ABSTRACT
On Wednesday, 30 September 1579, James VI returned to Edinburgh from his childhood home at Stirling Castle to take up residence at Holyrood. The burgesses were arrayed in armour along the High Street where the king dismounted and a volley was fired from the cannons of the castle. Just over two weeks later, his attainment to adulthood and personal government was symbolised in a formal entry: the streets were decorated with tapestries and paintings and the crowds were so great that ‘manie were hurt’ in the crush. Edinburgh’s magistrates received their thirteen-year-old king under a purple velvet canopy; he was hailed as Solomon and a boy, emerging from a descending globe, presented him with the keys of the burgh cast in silver; musicians played on viols, psalms were sung and a sermon delivered in St Giles’ church. Wine was drunk at the market cross, a fanfare of trumpets greeted the recitation of the king’s genealogy and, as he left the burgh to return to his palace, he beheld the good portents of the horoscope of his birth displayed upon the Netherbow port. Three days later, on 20 October, at the first parliament to meet in Edinburgh since 1573, ‘the magistratis … propynit the King with ane goldin copbuird, estimat to sex thousand merkis’. 1 The presence of the king and the agencies of central government were worth paying for handsomely and the favour of the king was worth cultivating: in 1590, Edinburgh staged a formal entry for James’s queen, Anne, and in 1617 when he returned to Edinburgh after an absence of 14 years, ‘ten thousand merkis in dowble angellis of gold’ were presented to him in ‘ane gilt baissin’. 2 The full picture of the burgh’s relationship with the crown is illustrated in another incident that occurred between James’s arrival in September 1579 and his formal entry on 17 October. On 7 October, he ordered the burgh to choose Alexander Clerk as provost which the council duly did, with formal protests that this ‘sould not hurt thair priviledges’. 3
