From God's Secretaries-
Scotland was no place to be a king. The English throne, infinitely more powerful in relation to the nobility than his own; supported by the structures and doctrines of the church, rather than eroded and undermined by them; rich, potent and admired — all this awaited him like a harbour tantalisingly visible from far out to sea, but, until Eliza-beth's death, only to be longed for and lusted after. Elizabeth taunted him. James had often sent his spies to Whitehall or to Richmond to see how near to death the ageing queen was coming. But the English Council was aware of this too and whenever a curious Scotsman seemed to be watching and attending on the queen more carefully than usual, it was arranged for him to stand waiting in a lobby from where he could see, 'through the hangings, to the queen dancing to a little fiddle'. Over and over again, James would hear reports of her fitness and her vigour. Meanwhile, she dandled her kingdom and her money in front of his eyes. There were other claimants to the English throne, but none so strong. Both his mother and father carried Tudor genes but Elizabeth would make nothing sure. In 1586, all too vaguely, she had promised to do nothing that would take away from 'any greatness that might be due to him, unless provoked on his part by manifest ingratitude'. She began to send him money, and in the letters that accompanied the cash, Elizabeth allowed herself to speak to James from the enormous and magnificent height of an imperial throne. As she wrote to him in June 1586:
Considering that God hath endewed ws with a crown that yeildeth more yerly profeit to us, than we understand yours doth to youe, by reason of the dissipation and evill governement thereof of long tyme before your birth, we have latelie sent to youe a portion meete for your awin privat use. The English carefully varied the amount from year to year, sometimes ,3,000, sometimes .g5p00, so that James would never quite know where he stood. The Scots always called the grant an 'annuity' — a payment due every year — and the English 'a gratuity', made out of the kindness of their hearts. The English policy had its effect. Although James's mother was a Catholic, and although he had flirted with the Catholic states in Europe and had made vague, lying promises to English Roman Catholics that he would introduce something like toleration when he acceded to the English throne, he had never done anything to put his chances of succession in jeopardy. He had been bought. By the time of Elizabeth's death — she died, in the end, 'mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree', so quietly that no one was quite sure of the precise time of her death — James's mouth was dry with years of panting. It was a difficult role to play. Although there is no evidence of his affection for a mother he hadn't seen since he was an infant, James had been forced to acquiesce in her execution in 1587. The unstated but implicit assumption was that he had bargained that acceptance for a recognition of his title to the English throne. The conventional modern view of such an upbringing would be negative: such abuse would be bound to destroy the person. James, for all his strange, unaccommodated behaviour, went precisely the other way. The outcome of his violent, threatened youth was not someone filled with vitriol and vengeance, although James could be foul-mouthed, but what might be called exaggeratedly social behaviour, a longing for acceptance and a desire for a life and a society in which all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home.
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