The White King Read online

  Charles’s anti-Habsburg policy stood to win over some of Buckingham’s fiercest critics, many of whom came from the old war party, now often called the ‘patriots’. But were their hopes of the possible gains of a war with the Habsburgs in any way realistic? The Stuart Crown was ‘in a miserable state’, one Frenchman observed, ‘without money, without friends and without reputation’.15 The royal income of Castile alone was six times that of England.16 The Habsburgs had secured Bohemia by armed force. James had no armed force. After James had made peace in 1604 the English army had virtually ceased to exist, and the logistic supply systems for food, clothing and weapons had all gone.17

  With no standing army and little money, Charles needed an alliance that would bring him both. The obvious place to look was France. The Bourbons had a history of backing Protestants when it suited their dynastic interests. A marriage to Louis XIII’s sister, the pretty young Henrietta Maria, would provide the Stuart Crown with the support of Louis’ great army, and money from a dowry with which to raise an army of their own. Charles also sought tax support from his father’s subjects, asking the king to call a parliament where he would seek to ask for the necessary subsidies. In 1624, he duly sat in the House of Lords as Prince of Wales and proved to be an effective leader of the ‘patriot’ party.18 There were concerns that a French marriage would oblige James to ‘take off or slacken the execution’ of the penal laws against English Catholics. These laws forced Catholics to attend Protestant services or face ruinous fines and denied them the freedom to attend Catholic worship. Although there was only a small Catholic minority in England, the threats in Europe meant that rooting out all popery was seen as vital for Protestant survival in Britain. After James had signed a House of Commons petition promising to continue to enforce these laws, MPs voted tax subsidies of £200,000. The money paid for an army of mercenaries and pressed men under the German general Ernst von Mansfeld, with the intention they be sent to fight the Habsburgs in the Netherlands on the side of the Dutch rebels.

  Some of the English poor drafted into the army rubbed salt into their eyes to escape being sent across the Channel. James was scarcely more enthusiastic and in mid February 1625, he called a halt to the war. Countermanding Buckingham’s orders to relieve the besieged Dutch garrison at Breda, James forbad Mansfeld from engaging with Spanish forces. Mansfeld’s army was already succumbing to disease in the cold and wet weather as they awaited orders, and their supplies were dwindling. If the army did not have their orders to march soon, Parliament’s money would be wasted–and the war policy Buckingham had advocated with Charles would fail. To add to Buckingham’s worries the former Spanish ambassador, the Conde de Gondomar, was proposing to return to England and help James gather support for a revived Anglo-Spanish peace.

  In England too, meanwhile, the weather was bad. There were floods in London, where Westminster Hall was under two feet of water. This was particularly dangerous to the old, and at the beginning of March 1625 James developed a ‘tertian ague’ while at the Elizabethan palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire. The fifty-eight-year-old king was overweight and heavy drinking had further weakened his health. Nevertheless, he had survived such fevers many times before. Indeed he was reported as recovering well when, on 21 March, he became ‘extremely sick’. The cause appeared to be a poultice and a cordial brought by Buckingham.19 With the king suffering violent fits of diarrhoea, his Scottish attendants began to quarrel. Some feared Buckingham had unintentionally poisoned the king. James refused to have the cordial again.20 On 25 March a Habsburg agent in the palace reported his suspicion that Buckingham had tried to murder King James. Out of Mansfeld’s force of 12,000 only 5,000 were now fit for service. James was still awaiting Gondomar, but the agent reported that Buckingham had used the king’s stamp to sign a warrant to stop the Spaniard from coming.21

  Two days later Charles was sitting at the side of his dying father. James tried to speak to his son, but found he had ‘no strength to express his intentions’.22 James VI of Scots and I of England died at noon on 27 March 1625, with Buckingham holding his hand.

  James was perhaps the greatest ever King of Scots, but he was an outsider in England and it showed. He had left a difficult legacy for his son. His incontinence with money, his quarrels with his English parliaments, and the anger provoked by negotiations for the defunct Spanish match had generated mistrust, while royal finances remained in a parlous state with the Crown dependent on the diminished revenue of a medieval monarch. There were problems stored up for the future also in his other kingdoms. James had failed to unite their divergent religions. The Irish remained predominately Catholic, while the Scots kept their distinctive kirk. Subjects who differed from their king in matters of religion were judged unlikely to be fully obedient or loyal. Charles had bridges to mend everywhere, and needed to do so urgently if he was to have his people behind him for the conflict ahead.

  In the following days England continued to be wracked by storms. As the words of the proclamation declaring Charles king were read in Cambridge, the townsfolk were unsettled by a blast of thunder like a cannon’s roar.23 After over twenty years of Jacobean peace it heralded the new king’s war.

  * To Puritans the war in Europe was evidence that the End of Days was approaching. As the pre-eminent Calvinist kingdom England had a divinely ordained role to lead the final battle against the Antichrist–a demonic entity that they believed was embodied in the papacy. This ruled out any peace or compromise with the Habsburgs who were seen as the military arm of the Counter-Reformation. For more moderate Protestants the Pope was not a demon but merely the invalid leader of a Catholic Church in need of Protestant reform. This allowed them to be open to the possibility of peace in the way the Puritans were not.

  * Buckingham could hardly forget that one of Henry VIII’s first actions on inheriting the throne had been to arrest two of his father’s loyal and effective, but most hated, servants. They were later executed.

  3

  A MARRIAGE ALLIANCE

  IT WAS DUSK WHEN THE PROCESSION ACCOMPANYING JAMES’S coffin arrived in London. Black smoke from thousands of coal fires curled up from tall chimneys into the gloom. A quarter of a million subjects and immigrant workers lived in Charles’s capital. Usually the streets were jammed with people and carts as well as the newly licensed hackney carriages.1 But that night, 4 April 1625, the roads on the processional route were cleared. Crowds gathered behind rails to watch the mayor and aldermen greet their new king, who rode before his father’s bier, accompanied by a guard of foot soldiers and horsemen. Behind, a long line of coaches carried ‘many great lords’.2 Haloed in torchlight the procession continued to Denmark House, the classical palace on the Strand James had built for his wife, and where James’s coffin was to lie in state.

  Just over a week later Charles lifted James’s orders refusing General Mansfeld permission to fight. With the army now heading for the besieged Dutch garrison at Breda, Charles pushed ahead with the marriage to Henrietta Maria to seal the French alliance. Unfortunately his bride was already proving an unpopular choice. Women had been key to the survival of Catholicism in England. Catholic men could be–and were–stripped of their property if they refused to attend Protestant services. Wives owned no property and were more defiant. They harboured priests and raised their children as Catholic. Henrietta Maria was, furthermore, no ordinary Catholic. Her brother boasted he was the ‘first Catholic among all kings’.3

  Rumours had also surfaced that the French marriage treaty had stipulated an end to the persecution of Charles’s Catholic subjects: rumours that were based on fact. Secret promises had been made that Catholics would not be punished for worshipping in their own homes. It was a necessary concession and reluctantly made. Charles now acted to allay Protestant fears. He refused leading Catholics the funeral blacks required to attend his father’s funeral, due to take place on 7 May. This snub signalled that Catholics would remain second class. Anxieties about the French marriage remained, nevertheless, as a
proxy wedding took place in Paris on 1 May while Charles remained in England for the funeral preparations.

  Henrietta Maria was now fifteen, but small for her age and only ‘on the very skirts of womanhood’.4 In other words she was a barely pubescent child. For much of her life it had been expected that she would marry into a cadet branch of the French royal family and her education had been limited to religious and courtly matters. With this she had acquired a ‘spirituality’ and ‘delicacy’, but to one French courtier, ‘above all there was something about her person that was noble and grand. Amongst all the princesses she had the great likeness to her father’, Henri IV; ‘Like him she had a noble heart, a magnanimous intrepid heart full of tenderness and pity.’5

  An elevated walkway hung with violet satin had been built at the archbishop’s palace, giving the crowds a perfect view of the bride as she was accompanied the short distance to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. ‘The princes, marshals, dukes and peers of France’ stepped out first, each dressed ‘in robes of inestimable value’: a brilliant moving tableau. Henrietta Maria followed in a shimmering bridal gown of silver tissue and gold fleur-de-lys, and a diamond-studded crown. Her figure was ‘finely proportioned’, she had ‘a perfect complexion’, her ‘large, black eyes’ were ‘soft, vivacious and shining’, her hair dark, her ‘teeth pretty’ and ‘big mouth… nicely made’.6 King Louis walked on his sister’s right in his velvet and ermine robes. The princesses of France bore her velvet mantle, embroidered with another large fleur-de-lys, and behind them was her mother, Marie de’ Medici: the former Regent of France a living reminder that, beyond their roles as wives and mothers, queen consorts could wield significant political power.

  At the west entrance to the cathedral, Louis handed Henrietta Maria to Charles’s proxy. The role had been given to a kinsman, the French Duc de Chevreuse. He was a member of the Guise family of Charles’s great-grandmother, Mary of Guise, the French wife of James V of Scots. As Charles was in mourning for his father, the duke had dressed in black, but his cloak was so thickly embroidered with gold and diamonds that ‘he seemed to burn and bear a living flame about him’.7 The wedding vows were taken on the platform at the doorway under a golden canopy. Since Charles would not attend a Catholic service the duke–although himself Catholic–would not enter the cathedral for the nuptial Mass. Charles’s young bride walked alone through such a profusion of candles the church resembled ‘the Palace of the Sun, described by Ovid in his Second Book of the transmutations of shapes’. Against a backdrop of cloth of silver, gold and rich tapestries she then took Communion alone beneath the soaring Gothic arches.8 That night, however, the Duc de Chevreuse played Charles one last time, lying in bed alongside Henrietta Maria, one leg touching, in a symbolic consummation of the marriage.9

  Charles longed to see his wife for himself and spent much of his spare time gazing at her picture bemoaning the fact ‘he could not have the happiness to behold her person’.10 She, in turn, was surely curious about her groom. Before they could meet, however, James’s funeral had to take place.

  James’s embalmed body was still lying in state at Denmark House, his coffin covered with a velvet cloth and mounted with a lifelike effigy dressed in royal robes. It was a statement of the undying nature of monarchical authority. This was something the funeral would express even more dramatically. Charles had borrowed the unprecedented sum of £50,000 for a funeral judged ‘the greatest ever known in England’.11 A cavalcade of several thousand plain-black-clad mourners escorted James’s body a little over a mile to the medieval splendour of Westminster Abbey. Each mourner was precisely ranked according to his status, while heraldic banners–symbols of chivalric virtue and dynastic greatness–shone in brilliant colour against this river of black. Buckingham rode one place behind the coffin, in his role as Master of the Horse. But ‘the greatest glory’, it was said, ‘was Charles’s own presence’. Dressed in a long black robe and hood he walked immediately behind the chariot bearing James’s body–it was only the third time an English king had ever done so and it was judged a striking mark of his love for his father.

  In the abbey the congregation heard a two-hour sermon recalling James’s survival of dangers, his success in achieving the union of the crowns and his strong support of episcopacy. James had argued that bishops, like kings, drew their authority from God and to deny their divinely sanctioned status was also to deny divine-right kingship: ‘no bishop, no king’, as he had once said. The sermon concluded with the statement that James’s kingly body now lived on in his son. At this, Charles stepped forward to accept his father’s hatchment, receiving James’s heraldic arms in a ritual enactment of the succession and an advertisement of the stable transfer of power.

  With the funeral over, Charles now dispatched Buckingham to Paris to collect his bride and firm up the French alliance. A revolt had just broken out in La Rochelle, a key port in south-west France and a Huguenot stronghold. Charles feared that Louis was poised to make peace with Philip of Spain in order to free him to focus on crushing this Calvinist rebellion at home. Charles relied on Buckingham to keep Louis on track for war.

  Buckingham was more than ready to impress the Bourbon court. He had ordered three coaches lined with velvet and gold lace to convey him around Paris. For travel by river, he took twenty-two boatmen with him, each of whom would be dressed in sky-coloured taffeta embroidered with gold. Even they, however, could not compete with his own appearance. Buckingham had packed twenty-seven rich suits in which to represent Charles. One alone, in white velvet spangled with diamonds, was said to be worth ‘fourscore thousand pounds’–more than a rich knight would earn in over a decade.12

  When Buckingham then appeared in Paris, he was judged ‘the best-looking and best-built man in the world’. Dressed in his ‘splendour he filled the populace with admiration, the ladies with delight–and something more; the gallants with jealousy, and the husbands, with something worse’.13

  He discovered that Marie de’ Medici had hurried Rubens to finish a cycle of twenty-one full-length portraits celebrating her achievements in time for the wedding celebrations. The paintings had just been installed at the newly completed Luxembourg Palace and she took Buckingham to see them. It was impossible not to be impressed, both by the great palace, with its windows of rock crystal framed in silver, and also by Rubens’ masterpieces, which today are kept in the Louvre. He was a profoundly original and powerful Counter-Reformation artist, and one whose dynamic and plump nudes would give the term ‘Rubenesque’ to the English language. Marie’s blank face and sexualised body overwhelm any images of her husband and her son. They include one of her giving birth to Louis, a scene reimagined in a vast outside space with Marie seated on a throne-like birthing chair. Marie gazes with her hazel eyes at the infant Louis, in the arms of a nurse, but he no more outshines her than does the pug that sits at her feet.14

  Buckingham immediately commissioned Rubens to begin a ceiling painting for his own house in London. It was to depict him being carried up out of the reach of the forces of Envy towards a temple of Virtue and Abundance: a theme close to his heart. The forces of envy against Buckingham were stronger than ever, with it disappointing many ‘that he should be found favourite to both father and son’.15

  Meanwhile Paris glittered with welcome for Buckingham. Suppers, musical evenings and masked balls were thrown for the duke and his train of English and Scottish courtiers. Louis XIII’s new chief minister, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu, gave one such party in the gardens of his small country palace of Ruel.16 Richelieu’s wiry frame, dressed in the flashes of scarlet that denoted his cardinal’s rank, exuded nervous energy. It was said you either liked Richelieu or hated him. He was not a man who inspired neutral opinions. He had served Marie de’ Medici as her Secretary of State during the Regency. After her fall, when she had plotted with Louis’ enemies, he had effected the reconciliation between son and mother. Louis had made him his chief minister the previous year and Richelieu was now set on making France the gr
eatest power in Europe. Cardinal or not, his loyalties in all secular matters lay with the king, not the papacy; if he thought it was in France’s interest to ally with Protestant heretics against Catholic Spain, he would.

  Richelieu’s gardens were his place of relaxation.17 There were evergreen trees and avenues with elaborate fountains. One, in the form of a serpent, shot out plumes of water sixty feet into the air that would sharply twist to catch the unwary passer-by. Buckingham had still more disconcerting experiences, however, at Richelieu’s hands. In their private meetings the cardinal refused to align France more openly against the Habsburgs, arguing that a formal military alliance would only antagonise neutral countries. When Buckingham requested that Charles at least be given a written promise that Louis not make a separate peace with Spain, Richelieu dismissed it as unnecessary. It seemed that his focus would indeed be on crushing the Huguenot rebellion. And even Rubens took the liberty of lecturing Buckingham on the virtues of peace with Spain, as the duke sat for his portrait.

  Buckingham was not the only Englishman in Paris to be troubled by Richelieu’s slipperiness concerning the alliance. So was the diplomat Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who had led the marriage negotiations. The thirty-four-year-old Holland was a ‘very handsome man, of a lovely and winning presence’. By nature easy-going, and generous with his money, he also relished intrigue and Richelieu was now in his sights.

  The French alliance had a personal dimension for Holland, one that was linked to his family’s legacy of hatred for Spain and support for the Calvinist cause in Europe. His mother, Penelope Devereux, was the 2nd Earl of Essex’s favourite sister. When Holland was ten he had seen her go to prison, reportedly for urging his uncle on in his revolt against Elizabeth I in 1601. Holland’s elder brother, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, had continued in the family tradition. He was the greatest anti-Spanish privateer of the day, and deeply involved in colonial and trading enterprises in the Spanish-dominated Americas.18 Warwick had acted, for example, as a signatory of the famous Pierce Patent, which confirmed the rights of the Puritans who had sailed on the Mayflower to plant and govern land in the Plymouth area of New England.19