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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was assassinated in the streets of Linlithgow on 22 January 1570, when James was three. The murder apparently pleased Mary so much that thereon she paid her brother’s assassin a yearly pension. Her old enemy, James’s paternal grandfather the Earl of Lennox, was however named the next regent as Scotland descended into civil war. Battles raged around Stirling as by night the four-year-old James slept in a bed draped in black damask, a picture of his grandfather James V on the wall, and by day he was coached by his two Calvinist tutors. The junior of these, Peter Young, remained close to James. He had been a kindly and encouraging teacher to a bright and sensitive pupil. But James’s senior tutor had proved a brutal master.

      George Buchanan was the finest Latin scholar in Europe: a poet, dramatist, humanist and founding father of Presbyterianism, he arrived at Stirling a man with a mission. The ink was barely dry on his tract Detectio Mariae Reginae, a vitriolic attack on the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he was determined to raise a very different type of monarch. In this he succeeded, but at a price. He instilled in James learning that surpassed that of any other monarch in Europe, but he used the rod to do it. He espoused high, democratic ideals of kingship, but he despised courtly manners and regarded women with contempt. He allowed James to grow up as timorous as his mother was bold, as boorish as his mother was refined, as contemptuous of women as she was charming to men. James ended up resenting Buchanan and much of what he stood for, but he was every inch his pupil. Inspired by Buchanan’s example James had written several impressive theological and political works, in which his theories on the divine right of kings countered Buchanan’s quasi-republican view that kings took their authority from the people and could be lawfully deposed – views that James had come to believe were a recipe for instability.

      After just a year of Buchanan’s tutoring James had been ready to open the Scottish parliament with an address in Latin. The events that followed were to be imprinted on his memory. He once said that he had learnt to speak Latin before he learnt Scots and even aged five he spoke it with confidence. His voice was naturally loud and in 1603, after years of speech-giving his language was often grave and sententious, but then it doubtless still had the squeak of a small boy. After his speech James had sat amongst the lairds, squirming in his chair until his sharp eyes and probing fingers discovered a hole, either in a tablecloth or the roof over his head. He then made the childish observation: ‘This parliament has a hole in it!’, words that were to be flung back at him as prophetic when only days later his grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, was brought into the castle dying of wounds received in a raid by his mother’s supporters.¹⁶ James never forgot his grandfather lying with his bowels cut open and, perhaps because of talk of his having foreseen it, he had developed a keen interest in the supposed gift of foresight.¹⁷

      But Lennox’s bloody death was not the only murder James had witnessed at Stirling. The old Earl of Mar had held the regency for only a short time before it passed on to the Earl of Morton, one of James’s father’s murderers. He held it until a few months before James’s twelfth birthday, when on 4 March 1578, two great Highland Earls, Argyll and Atholl, appeared at Stirling Castle dressed in full armour. They informed James that in Scots tradition he was now of age and should abolish the regency. James’s remarkable education and royal status had ensured he never suffered from undue modesty and he was already quite willing to take on the full mantle of a king, but Morton proved reluctant to relinquish his power without a fight. On 26 April 1578 James was woken in his room at Stirling Castle by the sound of clashing steel in the hall. Morton and James’s former playmate, twenty-year-old Jocky o’Sclaittis, had returned to seize the castle and James. Possession of the person of the monarch brought with it authority and the threat of kidnap had been a constant one until very recently. As James had watched the fight he witnessed Mar’s uncle trampled to death. Terrified, he tore at his hair, shouting that ‘the Master was slain’, but the fight continued until it concluded in victory for Morton and Mar.¹⁸

      James had problems sleeping for some time afterwards, and for the rest of his life he trembled at the sight of armed men. It would be a mistake, however, to label James a coward, as many Englishmen later would. As a teenager he learned to use his intellect and cunning to manipulate the fearsome warriors who wished to control him, developing a close and secretive side to his otherwise expansive character and growing perversely proud of a talent to deceive.

      In 1579 Buchanan had left James as he arrived with a treatise for the boy to ponder on. De jure regni apud Scotos promulgated the Presbyterian view that God had vested power in the people who could resist and depose the monarch if he ruled tyrannically or failed to promote the ‘true’ religion. That September, however, a new and long-lasting influence had entered James’s life – one who represented everything Buchanan detested: James’s Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny.

      D’Aubigny was a handsome, red-bearded father of four in his late thirties. He had returned from the court in France to deal with a dispute over the title and estates of the Lennox earldom and the newly adolescent James was fascinated by his sophisticated relative. He would stay up late with him, drinking and joking. D’Aubigny reciprocated with displays of affection and James, who had no other close family, became passionately devoted to him. D’Aubigny’s influence expanded rapidly. He reorganised James’s court and household on the French model and encouraged his interest in poetry. James in turn lavished money and titles on him, ostensibly converting him to Protestantism and eventually making him Duke of Lennox.

      The English agent, Sir Henry Widdrington, had looked on appalled at Lennox’s growing power, convinced that he was using his conversion as a cover for plotting with the Catholic powers. He sent letters south warning that James was ‘altogether persuaded and led’ by Lennox, so that ‘he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, often times he will clasp him about the neck, with his arms and kiss him’. The Kirk went further and later declared that ‘the Duke of Lennox went about to draw the King to carnal lust’.¹⁹

      Beyond seventeenth-century descriptions of James’s ‘lascivious’ kisses with his favourites, the exact nature of the sexual activity James enjoyed with Lennox and later male favourites is unknown. But the view of one (admittedly hostile) witness – that a man who showed so little restraint in public was unlikely to do so in private – seems a reasonable one.²⁰ James was a tactile man and the chief arguments against his having been a practising homosexual fail to convince. The first is that seventeenth-century Protestants regarded sodomy with ferocious disapproval and that James himself condemned it to his son as a sin so horrible ‘that ye are bound in conscience never to forgive [it]’.²¹ Homosexual sex is not, however, limited to sodomy, and James was also well known for his blasphemous oaths and his failure to live up to much advice he gave his son. The second argument is that James’s marriage to Anna had demonstrated physical passion (as proven by her frequent pregnancies). But while it is notable that James had no great male favourites during the period in which he was fathering children, it is also evident that after the birth of his last child Sophia in 1606, his attraction for young men reasserted itself and his sexuality became a matter of significance in English political life, with the appearance of Robert Carr in 1607 and then George Villiers in 1614.²²

      It is not known whether the English court knew of James’s sexual preferences in 1602/3, or if so, precisely how it was regarded. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was no real concept of ‘homosexuality’; sex between men was simply viewed as an act of depravity, along with all other sexual acts that took place outside marriage. It was, however, understood that some men had a particular taste for it. Burghley would have passed on everything he knew about James to his son Cecil before his death in 1598 and although there is no reported gossip on the matter in the winter СКАЧАТЬ