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

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СКАЧАТЬ women. Harington could not resist pointing out that it was thought a little strange that James had no mistresses, confessing that in England to call a courtier chaste, ‘specially if it were afore his Mrs’, was considered an insult worthy of a stabbing. If anything was suspected, however, such worldly courtiers were unlikely to be shocked. The Earl of Essex’s closest friend, the Earl of Southampton, enjoyed the sexual companionship of both men and women without earning great opprobrium.

      What really mattered to courtiers was how a king’s sexual preferences impacted on politics. Wotton and Harington praised James’s ‘chastity’ because in not keeping mistresses he was not creating bastards to rival his legitimate children. Male lovers, however, could hold direct power in a way that a mistress could not, and the power that Lennox held foreshadowed that of James’s later favourites in England. Safe in the knowledge of James’s devotion, Lennox had moved against the regent Morton, a trusted ally of England. Elizabeth had made a formal approach to James demanding that he get rid of ‘the professed Papist’, Monsieur d’Aubigny, but although James was usually wary of offending Elizabeth, on this he stood his ground.

      James’s stance sealed Morton’s fate and the last regent was executed during the summer of 1581, ostensibly for his part in Darnley’s murder. ‘That false Scots Urchin!’ Elizabeth is said to have exclaimed when the news of Morton’s death reached her, ‘what can be expected from the double dealing of such an urchin as this!’

      The following year the sixteen-year-old James was kidnapped by allies of the Kirk led by William Ruthven, first Earl of Gowrie and son of Patrick Ruthven whose servant had held the pistol to the belly of Mary, Queen of Scots during the Riccio murder. The captured king had been forced to look on as Lennox fled into exile in France where he died in 1583. But in due course James had used his cunning to escape his captors and effect a counter coup with Gowrie’s rivals. Gowrie, having been initially pardoned, was executed in May 1584, after attempting to stage a second coup; leading Presbyterian ministers were forced to flee to England and the Scottish parliament ordered all copies of Buchanan’s De jure regni, with its arguments against the divine right of kings, to be handed in to the authorities so that they could be purged of offensive material.²³

      It was at this time that Monsieur de Fontenay, Mary, Queen of Scots’s emissary, had visited James’s court. Fontenay thought the eighteen-year-old king ‘for his years the most remarkable Prince who ever lived’. But he also described a very damaged individual, ‘an old young man’, both wary and childishly self-indulgent. There were three aspects of James’s personality that particularly concerned the Frenchman: James’s arrogance, fanned by his superior education, blinded him to his ‘poverty and insignificance’ on the world stage. He was ‘overconfident of his strength and scornful of other princes’ – a characteristic that was still truer of him in 1603 when he had two decades of successful rule in Scotland behind him. Lastly, Fontenay made his observations about James’s addiction to hunting. The sport seems to have given him a sense of release from his disabilities matched by no other physical pursuit, other than sex, but his attachment to it was as uncontrolled as his love for his favourites and this incontinence was evident in other aspects of James’s life.

      He regularly spent money he did not have (a common problem in adults with ADHD). Elizabeth, not known for her generosity, bailed out her profligate neighbour in a series of payments totalling around £58,000, from 1586 to 1603.²⁴ He also appeased his lairds with gifts of titles without concern that he might degrade their value: by 1603 Scotland had as many nobles as England, though a population only a quarter of the size.²⁵

Mary, however, was also curious to know not only about her son’s character but also his religious views. It was evident that he felt his mother’s chief enemies, Presbyterians such as Buchanan, had also proved dangerous to him, and she hoped that James might invite her back to Scotland. Fontenay, however, forewarned her that although James had indeed grown to dislike his Presbyterian ministers and regarded the Kirk as the chief threat to royal rule, he despised the Pope and showed no obvious affection for her. Mary nevertheless remained desperate to believe that James would recognise her right to be sovereign of Scotland if she offered to legitimise the title of king that he had usurped from her. She made contact with her son to argue that such a deal was greatly to his advantage since the Catholic powers would then support his candidature for the English succession. But in 1585 she discovered James had made an agreement with Elizabeth that made him a pensioner of the English crown^* and left her in her prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire. Terrified that she was going to be left in England to be murdered under the Bond of Association, Mary threatened to disinherit him. He never contacted her again. The following year Sir Francis Walsingham began gathering the evidence to convict Mary of involvement in Babington’s plot against Elizabeth. Only the threat that James would break Scotland’s treaties with England and turn to France or Spain to avenge his mother’s death could have saved her. But while James pleaded for Mary’s life after her conviction, he never threatened to break Scotland’s treaties with England. He may have rested his hopes on Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit regicide, but he was certainly prepared to take the risk that his mother would be killed. While Elizabeth did not want to take responsibility for Mary’s death she had asked Mary’s gaolers to murder her so that she could cast the blame there. When they refused she signed Mary’s death warrant and then she suspended it as she redoubled her efforts to have Mary killed under the Bond of Association. Burghley, however, ignored her orders and convened a meeting of the Privy Council to ensure that the warrant was put into effect. James learned the grim details of his mother’s death first hand when her servants returned to Scotland.

      After eighteen years confined to a series of houses in England, Mary’s elegant frame had become thick set and her face hung with double chins. But her courage and dignity remained. On 8 February 1587 in the fire-lit hall of Fotheringay, she approached the scaffold smiling, having cast herself in the role of a Catholic martyr with ‘an Agnus Dei about her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and a pair of beads at her girdle with a golden cross at the end of them’.²⁶ The death of a common traitor nevertheless awaited her, and it was not to be a dignified one.

      Mary’s French physician, Monsieur Bourgoing, recorded in his journal that once she had been blindfolded and her prayers said she had lifted her head ‘thinking she would be decapitated with a two-handed sword (according to the privilege reserved in France for Princes and gentlemen)’. Henry VIII had granted such a privilege to Anne Boleyn and, when Elizabeth’s life had been under threat in the aftermath of the Wyatt revolt against Mary I, she had expressed the hope that if it came to it, she would be executed in the same manner. But Mary, who had been a Queen of France, was led to the block and butchered with an axe, ‘like those with which they cut wood’, Bourgoing noted with disgust. It took the nervous executioner three strokes to take off Mary’s head and when his companion raised it up, with the shout ‘God save the Queen’, he found himself, in a moment of grim farce, holding a chestnut wig, as her grey head rolled on the floor.

      Mary’s weeping servants had stayed after the official witnesses left the room and watched the executioners strip the stockings from Mary’s corpse (it was usual for the executioners to sell any clothes from the corpse of their victims; even their hair could be cut from their heads). As the men pulled and ripped, Mary’s little dog, a Skye terrier, dashed out from under her skirts. ‘The poor creature, covered with blood, rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively,’ Bourgoing recalled. Confused, it had lapped at the pools of blood on the floor before being taken away.²⁷

      After Mary’s servants had finished recounting their story James was silent, and he quickly retired to his room. He had once said that Scotland could never be without faction while Mary was alive, but the manner of her death СКАЧАТЬ