How the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth prevented this marriage I must not pause to relate. The Danish Princess espoused a reigning duke, and James was on the point of engaging himself to Katherine of Navarre, when the offer of the hand of Anne the younger daughter of Frederick being made to him, coupled with the alternative of his either taking Anne, or losing the islands, he “prayed and advised with God, for a fortnight,” and wisely resolved to wed with “pretty Anne.”
The matter progressed anything but smoothly for a time. At length, after endless vexations, the young princess was married by proxy, in August, 1589, and set sail, soon after, for Scotland under convoy of a dozen gallant ships, and with prospects of a very unpleasant voyage.
A terrible storm blew bride and convoy on to the inhospitable coast of Norway, and although two or three witches were executed for raising this storm out of very spite, the matter was not mended. Disaster pursued the fleet, and death overtook several who sailed in it, till the coast of Scotland was fairly in sight. The Scotch witches, or perhaps other causes not less powerful than witches, in those seas, in the fall of the year, then blew the fleet back to the mouth of the Baltic. “I was commissioned,” said Peter Munch, the admiral, “to land the young queen in Scotland; it is clear, therefore, that I can not return with her to Denmark. I will put her majesty ashore, therefore, in Norway.” The conclusion was not logically attained, but the fact was as we have described it. Letters reached James announcing to him the deplorable condition in which his queen was lying at Upslo, on the Norwegian coast—storm-bound and half-famished. After many projects considered for her relief, James resolved to set forth and seek the princess himself. It is in this passage of his life that we have an illustration of the degree in which he surpassed all other kings who have sat on the English throne—as a gallant knight es amours.
Toward the end of October, of this year, in the very stormiest portion of the season, James went, privately, on board a diminutive vessel, with a very reluctant party of followers and confederates, leaving behind him, for the information of the astonished lieges, a promise to be back in twenty days; and for their especial profit, a solemn exhortation to live peaceably till he arrived again among them, with his wife.
The knightly lover landed in Norway, early in November, and made his way along the coast, now on foot, now on horseback anon in sledges, and occasionally in boats or on shipboard, until with infinite pains, and in a sorry plight, he reached Upslo, to no one’s astonishment more than the queen’s, about the 19th of November. Accoutred and travel-soiled as he was, he proceeded at once to her presence. He was so well-pleased with the fair vision before him, that he made as if he would at once kiss the queen, who stood gazing at him. “It is not the form of my country,” said pretty Anne, not very violently holding her head aside. “It’s good old Scottish fashion,” said the young king: and it was observed that in less than an hour, Anne had fallen very completely into the pleasant mode from beyond seas, and quite forgotten the forms of Denmark.
The young couple were duly married in person, on the Sunday following the arrival of James. The latter, like any Paladin of romance, had perilled life, and contended with almost insurmountable obstacles, in order to win the royal lady after a less easy fashion than marks the wooing and wedding of kings generally. Such a couple deserved to have the merriest of marriage banquets, but while such a storm was raging without as Norway itself had never seen since the sea-wind first blew over her, such a tempest was raised within, by the Scottish nobles, on a question of precedence, that the king himself was chiefly occupied in soothing the quarrellers, and only half succeeded in accomplishing the desired end. Added to this was the prospect of a long winter among the melancholy huts of Upslo. James, however, again exhibited the spirit of a knight of more than ordinary gallantry. He not only resolved that the young queen should not be thus imprisoned amid the Norway snows till May, but he resolved to conduct her himself across the Norwegian Alps, through Sweden, to her Danish home. The idea of such a journey seemed to partake of insanity, but James proceeded to realize it, by means of method and judgment. He first performed the perilous journey alone, as far as Sweden, and finding it practicable, returned for his wife, and departed a second time, in her company. Much peril but small accident accompanied them on their way, and when the wedding party arrived safely at Cronenburg, toward the end of January, the marriage ceremony was not only repeated for the third time—to despite the witches who can do nothing against the luck that is said to lie in odd numbers, but there was a succession of marriage feasts, at which every gentleman drank deeper and deeper every day, until such uproar and dissension ensued that few kept their daggers in sheath except those who were too drunk to draw them. That all were not in the more disgraceful state, or were not continually in that condition, may be conjectured from the fact that James paid a visit to Tycho Brahe, and conversed with the astronomer in his observatory, in very vigorous Latin. The king, however, was not sorry to leave old Denmark, and when a Scottish fleet appeared off Cronenburg, to convey his bride and himself homeward, he could no more be persuaded to stay a day longer, than Tycho Brahe could be persuaded that Copernicus was correct in dislodging the earth from its Ptolemaic stand-point as centre of the solar system. The bridal party set sail on the 21st of April, 1590, and was safely moored in Leith harbor on May-day. A pretty bride could not have arrived at a more appropriate season. The royal knight and his lady deserved all the happiness that could be awarded to the gallantry of the one and the beauty of the other. But they did not escape the trials common to much less dignified couples; and here the knightly character of James may be said to terminate. Exemplary as he had been as a lover, and faithful as he continued to be as a husband, he was in all other respects, simply a shrewd man; and not indeed always that. There is little of this quality in a husband who begins and continues his married life with an indifference upon the matter of borrowing. With James it was silver spoons to-day, silk stockings to-morrow, and marks and moidores from any one who would give him credit. The old French knight who drank broth out of his own helmet rather than sip it from a borrowed bowl, was moved at least by a good principle. James rather agreed with Carlo Buffone, in Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humor,” that “it is an excellent policy to owe much in these days.” A policy which, unfortunately, is still deemed excellent, in spite of the ruin which attends its practice.
The grave chivalry impressed on the face and features of Charles I., is strikingly alluded to by Ben Jonson in his Masque of “The Metamorphosed Gypsies;” for example:—
“His brow, his eye, and ev’ry mark of state,
As if he were the issue of each grace,
And bore about him both his fame and fate.”