James I by John Matusiak

Author:John Matusiak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750966719
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

11 The King, His Beagles, His Countrymen and His Court

‘The English are for the most part little edified with the person or with the conduct of the king and declare openly enough that they were deceived in the opinion they were led to entertain of him.’

Christophe de Harlay, Comte de Beaumont, French ambassador to England from April

1603 to November 1605

Though James knew little of England’s laws and parliament, he was well equipped to grasp the elements of the struggle for power at Whitehall and the subtleties by which his predecessor had managed to maintain a fragile balance of forces around her council table. The enmity between Cecil and Raleigh, for example, was in any case certainly less noisy than the kind of knuckleduster fuming he had been forced to contend with in Scotland, and he had been kept closely informed of events by the letters of both Cecil and Henry Howard. Moreover, his opening moves on the broader front were wisely non-committal. On the one hand, he at once provisionally confirmed the existing council in office, while choosing to release Lord Southampton and Sir Henry Neville from the Tower, where they had been languishing in the aftermath of the Essex rebellion. As a further gesture towards healing old wounds and offering new beginnings, he also announced his intention of bringing up Essex’s heir in his own household – restored in blood and title, and reared in the companionship of Prince Henry. And those who had in any way supported his mother’s cause were to be brought back to favour and thus bound to the new dynasty alongside their former enemies.

In the meantime, the immediate shape of the new king’s government had been decided on 3 May at Theobalds when he stopped at the home of Sir Robert Cecil on the final leg of his journey from Edinburgh to London. It was there that he had withdrawn with Cecil to a ‘labyrinth-like garden, compact of bays, rosemary and the like’ for an hour’s intimate conversation to confirm the latter’s primacy and seal, in the process, the rather more disconcerting triumph of Henry Howard – soon to become Earl of Northampton – and his sailor nephew, Thomas, who was swiftly promoted to the earldom of Suffolk. Charles Howard, too, who had commanded the English fleet against the Spanish Armada as Lord Howard of Effingham, duly retained the office of Lord Steward of the Household under his new title of Earl of Nottingham. In James’s view, it would have been the ultimate folly to discard those very men who had so strikingly demonstrated their level-headed competence in securing his succession, and who appeared to embody so strikingly all that typified Elizabethan wisdom and prestige. It was only natural, too, that five of his loyal Scottish lieutenants – Lennox, Mar, Home, Elphinstone and Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss – should join the reconstituted council, since the court at Edinburgh had effectively ceased to exist, though for Sir Walter Raleigh and his allies, against whom Cecil

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