The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  It is a dreadful painting, awkwardly arranged and cluttered with ostentatious detail. The statue of a lion to one side is almost comical, squatting on an improbably large plinth, the menacing growl that the artist presumably intended looking like an awkward grimace, and his tousled mane like a dandy’s wig.

  On the opposite side of the scene, an open glass doorway provides a glimpse of a terrace or balcony with a marble balustrade, beyond which lies a formal garden and the rolling pastures of the family estate.

  On the floor is a scarlet Turkish rug, overhead a dark blue awning or canopy. To either side there are what appear to be statues of Greek gods or satyrs, bare-chested, their right hands clutching what might be sconces or candle holders. In the muddy dark background, two strange images are just visible, probably lion heads, perched, like the other classical characters, on fluted columns.

  The clumsy composition extends to the figures spread out across the centre of the canvas, the crudeness of the painting’s execution highlighting the gaudiness of the subjects.

  They are members of the most powerful clan of the age: the Villiers family, who came to prominence during the reign of James VI of Scotland and I of England. To the left is Susan – Countess of Denbigh at the time the portrait was painted. Little is known about her, which perhaps reflects her even-tempered character and relatively uneventful life. She sits next to her sister-in-law, Kate, the Duchess of Buckingham, an anxious, needy but resourceful woman who lost her mother when she was an infant, and had to fight to escape the influence of a controlling, irascible father.

  The two men standing to the right are John, the mad, philandering Viscount Purbeck, and Christopher or ‘Kit’, the Earl of Anglesey, a feckless and unemployable drunkard. Adopting a casual pose in the picture, John was prone to outbursts of violent mania, followed by periods of catatonic stupor. Kit, known to be vicious as well as lazy, looks more apprehensive, grabbing on to a chair arm with one hand while resting the knuckles of the other on the lion’s plinth.

  In the foreground are two children. The older is Mary, known as ‘Mal’ to King James, who treated her as a grandchild and delighted in watching her play in his privy chambers when her parents were away. Next to her is her infant brother George, presented like a trophy on a black velvet cushion brocaded in gold. He would grow up to become an incorrigible political schemer and celebrated wit. The young woman propping him up and staring blankly to one side is probably Susan’s teenage daughter, another Mary, the child bride of James, Duke of Hamilton.

  Looming behind the group is a framed portrait, the only known image of Sir George Villiers – of Brooksby, Leicestershire – the patriarch. The large woman sitting beneath his picture, the roundness of her face, the spread of her arms and her shapeless dress suggesting a middle-aged woman running to fat, is his widow, another Mary, the Countess of Buckingham. Sitting to the right of the countess is her second and favourite son, George, responsible for the family’s rise from rural obscurity to become the most powerful aristocratic dynasty in the country. He is the reason the portrait was painted and now hangs in royal splendour.

  The sexual charisma for which he was famous, the ‘magic thraldom’ he held over those who came under his spell, the arresting looks that made him ‘a man to draw an angel by’ – none of it is detectable in this depiction of him. Neither is there much evidence of the dashing bravado that enchanted his friends, or the appealing humility that beguiled his enemies.

  His mother, the countess, has a hint of guardedness, emphasized by her huge ruff, and the slight parting of her lips makes her appear startled. George’s sideways glance out of the picture, on the other hand, makes him look shifty. It adds an unsettling mood to the entire scene, as though something dreadful is about to happen, if it has not already occurred.

  ACT I

  Christ Had His John and I Have My George

  The King’s Way

  In the early seventeenth century, the writer and cleric John Earle spelled out the plight of the younger brother. Under the principle of primogeniture that meant the eldest male child inherited his father’s entire estate, the younger brother’s prospects were miserable. He was at the ‘mercy of the world’, Earle wrote, either ‘condemned’ to join the Church (Earle was writing from personal experience – he would go on to become a bishop), or, worse, headed for the ‘king’s road’, ‘a more crooked path yet’ which led through a life of aimless dissolution and debauched resentment to Tyburn’s tree, the infamous setting of London’s gallows.

  Languishing in the condemned cell at Newgate or the King’s Bench, under the shadow of Tyburn’s twisted limbs, the younger brother’s only hope of a reprieve would be desperate appeals to the older brother, who, out of family pride rather than fraternal love, must be prevailed on to use his inheritance and influence to secure a royal pardon. But even if a pardon was granted, relief was short-lived. The restless search for some kind of purpose as well as living would continue, perhaps taking him across the Channel to the war-torn Low Countries, ‘where rags and lice are no scandal, where he lives a poor gentleman of a company, and dies without a shirt’.

  These were the prospects facing George Villiers. If anything, they were even more hopeless. He was a younger brother in a second family. His father, Sir George, a Leicestershire MP and landowner, had died suddenly in 1606, when the younger George was thirteen years old. He left behind crippling debts, six children by a first marriage, and a further four by Mary, George the younger’s mother. Sir George had not left a will, so the entire estate had gone to his eldest son by his first marriage, William. Any provision for Mary or her children was now dependent on the generosity of a stepson who was openly hostile.*

  Mary had no land or wealth of her own to fall back on. She had pedigree: her ancestors, the Beaumonts, had been earls of Leicester in the thirteenth century, and her gravestone would insist she was ‘descended from Five Kings of the most powerful kingdoms of All Europe’. But the line had since dwindled into obscurity. By Mary’s generation, the most notable members of her clan were no longer mighty kings and noble earls, but petty lawyers and struggling dramatists.

  Her father was Anthony Beaumont, a Leicestershire squire. In her early teens, Mary had been sent to live with her father’s richer kinsman, Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, who had served as an MP for Leicestershire during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. There she had served as a ‘waiting woman’ to Henry’s wife Elizabeth, a socially ambiguous position that embraced many roles – maid, dresser, drudge, adornment, a companion for social outings, a conspirator in domestic disputes.†

  It was at Coleorton she met her future husband, George Villiers senior. He was a distant relative of the Beaumonts and had come to stay with the family soon after the death of his first wife. His arrival might have brought a whiff of masculine rivalry to the household, as George had just acquired one of the sleepier Beaumont estates, Goadby Marwood, in 1575, and had set about ‘enclosing’ it. This was a practice his family had already successfully and ruthlessly applied to the main Villiers seat at Brooksby, about twenty miles from Coleorton, the other side of Leicester. It involved evicting tenant farmers who had for centuries been cultivating small plots of land on the estate and enclosing the fields with fencing so they could be grazed by sheep. The enterprising, opportunistic George had begun a similar process at Goadby, with the result that he now boasted possession of the impressively refurbished ‘ancient mansion house’, standing amid rolling pastures, deserted cottages and rusting ploughshares.

  The Villiers clan was known to be a colourful, sometimes thuggish local presence. George’s roguish uncle, Sir John, had sired a bastard son and famously confronted a local magnate by riding into town at the head of a posse of ‘eight or nine horses’ with a ‘sword and buckler by his side’, which he threatened to use if anyone dared to arrest him.

  Mary was evidently impressed with the glamorous visitor. Barely in her mid-teens, she made her ‘handsome presence’ known to the forty-year-old widower, and he ‘
became very sweet on her’. He reportedly offered her £20 to buy a dress that would flatter her ‘beautiful and excellent frame’, and she obliged. As a result, his ‘affections became so fired’ that to ‘allay them’ he proposed marriage.*

  They had their first child, a boy called Samuel, in June 1590, suggesting they were married before October 1589 (assuming George’s affections were not ‘fired’ prematurely). Samuel survived only a month. Four more children followed in quick succession: John (perhaps named in honour of the roguish uncle), Susan, George (named after the father), and Christopher or ‘Kit’. All except Susan seemed to suffer from ill health. John had what was politely termed ‘giddiness of the head’, which manifested as fits of violent rage, while Kit, the youngest, suffered from a ‘weak brain’, a kind of moral lassitude that ‘could not buoy him up from sinking into that distemper that drowns the best wits’.

  Then there was George. He nearly died of a childhood illness, and he would continue to suffer lapses of health throughout his life. Like his older brother, he could be volatile, later admitting that as a child he would ‘nothing else but unreasonably and frowardly wrangle’. But these weaknesses only served to show off his strengths. For in George, Mary had her paragon: a charismatic, handsome young man, with an athletic if delicate frame, and a precociously confident manner tempered by a disarming humility and sometimes desperate vulnerability. Even his ‘froward wrangling’ added to his charm, acting as a register of emotional honesty, a candour that snuffed out feelings of hatred or disgust before they could take hold.

  Though she remained fiercely protective of all her brood, Mary put everything into the raising of George, her ‘domestic favourite’, as one family friend later put it. He became the embodiment of her hopes and instrument of her ambitions. For his part, he reciprocated by later expressing his feelings of a ‘more than ordinary natural love of a mother which you have ever borne me’.

  By the 1590s, the family as a whole was beginning to thrive, and no expense was to be spared in increasing its status. This inevitably meant stretching the finances to such an extent that, in 1592, perhaps in response to a looming crisis, a list of creditors was drawn up. This showed that George senior owed over £2,500 – more than ten times the annual income generated by the family estates. Nevertheless, it was money well spent: £20 9s on entertainment, £30 – a decent annual income for a craftsman – on a hat and coat. After all, reckless extravagance, rather than thrift, was the signifier of social ambition in an age of swaggering ostentation.

  In January 1594, the extravagance was rewarded with a knighthood. It came for no obvious reason from the Lord Deputy of Ireland rather than the king, making it somewhat dubious, but that would have been of little concern to the former waiting woman who, now in her early twenties, could call herself Lady Mary. In 1603, the ascent continued with Sir George being selected as one of Leicestershire’s two Members of Parliament alongside Mary’s former benefactor, Henry Beaumont (also now a knight, though receiving the honour nearly a decade later than her husband).

  Commensurate with this rising status, Mary cultivated an atmosphere of metropolitan sophistication at the Villiers residence that must have amused her more down-to-earth neighbours. For example, she decided to hire a personal musician, who lived with the Villiers some time in the mid-1590s, while George the younger was still in his cradle. Thomas Vautor would go on to write exquisite madrigals dedicated to his patroness and her son, songs celebrating the courtly arts of seduction and deceit.

  To prepare George the younger for a place on the family’s upward trajectory, Mary arranged for him to be tutored by Anthony Cade, the Cambridge-educated vicar of nearby Billesdon, who advertised himself as teaching ‘some nobles and many other young gentlemen of the best sort’.

  All of this progress came to a shocking halt with Sir George’s sudden death in 1606. He had probably been in London at the time, attending King James I’s first Parliament. He may have been a victim of the plague, struck down in the latter stages of a dreadful epidemic that had already killed tens of thousands.

  The death transformed Mary from lady of the manor into a ‘relict’, the genteel term for a widow that cruelly captured her ruined status. Her children too were suddenly at risk. Her teenage daughter Susan was unmarried, and it would now be all the harder to find a suitable husband. None of her boys, not even George, had the education or intellect for a life in the Church, university or law; they apparently faced the alternative John Earle had so vividly described: the king’s road to Tyburn’s tree.

  The Malcontent

  ‘At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester,’ Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII. And so, in 1606, came Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men. Thanks to the wealth generated by the wool its increasingly enclosed pastures produced, the city of Leicester had become a centre of culture as well as trade in the English midlands, and a regular stopping-off place for London’s acting troupes as they toured the country.

  The King’s Men were booked to appear at Leicester’s Guildhall, and among their repertoire of productions was a play especially commissioned for that year’s season called The Malcontent by John Marston, which had been revised in collaboration with John Webster. Drama was now firmly established as a semi-official medium for airing public anxieties too sensitive to discuss directly, and the King’s Men’s version of The Malcontent touched upon the most sensitive and current matter of all: the xenophobic fear that England was being taken over by a Scottish elite of corrupt deviants.

  In March 1603, Queen Elizabeth had died without heir, ending the Tudor era and throwing England into a state of anxious uncertainty about the future. Under a secret deal hatched by the government’s chief minister Robert Cecil, James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth’s cousin and a member of the Stuart dynasty, was proclaimed her successor.

  Within weeks of Elizabeth’s death, the new king had arrived in London with a large retinue of Scottish courtiers, becoming James VI of Scotland and I of England (being the first monarch south of the border to bear that name). The change of regime produced a deep cultural as well as political shock at the very highest levels. James’s entourage appeared to behave in a manner at odds with the more reserved English courtiers, particularly in their taste for flamboyant displays of public emotion and raucous feasts and entertainments – a habit apparently learned from the royal courts of France, making it all the more distasteful. The vulgar masculinity of their behaviour was hard to reconcile with the more restrained practices and habits that had evolved over the four decades of Elizabeth’s reign.

  A major concern was the new king’s weakness for ‘favourites’ – male acolytes chosen for their good looks and charming manners rather than noble birth or financial wealth. To the horror of James’s English nobles, advisors and ministers, he relied on them not only for emotional and, it was suspected, sexual succour, but political and diplomatic advice.

  James made little effort to disguise his feelings for these men. In 1584 a narrative poem called ‘A Metaphorical Invention of a Tragedy called Phoenix’ was published in Edinburgh as part of an anonymous poetry collection. It told the story of an exotic bird that landed in Scotland, attracting a great deal of admiration. Other birds became envious of the attention the phoenix was getting, and attacked it, forcing it to find refuge between the narrator’s legs. Eventually, it took flight, and was consumed by the flames from which it had emerged.

  James, who was seventeen when he wrote the poem, was widely known to be the author of this strange ‘Metaphorical Invention’, and he did not make it difficult to identify the subject. An acrostic in one of the poem’s verses spelled out the name of Esmé Stuart, a cousin of James’s murdered father, Lord Darnley, who had come from France to join the thirteen-year-old king’s Scottish court in 1579. James’s infatuation for the much older Esmé (he was thirty-seven when they first met) left little doubt as to whose thighs had provided the phoenix with shelter. The king had exuberantly celebrated Stuart’s ‘eminent ornaments
of body and mind’, his ‘comely proportions’ and ‘civil behaviour’, and had been seen at public events to embrace him in a ‘most amorous manner’. Esmé, suspected by James’s predominantly Protestant court of being an agent of the Catholic cause, had been forced into exile in 1582, and had died in May the following year. James had received soon after a ‘kist’ (small coffer) containing Esmé’s embalmed heart, a gesture that provoked the feelings poured into the ‘Metaphorical Invention’.

  James’s attitude towards Esmé had been well known in England, it being noted with disapproval that the Scottish king had become ‘altogether … persuaded and led’ by him, ‘for he can hardly suffer him out of his presence, and is in such love with him, as in the open sight of the people, oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’. Christopher Marlowe made a sly allusion to Esmé in the opening lines of his 1594 history play Edward II, which mentioned King Edward’s notorious favourite, Piers Gaveston, having ‘swum from France’ to ‘smile’ and take the king in his arms. The play also referred to the king’s weakness for ‘minions’ and ‘ganymedes’, words that carried strong associations with homoeroticism and pederasty.

  Since James’s arrival in England, it was noted how such minions and ganymedes had been congregating in the royal bedchamber, sleeping with him, pandering to him, and, to the even greater shock of government ministers forced to wait at the door, deciding who should have access to him.

  The new version of The Malcontent commissioned by the King’s Men in 1604 had played on these anxieties, and as such would have found a receptive audience among the burghers and gentry of Leicester, worried about the gossip reaching them from London.

  The play began with a warning against taking offence at what was to follow, as the ‘old freedom of the pen’ must be allowed to ‘write of fools, while it writes of men’. And offence duly followed. Like the best satires, what was most deplorable the play brought most luridly and vividly to life – in this case, London’s courtly corruption thinly disguised by being relocated to Genoa in Italy. The first stage directions for the first act literally set the tone, by calling for the sound of ‘the vilest out-of-tune music’. The music, it turned out, was coming from the chamber of the malcontent of the title, Malvole, the deposed and exiled Duke of Genoa who has returned to his court in disguise to try to settle scores and recover his title. As the dreadful din sent winces through the auditorium, Pietro, who had usurped the dukedom, entered with his entourage, including Ferrardo, described as Pietro’s ‘minion’. Ferrardo called to Malvole, provoking a tirade: ‘Yaugh! God-a’-man, what dost thou there? Duke’s Ganymede, Juno’s jealous of thy long stockings. Shadow of a woman, what woulds’t, weasel? Thou lamb o’court, what dost thou bleat for? Ah, you smooth-chinned catamite.’