The White King
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Leanda de Lisle
Map © Darren Bennett at DKB Creative Ltd.
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First published by Chatto & Windus in January 2018
First US Edition: October 2017
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Typeset in India by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953678
ISBNs: 978-1-61039-560-1 (hardcover), 978-1-61039-561-8 (ebook)
E3-20180124-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Map
Family Trees
Stuart Pedigree
Devereux Pedigree
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Preface: Venturous Knight
Part One
HIS FATHER’S ‘WIFE’ 1. ‘Dearest Son’
2. Becoming King
3. A Marriage Alliance
4. ‘Under the Eyes of Christendom’
5. Enter Lucy Carlisle
6. Exit Buckingham
Part Two
HIS WIFE’S FRIEND 7. ‘Happy in the Lap of Peace’
8. The Return of Madame de Chevreuse
9. ‘A Thing Most Horrible’
10. ‘A Broken Glass’
11. Strafford on Trial
12. Given Up
13. ‘That Sea of Blood’
Part Three
HIS TURNCOAT SERVANT 14. ‘Give Caesar His Due’
15. Edgehill
16. ‘Tiger’s Heart’
17. Enter Oliver Cromwell
18. Evil Women
19. ‘The Golden Ball’
20. ‘A Clouded Majesty’
21. Royalist Rising
Part Four
NEMESIS 22. The Red-Haired Mistress
23. The King’s Trial
24. Execution
25. Resurrection
Photos
Postscript
Appendix: Lucy Carlisle as Milady de Winter
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Leanda De Lisle
Notes
Index
For Peter
Illustrations
James I and VI, Paul van Somer, c. 1620 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, with Sir John Harington, in the Hunting Field, Robert Peake the Elder, 1603 © The Met Museum, New York / Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1944
Elizabeth Stuart, the ‘Winter Queen’ © Weiss Gallery
Philip IV, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, 1623–24 © Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas / Algur H. Meadows Collection
Cardinal Richelieu, Philippe de Champaigne, 1642 © Museum of Fine Arts, Strasbourg (Photo: Leemage / UIG via Getty Images)
George Villiers, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 17th century © Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images
‘Triumphant Death chases Londoners from their city’, from A rod for run-awayes Gods tokens, artist unknown, c. 1625 (Photo: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
Marie de Medici landing at Marseilles, Peter Paul Rubens, 1623 © Louvre
Charles I, Peter Oliver, c. 1625–32 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Henrietta Maria, John Hoskins, c. 1632 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, Daniel Mytens the elder, 1633 © National Trust Images
Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, studio of Daniel Mytens, c. 1632–33 © National Portrait Gallery, London
Henrietta Maria as St Catherine, Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1630s © Philip Mould & Company
Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, Adriaen Hanneman, c. 1660–65 © Minneapolis Institute of Arts / Bridgeman Images
John Pym, by or after Edward Bower, c. 1640 © National Portrait Gallery, London
Louis XIII at the Siege of La Rochelle, French School, c. 17th century © La Sorbonne, Paris / Bridgeman Images
Charles I, Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1635 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, as Diana the Huntress, attributed to Claure Deruet, 1627 © Castle Museum, Versailles (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)
Charles I, Henrietta Maria and Charles II when Prince of Wales dining in public, Gerrit Houckgeest, 1635 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
An Allegory of Marriage, Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), 1576 (Photo © RMN-Grand Palais, Musée du Louvre / Stéphane Maréchalle)
The Five Eldest Children of Charles I, Anthony van Dyck, 1637 (Photo: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Charles I, studio Anthony van Dyck, c. 1636 © Weiss Gallery
William II, Prince of Orange, and his Bride, Mary Stuart, Anthony van Dyck, 1641. Photo courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Atrocities in Ireland, from ‘The Teares of Ireland’ by James Cranford’, Wenceslaus Hollar, c. 1642–46. Photo © Courtesy of National Library of Ireland, Dublin [PD 2133 TX]
The Chair organ, Robert Dallam, Tewkesbury Abbey © Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn Ltd
The execution of Strafford, Wenceslaus Hollar, c. 1641–77. Photo © The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Canada
The death of Boy at Marston Moor, 1644. Photo © Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo
Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Gerrit Van Honthorst, c. 1630s–56 ©National Trust Images/John Gibbons
The fingernail of Thomas Holland © Courtesy of Tyburn Convent
The saddle used by the King at the Battle to Naseby, Private Collection. Photo courtesy of Graeme Rimer
The battlefield at Naseby, Robert Streeter, c. 1645
James II & VII, Princess Elizabeth and Henry, Duke of Gloucester, John Hoskins, c. 1640s © The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge
Anne of Austria, queen consort of France, with Louis XIV as a child, French school, 17th century. Photo: Christophel Fine Art / UIG via Getty Images
Mary, Princess Royal, studio of Gerrit van Honthorst, c. 1655 © Philip Mould & Company
Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Cooper, c. 1653 © Philip Mould & Company
Thomas Fairfax, circle of Robert Walker, 17th century. Photo: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo
Charles I at the time of his trial, after Edward Bower, 17th century © Philip Mould & Company
Charles I, miniature portrait with mica overlays, artist unknown, c. 1650–1700 © Carisbrooke Castle Museum Trust
Pe
arl earring owned by King Charles I, removed from the King’s ear after his execution, 1600–10 © The Portland Collection, Harley Gallery, Welbeck Estate, Nottinghamshire / Bridgeman Images
Portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria as a Widow, artist unknown, c. 1650s. Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum (CC0 1.0)
St George’s chapel, Windsor Castle, Josep Renalias, 2008 © Josep Renalias (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Frontispiece of the Eikon Basilike, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1649. Photo © The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Canada
It was observed… that his majesty on that [coronation] day was clothed in white… and this some looked on as an ill presage that the king laying aside his purple, the robe of Majesty, should clothe himself in white, the robe of innocence, as if thereby it were foreordained that he should divest himself of that Regal majesty that would have kept him from affront and scorn.
Peter Heylyn, The Life of William Laud
This Dreadful Deadman, intends nothing I tell thee, but confusion to thy long continued happiness, thy laws and liberties… The White King and the Dreadful Deadman are all one. William Lilly, A Prophecy of the White King and Dreadful Dead Man Explained
As the King’s Body was brought out of St George’s Hall, the sky was serene and clear, but presently it began to snow, and fell so fast as by the time they came to the west end of the Royal Chapel the black velvet pall was all white (the colour of innocency) being covered over with snow. So went the white king to his grave, in the 48th year of his age.
Sir Thomas Herbert, Memoirs
Author’s Note
THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK–THE WHITE KING–IS DRAWN FROM A sobriquet used by Charles’s contemporaries. To supporters he was the saintly White King crowned in robes the colour of innocence. To opponents he was the White King of the prophecies of Merlin, a tyrant destined for a violent end. It is a sobriquet that is unfamiliar today. I hope it inspires curiosity: that people wonder what other unexpected things they might discover about the extraordinary Charles I.
This new portrait, informed by previously unseen royal correspondence, depicts a brave and principled king who inspired great loyalty but who was also a man of flesh and blood. Charles the Martyr and Charles the Murderer, lauded by friends and condemned by enemies, is largely forgotten, but in popular memory something just as extreme remains. Charles has been pinned to the pages of history as a failed king, executed at the hands of his own subjects, and now preserved like some exotic but desiccated insect. In many accounts it seems that Charles was doomed to fail almost from birth, his character immutable.
We like to believe we have turned our back on old prejudices but the way we remember Charles shows how they lie just below the surface, still influencing the way we think. In the past disabilities were seen as marks of man’s fallen nature. The twisted spine of Shakespeare’s Richard III was an outward sign of a twisted soul. It has been surprisingly common for Charles’s fate to be read back into the physical difficulties of his childhood, as if his weak legs were physical manifestations of weakness of character. The determination and resilience he showed in overcoming his disability, emerging as an athletic adult, is surely more interesting.
Meanwhile the misconceived traditional view of Charles achieves two things. The first is that it inspires indifference to one of the greatest stories and most significant reigns in royal history. Despite the wealth of exciting new scholarship, and the fascinating women who surrounded Charles, the well trodden ground of the Tudor queens continues to produce more books for the general reader. Publishers and authors shy away from a riskier subject. The second consequence is that in conveniently blaming Charles for the horrors of the civil wars, it covers the tracks of those others who shared responsibility for the conflicts–and popular memory of the parliamentary heroes of the past could also stand some revision.
The White King attempts not to restore Charles to the pedestal of the martyr many viewed him as after his execution, but to give him life, to show him grow and change, to place him properly in the context of his times and amongst his contemporaries. Where Charles’s story has in the past been given a very masculine focus, here, the leading female political figures of the age, so often forgotten or dismissed, take centre stage alongside the men, just as they did in his own time.
The lost royal letters, quoted for the first time, give a voice not only to Charles, but also to his maligned Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria. Her reputation remains lost in the eye of a storm of sexist tropes. Women have always been judged to be creatures of emotion, not of reason, and too often she has been depicted as an hysterical girl who, even as a mature woman, has all the wit and political grasp of a child. It is women who, in myth, also brought evil into the world, and Henrietta Maria (despite her supposed stupidity) is still depicted as a seductive Eve to Charles’s Adam, leading the king astray.
In The White King Henrietta Maria is revealed in a new light, as every inch the daughter of the great warrior king, Henri IV of France, and as remarkable a queen as any of the wives of Henry VIII.
The early chapters of The White King take us into Europe and its empires. This is the world of Charles’s sister, the Winter Queen of Bohemia, of Protestant churches in flames and the advance of the Counter-Reformation, of the France of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and the Puritan colonies of New England, of a London buzzing with a fast-moving new media reporting on politics from Parliament.
Events are underpinned by ideas about power and faith that have a very modern resonance: one where populism meets religious justifications for violence, and where the theory of divine-right kingship is part of a royal war on terror.
Among the key figures is the court beauty Lucy, Countess of Carlisle, a descendant of Henry VIII’s mistress Mary Boleyn and the would-be lover of the king. This last Boleyn girl is a significant political player in her own right, but also important as one of the ‘Essex cousinage’.*
They are the heirs to a Tudor past: the son, nephews and nieces of Elizabeth I’s last favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. They help carry and explain the story from the beginning of Charles’s reign to its end.
Lucy’s cousin Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, is the greatest privateer of the age and deeply involved in the Puritan colonies. This ‘American’ connection is a significant one–it links Warwick to other totemic civil-war figures and to the radical opposition in London. Warwick’s younger brother Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, is, by contrast, close to Charles; he is the reputed lover of the subversive French courtier Marie de Chevreuse, and a favourite of Henrietta Maria. Like Lucy Carlisle, Henry Holland will prove both friend and enemy to the royal couple. Seemingly faithless, he and Lucy will turn and turn again, their fates linked to those of their master and mistress.
The trigger event in the early part of the book is Charles’s decision to take his kingdoms into the Thirty Years War, fighting for the dynastic interests of the Stuarts and the Protestant cause in Europe.
The title of this section, ‘His Father’s “Wife”’, refers to the royal favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The shooting star of the Jacobean age, judged beautiful and damned, he damages the young king’s relationship with his parliaments and supports controversial religious reforms while his military failures heighten the sense of Counter-Reformation threat. One of the royal letters now revealed in The White King gives Henrietta Maria’s personal account of Buckingham’s assassination.
The second section, ‘His Wife’s Friend’, opens with Charles’s own Brexit as he takes his kingdoms out of the Thirty Years War. Charles’s court enjoys the ‘halcyon days’ of peace, with exquisitely beautiful court masques depicting an idealised world of deference and social harmony. This period at court is immortalised in the paintings of the artist Anthony Van Dyck, and his images of the king’s growing family in their sensual silks and lace. It ends in 1642 in a very different world, in the aftermath of an invasion from Scotland, rebellion in Ireland, mobs on the streets, and Charles and his family flee
ing London. The royal favourites, Lucy Carlisle and Henry Holland, are now with the opposition, which they believe will be the winning side in the coming conflict between king and the English Parliament.
The third section, ‘His Turncoat Servant’, covers the English civil war, and its title refers to Henry Holland. An extravagant peacock, rather than a dour Puritan, Holland is a reminder of how close sections of the opposing sides are to each other–and how fluid they will become. The propaganda of Charles’s enemies, with its narrative of popish threat, and the trolling of Henrietta Maria, remains influential today, with a secular post-Protestant mistrust of Catholicism still lingering. The term ‘divine right of kings’ is remembered, but it bears the Catholic face of Henrietta Maria, rather than that of its author, the Calvinist King James, and many people believe that Charles was somehow ‘Catholic’ (encouraged by his seductress queen).
In fact this is to be a war of Protestant against Protestant over the nature of the Church of England, and where exactly the balance of power between king and Parliament lies. Many MPs will fight for the king’s cause. And many MPs who begin by fighting against him, end up fighting against their former comrades–Holland amongst them.
The tragedy ahead embraces not only Charles but also his subjects, the civil war reducing England to the misery of a failed state. The intense violence and scenes of battle are an important part of the narrative of The White King. Charles is an extraordinary survivor, but at the conclusion of this section he is in captivity. A new rebellion, this time against the iron rule of parliament, has begun and a new invasion is coming from Scotland.
The final Part of the book, ‘Nemesis’, introduces another little remembered woman to Charles’s biography: Jane Whorwood, a Royalist spy who Charles desires as his mistress. The real Charles was neither a saint nor his wife’s puppet, but a man of strengths and failings. He resembles the tragic heroes of classical Greek literature: a courageous king, of high ideals, whose flaws and misjudgements lead to his ruin. We feel horror and pity as the endgame approaches. For all the hate he engendered, he dies loved in a way his son, the cynical, merry Charles II would never be.