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СКАЧАТЬ main source of influence. The Countess was part of a group that backed the reunification of the Churches and Anna may have been aware that this was an area that interested her husband. In any event the Countess’s conversation doubtless made an attractive contrast to the lectures Anna received at the hands of the Kirk. The turning point in Anna’s religious life came in about 1600 when the chaplain she had brought with her from Demark became a Calvinist.

      Since Anna could not tolerate becoming a Calvinist herself she sacked her chaplain and turned to her Catholic friends for advice. They smuggled the Jesuit priest Robert Abercrombie into a secret room to give Anna instruction. She duly visited him for three days and on the last she heard mass and received the sacrament as a Catholic. Anna later described to Abercrombie how James confronted her about rumours of her conversion when they were in bed together, asking if it was true that she had ‘some dealings with a priest’. She had immediately confessed. ‘Well, wife,’ James apparently told her, ‘if you cannot live without this sort of thing, do your best to keep things as quiet as possible; for, if you don’t, our crown is in danger.’³⁸ James’s response, if accurately reported, seems a remarkably mild one, but he must have been as aware of the potential benefits of his wife’s conversion to his image abroad, as he was of its dangers to his popularity at home.

      Since the publication of the Jesuit-penned Conference About the Next Succession, James had sought to deflect interest from the candidacy of the Infanta Isabella. He hinted to English Catholics, to the Vatican and to the new King of France Henri IV, that he would offer toleration of religion in England and that he might even convert. Anna’s own conversion added considerable credence to his claims and according to the Duc de Sully she became ‘deeply engaged in all the civil factions, not only in Scotland in relation to the Catholics, whom she supported and had even first encouraged, but also in England’.³⁹ Robert Abercrombie was allowed to stay in Scotland until 1602, during which time Anna received the sacrament from him a further nine times. She would come to him early in the morning whilst the rest of the household slept and he recalled that afterwards she would stay and talk with him and that ‘sometimes she expressed her desire that her husband should be a Catholic, at other times her son should be educated under the direction of the Sovereign Pontiff’.⁴⁰ It was, however, the Mar family and not Anna who was raising James’s heir – a matter over which she felt deep resentment.

      Prince Henry, the first of James and Anna’s children, was born in February 1594 and soon after Anna had discovered that James intended for Henry to be raised at Stirling Castle, as he had been. It meant that if anything happened to James during Henry’s minority the Earl of Mar would become regent of Scotland instead of Anna, which was the norm in Europe. James was once overheard trying to explain to Anna that he was concerned that ‘if some faction got strong enough, she could not hinder his boy being used against him, as he himself had been against his unfortunate mother’.⁴¹ Anna refused to accept this and pleaded with James to change his mind, reminding him how she had ‘left all her dear friends in Denmark to follow him’.

      Anna usually got her way but on this James flatly refused to yield; he even gave written orders to Mar that he was to keep Prince Henry until he was eighteen unless he himself instructed otherwise.⁴² In 1596 Anna gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who was sent to be raised by Lord and Lady Livingstone, along with her younger sister, Margaret, who died at the age of two. James and Anna’s second son, Charles, was born in 1600 and subsequently placed with Lord Fyvie. In May 1602 a third son, Robert, followed but died four months later. These sad separations may have served to sour the royal marriage, but it was, above all, Anna’s lasting hatred for the Mar family that explains her reaction to that mysterious episode in Scottish history, the Gowrie affair: an episode that concluded in the destruction of all significant opposition to James and the Mar faction.

      By the autumn of 1599 James had become desperately worried that he was about to lose his chance of inheriting Elizabeth’s throne. His principal supporter at Elizabeth’s court, Essex, was under house arrest. Essex’s followers had warned him that Sir Robert Cecil would destroy his claim to the succession once Essex was out of the way, and there was evidence to support their view. In 1598 an English Catholic called Valentine Thomas had hinted in a confession that King James of Scotland had asked him to assassinate the Queen. The 1585 statute precluding those who plotted against Elizabeth from the succession was still extant and James was convinced that Cecil was behind Thomas’s confession, just as Lord Burghley had been behind the statute, which had been aimed at his mother. Elizabeth assured James that she did not believe Thomas, but when she ignored his demands for a public statement of his innocence, James listened to Essex’s supporters in their call for him to raise an army to back plans to overthrow the Queen.

That October James told his parliament that he ‘was not certain how soon he should have to use arms but whenever it should be, he knew his right and would venture crown and all for it’.⁴³ It had proved difficult, however, to raise the money for such an army. James’s financial situation, which had begun to improve three years earlier, was once again in desperate straits.^*

James was forced to raise new taxes and debase the coinage, but there was a danger that the Kirk would move to take advantage of growing public anger. James had infuriated the Kirk with plans to reintroduce episcopacy – an answer to Jesuit accusation that he would introduce a presbytery to England. It had also learnt that his Basilikon Doron raged about the power they had wielded in his youth. In November 1599 the Master of Gray wrote to Cecil that between the anger of the poor and that of the Kirk ‘there was in men’s breasts such a desire of reformation that nothing lacked save one gallant man for uniting grieved minds’.⁴⁴ The ministers had already settled on the twenty-two-year-old John Ruthven, third Earl of Gowrie, and the minister Robert Bruce was sent to fetch him from France where he was studying. By this time James appeared to have forgiven the Ruthven family for their role in the attack on his mother during Riccio’s murder and for the exile of his beloved Lennox. Several of the children of the first Earl of Gowrie, who led the Ruthven raid, were now in the royal household and Anna counted three of the sisters of the third Earl amongst her ladies-in-waiting.^† She was especially fond of the eldest, Lady Beatrice, and their brother, nineteen-year-old Alexander, was a favourite of both James and Anna’s. Gowrie had, however, willingly agreed to the Kirk’s request, first travelling to England, where he arrived at Elizabeth’s court on 3 April 1600.

      The English ambassador to Paris had written a ringing commendation of Gowrie for Cecil. He was ‘exceedingly well affected both to the common cause of religion and particularly to her majesty’, and, ‘one of whom there may be exceedingly good use made’. Gowrie had spent time in secret conferences with both the Queen and Cecil before arriving back in Edinburgh in May 1600. A huge crowd of supporters welcomed him, but James, watching, was overheard making the observation that there had been a still larger crowd for the execution of Gowrie’s father. Within three months Gowrie was dead, slain in his own house by the King’s men.

      James’s explanation of these deaths was almost literally unbelievable. He insisted that on 5 August 1600 Alexander Ruthven had lured him from a day’s hunting to Gowrie House in Perth, claiming his brother had captured a man carrying a large amount of foreign gold. As the rest of the hunting party ate their dinner with Gowrie, Alexander had tricked James into following him until he came to a room ‘where a man was, which the King thought had been the man had kept the treasure’.⁴⁵ Alexander then grabbed James and drew his dagger saying that James had killed his father and now he would kill him. James pleaded for his СКАЧАТЬ