The White King Read online

  Charles entered the hall at 9 a.m. with his wife and his tall, dark eldest son. Charles’s cloak glittered with the areole of the Garter Star. The prince, graceful in his movements, went and stood next to his seat, at the right hand of the throne. Charles walked on past the dais with the queen. When he reached the box allocated for him he sat down with his wife, then tore down the lattice screen. He would be seen, his visible expressions showing the support for his servant that he was determined to give.

  The Scots and Strafford’s enemies in Ireland had been lobbying hard against Strafford, but this theatre of justice was no mere show trial. They did not have the judges and peers in their pockets. Strafford, meanwhile, was prepared to fight hard for his life. He had a wife, a son and three daughters waiting at home. He was also confident he had a strong defence, ‘which certainly he has much reason for’, Lucy Carlisle remarked, ‘both from his own innocence and the weakness of his charge’.5

  Twenty-eight articles of impeachment were read out that first morning. The following day the prosecution began, led by Pym. It was easy to see why Pym had been chosen. He ‘was at that time… the most popular man and the most able to do hurt that has lived’.6 He could be a powerful performer in the Commons where his righteous conviction gave his speeches emotional force. But he was nevertheless humourless, bad at reading an audience, and slow to respond to a change in mood. Strafford, meanwhile, had no intention of allowing himself to be simply ploughed down by Pym’s rhetoric.

  The most serious accusation Strafford faced was of seeking to introduce illegal and arbitrary government. Here the prosecution case suffered one outstanding difficulty. Pym argued Strafford had committed treason against the state. In English law treason was to act against the king. Charles’s evident support was a reminder that Strafford had acted for the king. ‘Sure,’ Strafford observed, ‘it is a very hard thing, I should here be questioned for my life and honour, upon a law that is not extant, that cannot be shown.’7

  For over two and a half weeks Strafford picked apart the articles laid against him, calmly, politely, and with occasional flashes of scornful humour. Even a hostile spectator admitted, ‘when he speaks he does so with so much bravery… as begets admiration in all the beholders’.8 By contrast Pym’s ‘language and carriage was such’ it seemed he was expressing ‘personal animosity’ rather than seeking justice.9 Pym’s inner conviction was, this time, playing against his performance.

  The Scots and their allies feared that Strafford might even be found innocent. If so, he could return to office and strike back against them on Charles’s behalf. The Irish army was still standing, as was the humiliated English army, its soldiers left unpaid while money poured into Scottish coffers. English officers were now petitioning their desire to get back at the invaders, ‘if the perverse endeavours of some [traitors] do not cross us’.10 The Junto knew that drastic action had to be taken to bring the trial to its conclusion and the guilty verdict they needed.

  The key witness against Strafford was a former Secretary of State, Sir Henry Vane, whose enmity was personal. Vane claimed Strafford had intended to use the Irish army to subdue the English and not merely the Scottish rebels. His testimony was uncorroborated and flatly contradicted by other councillors. Vane’s son and namesake, a youthful former governor of Massachusetts, had, however, found his father’s council meeting notes and had passed them on to Pym. With the prosecution case slipping away, Pym decided to deploy Vane’s stolen documents.

  On 10 April the prosecution lawyers asked to introduce their new evidence. Strafford countered that, if so, then he should be allowed to introduce new evidence of his own. This would inevitably drag out proceedings and, given Strafford’s winning performance thus far, would likely cost the prosecution their case. When the Lords accepted Strafford’s request, the Commons men in the grandstands erupted in anger. Pym’s party shouted at the prosecution counsel, ‘Withdraw! Withdraw!’ In the heat of the moment many MPs heard this as ‘Draw! Draw!’ and reached for their swords. To calm the situation the Earl of Southampton called for the Lords to adjourn, but as the peers filed out of the hall, the Commons followed still in ‘great confusion’, crowding at the doors in a ‘tumultarie’.

  Strafford looked on, smiling in the knowledge that he might now be saved. Charles, in his box, laughed aloud.11 Their celebration was to be short-lived.

  Strafford’s enemies had already found a way around the difficulties of a trial. In the crush at the doors, heading for the Commons Chamber, was Lord Brooke’s brother-in-law Sir Arthur Hesilrige.12 He had in his pocket a white scroll in which the charges against Strafford had been redrafted as a bill of attainder. The plan was to deny Strafford any further hearing. The trial had failed but he could simply now be pronounced guilty, and condemned by Act of Parliament. A fellow MP, Sir Philip Stapilton, introduced the bill in the House of Commons that afternoon.13

  Attainder was not a tool, however, likely to appeal to anyone who revered common law, and some MPs saw it as threatening ‘judicial murder’.14 Time also remained on Strafford’s side. Anti-Scots and anti-Junto feeling was building, not least over Scottish demands for the abolition of episcopacy. Plenty of Englishmen wanted ‘leave to make laws in England ourselves without their directions’, and prayed ‘God for the church’s safety’ from Presbyterians.15

  Charles sent Strafford a letter reassuring him ‘upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune’. This was ‘but justice and therefore a very mean reward from a master to so faithful and able a servant’. The king signed himself ‘Your constant, faithful friend, Charles R’.16

  Charles hoped to bring round the more moderate elements within the Junto to find a compromise that would preserve Strafford’s life. Henrietta Maria, encouraged by Holland, was also anxious to help. Not only was her own safety threatened by the Junto radicals, so was that of the king’s Catholic subjects, whom it was her duty to protect. In an unpublished letter to Richelieu, recommending the merits of a Catholic who had fled into exile, she described a ‘storm that is falling upon the poor Catholics of this land’.17 The role of conciliator was a traditional one for a queen. Henrietta Maria seized this opportunity to take it up. Years later, in France, she would give dramatised accounts of the night-time conferences she now had with ‘the worst’ members of the opposition–by which she meant Pym. Their meetings took place at the foot of the back stairs to the rooms of one of her ladies-in-waiting, their faces lit only by the torches they carried.18

  Pym not only had clandestine meetings with the queen. He also saw the king. Charles offered high offices for Junto members in exchange for assurances that Parliament would grant the Crown adequate revenue to replace his tax-raising powers, that episcopacy in England would be preserved–and that Strafford’s life would be spared. Junto moderates were willing to accept this. Unfortunately there were also several figures who shared the Scots’ view that the only way to guarantee that Strafford would never again be restored to office was to cut off his head. ‘Stone-dead hath no fellow’, as the Earl of Essex put it.19

  The arrival in London of the fourteen-year-old Prince William of Orange should have been a cause for national celebration. He represented the valiant Dutch rebels against the might of Habsburg Spain, as well as being the groom for Mary, to whom her father had given the title ‘Princess Royal’. Prince William had, reportedly, brought gifts worth upwards of £23,000 as well as a substantial sum in gold. This generosity had, however, raised concerns amongst Junto hardliners that Charles would use it to pay the army’s arrears. There were already rumours of a Royalist plot by discontented army officers. If Parliament was now adjourned for the wedding celebrations, the army might ensure Parliament would never be recalled.20

  On 21 April a crowd of 10,000 ‘ready at command’ of the hardliners and ‘upon a watch word given’, descended on Westminster.21 Three officers of the City militia handed in a petition carrying 20,000 signatures calling for Strafford’s death. With the mob at the gates, MPs pa
ssed the attainder bill against Strafford and sent it up to the Lords. Strafford asked for mercy, that he might ‘go home to my own private fortune, there to attend my own domestic affairs, and education of my children’. But, he observed, if things went differently and ‘I should die upon this evidence, I had much rather be the sufferer than the judge’.22

  On 26 April, the peers passed the first reading of the attainder bill. Army officers, meanwhile, issued a new petition complaining of ‘ill-affected persons’ using mob violence to overawe Parliament and threaten the king. A diplomat reported nervously that ‘Every one fears that if the fire of these differences is not extinguished by the more prudent, it will finally break out in a terrible civil war.’23

  On 1 May, following another, failed attempt to reach out to hardliners, Charles went to Parliament to intervene himself in the debates on Strafford’s fate.

  Again he sought compromise. He accepted that Strafford had committed misdemeanours which required punishment, but not that he had committed treason. Kings were answerable directly to God for their actions. To sign the death warrant of someone he believed to be innocent would be a grave sin. ‘I hope you know what a tender thing conscience is,’ Charles told the Lords, ‘and no fear or respect will make me go against it.’24 He then issued a warning. He would not disband the Irish army until the Scots had left England. This statement left open the possibility that he might yet deploy the Irish army in England. The king’s speech ‘astonished us’, an MP recorded. This was, perhaps, what Charles intended. He had given notice that he was taking a stand.

  The following day was Princess Mary’s wedding. The mood in London was fearful and behind the scenes Charles had made one of his ‘extreme resolutions’.25 The ceremonies were to provide cover for a plot to spring Strafford from the Tower.

  12

  GIVEN UP

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, PRINCE WILLIAM’S CARRIAGE MADE ITS WAY down the Strand in a cavalcade of coaches heading for Whitehall Palace. He was a good-looking boy with long brown hair, dressed in red and gold. Not to be outdone, his companion Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, wore silver and gold. Holland had taken what should have been Warwick’s place in the carriage. Warwick had claimed he was too busy with ‘affairs of state’ to attend the wedding.1 It was a troubling absence and an extraordinary snub for Charles, who had made Warwick a privy councillor only days earlier.

  Did Warwick know what was happening at the White Horse Tavern near St Paul’s, where Sir John Suckling was now assembling a planned force of a hundred armed men?2 Suckling was the poet who had once written verses on the fantasy of stripping Lucy Carlisle naked while she walked in Holland Park. Slim, of middle height, with a small head and long fair curls, the thirty-two-year-old cavalier had ‘a brisk and graceful look’.3 He was a cousin of the queen’s current favourite, Henry Jermyn. Yet he was no blind supporter of Charles’s policies. Suckling had argued that Charles needed to pay court to the people, in the traditional manner of an English monarch and as Elizabeth I had done so successfully.4 But he also believed that men like Warwick and Pym were self-seeking and dangerous–and had to be stopped.

  While public attention was focused on the marriage ceremonies, Suckling planned that his hundred men would march to the Tower, where the lieutenant had verbal instructions to grant them entry. Once in, they hoped to overpower the wardens and release Strafford.

  Prince William, meanwhile, had reached Whitehall where he was escorted into the royal chapel. There he awaited his bride on a railed platform near the Communion table. The nine-year-old Princess Royal entered the chapel dressed in silver and escorted by two of her brothers: the ten-year-old Prince of Wales, and seven-year-old James, Duke of York. William had not been permitted to kiss Mary when they had first met, but thought her ‘beautiful’. She was wearing a necklace of huge pearls lent by his mother. ‘I love her very much and I believe she loves me too,’ he had told his parents. Behind Mary and her brothers followed sixteen small bridesmaids of her own age, ushered by Mary’s governess, the old Countess of Roxburghe.5 The king entered next, with a number of senior peers. Then came Henrietta Maria and the stately Marie de’ Medici, attending the ceremony as spectators rather than co-worshippers.

  Since Charles had been left financially dependent on Parliament, Marie de’ Medici’s allowance had been stopped, obliging the ‘mother of three kings’ to dismiss her household, with its dwarves and noblemen, and to live ‘the frugal life of a private lady’.6 She was also now showing signs of poor health. Her life in England was under constant threat and the strain was taking a toll. Holland had asked his fellow peers to provide money for a guard, reminding them that if anything were to happen to their royal guest, ‘it would be a great dishonour to the Nation’.7 The money was denied and so she still faced the danger of being killed by a rogue fanatic just as her husband, Henri IV, had been.

  The children’s wedding was presided over by the Bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, who was personally closer to Charles even than Laud, and promoted a devotional style far closer to baroque Catholicism than that of the archbishop. Light filtered through 241 feet of modern stained glass, while music was played on a magnificent organ. Charles gave the bride to the groom and William put a ring on her finger.8

  This was not a marriage of the stature Charles had wanted for his daughter. The Prince of Orange was the stadholder, or ‘place holder’, of the province of Holland, and as such merely the hereditary head of state of a Dutch republic. Charles would have preferred a King of France or Spain for Mary and would never have agreed to the marriage had he not desperately needed Dutch money. But Henrietta Maria told her sister Christine that ‘although [William] will not be a king I have no doubt she can be just as happy. I know well that it is not kingdoms that bring happiness.’9

  As the wedding ceremony ended, Suckling counted only around sixty men at the White Horse Tavern: two-thirds of the number he had expected. He decided to delay the enterprise until the following night. But word of this threatening group of soldiers was spreading through London, even as Charles enjoyed the wedding breakfast with his family in the withdrawing chamber.10 Here there was a notable absence. Charles’s eldest nephew, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Palatine, Charles Louis, had arrived in England in February hoping to prevent the Dutch alliance in order to marry Mary himself.11 Charles had tried for years to find rich brides for his nephews.12 He had always been generous to the family of his sister Elizabeth. Now that Charles was himself in financial straits, it was ungrateful of Charles Louis to have tried to claim Mary as his bride, and his coming to England was unhelpful on another front. For years there had been Puritans who believed the thoroughly Calvinist Charles Louis would be a more worthy King of England than Charles, or Charles’s sons by the Catholic Henrietta Maria.

  At around 10 p.m. the ambassadors returned to Whitehall to witness the ritual consummation that would ensure the marriage was irrevocable. They were escorted from the withdrawing chamber to the bedchamber where William now lay with Mary, as Charles and Henrietta Maria looked on. Since Mary was only nine it was considered sufficient that what was witnessed was the children ‘associating’, as the Venetian ambassador put it.13 The ceremony was given drama by the queen’s dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, who produced an enormous pair of shears to cut the stitching on the nightgown into which the princess had been sewn. William then could touch her leg–flesh against flesh made the ritual complete. Afterwards William was taken back to his own quarters. He would return home at the end of the month. It was not expected that Mary would leave her parents for The Hague before her twelfth birthday. They did not want the sexual act to take place before she was physically mature. Charles wanted her to be fourteen, at least.

  At eleven o’clock that night, with the wedding over, Charles learned that the plan to spring Strafford had failed. Notices had gone up that an attempt to free Strafford was planned and a crowd of around 1,000 people was now gathered in the darkness outside the Tower. By morning the crowd had shifted to Westminster and thei
r numbers had grown. MPs were informed of the Tower plot and of a further conspiracy to bring the English army in the north to London to institute a coup. Warwick had indeed been busy. MPs promptly drew up a protestation in defence of the Protestant religion. Over the following days several of those wanted for interrogation about the Tower plot fled aboard. The queen’s favourite Henry Jermyn was amongst them, as was Suckling. The Countess of Leicester–sister of Lucy Carlisle–saw Suckling in Paris soon after and pronounced him still ‘good company, but much abated in his mirth’.14 A year later he vanished and was rumoured to have taken poison rather than live in poverty.

  Lucy Carlisle was interrogated in front of a Commons committee about what she knew of the Tower plot.15 She learned more from them than they did from her–and the lesson she took away was that it was time to distance herself from her former affiliation to Strafford. Pym and her cousins Warwick and Essex were the new force in the land. Charles’s power, meanwhile, continued to diminish with a law passed that Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent.16 Henrietta Maria would henceforth refer to it shrewdly as the ‘perpetual parliament’, for why would MPs ever vote themselves out? The law opened the door to the absolute power of whoever controlled Parliament. Currently that meant the Junto–and their mobs.