The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  In the midst of these histrionic battles, George was all but forgotten. An adventure that had begun just a few months before, that had given him a tantalising glimpse of the glamour of court and brought him within touching distance of the king, had come to an end. Fortune had passed him by, and his efforts to run after it became desperate.

  George was spotted at a horse race at Newmarket. The royal entourage was passing through in January 1615, and he was hoping to rejoin the carnival. But abandoned by his sponsors, he had become indistinguishable from all the other wretched petitioners reaching for the king’s hem as he swept by. Dressed only in ‘an old black suit, broken out in divers places’, he could not even afford a room in a local inn, but had to rely on the charity of a local gentleman ‘of a mean quality’, who offered him a place to sleep on a ‘trundle bed’.

  Baynard’s Castle

  The humour in London in the winter of 1614/15 was sour. After a decade on the English throne, King James had yet to settle into it. He continued his restless touring of the country, from palace to hunting lodge to rural retreat, hawking or hunting or watching masques or feasting with his friends. He made little effort to address public concerns, was reluctant to summon Parliament – which served at his pleasure – and ran up enormous expenses which threatened to bankrupt the treasury. He was easily distracted, his interest in the affairs of state diverging wildly between schemes of enormous constitutional significance undertaken with casual presumption, such as a union of England with Scotland, and pet projects in which he became obsessively engaged, such as producing a definitive English edition of the Bible.

  The public mood had started to deteriorate seriously following the death in 1612 of James’s eighteen-year-old son and heir Henry, Prince of Wales. Henry had been a focus of adoration and hope in England, a paragon of princely virtues: ‘Tall … strong … well proportioned’, with ‘eyes quick and pleasant … his whole face and visage comely and beautiful … with a sweet, smiling, and amiable countenance … full of gravity’. But in October of that year he had fallen ill with a mysterious wasting disease, to which he succumbed on 6 November. It was noted that the king did not even bother to attend the funeral, the enormous procession being led by the forlorn figure of Henry’s twelve-year-old brother Charles.

  Robert Carr appeared to be filling the vacuum Henry had left behind, arousing growing resentment in court and beyond. His rise was seen as the reason for the royal bedchamber in London becoming so thick with Scottish accents. When it was discovered that James was teaching Carr Latin, a courtier quipped that he should first teach him some English.

  Like George, Carr was a younger brother without prospects of an inheritance, though from a more aristocratic background. His father had been the Laird of Ferniehirst, a closet Catholic whose clan, like Sir John Graham’s, patrolled the Scottish–English borders. In 1585 an encounter between Ferniehirst’s men and their English counterparts had resulted in a brawl that left one prominent English aristocrat dead. The laird’s death a year later had helped prevent a serious escalation, but the Carrs were not popular in English circles – less so soon after James came to England, when Robert was appointed a groom of the royal bedchamber, one of those who blocked the ‘beams’ of royal benefaction from the English.

  At a 1607 jousting competition staged to celebrate James’s accession to the English throne, the young Carr, barely twenty years old, was given the task of riding into the tiltyard with a ceremonial shield to present to the king. As he dismounted, his horse had reared and he fell, breaking a leg. James immediately lost all interest in the tilt and called for Carr to be carried to a nearby house to be attended by royal physicians. Over the following days it was noticed how the king spent hours at the groom’s bedside, fussing over his treatment and diet, deep in conversation with a young man not known for any ‘great depth of literature or experience’. James seemed to flourish in the role of self-styled physician, as it provided him a chance both to show a fatherly concern for his patient as well as to admire Carr’s smooth-skinned, pale complexion and well-formed frame, later said to share ‘the beauty of both sexes’. For jealous English courtiers, looking for an excuse to challenge the king’s choice of courtiers, this suggested an infatuation that had gone beyond the bounds of decency.

  ‘Wondrously in a little time’, James’s passion for Carr had become public. It was noted how James ‘leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smoothes his ruffled garment’, and would gaze adoringly at him even as he spoke to others. Carr responded by carefully honing his appearance and manner in ways that would maintain his master’s fascination. He learned ‘rather than to be, outwardly to seem’, as the Tudor poet Sir Thomas Wyatt bitterly characterized the courtier’s art. He would regularly change his tailors and ‘tiremen’ (dressers) so that he was always attired in the latest fashions. He became exquisitely sensitive to the king’s particular likes: for a flowing garment, for clothes that were ‘not all of one sort, but diversely coloured’, for collars that fell ‘somewhat down’, for ruffs ‘well stiffened and bushy’, managing to combine any resulting flamboyance with ‘some sort of cunning and show of modesty’ in a way that utterly beguiled his rivals. He learned not to ‘dwell too long on any one subject’, to ‘touch but lightly’ on the controversial issue of religion, and always to heap praise upon the king’s ‘roan jennet’, his favourite horse. It was an exhausting list, and vigilance as well as dedication were required to see that it was observed in every detail.

  ‘We are almost worn out in our endeavours to keep pace with this fellow in his duty and labour to gain favour,’ wrote one courtier to a country friend, ‘but all in vain; where it endeth I cannot guess, but honours are talked of speedily for him.’

  Honours duly followed. In 1608 Carr was given the manor of Sherborne in Dorset, worth about £1,000 a year (which had been confiscated from Queen Elizabeth’s favourite Sir Walter Ralegh, who now languished in the Tower), followed by the barony of Winwick in Northamptonshire and the custody of the castle of Rochester, as well as lands in Westmorland and Durham. Every man now clutched his property closer for fear it would be snatched by the king as a gift for the favourite.

  Carr also began to meddle directly in English politics. In 1610, he was suspected of spreading rumours to discredit Sir Robert Cecil, the man who had negotiated James’s succession and was now his chief minister. Soon after, he became Viscount Rochester, with the right to sit in the House of Lords, the first Scottish peer to do so, and in April 1612 was appointed to the English Privy Council, the body that ran the government.

  In 1613, Carr was created Earl of Somerset, and, in December of that year, in a lavish court wedding financed by the king, he had married Frances Howard, linking him to one of England’s most ancient and powerful noble families. By the following summer, he had secured his political ascendancy by acquiring the roles of Lord Privy Seal and Lord Chamberlain.

  As his wealth and status had risen, so had his sense of importance and control over the king. Even the Howards bemoaned the flatteries that had to be lavished on Carr to get his cooperation. ‘Will you say the moon shineth all the summer?’ Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, complained to a friend. ‘That the stars are bright jewels fit for Carr’s ears? That the roan jennet surpasseth Bucephalus, and is worthy to be bestridden by Alexander? That his eyes are fire, his tail is Berenice’s locks, and a few more such fancies worthy your noticing?’

  By the time the king had returned from his summer progress of 1614, a group of grandees had decided something had to be done to halt Carr’s rise, and loosen the Scottish grip on James’s inner circle. The story of how and precisely when this group came together is fragmentary, but it begins with a meeting called in or around December at Baynard’s Castle, the imposing fortress on the bank of the Thames that was home to the powerful Herbert family.

  The ringleaders were William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his younger brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery. Both had positioned themselves advantageously in the early d
ays of James’s English court, happy to engage in its sometimes boisterous antics, and skilful at cultivating the king’s affections. The Venetian ambassador described William as ‘a handsome youth’ who once ‘actually kissed His Majesty’s face, whereupon the king laughed and gave him a little cuff’. Knowing how much he hated frogs, James put one down William’s neck, causing much hilarity, and William got his revenge by putting a pig in the royal lavatory. Philip Herbert, meanwhile, had an ‘indefatigable industry in hunting’ that made him a favoured royal riding companion. Both, however, had found their ambitions thwarted by Carr’s growing dominance at court. Their resentment culminated with his appointment as Lord Chamberlain, an office Pembroke had expected for himself.

  There were plenty of other disgruntled courtiers ready to join the Herberts in bringing Carr down, including Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, and Edward Russell, the Earl of Bedford. Passing along Fleet Street en route to Baynard’s Castle, one of the group noticed a portrait of Carr hanging in a painter’s stall, and instructed his footman to throw dirt at it.

  The strategy this secret cabal chose to deal with the problem was simple: to ‘drive out one nail with another’. And a new nail was at hand: the currently unemployed sensation of the previous summer’s progress, George Villiers.

  With the king distracted by so many demands, ‘many arts’ would be needed to spark ‘the beginnings of new affection’, and, this being the age of Shakespeare, the one chosen by the Baynard’s Castle plotters was drama.

  While in London, the king, whose mood had been low, had started to ‘come forth’ more regularly ‘to see pastimes and fooleries’. It was decided that this provided the best opportunity for bringing George back to royal attention.

  Three ‘Master Fools’ – Sir George Goring, Sir Edward Zouch and Sir John Finit – were recruited to perform an introductory entertainment that would get James into a receptive mood. Goring was the most accomplished of these ‘fools’. He had a ‘jocularity of humour’ that was known to amuse the king.

  Together, Goring and his fellow master fools staged a bawdy show that culminated with two of James’s dwarves, David Droman and Archie Armstrong, performing a mock tilt, in which they rode piggyback on ‘other fools’ until, to gales of laughter, ‘they fell together by the ears’.

  The ‘jollity’ having cheered up the melancholy king, George was ‘ushered in’. Magnificently dressed by the Herberts’ tailor and seamstress in clothes made of the ‘curious’ materials that James appreciated, George stood before the royal throne and the royal eyes glistened promisingly.

  A few weeks later, George was invited onto an even bigger stage.

  For Twelfth Night, when by tradition the Christmas revels reached their peak, the playwright Ben Jonson – Shakespeare’s protégé – had been commissioned to write a masque (a short drama with highly elaborate sets and costumes) entitled Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists. ‘The principal motive’ for staging it, according to one source, was ‘the gracing of young Villiers and to bring him on the stage’. It was to be an extravagant affair, with the king, whose finances were already stretched, agreeing to contribute £1,500 towards the production costs.

  ‘Ben’s plays are works, where other works are plays’, went the jibe, and, for those not distracted by the gorgeous costumes, staging and sets, Mercury Vindicated was particularly hard work. The language was highly allusive and allegorical, and difficult for many to interpret. But it had to be. It was a gentle but nevertheless arousing caress of the most sensitive issue preoccupying the court: the king’s power to ‘create’ men like Carr.

  The masque opened in an alchemical workshop illuminated by a great furnace – perhaps a welcome source of real as well as theatrical heat for a show being performed in the depths of a hard winter in a draughty Whitehall chamber. In their efforts to discover the Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemists have trapped Mercury, in this context not the messenger of the gods but the personification of the vital spirit that brings dead matter to life. They need him to perform their experiments. Mercury tells the audience he is their ‘crude and their sublimate; their precipitate and their unctuous; their male and their female; sometimes their hermaphrodite; what they list to style me’.

  The ensuing drama was filled with references to the ingredients needed to ‘make men’ – ‘not common ordinary creatures, but of rarity and excellence, such as the times wanted, and the age had a special deal of need of; such as there was a necessity they should be artificial; for Nature could never have thought or dreamt of their composition’. There were interludes with hideously deformed ‘antimasquers’, half human, half chemical flask (their upper bodies dressed as ‘lambics’ or alembic distillation vessels), who performed a wild dance to screeching music until the audience rolled in laughter. There were mentions of a phoenix and of a monsieur – clear allusions to James’s first ‘made man’, his French cousin and favourite Esmé Stuart – and of the dangers of creating with ‘fire and art’ a hideous distortion of what was achieved by the ‘Sun and Nature’.

  At which point, in a coup de théâtre, the alchemists disappeared and the scene was magically transformed from a fiery forge into a ‘glorious bower’, a canopy of fresh plants, flowers and branches, in which sat Nature and Prometheus, surrounded by twelve ‘masquers’.

  ‘How young and fresh am I tonight,’ sang Nature, gesturing to the masquers, as ‘Twelve my sons stand in their Maker’s sight.’ And there was George, one of these twelve, the others various gentlemen of the court, standing ‘in their maker’s sight’, who as part of the finale ran off the stage and into the audience to choose a lady to dance with.

  And George, everyone could agree, was an exceptional dancer. ‘No one dances better, no man runs or jumps better’, it was remarked. To see him move was to behold ‘the best made man in the world, with the finest looks’. None could match his ‘exquisite manner’. The elegant movement of his elegant limbs ‘rendered himself the admiration and delight of everybody’.

  Dance demonstrated George’s charms to be a product of his natural ‘plight’, created ‘without affected forms’, as his friend Sir Henry Wotton put it. To this extent, he seemed to transcend the troubling question the production raised, about whether the qualities and powers of James’s ‘made men’, his other courtly creatures, were genuine or fake. In an environment as mannered and constructed as the court, how could the real be distinguished from the counterfeit? James, whose fragile vanity was balanced by a keen intelligence, would have enjoyed pondering such questions. But the dazzling appearance of this young man from – where was it? Northamptonshire? Leicestershire? Somewhere – his qualities were so manifest, so captivating, so spontaneously invoked, they must surely be real.

  James was smitten. ‘Strucken’ was the word used by the chronicler Arthur Wilson, a contemporary. But the king, whose turbulent upbringing had left him wary of confrontation, did not want to provoke Carr. Nor did he want others to think him ‘changeable’ or prone to ‘a sudden affection’. So he instructed his ‘confidents’ to reintroduce George to his circle ‘by degrees’, ‘at too great a distance’ to arouse suspicions of favour – out of Carr’s way, in other words, but within the king’s sight.

  St George’s Day

  In the early months of 1615, George somehow managed to keep far enough away from the king to avoid another clash with Carr. According to the French ambassador, James had persuaded the favourite that George had only been allowed back into court to act as a token Englishman, to quieten the complaints about Scots monopolizing the royal household.

  With Carr placated, the focus of the Baynard’s Castle plotters now turned to Anne of Denmark, James’s sociable, formidable wife. The queen’s relationship with her husband was complex. Being the sister of a Danish king and Holy Roman Emperor, she saw no reason why she should defer to him. Her principle was that ‘honour goes before life’, and certainly before marriage, which made her quick to take offence, and slow to offer forgiveness. She openly resiste
d any efforts by James to control her. In 1593, for example, she had gone riding in bad weather while in the early stages of pregnancy, against his instructions. Further efforts to confine her were frustrated until she agreed to be more compliant, but only if he gave her ‘the greatest part of his jewels’. The birth of Henry, a male heir, in 1594 had improved her standing in the Scottish court, but she was distraught and furious when James, fearing his son would be used as a pawn in the ongoing feuds with his barons, insisted that the child be brought up by foster parents. The king was also occasionally embarrassed by her Catholic sympathies, which had become increasingly obvious. At their joint English coronation, she refused to take the Anglican communion, causing consternation among the bishops.

  Since her arrival in London with James in the summer of 1603, an ‘open diffidence’ had been observed between them. Ending any pretence at cohabitation, she had set up her own household at Somerset House, one of London’s most magnificent mansions, renovating it to her Scandinavian tastes. In a gesture of patriotic defiance and regal independence, she had also renamed it Denmark House.

  Despite their estrangement, however, James trusted her. He continued to rely on his wife to vet royal appointments, because he knew it was not in her interests to allow anyone into his household who might plot to overthrow him. So, in order to ease George deeper into the royal ménage, the Baynard’s Castle plotters knew they had to win over the queen.

  Fortunately, Anne did not care for Robert Carr. His high-handed manner rankled with her sense of dignity. Nevertheless, she had been ‘bitten with favourites’ before, and ‘was very shy’ to promote another. In an effort to win her over, George and his sponsors approached George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a close friend of the queen. Abbot’s influence over James was at a low ebb, in part due to Carr, and he was eager to find a way of recovering his standing. In backing the charming and apparently pliable twenty-two-year-old George, he saw how this could be achieved.