After Elizabeth Page 16
The following morning the young lawyer John Manningham arrived at the black-draped royal chapel for the Sunday service. He expected to see Giles Thomson, Dean of Windsor, deliver the sermon, but the evangelical preacher John King, the Vicar of St. Andrew’s in Holborn, stood in the pulpit in his place. There were to be no more mistakes like that made on 13 March at Paul’s Cross. John King delivered a firm warning against “intestine discord,” as well as offering thanks for the peaceful transfer of power witnessed so far.33 Many feared there could yet be a Catholic uprising, an invasion at one of the ports, or a rebellion in favor of an English candidate for the succession. In Hampshire nervous locals were discussing the recent work done to the Earl of Hertford’s house, that “great iron bars and bolts were made for the doors . . . that the glass windows were boarded up, that divers pieces of ordnance were new scoured and made ready for present service and that one Thomas Smith a gunner . . . had been there . . . making bullets for shot.” Others reported that Hertford had told a watchman that “there might be another King within these six days” and that one of his men had said the Earl was “able to raise 6,000 men in arms at an hour’s warning.” In the West Country meanwhile people spoke darkly about Ralegh having ordered up horses, as if preparing for a possible revolt.34
By Monday 28 March rumors were rife that Lord Beauchamp had taken Portsmouth with 10,000 men, that he had French backing and that Catholics had risen in his support all over the country. As the hours passed, however, no Frenchmen appeared and that evening John Manningham was making light of the panic: “ ‘He is up,’ said one. ‘He is risen,’ said another. ‘True, I think,’ said I, ‘he rose in the morning and means to go to bed at night.’ ” 35 An embarrassed Lord Beauchamp explained that the rumors had sprung from a misunderstanding. He claimed that he had loyally taken a large band of men to proclaim James king at the High Cross in Bristol and people had wrongly assumed he was gathering support for himself. Not everyone was convinced. A friend of Manningham’s argued that “to muster men in these times is as good a colour of sedition, as a mask to rob a house.”36 The fact remained, however, that no one had rallied to Beauchamp’s colors—or those of any other of James’s rivals.
As the fears of disorder subsided again people began to reflect on Elizabeth’s reign, exchange anecdotes about her and speculate about the new king. Manningham recorded an entirely trivial, but delightful, story about Elizabeth and a dog-loving cousin:
Mr Francis Curl told me how one Dr Boleyn, the Queen’s kinsman, had a dog which he doted on so much that the Queen, hearing about it, requested that he must grant her one desire, and he should have whatsoever he should ask. She demanded the dog; he gave it and “Now Madam” quoth he, “You promised me my hearts desire.” “I will” quoth she, “Then I pray you give me my dog again.” 37
Manningham, however, had also picked up a curious piece of gossip that would become the basis of a legend that would persist until after the Civil War. The Queen’s chaplain at Richmond, Dr. Parry, told Manningham that the Countess of Kildare had assured him that when Elizabeth had her coronation ring cut from her finger she had replaced it with “a ring which the Earl of Essex gave her.”38 On the face of it Kildare had little reason to invent such a story. Not only was she the wife of Essex’s enemy, Lord Cobham, she was also the daughter of another enemy—Admiral Nottingham. But whether true or not, it inspired a reworking of the myth Scaramelli described, in which Elizabeth realized that Essex had been innocent of treachery in Ireland and was the victim of his enemies after all. The legend focused on whether or not Essex had ever pleaded for his life. In the summer of 1601, Elizabeth had told the French ambassador, de Biron, that she might have spared Essex’s life if he had asked her to do so.39 Her comments were designed to deflect criticism of her actions by highlighting Essex’s arrogance, but according to the legend, she discovered when she was called to the Countess of Nottingham’s deathbed that he had in fact asked her for mercy.
The dying Countess had supposedly reminded Elizabeth how she had once given Essex a ring, saying that if he ever needed her help or protection he should send the ring to her and it would be forthcoming. In the Tower, under sentence of death, he had given the ring to a boy to take to the Countess’s sister, Lady Scrope, who had defended Essex to the Queen for longer than almost anyone and whose husband had been one of James’s earliest supporters. Essex had intended for her to pass on his ring to the Queen as a sign that he was asking for mercy, but the boy gave the ring to the Countess instead. Her husband, Admiral Nottingham (or Cecil, depending on the version of the story), persuaded her to keep it but, having seen Elizabeth’s unhappiness after Essex’s death, she wanted the Queen to know the truth and beg forgiveness. According to one tradition the Queen’s response was to shake her cousin in her bed with the words “God may forgive you, but I never can.” 40
The legend is at odds with all the contemporary accounts of Elizabeth’s mourning of her cousin’s death, but the reasons for its persistence are not hard to find—they reflect the longevity of public hatred for Robert Cecil and the Howard family. There is no record of what happened to the ring described by Lady Kildare, if it ever existed, but a gold ring set with a sardonyx cameo portrait of Elizabeth, said to have belonged to Essex, and passed through the female line of his family, is still kept at Westminster Abbey. The inside is enameled with forget-me-nots.
Essex had blamed all the problems of government on Elizabeth’s gender and Manningham jotted in his diary his disgust that they had to pray to ladies (for their suits) in the Queen’s time—since those physically closest to her had, inevitably, been women. Now at last James’s kingship restored the proper order of the sexes and he and others rejoiced at it. In an effort to discover something more about the new king, Manningham visited Barbara Ruthven, who had fled to London from Edinburgh in January. He thought her “a gallant tall gentlewoman” but disliked “the lisping, fumbling language” she spoke. Although Barbara Ruthven would have spoken highly educated Scots, the English who heard it rarely admired it. To Manningham and others it was simply a bastardized English and one few were familiar with—there were no more than a handful of Scots in the whole of London. 23 Barbara Ruthven told Manningham that the King was much given to swearing, especially when out hunting. Elsewhere he learned that James leaned on courtiers as he walked—a sign of his favor, it was said.41
By Wednesday 30 March, courtiers were heading north in droves to see the new king for themselves and to hand him their petitions. “A new King will have new soldiers and God knows what men they will be,” Sir John Harington warned his friend Lord Thomas Howard. “One says he will serve him by day, another by night; the women (who love to talk as they like) are for serving him both day and night.”42 Another courtier complained that the dash to Scotland gave the impression that it was “as if it were nothing else but first come first served, or that preferment were a goal to be got by footmanship.” Senior figures began to fret that the “wrong sort” of people might gain royal favor.43 Lord Burghley told Cecil that he was on his knees asking God that “our corrupt court may not corrupt [James] nor such about the King as hereafter have credit with him,”44 and Sir Roger Wilbraham was also busy praying that “the wealth of England and the flattery of the Court do not in time deprave his government.”45 The men heading north certainly included enemies of the present government—Lord Cobham and a Puritan gentleman from Northamptonshire called Sir Lewis Pickering among them—and the Council sent others to countermand whatever they might say.46
Sir John Harington, anxious to avoid any trouble, left London, not for Scotland but for his estate in Somerset. “Good caution never comes better, than when a man is climbing,” he observed; “it is a pitiful thing to set a wrong foot and, instead of raising one’s head, to fall to the ground and show one’s baser parts.”47
James was in an ebullient mood as his English suitors and officials poured into Holyroodhouse. His master huntsman, Sir Roger Aston, is said to have described him as bein
g “like a poor man, wandering above forty years in a Wilderness and barren soil, and now arrived at the Land of Promise.” 48 He greeted everyone with familiarity and courtesy, anxious to send no one away disappointed.
The first suitor to reach Holyrood was the Puritan Sir Lewis Pickering. The new English edition of the Basilikon Doron had raised the hopes of the “hotter sort” of Protestant, as the preface appeared to sympathize with those who thought the Prayer Book ceremonies too Popish. James assured Pickering that the case for reform would be thoroughly examined. Hard on Pickering’s heels, however, came Archbishop Whitgift’s emissary, Dr. Thomas Neville, Dean of Canterbury. James assured Neville that he was resolved to maintain the Church “as it had been settled by the late queen”—not quite the impression he had given Pickering, but James hoped to keep both types of Protestant happy, initiating reforms here, rejecting others there and enjoying the debates along the way.
Indeed, a religious settlement was one of James’s top three priorities, along with peace with his neighbors and the union of England with Scotland. 49 The throne of England was within James’s grasp, but to secure it and keep hold of the Scots throne he had to ensure that his English and Scots subjects had a stake in his crown. This required a wider distribution of wealth and honors. The distribution of the latter was easy: James had showered the Scots elite with honors for years and he would now do the same for the English. When John Peyton, the son of the Lieutenant of the Tower, arrived in Edinburgh, James dubbed him his “first knight”—there would soon be many others. Distributing wealth, however, could only be achieved with peace and union, for without peace there would be no money and without union he would not be able to share it with the Scots.
Sir John Harington and the Earl of Northumberland had warned James that the English would resent seeing English money spent on Scotland, but they had never grasped the sacrifice the Scots were making in sending their King south. The Scottish lawyer Sir Thomas Craig had once predicted that “no prince born in Scotland will ever rule that country after . . . His Majesty’s son. Our kings will be Englishmen, born in England, residing in England. They will naturally prefer Englishmen as their attendants and courtiers . . . London will be the seat of government and the capital of the whole island. Thence for the most part will the laws that govern us proceed.” It was important that the Scots felt that they had something significant to gain by James’s accession to the English throne.
Intimations of James’s intentions were not long in coming. The royal engraver in London was sent instructions to make new signets with the union of the arms of England and Scotland, and a court official called Sir Thomas Lake reported back from Scotland that James would “be loath to give the first blow between Spain and him.” James had sent the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands assurances that he would not abandon them, but it was evident to Lake he was on good terms with the emissary to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella and that it was France whom he viewed with the most suspicion: “He told me the French Ambassador never looked merrily since he heard of his Majesty’s success in England.”50 Lake also gained the impression that James was prepared to accept peace with Tyrone “upon any terms.”
Fortunately Lord Mountjoy had received Tyrone’s submission at Mellifont Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday the 30th. An onlooker recorded that Elizabeth’s “Monster of the North” appeared utterly exhausted, throwing himself to the ground as he entered the room and “grovelling to the earth, with such a dejected countenance, that the standers by were amazed and my Lord Mountjoy had much ado to remember the work in hand.”51 He was left on his knees for an hour. It was not until he made his final formal submission before the Irish Parliament on Sunday 3 April that he was informed that Elizabeth was dead. Fynes Moryson watched as the news was broken and reported that he saw tears stream down Tyrone’s face, “in such quantity as it could not well be concealed, especially in him upon whose face all men’s eyes were cast.”52
Lake was finding it uncomfortable and expensive in Edinburgh, but he was among the first to be able to form a judgment of the new king, noting, “He is very facile, using no great majesty nor solemnity in his access, but witty to conceive, and very ready of speech.”53 Lord Burghley’s son, William, told his father that James’s well-known passion for hunting was also evident. James had announced that he had heard that every gentleman in England kept a well-stocked park for hunting and that he intended to hunt as many of them as he could on his way south. He wanted to enjoy his crown and leave the minutiae of political affairs to Cecil. Roger Aston passed on a message to Cecil that the King had heard that he was “but a little man, but he would shortly load your shoulders with business.” 54 This was both good news and bad for Cecil; some of the King’s business was already causing him considerable concern.
James had requested huge sums to cover the costs of his journey south. The figure of £5,000 was circulating in London—money that the English Treasury simply did not have.55 Cecil and Buckhurst had been through the accounts and found no credits whatsoever. Cecil, however, was loath to pass on the bad news and money was raised to present to James in Berwick. It allowed James to persist in the belief that he had inherited enormous wealth—and what a glorious change in circumstances that must have seemed.56 James was virtually bankrupt and even before Elizabeth was dead he had been asking Cecil for an advance on his annuity. A flurry of activity in the Scots Council provided James with some money for his immediate needs. He ordered a purple velvet cloak lined with fur, and matching purple coats and breeches lined with taffeta, in an effort to upgrade his modest wardrobe.57 The cost of such outfits was, however, but a drop in the ocean to what he intended to spend.
On Sunday 3 April James attended morning service at the High Church of St. Giles, Edinburgh—a church described by Fynes Moryson as “large and lightsome” but “nothing at all for beauty and ornament.” James’s throne was raised on wooden steps against the pillar next to the pulpit. Opposite was another seat very like it, in which those accused of acts of immorality were made to do their public penance. A few weeks before Moryson’s visit, a stranger had sat in this seat, assuming it was meant for important gentlemen, “till he was driven away with the profuse laughter of the common sort, to the disturbance of the whole congregation.” There were no such mistakes, however, during this service. The minister, John Hall, delivered a sermon celebrating the King’s peaceful succession as the work of God. When he had finished James stood up from his throne and addressed the congregation. He reiterated that he was the lawful heir to the crown of England, as he was to that of Scotland, and he then set out his vision for the future of his two kingdoms:
As my right is united in my person . . . my marches are united by land and not by sea, so there is no di ference betwixt them. There is nae mair di ference betwixt London and Edinburgh . . . than there is betwixt Inverness and Aberdeen and Edinburgh . . . But my course must be betwixt baith—to establish peace and religion, and wealth betwixt baith the countries . . . and as ane [one] country has wealth, and the other has multitude of men, sae ye may pairt the gifts, and ane [one] do as they may to help the other.
James promised that everyone, from the least important person in his kingdom to the greatest, would have access to him to pour out their complaints. He was not going abroad, he said, but simply traveling from one part of his isle to another, and he intended to return to Scotland once every three years. He ended his address with the words: “I now employ only your hearts to the gude prospering of me in my success and journey. I have nae mair to say, but pray for me.”58 Many of the Scots congregation wept.
James had set his departure date for Tuesday 5 April. Anna, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth were to follow after Elizabeth’s funeral, when the ladies-in-waiting would be free to attend upon their new royal family. The two-year-old Charles, Duke of Albany, was considered too young and sickly to travel with them and would not join his family until the following year. The final preparations went ahead rapidly. James wrote a fond lette
r of farewell to Prince Henry, still at Stirling Castle, and signed an act entrusting the education of the infant Charles to Lord President Fyvie. A number of other acts established the government in James’s absence. Finally on Tuesday James kissed Anna goodbye in front of a large crowd that had gathered on the Royal Mile. He bent low as his lips touched her throat. She was a few weeks pregnant and both were in tears, as were many in the crowd. James then rode off surrounded by a large train of followers. It included English noblemen and gentlemen, the French ambassador and his wife—who was to be carried the whole way to London in a sedan chair—and his Scots favorites.
Despite James’s promises to visit Scotland every three years he returned to his homeland only once, in 1617. He nevertheless boasted with some justice that he ruled Scotland from England more effectively with his pen than others had ruled it with the sword. It remained peaceful and increasingly prosperous, although the huge wealth that would be accumulated by his Scots favorites was not reflected in a wider distribution of England’s wealth north of the border. These favorites included Lord Home, who had tended Carey after his fall and whose castle at Dunglass the King was to stay at that night; his former tutor, Peter Young; his old school friend Jocky o’Sclaittis, the Earl of Mar; Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox, the son of his beloved Esmé d’Aubigny; his fat and jovial Treasurer, Sir George Home of Spott, said to be “the only man of all other most inward with the King”; the Captain of the Guard, Thomas Erskine; and Carey’s old adversary, Robert Kerr of Cessford—estimated to have been present at the violent death of twenty men and destined to be a future Lord Privy Seal.