Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, by Jose Maria Calvan y Candela, (19th century)
from Glenda Johnson, The Birth of the Scottish Atlantic
At the time Saxony went to war over the Bohemian throne, with its elector venturing personally into the war-torn country, taking his wife and three small children with him, the Electress Elizabeth was heir to the throne of Scotland. Lest anyone imagine the possibility of her succession was distant or unlikely, given that King Henry was still only 25 years old and in robust health, he had already survived three of the eight assassination attempts that would be made over the course of his reign, most notably the explosion of a barrel loaded with gunpowder next to his carriage while it was stopped on a street in Stirling, an apparent variation on the plot used to kill Henri IV of France in 1610. It turned the carriage on its side, killing the horses and his driver immediately, but left Henry remarkably unhurt.
Thus it could be assumed, natural affection aside, the well-being of the new Queen of Bohemia was of consequence to Scotland, especially given that among the next best claims after Elizabeth's, two belonged to Englishwomen, Margaret and Arabella Seymour, daughters of Arabella Stuart. The lack of other surviving legitimate descendants of James IV, James V, Mary I, and James VI had narrowed the field of potential Scottish monarchs rather remarkably, and Henry's own bloody accession to the throne of Scotland (he was rather upset to hear the word usurpation) had thinned out the field of potential Scottish monarchs still further.
And as to that natural affection, we are somewhat uncertain as to how strong it was at this point. As children, Henry and Elizabeth had shown great fondness for each other, and their inseparability during Elector Christian's remarkable visit to Scotland in 1613 seemed born from real enjoyment of each other's company. But all that had been before Henry had overthrown their father, James VI, perhaps thinking that was the only means to prevent his own murder at the hands of James's favorites. Whether Elizabeth at this stage blamed Henry for their father's death, we do not know.
Precisely because Henry was a king, she was his heir, and she might one day be forced to request armies from him, the tone in her letters from the time of her arrival in Saxony was always polite and deferential, even if perhaps a bit cold in a way that seems inconsistent to the behavior exhibited while she, Henry and Christian were galloping through the Scottish countryside around Linlithgow together. But in late 1619 came Elizabeth's first plea for help with the matter of Bohemia.
Its tone was both epic and personal. It spoke of her and her husband's calling to liberate an oppressed people and to vindicate true religion. It spoke to Henry's own faith, and held out the possibility brother and sister might see each other again, in the beautiful and ancient capital of a kingdom they had all freed together to their mutual honor, and the benefit of the entire world. It was a document so stuffed with amiable dreams it might qualify as a romance. The young Elizabeth can sometimes come off as a buffoonish creature, with her refusal to learn German or Czech, her revealing French dresses and her immodest behavior with her emphatically interested husband. But you already see in that letter her skill as a budding diplomat and propagandist.
Eventually, Elizabeth's correspondence, as Electress, then Queen, and then finally, Dowager Queen, to family members, heads of state, their ministers, high and low nobility, prelates, merchants, tutors, tradesmen who had swindled her, tradesmen she had swindled, philosophers, artists, actors, moneylenders, generals, city fathers, servants, prison wardens, unsavory admirers, and the angry parents of casualties who had died in her war, would run to twelve volumes. Each document therein, which she composed personally even when it was subsequently translated, whether addressed to the Ottoman Caliph, the Tsar of Muscovy, or one of her children's nursemaids who had taken ill, is supremely aware of its purpose and audience. And even in 1619, at barely 22, the young Elizabeth knew her business well.
A shame, then, it was no more effective than it was. Henry's reply made no mention of saving the world, or his own soul. And really it did not seem that interested in saving Elizabeth, even. It made mention of Scotland's poverty relative to Saxony, averred there would have to be some deferral of the huge expense of transferring any substantial number of soldiers from Scotland to the Continent in order for Scotland to participate at all in the war, and worried over the possibility that England might use the opportunity of his absence to invade--always a possibility! In short, the Scottish king announced, more practical discussions would have to be held, especially as to the matter of money. Then, perhaps, Scottish assistance of some kind to Saxony could be considered. All that was missing to make the point clear was the dreaded benediction "Best wishes in all your future endeavors."
Elizabeth of course would periodically repeat her plea to Henry, sometimes in much direr circumstances than she at that point in 1619 imagined possible, and her tone was always unfailingly respectful and even affectionate. Only once did her mask of courtly deference slip, and it was in person at her court rather than on the page to her brother. Decades hence, when one of Erste's secretaries asked her to consider how likely her brother would be to take a given side in an international dispute, Elizabeth exclaimed savagely "Why sir, I do think that if the enemy to be conquered is anything more threatening than a single, frail, fearful old man, His Majesty will have no taste for it."
Of course this was not the end of the saga of whether King Henry of Scotland would take sides in the First General War. In the declining months of 1620, with full scale war in the Empire raging and Spain having just waded in to support its Austrian Habsburg cousins, Spain's powerful ambassador to England, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, arrived in Edinburgh for talks with Henry I. Spanish ambassador at Frederick's court for ten years and himself a veteran of the long Anglo-Spanish War of the 16th century, Gondomar had a dazzling record of success sweet-talking Protestant kings. Henry's Scottish publicists describe this as a kind of triumph. Following the foreign policy success of his Long Ride and the negotiation of his marriage to Henrietta Maria, a Spanish embassy had come to pay respects to this savvy young king at the corner of the world.
In truth, the Spanish were most concerned about the Scottish practice of "cousining," which is to say Scottish ships sneaking into Spanish colonial ports under English flags and with English papers so as to fraudulently enjoy the benefits of the English
pas. At the Leith docks, the Count of Gondomar saw illegal merchandise--sugar from the West Indies--being unloaded. On the Royal Mile, he passed shops openly selling forgeries of the documentation necessary for English ships to sail into Spanish ports. And he met at Holyrood a king dressed in new green velvet who knew nothing about any of it, and who claimed he could not be held any more personally responsible for it than for the activities of cutpurses on his streets.
Inevitably, the Spanish envoys turned to the matter of the human catastrophe unfolding on the continent. Did Scotland have intentions to intervene on behalf of his sister and brother-in-law? Did the terms of Elizabeth's marriage to Christian provide for a military alliance? Were there terms in the new treaty with France pertaining to the war in the Empire? Henry I answered, with some emotion, that he despaired over his sister's safety, and that of her husband who was himself his own dear friend, and their small children, who were, like Elizabeth herself, his heirs, given that he as yet had none of his body. He said he dared not divulge specifics to the Spanish diplomats because the interests of their kingdom was of course adverse to those of the Saxons, but Henry stated confidently that there but a few details to be worked out before Scotland would enter the war on the side of the Protestant Union, and that it would so so with a sizeable enough commitment to decide the question quickly and restore peace to Christendom.
At this point, the somewhat unsettled Gondomar asked whether any inducement was possible which could persuade Henry, not to ignore the safety of his dear sister, certainly, but perhaps to provide time for a diplomatic solution to be worked out among the existing parties so that loss of life of his Scottish subjects could be avoided? Henry sighed, and answered that it was a lesson learned at the knee of his own dear father that a king must always work for peace. So, the Count of Gondomar continued, though they were unprepared to enter into serious talks on the matter, and had no negotiating authority on this subject, what terms might persuade Henry to forego Scotland's entrance into the war?
As it turned out the Scottish king had actually given the matter extensive thought. Henry thought Scotland being given its own
pas, equivalent in scope and character to the one England enjoyed, would be sufficient. Recalling from accounts of the Anglo-Spanish peace negotiations that Spain's initial objection to England being given the
pas was that England was too small and inconsequential a country for such a privilege, and that Frederick's reply had been that if England was inconsequential, then the cost to Spain of it being given it would be inconsequential too, Henry reminded the Spanish that Scotland was much smaller even than England, and so it would be no cost to Spain at all.
Failing that, Henry said that one term of the treaty Scotland had recently entered into with France was an agreement that the two kingdoms' New World colonies not attack each other, or purposefully frustrate each other, wheresoever they were located, so long as they were not established within distance of any settled areas, and that some equivalent terms with Spain would be adequate. This, Gondomar made perfectly clear, was absurd. He declared unambiguously Spain was not going to bestow the
pas to avoid a war with a country that had not enjoyed a clear military victory for hundreds of years. And it was likewise not going to give Scotland a license to settle anywhere it wanted in the vast stretches of land it claimed in the New World. These notions were ludicrous.
But rather than betraying any anger at this peremptory refusal, Henry merely smiled and said that he would gladly entertain counteroffers from the Spanish of a more limited and circumscribed nature. This was, of course, he advised, perhaps betraying a bit of the mildness of character ambassadors had noted in James VI, what it meant to negotiate. Ending the audience in indignation, Gondomar's party confidently reported back that not only were Henry's notions fantastically unreasonable, but that as far as they knew there were no Scottish preparations for war at all, and that most likely the Scottish king was trying to extract from Spain a price to not do the thing he had no intention of doing anyway.
Creating the impression of an imminent and sizeable, Scottish expedition would take work. Inquiries were made to England about the possibility of allowing a Scottish army of 20,000 to march peaceably and in good order to Dover, where it would be ferried to France for war in the Low Countries, and which would be provisioned from English merchants on its journey at market rates. Complementarily, inquiries were made to France about allowing a Scottish army of 20,000 to use Calais and Artois as a staging ground for an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands to aid the Dutch and Saxons. Alternately, inquiries were made to the Dutch and Danish about whether, as allies of Saxony, they would transport Scottish forces for free across the North Sea to Hamburg, from which they would ascend the Elbe to Bohemia.
These were all made with the intent that, whether by diplomatic back channels or espionage, word would reach Spain. In fact, we know for certain that word of them did reach Wittenberg and were in fact shared with the Electress, who believed momentarily that her brother was finally preparing to act to save the seriously endangered Saxon war effort. Of course we know, in retrospect, Elizabeth's hopes were doomed to disappointment. Henry I's state papers reveal there was never, to any extent, any intention of participating in the war, only of creating the impression in foreign capitals so that Scotland could extract the greatest possible concessions to maintain its neutrality.
During these same years, it would become well known throughout Midlothian that the occasional visits of foreign ambassadors were a fine way to make more than a week's wages in one day, for the King would hire them all to drill outside his windows even if for a few hours, just to create the impression he was planning imminent wars of conquest abroad.
And of course, objectively, the Spanish ambassadors' first appraisal was objectively right. Henry's demands in 1620 were absurd. Only very gradually, with Spanish defeats, and bankruptcies, and land wars with France, and the sheer depletion of the number of uninvolved outside powers with the resources to substantially affect the outcome of the conflict on which the future of Christendom depended, did they become less absurd, until finally, humiliatingly, the inconceivable talks the Spanish had balked at in 1620 began in earnest.
Of course, it should not be assumed there was no Scottish involvement in the First General War. Scots served both sides, as generals, officers and soldiers, just as they previously had in other European conflicts during the era of mercenary armies which were in their national compositions almost arbitrary in their relationship to whom they fought for. Substantial numbers of Scots had fought in both the initial phases of the Dutch Revolt and the Long Turkish War, and this enabled Scots to climb the chain of command even by the time the General War began. One of them, Alexander Leslie, would eventually be chief of the entire Saxon war effort.
The profound, and increasing, demand for fresh soldiers, and the relative prestige of Scottish soldiers on the battlefield, itself created an opportunity for Henry. Since his accession he had moved to curb the Highland Clans and force modernized land tenures, new royal courts and other reforms, many of them funded by new taxes and impositions on the clans. Catholic holdouts among the great families of the Highlands had especially been squeezed, though Henry had been careful to not press so hard as to trigger open revolt against his rule. Of course, being Henry, he had hoped to weaken the clans by encouraging immigration from among their number to his struggling colonies in the New World. But he also decided to encourage their wartime service in foreign armies.
All King Henry required was a small fee, assessed based upon land holdings, for a man to leave Scotland to enter foreign military service. It operated under the rationale that by leaving the country to offer their service to foreigners, these men could not offer it to their king, and so this was a contribution towards hiring their replacements. It was set high enough so that it would be a fresh source of revenue for a king always looking for one, low enough that it would not actually dissuade disaffected Highlanders from leaving the country to go fight, whether that would be for or against the King of Spain, or for against Henry's brother-in-law the Elector of Saxony, or any other party to the conflict. All that mattered was, as always, the King of Scotland got his part.
