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

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       CHAPTER TWO

       ‘A babe crowned in his cradle’

       The shaping of the King of Scots

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is said to have written Macbeth to flatter James. It certainly did not flatter Scotland. The play, which was first performed in 1606, depicted a violent, medieval country inhabited by witches. It was supposedly set in the eleventh century but as Shakespeare knew, many at the English court believed the picture held true of the Scotland of their day – and not without some reason. For the most part Scottish society was divided between feudal lairds and their tenantry. What meagre surpluses the land produced were used to feed the lairds’ private armies before any remainder could be traded in the towns. These consequently remained small and trade was underdeveloped, while an inordinate amount of energy was expended on the detection and killing of witches. There were, however, signs of growing wealth and improvement.¹

      The thirty-six-year-old James VI had been King of Scotland for almost as long as Elizabeth had been Queen of England, and his reign had brought a measure of peace to what had been a notoriously volatile country. In 1598 legislation was carried through the Scots parliament that encouraged the resolution of feuds through the royal courts. With it the tradition of the feud began to die out and by January 1603 James’s efforts were culminating in the resolution of one of the last of the great feuds: that between George Gordon, the sixth Earl of Huntly, and Huntly’s enemies, the Earls of Argyll and Moray. A marriage between their children was set for the following month. This lessening civil disorder had allowed trade to improve and in the towns stone houses were gradually replacing those of wood. Although witches were being strangled and burned in numbers never remotely matched in England, this too was considered an advance. Medieval Scotland had been comparatively lax with its witches, the true danger they posed having only been revealed by modern theological works to which Scotland’s highly educated King had himself contributed. Meanwhile at court, thanks in part to James’s patronage, Scotland had become a centre of cultural importance for poetry and music. There were also developments in the sciences, with John Napier of Merchiston, the discoverer of logarithms, already working on his inventions.²

      That January, 1603, James’s court was at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. Scotland’s capital was modest in size but dramatic in appearance, as the Earl of Essex’s former secretary Fynes Moryson described:

      The City is high seated, in a fruitful soil and wholesome air, and is adorned with many noblemen’s towers lying about it, and abounds with many springs of sweet waters. At the end towards the East is the King’s palace joining to the monastery of the Holy Cross, which King David the first built, over which, in a park of hares, conies and deer, a high mountain hangs, called the chair of Arthur. From the King’s palace … the City still rises higher and higher towards the west, and consists especially of one broad and very fair street … and this length from the East to the West is about a mile, whereas the breadth of the City from the north to South is narrow, and cannot be half a mile. At the furthest end towards the West, is a very strong castle which the Scots hold unexpugnable … And from this castle, towards the West, is a most steep rock pointed on the highest top, out of which this castle is cut.³

      Holyrood itself was also striking, with its grey stone courtyards and towers emulating the chateau of Chambord. It was reported to be in an ‘altogether ruinous’ state in 1600, but repairs costing £1,307 13 shillings and 10 pence had since been carried out and it had been furnished with several new items, including gold cloth curtains, a £20 silver water pot, several velvet chairs, eight silver chandeliers and a gilded plate worth £86. James’s private chambers were on the first floor of the northwest tower, built by his grandfather James V. There was an outer chamber to the east and an inner bedchamber to the west – the door and window frames having been painted red during his grandfather’s time. Directly above these rooms were those of James’s wife, Anna, the twenty-eight-year-old youngest daughter of Frederick II of Denmark. A new brass chandelier hung outside her door.⁴

      There were no Christmas celebrations as there were at Whitehall: the Kirk had abolished them when James was nine. Nor were there some of the usual court entertainments. Plays, which were an English obsession, were frowned on. There were, however, pageants and fireworks, visits to the royal lion house and hunting in the park. The structure of court life was relaxed, much closer to the informality of the French model than the English. While Harington complained that Elizabeth lived ‘shut up in a chamber from all her subjects and most of her servants’, James’s courtiers wandered in and out of his rooms quite freely, and dozens had open access to his Bedchamber. Royal meals were another striking point of comparison. Elizabeth did not eat in public. Instead a great table was set near her throne in the Presence Chamber. A cloth was laid and a courtier entered with one of her ladies. They brought the cover to the table and made elaborate obeisance. After trying the food some of it was carried through to the Privy Chamber where Elizabeth would eat and drink with her habitual restraint. Royal meals in Scotland, by contrast, were convivial affairs with plenty of wine drunk and coarse language heard.

      ‘Anyone can enter while the king is eating,’ the English diplomat Sir Edward Wotton reported after a visit in the winter of 1601/2; ‘the King speaks to those who stand around while he is at table … and they to him. The dinner over, his custom is to remain for a time before retiring, listening to jests and pleasantries. He is very familiar with his domestics and gentlemen of the bedchamber.’⁵ Most of these domestics had served James since he was a child – his valet William Murray had been with him since he was two.

      The royal table was laden with roasted game and boiled mutton, wine and ale, but did not include any fine food that was commonplace in a great English house. Fynes Moryson complained that the Scots had ‘no art of cookery, or furniture of household stuff but rather rude neglect of both’. Most Scots ate ‘red colewort and cabbage, but little fresh meat’ and even at the house of an important courtier he found the table ‘more than half furnished with great platters of porridge, each having a little piece of sodden meat’.⁶ James, however, liked his food simple, just as he declared that he preferred ‘proper, cleanly, comely and honest’ СКАЧАТЬ