The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The next stop on their journey was Farnham Castle, the palace of the Bishop of Winchester, romantically set on the side of a wooded hill, overlooking the prosperous market town of Farnham and the gentle billow of the Surrey downlands. Here, in a mood relaxed by the Villiers hospitality, in a bedchamber commanding glorious views of the soft, luscious English countryside pullulating with summer ripeness, James’s love affair with George was consummated.

  Many years later, when the relationship was in crisis, George would recollect the encounter to remind his ‘dear dad’ James of the emotional as well as physical intimacy they had exchanged, ‘the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’.

  George had long referred to himself as James’s ‘dog’, and there is little question from the way the two addressed one another that the use of the term was more than an expression of social subservience. James needed the comfort and consolation of a companion who showed unfaltering devotion and loyalty. He had been brought up in an atmosphere thick with fear, in which physical contact was usually violent and often deadly, in which love was sparse and sex strategic. But he was also a man of deep emotions, who craved tenderness, wanted to be generous with his feelings, displayed affection through contact, measured loyalty through closeness. He was starved of the warmth of another’s body next to his. He had not shared a bed with his wife for years. Esmé Stuart, the phoenix who had sheltered between his legs, was frozen in memory. Carr was now estranged, having been ‘long creeping back and withdrawing’ from lying in his chamber. It was no surprise, then that ‘in his passion of love to his new favourite … the King was more impatient than any woman to enjoy her love’ and George – with his charm and wit, his confidence and humility, his youthful strength and yielding spirit – provided it. Reflecting some time later on their relationship, George expressed his amazement that one so high as the king should ‘descend so low’ with his ‘good fellowship’. None showed expressions of more care than James did for him – not any master for his slave, not any physician for his patient, nor any father for his child, or any friend for his equal; not ‘between lovers in the best kind’, nor between a man and his wife. James was George’s purveyor, his ‘good fellow, my physician, my maker, my friend, my father, my all’.

  Later in the month, as the summer progress was about to pass into a dream, they were at Theobalds together and, at this still early and highly impressionable moment in their relationship, James took George on a hunt.

  * * *

  Few, not even the sons of country gentlemen, had experience of the elaborate rituals of the royal hunt. For James, it was the most manly and noble of pastimes, ‘specially with running hounds, which is the most honourable and noblest sort thereof’. It was an initiation into a world of sensual masculinity, of which James wanted to make George a part.

  Theobalds had originally been the country seat of James’s chief minister, the late Robert Cecil. Knowing of James’s enthusiasm, Cecil had turned it into a hunting paradise, filling its woodlands with game and diverting a river to beautify the park. He did such a good job that James took it over, making it his main retreat and hunting ground. He enlarged the park by absorbing nearby Enfield Chase, and the commons of Northaw and Cheshunt, and enclosed it within a brick wall ten miles in circumference to keep the wildlife in and the poachers out.

  This autumn hunt of 1615 was late in the season, and more dangerous for it, as the stags were in rut, and liable to attack rather than run. Nevertheless, if James was in residence, it was the huntsman’s job to find suitable quarry, whatever the conditions.

  The hunt took place on 25 September, just over a year after George had first served James at Apethorpe. It began with the ‘assembly’ at the edge to the park, the royal party and guests sitting in a pavilion erected for the occasion, or on blankets draped across the grass. James, George and the huntsmen were joined by various female companions – the ‘cunts’, as James called them on such occasions – who were to act as spectators. The hunting party itself was small, a group of the rougher sort that James preferred to accompany him. A huntsman arrived as breakfast was being eaten, and he spread across the ground the ‘fumes’ or dung of potential quarry, freshly gathered that morning. The king inspected the pellets, looking at their shape, considering their smell, and selected the most promising sample. The huntsman was then dispatched to lay a trail of markers leading to the chosen quarry’s harbour, from where the hunt would begin.

  At the appointed time, the men mounted their horses and trotted off into the woodland, watched by the women. They quietly followed a trail of snapped branches and broken twigs left by the huntsman. As they approached the quarry, the pace slowed. Once the huntsman was spotted, they came to a halt.

  The stag broke cover, crashing through the undergrowth, prompting the huntsman to blow his horn, releasing the hounds, and the hunting party spurred their horses.

  At a gallop they hurtled through the woods, horns blaring, hounds baying, men yelling, the buck glimpsed through the trees, threatening to confound the pursuit as it doubled back and darted off, or found a stream or river to break the trail. In the heat of pursuit, George could show off his horsemanship, the physical risk adding to the thrilling sense of vitality, as they thundered through the trees, leapt hedgerows and broke into the park. Some could not keep up, some fell; Nicholas Brett, one of George’s servants, suffered a terrible accident and died. But the chase continued, until the speed, strength and guile of the quarry became exhausted, and the beast slowed and turned its crown of antlers towards its pursuers. As it confronted the hounds, now held at bay by their handlers, the huntsman leapt at it from behind, and slashed its hamstrings with a knife, so it dropped to the ground. The king and his party dismounted, drew their swords and hacked at the creature’s neck to deliver the final blows.

  An exultant blast of the hunting horns announced the kill, and the party gathered round the corpse for the unmaking – the ritual cutting up of the carcass – which it was the privilege of the king to perform. James slit open the creature’s belly, and pulled out the steaming entrails to feed the howling pack of dogs. Then he anointed George with a smear of the creature’s hot blood on his face, and morsels of the tender meat, still warm with life, were fed to the triumphant, ravenous hunters.

  * * *

  As these ancient bonding rituals were being performed in the country, in London, Sir Ralph Winwood was also on the hunt, and closing in on his prey, contacts in Holland revealing that a young apothecary had admitted to supplying poison to Carr.

  As soon as the court was back in London, Winwood presented his findings to James. The king’s reaction went unrecorded, but he clearly took the accusations seriously, as he referred them to his lawyers before withdrawing from London to await their decision at his retreat at Royston.

  A trial was eventually held in May 1616, which led to the conviction of both Carr and his wife Frances. But what should have been a sweet moment for Ralph Winwood quickly turned sour. Because of his earlier association with Carr, he came under suspicion of involvement in the poisoning plot he had helped to expose. The strain led to him falling ill and he died the following year. As for Carr, before being committed to the Tower, where his victim had met his fate, he went to see the king. Two contemporary accounts of their final parting were circulated. According to one, presumably preferred by Carr’s enemies, he approached James with characteristic petulance, announcing the verdicts ‘to be a great presumption’. But the king told him he must accept that the evidence was decisive – indeed, he suggested (improbably) that even he would have accepted the verdict if he found himself in similar circumstances. According to the other, more dramatically satisfying version, Carr came to take his leave of the king, ‘embraced and kissed him often’, ‘shewed an extreme passion to be without him’ but as soon as his back was turned remarked ruefully as well as prophetically ‘with a smile’ that he would never see the king’s face again.


  Within a few weeks of Carr’s fall, and perhaps as an acknowledgement of his enthusiasm for the hunt, George was made Master of the Horse. The title was one of the court’s most coveted, replete with romance, glamour and chivalric honour. Even Carr had failed to secure it for himself, despite repeated efforts. George’s success demonstrated not only the king’s enthusiasm for his new minion, but that the young man was no amateur when it came to gaining power and position.

  Then suddenly George’s rise faltered. Everyone held their breath. It was rumoured that he had caught smallpox – the ‘gift of a friend’ was one sardonic observation. Smallpox would have left that beautiful face scarred, and his ambitions destroyed. It had been noted how since his rise George had ‘lost much affection of his particular friends and generally of all men’, and a certain grim satisfaction seemed to spread through the court. ‘The favours of princes are looked on with many envious eyes,’ warned Lionel Cranfield, a merchant who had become an advisor to George, and those eyes were now eager to catch the king’s.

  Then George recovered and rallied. There were scandalized reports that he was going to receive the Order of the Garter – ‘non credo’, unbelievable! one commentator complained. But the rumours were true. The twenty-three-year-old shared his investiture with the Earl of Rutland, a delicious moment for George and his mother Mary, no doubt, as the earl was a member of the Manners family, one of those Midlands dynasties that had flourished while the Villiers and Beaumont lines had languished.

  Around the same time, George’s faithful promoter and mentor Sir John Graham died. The old Scot was buried ‘in the night at Westminster with better than 200 torches’, and a not inconsiderable number of lords, including Thomas Erskine, whose own Garter ceremony had been such a focus of Carr’s fall and George’s rise. To some the solemnity and extravagance was ‘pompous’: in Tothill Fields, near Westminster, several ‘rude knaves’ performed an ‘apish imitation’ of the ceremony with a dead dog.

  Neither a God nor an Angel

  A delicious heaven, Marston had described it in The Malcontent, and with a smooth ease, George seemed to have entered it. Using his natural charms and instinctive guile, he had become a royal favourite. Vassals licked the pavement with their slavish knees. He was received with a general timorous respect, and surrounded by the confused hum and busy murmur of obsequious suitors. But he was also dangerously exposed, the focus of powerful rivalries and personal jealousies. The death of Sir John Graham had deprived him of perhaps his only dependable friend at court. The former friends and allies of Robert Carr, the man he had displaced, were already plotting his downfall, while the self-appointed ‘braccoes’ who had pushed so relentlessly for his promotion now presumed him to be their creature, and expected him to do their bidding.

  On 2 May 1616, George received a letter from Francis Bacon, the king’s Attorney General. The fifty-four-year-old veteran of court politics had been appointed to oversee Robert Carr’s prosecution. Bacon was a controversial presence in royal circles, arousing strong reactions. Many saw him as extravagant and pompous, a clever man flawed by greed and perversity. Rumours of his ‘most horrible and secret sin of sodomy’ dogged him throughout his career. He was later described by the antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey as a pederast, and a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral with a grudge against him claimed in 1619 that he had engaged in sodomy with one of his ‘catamites’ during a sermon.

  Others saw such flaws as minor blemishes in a man rightly hailed to be not only a brilliant jurist and politician, but ‘the greatest philosopher since the fall of Greece’, possessing ‘the very nerve of genius’ – claims that were not exaggerated for a scholar who in influential works such as Novum Organum was to shape the emergence of modern scientific thinking.

  George did not care about either his depravity or accomplishments. He recognized him to be a figure whose vulnerabilities provided access to his strengths, a brilliant operator who might be prepared to give up some of the secrets of the deadly arts of courtly politics in return for the new favourite’s flattering attentions.

  Bacon’s initial contact with George was innocuously bureaucratic, copying George into the confidential correspondence he had been having with the king about the conduct of the case against Carr. The king wished to ensure that the former favourite be found guilty without having to face the death penalty – a tricky outcome when the charge was murder. Bacon informed George that he was to be the ‘third person’ whom the king had ‘admitted to this secret’ desire.

  George intuitively grasped the significance of Bacon’s gesture, and responded enthusiastically, even flirtatiously. Bacon later mentions burning an ‘inward’ – surely meaning intimate – letter he had received around this time from the new favourite. ‘But’, the excited lawyer could not resist adding, ‘the flame it hath kindled in me will never be extinguished.’ Subsequent missives echoed this confidential tone, culminating with a long letter in which Bacon shared what he called his ‘country fruits’, opinions developed after much thought in his rural retreat about how George could consolidate his position as Carr’s replacement.

  He began with a carefully worded warning against greed. Thanks to the king’s generosity, George’s ‘private fortunes’ might seem ‘established’, but he must not appear too grasping in his pursuit of them; ‘for assure yourself’, Bacon counselled, ‘that fortune is of a woman’s nature, that will sooner follow you by slighting than by too much wooing’. Instead, he urged George to focus on the exercise of influence, to draw on a still shallow reservoir of royal love and trust to shape James’s regime.

  When he was at the height of his powers, Carr had effectively acted as James’s prime minister, deciding on the appointment of ministers and officials. But, Bacon informed George, his fragile self-confidence and paranoia had led to men of calibre, such as Sir Ralph Winwood, being ‘by design and of purpose suppressed’, turning the Privy Council into a ‘wilderness’ of talent. George was now in a similar position to shape James’s regime, so must reach beyond his brotherhood of braccoes to ‘countenance, and encourage, and advance able men and virtuous men and meriting in all kinds, degrees, and professions’. ‘Money, and turn-serving, and cunning canvasses, and importunity’, Bacon complained, had been allowed to ‘prevail too much’. Their influence must be suppressed – but not completely. For, as Bacon admitted, it was sometimes necessary to use ‘cunning and corrupt men’, but George must ‘keep them at a distance; and let it appear that you make use of them, rather than that they lead you’.

  It was the advice of a Machiavellian. Bacon was an early English scholar of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, an admirer of the Italian political theorist’s role in making the Medici family the dominant dynasty in Renaissance Florence. By exercising the same combination of guile, ruthlessness and pragmatism, Bacon was suggesting, George could achieve similar, epoch-making results. He could ensure that he ‘shall not be a meteor, or a blazing star, but stella fixa’, a fixed star in the firmament, ‘happy here, and more happy hereafter’.

  In August 1616, James decided to raise George to the nobility. But first an estate was needed worthy of the dignity of an aristocratic title. The lush countryside surrounding Whaddon, Buckinghamshire, said to be worth £1,500 a year, had been forfeited to the Crown from Thomas, Lord Grey of Wilton, a convicted traitor who had died in the Tower in 1614. James decided to give it to George.

  Bacon, whose snobbery gave him a sensitive appreciation of the importance of titles and names, fretted over what an ennobled George should be called. Baron Whaddon was suggested, but the king decided George should be a viscount, a higher aristocratic rank, and Bacon thought ‘Viscount Villiers’ to be best, as it was ‘a well-sounding and noble name, both here and abroad; and being your proper name, I will take it for a good sign that you shall give honour to your dignity, and not your dignity to you’.

  The title was conferred at Woodstock, the beautiful royal hunting lodge outside Oxford, in the late summer of 1616. The ceremony w
as enacted with the sort of courtly playacting that made the young man so attractive to the king. George was initially brought into the royal presence as Baron Whaddon. He then withdrew, changed his garments, and returned as Viscount Villiers, clad in a ‘surcoat of crimson velvet, girt with his sword’. With the queen and Prince Charles as spectators, James ‘performed the ceremonies of that action with the greatest alacrity and princely cheerfulness’. The new viscount and his supporters then retired to supper, but later ‘came all joyfully up in their robes with glasses of wine in their hands, kneeled all round about the King before he was risen from supper, and drank to His Majesty’s health; which he very graciously and cheerfully pledged’.

  James’s generosity began to run wild. He offered George Carr’s manor of Sherborne. But George, reflecting Bacon’s careful advice, tactfully refused ‘in a most noble fashion, praying the King that the building of his fortunes may not be founded upon the ruins of another’. The king then decided George must receive lands of equivalent value to make up the deficit. This entailed various legal complications, but Bacon cleverly worked round them, and soon suitable properties were being added to George’s flourishing portfolio.

  At the end of 1616, court gossip held that George ‘doth much decline in the King’s favour’, and John Chamberlain reported a ‘sourd bruit’ – a faint rumour – that the favourite’s fortunes were in decline, ‘as if the blazing star at Court were toward an eclipse’. But it proved to be wishful thinking. As a gift to celebrate the new year of 1617, the king sent George a miniature of himself with his heart in his hand – a declaration of love as romantic as any by an ardent suitor. A few days later, during a ‘day of oblation and sacrifice’, Viscount Villiers became Earl of Buckingham at Whitehall.