After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James. Leanda Lisle de

for the sufferings of the Ruthvens’. James, aware that Anna was pregnant, took her abuse without complaint, but he was not deflected from his pursuit of vengeance.

      On 6 August a party of men were sent to seize the surviving Ruthven brothers, William and Patrick, who were still only schoolboys. They escaped over the border and in June 1602 were said to be hiding in Yorkshire. James complained to Elizabeth and, with some reluctance, she agreed to have them banished. William fled abroad early in 1603 leaving Patrick behind. In Scotland, meanwhile, in the autumn of 1600, the decaying corpses of John and Alexander were tried for treason. They were found guilty, the Ruthven estates and honours were forfeited and their name proscribed. On the day their bodies were being gibbeted, quartered and exposed throughout the country, Anna gave birth to the future Charles I. James hurried to Dunfermline where she was lying with her child and in the New Year he presented Anna with a jewel worth 1,333 Scottish pounds. There were those amongst the Mar faction who wanted her imprisoned for her support for the Ruthvens, but James would hear none of it, ‘but … does seek by all means to cover her folly’, a witness reported.⁴⁸

      That January 1603 Sir Thomas Erskine, the Captain of the Guard, warned James that Anna had smuggled Beatrice Ruthven into her rooms at Holyrood and talked to her for hours just feet from where he slept. Beatrice left laden with gifts to support her in exile in England. James was shaken and angry but again he refused to punish Anna. He simply ordered workmen to seal up ‘all dangerous passages for coming near the King’s chamber.’ There were other matters to think about than the Ruthvens, as the question of the succession had returned to centre stage.

The aftermath to the Gowrie conspiracy had found James’s ally at Elizabeth’s court, the Earl of Essex, still disgraced and Secretary Cecil with total domination over the Privy Council. In December 1600, however, Cecil’s agents made an unexpected gesture of reconciliation. They claimed that ‘the Earl of Leicester or Sir Francis Walsingham were the only cutters of [Mary Stuart’s] throat’.⁴⁹ James had ignored them. Aware of the unpopularity of Elizabeth’s government, he was convinced that she would soon be facing an uprising and in February 1601 he sent the Earl of Mar and a diplomat named Edward Bruce to aid Essex in his plans to raise a revolt.^* But by the time Mar and Bruce arrived in London, Essex had already been tried and beheaded.

      James’s fear was that Cecil would now use the Essex revolt to achieve what the confession of Valentine Thomas had failed to do, namely link him directly to a plot against Elizabeth. Fortunately the black bag containing his last letter to Essex, which the Earl wore on the day of the revolt, had disappeared. It was probably destroyed either by Essex himself or the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Peyton, who soon offered James his loyalty. With no solid evidence against him, James sent instructions for Mar and Bruce to ask the ‘present guiders’ in England to declare that he was untouched by any actions against the Queen. They were to offer his future favour to those courtiers who supported him and his eternal displeasure to those who did not. He was particularly keen for the message to get through to Cecil who, he observed, ‘is king there in effect’. With Essex dead, however, the kaleidoscope of faction was shifting once more. Cecil made clear to the envoys that he had every intention of backing the Stuart cause. The rules of primogeniture underpinned the laws of inheritance to which the entire political elite was subject and the majority had never been comfortable with overturning them, still less now when James’s dynastic rivals were particularly weak. Even a foreigner like the French ambassador, André Hurault, Sieur de Maisse, had observed that ‘it is certain the English would never again submit to the rule of a woman’; that ruled out James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and Ferdinando Derby’s daughter, Lady Anne Stanley. Meanwhile the claim of Lord Beauchamp had been all but destroyed by the Doleman book and his failure to marry someone of suitable status.

      Essex was right to believe that Cecil had needed to have a rival candidate to James in the late 1590s. The evidence suggests Cecil had considered marrying Arbella to Beauchamp’s elder son Edward Seymour, so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s sisters Margaret and Mary Tudor. His ally, Beauchamp’s father, the Earl of Hertford, had certainly done so and Cecil’s interest in the match may have been behind the rumours in Europe that he wanted to marry Arbella himself. But Elizabeth would never have permitted a Seymour–Stuart union and the sensible thing for Cecil to do now that Essex was dead was to present himself to James as his greatest champion and suggest that Essex had really wanted the crown for himself. This appears to be exactly what he did. Bruce and Mar were delighted to have caught such a fish and tactfully dropped James’s demands for a public statement of his innocence of any plotting against the Queen. Instead they organised a code to enable Cecil to correspond in secret with the Scottish King. Names were to be represented by numbers: James, for example, was 30 and Cecil 10.

      Cecil insisted that absolute secrecy be maintained over their correspondence for, as he later put it, ‘if Her Majesty had known all I did … her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.⁵⁰ He had a narrow escape from being discovered only that summer. Elizabeth’s Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, later described how the Queen was walking in Greenwich Park when she ‘heard the post blow his horn’. She asked that the bag of letters be brought to her and Cecil, knowing that it would contain letters from Scotland, fell on his knees and begged her not to look at them. He told her that if she did people would think ‘it to be out of a jealousy and suspicion of him’ which would leave him disgraced and unable to continue working for her effectively.⁵¹ Elizabeth chose not to look in the bag, but Cecil remained so nervous of discovery that he risked insulting his future Queen by asking James not to tell Anna of their correspondence.

      Cecil’s first letter to the King assured him that Elizabeth was a dynastic legitimist, not at all inclined to ‘cut off the natural branch and graft upon some wild stock’, but he warned that Elizabeth would perceive any demand for a public recognition of his right as a threat. Furthermore if he invaded England as Essex had suggested all Englishmen would unite against him. James was happy to agree to Cecil’s requests, but in turn he required that Cecil work with two Englishmen he trusted. The first, Lord Henry Howard, was the embittered younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, beheaded for plotting to marry James’s mother – and thus a member of a family who had proven their loyalty to the Stuart cause. The second was Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, who like Howard was a Catholic, though Elizabeth had famously said of him that he ‘reconciled what she believed to be impossible, a stiff papist to a good subject’. Where Howard was a brilliant academic but a tedious companion, Worcester was handsome and charismatic – the perfect courtier – and when Elizabeth had sent him to Scotland in 1590 to congratulate James on his marriage he had impressed the King so much that they had remained in contact thereafter.

James hoped that as a leader of the English Catholics Worcester was well placed to reconcile his coreligionists to the King’s inheritance. Cecil had therefore helped engineer Worcester’s promotion to the Privy Council in the summer of 1601, along with two other new members: Arbella Stuart’s maternal uncle, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Cecil’s protégé, Sir John Stanhope, an old enemy of Shrewsbury’s.^* Howard assured James that Shrewsbury had only been picked because Elizabeth felt she had to respond to complaints that the nobility were under-represented on the Council, adding bitchily that Elizabeth never listened to his advice on anything. In fact James and Cecil recognised the need to have an ally within the Arbella camp on the Council and Cecil had chosen Stanhope as his counterweight. Thomas Wilson’s State of England described how Cecil maintained a tradition of pairing rival with rival in all the great offices of state so that ‘each having his enemies eye to over look him, it may make him look more warily to his charge, and that if anybody should incline to any unfaithfulness … it might be spied before it be brought to any dangerous head’. They in turn were supported only by ‘base pen clerks … that cannot conceive his master’s drifts and policies’.