The White King Read online

  On 20 February 1628, with deep reluctance, Charles duly called the third parliament of his reign.

  * Years later the queen would recall how, once, trapped on a ship in a storm with her ladies-in-waiting, she had heard several of them shouting out confessions of their sins above the noise of the wind–afterwards when they were safely back on shore she had teased them mercilessly about their guilty secrets.

  6

  EXIT BUCKINGHAM

  ‘THIS IS THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTS,’ ONE MP OBSERVED. ‘WE SHALL know by this if parliaments live or die.’1 On 17 March 1628 when Parliament opened, Charles had warned his MPs that if they failed to grant funds for the war he would revert ‘to other courses’.2 Dressed in chocolate-coloured silk trimmed in gold, Charles’s expression in his portrait by the Dutch artist Daniel Mytens is resolute. MPs understood that if Charles was forced to rely on his own emergency tax-raising powers the institution could suffer the recent fate of the French parliament. Known as the Estates General, the French parliament had suggested tax cuts in 1614, rather than the increases the Crown had needed. It was dissolved–and had not been recalled since. Nor would it be for generations to come.3 Charles still accepted that there were great benefits of working with Parliament, but he had come to wonder if this was still possible.

  With both king and MPs anxious to reach an accommodation, Parliament voted for a bill that would grant Charles £300,000. In exchange Charles duly examined MPs’ ‘grievances’–the traditional give and take between king and Parliament. Charles accepted that forced loans, the compulsory billeting of soldiers and the use of martial law against civilians were all ‘unlegal’. He insisted, however, on the right to refuse bail without showing cause–as he had with the five knights who had refused the forced loan. Such uses of the royal prerogative were, he said, sometimes necessary for national security. The judges in the Lords agreed. MPs in the Commons did not. They protested instead that Charles was making his subjects ‘slaves’ by claiming ‘a sovereign power above the laws and statutes of the kingdom’.4

  A Petition of Right was drawn up to set out what MPs considered the rightful liberties of the king’s subjects to be. Its careful wording avoided any repudiation of the king’s prerogative, encouraging Charles to make a strategic retreat. But the entire argument between Crown and Parliament was made very public when MPs had the petition published.

  In the past it was the Crown alone that had been largely responsible for the publication of political material. Now debates in Parliament were being printed and disseminated into the provinces. Six books had been brought to Bristol alone, describing the Commons arguments on the liberties of the subject. The publication of the Petition of Right took things further. MPs were, in effect, going to the country with a constitutional programme and raising the threat of public violence if Charles did not accept it. Charles angrily accused ‘some of the members of the house, blinded with a popular applause’ from trying to ‘destroy our just power of sovereignty’. Nevertheless, on 7 June, he consented to the petition.

  On another matter, however, Charles would not bend.

  MPs issued a protest document known as a ‘remonstrance’, demanding that Buckingham be removed from office. Where Charles saw military failure as the consequence of disobedience and Parliament’s refusal to honour the costs of war at a time of national danger, the remonstrance indicated that government incompetence and ‘popery’ were to blame. Concern was expressed at recent innovations in religion and in government that endangered the church, Parliament and the law, suggesting these were the cause of disasters at home and aboard, and ‘at a time when our religion is almost extirpate in Christendom’.5 It was met by Charles’s orders to the Commons not to interfere in matters that did not concern it–namely a king’s right to choose his own councillors.

  What followed on this announcement was ‘such a spectacle of passions as has seldom been seen in such an assembly’. There was weeping, shouting and further wild allegations. One MP claimed Buckingham was plotting to ‘drive out the king’ from his throne and take it for himself. Another that Buckingham ‘has got all our shops, forts into his hands’ and had ‘soldiers in every place to cut our throats’.6 As these speeches were disseminated throughout England, public anger against Buckingham rose to dangerous levels. Satires and songs even accused Buckingham of being in league with the Devil. A poem had Buckingham boast that he had got away ‘in the poisoning of the monarch of this land’–King James–by using black magic.7 His astrologer John Lambe was also said to be his ‘familiar’–a species of witch’s helper first identified during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

  An act of actual murder followed.

  On 13 June Lambe was attacked in Cheapside by a mob calling him ‘the duke’s devil’. He lost an eye from the beating and died the following day. Soon a new ballad was sung in warning:

  Let Charles and George do what they can,

  The Duke shall die like Doctor Lambe.

  Buckingham demanded justice. The City authorities did not oblige, even though two of the marshal’s servants had witnessed the murder and knew full well who the perpetrators were.8 Charles could have taken matters further. Others later argued that he should have made an example by executing the lynch mob’s ringleaders. But his focus now lay elsewhere. On 26 June 1628 Parliament was prorogued for the summer and Charles left London for Portsmouth to prepare a new fleet for the relief of the Calvinist Huguenots of La Rochelle. The conditions in the besieged city were appalling. Dog meat had become a luxury with people reduced to eating leather boiled in tallow. The Huguenots feared that if they surrendered they would face the same fate as Bohemia had suffered since the Battle of White Mountain. The kingdom’s former privileges within the Holy Roman Empire had vanished, nobles had been executed, fortunes had been confiscated, and Bohemia was now being ruthlessly re-Catholicised. Desperately the Huguenots awaited Charles’s fleet and salvation.

  Henrietta Maria, meanwhile, had been writing secretly to her mother, asking her to work for peace. She feared another disaster would soon befall England and her husband.9

  Now eighteen, Henrietta Maria’s marriage to Charles had become much happier. It was commented on how loving they were towards each other. She still disliked Buckingham, however, and her feelings had not altered even after his wife had delighted her with an unusual gift: an eight-year-old child who, although perfectly proportioned, was only eighteen inches high. He was called Jeffrey Hudson. Henrietta Maria had commissioned Mytens to paint several portraits of herself and the tiny boy to be sent abroad as gifts to friends and relations.10 We do not know if any of these were destined for Marie de’ Medici, but the queen dowager had asked her daughter for a picture, and a letter in the Belvoir archive reveals Henrietta Maria had found an opportunity to send her one.

  Henrietta Maria warned her mother the painting was rushed and the clothes done badly. Queens were expected to look their part. Many of her favourite summer dresses at this time were in a wavy silk called ‘Genoese tabby’, in white, black or a grassy green, each decorated with silver or gold.11 She begged her mother to have the picture altered and the clothes in her portrait ‘made more beautiful’–a fascinating insight into the attitude sometimes held towards artists whose works today hang in great museums.12

  Shortly after this letter was sent Henrietta Maria received shocking news from Portsmouth.

  Buckingham had been staying at the Greyhound Inn when, on 23 August, he was brought intelligence that an advance English force had relieved La Rochelle. He literally danced with joy. He then ate a hearty breakfast and ordered a carriage to drive him to the king, who was staying outside the town. Buckingham did not wait even to kiss his wife, who lay in their room upstairs, tired and pregnant. Whatever the nature of his past relationships with King James and Lucy Carlisle, his was a contented marriage.

  The inn was already crowded as he walked towards the hall, pausing to speak with one of his colonels. They bowed to each other from the knee, one foot forward.*
As Buckingham straightened, he saw a man leaning over the colonel’s lowered shoulder and felt a punch. ‘Villain!’ Buckingham shouted and, staggering back, he pulled out a dagger from his chest. He tried to draw his sword and move towards his attacker, but fell against other men in the press of the hall. Horrified and astonished, they lifted him onto a table.

  Upstairs, Buckingham’s wife heard the commotion and sent a friend onto the open gallery above to see what had caused it. From there her friend saw Buckingham lying on the table surrounded by moving heads and hands, his face turned up towards her and blood gushing from his mouth.13 He was not yet thirty-six.

  Henrietta Maria dashed off another letter to Marie de’ Medici telling her she had just learned ‘the duke is dead’. She guessed that by the time her letter arrived her mother would also know Buckingham had been assassinated, ‘but not how’. She told Marie de’ Medici that he was ‘killed with a knife’. She was under the impression that he had been alone with his murderer and it had been quick. His only words were ‘I am dead’ while his unrepentent killer was now insisting that the murder was a job ‘well done’.14

  Marie de’ Medici forwarded the letter to Richelieu, hoping it would be shown to Louis. ‘You see what a state she is in,’ she wrote of her daughter, ‘and how worthy of compassion.’15 With Buckingham gone Marie de’ Medici wanted peace between her children and their warring kingdoms.

  It soon emerged that Buckingham’s murderer was an embittered soldier who had been wounded at the Île de Ré, and who was owed £80 in back pay. He was caught in the kitchens of the Greyhound, and in his hat, which he lost as he fled, were pages of Parliament’s remonstrance demanding Buckingham be sacked.

  Charles was hearing divine service when a messenger whispered to him what had occurred. As the horror sank in he ‘continued unmoved without the least change in his countenance, till prayers were ended, when he suddenly departed to his chamber, and threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears’.16 His friend was dead, and, he later observed, he was ‘so near me’ the murderer might as well have aimed the dagger at his own breast. To add to his misery Charles was forced to hold Buckingham’s funeral at night so that he could be buried at Westminster Abbey without disturbances.

  Charles mourned Buckingham deeply. Buckingham had been a friend with a ‘nature just and candid, liberal, generous and bountiful’ and ‘of such other endowments as made him very capable of being a great favourite to a great king’. Charles had him buried in the Henry VII chapel, previously reserved for those of royal blood, and near his father, King James, who had loved Buckingham so well.17 Aged twenty-seven Charles had no more need for a mentor, however, and he would never again make the mistake of maintaining any other such great–and hated–favourite.

  The news that Buckingham had been bringing to Charles proved false. La Rochelle was not relieved and in October 1628 the Huguenots surrendered to Louis XIII. Of a population of 27,000 only 8,000 had survived the siege and it was said they were so thin and frail they looked like ghosts. On All Saints’ Day, 1 November, Louis made his entry into the port. The starving inhabitants lined his route on their knees crying out ‘Long live the king’. The main church had undergone a ceremony of purification the previous day to convert it from Protestant to Catholic worship and there the ‘Te Deum’–a Catholic prayer of thanks–was sung. The Counter-Reformation had won again.

  Henrietta Maria now lavished her love on her grieving husband. She also put all her quarrels with Buckingham’s relations behind her and went in person to see Buckingham’s widow and his mother to offer her condolences. Her own favourite, Lucy Carlisle, left no comment for posterity on the murder of the man who was said to have once been her lover. She had nearly died herself that summer, having caught smallpox. Miraculously she had been left unscarred and Henrietta Maria had been one of the first to visit her. Indeed she seemed prepared to put her life at risk and there was ‘much ado’ to keep the queen away until Lucy had fully recovered.18

  Lucy’s place in the queen’s affections was now more valuable to the Carlisles than ever. Come December, Lucy’s husband was predicting that the queen’s ‘influence [which] was rather eclipsed by Buckingham’s favour… would now shine as her eminent qualities deserved’.19 This made Lucy the favourite of a more powerful queen.

  The end of Buckingham’s dominance at court meant opportunities for others too. Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, had scarcely waited for Buckingham to be dead twenty-four hours before he had written to Charles asking for one of the duke’s former offices.20 He was soon given Buckingham’s former position as Master of the Horse, a role that guaranteed constant attendance on the monarch. Others were hopeful that Buckingham’s death also offered the possibility that the king’s fractured relationship with his MPs would heal.

  It was God–or rather the business of God–that ensured people’s hopes were to be disappointed. Although one hated servant was dead, another highly controversial figure had been promoted. Charles had raised the notorious anti-Calvinist cleric Richard Montague to the post of Bishop of Chichester during Parliament’s summer recess.

  Charles intended for parish churches to become a vehicle for the propagation of a culture of deference to lawful authority and the promotion of sacral kingship. He was certain the military failures since 1625, and their damaging consequences to the monarchy, had been occasioned by the corruption of disobedience, for from that had followed the refusal to help pay for the war’s necessities. There were MPs who wanted ‘to reduce his power to nothing’, Charles complained, ‘Puritans’, ‘enemies of monarchs’ and ‘republicans’.21 His efforts to change their rebellious culture had to be redoubled.

  Accusations of Arminianism had followed a ban on sermons and public discussion concerning the theology of predestination. The ban existed, however, only because Charles feared such discussion was dangerous to public order. If good works played no role in saving your soul then, some believed, you might as well live as you pleased. It was religious practice, not theory, that mattered to Charles. ‘Godliness is good manners’, as one of his chaplains observed.22

  In place of Calvinist preaching, emphasis was placed on set prayers, kneeling and standing. Churches were also gradually being reordered. Wooden Communion tables, kept in the centre of the church for parishioners to gather round for the Lord’s Supper, were coming to be positioned like altars, east-wise under windows, and protected by rails to encourage a sense of reverence.23 Plain glass windows were being replaced by stained glass offering valuable religious lessons. In Oxford, the new enamelled east window of the chapel of Lincoln College bore an image of Christ with Charles’s face: a reminder that he was God’s image on earth. Where James had promoted divine-right kingship in words, Charles was doing so visually.

  Some parishioners welcomed the changes. They described their relief at Communion tables being protected by rails that prevented them being used to dump hats on. They also liked the beautification of their churches, and the new ritualised forms of worship. Others, however, feared that the placing of Protestant tables like Catholic altars was only a step away from tables being used as altars, and that all images in churches were idolatrous. Puritans raged against the new ‘popish baits and allurements of glorious pictures, Babalonish vestures, the excessive number of wax candles at one time, and especially the horrible profanation of both sacraments with all manner of music’.24

  The more active Puritan opponents to Charles’s changes were punished in the church courts, as Charles sought to impose uniformity. In response, their protectors amongst the godly ‘patriot’ peerage plotted to use the American colonies as a base for opposition campaigns.25 For the time being, however, the Puritans and their allies had Parliament as their platform–and religion was to be the focus of the first debates when MPs reassembled in January 1629.

  There were many complaints on the floor of the Commons about the increase in popery since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It transpired, however, that there
was little agreement amongst MPs about what the Church of England should look like. Most wished to preserve the church’s Calvinist character. Others, however, actively approved of the reverent style of Protestant worship that Charles encouraged, while a radical minority wanted further Calvinist reform that would abolish the episcopate. Eventually, exhausted by their own squabbling, MPs returned to the vital question of customs duties.

  Tonnage and Poundage were duties that had been granted to English monarchs for their lifetime, for the past 200 years. Only Charles had been denied them. The ‘patriots’ wished to continue with this policy, and so make Charles more financially dependent on Parliament. The king’s supporters feared this would tip power too far from the Crown and they too now had a name–the Royalists. This distinction between MPs, into opposing parties, was seen as a troubling development–and it was one that was about to see an explosion in violence on the very floor of the House of Commons.

  On 1 March 1629, nine ‘patriot’ MPs met in a pokey room at the Three Cranes Inn just west of London Bridge.* They were convinced Charles was poised to dissolve Parliament, perhaps forever. A sharp-featured twenty-nine-year-old called Denzil Holles told his colleagues that as MPs they had a duty to their electorate to ensure ‘that we go not out like sheep scattered: but to testify to the world we have a care of their safety’. The others agreed and, the following morning, as Parliament reassembled, the nine had their plans in place.

  The Commons Chamber had been a royal chapel until the Reformation. MPs sat in the old choir stalls and a gallery that had been added since, creating a horseshoe shape, resembling a theatre.26 Centre stage that day, beneath the Gothic windows of the old chapel, was the Speaker, Sir John Finch. In his mid forties he was judged a ‘good Speaker’ and a ‘good man’.27 Charles had ordered Finch to adjourn Parliament for eight days, so he could negotiate a back-room deal on his prerogative taxes before MPs returned to their debates. Charles did not intend to dissolve Parliament as the nine MPs feared. But as Finch began to announce the adjournment, he was drowned out by shouts. He tried to stand, only to have Holles and a second MP grab him and force him down into his chair. The doors of the Commons were slammed shut and locked.