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Moray was succeeded by Darnley’s father, the earl of Le
The Godfather
!
Le
Under the leadership of Knox, the Reformed Church in Scotland had accepted Calvinism, which was opposed to religious hierarchy. According to Knox’s teachings, there was no scriptural basis for bishops because there was no mention of them in the Bible.
Knox died in November 1572, and his place was taken by an equally radical Protestant scholar and theologian, Andrew Melville, who had returned to Scotland in 1574 as principal of Glasgow University. Along with 29 other ministers, Melville drew up the
Second Book of Discipline
in 1578. It repudiated royal control of the Church and instead laid plans for the establishment of a
theocracy
(rule by the godly).
As Melville put it to the king:
Sirrah, ye are God’s silly vassal; there are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland: there is king James, the head of the commonwealth; and there is Christ Jesus, the king of the Church, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom he is not a king, not a lord, not a head, but a member.
Few people in the political elite were prepared to endorse the setting up of a theocracy, but many were suspicious of creeping Catholicism and signs of immoral behaviour on the part of the young king.
The king and his lover
Concerns came to a head with the arrival in Scotland of the king’s father’s cousin, the 37-year-old Esmé Stewart, from France in 1579. Although James was only 13, he began a scandalously open affair with Esmé. According to an English observer, ‘oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’.
James bestowed on his lover the earldom of Le
Morton’s execution led the nobility into open revolt at the influence of Le
The king did not escape from Ruthven until June 1583. When he did, he had Gowrie, whose father was one of the nobles who murdered David Riccio, executed. The following year, he set about imposing himself on his kingdom.
It’s witchcraft
James became fascinated by witches after his return from Denmark in 1590.He attended the North Berwick witchcraft trials, which was the first major persecution of witches under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. Seventy people were accused of trying to bring about his death and that of his new bride (details on her in the next section) by conjuring up the storms that delayed the monarch’s return to Scotland.
The most celebrated trial was that of Agnes Sampson who was personally examined by James at Holyrood Palace. She was fastened to the wall of her cell by what was called the
witch’s bridle
(a four-pronged instrument forced into the mouth in such a way that two of the prongs pressed on her tongue, and the other two against her cheeks). The poor woman was also deprived of sleep. Given all she had gone through, it wasn’t really surprising that Sampson was prepared to confess to the 53 indictments brought against her. She was strangled and burned as a witch.
James was convinced that witches were a threat to his reign and wrote a tract condemning the practice, called
Daemonologie
(1597). Due to his influence, 400 people (mainly women) were accused of witchcraft in 1597; of this total, around 200 were executed. However, after 1599, James’s views became more sceptical, especially over the ways to extract evidence (that is, sleep deprivation and pin-pricking to find the ‘Devil’s mark’ on the body).
Restoring royal authority
There were three issues for James to sort out:
The militants in the Church
The lawless nobles
The royal finances
Initially, the third issue was more easily solved than the first two. In 1586, a year before his mother was executed, James signed a pact with Elizabeth I to keep the peace. In return, he was given a pension of £4,000 a year, but it wasn’t enough to cover royal expenses. The solution was to get a wife, particularly a rich one! In 1589, James did just that when he married 14-year-old A
The crown’s improved economic position allowed James to confront those nobles who continued to challenge his authority. In the early 1590s, the Catholic earls of Huntly, Angus and Errol, along with the king of Spain, hatched a plan to land troops in Scotland and from there mount an invasion of England. On 3 October 1594, the earl of Huntly defeated a government force under the command of James and the earl of Argyll at Glenlivet. But it proved to be a pointless victory – with Mary dead, there was no figure that the rebels could rally round, so there was no backing for further action. Glenlivet proved to be the last protest by the landed elite against James.
Dealing with the Church proved to be a ding-dong affair. The pendulum seemed to swing one way and then another – at times in favour of the king, at other times in favour of the Church. However, in the end, the crown was the wi
As a boy, James had been tutored by George Buchanan, one of Europe’s greatest Latin scholars. Buchanan tried to instil in him the concept of contractual kingship. This meant that the monarch ruled with the consent of the ‘people’ (not Joe Bloggs, but the landed elite). If the monarch failed to perform his duty to the people, they had the right to remove him.
As he got older, James had no time for this and burned Buchanan’s writings at the first opportunity. James believed in the divine right of kings to rule. He was put there by God, and only God could remove him from the throne. James outlined his views in two publications –
Trew Law of the Free Monarchies
and
Basilikon Doron
(Royal Gift) – both written in 1598. In the latter book, written for his son Henry, he explained to him:
First of all things learn to know and love that God, whom ye have a double obligation; first, that He made you a man; and, next, for that He made you a little God to sit on his throne, and rule over other men.
It was only to be expected that holding such views would bring the monarch into conflict with the radical clergy in the Reformed Church. In May 1584, James passed the ‘Black Acts’, which reaffirmed royal control over the Church and upheld the authority of bishops. As a result, Andrew Melville and some of his followers were forced to flee Scotland for England.
The ‘Golden Act’ of 1592 restored the privileges of the Kirk (the Church), but with one important proviso: the General Assembly was only allowed to meet with the permission of the monarch and Parliament, and by 1606, bishops were restored to membership of the Scottish Parliament. By this time, James’s severest religious critic, Andrew Melville, was in the Tower of London; after four years’ imprisonment, he was allowed to leave England for France, where he died a forgotten man in 1622. Ain’t no stopping him now!
The Union of the Crowns
Elizabeth I died in Richmond Palace on 23 March 1603, and as next in line to the throne James was crowned I and VI king of England, Scotland, Ireland and France. He couldn’t wait to get out of Scotland and bade farewell to his subjects in St Giles’s Cathedral in early April. He headed south, promising he would return every three years. In fact, in the next 22 years, he returned only once, in 1617,and that was to prove highly controversial.
James soon changed the title of his kingdom to Great Britain, Ireland and France, and went out of his way to promote new symbols of Britishness: histories were written, flags were designed and coins were minted. He also tried to integrate the hundreds of Scottish carpetbaggers who followed him south into the institutions of court and government. Eight Scottish nobles and 12 English were installed as Knights of the Garter; one in five members of the English Privy Council was Scottish.
In a speech to the English Parliament, James spoke of the natural evolution of the two countries into one state:
I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdoms under mee your King … for no more possible is it for one King to governe two Countreys Contiguous, the one great, the other less, a richer and a poorer … than for one head to governe two bodies… .
Of course, James also promoted his favourites who received lavish gifts of land and titles. The most notorious was Robert Carr of Ferniehurst who was made a knight in 1607 and later earl of Somerset. It was said that the king kissed Carr and another favourite, Francis Osborne, ‘after so lascivious a mode in public’.
However, James’s attempts to engineer a complete union between England and Scotland were rejected out of hand in 1607 by the English Parliament. The Scots were also wary of Stewart plans – they felt that they might be turned into ‘a conquered and slavish province to be governed by a Viceroy or Deputy’. The example of Ireland was clearly in their minds. So, early plans by the monarchy for a more complete union were scuppered because there was no enthusiasm for it north or south of the border. But it did not dent James’s commitment to the idea of union.