The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

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  Heavy snow fell across London in January and February of 1615, and the freeze continued well into March. Despite the weather, the king decided to resume his restless touring of the country, George now a discreet presence among the serving staff. The great, creaking machinery of royal conveyance dragged itself across the snow-covered countryside, visiting Newmarket and Theobalds, James’s country mansion in Hertfordshire. In Cambridge he heard a sermon by the poet and clergyman John Donne and watched a play entitled Ignoramus: a Common Lawyer starring the versatile dwarf Dominic Drummond, which succeeded in provoking howls of outrage from the legal fraternity, and so impressed the king that he decided he would return to Cambridge later in the year to see it again.

  While James was away, Archbishop Abbot managed to persuade the queen to sponsor George’s promotion to the post of gentleman of the king’s bedchamber. Her agreement came with a warning. ‘My lord,’ she wrote to him, ‘you and the rest of your friends know not what you do. I know your master better than you all, for if this young man be once brought in, the first persons that he will plague must be you that labour for him. Yea, I shall have my part also’ – meaning that she too would suffer; ‘the King will teach him to despise and hardly entreat us all, that he may seem to be beholden to none but himself.’

  ‘Notwithstanding this,’ Abbot wrote years later, and with a nod to hindsight, ‘we were still insistent, telling her Majesty, that the Change would be for the better: For George was of a good nature, which the other [Carr] was not; and if he should degenerate, yet it would be a long time before he were able to attain to that height of evil, which the other had.’ In other words, all these grandees were confident that, once their objective had been achieved, they could rely on George, at least in the medium term, to be obedient to their bidding, and thereby help strengthen their influence over James.

  And so the plan was ‘stricken while the iron was hot’. An auspicious date was set: 23 April, St George’s Day. However, no sooner were arrangements in place than they started to unravel. James had returned to the capital for the anniversary of his English coronation, but, following rather lacklustre celebrations, he decided to remove himself to his suburban palaces at Hampton Court and ‘Oking’ (Woking). At the same time, Anne fell ill with a condition ‘not without danger’.

  Then the queen rallied a little, and managed to entice James back to London. She also decided to involve her younger son in the plan, perhaps in the hope of helping Prince Charles, the current heir, to overcome his shyness and his awkward, even marginal presence in his father’s court. She had become ‘passionately attached’ to her fourteen-year-old boy, calling him her ‘little servant’ and taking a keen interest in the crucial matter of his marriage prospects. Like his older brother Henry, he had been taken away from her during his early years, but since he had turned eleven he had been ‘admitted to the Queen’s service’, becoming a regular presence at Denmark House.

  On the appointed day, Anne sent instructions to George to dress in the clothes and ‘curious linens’ his sponsors had bought for him and repair to Denmark House, where he was to wait close by the queen’s private chambers. She then arranged for her husband and her son to come to her bedchamber.

  The king arrived to find Archbishop Abbot already there, along with the Herbert brothers, William and Philip, the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and other leading Baynard’s Castle plotters. James must have been puzzled, if not a little alarmed, to discover the primate and such senior nobles attending his sick queen.

  Anne then rose from her bed and, with husband and son standing before her – two fidgety figures with symptoms variously attributed to rickets and cerebral palsy – she asked Charles to hand her his rapier. The king flinched – memories of the bloody confrontations that had marked the early years of his Scottish reign had made him nervous of naked blades, even when they were wielded by his own son. But Anne was shrewd enough to have anticipated such a reaction, and turned shock into delight by producing from behind an arras – metaphorically if not actually – the twenty-two-year-old George.

  Drawing on the conversative qualities he had worked so hard to cultivate and that so potently amplified his natural appeal, George played his part impeccably, entrancing the jaded monarch and overcoming his instinctive wariness. Without the need for any further prompting, the king instructed him to kneel and used Charles’s sword to knight the glamorous young man on the spot.

  And so the dreams of George’s sponsors seemed to become reality, with the immediate swearing-in of the former cupbearer to the king’s bedchamber, the position closest physically as well as politically to the centre of royal power.

  Word of the apparently impromptu proceedings soon reached Carr, who instantly recognized the threat. It was too late to reverse the knighthood, so he sent a message ‘importuning’ James to promote Villiers to the lower rank of groom rather than gentleman. But the Herberts, with the queen’s and the archbishop’s continuing support, prevailed on the king to keep to their course, and Sir George arose as a fully fledged gentleman of the bedchamber.

  After the ceremony was over, Archbishop Abbot watched George go off with the king, the young man’s first experience of direct and private contact with the monarch. He emerged soon after alive with excitement, and came looking for the archbishop. He found him in the queen’s privy gallery, where he embraced him. ‘He professed that he was so infinitely bound unto me, that all his life long he must honour me as his father,’ Abbot recalled later, emphasizing his own central role in George’s dizzying ascendancy. ‘And now he did beseech me, that I would give him some lessons how he should carry himself.’

  The lessons the archbishop gave were predictably pious, but tinged with pragmatism: George should pray every day ‘upon his knees’ for the king and for the ‘grace studiously to serve and please him’, he should ‘do all good offices’ in support of the king’s relations with his wife and his son Prince Charles and he should ‘fill his Master’s ears with nothing but truth’. He made George repeat his promises three times.

  The archbishop ruefully noted several years later that George was grateful for the advice ‘for a few days, but not for long’. Abbot quoted the Roman historian Tacitus, who ‘hath somewhere a note’ to the effect that acts of kindness, ‘while they may be requited, seem courtesies; but when they are so high that they cannot be repaid, they prove matters of hatred’. He had conveniently forgotten that his own involvement had been as much out of self-interest as charity, and that it was a mistake on the part of all the Baynard’s Castle plotters to take their apparently pliant protégé for granted and assume he would remain subservient to their interests and wishes.

  The Matter of the Garter

  John Holles, an experienced observer of courtly affairs, was amazed at the ‘daring’ of George’s insurgency. He told his brother that the upstart’s supporters – known as the ‘braccoes’ for their strutting confidence – showed a ferocity and determination with which ‘this tame generation of ours is not acquainted’. Yet when it came to the flow of royal favour he could not believe they had the capacity to ‘turn the stream down another channel’. George had numbers, certainly, but Carr … he had the weight of office and tenure. Perhaps a shift in James’s affection might ‘bring something forth’, but not enough, surely, to ‘raze’ an incumbent ‘rooted by long service, and many offices of great latitude in our state’.

  A significant test came a month after George’s promotion to the bedchamber, at the ceremony to install two new Knights of the Garter, England’s most ancient chivalric order. The candidates were William Knollys, a veteran English soldier and courtier, and Thomas Erskine, James’s Scottish Groom of the Stool. Knollys was close to Carr’s in-laws, the Howard family, so had the backing of the favourite. George responded by declaring that he would join Erskine’s entourage, an apparently innocent gesture of Anglo-Scottish cordiality which was quickly recognized as a chance to test the strength of Carr’s support.

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nbsp; As the day of the investiture approached, John Chamberlain, a well-informed and perceptive gossip, was quick to realize the significance. In a letter to a friend in Holland, he speculated on which of the two knights would attract the more impressive following. He had taken it for granted that Knollys would prevail ‘by reason of his alliance’ to Carr’s supporters, which included the Howard clan and ‘many other great families that will bring him their friends’. ‘Yet,’ he pointed out, ‘most are persuaded, that the other will bear away the bell’ – that the underdog Erskine would win. This was because he had not only the support of ‘the best part of the Court’ and an escort of ‘an hundred of the Guard, that have new rich coats made on purpose’, but was backed by ‘Sir George Villiers, the new favourite’.

  On the day, George was forced to watch the investiture from the sidelines. James had forbidden him from taking part, fearing it would trigger another outburst from Carr. To that extent, the king’s efforts were successful, as the event went off without a hitch. However, it turned out that the real action was taking place not in the pageantry of the ancient ceremony, but in the royal box. Sir Ralph Winwood, the king’s secretary and thought to be a Carr loyalist, was seen to be watching the event alongside George. Chamberlain noted that Winwood’s ‘presence had been better forborne, in my judgement, for many respects’, not least to prevent an escalation of courtly infighting, ‘but that every man abounds in his own sense’.

  Winwood had become increasingly concerned about Carr’s domination of government affairs. A veteran of Queen Elizabeth’s diplomatic service, Sir Ralph had been a key figure in the early stages of James’s English reign, helping to implement the king’s pacifist foreign policy towards Europe. In 1612, the post of Secretary of State, responsible for foreign affairs, had fallen vacant, and Winwood was clearly the best qualified candidate. He had lobbied hard to get the job, focusing his efforts on Carr, who had been delegated by James to deal with government appointments.

  No one could have indulged in more humiliating and, at times, expensive, sycophancy than Sir Ralph in his efforts to win his prize. He had helped arrange the wedding of Carr to Lady Frances Howard in 1613, and had attended the nuptials in showy style, wearing an enormously expensive black suit made for the occasion. He had showered the couple with presents and when the bride needed horses to draw her new coach through the streets of London, offered her the pick of the thoroughbreds he had imported from Flanders.

  For more than a year he had endured the ‘misery and beggary’ and ‘vexation of spirit’ of this intensive courting until, finally, in March 1614, he was given the job. But it turned out he was Secretary of State only in name. Carr continued to keep a tight grip on the seals of office and the diplomatic bags, and ensured that all foreign correspondence was routed through his office. He treated Winwood, more than twenty years his senior, with breathtaking condescension. When Sir Ralph, for example, had suggested Carr should write to the English agent in Brussels on an important matter of state, he was told dismissively that he ‘should not trouble himself’ with such matters, as Carr ‘would do whatsoever was requisite’.

  In July 1615, two months after the Garter investiture of Erskine and Knollys, Sir Ralph’s defiant gesture of loyalty to George produced the result he had craved: he was told he would finally be receiving the seals of office. For a moment, it looked as though Carr was accepting the inevitable. But by this time, the favourite’s jealous petulance was out of control and, at the last minute, he changed his mind and snatched the seals back, leaving Sir Ralph once again humiliated and empty-handed. It was the last straw. Carr had done this ‘in so scornful a manner’ that Winwood gave up all further efforts at flattering him and pledged to ‘endeavour’ his ruin.

  Around this time, Carr embarked with the king on the annual royal progress, with George snapping at his heels. It was a long and dry summer, producing ‘the best and fairest melons and grapes’ ever seen in England, and as the royal party wound its way along the narrow country lanes from one market town to the next, past dense hedgerows frothing with blossom and butterflies and fields abundant with crops, the factionalism seemed to ease.

  Winwood, meanwhile, had been told to stay behind in London to deal with the menial business left by Carr. With the court away, he took the opportunity to visit Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, then a prisoner in the Tower of London. What prompted the meeting with Sir Ralph is unknown, and what transpired was too convenient to suggest an accident.

  The countess told him of a rumour she had heard concerning a flamboyant and fierce-tempered friend of Carr’s, Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury had been sent to the Tower two years previously, ostensibly for refusing a foreign post offered to him by James, but really because he had become bothersome to Carr’s and the king’s efforts to boost the favourite’s position at court. Locked away, it was convenient to all parties that Overbury be left to rot, and he had apparently obliged. He started to suffer severe vomiting, stopped eating, complained of being permanently thirsty, and, when physicians were called to treat him, produced urine samples that smelled unusually foul. He died on 15 September 1613, his body buried that evening, ostensibly because of the dreadful odour.

  There was nothing particularly suspicious about his death – fevers of various sorts were common and often fatal in prisons at the time. However, the countess was convinced he had been poisoned. She had heard it, she told Sir Ralph, from no less an authority than the Keeper of the Tower, Sir Gervase Elwes, suggesting that he must have been involved in the plot, as he controlled access to the prisoner.

  It was surely not chance that had delivered this useful information to Sir Ralph just when he needed it, suggesting a tip-off by one of George’s supporters. Whatever the circumstances, Winwood decided to investigate further. At a meal organized by the countess’s husband, perhaps with promises of his wife’s release, Winwood met the keeper, who confessed he had been forced to poison the prisoner by Carr and his wife Frances.

  As Winwood was making these sinister discoveries, the mood of the ongoing summer progress was beginning to change. While George had maintained a demeanour of serene self-possession, Carr had become tormented by self-doubts, making him increasingly needy and demanding. In an effort to resolve the issue, the king ordered Sir Humphrey May, an accomplished courtier and politician known for his warm manner and persuasive eloquence, to act as an intermediary. Though close to Carr, May had also been among the first to offer himself as a ‘wise servant’ to George.

  May suggested to George that he should go to Carr and offer to become his ‘creature’. May then approached Carr and advised him not to spurn his rival, but to ‘embrace him’. If he did so, he would ‘still stand a great man, though not the sole Favourite’. When Carr resisted, Sir Humphrey told him ‘in plain terms’ that it was the king’s will, and that George would be coming to him ‘to cast himself into his protection, to take his rise under the shadow of his wings’. Sir Humphrey then took his leave, and within half an hour George appeared in Carr’s chamber and dutifully said to him: ‘My Lord, I desire to be your servant, and your creature, and shall desire to take my Court-preferment under your favour and your Lordship shall find me as faithful a servant unto you as ever did serve you.’

  Carr’s reply was terse and decisive. He told George that he would have ‘none of your service, and you shall none of my favour. I will, if I can, break your neck, and of that be confident.’

  Carr then went to the king. With hostile forces closing in on him, and perhaps warned of Winwood’s investigations in London, he asked for a general pardon, an ancient royal prerogative that would give him immunity from punishment for all past crimes. General pardons were rarely granted and usually highly controversial. News of Carr’s efforts began to leak, prompting speculation about the offences he might have committed; some suggesting that it was because he had ‘appropriated a considerable quantity of the Crown jewels’.

  Hoping to calm his volatile favourite, James agreed to the pardon. But i
n a sign of growing concerns about the king’s lenience towards Carr, the Lord Chancellor Thomas Egerton, risking his own career, refused to put the royal seal to it. At a meeting of the Privy Council on 20 August 1615, as the progress was passing through the West Country, matters reached a head. Carr complained of ‘the malice of his enemies’ that had ‘forced’ him to ask for a pardon, and confronted the Lord Chancellor, demanding ‘if he knew anything against him, to say it there’. James spoke up in Carr’s favour. He summoned Prince Charles into the room and, in a move that must have perplexed his councillors as much as it humiliated his son, he placed a hand on the fourteen-year-old heir and proclaimed that the purpose of the pardon was so that his son ‘may not be able to undo that which I have done’.

  The strange performance did not have its intended effect. Egerton fell on his knees before the king, pointing out that there was no precedent for such a warrant and that awarding it would amount to giving Carr ‘the jewels, the hangings, and the tapestry, and everything’ the king owned. James ‘grew very angry, saying that he ordered him to pass it, and that he was to pass it’, and stormed out of the council chamber. But Egerton stood firm, continuing to withhold the seal. Frantic efforts by Carr to find a legal precedent that might force the issue drew a blank, and the queen, still acting as George’s champion and Carr’s enemy, persuaded James to let the matter drop.

  Some time in August, the royal progress reached Gotly, a West Country property belonging to one of George’s stepfathers. There the king was ‘magnificently entertained’, and perhaps met for the first time the formidable Mary Villiers, who held the property as part of a marriage settlement. James’s relationship with his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been a distant and troubled one, ending in him being effectively complicit in her execution by the English in 1587, after she spurned his efforts to help her. In contrast, Mary Villiers showed a fierce maternal devotion and determination that evidently impressed and moved the king, and explained the confident and self-assured manner of her son.