The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  With the help of officials such as Bacon, he had managed to exploit a number of often obsolete or obscure royal prerogatives to finance this profligacy. He had raised rents on Crown lands, and put offices, titles and privileges up for sale, reinventing the baronetcy to give provincial gentry a taste of aristocratic status for £1,000 a go, and offering monopolies over basic commodities and services to the highest bidder. He had extended tariffs on goods, such as tobacco newly imported from the Americas, and exploited ward-ships, a medieval ‘incident’ going back to feudal times which entitled him to a share of an estate left to an underage heir. But these often inventive initiatives, combined with ever-rising debts and dubious accounting practices, had failed to fill the deficit, and a chronic state of insolvency had set in.

  The only way of relieving the problem was taxation, but under constitutional conventions going back to Magna Carta, only a ‘common counsel of our kingdom’, which had come to mean Parliament’s House of Commons, could levy taxes. This required MPs to pass a so-called ‘supply’ bill, which would trigger an inefficient process whereby tax collectors scour the country, levying a ‘subsidy’ or special tax on trade and extracting one or more ‘fifteenths’ (or 6.66 per cent) of the wealth of property owners – a highly unpopular measure which MPs were not unnaturally reluctant to inflict on their electors.

  A combination of factors had made the English House of Commons one of only a few representative assemblies to have survived in Europe. The spread of absolutist regimes across the Continent, notably in Spain and France, had reduced many of its Continental equivalents to little more than instruments of royal power.

  The Commons was not democratic in the modern sense. The king chose when it met, and could dismiss it at will, and the processes for selecting candidates and conducting elections were vulnerable to corruption and routinely flouted. A rule going back to the fifteenth century, however, meant that anyone with property worth more than 40 shillings was eligible to vote, and, thanks to inflation, by the early seventeenth century that had come to include as much as a quarter of the adult male population. This had made the Commons, as one royal official complained, so ‘big and audacious’ that the king’s very authority would be under threat ‘if way be given into it’.

  If any institution comprising around four hundred members can be said to have a collective character, that of the Commons was a fragile and sometimes prickly sense of pride. This had been stimulated by James’s dismissive attitude towards it. Having apparently succeeded in sidelining its Scottish counterpart, he had initially tried to treat it in a similar manner, regarding it as ‘nothing else but the King’s great council’, with no powers over his government’s policy. Since 1614, he had tried to rule without it altogether, in the hope that an efficiency and austerity drive would make him financially self-sufficient. But the spending had continued, and, to avoid bankruptcy, he had been forced to issue writs for fresh elections in November of 1620, the first in seven years.

  Bacon was James’s representative in negotiating the new parliamentary programme, and there were early signs of a cooperative mood among MPs. The Lord Chancellor was able to secure a guarantee of a supply bill of two subsidies, which promised to yield between £150,000 and £200,000. There was, however, a price: the king had to accept the setting up of a parliamentary committee to enquire into public grievances. As James ruefully observed, he was never so well informed ‘of all the grievances of his people as in time of Parliament’. But, managed properly, Bacon calculated that such an investigation would be tolerable.

  Sir Francis’s lavish banquet at York House had barely had a chance to be digested before the new Parliament gathered at Westminster on 30 January 1621. The MPs were sworn in, and over the following days a series of votes were held to decide on the membership of various parliamentary committees. To Bacon’s horror, the man selected to head the enquiry into grievances was his irrepressible rival Sir Edward Coke, now an MP for Liskeard in Cornwall. Sensing danger, Bacon advised George to revoke some of the monopolies given to him by the king and being enjoyed by his ‘special friends’. This would ‘put off the envy of these things (which I think in themselves bear no great fruit), and rather take the thanks for ceasing them, than the note for maintaining them’. This idea was discussed by the Privy Council, but it was decided that no action should be taken, as it might be seen as a ‘humouring of the Parliament’.

  Coke’s committee responded by focusing its efforts on George’s relatives, in particular Sir Giles Mompesson and his dubious monopoly over the licensing of inns. Mompesson’s grasping efforts to force every innkeeper in the land to buy a licence to operate, a power previously and more discriminately exercised by local magistrates, had provoked outrage. It was eventually decided to refer the matter for debate by the entire House of Commons, which resolved to put Mompesson into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms while requesting the House of Lords to punish him for his abuses.

  Complaining bitterly of being ‘traduced’, Mompesson wrote to George, pleading for help, but was held in limbo for more than a week as the wrangling over how to deal with him continued. Eventually, it was decided he should be escorted back to his home by guards in order to gather together materials he would need for his defence. Feigning an attack of illness, he asked to be allowed a private moment in his wife’s bedroom, from which he escaped, showing a ‘fair pair of heels’ as he fled to the Continent. When news reached the Commons of Mompesson’s flight, there was uproar. His house was searched and his papers seized, which revealed the full extent of the extortion. George quickly moved to distance himself from Mompesson, complaining he had been ‘wronged and abused by this offender’ who had so recently written to him ‘protesting his innocency’.

  For the sake of keeping his hopes of a tax bill alive, James, ultimately responsible for granting Mompesson’s patent – indeed, who had in a fit of enthusiasm, personally put the seal upon it himself – was forced to revoke it and disassociate himself from the whole business, describing it as ‘hateful and offensive’ that his people ‘should be so injured, molested, vexed or oppressed’.

  Matters reached a head in March 1621, as Coke’s committee was preparing to report on its conclusions. George’s half-brother Sir Edward decided, with exquisite ill-timing, to demand the enforcement of the gold and silver thread monopoly, which he had found ‘now lay a-bleeding’. This resulted in several thread-makers, lowly craftsmen who worked in the City, being rounded up and thrown into prison. Powerful merchants, including the goldsmiths who sold the thread-makers’ wares, began to protest, forcing one of the MPs who acted as George’s proxy in the Commons’ chamber to intervene by declaring that the favourite had given Sir Edward ‘no encouragement or comfort’ in the matter.

  George’s initial reaction was to try to persuade James to dismiss Parliament, which the king was entitled to do. But James, still desperate for the tax revenues, resisted. Instead, a charm offensive was staged, which culminated in a strange piece of political theatre conducted in the House of Lords. It began with James arriving in the chamber to speak in George’s defence, explaining that the favourite had been more ‘troubled’ by petitioners and suitors ‘than ever any that served me’. It had been ‘purgatory for him’, the king said. He recognized that ‘rascals’ had been complaining about George ‘in inns and alehouses’, but their lordships should judge him not as a favourite but as a man. ‘I desire you not to look of him as adorned with these honours as Marquess of Buckingham, Admiral of England, Master of my Horse, Gentleman of my Bed Chamber, a Privy Counsellor and Knight of the Garter, but as he was when he came to me as poor George Villiers, and if he prove not himself a white crow he shall be called a black crow.’

  Whereupon George, who by virtue of the titles given to him by James sat in the Lords, went up to the king, and answered upon his knees: ‘Sir, if I cannot clear myself of any aspersion or imputation cast upon me, I am contented to abide your Majesty’s censure and be called the Black Crow.’

  The
performance might be thought to have been rehearsed. But, according to at least one contemporary, George was genuinely worried about his position. The ‘jealousies hatched in hell’ and unleashed by the parliamentary investigations had robbed him of ‘all peace of mind’. The king had made it plain that, stripped of all the titles, he was just ‘poor George Villiers’, and with the ‘arrow of vengeance’ having ‘grazed near to himself which is shot at his brother’ Sir Edward Villiers, he was extremely vulnerable.

  Foreign observers beheld these developments with excited anticipation. The Florentine agent was confident that George would now face a full parliamentary investigation. The French ambassador thought he was doomed to go the same way as Robert Carr, and that the prospects of this had reduced the favourite and his followers to ‘une grande melancholie’. The fact that James had not sent any ‘meat from his table’ to George’s for the Easter celebrations that year was taken to be ‘the strangest news of all’, as it was a sure sign of his fall from favour.

  ‘Swim with the tide,’ a friend advised George, ‘and you cannot be drowned.’ So he sent a conciliatory message to both Houses, declaring that he would not defend his brothers, but ‘leave them to the censure of the parliament’. As for his own conduct, he humbly accepted that he needed to understand better the ‘wisdom of Parliaments’ and he would ‘submit himself, as a Scholar, to it’.

  Charges of corruption and bribery duly followed – but they were not aimed at George; they were brought against Bacon. Their origin is unclear, but from George’s point of view, they could not have been more timely. Suddenly, parliamentary scrutiny switched away from the favourite to the Lord Chancellor – MPs voting to break off ‘all other business’ as they set about investigating him.

  Bacon wrote to George, pleading for protection. ‘Your Lordship spake of purgatory. I am now in it,’ he complained. ‘I know I have clean hands and a clean heart; and I hope a clean house for friends or servants. But Job himself, or whosoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, specially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.’

  Having just a few months earlier been celebrated by Ben Jonson as a ‘happy genius’, Bacon’s plunge from power was astonishingly fast. Within days of the charges being brought, he faced impeachment by his own peers in the House of Lords, an ancient procedure that had not been used since 1449. A few days later, James appeared before the House to declare that ‘no private person whatsoever’ was more precious to him than the public good, effectively signalling that he was prepared to surrender the Lord Chancellor if it settled the corruption matter. By the end of March 1621 Bacon’s loss of office seemed inevitable; on 10 April he wrote his will.

  Some were convinced that Bacon would be saved by George. They were both ‘enslaved by wickedness and held captive by the devil’, their enemies claimed, having engaged in the ‘most abominable and darling sin’ of sodomy. The writers of doggerel were once again busy, and a sheet of paper was found nailed to the door of Bacon’s home:

  Within this sty a hog doth lie

  That must be hanged for sodomy.

  A pig, a hog, a boar, a bacon

  Whom God hath left, and the devil taken.

  But according to a member of Bacon’s staff, George was to be Bacon’s destroyer rather than saviour. During an audience with James, the king had made it clear to the Lord Chancellor that he should ‘submit himself to his House of peers’ so that George would escape a similar fate. The satirists seemed to see it that way, one of them wondering how ‘Bacon should neglected be when it is most in season’, speculating that ‘perhaps the game of Buck hath vilified the boar?’

  The hunting image was a telling one, and would be used repeatedly in popular ballads as well as courtly gossip throughout George’s career. It captured his status as an object of desire, pursued just as enthusiastically by those who wanted to glory in his magnificence as by those who wanted to bathe in his blood. It also captured the perilousness of his position, that this was a race to the death, his only chance of survival being to keep ahead of the pack.

  As the pressure on Bacon increased, he fell ill. George visited his sickbed on several occasions, and presented mitigation on his behalf when he failed to attend the parliamentary hearings against him. And when it finally came to a vote on Bacon’s guilt, George was the only member of the Lords to dissent, even though there was no possibility that the gesture would save him. Soon after, the man who had once ruled England like a king was exiled to Gorhambury, his country retreat in Hertfordshire. Among Bacon’s rivals, a ferocious competition now began to take possession of York House, the disgraced Lord Chancellor’s coveted London residence on the banks of the Thames. Thanks to his increasing ability to exploit the political arts he had learned from his mentor, George comfortably won the contest, the court’s ‘new risen star’ now seemingly secure as a fixture in the firmament.

  ACT II

  Two Venturous Knights

  The Favourite and the Fountain

  In 1611, a factory in Florence was frantically producing a series of small, bronze sculptures based on the works of the Flemish master sculptor, Giambologna, famous for his marble statue known as The Rape of a Sabine, a centrepiece in Florence’s main piazza. They were being made for Prince Henry, King James’s heir, on the orders of Cosimo II, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose daughter he hoped might be a match for the British prince.

  The bronzes were presented to Henry in May 1612: a kneeling woman, a horse and bull, a bathing Venus, Hercules with his club, a birdwatcher, two shepherds – one blowing on bagpipes, the other drinking from a bottle – and a miniature horse. They were laid out in a private gallery set aside for their display in St James’s Palace, accessed via a secret garden and a spiral staircase. In terms of the history of art, these objects were of great significance. As far as is known, they were the first Renaissance bronzes ever to reach England, where sculpture was still the preserve of tombmakers.

  Perhaps in a demonstration of aesthetic appreciation, or childish possessiveness, when Henry first saw his collection laid out in his gallery, he picked one of the sculptures up and kissed it. He fondled the others, admiring the details and craftsmanship. An older courtier who was with him at the time admired the miniature horse and said that Henry’s younger brother Charles might like it. ‘No, no, I want everything for myself,’ Henry replied.

  Later, Henry protectively took the sculptures to a cabinet in one of his rooms, and arranged them carefully. He managed to get hold of three more, until his collection amounted to eighteen in total, including the miniature horse.

  Henry’s eleven-year-old brother Charles heard about his older brother’s petulant refusal to share the horse, and it was to have a poignant role in their relationship.

  Charles could not have been more different from Henry. Henry was athletic and tall; Charles was short, fragile and suffered from weak ankles. Henry had an attractive manner and commanding presence; Charles was aloof, reserved and stammered badly. Yet Charles adored Henry. When they were separated, as they usually were, he would send letters pathetically imploring his brother to visit, and would try to impress him with reports of his latest achievements in the schoolroom or the riding stables.

  According to Francis Bacon, Henry was ‘indulgent’ with Charles. But he could be cruel, too. A possibly apocryphal story tells of the two of them waiting in the presence chamber with the Archbishop of Canterbury for an audience with their father. Henry snatched the primate’s mitre off his head and put it on Charles’s, saying that when he became king, he would make him archbishop, because he was such a bookworm and his vestments would hide his crippled legs.

  Then Prince Henry had fallen ill. It was during celebrations for the wedding of Henry and Charles’s adored sister, Elizabeth, to Frederick, ruler of a patchwork of provinces in central Germany known as the Palatinate. Despite the symptoms, Henry continued with his duties until he finally succ
umbed to a ‘great pain in his head’, forcing him into his sickbed. The doctors gave him a ‘lenitive glister’ and ‘cordial julep’ with ingredients that included ‘bezoar’ (a stone found in the digestive systems of various animals) and ‘unicorn horn’ (usually the powdered tusk of the narwhal). After expelling a ‘great store of putrefied choler’, he rallied, and played a game of cards with Charles. But soon after he relapsed, and within days, weakened by continual ‘ravings’ and ‘convulsions’, he was close to death. Frantic efforts were made to treat him, which included pigeons and cockerels being cut in half and placed on his head.

  Fearing the worst, the royal family came to Henry’s sickbed. As the prince lay exhausted, his head shaved, his shoulders covered in scarifications used to draw blood, his face ‘pale and parched’, his eyes ‘hollow and of a wan colour’, little Charles pressed the miniature bronze horse, which he had fetched from St James’s Palace, into his brother’s hand. Within a week, Henry was dead, throwing the nation into convulsions of grief.

  When Charles led the funeral cortege a month later, the dejected, delicate figure seemed barely to be noticed. ‘Our Rising Sun is set’, the Earl of Dorset declared, ‘ere scarcely did he shine’, overwhelming Charles’s pallid glow as he passed along the streets of London. The man who interrupted the solemnity of the funeral procession by running naked through the crowd crying out that he was Henry’s ghost seemed to get more notice than the new heir to the throne. When Charles was installed as Prince of Wales in 1616, the Bishop of Ely, leading the prayers, called him Henry by mistake.