A few days later, the Earl of Mar escorted Henry across the courtyard to the Privy Council sitting in the great hall where he gave the prince into ‘the charge of other Lords appointed to wait on him on his journey to England’. As the child approached Lennox, his mother and the lords of the council, he suddenly stopped, ran back and ‘embracing the said Earl, burst forth in tears’.
After she miscarried, Anne kept the foetus and placed it in a tiny coffin. This now travelled with the royal party on its slow progress south. The queen ‘brought with her the body of the male child of which she had been delivered in Scotland’, the French ambassador explained to King Henri IV, ‘because endeavours had been used to persuade the public that his death was only feigned’. Malicious tongues whispered that she was never pregnant – just psychotically manipulative.
James begged her to cheer up. ‘Leave off these womanly apprehensions, for I thank God I carry that love and respect unto you which by the law of God and Nature I ought to do to my wife and mother of my children … As for your dole weeds’ – the black mourning clothes she put on for her dead baby boy – ‘wearing it is utterly impertinent at this time’, he told her. He wanted to show the English that the Stuarts came in great splendour to spread peace and harmony, and preside over a new dawn for the nations of Britain. Instead, his queen flaunted what she saw as the consequences of their enmity. Anne’s gesture was as dramatic as it was self-dramatising. Miscarriages were traumatic, then as now, no matter how frequently they occurred. In a spectacle-loving age, living on the royal stage, extravagant personal gestures cohabited with the most rigid etiquette.
By 23 May, just over two weeks after she had stormed into Stirling, the queen rode with Henry into Edinburgh. Having been delayed by a cold, six-year-old Elizabeth now joined them from Linlithgow. The two bewildered, excited children were together for the first time. In each other’s company they found a refuge amid all the changes. Soon, Henry ‘loved her … so dearly that he desired to see her always by him’.
In Edinburgh, huge crowds gathered agog with curiosity to see their crown prince and Elizabeth. Cannon saluted them from the city’s castle. Anne ordered a new carriage from George Hendry, coachmakers. Now she had what she wanted, she cast off her black dole weeds, preferring a new dress of figured taffeta, with a velvet-trimmed white satin mantle for travelling. She dressed Henry in a royal purple satin doublet and breeches and Elizabeth in Spanish red taffeta. Even the queen’s clown was fitted with a new coat.
‘Many English ladies in coaches, and some riding on fair horse’, appeared in the Scottish capital, like a flock of exotic birds blown off course. Led by Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, and the beautiful Penelope Rich, sister of the late Earl of Essex, these were young women from the fringes of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Fashionable, intelligent, witty, highly cultured, and about the same age as the queen, Anne took several of the Countess of Bedford’s circle into her service immediately. She appointed Lucy to the bedchamber, the only Englishwoman to be brought so close at present.
The French ambassador observed the queen’s nature ‘was quite the reverse of’ the king’s. He liked to be private. ‘She was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue.’ Henry rode beside his mother and Elizabeth, saluting the crowds with care from a fine French horse presented to him by Lennox. The infant Charles would join them in England when he was considered strong enough. Queen Anne was doing the English Privy Council’s job for them, giving them what some of them had been bargaining for in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign – the whole Stuart royal family.
Just over the border, at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the elderly ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber waited for their new mistress. Ever keen on continuity in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of his rule, James had simply reappointed them. With them they carried piles of the old queen’s dresses for Anne, and caskets of her jewels. Their grip tightened at the sight of Lucy Bedford and Lady Rich close at the new queen’s side. Anne listened as the venerable old ladies offered to dress her in her predecessor’s hand-me-downs, pin her jewels on her bosom and resume their old positions of privilege and intimacy at court. The queen thanked them, took the gifts, and sent her husband’s appointees away.
The royal party reached Althorp house in Northamptonshire on Saturday 25 June, where Ben Jonson had created a masque for the house’s wealthy owner, Sir Robert Spencer, and his esteemed guests.
Through the summer’s evening light, a willowy line of fairies and a satyr led ‘Queen Mab’ through the park and woods around Althorp, leaping and dancing towards the royal party.
‘Your father gives you here to the service of this Prince,’ the Satyr announced to thirteen-year-old Master Spencer, playing a huntsman. Prince Henry crossed from the audience into the masque to accept him. The two boys then rode off, to hunt together inside the magical world of the masque, though the two deer they killed were real enough. It was a world away from the fortified world of Stirling, protected from the public gaze.
The following day, Ben Jonson sent them all off with a blessing, addressing Henry as his:
dear Lord, on whom my covetous eye,
Doth feed itself, but cannot satisfy,
O shoot up fast in spirit as in years;
That when upon her head proud Europe wears
Her stateliest [at]tire, you may appear thereon
The richest gem, without a paragon.
Shine bright and fixed as the Arctic star …
Jonson foresaw Henry risen to his full height – Henry IX, the guiding North Star of Protestant Christendom, hanging in icy isolation. That day, ‘when slow time hath made you fit for war’, look across the narrow sea, ‘and think where you may but lead us forth’ on that day when ‘swords/Shall speak our actions better than our words’.
English glee bubbled over – a prince called Henry and a princess called Elizabeth. The age was both new and old.
SEVEN
A Home for Henry and Elizabeth
OATLANDS
The family reunited with the king at Easton Neston, sixty-five miles north of London. By the time the Stuarts reached Windsor Castle at the end of June, their train numbered over five thousand, a scale unseen for decades. Lady Anne Clifford, aged thirteen, and her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, killed three horses in their dash to reach the royal family and get a toehold near them. There ‘was some squaring at first between our English and Scottish Lords, for lodging and other such petty quarrels; but all is passed over in peace’. All the Stuarts had to do to repay this fervid reception, was satisfy the expectations of everyone in England who mattered.
At Windsor, James created a host of Garter Knights, the highest order of chivalry, to celebrate his accession. One of the first was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, freed from the Tower where he had been imprisoned since 1601 for rising with his friend, the late Earl of Essex. For all the talk of continuity, this really was a new age – mixing English, Scots, European family and elites, and rehabilitating the disgraced Essexians.
Prince Henry kneeled with Lennox, the earls of Mar and Pembroke, a proxy for James’s brother-in-law the King of Denmark, and the German Duke of Württemberg. When the prince stood up again, the Garter insignia – a gold-enamelled Protestant St George, thrusting the sword of truth down the maw of the Catholic hellfire-breathing dragon – rested on his breast. Princess Elizabeth and Anne Clifford watched from behind a screen. Lady Anne overheard ‘the earls of Nottingham and Northampton highly commended [Henry] … for diverse his quick witty answers, Princely carriage, and reverend performing his obeisance at the altar’. The earls’ flattery was normal court discourse, but it showed the ease with which Henry was able to play his public role at such a young age.