The White King Page 7
Every freeman with property valued at over £2 had the right to vote–as much as 40 per cent of the adult male population.21 For many Parliament had come almost to define what it was to be English, Protestant and free. But there was no certainty where exactly the balance of power should lie between a king and his MPs in a ‘mixed’ monarchy. And here the language of both monarch and Parliament had become increasingly defensive during James’s reign. MPs had felt threatened not only by James’s words–his insistence that a monarch’s authority was drawn from God and ‘free’ of legal restraint–but also by what he did.
James’s extension of customs duties, raised under the royal prerogative, had freed him from the financial necessity of calling regular parliaments. This threatened the ‘liberty of the subject’, expressed in Parliament’s debates, and in its protection of property rights. The Commons lawyers had fought back in defence of ‘liberty’, by asserting that Parliament, and not the king, had the right to take control of customs duties. These attacks had, in turn, prompted fears that if the Crown was too weakened, the monarch could end up in the financial pocket of a dominant faction of MPs. A strong king was seen as a protector against populist tyranny, ruling above faction and political interest.
Now, this new parliament, with a young and inexperienced king in grave need of money, meant fresh opportunities for champions of the ‘liberty of the subject’. Charles had seen the difficulties his father had faced in the 1621 Parliament, but he was confident that MPs would now support him in a dangerous war that threatened the very safety of the kingdom. After all, he observed, they had voted in 1624 to engage in the war, ‘and so were bound to sustain it’.22
On 18 June, Charles sat enthroned in the Lords Chamber, dressed in velvet and ermine, and prepared to give his opening speech. The benches beneath him were roped off with crimson tape, ‘the Lords in their Robes, and the Commons present below the Bar’.23 Buckingham was watching him, along with Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who would join the Privy Council the following month. Holland’s elder brother, Warwick, was also here.
Smiling out of a portrait by Daniel Mytens, Warwick sports a goatee, along with brilliant red breeches and a doublet sewn with a field of flowers. Even his enemies judged him a ‘man of a pleasant and companiable wit, of a universal jollity’.24 Yet behind the relaxed manner was a godly Calvinist who cultivated an inner life of reflection and prayer, and was a ruthless political strategist.25
Warwick was seen as a virtual king in Essex where he owned 20,000 acres, and had in his gift twenty-two livings–that is, placements for clerics–which he used to influence and organise prominent Puritan clergy.26 In London his colonising activities in the New World had also linked him to a new merchant class, sprung from the ranks of shopkeepers and mariners. These men did not have the wealth to be granted access to the great merchant companies like the Levant and East India that traded across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near and Far East.27 They had instead been obliged to develop commerce in the New World where Warwick had helped Puritans found godly communities.28
In Parliament Warwick was known as one of the ‘popular lords’ who ‘aimed at the public liberty’ and the limiting of royal power. Another was his cousin, the thirty-four-year-old ‘Robin’ Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth I’s last favourite. Pockmarked by smallpox and embittered after a disastrous marriage had ended in divorce, Essex had found purpose in spending his summers fighting for the Protestant cause in Europe.29 In the winters he came home to recruit men, or attend Parliament. He was now returning from the siege of Breda, which had just fallen to the Spanish. Of the English force of 7,000 Charles had sent to save the garrison two months earlier, a mere 600 had survived.30
‘I am unfit for much speaking,’ Charles admitted from the throne, and he kept to the point.31 The necessary supply of money for the war had to be voted quickly. Plague had broken out in north and east London–and was spreading rapidly towards Westminster.
Plague was a regular occurrence in summer. But this epidemic had fallen on a weakened population. Cheap imports of wool cloth had led to high unemployment and rain had ruined the summer harvest. The London poor were starving and easy prey to disease. One peer in Parliament knew the dangers better than most: he had had his shoemaker pull on his boots that morning, only to see the man drop dead in front of him.32
Charles reminded his listeners that the rapid granting of sufficient subsidies for the war was also vital for national and royal honour. ‘This being my first action,’ he said, ‘all the eyes of Christendom will be on me.’33
Unfortunately, this matter of national and royal honour proved to be of less concern to his MPs than Charles had hoped. The news of the fiasco of Breda and distrust of Buckingham had killed confidence. ‘We have given three subsidies and three fifteenths to the [Winter]Queen of Bohemia, for which she is nothing the better,’ as one MP observed.34 The funds that Parliament now voted were woefully inadequate for the needs of the war effort.35 To make matters worse, the French alliance was threatened as the debates turned to the suspension of the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Puritan MP John Pym saw it as a Jesuitical plot to destroy not only ‘us and our religion… but also the possession of themselves of the whole power of the state’. If Catholics ‘get but a connivance, they will press for a toleration, then strive for an equality, and lastly aspire to such a superiority as may work the extermination of both us and our religion’.36
Henrietta Maria became frightened that her promised religious freedom might even be taken from her. On her first morning in London there had been sour comments on the Mass being ‘mumbled over to Her Majesty’ at Whitehall, and her wearing ‘a veil upon her head’.37 To ease Protestant anxiety Charles forbad his subjects from attending his wife’s Catholic chapels, but the grumbling continued. It did not help that, after a brief experiment in his Protestant chapels when the congregation were invited to pray for their ‘Queen Henry’, Henrietta Maria’s name was anglicised instead to ‘Queen Mary’, with its unfortunate associations with the last Queen Mary of England: the Protestant-burning Mary Tudor.38
Ever watched by hostile Protestant eyes, Henrietta Maria felt suffocated in her chambers that summer. There were always hordes of visitors at court. People came on matters of business, to see its entertainments or simply to escape ‘the barbarous and insipid dullness of the countryside’.39 To gain admission you needed only to dress the part and you could eat in hall at the king’s expense–a part of his ancient duty of ‘good lordship’–or watch the queen dine. One MP was entranced by her, ‘a most absolute delicate lady… all the features of her face much enlivened by her radiant and sparkling black eyes’ and her behaviour ‘sweet and humble’.40 Another visitor, however, witnessed a different side of the queen. In the roaring fires and the press of people, the fifteen-year-old’s composure snapped, and ‘with one frown… she drove us all out’. It seemed that ‘howsoever little of stature’, she had ‘spirit and vigour’ as well as ‘a more than ordinary resolution’; ‘I suppose none but a queen could have cast such a scowl.’41
In Parliament Buckingham attempted to reopen the subsidy debate, but merely irritated MPs, who judged he was taking advantage of a thinly attended Chamber. Most of their colleagues had fled London. The weekly toll of plague victims had risen into the thousands. One arrival in the City ‘found nothing but death and horror, the very air putrefied with the contagion of the dead’.42 But England was still at war, and Charles still needed the money to fight it. He adjourned Parliament to have it reopen on 1 August in Oxford, far from the plague. A courtier travelling on Henrietta Maria’s barge en route for Oxford spotted the people of a Berkshire town stoning a man who was having a fit at the side of the road.43 They feared the plague was following the court. And, indeed, by 27 July the first deaths from plague were already being reported in Oxford: a knight who had arrived from London had succumbed along with a doctor, staying in the same house.
In the febrile atmosphere of a town of sudden death,
Charles now addressed his MPs’ concerns about the prosecution of the war. He explained that money was needed to support his Danish uncle, the Lutheran Christian IV, who planned to attack Catholic forces in north Germany.44 The remnants of Mansfeld’s army still needed paying. Meanwhile England’s major contribution to the latest war effort was to be a joint military and naval attack on Cadiz. The financial estimates and plans were laid out in detail. The aim was to drive Spain to the negotiating table by destroying her ships and undermining her sea trade. Essex, who had at last arrived from Breda, was asked to take the role of vice admiral serving under the experienced soldier Sir Edward Cecil.
Buckingham’s probity and competence as Lord High Admiral were, however, questioned. He was also attacked for his monopoly of power, for mismanaging the marriage negotiations, and for popish influences. Henrietta Maria was well aware of the pressure Charles was under to reimpose the anti-Catholic penal laws, and that Buckingham was encouraging him to do so in order to blunt the attacks on himself. As relations between France and England deteriorated so did they in royal marriage, and she treated Charles to ‘disrespects’ and ‘little neglects’.* Bewildered, Charles confided his distress in Buckingham, blaming her behaviour on ‘the ill crafty counsels of her servants’. Henrietta Maria was equally convinced it was Buckingham who was stoking their quarrels.45 According to one contemporary Buckingham had even reminded her ‘that there had been queens in England who had lost their heads’.46
When Charles did reinstate the penal laws it failed to stem the attacks on Buckingham. It seemed to Charles that having betrayed their duty to support their king in a challenging war, some MPs were now attempting to appropriate his right to appoint his own ministers. In despair of getting his money, on 12 August Charles dissolved Parliament. The war against Spain would have to be fought with what cash he had–and without the French, who were busy crushing the Huguenot rebellion. In October the Cadiz expedition set sail with 5,000 sailors and 10,000 soldiers funded at a cost of £250,000.47 This was more than double the money Charles had gained from the French for his wife’s dowry, but the navy was still undersupplied and many of the ships in poor condition.
Rubens, toiling on his painting of Buckingham, was disgusted by the duke’s role in the coming conflict. ‘When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham I pity that young king who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom, into such an extremity.’48
When the navy reached Cadiz the joint forces managed to capture a small fort, but this was followed only by the further capture of a large cache of wine. This was promptly drunk, turning the soldiers into a mob. Men who passed out on drink were left to have their throats cut by the Spanish as their ships then sailed away. ‘Throw but a butt of sack* in the way of the English’, the Spanish sneered, and ‘it will do more harm in an English army than a thousand Spaniards can do in arms.’49 Buckingham’s choice of commander, Edward Cecil, had proved incompetent, and his pressed men undisciplined and poorly led.
On 24 November, a few days after his twenty-fifth birthday, Charles opened his first Chapter of the Garter at Windsor. The king walked down the quire under a golden canopy, leading his knights two by two.50 Hierarchy, kinship, patronage and friendship mattered in England as much as impersonal institutions. So did the chivalric qualities of honour, duty and loyalty, of faith and courage.51 The Garter represented all these things and defined Charles’s ideals of kingship: Honi soit qui mal y pense (May he be ashamed who thinks badly of it) ran the motto. As spectators to the Garter procession gossiped nosily, Charles knew, however, that ‘under the eyes of Christendom’ a tragic scene was unfolding with the return of the Cadiz expedition.
Far from the music and ritual of the Garter chapel, contrary winds were destroying his navy. They crashed against the English coast, some ships wrecking as far as Scotland. There would surely be further loss of life in the fighting yet to come: ‘For anyone can start a war when he wishes,’ Rubens observed; ‘he cannot so easily end it.’52
* In the 1550s Protestants had argued there were biblical injunctions against female rule. To get round this issue when the Protestant Elizabeth became queen it was explained that royal sovereignty was ‘mixed’ with that of Parliament and so it was not ‘she that rules, but the laws’.
* One example Charles gave was that when he sent instructions that her household use the same rules as had governed that of his late mother, she had sent back an open rebuke, observing that she hoped he would allow her to look after her own household as she thought fit. He assumed she hadn’t meant to be so rude and so raised the matter with her, ‘calmly’ explaining that she shouldn’t have affronted him publicly and why she was wrong not to follow his mother’s household orders. She told him exactly what she thought of this, and then insisted that when he wished to see her he make an appointment. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 43.
* A fortified white wine such as sherry.
5
ENTER LUCY CARLISLE
THURSDAY 2 FEBRUARY 1626 WAS CORONATION DAY AND A YOUNG lawyer was hoping to find a seat in Westminster Abbey. Although he arrived early he couldn’t get into the abbey and decided to watch the procession instead. It was ‘a fair day’, winter bright, and Henrietta Maria was also waiting near the palace gate where the procession was due to begin. She had a good view from a room at a private house. Charles had intended for the coronation to be a joint ceremony with his wife. But since the penal laws against Catholics had been reinstated Henrietta Maria felt she had to offer her co-religionists assurance that she would not be cajoled into converting. She had therefore refused to be crowned at the hands of a Protestant bishop.1 Charles was disappointed: he had hoped to follow his parents’ coronation ceremony in every detail.
When the procession began it was strikingly orderly. Charles walked under a canopy supported on silver staves and carried by peers, while a choir sang a prayer for his long life–just as they had for James. It would later be claimed that Charles was dressed in white, and would be the first king ever to be crowned as such. For some the image of the white robes would later recall the prophecies of the ‘Dreadful Dead Man’: a prince in white who becomes ‘lost in the eye of the world… and in the love and affections of his people’.2 For others the robes were the mark of a prince ‘without one noted vice’: a royal saint, whose soul was pure as snow. The legend of the white coronation robes would earn Charles the sobriquet ‘the White King’. In fact, although Charles wore white satin underneath his purple mantle, this was because his father had done so.
As the procession entered the abbey’s west door the watching lawyer spotted another door ‘guarded by one and thronged at by a few’. He seized his opportunity, sneaked inside and ‘instantly settled myself at the stage on which stood the royal seat’. The officiating archbishop began by presenting Charles to the congregation as king, and asking them for a ‘general acclamation’. The careful choreography of the occasion then broke down. People were uncertain what to do. After an excruciating period of silence, the Earl of Arundel stepped forward and ‘told them they should cry out “God save King Charles!”’ ‘A little shouting followed.’ Arundel tried again. Finally the abbey rang with the words ‘God save the king.’3
The lawyer was now to witness the last coronation in England to use the medieval regalia and relics of Edward the Confessor.
Charles swore the same oath his father had sworn, and was presented with the regalia whose meanings James had recorded for him. The crown was a symbol of his people’s love; the sceptre–handed to Charles by the Earl of Essex–represented royal authority. The robes resembled the clothing of a bishop because kings ‘sit on thrones… as mixtae personae… bound to make a reckoning to God for their subjects’ souls as well as their bodies’.4 Finally, the anointing, carried out in cruciform, imprinted the king with God’s mark. Charles had ordered the consecration of new oil scented with orange and jasmine for this symbolic moment. It was a statement of his
just title, but also of sacral kingship and his status as Christ’s image in England.
Two days later Charles opened his second parliament. Another fleet was in preparation and his need for money more urgent than ever. Charles had nominated (or ‘pricked’) the leading malcontents of the Oxford parliament as sheriffs, which made them incapable of sitting as MPs. But the failure of Cadiz was a new and serious addition to the charge sheet against Buckingham. Military defeat at Breda, and now Cadiz, heightened fears of the Counter-Reformation threat. Just as Parliament got under way, the favourite then made still more enemies by aligning himself with a revolutionary new movement within the Church of England, labelled ‘Arminianism’.
The term ‘Arminian’, like ‘Puritan’, was intended to be an insult. It was drawn from the name of a Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius, who had attacked the Calvinist theology of predestination (that an elect was predestined by God for heaven, while everyone else was predestined to hell, whatever good they did in life).5 In fact not all so-called Arminians had strong feelings about predestination. The leading anti-Puritan cleric, William Laud, observed that such mysteries were unknowable in this life. The Arminians did, however, wish to ‘worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’, favouring ceremonial and ritual over Calvinist extempore prayers and sermons.6
It was a movement that had been encouraged by the example set in Elizabeth I’s royal chapels. But it was becoming evident that Charles intended to reform the entire Church of England in line with these preferences, and not just enjoy them personally in his palaces as she had done. He believed that well-ordered Protestant church services, conducted within beautified interiors, offered something more than just pleasure to the senses. They offered a religious lesson in the value he wanted inculcated in his dominions: a reverence for divinely instituted authority and the framework it offered for duty and service.