The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain Read online

  Henry was soon provoked by more than simply sexual jealousy. In order to prevent her husband handing out gifts without her authority, Mary decreed that all papers had to be signed first by her, with her own hand, and then by Henry – or rather, by Henry’s signature. She then had a seal made bearing Henry’s signature, and gave it to Riccio.24 This infuriated Henry. Not content with curbing his role as King–husband, Mary was now handing what was left of it to her Italian secretary – a foreigner and a papist, arrogant and conspicuously extravagant in his dress. Rumour had it that Mary wanted to appoint him as Secretary of State or even replace Morton as Chancellor.

  Although Mary had appointed Morton Lord Chancellor, and he had helped lead her forces during the Chaseabout Raid, she had never fully trusted the man, who was a staunch Protestant with family ties to Henry’s family the Lennoxes, and with reason. It was Morton who fed Henry’s suspicions about Riccio and encouraged his ambitions to assume his full powers as King. Henry should take on sole government of the country, Morton urged, drawing on the deeply ingrained misogyny of the time: it was ‘a thing against nature that the hen should crow before the cock; yea, against the commandment of the eternal God, that a man should be subject to his wife, the man being the image of God, and woman the image of man’. If Henry would guarantee to pardon past misdemeanours and restore his estates, Morton would guarantee the support of his faction, and of the English Queen Elizabeth.25

  Soon a plan to kill Riccio had been devised by Morton, along with Patrick, sixth Lord Lindsay and Patrick, Lord Ruthven, ‘to become that way masters of the Court’. The courtier and diarist Sir James Melville claims that it was Morton’s cousin, George Douglas, a kinsman and perpetual companion of Henry’s, who ‘put in his head such suspicion against Riccio that the King was won to give his consent over easily to the slaughter of Signor David’.26 Also drawn in was the fugitive Earl of Moray, who needed to escape the sentence that the forthcoming Parliament would doubtless pass against him; if Henry were to assume sole government, then the Parliament could be cancelled.

  Patrick, third Lord Ruthven, was one of the first men drawn into the plot. In his own account of the affair, written at the end of April 1566, he told of how he had doubts, especially concerning the killing of Riccio in front of Mary’s eyes. Several of the conspirators were ‘very loath to grant’ this, pointing out that this might prompt ‘sundry great persons’ in Mary’s company to intervene, causing considerable bloodshed. It was Henry who insisted on this detail: ‘Notwithstanding no reason might avail, but the King would have him [Riccio] taken in her Majesty’s presence, and devised the manner himself.’27

  Although Henry did not sign the bond until 1 March 1566,28 news of the plot had already leaked by 13 February, when Thomas Randolph reported back to England that ‘I know that … David with the consent of the King, shall have his throat cut within these ten days.’29 Randolph was slightly premature, but the planned attack became a matter of urgency when it was announced that Parliament would move to bring about the arrest and trial of Moray and his confederates on 12 March: since the conspirators hoped to avoid this, action had to be taken before then. Sir James Melville claims (perhaps with the pathos of hindsight) that he tried to warn both Riccio and Mary of the dangers to them. The secretary ignored his advice: ‘he disdained all danger, and despised counsel’. Mary dismissed the rumours, calmly assuring Melville ‘that our countrymen were talkative’.30

  The events of the evening of 9 March 1566 were so extraordinary that several local observers felt compelled to pen full accounts of the bloody proceedings, including Ruthven and Mary herself.31 While differing in minor details, as one might reasonably expect in telling such a sudden and violent encounter, these narratives are remarkably consistent in what they tell. The Queen was at supper with Riccio and her half-sister Janet, Countess of Argyll, in a small room leading off her bedchamber. She was mildly surprised when Henry came in and made awkward small talk, but she was astonished when, in full armour and backed by six men with drawn swords, Lord Ruthven burst into the room.

  ‘What strange sight is this, my Lord, I see in you?’ she asked. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘We have been too long mad,’ Ruthven retorted.

  But the secretary knew why they were there. Each account tells how Riccio, terrified, moved away from Ruthven and tried to take refuge behind the Queen, clasping his arms around her pregnant belly. This last detail is crucial. Riccio assumed that his best defence lay in being protected not just by the Queen, but by the unborn heir to the throne. He did not know that, by all accounts, Henry wanted his wife to miscarry, perhaps believing, as many would after him, that the child was not his but Riccio’s. Mary took hold of the secretary, and refused to let go until one of Ruthven’s men, Andrew Kerr of Fawdonsyde, placed a pistol to her breast. After a struggle Kerr pulled Riccio away, and dragged him to the next room where other conspirators waited. There the Earl of Morton struck the first blow with his dagger: fifty-two more were to follow. The King’s own dagger was belatedly thrust into the ruined corpse, to seal his complicity.

  Mary was weeping and shaken, but she remained imperiously in control of the situation. What was the cause of this attack, she demanded. Henry was taciturn, only speaking to say that no harm had been intended to her. Incensed, the Queen charged him with contempt and ingratitude towards her – she who had raised him from a private nobleman to a King, and her husband! Henry, seeing no way to defend himself, left the room. Then one of Mary’s maids came running in, exclaiming that Davy was dead – that she had seen him dead. The Queen dried her eyes. ‘No more tears,’ she said. ‘I will now think upon revenge!’ Their job done, Ruthven and Fawdonsyde came back into Mary’s chamber, Ruthven sitting himself down and calling for a drink, which further infuriated the Queen. ‘How dare you presume to commit that unreverence?’ she demanded, but Ruthven was unmoved. ‘Well, my Lord,’ said Mary, ‘it is within my belly that one day will revenge these cruelties and affronts!’32

  Despite her words, Mary was in no position to make threats. Under an effective house arrest in her private chambers, she had to look on while Henry took for himself the power that she had denied him. On the following day, he and his allies issued a proclamation, using his royal authority to dismiss the forthcoming Parliament. But Mary still had the upper hand in their marriage, refusing to allow him to join her in bed. And she already had her mind fixed on escape. Allowed to see the Dowager Lady Huntly, she passed a letter to her; suspecting foul play, her captors ordered Lady Huntly to leave, but she managed to secrete the letter before she went. In the afternoon, Mary told her captors that she was about to miscarry: a midwife was quickly summoned, and she confirmed it was likely. The conspirators determined that if Mary kept the child she should be moved to the more secure Stirling Castle, while Henry and the nobles would manage the government of the country from Edinburgh. If any persons tried to rescue the Queen, they decided, ‘we will throw her to them piecemeal from the top of the terrace’.33

  By the evening, Moray had returned from exile and had arrived in Edinburgh. The conspirators met together, and as they talked it dawned on the King that he was no longer safe. ‘If you wish to obtain what we have promised you,’ they told Henry, ‘you must needs follow our advice … if you do otherwise, we will take care of ourselves, cost what it may.’ The King was instructed not to talk with Mary ‘save in their presence’, his entourage dismissed and a guard put on him. Henry, scared for his life, tried to reach his wife, but she refused him admission to her room until the morning, when he fell on his knees, much to her discomfort. ‘Ah, my Mary,’ he said, ‘I have failed in my duty towards you … The only atonement which I can make … is to acknowledge my fault and sue for pardon.’ Showing her the bond that the conspirators had signed, he told her that they threatened her life: ‘Unless you take some means to prevent it, we are all ruined, and that speedily.’34

  Later in the day, Moray came to see the Queen. Mary threw herself on him, crying ‘Oh, my brother,
if you had been here they had not used me thus!’; despite his involvement in the plot, Moray reportedly wept to see his half-sister so moved.35 The midwife and Mary’s physician were allowed to examine their charge and agreed that Mary should be moved ‘to some sweeter and pleasanter air’; Henry relayed the message, but the lords distrusted it as ‘craft and policy’. In the afternoon, Henry brought Moray, Morton and Ruthven to the Presence Chamber, where they fell on their knees as Mary entered; she agreed to pardon them all, and told them to draw up a deed, which they did. The articles were given to Henry, who requested that the guard be removed and guaranteed that he would ‘warrant for all’ while they went to supper at Morton’s townhouse.36

  Given this space, Mary threw herself into action, organising horses and an escort to take her to Dunbar. At midnight, the King and Queen quietly left the palace via the privy stairs and the backdoor, crossing the graveyard of the old Abbey of Holyrood, where Riccio had been hastily buried. They rode frantically to Seton, with Henry allegedly shouting at Mary: ‘Come on, come on! By God’s blood, they will murder both you and me if they can catch us!’ When Mary reminded Henry that she was pregnant, he was unabashed: ‘Come on! In God’s name, come on! If this baby dies, we can have more.’37 Changing horses at Seton, they completed the thirty-mile ride to Dunbar by dawn.

  Safely installed at Dunbar Castle, Mary wrote to her cousin Elizabeth in England, complaining that some of her subjects and members of her Privy Council had shown what kind of men they are ‘as first has taken our house, slain our most special servant in our own presence, and thereafter holden our proper persons captive treasonably, whereby we were constrained to escape straitly about midnight out of our palace of Holyroodhouse, to the place where we are for the present, in the greatest danger, fear of our lives, and evil estate that ever princes on earth stood in’. She asked for Elizabeth’s help. ‘Of truth we are so tired and evil at ease, what through riding of twenty miles in five hours of the night as with the frequent sickness and evil disposition, by the occasion of our child.’38 From Dunbar, Mary gathered support and returned to Edinburgh on Monday 18 March, accompanied by Bothwell, Huntly and some eight hundred men. It was noted that she was ‘yet able to ride on a horse’ despite being, by her own account, only six weeks away from giving birth.39 Faced with Mary’s forces, power shifted almost instantaneously in her favour. A proclamation was issued declaring that, while Henry had consented to the return of Moray and other rebels, he had himself played no part in the murder of David Riccio.40 Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay among others fled to England, where Ruthven died in May; John Knox disappeared to Ayrshire and Henry’s father Lennox was banished from court. Mary restored Moray, Argyll and Alexander Cunningham, fifth Earl of Glencairn, a tacit admission that she could not succeed in governing alone.41

  Once the immediate furore subsided, Mary went to work to ensure that she and her unborn child could never be threatened again. Holyrood was clearly too open to intrusion: Mary set up home instead in Edinburgh Castle. There was a speedy reshuffle of the principal governmental positions: the conspirator James MacGill could no longer be Clerk Register, so Sir James Balfour filled his place; Morton was displaced as Lord Chancellor in favour of Huntly. King Henry’s role in the new regime was less assured. Mary and Henry maintained their shared government and appeared together in public, washing the feet of the poor in Holy Week.42 But there were rumours that Mary had broached Rome about a possible divorce.43 There could be no trust left in their marriage, and it was soon widely rumoured that Henry was no longer welcome in her bed (perhaps not in itself remarkable, given Mary’s advanced pregnancy). As one English ballad put it:

  When this Queen she the chamberlain was slain,

  For him her cheeks she did weete [wet],

  And made a vow for a twelvemonth and a day

  The King and she would not come in one sheet.44

  Over the next weeks, Mary concentrated on the forthcoming birth. On 4 April she wrote to ask Elizabeth to be ‘commere’ (godmother) to her child. ‘Excuse me if I write so badly,’ she begged, ‘because I am so grosse [fat/pregnant], being well into my seventh month.’45 After spending a month inside the castle walls, Mary emerged for the last time on 22 April, and ‘walked upon her feet a mile out of the town’.46 The impending birth alarmed her, and for more than the usual reasons. Being in childbed was a serious problem for a sovereign queen. For days, if not weeks, Mary would be bedridden and physically weakened. She was immensely vulnerable to attack or a political coup, as the events of the past few months had made only too obvious. Already she was nervous. She accused (erroneously) the English agent Thomas Randolph of authoring a book entitled Maister Randolphes Phantasey, which was circulating in Edinburgh. The tract was ‘written against her life and government’; she was afraid, wrote Randolph, ‘lest that it should breed danger to her birth or hurt to herself’.47

  Mary made her ceremonial entrance into her lying-in chamber, a tiny panelled room that survives to this day, on 3 June 1566. Six days later, she called together her whole nobility to appoint Regents. She had already made her will, ‘thrice written’: one copy to be sent to France, one kept by herself, and one for her Regents. She and Henry were reported to be ‘reconciled’ but Mary was not about to give any power to her husband: ‘what is contained in the testament [will],’ wrote Thomas Randolph, ‘he is ignorant.’48 Indeed, it was later reported that there had been considerable ‘ado’ about how the baby and the country should be governed if the Queen ‘miscarried’: Henry and his friends had claimed they should govern according to the custom of marriage in Scotland.49 In fact, the will stated that if Mary died, and her child lived, the child would be her sole inheritor.50

  On 19 June 1566, between nine and ten in the morning, after a long labour, Mary gave birth to a son. Sir James Melville was secretly despatched to inform Elizabeth of the happy news and an embargo was put on news of the birth getting out until he was past the border at Berwick.51 After the Prince’s birth was announced, the castle artillery was all shot and some five hundred bonfires were lit across the realm.52 But the atmosphere was different when King Henry came to visit the new mother.

  ‘My Lord,’ she exclaimed brightly, ‘God has given you and me a son, begotten by none but you!’ Clearly this display of marital fidelity was for the benefit of those assembled in the tiny bedchamber that was serving as the delivery room. Henry blushed but kissed the baby boy. Mary would not let the subject drop. Taking the child in her arms, she brushed aside the swaddling clothes to reveal his face, saying, ‘My Lord, here I protest to God, and as I shall answer to him at the great day of judgment, this is your son, and no other man’s son! And I am desirous that all here, both ladies and others, bear witness’ – but there was a sting in the tail – ‘for he is so much your own son, that I fear it be the worse for him hereafter!’ Not pausing to let the implications of this sink in, she turned her attention to the Englishman Sir William Stanley, who was in attendance. ‘This is the son whom, I hope, shall first unite the two kingdoms of Scotland and England!’

  ‘Why, Madam?’ asked Sir William, confused, ‘shall he succeed before your majesty and his father?’

  ‘Because,’ she said, loud enough for her husband to hear, ‘his father has broken to me.’

  Her words had the desired effect. ‘Sweet madam,’ protested Henry, ‘is this your promise that you made to forgive and forget all?’