After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James. Leanda Lisle de

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СКАЧАТЬ with silk lace, much less with lace of silver or gold’, and the style was French – ‘all things rather commodious for use than brave for ornament’.⁷

      James particularly disliked the wearing of earrings and was impatient of the fuss required to dress long hair. He kept his own reddish locks cropped short and his suits were usually dark and adorned with nothing more than a few enamel buttons. Wotton described the King as having a youthful face – he ‘does not seem more than twenty-eight, or thereabouts’ – and of being average in height, with broad shoulders and a ‘vigorous constitution’. He would go hunting whenever he could, often spending six hours a day galloping across country with a loosened bridle. Although it was a common pursuit amongst monarchs, and one his mother had enjoyed, her former emissary, Monsieur de Fontenay, complained that James’s passion for hunting amounted to an obsession and that he put this recreation before his work. James admitted in return he did not have much stamina for business, but he claimed he could achieve more in one hour than others in a day; that he could speak, listen and watch simultaneously and sometimes do five things at once. He was certainly a mass of nervous energy. He paced his rooms ceaselessly, fiddling with his clothes, hating to stay still even for a moment. An Englishman later described James’s twitching as resembling that of a man sitting on an anthill.⁸ But if James was unable or unwilling to concentrate on routine administrative work, Fontenay had to agree with the King that his mind was exceptionally quick:

      Three qualities of mind he possesses in perfection: he understands clearly, judges wisely and has a retentive memory. His questions are keen and penetrating and his replies are sound. In any argument, whatever it is about, he maintains the view that appears to him most just, and I have heard him support Catholic against Protestant opinions. He is well instructed in languages, science, and affairs of state, better, I dare say than anyone else in his kingdom. In short he has a remarkable intelligence, as well as lofty and virtuous ideals and a high opinion of himself.⁹

      James’s childhood friend, the Earl of Mar – whom James nicknamed ‘Jocky o’Sclaittis’ – had been telling the English court that the King’s body was as agile as his mind, but, as fit as James was, this was very far from the truth. Sir Edward Wotton tactfully described the lower half of James’s body as ‘somewhat slender’. In fact his legs were so weak he could barely walk before the age of seven and he never did so normally. Fontenay observed he had an ‘ungainly gait’ and others mention he meandered in a circular pattern and leant on the shoulder of one of his courtiers as he walked. The muscles in James’s face and mouth also appear to have had some weakness and his manner of eating and drinking was judged crude. One infamous memoir claims that James had ‘a tongue too large for his mouth, which made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth’.

      Such descriptions suggest that James may have suffered from cerebral palsy, caused by damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after his birth.¹⁰ But there is another aspect to the kind of brain damage James suffered that has not previously been explored. About 60 per cent of individuals with cerebral palsy have emotional or behavioural difficulties. James’s restlessness, his inability to concentrate on routine administrative work, his hyper-concentration on what did interest him, his passion for a high stimulation activity like hunting are all characteristic of the contentious Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which, like cerebral palsy, is said to have a neurological basis.

      James’s mother endured a long and difficult labour and it is possible that this is when the brain damage occurred. Many contemporaries, however, believed that his disabilities were caused in utero at the time of Riccio’s murder. The trauma to his mother might indeed have been sufficient to have damaged James – and whatever the true cause of his disabilities he had to live with the psychological effects of being told that this was the case. The childhood that had followed James’s birth was steeped in danger and he might easily have emerged from it as a brute, but despite having physical defects to remind him of the possible effects of violence on him, Wotton saw: ‘In his eyes and in the outward expression of his face … a certain natural goodness,’ and the English courtier Roger Wilbraham later claimed James had ‘the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew’. His experiences had filled with him less with anger than the desire to resolve conflict. He chose the Old Testament King Solomon as his role model and picked as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Beati Pacifici’, Blessed Are the Peacemakers.

      James was convinced it was his destiny to unite the old enemies, the crowns of England and Scotland. He sometimes pointed out the lion-shaped birthmark on his arm said to fulfil the words of a Welsh prophecy, quoted by Harington in his Tract on the Succession: ‘a babe crowned in his cradle; marked with a lion in his skin; shall recover again the cross; [and] make the isle of Brutus whole and imparted … to grow henceforward better and better’.¹¹

      In James’s mind the phrase ‘recover the cross’ referred to his intention to heal religious divisions. First James intended to reform the Church of England on lines that would satisfy all except the most extreme conservatives and Puritans, for example, by developing a preaching ministry, but keeping the hierarchy of bishops. His ultimate ambition, however, was to encourage the reform of the Church of Rome and make it acceptable to moderate Protestants. It was the divisions in Christendom that lay at the heart of so much conflict across Europe and he hoped that differences could be thrashed out at a Grand Council. James often said that he revered the Catholic Church as the mother church – comments that fuelled Catholic hopes that he might convert – but he also saw it as ‘clogged with many infirmities and corruptions’.¹² Chief amongst them was the office of the papacy and he had described the Pope as the Antichrist. ‘Does he not usurp Christ his office, calling himself universal bishop and head of the church?’, he once asked.¹³ He intended to do what other Protestants had failed to and knock the triple crown from the Pope’s head, reducing him to the rank of the first bishop of the church, ‘but not head or superior’.¹⁴

      James, as he was wont to remind people in later years, was a ‘cradle king’, crowned at the age of thirteen months on 26 July 1567. The Protestant lords who had overthrown his mother placed their infant king in the guardianship of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, the father of his childhood friend Jocky o’Sclaittis, whom he had at his side in 1603. It was at Mar’s castle, perched on a sheer rock face above the town of Stirling, that James spent his formative years. The omens for James’s survival in this fortress had not been good. Harington quoted a popular saying in his Tract: ‘A king in Scotland … die[s] rarely in his bed’. The Stuart crown he had usurped was as weak as the Tudor crown was strong. There had been a succession of child kings and despised women rulers and the great lairds retained the military power that had been stripped from the English nobles by the Tudors. James’s book of instruction on matters of kingship, the Basilikon Doron, dedicated to his eldest son in 1598, recalled them as robber barons who drank

      in with their very nourish milk, that their honour stood in three points of iniquity; To thrall by oppression the meaner sort that dwells near them … to maintain their servants and dependers in any wrong … and for any displeasure that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbour, to take up plain field against him; and (without respect to God, King or commonweal) to bang it out bravely, he and all his kin against him and all his.¹⁵

      Scotland was riven by private wars as well as religious differences and the usurping of Mary’s crown had offered opportunities to settle many old scores as well as new ones. All save one of James’s regents were to СКАЧАТЬ