Such descriptions suggest that James may have suffered from cerebral palsy, caused by damage to the brain before, during, or shortly after his birth.10 But there is another aspect to the kind of brain damage James suffered that has not previously been explored. About 60 per cent of individuals with cerebral palsy have emotional or behavioural difficulties. James’s restlessness, his inability to concentrate on routine administrative work, his hyper-concentration on what did interest him, his passion for a high stimulation activity like hunting are all characteristic of the contentious Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which, like cerebral palsy, is said to have a neurological basis.
James’s mother endured a long and difficult labour and it is possible that this is when the brain damage occurred. Many contemporaries, however, believed that his disabilities were caused in utero at the time of Riccio’s murder. The trauma to his mother might indeed have been sufficient to have damaged James – and whatever the true cause of his disabilities he had to live with the psychological effects of being told that this was the case. The childhood that had followed James’s birth was steeped in danger and he might easily have emerged from it as a brute, but despite having physical defects to remind him of the possible effects of violence on him, Wotton saw: ‘In his eyes and in the outward expression of his face … a certain natural goodness,’ and the English courtier Roger Wilbraham later claimed James had ‘the sweetest, pleasantest and best nature that ever I knew’. His experiences had filled with him less with anger than the desire to resolve conflict. He chose the Old Testament King Solomon as his role model and picked as his motto the words from the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Beati Pacifici’, Blessed Are the Peacemakers.
James was convinced it was his destiny to unite the old enemies, the crowns of England and Scotland. He sometimes pointed out the lion-shaped birthmark on his arm said to fulfil the words of a Welsh prophecy, quoted by Harington in his Tract on the Succession: ‘a babe crowned in his cradle; marked with a lion in his skin; shall recover again the cross; [and] make the isle of Brutus whole and imparted … to grow henceforward better and better’.11
In James’s mind the phrase ‘recover the cross’ referred to his intention to heal religious divisions. First James intended to reform the Church of England on lines that would satisfy all except the most extreme conservatives and Puritans, for example, by developing a preaching ministry, but keeping the hierarchy of bishops. His ultimate ambition, however, was to encourage the reform of the Church of Rome and make it acceptable to moderate Protestants. It was the divisions in Christendom that lay at the heart of so much conflict across Europe and he hoped that differences could be thrashed out at a Grand Council. James often said that he revered the Catholic Church as the mother church – comments that fuelled Catholic hopes that he might convert – but he also saw it as ‘clogged with many infirmities and corruptions’.12 Chief amongst them was the office of the papacy and he had described the Pope as the Antichrist. ‘Does he not usurp Christ his office, calling himself universal bishop and head of the church?’, he once asked.13 He intended to do what other Protestants had failed to and knock the triple crown from the Pope’s head, reducing him to the rank of the first bishop of the church, ‘but not head or superior’.14
James, as he was wont to remind people in later years, was a ‘cradle king’, crowned at the age of thirteen months on 26 July 1567. The Protestant lords who had overthrown his mother placed their infant king in the guardianship of John Erskine, Earl of Mar, the father of his childhood friend Jocky o’Sclaittis, whom he had at his side in 1603. It was at Mar’s castle, perched on a sheer rock face above the town of Stirling, that James spent his formative years. The omens for James’s survival in this fortress had not been good. Harington quoted a popular saying in his Tract: ‘A king in Scotland … die[s] rarely in his bed’. The Stuart crown he had usurped was as weak as the Tudor crown was strong. There had been a succession of child kings and despised women rulers and the great lairds retained the military power that had been stripped from the English nobles by the Tudors. James’s book of instruction on matters of kingship, the Basilikon Doron, dedicated to his eldest son in 1598, recalled them as robber barons who drank
in with their very nourish milk, that their honour stood in three points of iniquity; To thrall by oppression the meaner sort that dwells near them … to maintain their servants and dependers in any wrong … and for any displeasure that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbour, to take up plain field against him; and (without respect to God, King or commonweal) to bang it out bravely, he and all his kin against him and all his.15
Scotland was riven by private wars as well as religious differences and the usurping of Mary’s crown had offered opportunities to settle many old scores as well as new ones. All save one of James’s regents were to die violently. The first, Mary, Queen of Scots’s illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated in the streets of Linlithgow on 22 January 1570, when James was three. The murder apparently pleased Mary so much that thereon she paid her brother’s assassin a yearly pension. Her old enemy, James’s paternal grandfather the Earl of Lennox, was however named the next regent as Scotland descended into civil war. Battles raged around Stirling as by night the four-year-old James slept in a bed draped in black damask, a picture of his grandfather James V on the wall, and by day he was coached by his two Calvinist tutors. The junior of these, Peter Young, remained close to James. He had been a kindly and encouraging teacher to a bright and sensitive pupil. But James’s senior tutor had proved a brutal master.
George Buchanan was the finest Latin scholar in Europe: a poet, dramatist, humanist and founding father of Presbyterianism, he arrived at Stirling a man with a mission. The ink was barely dry on his tract Detectio Mariae Reginae, a vitriolic attack on the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he was determined to raise a very different type of monarch. In this he succeeded, but at a price. He instilled in James learning that surpassed that of any other monarch in Europe, but he used the rod to do it. He espoused high, democratic ideals of kingship, but he despised courtly manners and regarded women with contempt. He allowed James to grow up as timorous as his mother was bold, as boorish as his mother was refined, as contemptuous of women as she was charming to men. James ended up resenting Buchanan and much of what he stood for, but he was every inch his pupil. Inspired by Buchanan’s example James had written several impressive theological and political works, in which his theories on the divine right of kings countered Buchanan’s quasi-republican view that kings took their authority from the people and could be lawfully deposed – views that James had come to believe were a recipe for instability.
After just a year of Buchanan’s tutoring James had been ready to open the Scottish parliament with an address in Latin. The events that followed were to be imprinted on his memory. He once said that he had learnt to speak Latin before he learnt Scots and even aged five he spoke it with confidence. His voice was naturally loud and in 1603, after years of speech-giving his language was often grave and sententious, but then it doubtless still had the squeak of a small boy. After his speech James had sat amongst the lairds, squirming in his chair until his sharp eyes and probing fingers discovered a hole, either in a tablecloth or the roof over his head. He then made the childish observation: ‘This parliament has a hole in it!’, words that were to be flung back at him as prophetic when only days later his grandfather, the Earl of Lennox, was brought into the castle dying of wounds received in a raid by his mother’s supporters.16 James never forgot his grandfather lying with his bowels cut open and, perhaps because of talk of his having foreseen it, he had developed a keen interest in the supposed gift of foresight.17
But Lennox’s bloody death was not the only murder James had witnessed at Stirling. The old Earl of Mar had held the regency for only a short time before it passed on to the Earl of Morton, one