Back in the day: The figures who paved the way for James VI to be King of England

Anne was a formidable figure physically, standing taller than James, and unlike him she was also attractive. James – who was probably bisexual rather than homosexual – fell deeply in love with her, though it took five years before they produced an heir, Prince Henry, born in 1594.

They would have seven children in all, three of whom survived childhood. Henry died of typhoid in 1612, Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and they famously became the Winter King and Queen, and their second son, Charles, born in 1600, became the heir and succeeded his father as Charles I.

John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar, above, the oftentimes friend and secret agent of James VI

The marriage was happy at first but Anne showed an independent frame of mind that James simply couldn’t handle. She was also not James’s intellectual equal, so their arguments tended to be of the sullen variety. Some of James’s admonition of his queen have survived in letters sent to her.

As often happens in marriages, money was a source of disagreement, for the new queen enjoyed balls and extravagant parties.

Having been given Falkland and Linlithgow Palaces in return for her considerable dowry, she insisted on improving them expensively. She became a generous patron of the arts, something James could not object to as he was one himself.

He also continued to spend serious sums on buying Anne magnificent jewellery, some of which still survives in royal collections, as well as the latest fashions in gowns. Such expenditure was reported to his funder Elizabeth, who had started paying his promised pension of £4000 a year.

Anne was furious when she learned that she was being accused of extravagance, but all the problems seemed to have been resolved in 1594 when she became pregnant and gave birth to the son and heir James so desperately wanted.

James VI and I (1566-1625), King of Scotland, 1595

There was massive public rejoicing across Scotland even though neither the king nor the queen was universally popular. The continuation of the Stuart dynasty was sufficient for the people of Scotland, but behind the scenes, things were not going well in the royal marriage – though of course they did not have the prying eyes of the media upon them as has happened with recent royals.

The couple fell out spectacularly, and continued to do so for many years – the cleric Godfrey Goodman, Anne’s chaplain after she moved to London and who later became Bishop of Gloucester, recorded: “They did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together.”

Anne showed her formidable nature in two matters above all – parenthood and religion. The care of her eldest son Prince Henry became an issue not long after he was born, with James determined that from the age of six months, the boy would be raised by the 2nd Earl of Mar at Stirling Castle, just as the king himself had been in the care of the 1st Earl of Mar at Stirling.

Needless to say, Henry would also have a Protestant education, just as James had.

Surviving records and reports of the time show Anne was heartbroken by her husband’s stance and tried for years to get him to change his mind. The Earl of Mar and the chancellor, Lord John Maitland of Thirlestane, earned most of her wrath as she attempted in vain to make the king relent. She had already fallen out several times with Thirlestane, particularly over his pursuit of the Lord Admiral Earl of Bothwell on false witchcraft claims, but they were reconciled before his death on October 3, 1595. James VI composed his epitaph, which was inscribed on his memorial monument in St Mary’s, Haddington.

In his dying months, Maitland had initiated correspondence with some of Elizabeth’s courtiers in London, but it was the Earl of Mar who took forward the matter of James succeeding Gloriana. He did so while constantly feuding with Queen Anne over the education of Prince Henry.

Elizabeth had determined that James VI would succeed her but she would not commit her will on the succession to paper. Instead she instructed her favourite, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, to encourage James to think that he would indeed succeed, and it was Mar who linked up with Essex to advance James’s cause. As early as 1596, Elizabeth sent a miniature portrait of herself to Prince Henry, which the Earl of Mar received and kept at Stirling.

Meanwhile, King James was busying himself with the study of witchcraft – he published the extraordinary Daemonologie in 1597 – which fed his constant paranoia, although, as the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

On August 5, 1600, the Earl of Mar was with the king when he rode to near Perth with a party of friends and courtiers intending to go hunting. Historians still argue about what happened next and why, but what is certain is that the king was approached by Alexander, the Master of Ruthven, younger brother of John Ruthven, the 3rd Earl of Gowrie.

Their father was the Gowrie who was executed for treason for his part in attempted coups against James. You might think that James would be suspicious about having any dealings with the family who had imprisoned him after the Ruthven Raid, but the king seems to have been happy to accompany Alexander back to Gowrie House.

It is said that Alexander concocted a story about a man being found near Perth with a bag of gold, and wouldn’t the king be happy to meet the man and take the gold for his always depleted treasury? According to the king himself, he was inveigled to go up into the turret room to meet the man, but no sooner was he alone with the Master of Ruthven and a stranger dressed in armour than Alexander pulled a dagger and told King James he was going to die for his part in the execution of his father.

In his version, James kept his cool and managed to get to the window, shouting: “I am murdered! Treason! My Lord Mar help me.”

Mar hurried to save the king, along with the courtiers, but it was a young man called John Ramsay who reached the turret room first, where he found the Master of Ruthven struggling with James VI. Ramsay stabbed the king’s assailant in the neck, and then his companions finished the job with multiple stabbings. The Earl of Gowrie ran upstairs and Ramsay killed him, too. With Mar as his chief witness, James VI quickly produced a pamphlet that asserted he was the victim of a plot to kill him, forever after known as the Gowrie Conspiracy.

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The fact that James still owed the Gowrie family some £80,000 which he did not have and that the debt died with the Ruthvens should not be taken as evidence that James had an ulterior motive for ensuring the dispatch of both brothers. Yet there’s no doubt that James went alone into that turret room, and so it’s just possible that the Gowrie Conspiracy was real.

Meanwhile, at home, James had a serious problem. He had married Queen Anne because she was apparently a committed Lutheran, but Anne – co-incidentally a friend of the two handsome Ruthven brothers – had been secretly meeting a Jesuit priest who tried to convert her to Roman Catholicism.

Such a conversion might well have been fatal to James’s chances of becoming King of England and head of the Protestant Church of England, so Anne was persuaded to conceal her flirtation with Catholicism. She did so for the rest of her life but may have been received into the Catholic Church with baptism on her death bed in 1619. We will find out over the next fortnight just exactly what happened to James and Anne in a special two-part series on the Union of the Crowns.

Following the Gowrie affair, Mar was sent to London to deal directly with Elizabeth and her secretary of state Robert Cecil. It is probable that he had intended to meet Essex, who was supposedly planning a coup against the queen, but Cecil and his agents rumbled Essex. He was thrown in the Tower of London and executed on February 25, 1601.

Had James’s message of support for Essex been made public at the time, the destination of Elizabeth’s crown might well have changed and the history of Britain would have been very different. Mar managed to keep everything secret, however, and he made an impression on the queen, who called him a “courtly gentleman”. Certainly, Mar conducted matters with tact and prudence – qualities which made him very important in the life of James VI and I.

More importantly, his negotiations with Cecil went very well, and the secretary advised him very strongly to keep out of English politics while he made the necessary connections to ensure a smooth succession for James VI of Scotland to become James I of England.

James sent fresh instructions to Mar, including the warning that he should “walk surely between the precipices of the queen and the people”, and Mar then began in earnest to debate with Cecil and another prominent courtier, Henry Howard, later the Earl of Northampton, as to the way forward for James.

Cecil, later the Earl of Salisbury, was a consummate politician who knew exactly how to keep Elizabeth happy. He was persuaded by Mar to arrange a show of support for James from Elizabeth, and she duly increased James’s pension to £5000 a year.

Mar left for Scotland, having arranged for a public communication and a private and secret correspondence between the two kingdoms, as represented by Cecil, Mar and a few diplomats on either side of the Border. Some of the secret letters even used code numbers to refer to people – James was 30, Mar was 20 and Cecil was 10.

Meanwhile Elizabeth and James carried on their correspondence which was not meant for public consumption but invariably saw the light of day. The secret correspondence was kept from Elizabeth as the one suggestion for which she would behead anybody was the implication that she might die. Her father, Henry VIII, was similarly minded and passed a law making it treason to suggest his death – Elizabeth never used that law, but threatened several people with it as she grew older.

Howard and Cecil’s view was that “age and orbity joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her”.

It seems incredible that Elizabeth was kept in the dark but the importance of the secret negotiations only emerged long after James ascended the English throne – he was involved in it up to his neck and rewarded Howard, Cecil and Mar for their work.

The historian Patrick Fraser Tytler summed up the negotiations thus: “At all events, nothing could have been more secretly or adroitly managed than the whole correspondence between Howard, Cecil and the Scottish king. No-one had the least suspicion of the understanding that existed between the trio.”

The negotiations continued right up to the day that Elizabeth died. Find out next week what happened after her death on March 24, 1603.