The White King Read online

  The final chapter of The White King opens with Charles’s burial. The belief that Charles was the only king ever to have been crowned in white, the basis for his sobriquet, turns out to be untrue, while the famous description of him being buried in a snowstorm also melts into myth. But the intensely moving drama of Charles’s life and reign remain. The tales of his vilified queen, of populist politicians and religious terror, of foreign engagements and civil wars, of the suffering of ordinary people, the hopes vested in a different future, and the shadow of a coming genocide, make this an epic story for our times.

  * A term coined by the historian John Adamson.

  PREFACE

  VENTUROUS KNIGHT

  MONSIEUR DE PREUX CONSIDERED THE REQUEST OF THE TWO Englishmen standing at the old eastern gate of the Louvre. It was Saturday 22 February 1623, and Paris was labouring under a third winter of exceptional cold. De Preux, a former tutor to the French king, was no longer young and perhaps his eyesight was not what it had been. In any event, he decided to overlook the Englishmen’s wigs and false beards. Nor did it seem to trouble him they appeared remarkably unalike for men whose names–John and Tom Smith–suggested they were related. One was still boyish, small and slight, his wig covering a high forehead; the taller man, well built and strikingly handsome. De Preux simply treated them as two gentlemen of fashion travelling Europe as part of their education. As such, he was happy to introduce them to the spectacle of the Bourbon court and, at its heart, his master, Louis XIII.

  The men walked past the musketeer guards in their feathered hats and livery of blue and red to enter the palace. The buildings of the Louvre were strung along the Seine like a mismatched necklace, ancient medieval towers with arrow-slit windows alongside new light-filled Renaissance galleries. It seemed you never knew what you might find around the next corner. Yet little could have been as surprising as the true identities of the Louvre’s latest visitors. De Preux surely knew, however, or had heard rumours of the shocking truth. The older man was no less than the thirty-year-old George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham, Lord High Admiral of England and royal favourite to King James of Britain. Still more extraordinary, however, was the presence of the second man: James’s heir, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales.

  Although by some measure the smaller of the two men, Charles was an attractive youth, his long hair swept back from a fine face and large eyes that turned down at the outer corners. His paternal grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was well remembered here in Paris. She had inherited her Scottish throne as an infant, and been the child bride of a King of France, loved for her beauty and charm. Widowed when aged only eighteen, she had returned to Scotland from France, the Catholic queen of a newly Protestant Scotland. As the senior descendant of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, she had expected one day also to be queen of Protestant England. To help secure this inheritance she had married a junior Stuart who, like Mary herself, had English royal blood. But by the time Charles’s father, James, was born in 1566, Mary’s marriage had turned sour. Months later her husband was murdered. The Protestant lords and their allies in the Scottish ‘kirk’, or church, accused Mary and overthrew her. Her baby, James, was made king in her place and raised in the Protestant religion. Mary sought refuge with Elizabeth I in England but the Tudor queen instead imprisoned her Stuart cousin. Those who feared a Catholic heir to the English throne wanted Mary dead. Nearly twenty years later, in 1587, they got their way. After Mary’s desperate plots to escape she was tried for treason (although no subject of Elizabeth) and executed with a woodsman’s axe. There had been angry riots when the news reached Paris, but in London bonfires were lit in celebration.

  Charles’s grandmother had not been the last monarch to fall victim to Europe’s religious divisions. The fault line in Western civilisation begun at the Reformation had sent seismic shocks across the Continent, triggering rebellions, civil wars and assassinations. Even now, the aftershocks continued. Beyond Paris’s Champs-Élysées, named after the heavenly Elysian Fields of Greek myth, the political and religious map of Europe was shifting, churches were in flames and thousands were dying.

  The Reformation, launched in Germany in 1517, had been born in hell–or rather, in the question of how to avoid it. The Catholic Church taught that to gain salvation you needed to live a life of good works, such as giving to charity. Martin Luther, the great prophet of the Reformation, called for liberty from what he judged as spiritually burdensome rules, and railed against the corruption that had become part of them. The good work of giving to charity did not seem so good when you were being blackmailed with the prospect of hell, and the charities in question were the prestige projects and foundations of the mighty. Luther preached that God offered heaven to an elect few in return for faith alone, that nothing people did could gain them salvation. Scripture, furthermore, was the sole basis of religious truth: the ancient traditions of the Catholic Church and the teachings of its councils had no share in such a role.1

  People had, however, soon begun to draw opposing truths from their reading of scripture. What became known as Protestantism split into faiths united only by their rejection of Catholicism. Lutheranism’s greatest rival within Protestantism were the so-called ‘Reform’ churches that had begun in Switzerland and came to be labelled ‘Calvinist’ after the theologian John Calvin.2 Reform Protestantism had swept away what Calvinists judged the obfuscations and half-measures of Lutheranism. They emphasised that God’s total power over salvation meant that while He had predestined an elect to heaven, He had also predestined everyone else to hell, whatever good deeds they did. The most significant departure from Luther’s teaching was, though, their rejection of any belief in the physical presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine.* Rituals and altars were rendered superfluous and even judged idolatrous, while in place of a caste of priests they had ministers, who had no special status beyond academic credentials, reflected in their black gowns. The religious life of Calvinists centred on reading scripture, listening to sermons, spiritual self-examination and prayer.

  This was the Protestantism of Britain.

  The Scottish kirk was the purer Calvinist church of the Stuart kingdoms, for the Church of England remained only partially reformed, retaining its pre-Reformation structure of priests, deacons and bishops. English Protestants nevertheless saw themselves as leading members of the international Calvinist community. This embraced parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the Electoral Palatinate in the Rhineland, the northern provinces of the Netherlands which formed the Calvinist Dutch Republic, and in Catholic France, where the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion had left a substantial minority of Calvinists known as the Huguenots who had been granted the right to practise their Protestant religion.3

  There was no certainty of survival, however, for these Calvinist communities. Protestantism in Europe and in Britain had survived only when it had been imposed by rulers, or was permitted by them.4 To protect themselves British Protestants had, therefore, developed ‘resistance’ theories, which argued that rulers took their authority from the people who therefore had the right to overthrow, or kill, any monarch of the ‘wrong’ religion. These theories had justified the Scottish Protestant overthrow of Mary, Queen of Scots. But Catholics–especially those associated with the Jesuits–had also developed resistance theories. There had been several attempts to overthrow or kill their persecutor Elizabeth I. Indeed, she had only reluctantly permitted the execution of her fellow monarch, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she could no longer afford the risk of keeping her Catholic rival alive.

  Resistance theories had thus cost James his mother but he believed they were also the source of much of the disorder of his early reign, and the sedition he had faced from fellow Calvinists in Scotland. James’s famous advocacy of the ‘divine right’ of kings was his answer to such theories, launched in a verbal war on religiously justified terror.5 His 1598 tract ‘The True Laws of Free Monarchy’ argued that kings drew their au
thority from God, not the people, and so had a ‘divine right’ to rule. A good king would choose to rule by the law, but in the last resort he was above the law–a ‘free’ monarch. Whether a king ruled tyrannically, or failed the ‘true’ religion, only God could punish him: there could be no religious justification for sedition or regicide. To the modern mind divine-right kingship appears like megalomania but its acceptance was intended to ensure stability, which was a basic function of monarchy.

  By the time Elizabeth had died on 24 March 1603 James was ready to publish his religious and political works for an international audience. It was later said that her Privy Council had debated whether or not James should be invited to become King of England with conditions–in other words he would have to accept that his kingship was limited by English law and he would not be ‘free’ to do as he wished. This was voted down.6

  With James’s ambition to inherit the English throne achieved, he had united the crowns of Britain for the first time, though not the kingdoms. To James’s frustration the English saw no advantage in a political union with their ‘old beggardly enemy’, the Scots.7 And even though many accepted James’s theories on divine right in principle, in practical terms England was a ‘mixed monarchy’. Sovereignty lay with the king, mixed with that of Parliament, which gave his actions the force of law. There could be no British union without Parliament’s agreement and English MPs would not agree to one. Consequently, while James had given himself the title King of Britain, there was no such political entity.

  Charles was heir to the kingdom of England, together with its colony, Ireland (which had its own Parliament), and the entirely independent kingdom of Scotland (which retained its own system of law, its own Parliament and kirk). Nevertheless James’s achievement in 1603 had raised the Stuarts to the ranks of Europe’s greatest ruling dynasties. As the Stuart heir Charles should have been greeted in Paris with fanfare. He was, however, on a secret mission and wanted to pass through France undetected.

  Charles was well rewarded by his visit to the Louvre, where he saw Louis XIII walking in a gallery among his courtiers: a young man, with black curly hair, a pursed mouth, and dark, guarded eyes.8 Aged twenty-one, Louis was Charles’s almost exact contemporary, but had become king of the most populous kingdom in Europe aged only eight.9 This had followed the assassination in Paris of his father, the great warrior Henri IV, at the hands of a Catholic fanatic: a reminder that kings, and the stability of their kingdoms, faced dangers even from zealots of their own religion.10 Marie de’ Medici had acted as regent for her son, until Louis overthrew her aged fifteen, in a coup that had begun with her unpopular favourite being cut down by swordsmen at the eastern gate of the Louvre. Louis now faced continued problems of religious division in France between Huguenots and Catholics and of a powerful nobility obsessed with matters of ‘honour’. Deaths in duels were commonplace and reflected the same contempt for the rule of law as modern gangland murders. The fact the killers came from the top of society, rather than the bottom, just made them more dangerous, with the nobility’s willingness to resort to violence leading to large-scale revolts. The strain on young Louis was evident in his frequent illnesses and bursts of temper. He was also said to be ‘so extreme a stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak as much as one word’.11

  It would be untrue to say all was now forgiven and forgotten between Louis and his mother–who had even joined a noble revolt in 1619–but there had been an official reconciliation. Charles and Buckingham saw Marie de’ Medici treated with honour at the Louvre, dining in state, her voluminous golden coiffure framing a sensual face immortalised many times in fleshy extravagance by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.12

  Charles and Buckingham arranged with de Preux to return to the Louvre in the evening hoping also to see Louis’ Habsburg wife, Anne of Austria–a marriage that Marie had arranged during her regency. Anne was performing in a rehearsal for a form of allegorical dramatics called a masque and was reputed to be a green-eyed beauty.

  While the Stuarts ruled the kingdoms of Britain and the Bourbons ruled France, the Habsburgs ruled seemingly almost everywhere else. Their origins lay in Austria and Switzerland, hence their sobriquet, the House of Austria. There were, however, two branches. At the head of the junior branch was Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, a title associated with the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, and the overlordship of over 200 independent territories in central Europe, both Protestant and Catholic. They extended to borders as far west as France, as far east as Poland, north to Denmark and south to Italy. Marie de’ Medici’s mother had come from this branch. Anne of Austria, despite her confusing appellation, came from the still more powerful senior branch, headed by her brother, the seventeen-year-old Philip IV of Spain. His empire, known simply as ‘La Monarchia’–‘the Monarchy’–included Naples, Sicily, Lombardy and the southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium), as well as Spain, Portugal and their colonies. It was an empire upon which the sun could never set, spanning the globe from the Americas to Africa, to Asia and the Philippines.

  That night de Preux’s son duly escorted Charles and Buckingham to Anne of Austria’s masque, where Louis’ youngest sister, Henriette-Marie, was also performing. The princess had been named after her parents Henri (IV) and Marie (de’ Medici). It was how she would always sign herself, although it is as the Italianate ‘Henrietta Maria’ that the future Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland is remembered.13 Her reputation remains tainted today by misogyny, religious prejudice and the propaganda of her enemies, but she was to prove every inch worthy of the names of her remarkable parents.

  Aged thirteen, Henrietta Maria was a pretty, ‘black-eyed, brown-haired’ girl with a beautiful voice. She had been cast in the masque as the goddess Iris: in Greek myth the personification of the rainbow. The part was usually given to a young girl dressed with wings and in all the colours of the spectrum. Henrietta Maria was perfect for the role. Charles, however, barely noticed her. When he wrote to his father that night he didn’t mention her name, just noting there had been ‘nineteen fair dancing ladies’, of whom Anne of Austria was ‘the handsomest’.14 But then it was Anne of Austria’s sister, the infanta Maria, whom he was planning to marry, not the child Henrietta Maria, and, as he told his father, watching Anne dance gave him an even ‘greater desire’ to see the infanta.15

  The next day Charles left Paris with Buckingham riding south-west for Madrid.16 He was ready for marriage and eager for a wife, but this journey was less about seeking a bride than about his resolve to settle a matter of family honour. ‘At bottom’, Charles said of his mission, ‘this concerns my sister.’17 For the first time Charles was striking out independently of his father in a foreign-policy endeavour of his own. Over 700 miles lay ahead of him before he would reach the capital of La Monarchia. He faced many possible dangers on the road, and to his father’s Calvinist subjects his destination marked the heart of an evil empire. English Protestant identity had been forged in the fires of the Elizabethan war with Catholic Spain, when their homeland and faith were threatened by the invasion attempt of the Armada. Today the threat to that identity appeared even greater.

  In the 1590s Protestantism had held half of Europe, but it was now being rolled back. The Catholic Church had reformed since Luther and had emerged stronger than ever, with a well-educated, confident clergy, led by popes known for their personal austerity. Assaulted by the vitality of this Catholic Revival, also called the Counter-Reformation, and weakened by inter-Protestant quarrels, Calvinists once again faced the military might of the Catholic Habsburgs. The armies of both the Spanish and Austrian branches of the dynasty were on the march in Europe and they were re-Catholicising Protestants by force.18

  James sent a message after his son and his favourite, praising them as ‘Venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance’. In truth, however, James too feared where Charles’s adventure in Spain would lead.

  * For Catholics,
Christ’s death on Calvary is an event of such cosmic significance that it is not bound by time. The Mass, the central act of Catholic worship, tears away the veil between the present and the past, to the moment of Christ’s sacrifice. As it is a sacrifice, the Mass is carried out on an altar. There, when the priest says the mystical words at the moment of consecration, the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood–a miracle known as ‘transubstantiation’. Luther’s moderated view was that, while the bread and wine did not entirely transform, there was a ‘Real Presence’ of God in the Eucharist. For Reform Protestants the Communion service was an act of remembrance called ‘the Lord’s Supper’.

  Part One

  HIS FATHER’S ‘WIFE’

  1

  ‘DEAREST SON’

  CHARLES WAS FOURTEEN WHEN BUCKINGHAM ENTERED HIS LIFE as James’s new favourite. The then plain Mr George Villiers was twenty-two, an ordinary gentleman, blessed with extraordinary good looks: ‘From the nails of his fingers–nay from the sole of his foot–to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. The setting of his looks, every motion, every bending of his body was admirable.’1 James, who had always been attracted to handsome men, gave his favourite the Scottish diminutive ‘Steenie’, after the angelic-faced St Stephen. Charles hated him with all the usual passion of a teenager towards an interloper in their relationship with a parent. The two young men often fought, Charles once spraying the favourite with water, and he in turn telling the prince to ‘kiss his arse’–and getting away with it. The king was plying his favourite with wealth and office, making him a ‘Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Knight of the Order of the Garter; and in a short time (a very short time for so prodigious an assent) he was made a baron, a viscount, an earl and a marquess, and [in 1619] became Lord High Admiral of England’.2 Buckingham was still only twenty-six.