The White King Read online

  Elizabeth’s eldest son, Charles Louis, was not yet of age. Until he was, she would seek covert ways to raise money for his cause in Europe, as well as initiating diplomacy and military action on his behalf. ‘I… have become a stateswoman,’ she admitted.29 Charles, in turn, continued to send his sister what money he could to support her and her children, but he would not send an army. As one of his ministers observed, ‘putting aside the bonds of consanguinity… the Palatinate itself is as remote from his interests as it is from his dominions’.30

  In Whitehall Charles hung a powerful anti-war painting, which Rubens had left him as a gift. Mars, the God of War, is held back, while Peace, in the form of a sensual nude, brings bounty. In the foreground children play: this bounty would be their future if peace prevailed.

  Charles’s own brood of children was growing. A daughter, Mary Henrietta, had been born in 1631. Lucy Carlisle was chosen as the princess’s godmother. Lucy’s differences with her cousin Holland were also resolved. They were even said to be having an affair. Come the new year of 1633, Henrietta Maria was pregnant again. The baby was to be a second son, named James.

  Charles placed the Rubens picture in the gallery overlooking the old tilt yard. The money that used to be lavished on jousting and tilting was now spent instead on masques at the Banqueting House.31 These were an exquisitely beautiful form of theatre, with words by Ben Jonson and gilded sets built by Inigo Jones shimmering in candlelight. Charles would often appear in these theatrical events cast as the sovereign of a chivalric elite, whose wise rule created order and harmony. They were, in effect, beautifully crafted political manifestos, and designed to provoke some of the wonder found in high art. Charles still wished to be seen as an heroic monarch, but in the absence of Parliament’s subsidies to fight actual wars, these aspirations were transferred to the imaginary world of St George: an Arcadian fantasy of erotic delight, where the knight defeats the dragon and wins his lady.

  Back in Antwerp Rubens completed a new painting celebrating the ultimate success of his visit to England. It was a vast canvas of St George and the dragon, set in an English landscape, and in which the faces of St George and his princess were those of Charles and Henrietta Maria. The dragon, lying dead, represented the conquering of strife and disorder, with the couple ushering in an era of peace and tranquillity. He knew his client well. Charles soon acquired the painting for his art collection.

  The poet Thomas Carew described these years of peace as marking England’s ‘halcyon days’. While the Germans beat their drums, bellowing ‘for freedom and revenge’, it was for Charles’s kingdoms to prosper. They could be ‘rich and happy in the lap of peace’, even as Protestant agony in Europe continued.

  * Warwick had sponsored about half the aristocracy’s privateering ventures against Spain since 1626.

  8

  THE RETURN OF MADAME DE CHEVREUSE

  LUCY CARLISLE’S HUSBAND DIED IN STYLE IN MARCH 1636. HE HAD suffered a stroke, but had several new sets of clothes made in his last days, ‘to outface naked and despicable death’.1 Lucy was saddened by this loss, but her grief was neither deep nor long-lived. Indeed, she was soon ‘very jolly’ and busy honing her political abilities.2 Based in the Strand, she had, as a widow, gained that holy grail for the seventeenth-century woman–independence. ‘Who shall control me?’ asks a character in James Shirley’s contemporary play The Lady of Pleasure. ‘I live in the Strand, whither few ladies come / To live and purchase more than fame.’ And what Lucy had was indeed more valuable than fame: she had influence.

  ‘The gay, the wise, the gallant and the grave’ flocked to Lucy’s house.3 Poets claimed her beauty outshone jewels, and her limbs left ‘tracks of light’. Holland composed several such verses which were judged, even against this stiff competition, to be ‘the worst that were ever seen’.4 He did better with a gift of a diamond bracelet valued at the vast sum of £1,500.5 And Lucy was worth it. As the powerful Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, observed, she was ‘extremely well skilled how to speak with advantage and spirit for those friends she professes’, promoting careers and speaking the truth to power.6

  Lucy’s success did little to improve the darker side of her character. Her sister Dorothy, Countess of Leicester, complained that she still took pleasure in abusing ‘most of her friends when they are absent’. Indeed she had grown ‘greater in her own conceit than ever she was’.7 Her gallants were her slaves and Lucy did not like playing second fiddle, even to the queen. Henrietta Maria scarcely dared ask her to perform in her masques for fear of being turned down.8 Like it or not, however, Lucy owed much of her influence to her position in the queen’s bedchamber, and Henrietta Maria too had grown in confidence, as had her husband, the king.

  The outgoing Venetian ambassador described the thirty-six-year-old Charles in October 1637 as ‘in the flower of his age’. Slender and muscular, he handled his ‘arms like a knight and his horse like a riding master’. His hair was now short on the right side, and grown longer on the left in a fashionable lovelock. The Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne warned that lovelocks were used by the Devil to drag wearers down to hell for their ‘shameful and uncomely vanity’.9 But Charles’s clothes showed just as little regard for pious restraint. Jacobean ruffs had given way to falling collars of intricate lace, and he wore silk suits with clashing coloured stockings: he bought enough to put on a brand-new pair four times a week. Sartorially, the most striking addition to his wardrobe was the new escutcheon of the Garter, which he had embroidered on his cloaks. A Cross of St George surrounded by glittering silver rays, it sparkled when he moved. Garter knights were expected to wear it in public ‘at all times… and in all places’, along with their ‘George’: the badge of St George killing the dragon.10

  There were no great favourites at court. The Venetian ambassador noted approvingly that in political affairs Charles selected ‘his ministers not from affection, but from his opinion of their capacity’. In intellectual matters he showed ‘literary erudition without ostentation, possessing what befits a king’. He was careful to set an example in sacred observance and his ‘exercises in religion were most exemplary’, while he showed ‘no lusts or vices’.11 The deeply charged physical and emotional relationship he had with his wife lay at the heart of the court, and continued to raise fears of her influence on him. ‘The only dispute which now exists between us is that of our conquering each other by affection,’ Charles admitted to Marie de’ Medici.12

  Turning twenty-eight in November 1637, Henrietta Maria was ‘the happiest of women’. She loved ‘beautiful clothes, physical elegance and witty conversation’, as well as taking pleasure in her growing brood of children.13 Prince Charles, aged seven, was full of energy and curiosity. The king would make him a Knight of the Garter the following year, to ‘encourage you to pursue the glory of heroic actions’, he told his son.14 Lucy’s god-daughter Mary, aged six, had her father’s melancholic eyes and a wilful temperament. James, Duke of York, aged four, was as blonde as his brother was dark, and ‘cared not to plod upon his games’ but ‘was delighted with quick and nimble recreations’.15 As soon as he was five and allowed to wear breeches, he would be made honorary Lord Admiral. Sandy-haired Elizabeth was now almost two, while a baby, Anne–named after Charles’s mother–was just eight months old.

  In Stuart tradition the children were placed with governors, but the Stuarts were a close family by royal standards. The children of the Winter Queen later complained that she had preferred the company of her dogs to her offspring. By contrast, her brother Charles enjoyed measuring the growth of his children on a silver staff and accompanied his wife to play with them in St James’s Park. They, in turn, adored their father, greeting him after he had been away ‘with the prettiest innocent mirth that can be imagined’.16 He placed their portraits where he could see them every day. He had commissioned several likenesses from Rubens’ former assistant–another Catholic artist from Antwerp–the thirty-eight-year-old Anthony Van Dyck. Charles involved him
self in many of the details, once asking why the youngest ones weren’t painted in the aprons they usually wore to protect their expensive clothing.17 Mary wouldn’t stand still for her sittings, but Charles was delighted with the results. He kept one of the group portraits over his breakfast table. Another, of himself with Henrietta Maria and the two eldest children, was hung at the entrance to his personal quarters at Whitehall. They advertised his success in maintaining the continuity of the dynasty.

  Van Dyck was also painting many of the king’s leading subjects. Installed in a house in the Blackfriars on a royal pension of £200 a year, and with the help of his studio, he churned out a picture a week. Not all Van Dyck’s patrons were happy with his work. One countess demanded he make her figure ‘leaner for truly it was too fat’. Even after his alterations she claimed ‘the face is so big’ it looked like a representation of ‘the winds puffing’.18 Most, however, felt differently. Native Protestant artists, uncomfortable painting nudity, lost commissions, for the ladies of the court loved his ‘sweet disorder of the dress’, with sky-blue silk falling off their bosoms and bare arms.19 Men, meanwhile, were being painted for the first time with friends or brothers, their poses effortlessly aristocratic, lace tumbling down loosened shirts and foaming over tall leather boots: images that have come to define the Caroline court.

  But Van Dyck was not the only artist to benefit from Charles’s patronage. Diplomatic agents from Rome were wooing the king by helping to expand an art collection destined to become the greatest in English royal history.* Charles was like a boy at Christmas when these new paintings arrived. A papal agent once described him dashing to open the latest packages, taking Inigo Jones and Holland with him. ‘The very moment Jones saw the paintings he greatly approved of them,’ the papal agent reported, ‘and in order to be able to study them better threw off his cloak, put on his eyeglasses and, together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much.’20

  Inigo Jones had started his professional life as a London joiner, before spending much of his twenties learning about art and architecture in Italy. He had arrived at court as a set and costume designer for masques. Ben Jonson complained he remained a control freak even at sixty-five years of age, insisting on being ‘the main Dominus do all in the work’. Charles, however, was grateful ‘that he educated workers constantly day and night in our service’.21

  Charles had commissioned nine ceiling canvases from Rubens for Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House. The neoclassical building begun in 1619 had been inspired by the town palaces of Palladio and Scamozzi that Jones had seen in Italy, and the exterior was coloured in contrasting bands of pale gold Oxfordshire stone and the redder burnt gold of Northamptonshire.22 The ceiling, still a work in progress, would depict King James being transported to heaven as God’s former representative on earth, and celebrate the rich benefits of peace now being realised under Charles. Beneath it would hang tapestries celebrating the history of the Order of the Garter.23

  The king had transformed his finances since he had dissolved his last parliament in 1629. With the British kingdoms at peace and Europe at war, merchants were shipping their goods through English ports despite the high customs duties Charles charged. There was also unprecedented growth in trade with southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East. Out of Charles’s estimated total income of £900,000, almost £400,000 now came from customs duties.24 The most productive tax Charles raised was, however, the reinvention of a prerogative tax dating back to the Middle Ages known as Ship Money, so called because it paid for the navy.

  Eleven new ships of the line had been built with the Ship Money tax, including the Sovereign of the Seas, which, with 102 bronze cannon, was the most heavily armed battleship in the world. As Charles foresaw, the Royal Navy was key to Britain’s future wealth and power. Nevertheless, the tax was traditionally raised only on coastal areas in time of war. Charles was raising it in peacetime and had extended it to inland areas without any parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, this money was helping Charles rule without Parliament being called at all. As such the tax was seen as a threat to property rights as well as to ‘the liberty of the subject’. And some opponents refused to pay.

  Charles had sought to make an example of one repeat offender in non-payment: a member of Warwick’s American colonising circle called John Hampden.25 The former so-called ‘patriot’ party had high hopes when the case came to court that Ship Money would be declared illegal. But in November 1637 the judges declared for the king. It was now said that Charles was ‘more absolute than either the King of France or the great Duke of Tuscany’.26

  Yet John Hampden was widely treated as a hero, and Charles’s future was looking far from secure. The departing Venetian ambassador thought Charles would ‘be very fortunate if he does not fall into some great upheaval’.27 He cited not only the ‘diminution of the liberty of the people’, but also Charles’s religious reforms, spearheaded in England by the man he had made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633: William Laud.28

  Described by his social superiors as a ‘little, low, red-faced man’, ‘of mean birth, bred up in a college’, William Laud was a prelate with a mission and not much tact. The son of a clothier from Reading, Laud was, in private, a gentle intellectual who loved his cats and kept a dream diary in which he wrote of erotic encounters with the late Duke of Buckingham. In public, however, he was ‘arrogant’ with ‘an uncourtly quickness, if not sharpness’, a man who could ‘not debate anything without some commotion’.29 He was uncomfortable with women and his efforts to cultivate Lucy Carlisle had fallen on stony ground. He did, however, have Charles’s ear.

  Charles had given Laud a secular role as a privy councillor. This gave the archbishop more political power than any churchman had in England since the days of Henry VIII. Laud had no interest in living in the grand manner of a Cardinal Wolsey. He dressed modestly and teased clerics with a taste for the good life as ‘the church triumphant’–that is, those who had already achieved heaven. He did, however, hope to return to the Church of England something of the standing of the pre-Reformation English church. To do this he sought to restore the wealth of the church as an institution. That meant regaining some of the lost church lands. Land meant power, and Laud believed the Church of England could be a power for good–and not just in terms of the political support the church could give the king.

  Laud wanted to root out corruption in society. This had to begin with rooting out clerical corruption, and Laud was willing to use the ecclesiastic Court of High Commission against bishops as well as more junior clergy. More controversially Laud also took on rich and powerful gentry. The protection of the weak is a Christian duty and Laud used the Star Chamber in this spirit, prosecuting the mighty for such malefactions as hoarding grain for profit while the hungry starved, or enclosing the common land the poor used to feed their animals. In the parishes too, the clergy were encouraged to stand up to large landowners in the public interest. At the same time, however, the traditional roles of the gentry in their local communities were protected. ‘Lawful recreations’ such as archery and dancing, usually carried out on Sundays under the patronage of the local landowner, helped foster the community ties that Charles wished to cultivate, and so were permitted to continue–in the face of Puritan disapproval.

  Puritans also wanted to reform the morals of their fellow countrymen in order to help transform England into a new Jerusalem. For Puritans that meant encouraging a strict observance of the Sabbath, as well as opposing the new ceremonial style of worship that was central to Charles’s policy of building a more deferential society. Laud was ruthless in crushing such dissent, censoring the press and using the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber to bring Puritans to heel. The punishments Laud meted out to troublemakers could not be compared to those suffered by opponents of Henry VIII’s Reformation. There were no executions without trial, no one was starved to death in their cells, or burned alive. There were, however, fines, prison and, most horribly,
mutilation, such as cropping men’s ears.

  Puritans continued to flee abroad to join the colonies in New England where they hoped their communities would become beacons of godliness, acting as ‘a city upon a hill’, inspiring their homeland by their example.30 At home, meanwhile, large crowds came out to witness the suffering of the Puritan martyrs. Some came principally because they sympathised with Puritan religious beliefs. Others were more anxious about Charles’s rule without Parliament, which was backed from the pulpit by the Laudian clergy, and many were alarmed by what they had heard of the growing influence of their Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria.

  In 1625 Charles had forbidden his subjects from attending Henrietta Maria’s chapels. Yet Henrietta Maria now had a splendid new chapel at Denmark House designed by Inigo Jones, and when the chapel had opened in December 1635, there had been three days of festivities that had attracted numerous non-Catholics. Charles had even donated a Rubens painting of the Crucifixion. There had since been many conversions amongst ordinary members of the public who had attended the Catholic Mass out of curiosity. Meanwhile, the rough-clad Capuchin priests in Henrietta Maria’s household had achieved a number of further conversions, especially amongst her ladies-in-waiting.

  It seemed to Puritans that Charles’s queen was behind his religious changes, and that they were part of a popish plot to turn England over to Roman tyranny. ‘Ordinary women can, in the night time, persuade their husbands to give them new gowns’ so could not Henrietta Maria, ‘by her night discourses, incline the king to popery?’31 In fact, Charles was appalled by the Catholic conversions and used both stick and carrot to encourage conversions the other way–from the Catholic Church to the Church of England. He vigorously collected the fines that fell on Catholics for their refusal to attend Church of England services, and pushed on with his reforms, convinced that when Protestant worship was as impressive as Catholic ritual, he would be able to ‘deal with… the Pope as wrestlers do with one another, take him up to fling him down’.32