Elizabeth’s proxy godparent, the Earl of Sussex, arrived, acting as if nothing could happen in Scotland until England appeared.
On the morning of 30 August 1594 the guests took their places in the chapel royal. At the east end stood the king’s chair of state, empty on a platform, cloth of gold spread all round it. Stuffed and gilded chairs received the fundaments of a series of leading foreign dignitaries, who took up their places beneath red velvet canopies adorned with the arms of each of their countries. The arms of England hung over a chair to the right of the throne, Denmark’s hung over the one to the left, and the arms of Scotland dominated the centre. Anne sat to one side with her ladies and friends.
The new pulpit dazzled with cloth of gold and yellow velvet. The black-clad Calvinist clergy sitting at a table below felt a little queasy. Their eyes found no relief from the idolatrous frippery, as they glanced from alabaster bas-reliefs to classical Greek friezes, and a huge fresco of the king in his pomp behind the altar. Calvinists insisted on the separate jurisdictions of God and state. James VI apparently did not. Rather the opposite.
Waiting to conduct the service were David Cunningham, the Bishop of Aberdeen, David Lindsay, Minister of Leith; Patrick Galloway, a minister in the royal household and moderator of the General Assembly; Andrew Melville, who had recently criticised the queen for her lack of piety, and John Duncanson. A hundred younkers guarded the chapel door.
A fanfare sounded announcing the king, who sent for his son. The Earl of Sussex walked in carrying the infant Henry beneath the prince’s red velvet canopy of state, just like the canopies that hung over saints in religious parades in towns throughout Catholic Europe. The godly ministers bridled. Such ceremonial flummery had been banished from Christian worship in the Protestant revolution, but here the canopy hinted at the shifting iconography of the sacred, from church and saints to monarchy, as if the king replaced God as an object of worship and his power was as sacred as it was secular. For them, authority rested in the Bible alone, the Word of God. It was unassailable by a mere mortal, even a king.
The chapel fell silent as Galloway climbed the pulpit and preached from Genesis 21:1 – where Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah in their very old age. The boy was the child of barren loins. James was twenty-eight and Anne nineteen, so this could hardly mean them. Was it a dig at the other ‘parent’, Henry’s barren godmother Elizabeth? At the end of Genesis chapter 21, the Lord makes his solemn league and covenant with Abraham, identifying his descendants as the chosen people. All would have understood the allusion: biblical language and symbolism saturated these reformed Christian lives. Henry was Isaac, the one in whom the chosen Stuart race was called to greatness.
At the font, the ministers blessed Henry, wishing on him heroic energy and courage, strength to conquer monsters, raise the people of God, lead his nation, and to go into battle against hell’s legions (Rome and Spain), to complete the glorious revolution and found the New Jerusalem of the Protestant Promised Land. In years to come in England, apocalyptic Puritan preachers would seek out Henry. Here is where they found purchase, in this groove carved into him from birth, stirred in along with the luxury.
Finally, to the sound of trumpets, Lord Lyon, King at Arms, proclaimed: ‘Henry Frederick, Frederick Henry’.
Everyone now processed out of the chapel and into the sun, laughing and talking. From high windows, servants threw handfuls of gold coins down on the people of Stirling, waiting outside the castle walls. The christening party crossed to the great hall. Henry was placed at the highest table, while guests filled the benches below – relaxing, swapping observations and stories, planning how to report this event to their masters in the courts of Europe.
Another blast of trumpets interrupted their chatter. The doors swung open and a chariot laden with delicacies, bearing the goddesses of Liberality and Fecundity, rolled in. At first, Anne had hoped the king’s pet lion would pull the chariot, until her servants expressed doubts about how the lion would react to the hubbub, and who would be eating whom if he went berserk because ‘the lights and torches … commoved his tameness’. In the end they settled on Anne’s favourite Moor. They strapped the man into the lion’s harness. He leaned in and pulled.
The goddess of Fecundity held forth bushels of corn, to represent ‘broodiness’ and abundance. Her motto alluded ‘to the King’s and Queen’s majesties – that their generations may grow into thousands’. The Stuarts flaunted the symbolism of the fertile holy family, infuriating for the spinster queen in the south. Liberality, meanwhile, held two crowns in her right hand and two sceptres in her left with the motto: ‘Having me as the follower, thou shalt receive more than thou shalt give’. More treason to Elizabeth’s ears. Unable to take an official role in government, Anne applied her skill in the political use of revels. A ‘sensuous and spectacle-loving lady’, she sat back, well pleased with her show.
Anne’s chariot retreated and a ship over twenty feet long was hauled in. Neptune stood at the prow and ‘marine people’ hung from the sides, their bodies decorated with the sea’s riches – pearls, corals, shells and metals ‘very rare and excellent’. The ship boasted thirty-six brass cannon and was gaily decorated with red masts and ropes of red silk, pulleys of gold, and silver anchors. On her foresail a painting of a huge compass billowed, pointing to the North Star. Europe could set its course by James and Henry.
Sugars, sculpted and painted to resemble seafood, lay in heaps on the decks – ‘herrings, whitings, flukes, oysters, buckies, lampets, partans, lobsters, crabs, spout-fish, clams’. Sea maidens distributed the feast among the guests. From the galleries at the end of the room, the hautbois began a tune, joined by the viols, recorders, flutes, and then scores of choral voices all in deafening counterpoint to each other, singing in praise of king, queen and the prince of glorious expectation, Henry Frederick Stuart. As the music reached a crescendo, each of the thirty-six cannon unleashed a volley. The walls of the great hall thundered and echoed. The infant must have leapt from his skin.
From Stirling to St James’s Palace in London, Prince Henry would learn a humanist truism: the encounter with the ancients in whatever form you find them – in coin or word or image, in plays, masques, and pictures – will endow you with their qualities of rationality, eloquence, glory, wealth, virtue, and political wisdom. Europeans communicated through these symbolic languages. James and Anne used this language on Henry’s christening day to demonstrate the sophistication and merit of the dynasty sitting in wait for the death of Elizabeth Tudor.
Next morning the celebrations continued, as guests made their way in groups into Edinburgh. Others headed for the port of Leith and their ships. Ambassadors penned their accounts and examined the quality of the gifts of gold chains King James sent for their masters. Meanwhile a poem, ‘Principis Scoti-Britannorum Natalia’ (‘On the Birth of the Scoto-Britannic Prince’), by Andrew Melville, one of Scotland’s leading Presbyterian churchmen, reminded them of the true significance of Henry’s birth for Christendom:
Those who were divided by the Tweed …
The rule of Scoto-Britannic sovereignty now joins together,
United in law and within a Scoto-Britannic commonwealth,
And a Prince born of a Scoto-Britannic king
Calls them into a single Scoto-Britannic people.
To what great heights will Scoto-Britannic glory now rise
With no limits set by space and time?
By the time Elizabeth of England heard the word ‘Scoto-Britannic’ in this context for the fifth time in five lines, she was incandescent with rage. Chief minister, Robert Cecil, penned a letter on her behalf, pointing out that it verged on treason to say that James VI was ‘king of all Britain in possession’. James responded laconically that, ‘being descended as he was’ from Henry VIII’s sister Margaret Tudor, ‘he could not but make claim to the crown of England after the decease of her Majesty’. He was Elizabeth’s closest blood male heir.
James connived in having the poem broadcast as widely as possible and authorised the Royal Printer, Robert Waldegrave, to publish it. It enjoyed wide circulation in Protestant circles across Europe and was reprinted several times