It is a Saturday evening in Holyrood,—the evening of Saturday, the 26th of March 1603. All is dull and sleepy within the Palace, the King and Queen having retired after supper, and the lights in the apartments now going out one by one. Suddenly, hark! what noise is that without? There is first a battering at the gate, and then the sound of a horse’s hoofs in the courtyard, and of a bustling of the palace servants round some late arriver. It is the English Sir Robert Cary, brother of Lord Hunsdon. He had left London between nine and ten o’clock in the forenoon of the 24th; he had ridden as never man rode before, spur and gallop, spur and gallop, all the way, through that day and the next and the next, the two intervening nights hardly excepted; and here he is at Holyrood on the evening of the third day,—an incredible ride! His horse, the last he has been on, is taken from him all a-foam; and he himself, his head bloody with a wound received by a fall and a kick from the horse in the last portion of his journey, makes his way staggeringly, under escort, into the aroused King’s presence. Throwing himself on his knees before his half-dressed Majesty, he can but pant out, in his fatigue and excitement, these words in explanation of the cause of his being there so unceremoniously: “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England.”
It was the most superb moment of King James’s life. He was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,—or, at all events, ever since February 1586–7, when the captivity of his mother came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,—his constant thought had been of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount, there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him on the part of large sections of the English community; and that especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,—though she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,—she had always resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister since the death of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.
Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her age, about three o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March 1602 (so in the English reckoning, but in the Scottish it was 1603), after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor, or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis. Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it without special warrant.
One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth’s councillors by being related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen’s employment had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours. While in this post, he had incurred the Queen’s disfavour by marrying,—a fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however, to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness, and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been admitted easily enough into the dying Queen’s presence. “When I came to Court,” he tells us, “I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said ‘No, Robin, I am not well,’ and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded.” This interview was on the night of Saturday, the 19th of March; and it was within the next day or two that, learning from his sister that the Queen had become worse and worse, and that there was no hope of her recovery, and remembering his friendly intercourse with the Scottish King on former occasions, he despatched a letter to James announcing the condition of affairs at Richmond, and resolved moreover that, when the Queen was actually dead, he would be himself the first man to carry the great news to Edinburgh. Once again he was in the death-chamber. It was on the day before the Queen’s death,—that Wednesday, the 23d of March, on which, lying speechless in bed, she gave the sign which Cecil and the other councillors construed as they desired. Among those who stood by her bedside on the evening of that day, while Archbishop Whitgift prayed with her several times in succession, was Sir Robert Cary. It was late, he tells us, when the group broke up, and the Queen was left to die, with only her waiting-women around her. Sir Robert had then gone to his lodgings in the town, and had given instructions that he should be called at the proper moment. Accordingly, about three o’clock on the following morning, when he knew for certain that the Queen was dead, he was at the palace gate. The porter had just received his orders not to admit any one that was not privileged; and even the bribe with which Sir Robert had already primed that official would not have been enough, had not one of the councillors, who chanced to be at the gate at the time, taken the responsibility of passing him in. He made his way through the chamber in which the weeping ladies were to that in which the councillors were assembled and were drafting their documents. His brother, Lord Hunsdon, and his sister, Lady Scroope, being already in his confidence, and his purpose having been guessed by Cecil and the rest, he found that they were very angry with him, and were making arrangements of their own for the necessary despatches to Edinburgh. In fact, they laid hold of him, told him he must remain where he was till their pleasure should be known, and, to show that they were in earnest, sent peremptory fresh orders to the porter that no one was to be allowed to pass the gates except the servants that were to be sent presently to get ready the coaches and horses for the conveyance of the councillors themselves to Westminster. For an hour or so, Sir Robert walked about in the palace chagrined and disconcerted. He had got in with difficulty; but his exit seemed impossible. Bethinking himself at last, he went to the private chamber of his brother, Lord Hunsdon. His lordship, overpowered with the fatigues of the preceding days, was asleep, but was soon roused, and willing to assist. The two went together to the porter’s gate, where the Council’s servants were just making their egress to bring the horses and coaches. The porter could not prevent a great officer like Lord Hunsdon from going out with them; but he stopped Sir Robert. It needed some exertion and some angry words from Lord Hunsdon to cow the man; but this was accomplished, and Sir Robert, to his great relief, found himself outside the gate in the raw air of the dim March morning.
Not even yet were his difficulties over. Speeding from Richmond as fast as he could, he was in Westminster by himself, and in a friend’s house there, some time before the Lords of Council arrived in their coaches. Learning, however, after they had arrived, that they were holding a meeting in Whitehall Gardens to make final arrangements for the proclamations of the new sovereign both in Westminster and in the City, he thought it might be as well to try again whether they would employ him for the service on which he had set his heart. He sent them word, therefore, that he was in town, and was waiting their pleasure. It was now past nine o’clock, and the proclamations were to be at ten. The answer of the Council was a request to Sir Robert to come to them immediately; and, as it was conveyed with a kind of intimation that he would find them perfectly agreeable now to his proposal, he hastened to attend them. He was actually between the outer and the inner gate of Whitehall for this purpose, when a word sent out to him by a friendly councillor made him aware that the Council were deceiving him, and that, if he appeared among them, he would be laid fast. Then he hesitated no longer. Giving the Council the slip, and not staying for the proclamations or for anything else, he took horse at once, somewhere near Charing Cross, and was off for his tremendous ride northwards. He himself tells us the successive stages of his ride. He was at Doncaster that night, a distance of 155 miles from London; next night he reached a house of his own at Witherington in Northumberland, about 130 miles from Doncaster; leaving Witherington on Saturday morning, he accomplished some 50 miles more before noon that day, bringing him to Norham, close to the Tweed; after which there were still about 65 miles of that Scottish portion of his ride which lay between Norham and Edinburgh. He had hoped to be at Holyrood House before supper-time; but his dizziness and loss of blood from the fall from his horse in this last portion of his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two.
After his first abrupt salutation of King James in Holyrood that Saturday night, there was naturally a longish colloquy between them. In the course of this colloquy the King’s first excitement of joy was damped for a moment by the reflection that the messenger had come of his own motive merely, and without letters from the English Privy Council. The production of a sapphire ring by Sir Robert removed, he tells us, all doubts. The ring, it appears, had been thrown to him out of one of the windows of Richmond Palace, just before he left, by his sister Lady Scroope; and one account makes it out that it had been a gift by King James himself to Queen Elizabeth, and that Lady Scroope took it off the withered finger of the Queen after her death, to serve as a token that could not be mistaken. Sir Robert’s own account does not quite imply this, but may be so interpreted. All the members of the Hunsdon family, one gathers, were known to King James as having been for some time active in his interest. It was late before the colloquy ended, and Sir Robert was dismissed by the King for his much-needed rest of some days, in or near Holyrood, in charge of the Master of the Household, and under care of a surgeon.
Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very track of Sir Robert’s ride (he had himself ordered them in Northumberland), the community of Edinburgh could still have remained ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English Privy Council; and they did not arrive,—the laggards!—till the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and knights of the English Council; and it opened thus—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret, daughter of the high and renowned prince, Henry the Seventh, King of England, France, and Ireland, his great-great-grandfather,—the said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward the Fourth, by which happy conjunction both the Houses of York and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom, formerly rent and torn by long dissension of bloody and civil wars,—the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the Eighth, of famous memory, King of England as aforesaid: We therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm, being here assembled, united and assisted with those of her late Majesty’s Privy Council, and with great numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality in the kingdom, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a multitude of other good subjects and commons of this realm, thirsting now after nothing so much as to make it known to all persons who it is that, by law, by lineal succession, and undoubted right, is now become the only Sovereign Lord and King of these imperial crowns, to the intent that, by virtue of his power, wisdom, and godly courage, all things may be provided for which may prevent or resist either foreign attempts or popular disorder, tending to the breach of the present peace or to the prejudice of his Majesty’s future quiet, do now hereby, with one full voice, and consent of tongue and heart, publicly proclaim that the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, Queen of England, of famous memory, become also our only lawful and rightful liege lord, James the First, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.” The other document was a missive letter to King James, signed by nearly the same persons, and expressing their profound allegiance to him individually, and their desire to see him in England as speedily as possible. It contained, however, this paragraph:—“Further, we have thought meet and necessary to advertise your Highness that Sir Robert Cary is this morning departed from hence towards your Majesty, not only without the consent of any of us who were present at Richmond at the time of our late Sovereign’s decease, but also contrary to such commandment as we had power to lay upon him, and to all decency, good manners, and respects which he owed to so many persons of our degree; whereby it may be that your Highness, hearing by a bare report of the death of our late Queen, and not of our care and diligence in establishing of your Majesty’s right here in such manner as is above specified, may either receive report or conceive doubts of other matter than (God be thanked) there is cause you should: which we would have clearly prevented if he had borne so much respect to us as to have stayed for our common relation of our proceedings and not thought it better to anticipate the same; for we would have been loth that any person of quality should have gone from hence who should not, with report of her death, have been able to relate the just effects of our assured loyalties.” Both documents were read that day in the Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh; and their purport was published for the general information.
What commotion in Edinburgh through the next few days! The King’s leave-taking had to be hurried; and it was on Sunday the 3d of April that, rising from his place in St. Giles’s Church after the sermon, he made what had to pass as his farewell speech to all his Scottish subjects. It was a speech intended to console them for their grievous loss. “There is no more difference,” he said, “betwixt London and Edinburgh, yea, not so much, as betwixt Inverness or Aberdeen and Edinburgh; for all our marches are dry, and there be no ferries betwixt them”; and, after dilating somewhat further on the undeniable fact of the geographical continuity of his new kingdom with his old, he mentioned one of its probable consequences. “Ye mister [need] not doubt,” he said in conclusion, “but, as I have a body as able as any king in Europe, whereby I am able to travel, so I sall visie you every three year at the least, or ofter as I sall have occasion.” On Tuesday, 5th April, all being ready for his departure, there was the long procession, amid thunders of cannon from the Castle, which conducted him out of Edinburgh towards Berwick, there to begin the very leisurely tour through the northern and midland counties of England by which he came to London early in May. Many Scottish lords and gentlemen were in his retinue, but none of the royal family. The Queen, Prince Henry, and the Princess Elizabeth were to follow soon; and Prince Charles, afterwards Charles I., then a rickety child in his third year, and unfit to travel, was to remain in Scotland for about a year longer, under the charge of Lord and Lady Fyvie, afterwards known as Earl and Countess of Dunfermline.
From and after the 5th of April 1603 Holyrood, though not quite left to the rats, was no longer the home of royalty. King James’s parting promise that he would revisit his native kingdom at least once every three years passed out of his mind; and not till 1617, fourteen years after the ecstatic delight of his removal to the banks of the Thames, did he find it worth while to recross the Tweed. Holyrood, with the other royal palaces of Scotland, was then refurbished for his temporary accommodation; but with that exception, and the further exception of two subsequent visits of Charles I. to Edinburgh, there was to be no sight of a sovereign face for many a day in the towered edifice under Arthur Seat. For Scotland as a whole, indeed, the five-and-thirty years which intervened between 1603 and 1638 may be described as that period of her history during which, though still retaining a nominal apparatus of independent autonomy, in the shape of a resident Scottish Privy Council and an occasional meeting of a Scottish Parliament, she was governed essentially and in the main from London through the post. “This I must say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it,” said King James in a speech of rebuke to his somewhat troublesome English Parliament on the 31st of March 1607: “here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write, and it is done; and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now,—which my ancestors could not do by the sword.” The words were perfectly true; and they remained true for his son and successor, Charles I., till that point in his reign when the soul of Scotland flashed out again in her “National Covenant,” electrifying the dormant Puritanism of England, and initiating the great Seventeenth Century Revolution in all the British Islands.
It is so long ago now, and so much has happened between, that one almost forgets to ask what became of Sir Robert Cary. Should there be any interest in that subject, however, here are the facts in brief:—Though appointed by King James, before he left Edinburgh, to be one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber, and promised further promotion, he did not at first benefit so much as he had expected from his signal piece of service to that King. After accompanying the King to England, he lost even his place in the bedchamber, and, probably from the grudge which Secretary Cecil and the other English councillors still owed to him, was kept otherwise in the background for some time. Gradually, however, he recovered favour. His first considerable rise was when Lord and Lady Dunfermline brought the sickly Prince Charles into England. Sir Robert Cary’s wife was then selected as the fittest person to succeed Lady Dunfermline in the charge of the delicate boy; and the honour to Sir Robert and his wife was the less envied them because it was generally expected that the boy would die in their hands. But he grew up under their careful tending, with evident improvement of his health year after year from his fifth year to his eleventh; and this ensured their future fortunes. Queen Anne always stood their friend, and influenced the King in their favour; Prince Henry, while he lived, treated them with respect; and after Prince Henry’s death in 1612, when Prince Charles became heir-apparent in his room, who but Sir Robert Cary could be the chief man about the heir-apparent and the chamberlain of his household? There were ups and downs still; but Sir Robert and his wife had gifts and pensions, saw their sons and daughters suitably married, and found themselves in the English peerage at last. In 1621 Sir Robert became Baron Leppington. This was his last honour from King James; but in March 1626, at the coronation of Charles I., he was created Earl of Monmouth. He was then about sixty-six years of age; and he lived in that dignity till 1639, when he died at the age of about eighty. His Memoirs, written by himself, were first published from the manuscript in 1759.