ve early
information what to do in certain contingencies, and to keep
themselves under arms. As he had always thought it possible that he
might require naval assistance from Denmark, so now he instigated a
sort of free confederation of the magnates and barons of Scotland:
they were to prepare their military retainers in order to enforce his
rights. Not that he had formed any design against the Queen, but he
believed that after her death he must give battle to her ministers in
order to gain the crown, and he appeared determined not to decline the
contest.

In reality however this mode of action was foreign to his nature. How
often he had said that a man must let fruit ripen before plucking it:
and a foreign prince, to whose sayings he attached great value, had
advised him to proceed by the safest path. This was the Grand Duke
Ferdinand of Tuscany, who then played a certain part in Europe, as he
had set on foot the alliance between Henry IV and the Pope in
opposition to Spain: Mary de' Medici, Queen of France, was his niece.
With the house of Stuart also he stood on the footing of a relation:
his consort, like the mother of King James, was a scion of the house
of Lorraine, and a marriage at some future day between the King's
eldest son and the daughter of the Grand Duke was already talked of.
This relationship, and Ferdinand's reputation for great political
far-sightedness and prudence, caused his advice to exercise great
influence on James's decisions, as James himself tells us. So long as
victory wavered between Essex and his opponents, or, as he conceived,
between the existing government and the people, James did not declare
himself: when the issue was decided he gave his policy a different
direction and made advances to the ruling ministers, whom up to this
time he had regarded as his enemies.

They were quite ready and willing to meet him. Robert Cecil asserted
later that he had by this means best provided for the safety and
repose of the Queen, for that by an alliance between the government
and the heir to the crown the jealousy of the Queen was best appeased:
yet still he observed the closest secrecy with regard to it. It is
known that he dismissed a secretary because he feared that he might
see through the scheme and then betray it. He thought that he was
justified in keeping the Queen in ignorance of a connexion that could
only be distasteful to her at her advanced age, which had deepened the
suspicion natural