-eminent.
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