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Mary, however, was also curious to know not only about her son’s character but also his religious views. It was evident that he felt his mother’s chief enemies, Presbyterians such as Buchanan, had also proved dangerous to him, and she hoped that James might invite her back to Scotland. Fontenay, however, forewarned her that although James had indeed grown to dislike his Presbyterian ministers and regarded the Kirk as the chief threat to royal rule, he despised the Pope and showed no obvious affection for her. Mary nevertheless remained desperate to believe that James would recognise her right to be sovereign of Scotland if she offered to legitimise the title of king that he had usurped from her. She made contact with her son to argue that such a deal was greatly to his advantage since the Catholic powers would then support his candidature for the English succession. But in 1585 she discovered James had made an agreement with Elizabeth that made him a pensioner of the English crown* and left her in her prison at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire. Terrified that she was going to be left in England to be murdered under the Bond of Association, Mary threatened to disinherit him. He never contacted her again. The following year Sir Francis Walsingham began gathering the evidence to convict Mary of involvement in Babington’s plot against Elizabeth. Only the threat that James would break Scotland’s treaties with England and turn to France or Spain to avenge his mother’s death could have saved her. But while James pleaded for Mary’s life after her conviction, he never threatened to break Scotland’s treaties with England. He may have rested his hopes on Elizabeth’s reluctance to commit regicide, but he was certainly prepared to take the risk that his mother would be killed. While Elizabeth did not want to take responsibility for Mary’s death she had asked Mary’s gaolers to murder her so that she could cast the blame there. When they refused she signed Mary’s death warrant and then she suspended it as she redoubled her efforts to have Mary killed under the Bond of Association. Burghley, however, ignored her orders and convened a meeting of the Privy Council to ensure that the warrant was put into effect. James learned the grim details of his mother’s death first hand when her servants returned to Scotland.
After eighteen years confined to a series of houses in England, Mary’s elegant frame had become thick set and her face hung with double chins. But her courage and dignity remained. On 8 February 1587 in the fire-lit hall of Fotheringay, she approached the scaffold smiling, having cast herself in the role of a Catholic martyr with ‘an Agnus Dei about her neck, a crucifix in her hand, and a pair of beads at her girdle with a golden cross at the end of them’.26 The death of a common traitor nevertheless awaited her, and it was not to be a dignified one.
Mary’s French physician, Monsieur Bourgoing, recorded in his journal that once she had been blindfolded and her prayers said she had lifted her head ‘thinking she would be decapitated with a two-handed sword (according to the privilege reserved in France for Princes and gentlemen)’. Henry VIII had granted such a privilege to Anne Boleyn and, when Elizabeth’s life had been under threat in the aftermath of the Wyatt revolt against Mary I, she had expressed the hope that if it came to it, she would be executed in the same manner. But Mary, who had been a Queen of France, was led to the block and butchered with an axe, ‘like those with which they cut wood’, Bourgoing noted with disgust. It took the nervous executioner three strokes to take off Mary’s head and when his companion raised it up, with the shout ‘God save the Queen’, he found himself, in a moment of grim farce, holding a chestnut wig, as her grey head rolled on the floor.
Mary’s weeping servants had stayed after the official witnesses left the room and watched the executioners strip the stockings from Mary’s corpse (it was usual for the executioners to sell any clothes from the corpse of their victims; even their hair could be cut from their heads). As the men pulled and ripped, Mary’s little dog, a Skye terrier, dashed out from under her skirts. ‘The poor creature, covered with blood, rushed up and down the body, howling plaintively,’ Bourgoing recalled. Confused, it had lapped at the pools of blood on the floor before being taken away.27
After Mary’s servants had finished recounting their story James was silent, and he quickly retired to his room. He had once said that Scotland could never be without faction while Mary was alive, but the manner of her death was a bitter humiliation for him and for his country: a high price to pay for Elizabeth’s crown. With his noblemen demanding vengeance, James immediately cut all contact with England. South of the border, meanwhile, Elizabeth went into mourning; Burghley was banned from her presence and Sir William Davison, who had delivered the death warrant, was thrown into the Tower. Elizabeth then sent her cousin Sir Robert Carey to Scotland with a letter in which she swore that she had signed Mary’s death warrant only on the understanding that it would be put into effect in the event of the arrival of an invasion force. But Carey was stopped at the Scottish border and was forced to wait for days before James agreed to see him.
The storm did pass, however, as Elizabeth and James knew it would. James accepted Elizabeth’s story, with English money sweetening the pill. Elizabeth for her part forgave Burghley, but not Davison, whom she made the scapegoat for what had occurred.
James seized the opportunity offered by Mary’s death to heal the divisions in Scotland. Thereafter he had rewarded and protected his mother’s servants and in the Basilikon Doron James advised his son that he had found those who served his mother amongst his most loyal subjects.28 It was a lesson he would carry with him to England.
James had chosen the future Queen of Scots and England with care. In 1589 Anna was a Protestant princess, with a generous dowry comprising £150,000 and various territories including the Orkney and Shetland Isles pawned to Scotland in the previous century. A miniature had also shown the fourteen-year-old to be very pretty, with fair hair and ivory skin. There had been an exchange of letters in French during which the lonely James fell so in love with his future companion that when the ship bringing her to Scotland was caught in storms and forced to head to Norway, he set sail to fetch her, committing ‘himself and his hopes Leander-like to the waves of the ocean, all for his beloved Hero’s sake’.
As soon as he arrived in Norway, James had made his way along the coast by ship and horse until he reached Oslo and the bishop’s palace. There he dashed to see Anna ‘with boots and all’. The minister David Lindsay, who was with James, declared her ‘a princess both godly and beautiful’. Anna was tall for her age with a determined set to her chin, and James was immediately ‘minded to give the Queen a kiss after the Scottish fashion, which the Queen refused as not being the form of her country; but after a few words privily spoken between his majesty and her, familiarity ensued’.29 The royal couple were married the following Sunday before travelling to Denmark to enjoy a second wedding and several months of honeymooning amongst Anna’s relatives. It was here, amidst the rich and sophisticated Danish court, that James was introduced to the modish European theories on witchcraft he later expounded in his Daemonologie, a treatise he published in support of the persecution of witches.
The Danish admiral who had escorted Anna to Norway had blamed the storms on the wife of a Copenhagen burgess with whom he had quarrelled. She confessed under torture that she was a witch and was burnt alive in September 1590 along with several others whom she had named. The Kirk had long been obsessed with witchcraft, but they had been unable to persuade James to take an interest in it until he returned from Denmark. Investigations however, now lead to the unmasking of a coven in Berwick which, it was claimed, had plotted to kill the King. James attended the trials and was astonished to hear the accused witches describe what he believed to be private conversations he had had with Anna