The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The following month, the relentless promotion continued when George, Earl of Buckingham, Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire and Master of the King’s Horse was introduced to the Privy Council as its latest member, at twenty-four years of age the youngest ever to serve. George’s charisma, and Bacon’s relentless support in the background, had been translated into political power. When James’s ministers objected to someone so callow having such seniority, the king delivered a speech choked with emotion: ‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man, and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf, and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had His John and I have my George.’

  The king did not confine his startling, embarrassingly candid expressions of devotion to closed meetings of his council. A scandalized Venetian ambassador reported how, during a royal banquet, the king ‘as a recreation’ decided to get to his feet and read out verses he had written expressing his adoration of the favourite, the guests forced to stifle any amusement or consternation as they listened to the mawkish tribute.

  Keeper of the Seal

  In an address to his people, King James once remarked that he had no family – ‘no father, mother, brother nor sister’. But when George came into his life, he seemed to find a substitute. The favourite’s noisome, curious, vigorous kin gave him the kind of family life he had been denied, complete with its surface tiffs and tensions as well as a deeper love and loyalty.

  He became particularly attached to George’s mother, Mary. She has been variously described as ‘busy, intriguing, masculine, and dangerous’, a ‘Jezebel’ and ‘from first to last ambitious and unscrupulous’. Her activism on behalf of her relatives was relentless; she spared no effort to advance what were sniffily referred to as her ‘poor’ relatives, particularly her other, less eligible and more difficult sons, John and Christopher, for whom ‘young maids’ were being busily sought as marriage partners. It was jealously noted that within months of her son’s promotion to the royal bedchamber, she was ‘always so much at court’ – at one point even George found her interference too insistent, pleading with her ‘not to intermeddle with business’.

  But James enjoyed her company. He encouraged Queen Anne to include her in her household and receive her kinsmen. By June 1616, Mary was enjoying private dinners with the Countess of Salisbury, and a queue of senior courtiers made themselves ‘great followers and observers’, having ‘feasted and entertained her by turn’. ‘All the entertainment was chiefly intended and directed to her and her children,’ it was noted. Reflecting her growing eminence, the senior diplomat Sir John Digby asked her to be godmother to his son. Soon, it emerged she was to be made ‘a countess, or marchioness’, even though her husband Sir Thomas Compton, now a rather dejected figure, was ‘not to rise, but to continue where he is’. ‘I should not write these unlikely things,’ John Chamberlain noted, ‘but that nowadays what seems most improbable mostly comes soonest to pass.’

  Thanks to Mary and George’s efforts, in June 1616, John, the troubled eldest son, received a knighthood. He also became his younger brother’s heir. As favourite, George could not envisage having the time or opportunity to find a wife and produce an heir himself, so decided to ‘entail’ his titles and estates to John. This meant finding a wife as quickly as possible for him, so that he and his children would be able to secure the family’s new aristocratic status in the event of George’s death, an objective towards which Mary now turned her formidable energies.

  Meanwhile, hectic arrangements were underway for James to make his first – and belated – visit to his Scottish kingdom since first coming to London in May 1603. George was to be his companion, and Bacon would be left with the royal seals of government, giving him overall responsibility for managing royal business during the king’s absence. Brimming with gratitude and pride, Bacon credited George with the promotion. In a letter of thanks, he apologized for his failure to express adequate gratitude by word of mouth, but claimed that it was in the nature of ‘cares and kindness, that small ones float up to the tongue, and great ones sink down into the heart with silence’. ‘You are the truest and perfectest mirror and example of firm and generous friendship that ever was in court,’ he added. ‘And I shall count every day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well doing in thought, or do your name honour in speech, or perform you service in deed.’ He proudly signed the letter ‘C. S.’, Custos Sigilli – Keeper of the Seal.

  James and George left London on 15 March 1617. They slowly headed north, covering between ten and twenty miles a day, stopping off en route at various country estates. They crossed the Tweed on 13 May, and James entered his motherland for the first time in over fourteen years. Three days later, they reached Edinburgh.

  James’s Scottish Privy Council – the appointed body that had been left to run the country with only minimal royal interference during the king’s absence – had gone to great lengths to get the city ready for his arrival and ensure it was ‘seemly in the eyes of the many English nobles and gentlemen who will be in his train’. It was noted that ‘strangers’ coming with him ‘will be so much the more careful narrowly to remark and espy the carriage and conversation’ of the citizens, so it was important that a good impression was made. To that end owners of guest houses were ordered to spruce up their bed linen and furnishings, cattle were removed from the royal parks, stables were filled with fodder, streets were cleaned, middens cleared, ‘idle beggars and vagabonds’ harried back to wherever they had come from, and supplies of food and drink ordered, including large quantities of French wine. Holyrood House, the king’s empty palace at the foot of the city’s Royal Mile, was refurbished and a total prohibition on all hunting declared in order to ensure sufficient game for the king’s ‘recreation, exercise, and pastime in the fields’.

  The ‘salmon-like instinct’ that James claimed pulled him back to his homeland also made him nervous. Memories of the kidnapping and assassination plots that had surrounded his time in Scotland came flooding back. In a candid letter sent to the Scottish Privy Council before his departure from London, he wondered if he might be met by an ‘unwelcome coldness’, and during a tour of undersea coal works at Culross he had panicked, becoming convinced of ‘some plot against his liberty or life’ and shouting ‘Treason!’

  Keeping George close seemed to steady his nerves, so James made sure his favourite was at his side as he processed into Edinburgh for the formal welcome. Apart from the king himself, George was the only member of the royal entourage to be mounted, riding ‘upon the king’s stirrup’, dressed in his chivalric insignia and flattering riding breeches, while the other English lords followed on foot in their long, heavy robes. The king also made him the first Englishman to be appointed to the Scottish Privy Council.

  At the opening of the Scottish Parliament, George stood by the king, an epitome of the sort of English nobility James decided tactlessly to eulogize. At the Tollbooth, Edinburgh’s imposing medieval parliament building, the king told the assembled members that he intended to ‘reduce the barbarity’ of Scotland to ‘the sweet civility’ of England. The Scots, he said, should learn to be as ‘docible’ to the best aspects of English culture as they were prone ‘to limp after’ the worst: ‘to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes, to take tobacco, and to speak neither Scottish nor English’.

  From London came Bacon’s regular reports. He was clearly wallowing in his new status. ‘This matter of pomp, which is heaven to some men, is hell to me, or purgatory at least,’ he complained unconvincingly to George, but was gratified to see the ‘king’s choice’ of regent – in other words, himself – was so ‘generally approved’ by the public, not because it flattered his vanity, but because it made him a ‘fitter instrument’ to do James and G
eorge service.

  Some were not so approving. ‘Within ten days after the king goes to Scotland, Bacon instantly begins to believe himself king,’ a courtier in James’s Scottish entourage reported. He ‘lies in the king’s lodgings, gives audience in the great Banqueting House, makes all other councillors attend his motions’ and ‘with the same state the king used’ would allow ‘audience to ambassadors’.

  Bacon’s luxurious purgatory was soon disturbed. Rumours reached London that George had died in Scotland. Bacon later reported the panic he had felt: ‘I thought I had lived too long,’ he lamented. ‘That was (to tell your Lordship truly) the state of my mind upon that report. Since, I hear it as an idle mistaking of my Lord Evers for my Lord Villiers. God’s name be blessed, that you are alive to do infinite good, and not so much as sick or ill disposed for any thing I now hear.’

  It was a false alarm, but it served as a reminder of the ephemerality of George’s titles, and prompted Mary to redouble her efforts to find a bride for John and secure the line of inheritance. Despite her son’s apparent eligibility, finding a willing mate was not easy, since John was now manifesting the early signs of serious mental illness. However, persistence paid off and Mary eventually found an apparently suitable candidate: Frances, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Sir Edward Coke.

  A bitter personal as well as professional rivalry existed between Coke and Francis Bacon. Sir Edward had been the government’s most senior lawyer, handling vital legal matters in the early years of James’s English reign. He had also been due to lead the trial of Robert Carr, until the rise of George and manoeuvrings by Bacon had led to his plunge from grace. An alliance between his daughter and the Villiers family provided hope of redemption, so he leapt at it.

  He began negotiations with Mary, but kept them secret from his wife Elizabeth, knowing she would disapprove of their daughter being married off to a provincial upstart like George. A fiery, impetuous woman, Elizabeth Coke was known at court as Lady Hatton, after her more famous first husband, the late Sir Christopher Hatton. This was a humiliation that Coke had been forced to endure as most of the family wealth was in her name, having been inherited from Sir Christopher.

  When Lady Hatton heard of Coke’s secret plan for their daughter she was furious. Concerned about her own estates falling into the hands of the Villiers clan, and perhaps mindful of John’s unstable temperament, she set about trying to block the match. ‘Uncivil words’ were exchanged with George’s mother Mary, some involving the queen, with the upshot that Elizabeth found herself excluded from court.

  However, the redoubtable Elizabeth was not going to let the matter rest there. She took Frances from the family home, and hid her away, hampering her husband’s efforts to recover his daughter by moving her between a series of safe houses.

  All this left Bacon uncomfortably compromised. On the one hand, he had to maintain his loyalty to George. On the other, he wanted to frustrate Coke’s efforts to recover his position at court. With George absent in Scotland, Bacon’s hatred of Coke prevailed, to the extent that he had even offered to use his office as Lord Keeper to help Lady Hatton in her efforts to obstruct the marriage.

  Sir Francis wrote to George, advising him against the match on the grounds that George’s brother would be marrying into ‘a troubled house of man and wife’ – Coke and Lady Hatton were known to be at loggerheads – and that George would lose ‘all such your friends as are adverse to Sir Edward Coke’ (excepting, of course, Bacon, ‘who out of a pure love and thankfulness shall ever be firm to you’).

  George received this letter as he and the king were in the midst of a tour of Scotland’s towns, castles and universities. At first he ignored Bacon’s advice, but then news began to arrive from London of a situation running rapidly and farcically out of control. Mary, it transpired, had tried to get Bacon to issue a warrant to allow Coke to repossess his daughter, but Bacon had refused. Coke then discovered where his wife was hiding their daughter and broke down ‘divers doors’ to reach her. He snatched Frances back and set off by coach to his house in London. Lady Hatton had immediately given chase, managing to remain ‘at his heels, and if her coach had not tired in the pursuit after him, there was like to be strange tragedies’. Thwarted in her efforts, she went to Bacon’s house while the Lord Keeper was resting and, told to wait outside his bedchamber, she instead ‘bounced against’ his bedroom door ‘and waked him and affrighted him’. Apologizing for the interruption, she explained the urgency of the matter, and Bacon, recovering his composure, issued a warrant ordering Coke to surrender his daughter to the Privy Council.

  Coke, however, refused, handing his daughter to Mary, who took Frances and some horsemen from Coke’s house and set off to another secret location, with Lady Hatton once more in pursuit accompanied by what were described as sixty ‘tall fellows’ armed with pistols. Mary managed to escape her pursuer, preventing what would have been a bloody confrontation with Clem Coke, Sir Edward’s ‘fighting son’.

  By now this had become a Privy Council matter, with Sir Edward being summoned to answer charges of ‘riot and force’ before his enemy Bacon. Mary was also ordered to appear, apparently as a witness.

  As he sat as the council’s chairman, resplendent in his robes and chains of office, with Coke seemingly defenceless before him, little did Bacon realize that Coke’s associates had been hard at work in Scotland, agitating for the match and reporting to George the poor treatment of Mary and John. A few days later, a letter arrived from the king in Scotland commanding Lady Hatton to return Frances to her father ‘and not again entice her away’.

  Bacon responded by writing to George reminding him of the earlier letter ‘wherein I gave you my opinion touching your brother’s match’. He followed it up with a letter addressed directly to James, reiterating his concerns, and claiming that as a ‘true friend’ to George he would ‘rather go against his mind than against his good’.

  The road from Scotland fell quiet. For days, no messages arrived for the Lord Keeper. Bacon began to fret. He wrote again to George, noting: ‘Your Lordship writeth seldomer than you were wont.’ Still nothing.

  Then, almost a month later, a letter arrived. It was from George, explaining that he had felt ‘excused’ from responding more promptly because Bacon had ‘found another way of address’ – a tart reference to him writing about the matter of John’s marriage directly to the king. George suggested that such a move was a sign of Bacon having become ‘weary of employing’ him. And he mentioned almost in passing that with respect to ‘this business of my brother’s that you overtrouble yourself with’, he had heard from friends in London ‘that you have carried yourself with much scorn and neglect both toward myself and my friends; which if it prove true I blame not you but myself, who was ever, Your Lordship’s assured friend, G. Buckingham.’

  This devastatingly calm, almost casual dismissal was a powerful demonstration to Bacon that his once naive protégé had become a political creature. ‘There is rarely any rising but by a commixture of good and evil arts,’ Bacon once noted, and here was evidence that George had the strength of purpose and character to use both.

  Bacon moved quickly to redeem himself. Within days, a letter was winding its way north in which he promised to show his ‘acquiescence to the match’ of John and Frances. Once more, his pleas were met with silence, so Bacon wrote to the king, begging him to intercede with George, confessing that he had been ‘a little parent-like’, but only for the favourite’s benefit, as he would ‘spend’ his life ‘and that which is to me more, the cares of my life’ for George.

  Meanwhile, Mary and John were treating Bacon ‘with some bitterness and neglect’, and he wrote again to George, asking that he not be made ‘vassal to their passions’. George maintained his silence, leaving it to the king to answer by castigating Bacon’s presumption in describing his actions as ‘parent-like’.

  By this point, James and George were on their way back to London, and Sir Edward Coke, taking advantage of his ch
ange of fortunes, was rushing north to meet them. They met at Coventry, and Coke immediately set about courting George, becoming, it was tartly observed, ‘as close’ to the favourite ‘as his shirt’. An associate of Bacon’s described George’s mood as ‘very fervent’, having been ‘misled by misinformation’. Combining reassurances with threats, George had told the associate that he ‘would not secretly bite’ those who had ‘any interest or tasted of the opposition to his brother’s marriage’; instead, he would ‘openly oppose them to their faces, and they should discern what favour he had by the power he would use’.

  Two days later, George wrote directly to Bacon complaining of the number of letters he had received from him. As for Bacon’s ‘unkind dealing with me in this matter of my brother’s, time will try all’. With that chilling expectation, the by now distraught Bacon was left to stew for a month as the royal entourage slowly made its way south.

  The court eventually trundled into London in mid-September, and George returned to Cecil House, his new residence on the Strand, to recover from the journey. Repeated messages arrived from his servants to notify him that Bacon was apparently waiting in the corridor outside his bedchamber, having been there since his homecoming. George decided to ignore him, ordering that he be removed to a room ‘where trencher-scrapers and lackeys attended’. There he was made to linger for two days, sitting on an old wooden chest. Anthony Weldon, one of the courtiers who had returned with George from Scotland, noted what a dejected figure the Lord Keeper made, the ‘Purse and Seal’ resting on his lap now ‘of so little value, or esteem’. Without them, Bacon ‘merited nothing but scorn, being worst among the basest’.

  Eventually, George admitted the poor Lord Keeper. ‘At first entrance’ Bacon ‘fell down flat on his face’ and kissed George’s feet, ‘vowing never to rise till he had his pardon’. George reached down and raised the grovelling minister from the floor.