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

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СКАЧАТЬ The man had seemed unwilling and a struggle followed during which James was spotted screaming for help at the window. His men dashed to his aid and killed first Alexander and then Gowrie as he fought to revenge his brother.

      James ordered the Kirk’s five Edinburgh ministers to repeat this story to their congregations so that they might thank God for his deliverance, but they refused. Robert Bruce, the minister who had crowned Anna, and fetched Gowrie from France, made it clear he believed James had plotted to kill the brothers, either because of his hatred for the family, or because Anna was having an affair with one of them (there was talk that she had a flirtation with Alexander). James’s reply to these accusations was blunt and compelling: ‘I see Mr Robert,’ he told Bruce, ‘that ye would make me a murderer. It is known very well that I was never blood-thirsty. If I would have taken lives, I had causes enough; I need not to hazard myself so.’⁴⁶ James was certainly not the kind of man to place himself in the middle of a violent situation.

      When the ministers persisted in refusing to accept James’s story he had them replaced: four later capitulated and were forced to tour the country offering their humble submission in public places whilst the fifth, Robert Bruce, refused and was sent into exile. The Kirk was informed that thereafter, 5 August was to be celebrated as a national holiday with special services to give thanks for the King’s survival.

At home and abroad, however, people remained unconvinced by James’s version of events. The English ambassador Sir William Bowes thought that James, finding himself alone with Alexander – ‘a learned, sweet and artless young gentleman’ – had made some mention of the boy’s father ‘whereat the youth showed a grieved and expostulatory countenance’. James had taken fright and shouted for help, and after the boy was killed, he made up his story to conceal his embarrassment.⁴⁷ More recent theories have suggested that Alexander offered James sexual favours or the cancellation of a debt to lure him from his protectors and kidnap him. When James had realised what was happening he shouted in terror that he was being murdered. The Kirk certainly had strong motives for supporting another kidnap attempt and there was a suggestion at the time that England was involved^*. Gowrie’s servants were, however, severely tortured in an effort to uncover a conspiracy and all denied any knowledge of one. The man whom James had seen in the tower swore he had just been told to go there and wait upon events. An explanation for this comes from Gowrie’s tutor, William Rynd, who reported that he had once heard young Gowrie say that the best way for a man to keep a plot secret was to keep its existence to himself. But it is possible that James did indeed plot against the Ruthvens. In London in the winter of 1602 a character named Francis Mowbray appeared claiming that he had evidence of the Ruthvens’ innocence. He was handed over to James that January and died in February 1603 having fallen, it was reported, from the window of his cell in an escape attempt.

      Whatever the truth behind the Gowrie mystery the significance of it lies in James’s determination to use the incident to demonstrate that neither Kirk nor nobleman would be able to control him as they had done in the past, and those that tried would suffer for it. His action against the remaining members of the Ruthven family began immediately. As soon as the King’s party returned to Falkland Palace that night he had the three Ruthven sisters thrown out into the driving rain, despite Anna’s protests. She refused to believe the Ruthvens had attempted to kill her husband and saw the event entirely in terms of a triumph for the Mar faction. She stayed in bed for two days afterwards, refusing to eat or speak. When she eventually did so she shouted at her husband to beware how he treated her for she was not the Earl of Gowrie. On another occasion she ‘hoped that heaven would not visit her family with the vengeance for the sufferings of the Ruthvens’. James, aware that Anna was pregnant, took her abuse without complaint, but he was not deflected from his pursuit of vengeance.

      On 6 August a party of men were sent to seize the surviving Ruthven brothers, William and Patrick, who were still only schoolboys. They escaped over the border and in June 1602 were said to be hiding in Yorkshire. James complained to Elizabeth and, with some reluctance, she agreed to have them banished. William fled abroad early in 1603 leaving Patrick behind. In Scotland, meanwhile, in the autumn of 1600, the decaying corpses of John and Alexander were tried for treason. They were found guilty, the Ruthven estates and honours were forfeited and their name proscribed. On the day their bodies were being gibbeted, quartered and exposed throughout the country, Anna gave birth to the future Charles I. James hurried to Dunfermline where she was lying with her child and in the New Year he presented Anna with a jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds. There were those amongst the Mar faction who wanted her imprisoned for her support for the Ruthvens, but James would hear none of it, ‘but … does seek by all means to cover her folly’, a witness reported.⁴⁸

      That January 1603 Sir Thomas Erskine, the Captain of the Guard, warned James that Anna had smuggled Beatrice Ruthven into her rooms at Holyrood and talked to her for hours just feet from where he slept. Beatrice left laden with gifts to support her in exile in England. James was shaken and angry but again he refused to punish Anna. He simply ordered workmen to seal up ‘all dangerous passages for coming near the King’s chamber.’ There were other matters to think about than the Ruthvens, as the question of the succession had returned to centre stage.

The aftermath to the Gowrie conspiracy had found James’s ally at Elizabeth’s court, the Earl of Essex, still disgraced and Secretary Cecil with total domination over the Privy Council. In December 1600, however, Cecil’s agents made an unexpected gesture of reconciliation. They claimed that ‘the Earl of Leicester or Sir Francis Walsingham were the only cutters of [Mary Stuart’s] throat’.⁴⁹ James had ignored them. Aware of the unpopularity of Elizabeth’s government, he was convinced that she would soon be facing an uprising and in February 1601 he sent the Earl of Mar and a diplomat named Edward Bruce to aid Essex in his plans to raise a revolt.^* But by the time Mar and Bruce arrived in London, Essex had already been tried and beheaded.

      James’s fear was that Cecil would now use the Essex revolt to achieve what the confession of Valentine Thomas had failed to do, namely link him directly to a plot against Elizabeth. Fortunately the black bag containing his last letter to Essex, which the Earl wore on the day of the revolt, had disappeared. It was probably destroyed either by Essex himself or the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, who soon offered James his loyalty. With no solid evidence against him, James sent instructions for Mar and Bruce to ask the ‘present guiders’ in England to declare that he was untouched by any actions against the Queen. They were to offer his future favour to those courtiers who supported him and his eternal displeasure to those who did not. He was particularly keen for the message to get through to Cecil who, he observed, ‘is king there in effect’. With Essex dead, however, the kaleidoscope of faction was shifting once more. Cecil made clear to the envoys that he had every intention of backing the Stuart cause. The rules of primogeniture underpinned the laws of inheritance to which the entire political elite was subject and the majority had never been comfortable with overturning them, still less now when James’s dynastic rivals were particularly weak. Even a foreigner like the French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, had observed that ‘it is certain the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman’; that ruled out James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and Ferdinando Derby’s daughter, Lady Anne Stanley. Meanwhile the claim of Lord Beauchamp had been all but destroyed by the Doleman book and his failure to marry someone of suitable status.

      Essex was right to believe that Cecil had needed to have a rival candidate to James in the late 1590s. The evidence suggests Cecil had considered marrying Arbella to Beauchamp’s elder son Edward Seymour, so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary Tudor. His ally, Beauchamp’s father, the Earl of Hertford, had certainly done so and Cecil’s interest in the match may have been behind the rumours in Europe that СКАЧАТЬ