James VII: Duke and King of Scots by Alastair Mann

Author:Alastair Mann [Mann, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2014-12-21T07:00:00+00:00

LONG LIVE THE KING

Charles enjoyed the final years of his reign. His bouts of illness in 1679, 1680 and 1682 had temporarily caused panic among his ministers and family, but other than gout, brought on by his diet and immoderate drinking over the years, he was considered healthy and still enjoyed long and brisk walks twice each day. However, on 2 February 1685 he collapsed in a ‘fit of Apoplexy’ and it soon became clear he was mortally ill. After four days of invasive prodding, in line with the grim medical knowledge of the day, he passed away. Before this James arranged for Father Huddleston, the Catholic priest who helped Charles escape from England thirty-three years before, to be smuggled into the room through a side door, and he received Charles into the Catholic Church and administered the last rites. He was fifty-four years old. Although the precise details of Charles’s death-bed conversion are shrouded in mystery, as we have seen, the fact of it is not doubted. Thereafter James, like other Catholics, took the opportunity to make capital out of the conversion, publishing printings of two tracts, supposedly written by Charles, explicating his preference for Rome. But now, on the day of his brother’s death, with tears of genuine emotion still in his eyes, James made an impromptu speech to the councillors present, and made reassuring promises to ‘preserve this government in Church and State as it is now by law established’. James, himself fifty-one years old, was proclaimed king in London, Dublin and the colonies. In Edinburgh on 10 February he was proclaimed James VII at the ‘mercat cross’ by Chancellor Perth before the Council, burgh magistrates and population of the capital. They celebrated to the sound of bells and cannon and the setting of bonfires, though also, as Fountainhall qualified, mourned ‘ther dearly beloved king’. Ten days later the impending session of the Scottish Parliament, then due on 10 March and with James presiding, was recognised as dissolved by the death of the late king. With a new reign, a new parliament with fresh elections was required, and it was summoned for 9 April, and then adjourned to 23 April, St George’s Day, the day of James’s English coronation. There would be no such Scottish ceremony and he would be the only Stuart never to take the Scottish coronation oath, for even William and Mary and Queen Anne were administered the oath, not in Edinburgh but at Whitehall. In fact no Scots are listed in the official form of proceeding for the English coronation. In London James announced after a few days his intention to hold a parliament there in May and, realising his rashness, explained to Barrillon, the French ambassador, that there was nothing for King Louis to fear. He would immediately dissolve the Westminster Parliament if it began to talk about foreign matters that interfered with their special relationship. In the meantime, a coronation service was devised that, as Turner remarks, ‘gave complete satisfaction to

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