The ceremony began with a grand procession of trumpeters and nobles. James followed, dressed in deep red, with five earls carrying his long train. Behind them came Anna. She joined James on a throne placed on a raised platform. Hymns were sung and, later, after a short oration by the minister Robert Bruce, the moment came for the anointing.30 A witness recorded that ‘the Countess of Mar went up to the queen and bared a little of the queens right arm and shoulder. Robert Bruce immediately poured the queen’s oil onto her bare arm and shoulder’. Anna was then taken away and dressed in new robes of red velvet and white Spanish taffeta before being returned to her seat. ‘Silence was called for. Then his majesty had the crown delivered to her … Immediately afterwards his majesty delivered the sceptre to Robert Bruce that he might pass it to the queen.’ As he did so he acknowledged Anna as queen and pledged obedience, but his speech concluded, ‘we crave from your majesty the confession of the faith and religion which we profess’. Anna had been promised the free exercise of her Lutheran faith, but from that moment it was apparent that she would be pressured into accepting the lower church Protestantism of Scottish Calvinism.31 Anna, however, proved to be very much her own woman.
The Duc de Sully described Anna’s character as ‘quite the reverse of her husband’s; she was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue’.32 Even at just fifteen and unable to speak Scots,* Anna had made her presence felt. She had been raised in one of the most prestigious kingdoms in Europe and she encouraged a new formality at James’s court. ‘Things are beginning to be strangely altered,’ it was reported; ‘Our Queen carries a marvellous gravity, which, with the reserve of her national manners, contrary to the humour of our people, has banished all our ladies clean from her.’33 Anna also made it plain that she enjoyed traditional courtly pursuits and she quickly earned herself the sobriquet the ‘dancing queen’, as well as the anger of the Kirk, who condemned her ‘night waking and balling’.34
James, however, found that Anna had a warm and generous temperament and the early years of the marriage were happy ones, with Anna joining him hunting and him indulging her love of fashion and jewellery. In January 1603, her wardrobe included gold on peach gowns with silver sleeves and her hair was habitually adorned with Scottish pearls strung on coronets worn on the back of the head. Every New Year, James added new jewels to the collection of ‘my dearest bedfellow’: necklaces fringed with diamond drops, jewelled flower and butterfly brooches and a large number of diamond ciphers. Her favourite was A for Anna – the name she always used, although James preferred to call her ‘my Annie’.35 She quickly learned to write as well as speak Scots and by the time she was eighteen she was also politically active. A member of the Mar family later complained that Anna’s friends ‘generally happened to be of a contrary party to those whom the King thought his faithfulest friends’. James, however, recognised that she was uniquely placed to intercede for those who felt cut off from royal favour and he demonstrated that he appreciated her role by listening to, if not always agreeing with, her opinions.36
Gradually it was noticed that Anna had become close to her French-educated courtiers: she had depended on them for conversation before she learnt Scots and she appreciated their refinements, as did James. Many were Catholic and, although Anna had sworn an oath at her coronation to ‘work against all popish superstition’, she was reported to be leaning towards Catholicism as early 1593.37 The Countess of Huntly, who gave her a Catholic catechism, was believed to be the main source of influence. The Countess was part of a group that backed the reunification of the Churches and Anna may have been aware that this was an area that interested her husband. In any event the Countess’s conversation doubtless made an attractive contrast to the lectures Anna received at the hands of the Kirk. The turning point in Anna’s religious life came in about 1600 when the chaplain she had brought with her from Demark became a Calvinist.
Since Anna could not tolerate becoming a Calvinist herself she sacked her chaplain and turned to her Catholic friends for advice. They smuggled the Jesuit priest Robert Abercrombie into a secret room to give Anna instruction. She duly visited him for three days and on the last she heard mass and received the sacrament as a Catholic. Anna later described to Abercrombie how James confronted her about rumours of her conversion when they were in bed together, asking if it was true that she had ‘some dealings with a priest’. She had immediately confessed. ‘Well, wife,’ James apparently told her, ‘if you cannot live without this sort of thing, do your best to keep things as quiet as possible; for, if you don’t, our crown is in danger.’38 James’s response, if accurately reported, seems a remarkably mild one, but he must have been as aware of the potential benefits of his wife’s conversion to his image abroad, as he was of its dangers to his popularity at home.
Since the publication of the Jesuit-penned Conference About the Next Succession, James had sought to deflect interest from the candidacy of the Infanta Isabella. He hinted to English Catholics, to the Vatican and to the new King of France Henri IV, that he would offer toleration of religion in England and that he might even convert. Anna’s own conversion added considerable credence to his claims and according to the Duc de Sully she became ‘deeply engaged in all the civil factions, not only in Scotland in relation to the Catholics, whom she supported and had even first encouraged, but also in England’.39 Robert Abercrombie was allowed to stay in Scotland until 1602, during which time Anna received the sacrament from him a further nine times. She would come to him early in the morning whilst the rest of the household slept and he recalled that afterwards she would stay and talk with him and that ‘sometimes she expressed her desire that her husband should be a Catholic, at other times her son should be educated under the direction of the Sovereign Pontiff’.40 It was, however, the Mar family and not Anna who was raising James’s heir – a matter over which she felt deep resentment.
Prince Henry, the first of James and Anna’s children, was born in February 1594 and soon after Anna had discovered that James intended for Henry to be raised at Stirling Castle, as he had been. It meant that if anything happened to James during Henry’s minority the Earl of Mar would become regent of Scotland instead of Anna, which was the norm in Europe. James was once overheard trying to explain to Anna that he was concerned that ‘if some faction got strong enough, she could not hinder his boy being used against him, as he himself had been against his unfortunate mother’.41 Anna refused to accept this and pleaded with James to change his mind, reminding him how she had ‘left all her dear friends in Denmark to follow him’.
Anna usually got her way but on this James flatly refused to yield; he even gave written orders to Mar that he was to keep Prince Henry until he was eighteen unless he himself instructed otherwise.42 In 1596 Anna gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who was sent