The Scottish Tiberius
Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part III:
The Last Years of Henry II of Scotland
It is impossible to calculate the full effect of the scandal and death of Queen Anne Marie Louise of Orleans on Scotland in 1673. It was not merely the shame of an unhappy royal marriage ending in extreme tragedy. Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been a kingdom racked by insecurity, both without and within. In the story Scotland had been telling itself since the early reign of Henry I, it had put aside the troublesome internal divisions of faith and clan to embark on a new era of overseas expansion and prosperity. In this context, the discovery of a conspiracy that numbered among its ranks some of the leading nobles of the realm and the queen herself was like a lightning strike from a clear sky. It was not just that the bad old days might return. It was that they had never really left, and that the nation had been merely living in a pleasant dream.
By early 1674 the business of peace with England had been accomplished, as Mary II’s “great reversal” of her father’s alliance with France against Scotland was now transformed into the British monarchies aligned against France. Mary’s strategic thinking was that the Scottish king had proved what the counsellors of Henry VII had known 200 years earlier: England could not effectively project its power beyond the island of Britain if every time it tried it faced a war in its own north. Thus the countless doting words she spilled to “Our dear, honored and wholly beloved cousin, Uncle Henry.” With these assurances the Scots had won the island of Tortola in the Caribbean for the trouble of the 1673 invasion.
Relations with France were now as bleak as they had ever been in the entire history of the two nations. Angry heralds were dispatched to Versailles demanding explanations, and more importantly, the return of the traitor James Alexander to face justice. Louis XIV’s responses that he knew nothing, had no contact with any such relation of the King of Scotland, and felt only deepest sorrow for the death of his cousin Anne Marie Louise fell on deaf ears. In the peace negotiations at Westhorpe in 1675 Henry II was present personally to put these demands to the French plenipotentiaries, at some points leaving them fearful of physical violence.
Within the Scottish royal family, the situation was actually far worse. While the queen and her son the Duke of Rothesay had not been as close as she had been to the princesses, James now blamed his father’s efforts to rule Anne Marie Louise for the chain of events that led to her death. The king and Prince James would not reconcile before his death. Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth were likewise inconsolable, and efforts to place them in the home of a Scottish noble family appropriate to the task of training them for the marriage market and their futures as queens were rejected. The broad consensus among the Scottish nobles was that the king should remarry quickly, preferably a native girl, and return to his usual projects.
What such ideas avoided however was the passion that now consumed Henry: discovering the conspirators. Nineteen men rumored to have been among the company that traveled with the queen were arrested in 1675 and interrogated, and in that process twelve died, with the result that James Douglas, 12th Earl of Angus was arrested. Douglas, only 27, had himself at one point been rumored to have been intimate with the queen years before, only to have the king himself publicly condemn as frivolous the rumors. Douglas did not himself survive long enough in custody to be tried, much less executed for his crimes. For his part the Earl of Erroll did not wait to be implicated but fled hidden in what was marked as a barrel of spirits for France. The Marquess of Huntly attempted to flee too, but was caught on the docks of Edinburgh. He freely admitted his guilt, though he stated he knew not who else had been involved in the plot given that James Alexander acted as the common intermediary to minimize the risk lest any one conspirator be captured. Thereafter a period of lengthy negotiations between his lawyers and the crown began, which ended when he was admitted to a private audience with the king on August 7, 1677. The contents of the conversation were not recorded, but thereafter Gordon entered a guilty plea on the charge of treason, was found guilty, and on September 21 was executed. But whereas the earldoms of Erroll and Angus were reabsorbed into the crown along with all their holdings, that of Huntly was permitted to continue under the Marquess’s heir, who now came to live at court a ward (in truth, a prisoner), with the king controlling his lands and wealth.
These were only the most notable conspirators implicated: by 1680 665 Scots had been detained on orders of the king relating to the incident, of which nearly ninety were of high birth. The property transmitted to the crown by legal judgments, attainders and gifts to “clear the blood” equaled, it is believed, the size of the county of Ayrshire. Moreover, the ease with which the agents of Louis XIV operated in Scotland in the days running up to Dumbarton had persuaded Henry that he sorely needed a robust domestic spy network. Hundreds more were then implicated, with sometimes acts as small as keeping a rosary or a cross bearing the figure of Jesus enough to create sufficient suspicion to lead to an investigation. If anything, King Henry I’s old policy of the acceptance of “Quiet Observance” by the Roman Catholic nobles at home had been unpopular with the great mass of Scots, and had it not been coupled with Henry’s doing away with the bishops in the Church of Scotland it could have provoked discontent between king and kirk. Thus the great mass of Scottish opinion after the tragedy of Dumbarton was squarely on the side of the king in these efforts, reasoning that Holyrood had been too soft on the papists for too long, and that the whole Dumbarton ordeal was the natural consequence of the weakness of the kings in support of True Religion and their preference for French queens. Among Catholics, however, Henry II was now becoming known as the Scottish Tiberius. Particularly in France, his repression was vilified. Or as one English writer sympathetic with the plight of the Scottish Catholics put it memorably,
Good King Henry had an undisciplined wife whom he left free to wander the countryside when he departed to make war, invade this country and invest its cities; and that this wife then fell to mischief with King Henry so far away now all the men of Scotland suffer. Has ever more blood been shed merely because a man set aside as unwelcome his husbandly duties?
This support for the monarchy’s position was shaken somewhat as the evidence mounted that the king’s agents, the Capable Service, were now pursuing targets of investigation not because of actual suspicion but increasingly the possibility of bringing more money and wealth to the crown. To some extent this was because the death of Anne Marie Louise had a practical effect for crown finances as well. The loss of her remaining rents from France meant less revenue for the king, and even with the growing profits Henry II reaped from the slave trade the appetite of the Scottish overseas empire and the navy necessary to support it for cash was overwhelming. Legal disputes in France over her inheritance went nowhere, with Louis XIV adamant that her lands on her death reverted to the crown.
The gloom of the Edinburgh court following the death of Anne Marie Louise was relieved greatly when word leaked that the king had entered into negotiation with the German Emperor Christian to marry the surviving princesses Margaret and Elizabeth to his son and heir and his nephew. The Scottish public was by and large enthusiastic about being bound more tightly to the leading Protestant power of Europe, and the concern for moral rectitude of the Alexandrian line of the House of Wettin fit Henry II’s need to recapture a sense of propriety for the royal family perfectly. Negotiations hit a hurdle however when it became plain that Christian was willing to submit to the indignity of marrying his heir and nephew to the daughters of the most notorious adulteress in Christendom only with Jamaica thrown into the bargain. Henry flatly refused through his plenipotentiaries, and reminded Christian that his own sisters had honorably married in Scotland. Christian counteroffered that he was willing to consider Tortola as an alternative. To this Henry again flatly said no. The negotiations, conducted in tandem with talks at Westhorpe over mutually agreed-upon frontiers to the North American colonies, dragged on. Eventually, they were saved only by only a letter from Christian’s brother Charles directly to the King of Scotland proposing a separate set of terms, including a payment sub rasa for the privilege of marrying his son to a royal princess. King Henry was amenable to this notion, and in 1683 Prince Frederick performed the Scottish custom of traveling to meet his bride in her home and escorting her to her new home. In their brief appearance in Edinburgh before leaving for Wittenberg, the Princess Elizabeth seemed utterly charmed by her new husband. They married immediately in Wittenberg upon their return. Ten months later, the Duchess Elizabeth bore her first daughter, Sophie. A year after she bore their second daughter, Sybille.
Europe was meanwhile reeling from the Catastrophes. The twin sacks, of Vienna by the Ottomans and Amsterdam by the French in 1683 and 1684, triggered war across the continent on a scale that frightened the Scottish king. England and Germany both waded immediately into the conflict to eject France from the Netherlands, and the expectations of both Mary and Christian was certainly that Scotland would join them. This was the third time in Henry’s reign England, France and Germany went to war. Each time war erupted before Henry had shrewdly calculated the best course of action, in the first instance auctioning his decision-making to the highest bidder, in the second invading England in a spirited imitation of his medieval forbears. Both times, he had gauged his conduct perfectly. Now, the time came for Henry to recalibrate again, and this time he chose neutrality. There were two reasons for this: the first was that the newfound strength of France and the internal divisions of Germany, both between the Saxon kingdom and the Empire, and Wettin and Hohenzollern, led him to assess that the balance of power had shifted against the Protestant powers on the continent. But also, none of the participants in the conflict had offered him a price at which he would consider it worthwhile to participate. Certainly the arrogance of Christian I in the marriage negotiations had soured Henry on his long connection to the House of Wettin, even though the marriage of his youngest daughter to the Emperor’s nephew had given the appearance to the Saxons that their relations with Edinburgh was still cordial. Subtly, though Henry’s official relationship to Louis XIV was as sour as ever in his public diplomacy, the Scottish king subtly intimated in letters that despite all that had passed between them he would be amenable to a renewal of the auld alliance, if but Anne Marie Louise’s lands as duchesse du Montpensier that she still held at her death and the rents therefrom where to be settled on James duke of Rothesay as her heir. For his part, Louis calculated he was near enough to winning without the intervention of Scotland, and feared the alliance might be merely the first stage of a plan of betrayal. Thus Scotland remained outside the Second General War during the disastrous years of the 1680s.
Though it was not part of Henry’s design, the net effect of this policy was that banking, insurance and trade that had previously been conducted through Amsterdam was now redirected through Edinburgh, one of the few places in Europe French, Germans, English, and Dutch men of business could conduct their affairs in person safely. Moreover, whereas once Scotland’s isolation from the rest of Europe had been a detriment, the distance of the great continental armies from its shores and its own potent army and navy made it now singularly safe. It was especially well-positioned for finances pertaining to the colonial trade. The fact that Scotland’s shipping could service the colonies of the other European powers without fear—none of them wanted to take the risk of tipping Henry into the camp of their rivals—led its mercantile cargo per annum to double between 1680 and 1700. Of course, it went without saying that asides from rum, sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean precious little on those ships was made in Scotland or its colonies, which still were themselves net drains on the treasury. Instead, Scotland’s vast proceeds from the slave trade now floated its treasury.
Inevitably, the pan-European war greatly complicated Henry’s singularly pressing diplomatic objective in his concluding years, finding prestigious matches for his unhappy, quarrelsome and quite possibly illegitimate children. Following the unhappy negotiations with the Emperor, Margaret was quickly married off to Prince George of Denmark in 1684, another beneficiary of Henry II’s burning desire to build bridges with the other Protestant powers “and wash the French taste from out his mouth”, in the memorable words of one pamphleteer. This left the last marriage Henry had to negotiate, which was also the most important, that of his heir, James duke of Rothesay. Henry’s initial keenness for an imperial match had been soured by the insult to his family by the Emperor Christian. However, in 1685 Christian was killed as the Second General War slipped in the direction of France. His successor brought a new house into the imperium, that of the Hohenzollerns. Merely fifty years before the exigencies of the First General War had rendered them without title, lands or prospects. And yet now the new crisis in Germany had placed them at the apex of power and humbled their great rivals, the Wettins. The new emperor, Frederick II, desperately wanted a royal match to solidify the restored prestige of the Hohenzollerns. To that end he eagerly accepted the overtures of Henry II of Scotland. Thus in 1687 James the duke of Rothesay was married to Frederick’s seventeen year old daughter, Maria Amalia. This clinched in the eyes of Europe the legitimacy of Henry’s heirs and thus prevented any lingering problems from Anne Marie Louise’s indiscretions, perceived or real, from affecting the Scottish succession.
If the period of the Second General War was a time of prosperity for the Scots, with the growing wealth of the commercial classes now threatening to eclipse the kingdom’s hereditary nobility, it was also a time of insecurity. The perceived threat came not from the French king or the traditional rival, England, but Henry himself. Almost 800 people, 70 of whom were of high birth, were arrested as agents of foreign powers and executed for treason between 1685 and 1690 alone, and this does not include a large number of extrajudicial killings and disappearances that Henry apparently resorted to in circumstances when the evidence was insufficient or the suspect too prominent. Of course, one case stands head and shoulders above the others. In 1686 the Duke of Albany died after a long life of service to Scotland and the Stuarts. Henry had been close to Albany his entire life, and had grown up with his son James. This was the case even though James the second duke of Albany had been raised by his Roman Catholic mother in that faith himself. Having served honorably in Henry’s two wars, and served in many high offices of state besides, James for his part had five sons: Henry, Charles, James, Louis and Alexander. Of these, Henry was widely known to be mentally incompetent, and Louis had died in early childhood. In 1688 the first tragedy struck the House of Albany when the elder duke was killed, supposedly by accident, by one of the king’s huntsmen while they were in the Highlands together. At first, the only thing beyond the incident itself that raised suspicion was the king’s lack of mourning. Then later, in the king’s own will it was revealed that the huntsman in question had received a bequest three times any of the other servants of the king of a similar station. Handwriting analysis in the nineteenth century then indicated that among the unsigned letters and scraps of papers assembled by the Capable Service in its investigation of the Dumbarton scandal was messages from Albany to Louis XIV. None of these implicated him specifically in the effort to foment a revolt or permit the French to make off with the queen, but touched upon efforts to win greater religious freedom for Scottish followers of Rome. However, with King Henry that quite likely may have been reason enough.
Such a possibility makes sense, given that in 1689 the infirm Henry, third duke of Albany fell from a high window to his death of a broken neck. Charles, the second son of James duke of Albany then drowned in mysterious circumstances on a trip to the Continent. James the third son then disclaimed his inheritance and left Scotland to fight the Ottoman Turks in the army of the Habsburgs, never to return. This left the youngest son, Alexander, only fifteen in 1691, who was made a ward of the king and lived at court, with the king enjoying his rents through the time of his death. It is in these suspicious misfortunes that Henry II’s reputation as “the Scottish Tiberius,” a figure of horror and fascination, grew. For his part, Henry’s prince and heir James duke of Rothesay would neither attend his father at court nor do anything to provoke him, and openly stated his fear of his father and his certainty that King Henry “has younger sons enough to feel free to do me mischief.”
One recurrent fear during the latter period of Henry’s reign was that the threshold necessary for the Capable Service to take an interest in a person of quality was constantly declining, and the value of property or wealth that the crown could claim from a traitor’s estate was becoming ever more important than any actual subversive activities on behalf of foreign powers. Increasingly, the Capable Service was now also looking beyond the “usual suspects” of Catholic nobles, resident foreign subjects and those disaffected with the Protestant state religion. Some Protestant merchants of sufficient wealth began to feel the breath of the Capable Service on their neck, accused of trying to subject the good people of Scotland not to a pope but to the “English plague” of a rule of bishops.
In any case, such worries came to an abrupt end. Though Henry was now 62, he was robust and alert, and planned to continue actively ruling for the foreseeable future, with no plans made to surrender any of his duties to James Duke of Rothesay. It then came as a surprise when on October 25, 1691, when the king was found dead in his chamber at Holyrood. Studies of the body by the royal physicians confirmed the cause was most likely a sudden stroke. They called it the delayed but inevitable result of his heartbreak at the death of his queen seventeen years earlier.
Other, less charitable historians, look back at the latter course of his life and wonder what heart they speak of.
Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part III:
The Last Years of Henry II of Scotland
It is impossible to calculate the full effect of the scandal and death of Queen Anne Marie Louise of Orleans on Scotland in 1673. It was not merely the shame of an unhappy royal marriage ending in extreme tragedy. Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been a kingdom racked by insecurity, both without and within. In the story Scotland had been telling itself since the early reign of Henry I, it had put aside the troublesome internal divisions of faith and clan to embark on a new era of overseas expansion and prosperity. In this context, the discovery of a conspiracy that numbered among its ranks some of the leading nobles of the realm and the queen herself was like a lightning strike from a clear sky. It was not just that the bad old days might return. It was that they had never really left, and that the nation had been merely living in a pleasant dream.
By early 1674 the business of peace with England had been accomplished, as Mary II’s “great reversal” of her father’s alliance with France against Scotland was now transformed into the British monarchies aligned against France. Mary’s strategic thinking was that the Scottish king had proved what the counsellors of Henry VII had known 200 years earlier: England could not effectively project its power beyond the island of Britain if every time it tried it faced a war in its own north. Thus the countless doting words she spilled to “Our dear, honored and wholly beloved cousin, Uncle Henry.” With these assurances the Scots had won the island of Tortola in the Caribbean for the trouble of the 1673 invasion.
Relations with France were now as bleak as they had ever been in the entire history of the two nations. Angry heralds were dispatched to Versailles demanding explanations, and more importantly, the return of the traitor James Alexander to face justice. Louis XIV’s responses that he knew nothing, had no contact with any such relation of the King of Scotland, and felt only deepest sorrow for the death of his cousin Anne Marie Louise fell on deaf ears. In the peace negotiations at Westhorpe in 1675 Henry II was present personally to put these demands to the French plenipotentiaries, at some points leaving them fearful of physical violence.
Within the Scottish royal family, the situation was actually far worse. While the queen and her son the Duke of Rothesay had not been as close as she had been to the princesses, James now blamed his father’s efforts to rule Anne Marie Louise for the chain of events that led to her death. The king and Prince James would not reconcile before his death. Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth were likewise inconsolable, and efforts to place them in the home of a Scottish noble family appropriate to the task of training them for the marriage market and their futures as queens were rejected. The broad consensus among the Scottish nobles was that the king should remarry quickly, preferably a native girl, and return to his usual projects.
What such ideas avoided however was the passion that now consumed Henry: discovering the conspirators. Nineteen men rumored to have been among the company that traveled with the queen were arrested in 1675 and interrogated, and in that process twelve died, with the result that James Douglas, 12th Earl of Angus was arrested. Douglas, only 27, had himself at one point been rumored to have been intimate with the queen years before, only to have the king himself publicly condemn as frivolous the rumors. Douglas did not himself survive long enough in custody to be tried, much less executed for his crimes. For his part the Earl of Erroll did not wait to be implicated but fled hidden in what was marked as a barrel of spirits for France. The Marquess of Huntly attempted to flee too, but was caught on the docks of Edinburgh. He freely admitted his guilt, though he stated he knew not who else had been involved in the plot given that James Alexander acted as the common intermediary to minimize the risk lest any one conspirator be captured. Thereafter a period of lengthy negotiations between his lawyers and the crown began, which ended when he was admitted to a private audience with the king on August 7, 1677. The contents of the conversation were not recorded, but thereafter Gordon entered a guilty plea on the charge of treason, was found guilty, and on September 21 was executed. But whereas the earldoms of Erroll and Angus were reabsorbed into the crown along with all their holdings, that of Huntly was permitted to continue under the Marquess’s heir, who now came to live at court a ward (in truth, a prisoner), with the king controlling his lands and wealth.
These were only the most notable conspirators implicated: by 1680 665 Scots had been detained on orders of the king relating to the incident, of which nearly ninety were of high birth. The property transmitted to the crown by legal judgments, attainders and gifts to “clear the blood” equaled, it is believed, the size of the county of Ayrshire. Moreover, the ease with which the agents of Louis XIV operated in Scotland in the days running up to Dumbarton had persuaded Henry that he sorely needed a robust domestic spy network. Hundreds more were then implicated, with sometimes acts as small as keeping a rosary or a cross bearing the figure of Jesus enough to create sufficient suspicion to lead to an investigation. If anything, King Henry I’s old policy of the acceptance of “Quiet Observance” by the Roman Catholic nobles at home had been unpopular with the great mass of Scots, and had it not been coupled with Henry’s doing away with the bishops in the Church of Scotland it could have provoked discontent between king and kirk. Thus the great mass of Scottish opinion after the tragedy of Dumbarton was squarely on the side of the king in these efforts, reasoning that Holyrood had been too soft on the papists for too long, and that the whole Dumbarton ordeal was the natural consequence of the weakness of the kings in support of True Religion and their preference for French queens. Among Catholics, however, Henry II was now becoming known as the Scottish Tiberius. Particularly in France, his repression was vilified. Or as one English writer sympathetic with the plight of the Scottish Catholics put it memorably,
Good King Henry had an undisciplined wife whom he left free to wander the countryside when he departed to make war, invade this country and invest its cities; and that this wife then fell to mischief with King Henry so far away now all the men of Scotland suffer. Has ever more blood been shed merely because a man set aside as unwelcome his husbandly duties?
This support for the monarchy’s position was shaken somewhat as the evidence mounted that the king’s agents, the Capable Service, were now pursuing targets of investigation not because of actual suspicion but increasingly the possibility of bringing more money and wealth to the crown. To some extent this was because the death of Anne Marie Louise had a practical effect for crown finances as well. The loss of her remaining rents from France meant less revenue for the king, and even with the growing profits Henry II reaped from the slave trade the appetite of the Scottish overseas empire and the navy necessary to support it for cash was overwhelming. Legal disputes in France over her inheritance went nowhere, with Louis XIV adamant that her lands on her death reverted to the crown.
The gloom of the Edinburgh court following the death of Anne Marie Louise was relieved greatly when word leaked that the king had entered into negotiation with the German Emperor Christian to marry the surviving princesses Margaret and Elizabeth to his son and heir and his nephew. The Scottish public was by and large enthusiastic about being bound more tightly to the leading Protestant power of Europe, and the concern for moral rectitude of the Alexandrian line of the House of Wettin fit Henry II’s need to recapture a sense of propriety for the royal family perfectly. Negotiations hit a hurdle however when it became plain that Christian was willing to submit to the indignity of marrying his heir and nephew to the daughters of the most notorious adulteress in Christendom only with Jamaica thrown into the bargain. Henry flatly refused through his plenipotentiaries, and reminded Christian that his own sisters had honorably married in Scotland. Christian counteroffered that he was willing to consider Tortola as an alternative. To this Henry again flatly said no. The negotiations, conducted in tandem with talks at Westhorpe over mutually agreed-upon frontiers to the North American colonies, dragged on. Eventually, they were saved only by only a letter from Christian’s brother Charles directly to the King of Scotland proposing a separate set of terms, including a payment sub rasa for the privilege of marrying his son to a royal princess. King Henry was amenable to this notion, and in 1683 Prince Frederick performed the Scottish custom of traveling to meet his bride in her home and escorting her to her new home. In their brief appearance in Edinburgh before leaving for Wittenberg, the Princess Elizabeth seemed utterly charmed by her new husband. They married immediately in Wittenberg upon their return. Ten months later, the Duchess Elizabeth bore her first daughter, Sophie. A year after she bore their second daughter, Sybille.
Europe was meanwhile reeling from the Catastrophes. The twin sacks, of Vienna by the Ottomans and Amsterdam by the French in 1683 and 1684, triggered war across the continent on a scale that frightened the Scottish king. England and Germany both waded immediately into the conflict to eject France from the Netherlands, and the expectations of both Mary and Christian was certainly that Scotland would join them. This was the third time in Henry’s reign England, France and Germany went to war. Each time war erupted before Henry had shrewdly calculated the best course of action, in the first instance auctioning his decision-making to the highest bidder, in the second invading England in a spirited imitation of his medieval forbears. Both times, he had gauged his conduct perfectly. Now, the time came for Henry to recalibrate again, and this time he chose neutrality. There were two reasons for this: the first was that the newfound strength of France and the internal divisions of Germany, both between the Saxon kingdom and the Empire, and Wettin and Hohenzollern, led him to assess that the balance of power had shifted against the Protestant powers on the continent. But also, none of the participants in the conflict had offered him a price at which he would consider it worthwhile to participate. Certainly the arrogance of Christian I in the marriage negotiations had soured Henry on his long connection to the House of Wettin, even though the marriage of his youngest daughter to the Emperor’s nephew had given the appearance to the Saxons that their relations with Edinburgh was still cordial. Subtly, though Henry’s official relationship to Louis XIV was as sour as ever in his public diplomacy, the Scottish king subtly intimated in letters that despite all that had passed between them he would be amenable to a renewal of the auld alliance, if but Anne Marie Louise’s lands as duchesse du Montpensier that she still held at her death and the rents therefrom where to be settled on James duke of Rothesay as her heir. For his part, Louis calculated he was near enough to winning without the intervention of Scotland, and feared the alliance might be merely the first stage of a plan of betrayal. Thus Scotland remained outside the Second General War during the disastrous years of the 1680s.
Though it was not part of Henry’s design, the net effect of this policy was that banking, insurance and trade that had previously been conducted through Amsterdam was now redirected through Edinburgh, one of the few places in Europe French, Germans, English, and Dutch men of business could conduct their affairs in person safely. Moreover, whereas once Scotland’s isolation from the rest of Europe had been a detriment, the distance of the great continental armies from its shores and its own potent army and navy made it now singularly safe. It was especially well-positioned for finances pertaining to the colonial trade. The fact that Scotland’s shipping could service the colonies of the other European powers without fear—none of them wanted to take the risk of tipping Henry into the camp of their rivals—led its mercantile cargo per annum to double between 1680 and 1700. Of course, it went without saying that asides from rum, sugar and tobacco from the Caribbean precious little on those ships was made in Scotland or its colonies, which still were themselves net drains on the treasury. Instead, Scotland’s vast proceeds from the slave trade now floated its treasury.
Inevitably, the pan-European war greatly complicated Henry’s singularly pressing diplomatic objective in his concluding years, finding prestigious matches for his unhappy, quarrelsome and quite possibly illegitimate children. Following the unhappy negotiations with the Emperor, Margaret was quickly married off to Prince George of Denmark in 1684, another beneficiary of Henry II’s burning desire to build bridges with the other Protestant powers “and wash the French taste from out his mouth”, in the memorable words of one pamphleteer. This left the last marriage Henry had to negotiate, which was also the most important, that of his heir, James duke of Rothesay. Henry’s initial keenness for an imperial match had been soured by the insult to his family by the Emperor Christian. However, in 1685 Christian was killed as the Second General War slipped in the direction of France. His successor brought a new house into the imperium, that of the Hohenzollerns. Merely fifty years before the exigencies of the First General War had rendered them without title, lands or prospects. And yet now the new crisis in Germany had placed them at the apex of power and humbled their great rivals, the Wettins. The new emperor, Frederick II, desperately wanted a royal match to solidify the restored prestige of the Hohenzollerns. To that end he eagerly accepted the overtures of Henry II of Scotland. Thus in 1687 James the duke of Rothesay was married to Frederick’s seventeen year old daughter, Maria Amalia. This clinched in the eyes of Europe the legitimacy of Henry’s heirs and thus prevented any lingering problems from Anne Marie Louise’s indiscretions, perceived or real, from affecting the Scottish succession.
If the period of the Second General War was a time of prosperity for the Scots, with the growing wealth of the commercial classes now threatening to eclipse the kingdom’s hereditary nobility, it was also a time of insecurity. The perceived threat came not from the French king or the traditional rival, England, but Henry himself. Almost 800 people, 70 of whom were of high birth, were arrested as agents of foreign powers and executed for treason between 1685 and 1690 alone, and this does not include a large number of extrajudicial killings and disappearances that Henry apparently resorted to in circumstances when the evidence was insufficient or the suspect too prominent. Of course, one case stands head and shoulders above the others. In 1686 the Duke of Albany died after a long life of service to Scotland and the Stuarts. Henry had been close to Albany his entire life, and had grown up with his son James. This was the case even though James the second duke of Albany had been raised by his Roman Catholic mother in that faith himself. Having served honorably in Henry’s two wars, and served in many high offices of state besides, James for his part had five sons: Henry, Charles, James, Louis and Alexander. Of these, Henry was widely known to be mentally incompetent, and Louis had died in early childhood. In 1688 the first tragedy struck the House of Albany when the elder duke was killed, supposedly by accident, by one of the king’s huntsmen while they were in the Highlands together. At first, the only thing beyond the incident itself that raised suspicion was the king’s lack of mourning. Then later, in the king’s own will it was revealed that the huntsman in question had received a bequest three times any of the other servants of the king of a similar station. Handwriting analysis in the nineteenth century then indicated that among the unsigned letters and scraps of papers assembled by the Capable Service in its investigation of the Dumbarton scandal was messages from Albany to Louis XIV. None of these implicated him specifically in the effort to foment a revolt or permit the French to make off with the queen, but touched upon efforts to win greater religious freedom for Scottish followers of Rome. However, with King Henry that quite likely may have been reason enough.
Such a possibility makes sense, given that in 1689 the infirm Henry, third duke of Albany fell from a high window to his death of a broken neck. Charles, the second son of James duke of Albany then drowned in mysterious circumstances on a trip to the Continent. James the third son then disclaimed his inheritance and left Scotland to fight the Ottoman Turks in the army of the Habsburgs, never to return. This left the youngest son, Alexander, only fifteen in 1691, who was made a ward of the king and lived at court, with the king enjoying his rents through the time of his death. It is in these suspicious misfortunes that Henry II’s reputation as “the Scottish Tiberius,” a figure of horror and fascination, grew. For his part, Henry’s prince and heir James duke of Rothesay would neither attend his father at court nor do anything to provoke him, and openly stated his fear of his father and his certainty that King Henry “has younger sons enough to feel free to do me mischief.”
One recurrent fear during the latter period of Henry’s reign was that the threshold necessary for the Capable Service to take an interest in a person of quality was constantly declining, and the value of property or wealth that the crown could claim from a traitor’s estate was becoming ever more important than any actual subversive activities on behalf of foreign powers. Increasingly, the Capable Service was now also looking beyond the “usual suspects” of Catholic nobles, resident foreign subjects and those disaffected with the Protestant state religion. Some Protestant merchants of sufficient wealth began to feel the breath of the Capable Service on their neck, accused of trying to subject the good people of Scotland not to a pope but to the “English plague” of a rule of bishops.
In any case, such worries came to an abrupt end. Though Henry was now 62, he was robust and alert, and planned to continue actively ruling for the foreseeable future, with no plans made to surrender any of his duties to James Duke of Rothesay. It then came as a surprise when on October 25, 1691, when the king was found dead in his chamber at Holyrood. Studies of the body by the royal physicians confirmed the cause was most likely a sudden stroke. They called it the delayed but inevitable result of his heartbreak at the death of his queen seventeen years earlier.
Other, less charitable historians, look back at the latter course of his life and wonder what heart they speak of.
Last edited:
Thank you for the assistance.