The White King Page 6

  Holland had had to be more circumspect than Warwick in defying James’s peace with Spain. As a younger son he did not have his brother’s vast landed inheritance. He needed a successful court career to pay for the magnificence he enjoyed, and his achievements had recently earned him his earldom. Nevertheless, Holland shared the family’s anti-Spanish values, as well as having a taste for women in his mother’s image: clever, alluring and dangerous. His current lover was reputed to be no less a figure than the wife of Charles’s proxy, the twenty-four-year-old Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse–or Mme de Chevreuse as she was known. She was due to travel with Henrietta Maria to England as dame de la chaise percée, the queen’s closest body servant.20 Meanwhile, she was happy to join Holland in his intrigues.

  A fair-skinned, petite woman, Mme de Chevreuse looked innocent enough. She had a round, almost baby face, framed with long tawny curls called ‘serpents’ and an expression that was both ‘majestic and sweet’. This belied a ruthless political animal, recalled in Richelieu’s memoirs with grudging respect: ‘She had a fine mind, a potent beauty, which she knew how to use to her advantage, was never disheartened by any misfortune and always retained her evenness of temper.’21 Mme de Chevreuse, in return, viewed the cardinal only with contempt for his social origins in merely minor nobility.* The higher nobility believed they had a right to dominate the king’s councils and she saw the power given to Richelieu as an insult. As for Louis, she thought him ‘an idiot’.22 With Richelieu out of the way, she believed the French king would be easy to manipulate–and she advised Holland and Buckingham that the most effective tool to weaken the cardinal’s power was Louis’ queen, the green-eyed Anne of Austria.

  Mme de Chevreuse and Queen Anne were close friends, their intimacy sealed by a tragic event three years earlier. A boisterous game the young women had been playing in the corridors of the Louvre had ended in the queen miscarrying her first child. Louis had sent Chevreuse into exile, which she had bitterly resented, while his angry treatment of his wife had damaged his marriage. Mme de Chevreuse was now back at court and closer than ever to Anne. No one was better placed to help Buckingham ingratiate himself with Louis’ wife, and the French would never forget his efforts. Buckingham’s extravagant glamour, his flirtatious behaviour with the Queen of France and his enmity with Richelieu later inspired Alexandre Dumas’ nineteenth-century novel The Three Musketeers.23

  Henrietta Maria spent the eve of her departure from Paris in a Carmelite convent. It was a peaceful and spiritual retreat, offering the new Queen of England a simple diet and time to reflect.24 In the far future, when Henrietta Maria had all the more reason to appreciate its serenity, she would ask for her heart to be buried here.

  On 23 May she was carried out of Paris in a litter lined with red velvet, amidst ‘shouts of applause’ and ‘a countless throng of people’.25 In her train were an estimated 4,000 courtiers, ‘all the flowers of France’, servants, diplomats and members of her family, as well as Buckingham and his British train. Scarlet coaches rolled along the bumpy roads on gilded wheels, the footmen dressed in the red of the Stuart livery, the horses trapped to match, with white plumes of feathers nodding from their heads. Behind, carts carried the trousseau. There were beds of estate, furniture for her chapels and a vast wardrobe of clothes: embroidered shoes, red velvet boots lined with marten fur, perfumed gloves, cutwork handkerchiefs, a royal mantle of crimson violet, a petticoat in the fawn colour ‘Isabella’, embellished in gold, a silver dress embroidered with brilliant coloured flowers, and much, much more.26

  To one Englishman in the train the young Henrietta Maria was ‘a sweet, lovely creature’, and a ‘brave lady’ who was ‘full of wit’.27 Holland had also found her intelligent, observing that her conversation showed ‘extraordinary discretion and quickness’. Although Buckingham’s focus remained on Anne of Austria, and Venetian diplomats reported growing gossip about the pair, this was largely forgotten in the great spectacle of Henrietta Maria’s formal entry to Amiens.28 The gates of the city had been hung with the arms of England, and seven triumphal arches, built at enormous expense, led her in procession to the cathedral. The last was fifteen metres high and depicted five virtuous former queens of England.29 The strain on Buckingham of a potential collapse of the French alliance against Spain was beginning to tell–and it prompted a row with Charles’s young wife.

  The anger felt by Protestants in England at the impending lifting of the anti-Catholic penal laws was mirrored in France by the hope that, indeed, English Catholics would now be allowed some religious freedom. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV had founded a new department–Propaganda Fide–for the evangelising of the faith. It would prove a powerful force across the globe. There were now twenty-eight priests in Henrietta Maria’s train, each of them ready to serve as a Counter-Reformation missionary. The sight of such men, dressed in Catholic religious clothes, was bound to cause deep unease in England, and Buckingham knew that as the man judged responsible for the treaty that permitted this, he would be blamed. His concerns were brought into even sharper focus with the arrival at Amiens of a papal legate.

  Henrietta Maria had written to Pope Urban VIII promising to remain faithful to the church after her marriage and to work for ‘the liberty of the Catholics’ in England–that is, for their freedom from persecution.30 Without this the Pope might not have granted the dispensation necessary to permit her marriage to a heretic king. The Pope’s representative now expressed the Pope’s delight in her promises, bestowing on Henrietta Maria the honour of the Golden Rose, an ancient Catholic symbol of joy following sorrow. In an accompanying text the Pope further urged her to become like a rose, ‘a flower of the root of Jesse among the spines of Hebrew iniquity’, who would spread the true Catholic faith amongst the heathen in England.31

  When the ceremony was over, Buckingham berated Henrietta Maria for the warm welcome she had given the legate. It must have been intimidating for a young girl to be lectured by a strapping man like Buckingham, who was also the representative of an as yet unmet husband. Nevertheless, Henrietta Maria defended herself, reminding him ‘that it behoved her to treat with respect the representative of the head of her religion’.32 It was an unfortunate start to their relationship, and on this unhappy note, the stay in Amiens concluded.

  Marie de’ Medici had been unwell for days and remained too ill to travel, so she said farewell to Henrietta Maria outside the town. Marie had enjoyed a strong influence over her fatherless daughter and she now gave Henrietta Maria a final letter of instruction, written in her own hand ‘so that it will be dearer to you’. It reminded the queen to be grateful for the privileges God had given her and to remember that she had been placed on earth for His glory. A longer version, which also still survives, encouraged her to love her husband and to be kind to all his subjects, but also to remember she had a duty to her persecuted co-religionists: ‘God has sent you into this country for them… who have suffered for so many years’.33 It was a role the young queen accepted with the utmost seriousness. It was traditional for a queen consort to intercede on behalf of the condemned. Who would she wish to intercede for more than those punished for sharing her religious faith? Two days later Henrietta Maria was on the coast at Boulogne, ‘in good health and very merry’.

  The last of the French queens of England, Margaret of Anjou, had also left her homeland aged fifteen. It was 1445 and England, under the Lancastrian Henry VI, was losing the Hundred Years War with France. Margaret of Anjou was seen as the child of the enemy. When that war was lost and civil war came to England, she had fought bravely for her husband’s cause, but this negative view of her never changed. Shakespeare condemned her as the ‘she wolf of France’ and a ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. Now, 180 years later, English Protestants judged Henrietta Maria a child of the powerful Catholic enemy. But hers was ‘a nature inclined to gaiety’ and she was excited to be taking the boat from France.34 Henrietta Maria was watched that evening dashing to the water’s edge, lett
ing the waves lap over her shoes: a haunting image of carefree childhood before the wind caught the sails of an English ship and brought her to a new shore.35

  * Her sense of her own status is reflected in her family motto: ‘Roi ne puis, Prince ne daigne, Rohan suis’: ‘King I cannot be, Prince deign not to be, Rohan I am.’

  4

  ‘UNDER THE EYES OF CHRISTENDOM’

  HENRIETTA MARIA SPENT HER FIRST NIGHT IN ENGLAND AT DOVER Castle. Buckingham had had it dressed with goods from various royal palaces, but many of these furnishings were old. Her servants expressed their disappointment. Charles was also unable to afford, either politically or financially, to fund such lavish greetings as had been seen on Henrietta Maria’s route from Paris to Boulogne. From the castle, if she now looked out across the sea and it was clear, she could see France and mourn what was past. ‘Goodbye, sweet banks of the Seine where I have enjoyed a thousand pleasurable entertainments… Fountains, goodbye, I will no longer look into the mirror of your crystal waves.’1 If she turned inland, there was, however, also the kingdom of her future, with its beautiful ‘up and down’ countryside, ‘many good woods and pretty houses with rows of trees’.2

  The young queen was due to meet Charles the following day at Canterbury, seventeen miles away. Instead, he arrived without ceremony at ten the following morning. Henrietta Maria was having breakfast. ‘Nimble and quick’, she dashed down the stairs to greet him, falling to her knees as she saw her husband for the first time. Charles had grown a moustache and a short ‘royale’ beard, and although he was dressed casually in his riding clothes and tall boots there was ‘a majesty in his appearance’. Henrietta Maria was nervous: she did not yet speak English and, after giving a rehearsed speech in French about her love and duty, she burst into tears. Charles raised her from her knees, took her in his arms and kissed her.

  Charles had been warned that his wife was small and was surprised to discover she reached his shoulder.3 He glanced down to check if she was wearing high shoes. She noticed immediately and, raising the hem of her dress, assured him, ‘Sire, I stand upon mine own feet. I have no help by art. This high am I, and neither higher nor lower.’4 Charles’s father had advised that with a wife you must ‘rule her as your pupil’.5 If so, it was evident Henrietta Maria was not going to be a slow-witted or unobservant pupil.

  That night, Charles’s first with his wife, was spent at Canterbury in the archbishop’s palace. There, Mme de Chevreuse handed Henrietta Maria her night attire in a formal ceremony and prepared her for her bridal coucher. When Charles arrived in her bedchamber, he asked their servants to leave. He then bolted all seven doors to her rooms. This was to be a private night, without courtiers joking around the bedside, as they had at court weddings under James. Henrietta Maria had been told something of what to expect in her first sexual experience. Her tutor in this matter, Mme de Chevreuse, had done her job well and would return to France that summer having earned Henrietta Maria’s affection and Charles’s gratitude.6

  The next day Charles emerged from the queen’s rooms ‘very jocund’. Henrietta Maria appeared more subdued. She was concerned for her friends. The crumbling Anglo-French military alliance was already having an impact. Nationalist tensions had emerged on the way to Canterbury, when a row had broken out over which women could travel in her carriage.7 The English had taken the side of their ladies, with their French rivals described dismissively as ‘poor, pitiful sort of women’. Only Mme de Chevreuse was judged worth looking at and it was said ‘though she be fair’, she ‘paints foully’.8

  Henrietta Maria retreated amongst her familiar friends, but that evening, in her rooms, she invited Charles to watch from behind a screen as she danced a slow sarabande by candlelight.9 Dance was ‘a kind of mute rhetoric’, a teacher of the art had once said, the movements suggesting the dancer was worthy to be ‘acclaimed, admired and loved’.10 Charles looked on discreetly, as he had when he saw her perform in the masque in Paris in 1623, but as she danced her French adaption of this old and erotic Spanish dance, he had the opportunity to see how beautiful his wife was growing. Buckingham boasted in a letter written to Louis that night, it would not be long before Charles sired a child with the queen.11 Charles’s happiness was still evident on 16 June when, with Henrietta Maria at his side, they approached London by barge.

  The king and queen were dressed in matching green costumes, the colour chosen as a symbol of their love and youthful fertility. The London skyline, with its myriad church spires and tall chimneys, was veiled in rain. This had not, however, put off the crowds. James had told Charles that his people’s love would be his ‘chiefest’ security, yet had also warned that such love was best earned by ruling a well-ordered society: that meant subduing the rabble, not exciting it by playing to the gallery.12 Taking his father’s advice, Charles had instructed his subjects ‘to dispense with public shows of their zeal, cheerfulness and alacrity’.13 Yet still they cheered along the riverbanks and a courtier reported he had ‘never beheld the king to look so merrily’.14 One ship by the shore was leaning dangerously in the water, with over a hundred people piled on the side with the best view of the royal couple. As they bunched closer the ship tipped, then capsized, spilling the occupants into the river. Numerous small boats dashed to fish them out.15

  That night, as Londoners toasted the royal couple and lit bonfires, Henrietta Maria was introduced to Whitehall. Charles’s principal residence in London was described by one Frenchman as ‘the largest and ugliest palace in Europe’; ‘a heap of houses, erected at divers times’, observed another.16 Charles was keen to replace its 2,000 musty Tudor rooms with a palace in the clean, modern lines of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, which had been built next door by his father. Unfortunately, such a project would soak up the money he needed for the war with Spain. Instead, Charles was doing what he could do to transform life in the palace: the life of the court.

  Not only power but also virtue was supposed to flow from a king, through his court, to the people. At James’s coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury had prayed that ‘the glorious dignity of his royal court’ would ‘brightly shine as a most clear lightning’.17 The reality had proved rather different. James’s court had become notorious for its drunkenness and immorality. Charles had announced early his determination to ‘establish government and order in our court from which thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom’.18 The informality and hard drinking habits of James’s court were brought to an end and the strict ‘rules and maxims of the late Queen Elizabeth’ were reintroduced. Charles asked that the nobles not ‘enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore’.19 Each rank was to have its appointed place, as they had at James’s funeral. This emphasised the importance of hierarchy outlined in James’s Basilikon Doron. For Charles, however, rank did not exist to encourage a sense of entitlement, but rather service, and not only to those above you but also those below you to whom you had a duty of care and to foster talent. More elaborate ceremonies were planned as Charles began to craft a kingly figure as impressive as any of his contemporaries in Europe. Foreign observers were impressed and judged him ‘well, active, resolute’.

  Now Charles was ready also to assert the honour of the Stuarts against Habsburg power. He needed £1 million a year for his war. To get it he had reconvened Parliament: the first of his reign.

  For weeks Westminster had been a hive of activity as the palace was prepared for the coming influx of 600 MPs and 150 peers. Workers had mended windows, delivered furniture from the king’s other palaces, hung curtains and sewed seats of wool and canvas in preparation for what was the largest representative assembly in Europe.

  The daily business of ruling England was centred on the monarch. At his right hand were his councillors, all of whom were courtiers since they had to be where the king was. Parliament was only called periodically–sometimes not for years–but it was England’s highest legislature and an effective tax-raising body which had grown enormously in importance
since the Reformation. Parliamentary legislation had rubber-stamped the legitimacy of monarchs, and, time and again, had been used by monarchs to alter religion. The Elizabethan theory that the king’s authority resided not in the physical person of the monarch alone, but was ‘mixed’ with that of Parliament, had further empowered it–although not, necessarily, to the disadvantage of the monarch.*

  ‘The truth is,’ a future Royalist observed, ‘the Kings of England are never in their glory, in their splendour, in their Majestic Sovereignty, but in Parliaments. Where is the power of imposing Taxes?… Where is the legislative Authority?… The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction. But waited on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute.’20

  Charles appreciated the potential value of king and subjects working together through Parliament. It would take national will, as well as money, to face the military challenges ahead.

  The most powerful figures in Parliament were the peers who sat in the Chamber of the House of Lords. They included the Lords spiritual–the Church of England’s bishops–and the Lords temporal, the hereditary nobles. Their great houses were centres of local political authority and they influenced who were chosen as the House of Commons MPs. These MPs were also mostly from landed families (if not landed themselves). Some had trained as lawyers, which was a common profession for a younger son in the gentry. They often acted as agents for the peers, but they still had to engage the backing of their electorate.