BUK

Acts and proceedings of the General Assemblies of the Kirk known as The booke of the universall Kirk ed. T. Thomson (Bannatyne Club, 1839–45)

CBP

Calendar of letters and papers relating to the affairs of the Borders of England and Scotland, ed. J. Bain, London 1894–6

CSPDom.

Calendar of state papers domestic, ed. R. Lemon and others, London 1856–72, 1992–

CSPScot.

Calendar of state papers relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, ed. J. Bain and others, Edinburgh 1898–1969

CSPSpanish

Calendar of state papers, Spanish, ed. G. A. Bergenroth and others, London 1862–1954

CSPVenice

State papers and manuscripts relating to English affairs in the archives and collections of Venice and in other libraries of northern Italy, ed. R. Brown and others, London 1864–1947

HMC, Salisbury

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the marquess of Salisbury, London 1883–1930

NAS

National Archives of Scotland

RH

Recusant History

RPC

Register of the privy council of Scotland, ed. J. H. Burton and D. Masson, Edinburgh 1877–98

SHR

Scottish Historical Review

TNA

The National Archives

Anna, second daughter of Frederick ii of Denmark and Sophia of Mecklenburg, was born on 12 December 1574. Unlike her future spouse, James vi of Scotland, Anna had a happy childhood. She was brought up as a Lutheran. The marriage contract between Scotland and Denmark was agreed by August 1589. James had not considered a Catholic bride and accepted the Danish council's demand that Anna have freedom of religion and that a Lutheran pastor, John Sering, remain permanently within his wife's household. Indeed, Anna's late father had specified that all his subjects should die in the Lutheran faith.Footnote ¹ The fourteen-year-old Anna now found herself married to a Reformed Protestant, but few could have predicted that, around 1592–3, she would secretly adopt the Catholic liturgy in her private devotions. Anna did not fully convert at this time and her faith could best be described as crypto-Catholic, as she went to both Protestant and Catholic services. This may have appeared schismatic to the Counter-Reformation Catholics who surrounded her, but even they had to compromise at times in the highly-charged political and religious atmosphere of the Jacobean royal court.

There has never been a full investigation into why Anna became Catholic, though earlier work by W. Plenkers in Historisk Tiddskrift (1887–8) and Albert Loomie's 1970 article in the Huntington Library Quarterly are useful.Footnote ² Exactly when Anna converted is the subject of much debate, for there is a wide gap between attending mass and fully converting to Catholicism. The historians Alphons Bellesheim, Mary Fink, Albert Loomie, W. Plenkers, John Stevenson and A. W. Ward all suggest a date around 1600, although H. Chadwick suggested 1599 and Agnes Strickland erroneously maintained that Anna was Episcopalian.Footnote ³ In this further exploration of Anna of Denmark's faith it will be revealed that Anna's first use of Catholic liturgy was, in fact, much earlier than this. The people and processes by means of which she came to adopt and maintain Catholic worship have also been under-researched, but will be made known here through close study of the prominent women within her household, both in Scotland before 1603 and afterwards in England.

The reasons for Anna's change of religion are none the less complex and intriguing. The Lutheran Danish government had been prepared to overlook Scotland's Calvinist tendencies as the royal wedding would enhance diplomatic and trading relations between their countries. However, shortly after the Danish entourage landed in Scotland in May 1590, a theological row about Anna's coronation erupted between James and leading Presbyterian ministers. There had not been an adult coronation since before the Scottish Reformation and the debate centred on whether the oil being used in the anointing ceremony should be regarded as a civil or an ecclesiastical symbol. This episode did not endear Anna to Presbyterians, but she had been impressed by a welcoming speech made by the Catholic James Elphinstone (later earl of Balmerino) soon after her arrival in Scotland. He would become an important courtier in Anna's household, and Secretary of Scotland, despite being Catholic.Footnote ⁴

James sought a compromise with the ministers by moving the official entry into Edinburgh from the Sabbath to the following Tuesday, but he refused to ban the anointing, arguing that it was tradition rather than superstition. The coronation oath was taken in French as Anna did not yet understand Scots and she agreed to it by placing her hand on the Bible. This may have made Anna's later conversion to Catholicism easier, for it was debateable whether she really had promised to ‘defend the true religioun and … withstand and dispys [despise] all papisticall superstitiones’.Footnote ⁵ James treated elite Scottish Catholics with more regard than he did the Presbyterian ministry and there were rumours throughout Europe about his own faith. The pope was even rumoured to be offering James 10,000 ducats a month to protect ‘the Catholics in Scotland’. James would, however, never sway from Protestantism although he appears to have allowed ‘liberty of conscience’ to his wife and courtiers. He also enjoyed and encouraged theological debate with Protestant and Catholic alike. Before 1603 James had preferred to exile rather than execute priests. He therefore deeply regretted the execution of Fr John Ogilvy at Glasgow in 1615 for he had ‘no wish to see bloody heads around my deathbed’.Footnote ⁶ On the other hand he adopted a more orthodox stance against radical Protestants such as the English anti-Trinitarians Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman who were burned at the stake for heresy in 1612.Footnote ⁷

Anna's first household comprised a mixture of Scottish and Danish officials, so their religious affiliations were diverse. However in November 1590 Henrietta Stewart, countess of Huntly, offered her attendance upon the queen. The countess was a well-known Counter-Reformation Catholic and her influence on the young queen's religious outlook would prove critical. Her husband's kin, the Gordons, were still Catholic and were linked to Jesuit activities in north-east Scotland. In addition, Henrietta was the daughter of the king's much loved cousin Esmé Stewart, duke of Lennox. When Henrietta came from France in 1588 to marry George Gordon, sixth earl of Huntly, James had given them a magnificent wedding at Holyrood and 5,000 merks (£3,333 Scots) to cover their travelling expenses. James was therefore delighted to have Henrietta back at court, yet a year later when there was talk of Lady Huntly leaving, one observer noted that it would ‘well please the best affected in Scotland that fear to find no good fruit in religion coming by her company with the queen, who presently is thought to be with child’. If Anna was pregnant in 1591, she probably had a miscarriage, to which she was sadly prone. Indeed the lack of an heir to the throne may have been one of the reasons why Anna turned towards Catholicism. Henrietta and Anna had become close friends and confidantes by 1591, but to placate her critics Henrietta promised to accept the reformed faith. This was politically adept, but religiously insincere.Footnote ⁸

In his 1608 account of Queen Anna's conversion, the Jesuit Robert Abercromby wrote that Anna ‘had seen a priest who daily celebrated Mass’ whilst ‘very young, and resident for her education in the house of a certain great princess who was a Catholic’. W. Plenkers investigated this claim in 1887, but was unable to identify the princess.Footnote ⁹ The influence of the countess of Huntly would prove far more significant to Queen Anna's conversion than this mysterious lady. In December 1593 Anna was reported ‘to be very well enclyned unto Catholique religion, beeing thereunto partly perswaded by the Lady Huntley, of whome she hathe receaved a Catholique Catechisme in French, which she much esteemeth’.Footnote ¹⁰ Anna had learned French prior to her marriage, in order to have a common language with her husband and Scottish courtiers.

Anna probably found Scottish Catholics far friendlier than the Presbyterians who were overly critical of her behaviour and friendship with known Catholics, whose movements were carefully monitored both by leading Presbyterian ministers and by the English ambassador, Robert Bowes. The queen was not openly suspected at this time, although she had begun to adopt Catholic worship in the privacy of her chambers during 1592–3. This secrecy was indicative of Anna's awareness of the volatile political and religious situation in Scotland for she was noted as a ‘wise ladie for her years’. Any Presbyterians observing the queen at prayer or taking communion may have been fooled into thinking that Anna was observing her permitted Lutheran liturgy. In the late sixteenth century some Lutheran practices were not so different from Catholic ones to Presbyterian eyes. For example every Sunday service in Denmark incorporated communion, rather than the four communions a year advocated by Calvinism. Moreover, as a prelude and prerequisite to Lutheran communion Danes had to confess and receive absolution. Confession and absolution had been abandoned in Scotland at the time of the Reformation in 1560.Footnote ¹¹

Anna's support in January 1593 for the notorious Catholic messenger, George Ker, is revealing. Ker had been apprehended just as he was about to sail to Spain in late December 1592. He was found to be carrying the infamous ‘Spanish Blanks’. These were eight blank pieces of paper signed by the earls of Huntly, Errol and Angus supposedly offering to support a Spanish invasion of England, by way of Scotland. William Crichton, a Scottish Jesuit resident in Spain, was supposedly going to fill in these blank pages with terms negotiated with King Philip ii. English agents had been warning James vi about the activities of the earls since 1589, but he had delayed taking any actions against them for reasons that were partly political. These men were also the king's friends and they controlled large areas of Scotland on his behalf. James had not regarded them as a threat, but for the sake of Anglo-Scottish relations and his long-term ambition to succeed to the English throne he made a token march north to apprehend them. None was arrested and George Ker conveniently escaped from prison, preventing any trial about the ‘Blanks’. James pleaded poverty rather than indifference to any Catholic threat: he simply did not have enough men, ships or arms to take on these powerful earls. He also needed their support as a counter-weight to the nefarious Francis Stewart, earl of Bothwell, who was in open rebellion against him. Another possible reason is that James did not want to alienate English Catholics by taking action against leading Scottish Catholics. The queen's friendship with the earls and their wives was another important influence upon James as Anna freely interceded on their behalf. The king would, however, have been less tolerant of his consort's continuing friendship with Bothwell, who posed a greater threat to him than Huntly, Errol or Angus.Footnote ¹²

When some marital friction occurred in 1593 the king failed to be a commanding patriarch within his marriage, for he asked the ministers Robert Bruce and David Lindsay to talk to Anna. She did not appreciate their interference and distrusted Bruce as he was staunchly Presbyterian and a friend of her political bête noire, the Chancellor John Maitland. Anna still attended sermons, but boycotted those preached at Holyroodhouse Chapel by Patrick Galloway, James's personal minister. Galloway's vehement anti-Catholic rhetoric was hardly likely to endear him to Anna and the Catholic members of her household. In October 1593 a leading Scottish Jesuit, William Crichton, assured the head of the Society, Claudio Acquaviva, that Anna ‘had separated herself from the heretics and showed favour to the Catholic ladies, who in their turn had a great opinion of her and the greatest hopes’.Footnote ¹³

By the end of 1593 James and Anna were anticipating the birth of their first child, but the arrival of Prince Henry on 19 February 1594 caused a serious rift between them. Anna was unhappy at the prospect of her child being placed in the Protestant household of the earl of Mar at Stirling. She wanted her children to remain with her and be brought up as she had been in Denmark, surrounded by her brothers and sisters. The paranoid James wanted Henry kept well away from danger, so his heir was destined to have the same solitary nurturing at Stirling that James himself had experienced under the supervision of the formidable Annabelle Murray, dowager countess of Mar. It is significant that all the other royal children born before 1603 were placed in Catholic households more favourable to Anna's wishes. In 1596 Princess Elizabeth was given into the care of the Catholic Helen Hay, Lady Livingstone, where she was joined by Princess Margaret in 1599. Anna was able to visit her daughters and have them stay with her at Dunfermline where Prince Charles was born in 1600. Charles was placed with Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie (later earl of Dunfermline), a prominent courtier and crypto-Catholic friend of the royal couple who had been educated by the Jesuits in Rome. He also had the care of Prince Robert in 1602, but neither Robert nor Margaret survived infancy.Footnote ¹⁴ It was no coincidence that the countess of Huntly was chief gossip (godparent) at all the royal births, for which she was richly rewarded. In 1594 it was said that her gifts were ‘liberal and far exceeding the common order and proportion used here’. Anna and James were, nevertheless, careful to name their children in a manner that would flatter Elizabeth i. It was not until after the English queen's death that a daughter was named in memory of Mary, Queen of Scots. Leading Presbyterian ministers did not become involved in the royal couple's arguments over Henry's guardianship as he was in a Protestant household. However they were aggrieved at Catholic control of all the other royal siblings. Lady Elizabeth remained with the Livingstones even though they were excommunicated in 1597. The ministers also disliked the post of governess to Prince Charles being granted in February 1602 to the fervently Catholic Jane Drummond, who had a particular role in maintaining the queen's Catholicism after 1603.Footnote ¹⁵ The young Jane Drummond, a daughter of Patrick third Lord Drummond, was a very significant influence in the queen's household. She was introduced to Anna in 1590 by her Catholic brother-in-law, Alexander Seton, and her kinsman James Elphinstone. Jane's Catholicism had its source in her mother's family, the Lindsays.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed Samuel Rawson Gardiner credited Jane Drummond with being ‘the main instrument in attaching … Queen Anne to the religion which she herself professed’.Footnote ¹⁷

Whether James knew about Anna's use of Catholic liturgy as early as 1592 is not known, although he would later urge her to practise her faith in secret whilst exploiting it when negotiating with Catholic interests at home and abroad. James was prepared to negotiate with any foreign power as he became increasingly frustrated at Elizabeth i's refusal to name him as her heir. When Anna's Danish jeweller fled to England with some of her jewels in 1594, no crucifix was subsequently recovered. Anna may not have possessed one at the time but the thief was intercepted by her friend the earl of Bothwell, who was in hiding in England at the time. Bothwell would have been unlikely to turn a Catholic symbol over to the anti-Catholic English authorities. A decade later, in 1606, Anna had no fewer than eleven crosses listed in an inventory of her jewels, including one that had belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots. This would have been a highly prized possession as the story of the execution, or martyrdom, of Mary would have been related to Anna by her Catholic friends, and could well have been another reason why Anna switched to Catholicism. Indeed, when copies of the English poet Edmund Spenser's new six-part Faerie queene (1596) arrived in Scotland, Anna was compelled to defend the reputation of her mother-in-law and husband, who were seemingly ridiculed in this work. She made her anger known to the English ambassador, who informed Queen Elizabeth, as Spenser had dedicated his epic poem to her and had been richly rewarded.Footnote ¹⁸

In April 1595 Jesuits were again being sent to Scotland in hopes of converting James. They had had such aspirations for many years and and would continue to nurture them in the future, but now they knew that Anna was ‘reconciled’ to Catholicism and was considering full conversion. This ‘great secret’ was revealed when the itinerant Fr Morton brought a small shrine made of gold ‘with the history of the passion, fynlie wrocht [finely worked] in imagrie’ to the Scottish Court. It was sent as a gift from Cardinal Cajetan in Rome and, significantly, was first given to James, who then ‘delivered it to the queen’. This event was reported to the Danish ambassador, Christian Barnekow, but he was sceptical about the king's links to Rome. However, he said nothing of the queen's faith, so Barnekow and James probably did know of Anna's Catholicism by the mid-1590s. James would, nevertheless, have insisted upon secrecy to protect his hopes of succession to the English throne.Footnote ¹⁹

Attitudes to Catholic priests at the Scottish and at the English royal court in the 1590s differed greatly. Unofficially James vi welcomed Jesuits at his court, but in England they were despised as public enemies. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland took a similar line in declaring them traitors, but the king mostly ignored its injunctions. James made use of one of the leading Scottish Jesuits, James Gordon, uncle of his friends the earl and countess of Huntly. Orders for Gordon to leave the country had been issued in 1590 and 1592, but were never enforced. James Gordon even travelled to Rome on James's behalf in 1594 and returned with a papal nuncio, George Sampiretti, and the promised 10,000 crowns to protect Scottish Catholics. Ironically this money was used by James to put down a rebellion on 3 October 1594 led by the ‘popish’ earls of Huntly and Errol, known as the battle of Glenlivet. Leading Presbyterians often tried to outlaw Jesuits, but when parliament eventually passed an act against them in 1598 Gordon's name was crossed out, probably at the king's insistence. Gordon's kinship, and the fact that he never questioned James's rights as a ‘heretic’ monarch, allowed him privileged access to the king. As superior of the Jesuit mission to Scotland Gordon negotiated with the king on behalf of elite Scottish Catholics during much of 1598. The king reluctantly imprisoned Gordon, who sensing that the situation had turned against the Catholics ‘betook himself to Denmark to await better days’ with letters of commendation from both James and Anna. Gordon thereafter returned to teaching at Scots colleges in the Low Countries and France.Footnote ²⁰

The battle of Glenlivet had serious consequences for the earls of Huntly and Errol and their wives. The king's toleration of elite Catholics had been pushed too far and by the spring of 1595 the earls, along with the mischievous earl of Bothwell, were sent into exile. For Anna this situation was even more serious than the summer of 1593 when, in the aftermath of the Spanish Blanks affair, the countess of Huntly had left court for a few months to placate Queen Elizabeth. Henrietta had remained ‘in good grace with the King and Queen’, but during 1595–6 she had to leave court again. The countess used personal pleading for the restoration of her banished husband as a pretext for coming back, but she was placed under house arrest at Stirling in early 1596. None the less she was back to attend the birth of Princess Elizabeth at Dunfermline in August 1596 and in October disingenuously signed the articles of religion before the Synod of Moray, to facilitate her husband's restoration.Footnote ²¹

Meanwhile Anna's faith was still baffling observers, for two reports noted her as a Lutheran who favoured Catholics, but who was significantly ‘far removed from Calvinism’. She probably used the same ‘subtile forme of practise’ as the countess of Huntly to hide from the wrath of the Presbyterian ministry.Footnote ²² By February 1596 Elizabeth i was alarmed by these reports and ordered her ambassador, Robert Bowes, to speak with Anna. Bowes warned her ‘to beware to prefer or cherish any suspected in religion’. Anna was skilled enough to fob Bowes off by assuring him that she still went to reformed church services, though she never took communion. She also ‘liked not to reveal the names of the practisers’ – that is the Catholics – who had drawn her away from Protestantism. Remarkably this left both sides satisfied for the time being. By practising Catholicism in private and Protestantism in public, Anna was attempting to keep the peace with England and the Presbyterians. Bowes realised that he was dealing with a charming, but shrewd young woman. Elizabeth may have thought that the young queen was just being naive, but the last thing that English courtiers wanted was a potential successor who had a Catholic wife.Footnote ²³

Leading Presbyterian ministers were not so easily fooled. Matters came to a head in 1596 when the General Assembly openly criticised the royal family's behaviour. James, for example, was cited for swearing, whilst he and Anna were noted for having too many Catholics in their company. Anna was singled out for ‘not repairing to the word and sacraments, night-waking and balling’ and for allowing ‘all her gentlewemen’ to do likewise. The Assembly was of the clear opinion that Anna's ‘ministrie’ needed ‘to be reformit’ and they evidently did not appreciate Anna's zest for entertainments.Footnote ²⁴ Anna would no doubt have regarded them as thorough-going killjoys and continued to antagonise them by soliciting a pardon for the disgraced earl of Huntly and then placing her newborn daughter Princess Elizabeth in the Catholic Livingstone household. This time she was criticised for ‘favouring and dealing for the enemies of the truthe … and speeking contemptouslie and reproachfully of the ministrie; as also for want of godlie and vertuous exercise among her maids, and spending of all tyme in vanitie’. When the ministers Robert Bruce, Andrew Melville and John Davidson went to Holyroodhouse to see Anna about her ungodly behaviour she was defiant. Anna ‘was at the dancing’, so they were asked ‘to come at another time’.Footnote ²⁵

David Black, minister at St Andrews, then preached a vociferous sermon that attacked Anna directly. He stated that ‘as for the quene we most also pray for hir for the fassioun, bot we have na caus to pray for hir: scho will nevir do us gude’. Just for good measure he called Elizabeth i an atheist and was promptly warded for his outburst.Footnote ²⁶ When Anna realised that Black's wife had been forced to flee her Edinburgh house she tried to have it restored to her, proving that she was still prepared to help Catholics and Protestants alike. Anna demonstrated both political shrewdness and compassion by interceding on behalf of imprisoned ministers and their families until she left Scotland in 1603. There can be no doubt that she pitied Mrs Black, yet Anna was mindful that commissioners from the General Assembly had recently visited her and may have been trying to placate them. The commissioners had ‘received sweet and comfortable answer’ from the ever gracious Anna, but like Ambassador Bowes they ‘feared the Lady Huntly having exceeding interest in her and her affection toward this lady shall over far possess and draw her or the king's heart estranged towards the ministers’.

It was not just the countess of Huntly's influence that prominent Presbyterians feared in 1596. Anna's friendship with the Catholic Lady Seton, mother of her trusted officer Alexander Seton, also alarmed them. The Setons' adherence to Catholicism was as strong as that of the Huntlys. Like the them they had long intrigued with Spain, so it is not coincidental that a Spanish source first noted Anna as a Catholic in December 1592. Anna had apparently ‘told several Catholic ladies, and particularly the mother of Lord Seton, that she is really a Catholic, and prays by the rosary’. Other Catholics in Anna's circle included the fiscally and legally adept Thomas Hamilton (later earl of Melrose) and her revered architect, William Schaw. Besides the prominent Jane Drummond, other Catholic gentlewomen of the queen's chamber included Elizabeth Gordon of Gight, wife of the powerful courtier Sir George Home (later earl of Dunbar).Footnote ²⁷

By March 1597 it was again noticed that ‘papists’ were drawing ‘the Scottish queen to unusual observance’. Within a month John Petit wrote from Brussels that ‘the Queen of Scots is converted and wants but absolution’, though he later contradicted this by hoping that James ‘and his Queen will also be converted’.Footnote ²⁸ Lady Huntly was entrenched at court once more and the guardianship of her son was entrusted to the queen. The Huntly estates were now protected by royal intervention as well. Anna had strongly disapproved of James's move against the Catholic earls and lent the royal ‘H’ jewel to Lady Errol ‘sayeing it was litle enoughe that she had it a night for the casting downe of her husbandes house’.Footnote ²⁹ There was no more open hostility between the crown and the leading Presbyterians for nearly two years, yet there was continual pressure on elite Catholics like the restored earl and countess of Huntly to subscribe to their confession of faith. The royal truce ended with the celebrations on the birth of Princess Margaret on 24 December 1598. Presbyterian ministers were offended that there was ‘great feasting and pastime … at Christmas’. When James officially shortened Lent by a week to allow for Margaret's baptismal feast in April 1599 and elevated the earl and countess of Huntly to a marquisate at these celebrations, the ministers were incensed.Footnote ³⁰

Rumours that both king and queen were Catholic sympathisers abounded, yet it would probably be taking things too far to suggest that Prince Henry would be sent to France to be brought up as a Catholic. Anna was none the less reported as ‘suspected to be a papist’ in April 1599.Footnote ³¹ The Catholics within Anna's household were bolstered in 1599 with the presence of Robert Abercromby sj at Holyroodhouse. Abercromby was well known to James vi, whom he had first met back in 1580, and he took the credit for converting the queen in 1608 even though she had been attracted to Catholicism since at least 1592. Abercromby's account of her conversion was retrospective with few accurate dates and no mention of the Gordons, who should have been given equal credit. Both James and Anna were corresponding with Rome at this time and they would have taken advice on their letters from Abercromby. James was still perceived as the heir of a martyr by the pope, even though he practised the Protestant religion. Clement viii was said to ‘affect him most for his lerning and puir lyif’. Having a Catholic spouse was an added incentive for papal interest and James Beaton was already acting as a Scots ambassador in Rome during June 1598, to further the king's claim to the English throne. In 1600 James sent Patrick Stewart, the Capuchin brother of the earl of Atholl, to Rome ‘to ask for the money promised by his holiness’. However, James typically denied writing to this pope when later confronted with the evidence. He also sent an ambassador to Philip iii of Spain in 1600 to seek his support for his claim to to the English throne and probably used his wife's Catholicism as a bargaining counter there as well.Footnote ³²

Robert Abercromby became disillusioned with James when he suspected that his overtures to Rome were merely a political ploy to get the pope's support for his claim to England's crown. Abercromby left royal circles and went into hiding in the north-east where he was shielded by the Huntlys until he left Scotland in 1606. One abortive search for him in 1602 deliberately targeted Anna's palace at Dunfermline, which incensed the king and queen.Footnote ³³ After 1600 Anna was much less secretive about her Catholicism as full conversion made her bolder in her defence of her faith. One anonymous writer called her a ‘zealous Catholic’ and reported that James too was well inclined towards Catholicism ‘because an Agnus Dei given him by the queen had miraculously saved him in a tempest at sea stirred up by witches, as the witches themselves confessed’. This would appear to be a confused tale based upon Anna's abortive voyages to Scotland back in 1589, when storms in the North Sea prevented her landing in Scotland. They were blamed on witchcraft and the king took a personal interest in the subsequent witch trials, but he himself was not caught up in any sea tempests. The commentator thought that these stories were ‘only a Scottish device to fish for money’ and he was probably right.Footnote ³⁴ Anna sensed that her husband's right to the English throne was being put at risk by her more open Catholicism, so she still publicly defended Presbyterian ministers like Robert Bruce after James deprived him of his living in 1600. This was not enough to placate Elizabeth i, who again ordered her ambassador to report, but their inquiries were impeded for Anna was fortuitously pregnant again.Footnote ³⁵

Prince Charles was born on 19 November 1600 and baptised on 23 December with a degree of pomp and ceremony that antagonised the Presbyterians as it was so close to Christmas. Anna did not attend any of the baptisms, as tradition dictated, but her Catholic friends were prepared to be seen as schismatic by taking part. For instance the marquis and marchioness of Huntly and Lord Livingstone played prominent roles at this ceremony. It was observed that ‘the Lady Marchioness of Huntley bare the Bairn instead of the Nourice [nurse], within the said Pall all the time of sermon’.Footnote ³⁶

The General Assembly demanded that more ministers be placed in both royal households and that all known Catholics be expelled from court. James and Anna agreed to the ministers, but refused to reassign the guardianship of their children or to expel their Catholic friends. By May of 1602 there was said to be ‘a great brawling betwixt the Church and the Queen’ on this matter.Footnote ³⁷ Anna was still taking a crypto-Catholic stance in order to ‘win the people's heart’, attending the Abbey Church in the spring of 1601 and continuing to go to ‘the parish preaching, but not to Mr Patrick Galloway's preaching at Holyroodhouse’.Footnote ³⁸ This public relations exercise was marred when one of Anna's maids had to apologise for ‘accidentally’ going to mass. This was followed by an argument between the royal couple over the execution of James Wood of Bonnington. Wood was a Catholic and one of the queen's messengers; his sister, Margaret, was in Anna's household. Although condemned for rebellion and the theft of his father's charter chest, rather than his Catholic faith, Wood was nevertheless considered a Catholic martyr. Letters from Anna to the pope, which Bonnington had been carrying at the time of his arrest, were still delivered. Fortuitously they had not fallen into the hands of the Presbyterian ministry or English agents and thus did not jeopardise the Union of the Crowns. In July 1601 Anna had also written a letter to Cardinal Borghese, the self-styled defender of the Scottish monarchy, assuring him that she was a good Catholic. Anna now adopted her friend, the long-disgraced earl of Bothwell, as an intermediary between herself and Rome.Footnote ³⁹

Anna's household was regularly visited by priests, so the Lutheran pastor John Sering petitioned the Danish Council and Anna's brother, King Christian iv, to return to Denmark. However, as he was both a pastor and a good source of intelligence for the Danes, he was not allowed to leave until after Anna's death in 1619. He appears to have been known affectionately within the queen's household as ‘Hairy Hans’, and still served the Lutherans there. Sering nevertheless became sympathetic towards Presbyterianism, which alienated him from the queen and further assisted her conversion to Catholicism.Footnote ⁴⁰

Letters sent directly from Clement viii to Anna and James during the summer of 1602 welcomed her conversion and hoped that she would influence her son Henry and give him a Catholic education.Footnote ⁴¹ Anna had no influence over Henry and shrewdly continued to plead the case of Protestant ministers, such as Robert Bruce, and their families, when they found themselves on the wrong side of James. Andrew Melville even gained his liberty thanks to her intervention in June 1602.Footnote ⁴² This surely indicates that her Catholicism was of a milder nature than that of diehard Counter-Reformation Catholics who would never have defended Protestants, as well as her continuing political awareness. Some elite Scottish Catholics attended both Protestant and Catholic services to indicate token conformity. Unlike in England, these Scots were not labelled as schismatics by their priests for doing this: pragmatism prevailed. Even the Huntlys had subscribed to the articles of religion to make peace with the Presbyterians, though they proved to be somewhat insincere Protestants. Alexander Seton proved that one could be Chancellor of Scotland, yet still be Catholic in private. While his Catholic wife and children never attended church, he craftily had a crucifix carved on his kneeling desk in Dunfermline parish church. Seton and the other leading Catholics were being practical, just like their queen. They were also bowing to the wishes of the king, who sought token conformity from his own household and leading courtiers after the Union of the Crowns in 1603.Footnote ⁴³

James's tolerance of Catholic officials and courtiers, including crypto-Catholics and church papists, was a feature of his court in England, as it had been in Scotland. Although Elizabeth made the Roman Catholic earl of Worcester her Master of the Horse in 1601 (she apparently remarked ‘that he “reconciled what she believed irreconcilable, a stiff papist to a good subject”’), an instance of James's tolerance of crypto-Catholics in England is the favour that he showed to Henry Howard, earl of Northampton (and Northampton's kin, the Suffolks), which Elizabeth did not.Footnote ⁴⁴ His toleration, however, depended on the person being a loyal Roman Catholic, outwardly conforming to the English Church and rejecting the papal deposing power.Footnote ⁴⁵

In 1603 Anna's mild Catholicism did not jeopardise James's succession to the English throne. However her refusal to participate in any form of Protestant communion service before leaving Scotland was obvious. It was not unknown for James to take communion whilst Anna abstained. Indeed, as early as 1593 Anna had referred to the Calvinist communion as something ‘she could very aptly lyken … unto a taverne breackfast’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Anna's Catholicism was also an open ‘secret’ in England, confirmed by her firm refusal to take communion at the coronation on 27 July 1603.Footnote ⁴⁷ Furthermore, there is no record that she ever partook of the sacrament at an Anglican service, including the first communions of her children after their confirmation.Footnote ⁴⁸ In January 1604, only a few months after Anna's refusal to take communion at her coronation, ‘the English adventurer Sir Anthony Standen’, returned from ‘a tour of Catholic countries, evidently on James's behalf’. He carried with him for the queen, a ‘message of goodwill’ from the pope, ‘along with relics, rosaries and other devotional objects … to sustain her faith and apparently to encourage her to extend her religious influence over her husband and children’.Footnote ⁴⁹

On 24 January 1604 Sir Robert Cecil wrote a detailed account of the Standen affair to Sir Thomas Parry, the English ambassador in Paris.Footnote ⁵⁰ Parry had alerted Cecil to the imminent arrival of these objects by forwarding to him an intercepted letter from Standen to the Jesuit priest, Robert Persons dated 27 December 1603.Footnote ⁵¹Inter alia, Standen had written that ‘The Queen is warned from dealing in Catholic causes, and she is very assiduous at sermons, so that I am in a stagger because of my tokens, for that you know the laws in that case and the dangers they threaten, yet will I make the sign of the cross and forward with them.’Footnote ⁵² Being discovered, questioned and imprisoned before he could meet with the queen, Standen was prevented from presenting the gifts to her and, as Cecil reported to Parry, ‘all things appointed for her Majesty, are safely reserved, to be returned back again sub silentio’.Footnote ⁵³ James was at pains to refute the notion that the queen was a Catholic: Cecil passed on the king's ‘pleasure’ that Parry inform the pope through the papal nuncio in Paris

James was also angered that the pope should presume ‘to serve himself by so improper a meane for his Ma^tys conversion, whose faith is grounded upon the true foundation of Gods holy word, without possibility to be shaken’.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, despite the king's strongly worded denial of his wife's Catholicism and ability to convert him, Catholic writers continued to pursue Anna in this respect. Philip Woodward, in his New Year's gift to her of his translation of The dialogues of S. Gregorie (printed in Paris in 1608), reminded her of St Gregory's letters to ‘Aldiberga, Queene of England … encouraging her by the example of Saint Helena (the glory of great Britayne) to labour the conversion of the kinge and his people’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Moreover, Anna did not disassociate herself from Standen. According to the Venetian ambassador in Rome, writing in March 1606,

On 15 August 1606, in a letter in Italian to the duchess of Tuscany Anna ‘recommends her subject and servant Anthony Standen, travelling in Italy to quiet his conscience and exercise his religion’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Much has been written on the issue of Anna's Roman Catholicism, as well as a detailed account of the conformist side of her church papistry by Peter McCullough.Footnote ⁵⁹ What is less well known is how the queen practised her faith, and the significant role played by her Roman Catholic servants in facilitating that practice and masking it from public view.Footnote ⁶⁰ The nature of the evidence is probably responsible for this as it is largely indirect and questionable, consisting of report, rumour, gossip and wishful thinking on the part of priests and Catholic ambassadors and newsletter-writers. This was the inevitable result of the necessarily covert nature of the queen's private religious life. However, a measure of insight into this ‘secret’ world can be gained through a process of inference and speculation, the gathering together of scattered fragments of evidence already published in primary and secondary works, and the addition of fragments of new evidence from manuscript sources, published and unpublished.

When Anna left Scotland in June 1603 she brought with her, as her First Lady of the Bedchamber, the zealously Catholic Jane Drummond (later countess of Roxburgh). She was none other than the young woman whose appointment as a royal governess in 1602 had been opposed by prominent Presbyterians. The Jesuit Fr Abercromby, in September 1608, claimed to have received a letter from ‘[o]ne of the leading ladies at the Court … that she can no longer enjoy the free practice of her religion which she had while in Scotland’.Footnote ⁶¹ Anna was thus obliged to practise her faith in ‘secret’ and Jane Drummond, through her intimate and constant service until 1617, is critical to any understanding of Anna's continued adherence to Roman Catholicism and the means by which she practised it in England.

Peter McCullough claims (and convincingly demonstrates) that Anna was ‘one of Jacobean England's consummate “church papists”’, attending Protestant services and sermons and having Protestant chaplains and preachers in her court and household while privately practising her Roman Catholic faith. This was a common practice in Scotland and England and one which the Catholic mission sanctioned.Footnote ⁶² However, if the reports of Catholic priests allegedly in attendance on the queen (as relayed by Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, to Philip iii) can be credited, she paid a private price for her church papistry as the priests often withheld the sacrament and confession from her.Footnote ⁶³

Jane Drummond's key role in the queen's private practice of Catholicism was supported by other Catholic Bedchamber staff, and by the Bedchamber itself. It is worth noting, as McCullough and Loomie have observed, that in contrast to the experience in Scotland before 1603, there was no high-profile group of Catholic women (and men) gathered around Anna as a political force or faction;Footnote ⁶⁴ nor did the queen favour Catholic over Protestant women in appointments to places in her privy chamber.Footnote ⁶⁵ To do so would have attracted unwanted attention. The queen's small enclave of intimate Roman Catholic Bedchamber attendants – Jane Drummond (until 1617), Lady Anne Hay and Lady Anna Livingstone (early in the reign), and her pages Piero Hugon (and possibly Matthew Harestanes), served the purpose well.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, the most private space in which Anna could hear mass or make her confession was the Bedchamber or an ante-room adjoining it, to which only those sworn of the Bedchamber were allowed access. According to Gardiner, basing his argument on the Spanish ambassador's despatches to Philip iii in 1613 and 1614, Denmark House (Anna's London residence in the Strand) apparently had an even more secluded space: ‘those who were admitted to her privacy in Denmark House knew well that, as often as she thought she could escape observation, the Queen of England was in the habit of repairing to a garret, for the purpose of hearing mass from the lips of a Catholic priest, who was smuggled in for the purpose’.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, the Spanish ambassador's report may be misleading or mistaken. Recent work on Denmark [Somerset] House, and the 1619 inventory of its contents, reveals a room more suitable for the purpose in the main part of the palace: ‘The “little room between the two galleries” [which] was hung with pictures of Christ, Mary and Martha … [and] also furnished with a ‘Crucifix in a case of Ebony’. Thus ‘Was this room, easily reached from Anne's innermost lodgings, in fact her secret oratory filled with devotional pictures’?Footnote ⁶⁸

Anna also purportedly took the opportunity sometime between 1603 and 1608, of a ‘mere visit of compliment’ to the Spanish ambassador to hear mass and take communion, but as this drew a strong reaction from the king it is unlikely that it was repeated.Footnote ⁶⁹ Peter McCullough has suggested that ‘the privy closet would have provided the perfect place for clandestine celebration of the Mass’, but this is unlikely.Footnote ⁷⁰ The privy closet was usually located between the presence and privy chambers, making it a relatively ‘public’ space, accessible to a larger number of people than the Bedchamber.Footnote ⁷¹ Items purchased by her Clerk of the Closet ‘for the service of the Queen in [her] closet’, communion linen, a Bible, psalters and ‘two great Communion service Bookes’Footnote ⁷² suggest that Protestant holy communion services was held there, but it is unlikely that Anna herself communicated.Footnote ⁷³ If she did so in private, why refuse to take the Protestant communion in public?

Gondomar reported to Philip iii in 1617 that Anna had told him that she had a Catholic chaplain and a confessor at Oatlands, her palace in Surrey. The chaplain said mass daily and other Catholics partook ‘in the Queen's presence’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Oatlands had an oratory decorated with twenty-three paintings, nineteen of which had religious subjects. Adjoining the oratory was a closet which also had eight religious paintings as well as a portrait of one of Anna's brothers.Footnote ⁷⁵ Perhaps significantly, one of the religious paintings was of Queen Hester [Esther], who is credited in the Old Testament Book of Esther with interceding with her husband, the Persian king Xerxes, to save the life of her people, the Jews. In his dedicatory epistle to Anna in his 1610 work, A brief admonition to all English Catholikes, concerning a late proclamation set forth against them, the priest Michael Walpole [alias Christopherson] reminded her that the ‘history of Hester [was] not unknowne to [her] … And why should not Queen Anne prevaile as farr with King Iames for Ancient and Christian Catholikes?’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such a room, accessible only to those with entrée to the Bedchamber, with such a painting, may well have served the purpose for the queen's private Catholic devotions and mass away from the capital.

Jane Drummond's Catholicism did not draw adverse comment, nor cause any problems (at least any recorded problems) in England until 1630 when Charles i wished to bring her back to court as governess to his eldest son, Prince Charles. Objections were made on the grounds of her religion, and the Protestant countess of Dorset (Mary Sackville, née Curzon) was appointed instead.Footnote ⁷⁷ Jane's situation at the Jacobean court might have been different if Charles had married a Catholic princess while she was still in his mother's service. In 1614 the Spanish ambassador noted that Anna was ‘a Catholic and her Lady of the Bedchamber most Catholic, and [that] it is in the company of these two persons that the Princess [the Spanish Infanta] will have to be, which will greatly lessen the inconvenience of the attraction of the wife and children to the husband’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The presence of a Catholic princess at court would have exposed the open ‘secret’ of the queen's Catholicism and that of her First Lady to more public view, even in the unlikely event that a Spanish princess would have been allowed by her confessors to follow the queen's example of hearing the mass privately but publicly hearing Protestant sermons.Footnote ⁷⁹ Conversely, an Infanta's presence might also have encouraged the queen and Jane Drummond to practise their faith more openly, possibly leading to the formation of a ‘papist enclave’ at her court which Anna, on her own, wisely did not seek to encourage.Footnote ⁸⁰

As Anna could neither openly attend a Catholic mass, nor openly keep priests and confessors, a way around the problem was apparently devised. Priests were probably concealed as ‘servants’ of Jane Drummond. That such a practice was adopted is revealed by Alonso de Velasco, the Spanish ambassador, in a letter to Philip iii of 27 September [n.s.] 1611. Velasco reported that ‘Mass was being said by a Scottish priest, who was simply called a ‘servant’ of [the queen's] lady-in-waiting, Lady Drummond'.Footnote ⁸¹ Two years later, the seminary priest and newsletter-writer, Anthony Champney, wrote from Paris to Thomas More, agent of the secular clergy in Rome, that ‘a priest “of the Order of St John of Hierusaleme” … had been in England “for these two yeares and more and haunted the court knowne to the kinge and sayd mass before the queene and her mayd ladie Dromond”, though he had eventually been imprisoned in the Gatehouse and then exiled’.Footnote ⁸² Apart from this, and Gondomar's report that Anna had priests at Oatlands, further evidence of other priests being present at court, privy to conversations between the king and queen, and enjoying ‘private conference … sub sigillo secreto’ with Anna (the queen even rewarding one with £30) has also been discovered in the archives of Westminster Cathedral in London among other newsletters written by Catholic priests.Footnote ⁸³

This evidence suggests that James tolerated the presence of priests at court provided that they remained hidden, acting against them only when the matter was brought publicly to his attention, as apparently was the case with the priest whose presence there was reportedly known to him.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this respect, James was still adopting the same policy as in Scotland before 1603. Why had the priest been able to say mass for two years, if not through the protection of Jane Drummond, concealed as her ‘servant’? Although imprisoned, why was he let off so lightly? The most likely explanation is that James did not wish to draw wider attention to the priest's presence. Not only would this be clear evidence of his wife's Catholicism, but it also opened up the prospect of his being exposed to public criticism for allowing priests to frequent the court. Moreover, harbouring a priest was a capital felony in England.Footnote ⁸⁵

The critical role played by Jane Drummond in the private practice of the queen's religion makes all the more inexplicable, at first glance, Anna's insistence on the ‘retirement’ of her First Lady in 1617. The ostensible reason for her enforced departure was that her husband had sought the office of chamberlain in Prince Charles's household without informing the queen.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, her departure appears to have had a deeper political motivation, associated with the queen turning, at this time, against a Spanish match for her son and towards a French one. This might not originally have set the queen against Jane. Nevertheless, it probably added fuel to the fire, making Jane, who was a pensioner of Spain, a casualty among others of ‘the Spanish party’ (including notably Sir John Digby) who all fell spectacularly out of favour with Anna in the wake of her volte face. In reporting this situation on 8 September [n.s.] 1617, the Venetian Secretary wrote: ‘it has appeared like an outrage to see Mrs. Drummond [then countess of Roxburghe] also deprived of her favour’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Who replaced Jane as the queen's Roman Catholic confidante and the person who facilitated the presence of priests at court? Not Lady Grey de Ruthen, her successor, despite the Catholicism of her mother, the countess of Shrewsbury, and of her sister the countess of Arundel. In reporting on Jane Drummond's replacement in a despatch to Philip iii, Gondomar commented that Lady Ruthen was ‘completely different, inasmuch as Mrs. Drummond was a very good Catholic’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Catholic Lady St John was reportedly in competition for the place, her chances enhanced because she was believed to be ‘turning from Poperie’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Apparently it was acceptable for the Catholic Jane Drummond to be First Lady as she had come from Scotland with the queen, but for a Catholic to win the place in open competition was a different matter.

A curious piece of evidence suggests that Jane Drummond's replacement as Anna's Roman Catholic Bedchamber confidant was not another woman but Piero Hugon, the French Page of the Bedchamber. Hugon had already taken over many of the tasks of ‘trust and expense’ usually performed by the First Lady and may also have replaced Jane Drummond as the queen's ‘political’ confidant and adviser.Footnote ⁹⁰ That he should be privy to – and probably involved in – Anna's Catholic practices would therefore not be surprising. In addition, being French, he may also have influenced Anna in her switch to favouring a French dynastic alliance.Footnote ⁹¹ Hugon's roles in these respects serve to illustrate that a man holding a quite humble position in the queen's service could be as significant as the principal lady-in-waiting.Footnote ⁹²

This unexpected evidence is made stronger still by Hugon's apparent theft of the queen's jewels around the time of her death in March 1619. Two months after the queen died her jeweller, George Herrick, noted that £36,000 worth of jewels were missing. Hugon and the queen's long-serving Danish maid, Anna, were suspected of their theft and placed in custody.Footnote ⁹³ Sir Edward Herbert (later Lord Herbert of Chirbury), then ambassador in France, chanced to discover that Hugon had sent two trunks over to Paris with a brother of one of the queen's French musicians, Monsieur Richard.Footnote ⁹⁴ Herbert was asked to obtain access to these trunks and provide an inventory of their contents, which he duly did.Footnote ⁹⁵

Among the jewels and many other goods were a number of items of Catholic paraphernalia. The royal provenance of some items is very clear, and others are too luxurious not to have been acquired from the queen and her wardrobe.Footnote ⁹⁶ Besides an ‘Agnus dei embroidered in a hart of gold and perle’Footnote ⁹⁷ and a ‘small christall box with diverse small images of saints, of gold and enamel’ were ‘ffoure latin prayer-bookes’, a ‘little booke of pictures of Saints embroidered in gold’, an ‘English b[ook] of popish prayers embossed with gold & enamelled’, a ‘large Crucifix, the crosse ebon[y], the image silver’, two ‘[tissue(?)] guirdles for priests, the one with great gold buccles’, a ‘St ffrancis hare [hair] guirdle’, and a ‘little crucifix siluer guilt’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Even more curious is a note in French, ambiguously worded, written on a piece of paper which was found wrapped around a rope of nearly two hundred ‘very faire pearles’. Signed ‘Hugon’, the note claims that the pearls were given to Hugon's wife by the queen ‘nostre bonne Maistress’ (our good Mistress), together with a diamond worth a few thousand livres to himself, when they married – very substantial gifts for a page. The note further directed that whoever received the pearls was obliged to say a mass for the soul of the queen on every Tuesday of the first month of the year.Footnote ⁹⁹

This evidence appears to substantiate the nature of Anna's private faith, and the involvement of her most intimate Bedchamber servants in its practice. The inventory confirmed that Hugon had indeed taken possession of the queen's jewels, adding to the likelihood that the items of Catholic paraphernalia found among them also belonged to the queen. Hugon may have removed them – perhaps even at the queen's request – before they could be discovered after her death, as surely they would have been. Back in 1570 the bringing of such items into the realm of England had been made an offence under Richard ii's Statute of Praemunire.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1604 similar items brought as gifts from the pope to Anna by Sir Anthony Standen were seized and returned ‘sub silentio’ without ever being given to her. A supposed eyewitness account of the queen's death makes it clear that Hugon and Danish Anna were the only people in close attendance on the queen in the few weeks prior to her decease,Footnote ¹⁰¹ enabling Hugon to spirit these items away, among the other jewels.

However, a far more significant motivation may have lain behind Hugon's removal to France of Anna's jewels, together with the Catholic paraphernalia. Anna may well have intended the jewels to fund, in part, the founding of a monastery in France. She had apparently nurtured a desire to do this for almost two decades and may have intended to retire there at the end of her life, had death not claimed her in early middle age. As extraordinary as this seems, it becomes very plausible in the light of Hugon's later revelations and a purported conversation between Anna and the Jesuit Abercrombie before she came to England. While the evidence is circumstantial and cannot be proved, it is none the less compelling, and the strongest indication of her commitment to Catholicism.

Under pressure of examination by Lord Digby and the Secretary of State, Sir Robert Naunton, over several days in August 1619, Hugon ‘confessed much’.Footnote ¹⁰² According to Sir Gerard Herbert

In death, as in life, Queen Anna's faith was the source of much controversy. However, she emerges from this reappraisal as a much more politically astute queen consort than that of her son Charles i. That she was able successfully to maintain her position as a church papist at a very sensitive time in British history was due in no small measure to her assiduous attendance at Protestant services and sermons, her ‘secret’ practice of Roman Catholicism and to the king's toleration. But she also wisely limited her circle of fellow Roman Catholics at court to her immediate Bedchamber servants and did not press James for greater toleration. Anna may have engineered the placement of her children (with the exception of Prince Henry) into Catholic households before 1603, but she never attempted to convert her surviving children as they matured in the care of the staunchly Protestant Harington and Carey families in England. In so doing she avoided giving rise to any religious controversy or anxiety which could have jeopardised the monarchy.

Nevertheless, for Catholics at home and abroad, Anna's ‘secret’ Catholicism (where this was known) undoubtedly raised hopes of toleration, and fears for Protestants. In the early part of the reign, for instance, the religion of her ladies-in-waiting and masque participants in England was observed closely in order to gauge any shift in attitudes to Catholics.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Toleration was always the hidden agenda of the marriage alliances proposed by Catholic states for Anna's children (with the concomitant hope of conversion). Behind the scenes, ambassadors cultivated the queen and her First Lady in order to encourage them to exert influence and Jane Drummond earned a secret Spanish pension for her services.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Despite the active interest of the queen and Jane Drummond, particularly in relation to Spanish interests, ultimately Anna's influence proved negligible, not only in this respect but also on affairs of state and the Catholic community's much hoped for religious tolerance and if she indeed intended to found a French monastery even that hope was frustrated. Footnote ¹⁰⁸