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

Anne asked that ‘the keeping of the Prince’ be moved to Edinburgh Castle, where she might personally oversee his care and prevent his nursery woes escalating into real danger. But Edinburgh, the seat of government, religion, and plots, was felt to be a more dangerous place for the prince. James refused to hand over Henry’s care to her.

The queen’s initial misery at being deprived of her son now settled into a pulsing anger. ‘Two mighty factions’ formed: the king’s supporters – including Mar, his kinsman Thomas Erskine and Sir James Elphinstone – warning that Anne, Queen of Scots, schemed with the discontented Catholic ‘[Earl] Bothwell and that crew, for the coronation of the Prince and the departure of the King’. Sir John Maitland, the Scottish chancellor, spearheaded support for the queen. ‘What the end will be, God knows,’ sighed Robert Aston, an English agent.

The king tried to get the leaders of the factions, Mar and Maitland, to reconcile before the court but found that courtiers continued to put light ‘to the coal’ of the strife, standing back to ‘let others blow at it’. This ‘is the condition of this estate … Everyone shooting at others without respect to King or Commonweal, or the safety of the young Prince’, commented Aston.

From Whitehall, Robert Cecil pondered the implications for England if King James and his obdurate consort ascended the English throne. James’s apparent disinclination to suppress dissent and put his ‘Lords … to the horn’ left a question mark against his suitability as successor. Yet the Scottish king had settled Scotland as his forebears had failed to do. The child was a healthy male and, despite the unpropitious circumstances, there were whispers at court that he might soon have a sibling: ‘by all appearances [the queen] … is with child, yet she denies it’, agent Aston reported to Ambassador Bowes.

Hostilities quickly resumed though, with James informing Anne that in pressing for the removal of the prince, her supporters ‘sought nothing but the cutting of his [the king’s] throat’. Worse, he said, her plots were not only ‘a danger to his person’, but ‘treason’. Anne collapsed under the strain. If she had been pregnant, she was not any more.

Anxiety for the health of his ‘dearest bedfellow’ drove James to see Anne at Linlithgow palace, set away from ‘the tumults of Edinburgh’. Here, James entertained ‘the Queen very lovingly … to draw her off’ her obsession. She received him well and was reported to be ‘all love and obedience’. But at supper, thinking she had her husband ‘in a good humour’, she declared that ‘it was “opened” in Scotland, England and Denmark that she had sought to have the keeping of the young Prince and that therefore it touched her honour and her credit’ as mother of the heir and queen, not to be slighted. James insisted that ‘he regarded her honour and the safety of the Prince as much as she, and would, if he saw cause, yield to her’. On both sides, love was intimate and strategic. James spoke for them all when he told Henry later: ‘a King is as one set on a stage’.

The fight to be reunited with her son drew out a relentless streak in Henry’s unhappy mother. The result, an audible rending of the fabric of the Stuarts’ domestic life, was terrible to witness. By July 1595, Anne seemed to be ‘somewhat crazed’ in her grief. She obsessed over the right ‘cause’ to make the king ‘yield to her’. She asked him to ‘convene his nobles for their advice therein … But he has utterly refused her motion and continues his promises to Mar. So this matter is “marvellous secret”,’ intelligencer George Nicolson observed with some sarcasm.

The feud turned violent when the queen’s supporters clashed with the king’s men under the walls of Stirling Castle, and Mar’s baillie, a man named Forrester, was slaughtered. ‘I fear it will very suddenly burst into bloody factions,’ Nicolson judged, ‘for all sides are busy packing up all small feuds for their advantage.’ The kirk ordained a day of fasting ‘for the amendment of the present danger’ caused by this rupture. James, meanwhile, pleaded with the queen to abandon her campaign. ‘My Heart,’ he wrote, ‘I am sorry you should be persuaded to move me to that which will be the destruction of me and my blood.’

One of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting carried the stories to Denmark. Anne’s mother, Queen Sophie, unmoved by her daughter’s distress, advised that she should ‘obey the King in all things’.

In London, Cecil was told ‘there is nothing but lurking hatred disguised with cunning dissimulation between the King and the Queen’. Elizabeth I let off an exasperated rebuke to her cousin, rueing ‘to see him so evidently a spectacle of a seduced king, abusing counsel, and guiding awry his kingdom’. Her brother prince – her heir, perhaps – had let his popish lords lay out their demands, ‘turning their treason’s bills to artificer’s reckonings – one billet lacking only’, she fumed, and that is, ‘an item … so much for the cord whose office they best merited’. James did not immediately follow advice on executions from his mother’s killer, no matter how wittily expressed – though he did love wit.

A rapprochement occurred between king and queen towards the end of the year, and by early 1596 Denmark’s daughter was pregnant again. Princess Elizabeth, named in honour of Elizabeth I, was born at Falkland Palace, Fife, in August 1596. She too was quickly fostered out to the king’s allies and Henry saw nothing of his new sister. Nor would he see his baby brother, Charles, born four years later. Nor Princess Margaret, born 1598, but dead by March 1600.

Prince Henry’s first portrait dates from this time. It shows a king in miniature. About eighteen months old, in his high chair, dressed in jewel-encrusted, padded white-satin robes, with a coronet on his head, he holds a rattle as if it were a tiny sceptre. The reddish blond down on his head is baby hair. His skin is white as the moon. He resembles his mother.

FOUR

Nursery to Schoolroom

‘THE KING’S GIFT’

By 1599 James had shooed ‘the skirts’ out of Prince Henry’s lodgings and ordered diverse men of ‘good sort to attend upon his person’ instead. It was time to prepare the boy to be king.

James produced a hands-on guide to kingcraft for this purpose. You must ‘study to know well [your] own craft … which is to rule [your] people’, he told his five-year-old son. The king had been writing and thinking about this for a long time. His Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s Gift’) came out that year in a tiny print-run of seven. Copies of ‘His Majesty’s instructions to his dearest son, Henry the Prince’ went to a privileged few: Prince Henry, the queen, Mar, and the man James appointed to be Henry’s tutor, Adam Newton.

Self-help guides in preparation to rule were an established genre. The most famous, still in use at this time, was Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani (‘The Education of a Christian Prince’, 1516). James VI’s book possessed a special allure, though, being written by a ruling personal monarch with vast experience of the subject.

He divided Basilikon Doron into ‘three books: the first instructing the prince on his duty towards God; the second in his duty when he should be king; and the third informing him how to behave himself in indifferent things, which were neither right nor wrong, but according as they were rightly or wrong used’. James’s writing voice enlivened the content. He could be intimate, colloquial, shrewd and humorous, but also deeply learned. When it came to publishing the book for a wider readership, in England in 1603, James revised it, allowing his subjects to see how the wise philosopher-king was nurturing the student prince for them.

God expected Henry to have a detailed knowledge of scripture, his father told him, in order to ‘contain your Church in their calling’. In James’s view, the clergy’s role was only to be custodians of his church, subservient to the king’s wishes. Henry must not let ministers overstep this mark, interfere in government, or try to limit the authority of the king. Henry should strive to cultivate a middle path in matters of faith: ‘Beware with both the extremities; as well as ye repress the vain Puritan, so [also] not to suffer proud Papall Bishops.’ The king had already experienced memorable run-ins with certain Calvinist ministers who treated the heavenly and worldly realms as distinct. In general, Henry should be ‘a loving nourish-father’ to his church, said James, echoing Isaiah 49:23, where ‘Kings shall be thy nursing fathers’.

A poet, philosopher and one of the most intelligent rulers in Christendom, James wanted his son to be as scholarly as him. In matters of secular government, Henry must ‘study well your own laws’, and recommended as further reading Xenophon and Caesar on statecraft. Henry’s tutors agreed, but had their own preferred exemplars; in time they would expose the prince to them, to the king’s displeasure.

James encouraged Henry to study mathematics, which would allow him to fulfil the prime function of monarchy: the management of national security and foreign policy – or, when and how to make war. For this, maths would improve his mastery of ‘the art military, in situations of Camps, ordering of battles, making fortifications, and the placing of batteries’. A good commander could calculate the range and elevation for firing artillery and placing of infantry, and understand engineering issues such as where to mine walls for maximum destruction.

Although Basilikon Doron was a practical manual on kingcraft, James touched on the theory of monarchy, as expanded upon in his recent long essay: The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. The king nuanced the Calvinist theory of predestination when he told Henry there was nothing you could do to earn the right to rule; God’s will destined Henry to be king. Kings preceded the creation of all councils, including parliaments and church. Thus, on every count the king’s power was pre-eminent.

This was the voice of a personal and absolute monarch speaking: one in whom supreme power rested, without any necessity to work through parliaments or councils. King Henry IX will be a type of ‘little god’, said James, adapting Psalm 82:6: ‘I have said, ye are gods’, there to exercise imperial power. Nonetheless he must earn his subjects’ respect – as ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.

Lofty and earthy, this was a classic Jamesian image of kingship, congruent with his True Lawe of Free Monarchies (subtitled The reciprock and mutuall dutie betwixt a free King, and his natural Subiectes), in which James made an apology for the theory of the divine right of kings and absolutism, the monarch’s ‘imperium’. Since they were quasi-divine beings, said James, kings could not be punished by subjects if they were weak or wicked.

In the last resort, a monarch was ‘free’ to do as he liked. Only God could tip monarchs off the ‘sliddriest’ bench into the abyss if they failed to rule well. A king’s duty was more onus than honour. His first duty was to be a good ruler. If Henry kept that in mind, he would avoid the loathing of God and men.

FIVE

Tutors and Mentors

‘STUDY TO RULE’

To shape this ‘little god’, James and Mar appointed the humanist scholar Adam Newton, an Edinburgh baker’s son, as principal tutor. Newton had been the only commoner to receive Basilikon Doron in 1599. Henry now sat in the schoolroom in the Prince’s Tower at Stirling, where his father and Mar had sat twenty-five years before, when they had been nurtured by a luminary of the Calvinist renaissance, the aged, godly and abusive George Buchanan. Buchanan might well have thrashed James senseless for proposing the unassailability of absolute monarchy.

Buchanan’s own political writings legitimised not merely resistance, but prescribed overthrow, even tyrannicide, for ungodly monarchs. Extreme Calvinism and the idea of a contractual, not absolute, monarchy often went hand in hand. James thought Buchanan was a ‘vain Puritan’, violently overstepping his calling, and he had feared him. The beatings the boy-king suffered were on occasions frenzied. Once James left the schoolroom and took control of government, he banished Buchanan and burned his books.

As well as tutoring the king, Buchanan had mentored the godly Melville, author of Prince Henry’s baptism poem. Henry’s newly appointed tutor, Adam Newton, had in turn been mentored by Melville. Newton was as demanding as the king’s tutors had been, but kind. Henry’s servants remembered that ‘next his parents, he was always most loving to his schoolmaster … notwithstanding that … Newton did always prefer his own duty and his Highness well-doing before the pleasing of his fancies’.

After receiving his degree, Newton had travelled to France to hear Huguenot philosophers debate the politics of rightful resistance to a king. The philosophy of contractual monarchy argued that a monarch must rule by the consent of the people, for the benefit of the whole commonwealth. If not, he should be resisted, perhaps removed. In exchange for good governance, the people submitted to his rule, and gave their loyalty, even to death. Honouring this implicit ‘contract’ sanctioned the ruler’s supreme power over their subjects and safeguarded their liberties. Newton went to teach this political vision at the prestigious St Maixent college in Poitou, north of La Rochelle. He believed in monarchy as a system of rule, but in a contractual not imperial version. Yet he served a king whose theories on the nature of monarchy allowed no resistance to the will of the ‘little god’ monarch, no matter how bad he was.

Henry’s guardian, the Earl of Mar, appeared to embrace some of Buchanan and Newton’s political vision. In one council meeting, Mar censured fellow nobles for saying they would ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’. ‘It was not well that they should not freely give their advice as Councillors,’ said Mar, ‘which the King well allowed of.’ Although James VI welcomed advice and debate, he never felt bound by any of it. The godly Mar envisaged king and well-born advisers ruling together in council, through the legislature, for the good of the realm as a whole. It was hard to imagine Newton or Mar working to shape a future Henry IX who believed his councillors should ‘leave all to the King’s pleasure’.

From these first days in the schoolroom, Prince Henry was exposed to at least two potentially incompatible sets of ideas about who he was, what he should believe, his attitude to monarchy and how he should act.

Newton was not left alone to educate Henry. Walter Quin, an Irish poet, was sent for to assist him. Quin came with the blessing not only of King James of Scotland but also of the Earl of Essex over four hundred miles away in London. Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, was Elizabeth I’s principal favourite, a significant power in the country and a military commander in Ireland. In his poems praising James VI, Walter Quin urged the king to let a man of great Renaissance virtue guide him onto the English throne. He surely had Essex in mind.

Essex meanwhile courted James and tried to persuade Elizabeth of the need to settle the succession in favour of the Scottish king and his progeny. However, Elizabeth would not listen to his counsel, to the earl’s fury. Essex firmly believed strong councillors secured an absolute monarch. These councillors must criticise when they saw their sovereign acting in error, against the good of the whole commonwealth.

As well as tutors of all kinds, Henry needed body servants. Mar brought in his first cousin, David Murray of Gorthly, as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Murray’s high forehead and thick red hair and beard framed small bright eyes, giving him the look of an alert, friendly squirrel. A full-lipped mouth twitched upwards in a smile, all set in a long, rectangular face. A Renaissance soldier-poet, Murray was also a godly Calvinist, like most of the Mar clan. As overseer of the prince’s bodily needs, Murray slept on a truckle bed in Henry’s chamber. No man saw more of the boy.

James sent David Foulis to work with Murray and take charge of Henry’s wardrobe. Foulis had first come to James’s court as a pageboy. Later, he would be entrusted with taking the king’s communications to Elizabeth. Now, as ‘an ancient friend’ of the Essexians, he acted as go-between in the secret correspondence between James and Essex. His role allowed him easy access to intelligence on the prince and his household, which he then sold on to the English earl and his camp.

In the letters, Essex’s codename was ‘Plato’ and the king ‘Tacitus’. James might have wondered why he was Tacitus. The Roman historian was a source of great fascination for the Essexians and Henry Savile, who tutored Essex’s son, was a renowned translator of his writings. Rediscovered in the Renaissance, Tacitus’s works analysed the virtues of Rome under the Republic, where power resided in a strong council of elected individuals representing the flower of the whole community, under an elected leader. In comparison, Tacitus had reservations about the imperial era in Rome under the rule of the Caesars: absolute rule by non-elected emperors, ‘free’ to be unaccountable for their actions, if they wanted. Referring to James VI as ‘Tacitus’ suggested the Essex group dreamt that Stuart rule would inaugurate a Tacitus-influenced English political system: strong council with virtuous rule, and the security of a hereditary monarchy.

Mar facilitated and encouraged regular communication between Prince Henry’s schoolroom and Essex House, the Earl of Essex’s power base near Westminster. In this arrangement Mar boasted of his own importance as guardian of the heir and future King of Scotland and England. Essex confided to Mar that his faction’s support for the Scottish king might possibly lead to arms, forcing Queen Elizabeth to name James as her successor in Parliament. The imprimatur of parliamentary legal consent mattered to Essex’s group. For them, only a strong buffer of constitutional safeguards, legitimised in Parliament, guaranteed the Crown’s authority. Issues such as the succession must then, Essex House concluded, include parliamentary participation. Although, Essex believed MPs had to be guided by Parliament’s steering group, the Privy Council, staffed mainly by politically and militarily active aristocrats.

The Cecil faction, Essex’s rivals for Elizabeth I’s favour, also wanted to serve a monarch exercising absolute or ‘imperial’ powers, but contained by the due process of law and counsel by virtuous men of honour. The chivalric soldier in Essex would go further, fatefully, than any of the Cecil group in an attempt to bring this to fruition. For now, Essex suggested Mar come to London for private discussions.

This, then, was the complex, multifaceted and intensely ideological environment in which Henry began his formal education at the age of four: writing the alphabet; reading classical masters of Latin grammar; studying the elements of rhetoric; learning French, and a bold italic hand to express himself in. If James thought his own character had been adversely affected by the brutality and instability of his childhood, then perhaps Henry’s more temperate personality – described as showing ‘sparks of piety, majesty, gravity … using a mild and gentle behaviour to all, chiefly to strangers’ – reflected the kinder setting in which the boy was being raised. He shared his classroom with some of Mar’s seven boys, and the earl’s five daughters lived close by. Henry grew up with plenty of other children, but not his siblings.

Henry’s handwriting was seen as reflecting the quality of the king in training, and the esteem he felt for the recipient. A scrawled letter, half illegible in a childish hand, found to be full of spelling mistakes when it could be deciphered at all, insulted the person and country receiving it. Henry sat in the Prince’s Tower and practised italic script over and over. Cicero said you could not think well if you did not have a solid grounding in morally edifying texts, and good handwriting. So Henry filled his notebooks with lines of rrrrrs and ssssses. He perfected phrases before they went into the final copy of a letter. Typical child, he covered pages of his exercise books with his signature, practising his joyful twirls and flourishes –, Henricus, Henricus, Henry, Henry – for illustrious addressees.

By the age of six, he was initiating exchanges with foreign states and rulers. The first official letter he wrote in 1600 was to the Dutch States General and Maurice of Nassau, commander of the Protestant Dutch troops in their rebellion against Catholic Spain. In it he thanked them for their good opinion of him in his tender years. Henry promised these ‘first fruits of his hand’ showed ‘his interest in serving them … hereafter in better offices’. The Dutch were already paying the 500 crown annuity promised at his baptism, though it went straight to the king’s coffers. Henry would repay their faith in him, by coming to serve in the field, and learn the military arts from Maurice himself.

The king appointed a court favourite Sir Richard Preston to school the prince in the military arts. Preston had fought for the Dutch with the Earl of Leicester and Leicester’s brother, the late Sir Philip Sidney, both English heroes of international Calvinism. Many of Prince Henry’s household, and the Essexians in London, shared a belief that Scottish Calvinism and the Church of England were parts of a greater body: the united European community of Protestants. With a touch of knights on a quest about them, such individuals felt honour-bound to defend any fellow Protestant state threatened by a Catholic power. Subsequently Preston, ‘a gentleman of great accomplishments in mind and body’, became a follower of Essex.

As Preston trained Henry, it was quickly observed how well the young prince ‘began to apply himself to, and to take pleasure in, active and manly exercises, learning to ride, sing, dance, leap, shoot with the bow and gun, toss the pike, &c., being instructed in the use of arms’. Preston tutored Henry in the honour code of ‘Protestant martial Virtue’ he espoused. By May 1599, Preston occupied a ‘“Praetorian” role’, as ‘captain over all the officers in the King’s Household’.

Veterans of Europe’s religious wars, men such as Preston, recounted poems and stories, and introduced the prince to the latest innovations on the modern battlefield. Henry learned, while tales of siege trenches, training and army camp life replayed in his and his followers’ imaginations. Soon ‘no music being so pleasant in his ears as the sounding of trumpet and the beating of drum, the roaring of the cannon, no sight so acceptable, as that of pieces, pistols, or any sort of Armour’, he wanted to be practising his martial skills all the time. The young prince attacked a plate of strawberries, holding up his two spoons. ‘The one I use as a rapier,’ he chattered, ‘and the other as a dagger.’ Looking on, the men around him proudly shared these anecdotes: signs their education was taking root.

Henry also grew up with a keen sense of the threats to his father’s kingdom. He saw the bodies of rebels rotting on gibbets as he trotted in and out of Stirling Castle. He knew how some of ‘the great ones’ in Scotland plotted to seize him and take him away. Sitting on his pony with his friends, watching the king and Mar hunt stags, someone asked Henry if he loved to hunt animals as much as his father.

‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘but I love another kind of hunting better.’

‘What manner of hunting?’ they asked.

‘Hunting of thieves and rebels with brave men and horses,’ and adding: ‘such thieves as I take shall be hanged, the great ones higher than the rest.’

By the age of seven, Henry was seeking to improve his essays by imitating classical masters, composing epistles in Latin in different styles. In the first instance Adam Newton, a master of style, would compose them and Henry transcribe them. But as he grew, Henry began to pick out anything that caught his eye. Newton gave him Cicero’s De Officiis. Henry annotated it, heavily, underlining unusual words and phrases and copying them out to help him remember. He numbered the stages of a Ciceronian argument so he could learn how to debate. He marked up phrases he liked – often those where Cicero advocated active participation in public life.