The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart

‘In case God call me at any time,’ James said, ‘that neither for the Queen nor Estates [Parliament’s] pleasure ye deliver him till he be eighteen years of age and that he command you himself.’ Henry would live out his entire infancy, childhood and youth at Stirling Castle. Anne would have to accept she would never govern Henry’s household. Her son would be raised by the high-born women of the Mar faction – the ladies Morton, Dunhope, Clackmannan, Abercairney, and the widow of Justice Clerk Cambuskynneth – and his male officers, James Ogilvie, Marshall and David Lennox, who served and ate at the ladies’ table. Over the years the boy’s intimacy with these families would build up his royal ‘affinity’. As king he would then have a powerful magnate group at his side, his most loyal supporters. None were the queen’s supporters.

Barely a fortnight after Henry’s birth, events appeared to vindicate James’s decision to isolate his son. On 5 March the Catholic earls of Bothwell, Huntly, Angus and Errol gathered in a plot to kidnap the boy. Once they had him, Huntly’s wife, Henrietta, a favourite of the queen, would reunite mother and son.

After uncovering the plan, James ordered the earls to be placed under house arrest. But in answer they came ‘against his Majesty at Holyroodhouse’. Elizabeth I instructed her cousin to put his ‘lewd Lords … to the horn as traitors’ – outlaw and hunt them down. James refused. High-handed, the English queen overrode him and sent a direct warning to the earls ‘in no case to seek the young Prince’. If the child was killed, the inheritance of England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales would be thrown into chaos, leaving the realm vulnerable to foreign claimants.

The General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church added to the complaints against James. Why did the king not simply crush those magnates seeking ‘the ruin of the state by foreign forces’? – meaning Spain and the pope. They warned of trouble arising from our ‘intestine troubles’ – the subversive activities of Bothwell, Huntly and their crew, but also Queen Anne. The French special envoy described the queen, in the wake of the removal of her son, as ‘deeply engaged in all civil factions … in Scotland in relation to the Catholics’.

Within weeks of Henry’s birth, the Scottish court split between allegiance to the king and the Mar clan, and allegiance to the queen and her faction. As much as it was an event to be celebrated, Henry’s birth threatened King James’s hard-won domestic peace. If the earls seized Henry, they could force the king to give Catholics more power in the government of Scotland and divide the nation between Presbyterian followers of the king and papist followers of the queen. It seemed as though history might repeat itself, as James was only too aware.

James’s memories of his own childhood determined that his son must stay at Stirling. In 1566, David Riccio, secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was stabbed to death in her presence – or as James put it, ‘while I was in my mother’s belly’. The king said that the in utero trauma scarred him with a ‘fearful nature’. James’s father, Lord Darnley, was suspected of conspiring with Protestant nobles, including lords Ruthven, Morton and Lindsay, in the killing; and Darnley himself was found strangled to death when James was just a few months old. Mary, Queen of Scots, then married the probable murderer of her son’s father.

James was kidnapped by a group of Protestant lords and taken to Stirling Castle, where he was crowned, aged thirteen months. He never saw his mother again. Scotland divided into two factions: the king’s men behind the infant James VI, the queen’s behind Mary, Queen of Scots. From this bitter civil war, the king’s men emerged triumphant. James’s mother, the focus of the unrest, was arrested and imprisoned. She escaped to England and was put back under lock and key by her cousin, Elizabeth, on whose mercy she threw herself. James remained with the Mars at Stirling, as civil unrest rumbled on. During one outbreak of fighting, the five-year-old king saw his beloved paternal grandfather carried past him, stabbed and dying, the old man’s blood streaming across Stirling Castle’s flagstones.

In 1587, James learnt that his mother had been beheaded on Elizabeth I’s orders. Seizing power in Scotland the moment he could, the highly intelligent and capable young king dedicated the first years of his reign to melding the factions and turbulent powers of his country into a workable whole. By the age of seventeen he had gained full control of his government.

Yet he still lived in constant fear of attack. Threats remained from within the king’s inner circle. In August 1582, the Earl of Mar had been involved in the Ruthven Raid against his former charge. Mar and his allies held James captive in an attempt to force the king to oust certain favourites, particularly the king’s French cousin Esmé Stuart. James was widely believed to be in love with Stuart, whom he had created 1st Duke of Lennox, and openly hugged and kissed him in public. Lennox was a Catholic – anathema to the devout Calvinist Mars. He converted to Protestantism but that did not convince the Scottish Calvinist elite. The Ruthven raiders ensured Lennox was exiled to France, where he died the following year. James was heartbroken.

The king and queen’s failure to have children for the first four years of their marriage had only heightened the speculation that James could not fulfil his duty to his country, to secure it through an heir. Anne reminded her husband that he was now entrusting their son to a faction that had held the king to ransom. James countered that some of the queen’s closest confidants had been at the heart of recent plots against him. In August 1600, when Henry was six, one resulted in the king’s near assassination. The king had the ringleaders, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, executed and demanded that Anne ‘thrust out of the house’ her ladies-in-waiting, Gowrie’s sisters Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven.

Scotland’s unruly magnates were not merely power hungry. The political threats during Henry’s early childhood reflected the often violent religious conflicts dividing Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Religiously motivated wars and uprisings broke out continually throughout Christendom; assassinations and kidnappings were a common feature of those divisions. In 1584, the Calvinist ruler of the Dutch free states, William the Silent, was murdered by a Catholic fanatic. In France, the Protestant Henri of Navarre had just converted to Catholicism in order to unite France, win the throne, and try to bring to an end the religious wars and repeated attempts to assassinate him. In England, Elizabeth I’s spymaster, the late Walsingham, had regularly intercepted foreign plots against the queen.

For all these reasons, of custom and of threats to the monarchy and heir, James was adamant. Henry stayed at Stirling.

* She called herself ‘Anna’ in Scotland, but was Queen Anne in England. James’s name for her was ‘Annie’ (sometimes ‘my own Annie’). To avoid confusion, I will refer to her as Anne.

TWO

Launching a European Prince

On the issue of the prince’s christening his warring parents were as one. Henry was not the name of a Scottish king. England, though, had lived under eight Henrys to date. The last was James VI’s great-great-uncle, Henry VIII, father of Elizabeth. James’s father was also a Henry – Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Anne’s father was Frederick II. The boy would be christened Henry Frederick Stuart.

The king sent for his Royal Master of Works, William Schaw, to demolish the chapel royal at Stirling Castle and replace it with a new one worthy of Scotland’s first major Protestant royal christening. Schaw came up with a ‘scale model of Solomon’s temple’, and a little Renaissance gem. The interior reflected modern Renaissance Protestant thought and very likely the cultural dowry Anne had passed to the king. When James went to Denmark to bring Anne home, he witnessed an ebullience, sophistication and diversity of cultural and scientific activity he had never before experienced. He enjoyed Denmark and the company of his new Danish in-laws so much that he stayed for months longer than he needed to. This chapel royal seemed designed to reflect that happy period of his life.

The king asked Elizabeth I to stand godmother to Henry, bringing English queen and Scottish prince together in a quasi-parental relationship. James asked Henri IV of France to become Prince Henry’s godfather. For weeks no answer came – until Elizabeth heard that Henri IV had refused to send a representative. Elizabeth was only too aware of the politics of this gesture. Elizabeth originally intended to refuse to send a proxy. Now, she accepted James’s invitation. As a Protestant, Henri, the Huguenot King of Navarre, had been Elizabeth’s most powerful ally against the papal-backed Habsburg rulers of Spain and their cousins, the Holy Roman emperors. When Henri converted to Catholicism to unite France in July 1593, Elizabeth, still locked into war with Spain, felt bitterly betrayed. Henri was crowned king of all France the following February, the same month Henry was born, leaving Protestant England to face a newly united Catholic France twenty miles across the Channel. In the summer of 1594, therefore, Elizabeth wrote to Queen Anne, expressing ‘[our] extreme pleasure … [in] the birth of the young Prince[and] … the honourable invitation to assist at the baptism. We send the Earl of Sussex as our representative.’

The English queen’s acceptance irritated Henri IV, as it was meant to. France disliked any sign of an enlarged multiple British monarchy forming across the Channel, already recently strengthened by Anne’s Danish connections. After all, the family tree of a ruling dynasty was a European political network. Anne’s sister, Hedwig, was married to the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven men who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. The Saxons were cousins of the free Dutch leader, Anne’s former suitor, Maurice of Nassau.

By July, Anne’s German relatives from Brunswick and Mecklenburg were beginning to arrive for the christening. Henry’s mother knitted her son into the top echelon of Protestant Europe’s rulers, while his father’s French blood connected him to major Catholic rulers. The Venetian ambassador reported to the Senate that ‘the Ambassadors of France, England, the States of Holland, and some German Princes … meet in Scotland at the baptism of the king’s son. The occasion is considered important on account of the understanding which may then be reached’ on how to humble the resurgent Catholic powers of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Fear of a coalition of Habsburg interests drove the abiding contemporary narrative of fear of predatory militant popery.

No less than three representatives arrived from the independent Dutch states for the christening, with twelve gentlemen and a train of thirty servants, reflecting the importance of the event. Embroiled in a prolonged war to free themselves from Spanish control, the Protestant Dutch came ‘to renew the ancient friendship between’ Scotland ‘and their own country, and to persuade’ King James to ‘enter into a general alliance against Spain’. They also brought gifts. Henry was given a ‘fair cupboard of plate’ (silver) and the promise of a hugely generous annuity of 500 crowns a year for the rest of his life.

As the event’s political stature grew, empty coffers forced James and Anne to address the tiresome issue of how to fund the grand baptism. The king turned to the Edinburgh money men, ‘to cause provision for wine and beer in great for the furnishing and entertaining’ of their guests. Thomas Foulis, goldsmith, lent the king £14,598 (Scots). James promised to repay it by November the following year. The royal couple already had a reputation for profligacy and Foulis beseeched his majesty for a more tangible guarantee than his sacred word. The king pawned ‘two drinking-pieces of gold, weighing in at fifteen pounds and five ounces of gold’. If he defaulted, then Thomas Acheson, master ‘cunyeor’ (coiner) was to ‘strike down and cunyie’ the cups into five-pound pieces of gold at the Cunzie House, the counting house, or royal mint. Foulis would take what he was owed and ‘the superplus, if any be, to make forthcome and deliver to his Majesty’s self’.

Others loaned and received their gold cup as security. A one-off parliamentary levy brought in £100,000 Scots, for ‘the incoming of the strangers to this honourable time of the baptism of the Prince, his Highness dearest son’. At the end of August and weeks overdue, Elizabeth’s proxy godparent, the Earl of Sussex, arrived, acting as if nothing could happen in Scotland until England appeared.

On the morning of 30 August 1594 the guests took their places in the chapel royal. At the east end stood the king’s chair of state, empty on a platform, cloth of gold spread all round it. Stuffed and gilded chairs received the fundaments of a series of leading foreign dignitaries, who took up their places beneath red velvet canopies adorned with the arms of each of their countries. The arms of England hung over a chair to the right of the throne, Denmark’s hung over the one to the left, and the arms of Scotland dominated the centre. Anne sat to one side with her ladies and friends.

The new pulpit dazzled with cloth of gold and yellow velvet. The black-clad Calvinist clergy sitting at a table below felt a little queasy. Their eyes found no relief from the idolatrous frippery, as they glanced from alabaster bas-reliefs to classical Greek friezes, and a huge fresco of the king in his pomp behind the altar. Calvinists insisted on the separate jurisdictions of God and state. James VI apparently did not. Rather the opposite.

Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.

A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.

The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.

At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.

Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.

Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.

Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.

The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.

Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.

Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble seafood, lay in heaps on the decks – ‘herrings, whitings, flukes, oysters, buckies, lampets, partans, lobsters, crabs, spout-fish, clams’. Sea maidens distributed the feast among the guests. From the galleries at the end of the room, the hautbois began a tune, joined by the viols, recorders, flutes, and then scores of choral voices all in deafening counterpoint to each other, singing in praise of king, queen and the prince of glorious expectation, Henry Frederick Stuart. As the music reached a crescendo, each of the thirty-six cannon unleashed a volley. The walls of the great hall thundered and echoed. The infant must have leapt from his skin.

From Stirling to St James’s Palace in London, Prince Henry would learn a humanist truism: the encounter with the ancients in whatever form you find them – in coin or word or image, in plays, masques, and pictures – will endow you with their qualities of rationality, eloquence, glory, wealth, virtue, and political wisdom. Europeans communicated through these symbolic languages. James and Anne used this language on Henry’s christening day to demonstrate the sophistication and merit of the dynasty sitting in wait for the death of Elizabeth Tudor.

Next morning the celebrations continued, as guests made their way in groups into Edinburgh. Others headed for the port of Leith and their ships. Ambassadors penned their accounts and examined the quality of the gifts of gold chains King James sent for their masters. Meanwhile a poem, ‘Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia’ (‘On the Birth of the Scoto-Britannic Prince’), by Andrew Melville, one of Scotland’s leading Presbyterian churchmen, reminded them of the true significance of Henry’s birth for Christendom:

Those who were divided by the Tweed …

The rule of Scoto-Britannic sovereignty now joins together,

United in law and within a Scoto-Britannic commonwealth,

And a Prince born of a Scoto-Britannic king

Calls them into a single Scoto-Britannic people.

To what great heights will Scoto-Britannic glory now rise

With no limits set by space and time?

By the time Elizabeth of England heard the word ‘Scoto-Britannic’ in this context for the fifth time in five lines, she was incandescent with rage. Chief minister, Robert Cecil, penned a letter on her behalf, pointing out that it verged on treason to say that James VI was ‘king of all Britain in possession’. James responded laconically that, ‘being descended as he was’ from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, ‘he could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of her Majesty’. He was Elizabeth’s closest blood male heir.

James connived in having the poem broadcast as widely as possible and authorised the Royal Printer, Robert Waldegrave, to publish it. It enjoyed wide circulation in Protestant circles across Europe and was reprinted several times in Amsterdam.

Once Henry heads the united ‘Scoto-Britannic people’, the poem thundered on, he will lead them into the cosmic conflict against the combined forces of papacy and Spain to ‘triumph over anointed Geryon’. In Roman mythology, Geryon is the triple-headed monster guarding the cattle in the Underworld. And here Geryon meant Spain. Melville addressed the infant:

Your foot tramples the triple diadem of the Roman Cerberus,

Dinning out of Hell sounds with thunders terrible

From the Capitoline Hill.

The pope was ‘the Roman Cerberus’, the attack dog guarding the gates of hell. Cerberus belonged to Geryon (Spain), who fattened him with titbits of Spanish New World wealth. Melville combined classical motifs and an Old Testament prophetic tone so beloved of godly radicals, alert for signs their God willed them to complete the religious revolution.

Lurid propaganda perhaps, yet fear of popery drenched Protestant Europe. ‘It crossed all social boundaries; as a solvent of political loyalties it had no rivals.’ The destabilising range and power of that fear was heightened by the biggest problem facing Protestant Europe right now – the revival of militant Catholicism.

Hitting back, Melville promoted Henry as Christendom’s saviour. Born in obscurity in Scotland, he would lead the Protestants of a united Europe against the sprawling gold- and silver-engorged powers of Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in a battle for the soul of the ‘nation of Europe’.

‘The holy zeal of Christians … in their struggle against the anti-Christ’ had found their future leader.

THREE

The Fight for Henry

‘TWO MIGHTY FACTIONS’

It was pleasing for James to envisage the European scale of Henry’s destiny, but he and his advisers knew it might come to nothing if the king could not ensure order and tranquillity at home – where, the English ambassador Bowes told Robert Cecil, ‘the question of the Queen and her son’, is ‘a breach working mightily’.

Some even saw Henry’s wet nurse as playing a sinister part in the drama. Everyone knew a child imbibed the nurse’s character with her milk. When a messenger told Anne that Margaret Mastertoun had ‘become dry through sickness’, she feared the worst. But the drama soon passed. Whatever illness the wet nurse had, Henry had caught it, ‘but is now well again. The King coming, the Nurse prayed pardon.’ Her milk, however, had gone. ‘The old nurse being of the Countess of Mar’s choice,’ Bowes explained, ‘some seek to impute this fault to Mar.’ If abundant breast milk equalled loyalty, the withdrawal of it implied treason. The Mars found another woman to tend to Henry, but ‘the young Prince cried for want of’ his old nurse and refused to feed. Recovering but unsettled, he preferred to go hungry and risked weakening himself further.