![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnUnfortunately, there was then at Berlin a King who pursued one policy only, who deceived his enemies, but not his servants, and who lied without scruple, but never without necessity.
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 08:19 am (UTC)(Sidenote about poor murdered Rizzio: he spent a few centuries as gossip material as potential Mary Queen of Scots lover - for example, Henri IV of France made a quip when James had his court poets style him the new Salomo that sure he was, given Salomo was the son of David - and then Maxwell Anderson in his play and script based on play about Mary turned it around and made Rizzio gay and Darnley's ex boyfriend whom he's thus extra spiteful to because Rizzio sides with Mary. This seems to have been an enduring invention, because in the latest movie about Mary Rizzio is still gay and has a fling with Darnley before Darnley marries Mary and Rizzio sides with her, and he's even trans (or at least fond of cross dressing) to boot. This amuses me because as far as I can tell, Gay!Rizzio and bi!Darnley were entirely made up by Anderson. Though now that I've said it, undoubtedly Mildred will find gay Rizzio depictions preceeding good old Maxwell.)
Post-birth, the drama in baby James' life continues: Darnley gets famously blown up and strangled, Mary marries or is forced to marry Bothwell who killed him, Scotland is up and in arms against Mary, and Mary for reasons still befuddling historians doesn't flee to France, where as an ex-Queen they'd have been forced to take her in graciously even if Catherine de' Medici probably wasn't keen, but to England, where she spends the next two decades imprisoned by Elizabeth while baby and then child James goes through a succession of Regents in Scotland who all murder their predecessor but have the common denominator of loathing both of James' parents. To complete his candidacy for Fritz-like woobieness pre power having, James also gets beaten by his teachers so harshly that it's noticed even in those times where physical punishment for children was the standard. And then there's the hobby the Scottish nobility has of king-napping to become Top Dog, which happened to teenage James repeatedly, too. All of which results is a King who is truly fond of books but writes his first one about witches because he's deeply convinced much of the horrors of his childhood come from them. An episode once young James has actual power and almost but not completely tamed his earls: he's become engaged, as royals to, sight unseen to one of the Protestant princesses in continental Europe, Anne of Denmark. Anne is supposed to be escorted to Scotland in the usual way, with noble delegations and by boat, of course. But there's a mighty storm making it impossible for her ship to leave as scheduled. Does young James once hearing this wait a month or two, or even three, until the weather improves? He does not. In the sole grand gesture directed towards a woman which can be interpreted as romantic in his life, he insists on on sailing to Scandinavia himself to get his bride. There's a storm during his sea crossing as well, but he makes it to Norway (where Danish Anne is because that's where her own storm-tossed boat had ended up) and sweeps his bride off her feet.
(Even discounting the exaggarations that come with court scribes, Anne and James seem to have gotten along very well the first few years of their marriage. What made their relationship get worse was less his tendency towards boyfriends and more that he refused to let her raise their oldest son Henry but insisted this was, as was custom in both England and Scotland, to be done by by a worthy noble (one of his buddies, the Earl of Mar, as it happens) elsewhere. Cue years long royal marital argument. Remember that Sophie of Hannover has some sharp statements in heir memoirs about her mother, James' daughter, letting her children be raised elsewhere, too. In fairness, James had the money to spare to follow etiquette at this point, Elizabeth otoh in her Dutch exile could have used the saving of same by not setting up a separate household for her children.)
When James and Anne return to Scotland, he’s convinced that his current main enemy, the Earl of Bothwell (not his mother’s third husband, that guy’s cousin or son, I honestly don’t know right now and can’t looik it up) who is of course a sorceror in conjunction with a bunch of witches has conjured up those storms to stop him from marrying (Anne’s dowry is really handy for becoming an Earl-defying, independent King). If this was a fantasy movie, he’d have been right. It’s reality, and so it leads to the deaths of various innocent women.
When Elizabeth I. dies and James becomes the first King of both Scotland and England, he's first greeted warmly, and not just by those of her councillors who have been secretly corresponding with him for some years now, like Robert Cecil. (Son of the legendary William C., Lord Burghley, and also one of Elizabeth's most important councillors in her later years.) It's the usual effect of a monarch having reigned for a long time - four decades - that makes people ready for a change, plus some misogyny (at last a male King again, surely doing manly things!), plus the fact that the war against Spain in combination with the nine years of war in Ireland have left England weary, exhausted, and in pretty bad financial shape. (Yes, it's nice to capture the occasional treasure-carrying Spanish warship, but that doesn't make up for all the war costs.) Enter James to great jubilation and acclaim, though there are some early grumblings because he is after all a Scot, and that brings me to the failure of James' first big project. See, ruling over both Scots and English, he thought he'd unite the island while he was it into one realm. He was, in fact, the first monarch to call himself "King of Great Britain". Unfortunately, no one else called him that.
English: OMG no way! We know only one way of union: conquering! Which is why, say, Edward I ("Longshanks") tried to conquer Scotland. But we didn't conquer you. If a SCOTTISH King rules us AND renames us, that would imply you conquered us! NO WAY! The noble name of England must stay together. And also, let's start a few centuries of xenophobic paranoia right now about Scottish folk coming from your miserable north to our nice and wealthier (even after two wars) south to take our jobs and money!
Scots: ARE YE MAD, JAMIE? WE HATE THOSE BASTARDS!!!!!
=> result: both the English and the Scottish parliaments refuse a union of both countries and insist James will rule them only in personal union (i.e. as King of both), but as two separate countries. This will stay the case until the last Stuart monarch, Anne, in whose reign the act of union finally formally happens.
(Oh, and the flood of greedy Scots draining English wealth and dominating English politics that got conjured up in Parliament and which proved an enduring bogeyman in English propaganda never materialized. James did bring a Scottish entourage with him, of course, but the majority of those nobles got given titles and sent back to Scotland. He adopted most of Elizabeth’s last privy council, and his three top advisors - Robert Cecil, soon Earl of Salisbury, Thomas and Henry Howard, later Earls of Suffolk and Northampton - nicknamed by him his “three knaves”, were all English.)
James’ other big idea, it turns out, is peace as a foreign policy. Peace with Spain, most of all, but also peace with other European countries in general. Here he was aided by the fact that Philip II of Spain had died even before Elizabeth did, and Philipp III wasn’t any more keen on continuing battles with the Brits than James was. The Spaniards would, of course, continue to battle the Dutch, and there were still English volunteers serving in the Netherlands to fight the Protestant cause, but no more official English military support. No more “privateers”, either. (I.e. officially licensed pirates capturing Spanish treasure ships.) Peace allowed for trade relations with what was still the world’s mightiest superpower with those rich new colonies, which even from a purely pragmatic standpoint was way more profitable than battling the Spaniards and capturing the occasional ship.
Now, given that ever since Spanish Armada days, the Spaniard were THE Big Bad of English imagination, this became an increasingly unpopular policy, though at first there was also some general relief because of the near brokeness of English state finances and the according costs for the population. There were some early conspiracies, infamously the Gunpowder Plot but also two other ones, that were easily foiled. BTW, one of those ended up in Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh accused, convicted and ending up in the Tower. Here a younger Selena had always read in various fiction, including Rosemary Sutcliff’s, that Raleigh was framed (with Robert Cecil getting most though not all of the blame), so I was surprised that both the podcasts I listened to - “Early Stuart England” and “Pax Britannica” - took it as given Raleigh was in fact guilty as charged, and didn’t even bother to present an argument for or against, it just was treated as an undisputable fact. Presumably historical theory marches on? I can well believe Raleigh was romantisized later because the further we get from Elizabeth’s reign and especially once James’s on Charles is on the throne, the more criticism not just of Charles but his Dad as well gets voiced by the historians, summed up in the quip that Elizabeth ruled as a King while James ruled as a Queen, which has exactly all those implications you think it does.
When I said Robert Cecil got most of the blame: the rest is given to the new Spanish envoy, Gondomar, who becomes THE sinister Spaniard of popular imagination. A decade or so later, there’s a very popular pamphlet claiming to present excerpts of Gondomar’s corrspondance where he is muhahaing about having James under his thumb and preparing the Spanish conquest of England, and this was taken as the real deal for quite some time until grudgingly the Brits were ready to admit it was a very successful forgery. In reality according to those two podcasters, Gondomar was an able envoy presenting Spanish interests well, but by no means was he dominating or fooling James. James saw peace with Spain as a good thing because by and large it was, and continuing war with Spain when you inherit an almost broke country really would not have been. (Always worth remembering: England didn’t yet have colonies of its own to draw wealth from. It started to aquire them under James. Including poor Ireland, which had been militarily ruled by the English before, but during James’ reign, the whole “planter” project of importing a lot of Protestant new landowners into Ulster started. Jamestown in Virginia is of course named after him, too.)
It wasn’t all pragmatism on James’ part, though, he does seem to consider peace as desirable as a Christian monarch, too. He’d been raised by hardcore Presbyterians but ended up a Protestant moderate ready to do business with Catholics, which isn’t the same as considering the Catholic religion as good. The idea for Ireland, for example, was that once there were enough god-fearing rightly thinking Protestants there, surely the unenlightened Catholic masses would see how much better Protestantism was and would convert. 800 years later…. Also James’ first address to European Catholic monarchs went something like: “Guys, how about peace for all of us! We should be responsible Christian rulers, and I believe we can get on the same page here, right? But I must say that the Pope sucks, and here are an additional two pages to my peace message of why he’s the Antichrist.”
Later missives stopped short of the Pope bashing, but something which Spain never stopped demanding was the freedom for (English) Catholics to practice their faith without recriminations. As it was, the legal situation was that any Catholic doing that had to basically pay a fee for it to enrich the royal coffers, plus they were bared from a couple of professions. Obvious irony of Spain, champlion of freedom of conscience (Gedankenfreiheit!) is obvious, but logical. (Also reminds me of a novel about Elizabeth I. when young Elizabeth tries to get out of committing to Catholicism by arguing wiith sister Mary "Didn't you fight for freedom of religion in our brother's reign, sister?" and Mary replies "Of course I did - mine was the true faith!" and adds that she'd have been ready to die for it, and if Elizabeth really was ready to die for the Protestant heresy, which Elizabeth is not.) Anyway, what Gondomar and also the French ambassodor, who as envoys got license to practice their Catholic faith in their respective households, did was open their services to any English Catholic who'd want to attend as well, and because there was royal license for the mass itself the English Catholics in London who did so could do so without fees. With the result that the de facto Spanish embassy (they didn't call the house of the envoy that back in those days) was regularly packed, which fueled conspiracy theories of Gondomar preparing a Spanish invasion of England with dirty traitors even more. James didn't budge on the fee business until the last few years of his reign when he was trying to conclude the endless Spanish marriage project (first son Henry, then after Henry's death son Charles with a Spanish infanta- this was literally negotiated for twelve years), more about that later, but full equal rights for Catholics was impossible to sell to the English (and Scottish, for that matter) majority, not least because by then the Thirty Years War had started.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 03:01 pm (UTC)Though now that I've said it, undoubtedly Mildred will find gay Rizzio depictions preceeding good old Maxwell.
Lol! Well, Mildred doesn't care enough about this one to go looking, but I see salon is training us both!
his current main enemy, the Earl of Bothwell (not his mother’s third husband, that guy’s cousin or son, I honestly don’t know right now and can’t looik it up)
Looks like it's his nephew, according to Wikipedia.
Scots: ARE YE MAD, JAMIE? WE HATE THOSE BASTARDS!!!!!
Lol!
=> result: both the English and the Scottish parliaments refuse a union of both countries and insist James will rule them only in personal union (i.e. as King of both), but as two separate countries. This will stay the case until the last Stuart monarch, Anne, in whose reign the act of union finally formally happens.
And from everything I've read and been told, the Scots still largely hated those bastards, but the Scottish Parliament was basically bribed into dissolving itself and letting Scotland be ruled from London. OTOH, that could be Jacobite propaganda, idk.
Ah, yes, Wikipedia says "The role played by bribery has long been debated" and doesn't come to a firm conclusion. It does agree, though, that "the Union was carried by members of the Scottish elite against the wishes of the great majority. The Scottish population was overwhelmingly against the union with England."
And that was in 1707, after a hundred years of personal union! I can only imagine how they felt in James' time.
The idea for Ireland, for example, was that once there were enough god-fearing rightly thinking Protestants there, surely the unenlightened Catholic masses would see how much better Protestantism was and would convert. 800 years later….
*facepalm*
Although technically it would be 400 years since James' introduction of Protestant planters, 800 since Strongbow initiated English occupation. Either way, though.
Of course, I still can't help being reminded that my history teacher in high school insisted James (of the King James' Bible) was Catholic! Because all the Stuarts were Catholic! And none of young Mildred's counterarguments held any weight.
full equal rights for Catholics was impossible to sell to the English (and Scottish, for that matter) majority, not least because by then the Thirty Years War had started.
This will become relevant, at least tangentially, when I do my 1768-1772 foreign policy write-up. On which work continues apace!
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 05:43 pm (UTC)Ah, yes, Wikipedia says "The role played by bribery has long been debated" and doesn't come to a firm conclusion. It does agree, though, that "the Union was carried by members of the Scottish elite against the wishes of the great majority. The Scottish population was overwhelmingly against the union with England."
Bruce Lenman goes into this in some detail in his book The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689-1746. According to him, the English Parliament introduced an act (the Alien Act) which said that unless a union was put in place, all Scots not living on English territory would become aliens (apparently James I/VI had introduced a joint citizenship for all English and Scots born after his succession to the English throne). This was bad for Scots nobles because they often owned land in both England and Scotland (often through marriage), and then their English land holdings would be threatened. They would also ban the three main Scottish exports to England (cattle, linen, and coal).
Further, the Scottish Parliament was manipulated into letting Queen Anne appoint the Scots commissioners who would negotiate the terms of union. This was accomplished by the Duke of Hamilton, one of the leaders of the Scottish opposition to union, encouraging people to go home, and then putting it to the vote when few people were there. There are indications in correspondence between pro-union politicians that some sort of pressure had been brought to bear on Hamilton, either financial or legal (he had lots of debts).
So the people negotiating for Scotland were in reality not properly representing Scotland. Nevertheless there had to be enough concessions for the Scots parliament to pass the Treaty of Union. These concessions were 1) securing the position of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, 2) that the rights and privileges of the Scottish burghs would remain the same (they were later abolished in the 20th century), 3) Scots law and the heritable jurisdictions of Scotland would remain the same (the latter were obviously abolished about 50 years later), 4) everybody who had lost money in the Darien scheme would have it repaid. You could call the latter a bribe, of course. And of course there's lots of other stuff in the treaty.
But it was still massively unpopular. To avoid this unpopularity affecting the next election, the old, discredited Scottish Parliament appointed the first Scottish representatives to the new union parliament, instead of them being elected.
Lenman has the following to say (this is a great example of his scathing irony): The jobbery and pressures used to expedite the progress of the treaty through the Scots parliament would appear to have been little different from the behavior which was standard government practice in the 18th century. It was perhaps neither less nor more reputable than the practices of government in late 20th century Britain, another patronage-ridden society.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 04:58 am (UTC)Lenman has the following to say (this is a great example of his scathing irony)
Hee. The more things change...
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 12:24 pm (UTC)Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-04 07:26 am (UTC)LOL, though also, what a testimony to the miserable state of education. Bad history teacher. I mean, last month I stumbled across a vid where a guy took of all the inaccuracies in any given Three Musketeers film adaption (and also the original novel) the one thing to complain about that was actually completely correct, to wit, the statement that Anne of Austria had been a Spanish Princess. I mean, I get the confusion if you're not familiar with the Habsburgs referring to themselves as "The House of Austria" and Charles V. having divided his realms up between his son and his brother, thus founding the two lines. But then don't make absolute statements like "Anne of course as Austrian, not Spanish!" without at least taking the two seconds to google her wikipedia entry!
Catholics won't end up getting emancipated until 1829.
We also heard a bit of the situations for Catholics in the "Mitred Earl" biography where Fred Hervey did try to make things better for the Irish Catholics which was still very much a minority position in the late 17000s.
BTW, to return to James, he lifted the fees for Catholics in the last years of his reign in order to finally make progress with the Spanish marriage project, and Charles reinstalled them at the start of his reign to much acclaim. His wife Henrietta Maria kept asking him to lift them again and it was quite a while until he did. The image of Charles I. as being pro Catholic and just a a step short of proclaiming himself Catholic as well really derives not from his actual deeds or convictions (whatever else he was, he was solidly Protestant all his life and one of the things he made the two children still with him in England, Henry and Elizabeth, swear on their last meeting before his execution was that they should remain true Protestants) but from the mixture of Puritan anti Royalist pamphlets and son James (II)' behaviour decades later, who of course wanted to believe Dad would have if he could have.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 05:10 pm (UTC)It's amusing to me that James I/VI really wanted union, while James III/VIII and BPC promised deliverance from the hated union...
Guys, how about peace for all of us! We should be responsible Christian rulers, and I believe we can get on the same page here, right? But I must say that the Pope sucks, and here are an additional two pages to my peace message of why he’s the Antichrist.
LOL!
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-04 07:12 am (UTC)Indeed. If 16th and 17th century folk note a child is treated harshly, then....
It's amusing to me that James I/VI really wanted union, while James III/VIII and BPC promised deliverance from the hated union...
Well, they needed something people wanted to offer! But seriously, James I/VI seems to have been the only guy wanting the union in his time on both sides of the island, whereas by the 18th century, Scottish feelings were at least mixed. (English feelings by and large seem to have been still mainly anti Scots, but not in a "we want them to become an independent kingdom again" kind of way.) As to why James wanted it, well, it would have made administration much easier, for starters. And he also thought both realms could learn from each other. (From a purely monarchical pov, he'd have loved for the English Commons to be as relatively harmless to him as the Scottish parliament, and thought the Scottish Kirk definitely should be more like the English Church, neatly organized in diosceses with bishops doing the administrative work instead of being the unruly monarchical headache it was. This was not a view shared by either Scots or English.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-04 05:48 am (UTC)This amuses me because as far as I can tell, Gay!Rizzio and bi!Darnley were entirely made up by Anderson.
Oh! Because even though I had very little idea of who Rizzio was, my reaction to him coming up as Mary's potential lover was "am I mixing him up with another guy who was gay? because that name makes me think of someone gay?" LOL. (Of course, it's very possible I read something else you wrote about Rizzio or movies thereof in the past :) )
and Mary for reasons still befuddling historians doesn't flee to France
Huh. Any guesses?
What made their relationship get worse was less his tendency towards boyfriends and more that he refused to let her raise their oldest son Henry but insisted this was, as was custom in both England and Scotland, to be done by by a worthy noble
Aw. I'd be having some marital strife there too :P
He was, in fact, the first monarch to call himself "King of Great Britain". Unfortunately, no one else called him that.
...oh. Right. That... I can see that happening.
BTW, one of those ended up in Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh accused, convicted and ending up in the Tower.
I knew about this, at least vaguely, because of the capital of the state where I grew up being named after him. I can't remember too well so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm pretty sure that I also came away with the impression that he was framed; in this case it might well have been romanticization given that you don't necessarily want to talk about how your capital city is named after a guilty guy, I guess. Certainly I don't remember any emphasis on him being guilty.
James saw peace with Spain as a good thing because by and large it was, and continuing war with Spain when you inherit an almost broke country really would not have been. (Always worth remembering: England didn’t yet have colonies of its own to draw wealth from.
That makes sense! (And also makes sense people increasingly forgot and didn't see it as a good thing, as you said before.) Also thank you for the orientation re: colonies :)
800 years later….
whoops
Also James’ first address to European Catholic monarchs went something like: “Guys, how about peace for all of us! We should be responsible Christian rulers, and I believe we can get on the same page here, right? But I must say that the Pope sucks, and here are an additional two pages to my peace message of why he’s the Antichrist.”
LOL! Way to be uncontroversial, James :)
when he was trying to conclude the endless Spanish marriage project (first son Henry, then after Henry's death son Charles with a Spanish infanta- this was literally negotiated for twelve years)
Endless marriage projects sound like a theme :P
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-04 07:04 am (UTC)LOL, well, James was SD's direct ancestor! (Bloodline: James - Elizabeth the Winter Queen - Sophie of Hannover - George I of England - SD).
and Mary for reasons still befuddling historians doesn't flee to France
Huh. Any guesses?
Sheer speculation:
- She thought that despite having claimed she was the true English Queen from age 16, the Royal Bro Code (Sister variation) would oblige Elizabeth to host and support her against her rebellious subjects
- She thought if she went to France, they might host her as a former Queen of France but she'd end her life as a genteel court ornament, as Catherine certainly wouldn't back an invasion force to take back the Scottish throne, whereas if she went over the border to England, she'd only have to stay there for a short while until the Scots loyal to her overthrew the rebel government and/or there was a mighty uprising of English Catholics in favour of their true Queen, inspired by her presence?
But as I said, that's sheer speculation on my part. Maybe Mary was just exhausted from imprisonment, stillbirth (of twins by Bothwell) and jail break and didn't really think straight, and it was as simple as that.
I knew about this, at least vaguely, because of the capital of the state where I grew up being named after him. I can't remember too well so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm pretty sure that I also came away with the impression that he was framed; in this case it might well have been romanticization given that you don't necessarily want to talk about how your capital city is named after a guilty guy, I guess. Certainly I don't remember any emphasis on him being guilty.
So, the two versions of how things went down with Raleigh:
Pro-Raleigh: 1) As mentioned, Robert Cecil and Henry Howard during the last years of Elizabeth's reign kept up a secret correspondance with James. During which they didn't just prepare James for his eventual government takeover after Elizabeth's death but prejudiced him against Raleigh. Why? Because Raleigh was a good looking guy and otherwise James would have fallen for him (Cecil) and because Raleigh was hardcore anti Spanish (being a primary privateer into plundering Spanish ships) and crypto Catholic Henry Howard was pro Spain and didn't want Raleigh as an influential voice warning James against the evil of making a peace treaty with Spain. Then, after James showed up in England to be crowned, they framed him as a leader of one of the three anti James conspiracies that happened (these were: the main plot, the by plot and the Gunpowder plot, the big difference being that the main plot and the by plot wanted James' cousin Arabella Stuart on the throne whereas the hardcore Catholic Gunpowder plot guys wanted child!Elizabeth (plus Catholoic regents) after they'd blown up Parliament and James and son Henry with it (little Charles was still in Scotland at the time). The plot Raleigh was supposed to have been one of the main conspirators of was the "Main Plot", no explosion planning involved, just a good old fashioned coup resulting in Arabella as Queen. The other main leader Cobham denounced Raleigh, according to the pro Raleigh version after immense pressure and changing his testimony, Raleigh got condemned but James commuted his sentence to imprisonment in the Tower for the next decade plus, wherein Raleigh did have comfortable lodgings, regular visits from his wife (another kid was sired and born during that time) (and kept up a lively correspondence with young Henry of Wales who adopted him as a kind of mentor, but was stuck until James gave in to his petitions and released him to lead a fleet to the New World to find El Dorado (remember, that was a still a thing at the time), but with the strict and written order to not engage with and plunder any Spanish ships (because of the peace treaty). Raleigh sailed to the New World, of course didn't find El Dorado, and his second-in-command and cousin took out his frustrations by sacking some Spanish war ships. Raleigh did not know this until it was done and immediately could see this as the disaster it was, and confined the guy who in remorse committed suicide, but it was too late. As soon as the news of this treaty breaking reached Europe even before Raleigh's fleet did, Gondomar, as a Spanish envoy would, went to James and demanded that this outrage and treaty breaking was to answered by the reinstatement of Raleigh's original death sentence. James meekly caved and had the national Protestant hero executed. As Raleigh's pal young Prince Henry was dead by then, there was no one who could have saved him. Raleigh died bravely, with a quip ("Just get on with it") to the executioner.
2.) On the podcasts: Raleigh got into the Main plot presumably because he thought Queen Arabella would be better for him than King James. When the By Plot was uncovered (the first of the three plots which was), he got cold feet and actually denounced Cobham before Cobham denounced him. James didn't want to start his reign by executing National Elizabethan Hero Sir Walter Raleigh, plus Raleigh had helped uncovering the Main Plot by denouncing Cobham first, so he commuted his sentence to genteel imprisonment in the Tower, which Raleigh had already experience with because back in the day when he'd married Elizabeth's lady in waiting Bess Throckmorton, Elizabeth had put him and Bess into the Tower for a short while, too. Raleigh may or may not have had anything to do with his second in command plundering those Spanish ships, though there were some testimonies on his second trial from gentleman who swore they heard him say he looked forward to going up against the Spaniards again after his release from the Tower, but he was the overall commander, he did have explicit written orders not to do that, he was on parole anyway, and if James hadn't executed him at this point he would have ruined his own believability as King. Yes, Gondomar protested and demanded said execution once he got the news - as any envoy of a country to whom this happened worth his salt would - , but even if he hadn't, James would have done it. Two strikes and you're out, so to speak, and he'd been lenient to Raleigh the first time around anyway.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 05:15 am (UTC)Wait, was Raleigh bi? This is another bit that we never learned in school!
which Raleigh had already experience with because back in the day when he'd married Elizabeth's lady in waiting Bess Throckmorton, Elizabeth had put him and Bess into the Tower for a short while, too.
Oh, yeah, I did know about this (it being gossipy :) )
I don't remember at all what I knew about Raleigh's death, though! Surely I must have known something, but none of that sounds familiar, so maybe I didn't, hm.
but even if he hadn't, James would have done it. Two strikes and you're out, so to speak, and he'd been lenient to Raleigh the first time around anyway.
I mean... this sounds extremely plausible :P
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 08:49 am (UTC)Not that I've heard. The point in this version of the story aren't his own intentions - especially since he's the good guy in this version - but that Robert Cecil, handicapped himself (i.e. a hunchback as the expression went), saw in handsome Raleigh (who'd been dashing and charming enough to impress Elizabeth, after all) someone who could be competition once James came to England and thus badmouthed him in advance in his secret letters.
BTW, as far as I recall, this story hails from Raleigh's younger son's defensive biography of his father, written many decades later, not from any actual letters, by Cecil or otherwise. But it's the story which shows up in historical fiction. Anyway, I checked, and it seems a Virginia website gives a good overview of his life and death.