The White King Read online

  There was no attempt by Charles to modify the Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles, which remain the defining statements of the doctrines of the Church of England. But anxiety was such that the more Charles and Laud beautified English liturgy ‘the more the Puritans cling to the bareness of their worship’, the Venetian ambassador noted, ‘and what is worse, many other Protestants, scandalised by the new institutions, become Puritans from fear of falling into Catholicism’.33

  Time, however, was on his side. Charles was young and had sons to succeed him. Rather than be intimidated by opposition to his reforms he was extending them, determined to succeed where his father had failed–in achieving religious uniformity across the three kingdoms. In July 1637 he had introduced a new prayer book into Scotland to bring the kirk and the Church of England into closer alignment. Instead it would unleash the very forces he most feared.

  It is often said–and not inaccurately–that the first blow struck against Charles in the civil wars was a woman throwing a stool. On 23 July 1637, as the Dean of St Giles, Edinburgh, read from the new Scottish prayer book, a row of women sitting at the front of the congregation on fold-up stools began to clap and shout. They called him Satan’s spawn and the stout Bishop of Edinburgh, sitting near the dean, was abused as ‘a beastly glutton’. It was when the dean continued to read that the stool was thrown. He ducked, but the man who tried to stop a second such projectile was set upon, ‘his gown rent, his prayer book taken from him and his body pitifully beaten and bruised’. The plump bishop then fled down the street, with women in pursuit screaming abuse, throwing clods of mud and threatening to cut his throat.

  The stool-throwing was a pre-planned protest organised by the most firmly Presbyterian ministers of the kirk, along with leading aristocrats who resented the growing secular power of the bishops, and feared the restoration of church land at their expense. The passion of the matrons of Edinburgh expressed in the riot was real nevertheless, and not manufactured. Charles had underestimated the extent to which the stripped-down Calvinism of the kirk was bound up with the national, and even personal, identity of the Scots. His sole visit to Edinburgh as king was in 1633, for his coronation, which had been carried out in a manner many Scots had found offensive, with candles and crucifixes, a railed-in Communion table and bishops in surplices.

  When Charles had subsequently purged awkward nobles from high office, replacing them with pliable lawyers and grateful bishops, ordinary Scots had begun to wonder what this outsider from England might introduce next.

  Then came the Scottish prayer book.

  It had been drafted by a committee of Scottish bishops and vetted by the Scottish Privy Council. But it was introduced on the royal prerogative alone, without consultation with the Scottish Parliament or any recent General Assembly of the kirk. It was now widely judged to be even more ‘popish’ than the English prayer book, which the Scots had always despised. Most notably it left out several words that denied any belief in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist–the core difference between Lutheran and Calvinist belief.

  Further riots followed, along with a petitioning campaign against the prayer book and the bishops. But this was as much an aristocratic and nationalist rebellion as a religious one. By early 1638 Scottish dissidents had set up what amounted to a provisional government. Its aim was to limit the exercise of the royal prerogative, and to replace low-born bishops and lawyers as well as other ‘evil’ councillors with members of the traditional ruling elite.34

  This sedition had to be confronted. In February 1638, Charles announced that opponents of the new Scottish prayer book would be treated as traitors. This sent shock waves south of the border. The Tudors had dealt with opponents of their religious reforms with the utmost savagery. Warwick and other colonising aristocrats wondered if the time had come for them to join the emigration to Puritan New England.

  While they dithered, the Scottish dissidents responded aggressively by issuing a public contract known as the ‘National Covenant’. Inspired by the Old Testament covenants made between God and his people, its signatories swore to protect their Calvinist kirk against popish influences. Loyalty was sworn only to a covenanted king–in effect a Presbyterian–who ruled according to the laws of the realm. It swept the central and southern Lowlands, raising political consciousness there in a way that had never been achieved in Scotland before. Its subscribers, irrespective of rank, were now political actors in God’s design for their nation in the overthrow of popery. Charles believed, however, that this was the work of only a few dangerous malcontents who were in league with Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.

  Seditious alliances of fiery ministers and lairds dated back to the earliest days of the Scottish Reformation. James had described the consequences in his ‘how to rule’ handbook, the Basilikon Doron, and the last example had resulted in the execution of the Ruthven brothers on the day that Charles was born. The involvement of the French in Scottish affairs was even longer-standing. For centuries France had used Scotland as a ‘bridle’ on England, fomenting anti-English feeling in Scotland to ensure kings of England had to divert resources to their northern border, while confronting France to the south. It appeared to Charles that Louis was playing this old game.

  France and Spain had been at war since 1635. The result was that Louis, the ‘first son of the [Catholic] Church’, and his cardinal chief minister were doing far more for European Protestants in their battles against the Habsburgs than the Stuart kingdoms ever had.35 But renewed hopes in Paris of an Anglo-French alliance against Spain had risen and fallen over the course of 1637.36 Louis feared that Charles might even make an alliance with Spain instead. An angry Charles now encouraged those concerns by welcoming to court a long-standing enemy of Richelieu. This was no less than Holland’s reputed former mistress, the glamorous intriguer with the serpentine ringlets, Mme de Chevreuse.

  On 7 September 1637 Mme de Chevreuse had left the Loire and ridden for the frontier with Spain. Successive quarrels with Richelieu had forced her to flee France, and she was disguised as a boy. Accompanied only by two grooms she successfully reached the Pyrenees and safety, changing back into her fine clothes at a remote monastic hospice. From there she had made her way to Madrid. As a favourite of Anne of Austria, she received a friendly welcome at the court of Anne’s brother, Philip IV, and had spent December and January being banqueted and feted. Then, in February 1638, she had left Madrid for refuge in England.

  Charles could not easily have forgotten the woman who had prepared Henrietta Maria for his wedding night. On her departure from England in August 1625 she had left behind her portrait dressed as an erotic shepherdess with one breast exposed.37 She had later entangled not only English courtiers, but also Henrietta Maria in her plots against Richelieu. It was only in recent years that Richelieu had begun to build a better relationship with Henrietta Maria. Louis feared Chevreuse would again now ‘perform unfriendly offices’ against his government in England.38 And, indeed, when she disembarked at Portsmouth in April 1638, Mme de Chevreuse had every intention of doing exactly that.

  Chevreuse believed that France would benefit from making peace with Spain, just as Charles’s kingdoms had benefited. Richelieu was an impediment to these hopes, but if Britain went into alliance with Spain this would force Richelieu’s downfall. Her allies could then bring France to the negotiating table.

  Charles sent her former lover, Henry Holland, at the head of a welcoming party of twenty-five coaches to bring her to Whitehall. Holland remained high in royal favour at court and had succeeded Lucy’s late husband as Charles’s Groom of the Stool. He also had a key position in helping raise money for the king by enforcing the medieval Forest Laws. At the palace Mme de Chevreuse was granted the privilege of being permitted to sit in the royal presence while the wife of the French ambassador was publicly denied a similar honour–an ominous snub to Louis XIII, whose representative her husband was. Charles also loaned Chevreuse a house in Whitehall’s gardens. In it he hung a p
ortrait by the high-baroque Italian artist Guido Reni depicting the biblical figure of Judith holding the decapitated head of her enemy, just as Chevreuse would have liked to do with Richelieu: Charles’s joke.

  Mme de Chevreuse was soon enjoying herself immensely. Charles paid her expenses while Henrietta Maria supplied her with fashionable clothes. ‘She has renewed her old acquaintances and is making new ones,’ a diplomat noted, ‘all the lords pay her court and she passes the time merrily.’39 Although she was personally pious, Henrietta Maria’s friends were often rakish: there were drinkers, gamblers and fornicators amongst them. Chevreuse too liked to shock, and one day went swimming in the Thames, inspiring poets who compared her body to a galaxy of stars, shooting through the water like the Milky Way.40 But she also spent more respectable hours attending the queen’s masques. Often they depicted representations of the love Henrietta Maria shared with Charles, which in turn reflected the peace and order Charles had brought his kingdoms.

  Yet worthy as these masques sound, to hot Protestants they demonstrated a moral threat every bit as much as Mme de Chevreuse swimming in public view. Henrietta Maria had revolutionised the English stage by introducing women who both spoke and sang. The Puritan William Prynne railed against this, arguing that women, standing on stage, ‘perchance in man’s apparel and [with] cut hair’, subverted woman’s divinely ordained submission to man. They were ‘notorious whores’, he wrote, both ‘sinful and abominable’. His ears had been struck off for his words, and the masques with their transient kingdoms of gilded board continued. ‘O shows! Shows! Mighty shows! / The eloquence of masques!’ the underemployed Ben Jonson scoffed. ‘What need of prose / or verse… / You are the spectacles of state!’41

  The court conversions also continued. In May 1638 one onlooker complained that it seemed ‘Our great women fall away [from the Protestant faith] every day.’42 Mme de Chevreuse made great play with the queen of trying to also convert Holland. Chevreuse knew very well that Holland would never become a Catholic. His support for Puritans was linked both to family solidarity and a genuine horror of popery, even if he was not a Puritan himself. But at court the distinction between those Calvinists, like Holland, who were Church of England conservatives, and as such disapproved of Charles’s innovations, and those who were full-blooded Puritans and active dissidents, was being blurred. Lucy’s brother, the Earl of Northumberland, complained that ‘To think well of the Reformed religion is enough to make the archbishop one’s enemy.’43 Chevreuse’s ‘failed’ efforts to convert Holland were designed to tar him with the Puritan-dissident brush, while reminding the queen that Chevreuse was a fellow Catholic and a much older friend. Holland remained viscerally anti-Spanish, and that was not an influence Chevreuse wanted anywhere near the queen.

  While cutting Holland out from Henrietta Maria’s circle, Chevreuse also busied herself making friendships with court Catholics to whom the queen was close, and began the promotion of the alliance when she ‘artfully threw out some project of a marriage between the Princess Mary… and the prince of Spain’.44 Added pressure could be brought on the queen through her mother.

  Marie de’ Medici had been living in the Spanish Netherlands since a failed coup against Richelieu in 1630. Henrietta Maria was concerned about her, and Mme de Chevreuse persuaded the queen to press Charles to invite her mother to England. Laud was aghast at this development. Marie de’ Medici was well known for her Counter-Reformation commitment, and Laud was already at his wits’ end over the court conversions. Chevreuse, he observed, was ‘a cunning and practising woman’, and Marie de’ Medici’s imminent arrival with her ‘seditious, practising train’ would be a most ‘miserable accident’.45 Charles, meanwhile, also dreaded the expense. He would have to pay to support Marie and her household at a time when financing his sister and her son, the Prince Palatine Charles Louis, was stretching his resources. The plan, however, had the advantage of further annoying the French. As the situation in Scotland continued to deteriorate, he agreed at last to his wife’s request, and offered to welcome Marie de’ Medici to England.

  * Henrietta Maria was particularly grateful for the introduction to Bernini, the greatest sculptor of his day. Van Dyck had painted the king’s head from three angles, so he could do a bust of him.

  9

  ‘A THING MOST HORRIBLE’

  THE MOTHER-IN-LAW HAD LANDED, HER ARRIVAL ON THE ENGLISH coast heralded by storms. In London the ‘great winds’ of October 1638 were dubbed ‘the queen mother’s weather’. Having disembarked, Marie de’ Medici took ‘to her bed to recover from the discomforts of the sea and had recourse to medicine’.1 Meanwhile, Henrietta Maria awaited her arrival at court anxiously. Marie had regularly admonished her little daughters to be compliant, demanding in her Tuscan-accented French that they were ‘well behaved and obedient’.2 Discipline had been strict and Henrietta Maria still felt a childlike need to please her.

  A state entry to London was organised of a grandeur appropriate to Marie’s rank as ‘a mother of three kings’ (her son being Louis XIII of France, and her sons-in-law Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of Britain). She was processed down Cheapside by Charles’s entire court, along with six of her own coaches, seventy horses and 160 followers. There were monks and dwarves, dogs and nobles, while the crowd enjoyed at least the hope of also glimpsing the queen mother. In her youth she had been the embodiment of Rubens’ ideal of beauty, all full curves and chestnut-gold hair. Even now her curvaceous body was reminiscent of those imposing saints and angels depicted in baroque churches, stampeding towards heaven in rolling waves of marble: indeed she was almost the Counter-Reformation in physical form. Henrietta Maria greeted her mother, accompanied by her five children, and despite being heavily pregnant, threw herself at Marie’s feet.

  Although state apartments had been made ready for Marie at St James’s Palace, Henrietta Maria was supervising the upgraded redecoration of the passage between her mother’s bedroom and a Catholic chapel. Marie, meanwhile, pronounced her ‘extraordinary satisfaction’ at ‘the great progress of their holy religion in the kingdom where it had formerly been so persecuted’.3 Henrietta Maria had done well in fulfilling the written instructions she had been given at their parting in France.

  Charles visited Marie daily and also proved generous.4 By 5 November a warrant had been issued giving Marie an allowance of £100 a day.5 Pensions of leading courtiers were, however, being stopped. Charles needed the money to face down the Scots.

  That same month a General Assembly of the kirk had formally backed the Covenanters, condemning the new Scottish prayer book as popish and declaring episcopacy unlawful. This marked a challenge to Charles’s authority across his kingdoms, for if bishops were ‘unlawful’ in Scotland, then it could be argued they were unlawful in England and Ireland too. The royal supremacy in religion that gave the king the right to direct religious policy in England was under threat, and so were his secular powers. Leading Covenanters, such as the Highland chief Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, were pushing reforms through the Scottish Parliament that stripped Charles of his ‘prerogative’ rights, instituted the calling of regular sessions of Parliament and denied Charles the power to veto legislation–thus allowing themselves to make law without royal consent. This included the abolition of the episcopal system, which Charles, like his father, believed had been ordained from the earliest Christian times and was a pillar of the monarchy itself.

  ‘The aim of these men is not religion as they falsely pretend and publish,’ Charles observed, ‘it is to shake all monarchical government and to vilify our regal power, justly descended to us and over them.’6 As for their ‘damnable Covenant’: so long as it ‘is in force I have no more power in Scotland than as a Duke of Venice, which I will rather die than suffer’.7

  Already Van Dyck had begun to produce portraits of Charles in the guise of a military leader. In several Charles stands in armour, his hand resting on a helmet. Surviving studio copies of a lost original show the same image, but in th
ese the king’s hand rests instead on a transparent sphere. The inspiration came from a Titian in Charles’s collection. Entitled An Allegory of Marriage, it shows a woman holding a transparent sphere as a symbol of the fragility of human happiness.8 It was usual for a globe to be used as a symbol of terrestrial power. The weighty orb in the coronation regalia was one example. Yet, here, under Charles’s hand, this symbol of power is as delicate as glass, as transient as a soap bubble.9

  On 3 January 1639 Sir Henry Slingsby, the thirty-six-year-old deputy lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, went to Bramham Moor to see the light horse practising for battle. He had contributed two horses to support the king in the coming confrontation with Scotland, but he felt no pride as he watched his horses being trained. ‘These are strange, strange spectacles to this nation in this age that have lived thus long peaceably without noise of shot or drum,’ he wrote in his diary. That Englishmen should be poised to fight fellow subjects of the king was ‘a thing most horrible’. He compared it to the freakish horror of looking up and seeing in the sky ‘a flock of birds… fight and tear one another’.10

  The effect on Charles of the coming conflict also should not be underestimated. Kings existed to ensure peace, prosperity and justice, ruling above the narrow interests of faction for all a nation’s people. He had promised harmony in his court masques. This rebellion was a failure of kingship. A hundred years earlier, in the wake of another religiously motivated rebellion in 1536, Henry VIII had changed his burial wishes, moving his planned tomb from Westminster Abbey to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He did so in order that he could be buried with the protagonists of the Wars of the Roses, with himself depicted as the embodiment of national reconciliation between the rival royal houses from which he claimed descent: a mark of his trauma in the face of the new divisions he had opened. This Scottish rebellion was equally a body blow to Charles’s self-esteem. Even if he defeated the Scottish rebels, he mourned that ‘It is my own people who will by this means for a time be ruined.’11 Nevertheless, a war that neither side wanted was now almost upon them.