History Forum / General / British History / February 2004

because they would have chopped his head off too .

Because he wanted to be King of England.

James was brought up from earliest childhood to regard his mother, who
he never knew, as an adulteress, and the murderer of his father. And
as long as she lived, his claim both to the Scottish throne and
English succession was doubtful. In 1586, only months before the
execution, James concluded a formal alliance with England, by which he
received a subsidy of £4,000 per year. Elizabeth refused to recognise
him as her successor, but did undertake not to do anything to derogate
from his rights "unless provoked by manifest ingratitude". He sent
ambassadors to England to protest against the death sentence, but that
was a matter of form. After the execution Elizabeth wrote to him
claiming that it had been done without her knowledge, to which he
replied thus: "Whereas ye purge yourself of yon unhappy fact, I dare
not wrong you so far as not to judge honourably of your unspotted part
therein, so I wish your your honourable behaviour in all times
hereafter may fully persuade the whole world of the same". No
"manifest ingratitude" there. With that, the matter was closed.

Caroline Bingham suggests that: "To James the episode was profoundly
distasteful and deeply disturbing. His conscience was not easy, and it
probably afflicted him the more because his mother's death was so
greatly to his advantage". This is likely enough, but there seems to
be no direct evidence for it.

'The queen is dead, long live the king'?

As those above have pointed out, James was in a tough spot.  If he protested
his mother's execution he would have put his claim to the crown at risk and
maybe his very life at risk.

It is also true that James was brought up by the very same hard line
Calvinists who had more than once dragged lovers out of Mary's chamber and
hung them on the spot.  (Mary was both Roman Catholic and very "liberated"
... the stiff Calvinist noblemen were, to say the least, not so liberal!)
James believed his mother was guilty of everything from the murder of his
supposed father (Mary was, in fact, an accomplice at least) to adultery
(guilty!), and ames knew very well that she had indeed plotted the
assassination of Elizabeth over and over just as Elizabeth said.

For that matter, James' dark complexion was closer to that of Mary's
secretary and executed lover, Rizi, than the light complexioned Stuart.  And
this tidbit did not go unnoticed by either James or anybody else.

In the end, James had lots of reasons to feel a bit less than complete
affection for his mother.

Neither James nor even Elizabeth herself liked the idea of the exciting
Mary, but after the umty-umth plot to kill Elizabeth and all the rest of
Mary's history, neither James nor Elizabeth saw any way out of it.

Rod