The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  Fatherly feelings did not come naturally to James. He doubted his own paternity – there was always a suspicion he was the son of David Rizzio, his mother’s Italian lover, rather than of her husband and Rizzio’s murderer, Henry Stuart. The wags of court eagerly played on these anxieties by whispering the joke that the self-styled British Solomon was in fact the son of David. While no one ever suggested that any of the king’s children were illegitimate – James showed no interest in having mistresses – he seemed to have difficulty reconciling his relationship with them. He saw Henry more as a rival than a son – a feeling that had once surfaced during a hunting party, when the king rowed violently with the prince, but found himself humiliatingly abandoned when Henry stormed off, and most of the royal entourage followed.

  James might have had a more fatherly attitude to Charles. The younger son was less assertive, less competitive than the older, and had more in common with the king. He shared James’s interest in books and theological issues, and the self-consciousness and insecurity that came from suffering similar physical disabilities. But where James had harboured jealousies of Henry, he felt only disappointment in Charles. When the two made a royal visit to Cambridge University in 1615, an overeager don hailed Charles ‘Jacobale’ and ‘Jacobissime Carole’ – little James, so very James-like, prompting the king to tell him to curb the comparisons.

  Then came St George’s Day of 1615, the day George Villiers was introduced to the royal bedchamber. The appearance of this fascinating, glamorous figure of his older brother’s age and build seemed like a miraculous resurrection of princely charisma in a royal household left drab and traumatized by Henry’s death. And Charles had been given a central role in the miracle of transubstantiation, providing the very blade the king used to turn a provincial commoner into a chivalrous cavalier. For a while, Charles must have wondered whether James had given him back the brother he so badly missed.

  But George, it turned out, was a rival, not a substitute sibling. The favourite seemed blithely unaware of Charles’s efforts to get his attention, and the prince could only watch on helplessly as James lavished upon the favourite an intensity of feeling that the son never received. It was as if he had been tricked by his mother into providing the instrument of his own exclusion.

  Once again, Charles found himself eclipsed. An ‘uncessant swarm of suitors importunely’ hung upon George, James once pointed out, ‘without discretion or distinction of times’. But few paid much attention to Charles. In 1616, his efforts to get a learned and well-qualified divine called Dr George Carleton appointed Bishop of Carlisle were humiliatingly spurned, James instead choosing to give the job to one Robert Snowden, ‘an obscure fellow’, who had ‘come in at the window’ (in other words from nowhere) and shut Carleton out.

  Two incidents show Charles’s miserable position. In March 1616, he admired a ring that George was wearing, and asked to borrow it. The following day, George asked for it back, but Charles claimed to have ‘forgot it and lost it’. George mentioned the matter to the king, ‘who chided the Prince so severely as to bring him to tears’. James ‘forbade’ the humiliated Charles from being in his father’s presence ‘till the ring was restored’. It was soon discovered by one of Charles’s servants in his bedchamber, and the prince fooled nobody when he explained to the favourite that it had been found in the back pocket of ‘yesterday’s breeches’.

  The second incident happened two months later. James and George, flanked by the royal flunkies, were enjoying a stroll through Greenwich Park, when Charles ‘in jest’ decided to turn the jet of a fountain on the favourite, soaking George’s no doubt exquisite and expensive clothes. The king was so incensed by the prank that, in front of George and all the royal staff, he boxed the prince’s ears.

  A Masque on Twelfth Night

  In 1616, Francis Bacon, George’s mentor, gave his pupil a warning about Charles. ‘The prince groweth up fast to be a man,’ he noted. ‘It would be an irreparable stain and dishonour, having that access unto him, if you should misread him, or suffer him to be misused by any loose or flattering parasites: The whole kingdom hath a deep interest in his virtuous education; and if you, keeping that distance which is fit, do humbly interpose yourself, in such a case, he will one day give you thanks for it.’

  Initially, George, preoccupied with the king’s inexhaustible needs and his own personal ambitions, ignored the advice. But gradually he became aware that, if he was to secure his position in the complicated and emotionally fraught royal household, he needed a relationship with the hapless Charles.

  A turning point came early in 1618. James had just made George a marquis, and, ‘beyond all expectation’, causing consternation among the earls and other lords whose precedence had been overturned by the young upstart, had decided to make the title hereditary, to be passed on to the ‘male heirs of his body’. Charles, in a last-ditch effort to gain his father’s attention and approval, decided to organize a Twelfth Night masque to celebrate the promotion, expending ‘extraordinary pains’ on arranging what promised to be a spectacular event.

  The festivities were a highly significant and keenly anticipated affair, marking the moment when Christmas at court shifted from a mood of ceremonial reverence to carnivalesque revelry. That year they were to be given added significance by the king’s decision to invite the Conde de Gondomar, who after five years as Spain’s ambassador in London, was returning to Madrid.

  Since the ambassador’s arrival in England in 1613, James had quite fallen for him. They seemed so inseparable, they became known as the ‘Two Diegos’ (Diego, Gondomar’s first name, being Spanish for James). The king warmed to the Spaniard’s combination of stiff, Castilian formality and wry, understated humour. And complaining to his masters in Madrid of James’s ‘vanity’, Gondomar expertly played on the king’s feelings of isolation and inadequacy. They were both foreigners surrounded by a condescending English establishment, sharing a dislike of London, a seedy, rotting city swelled by waves of impoverished immigrants. James even confided to Gondomar how unpopular he felt, how his English subjects would say unspeakable things about him. And the king revelled in the Spanish ambassador’s expert flattery. Gondomar once told him that, while he spoke Latin badly, like a king, James spoke Latin well, like a scholar – just the sort of thing James, who yearned more than anything to be considered an intellectual, wanted to hear.

  The Two Diegos were also close on the matter of Charles’s future. In 1618, they had come up with a daring, if potentially delusional, plan to marry the prince to the Infanta Maria, the twelve-year-old daughter of Philip III of Spain. The earlier, disastrous unions of Henry VIII with Katherine of Aragon, and ‘Bloody’ Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter, with Philip II of Spain, and the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England in 1588 were all still vivid in the English collective memory, making the idea of a so-called ‘Spanish match’ unpopular. But Scotland had never been at war with Spain, and by uniting his own family, the Stuarts, rulers of Protestant Great Britain, with the Spanish Habsburgs, the Continent’s most powerful Catholic royal family, James not only flattered his dynastic ambitions but would cement his self-appointed position as the reunifier of a divided Christendom.*

  In response to the king’s growing affection towards Gondomar, George started to cultivate his own relationship with the Spanish ambassador. Gondomar was at first wary, assuming the favourite to be anti-Catholic. But he warmed to him as George became increasingly involved in the negotiations over Charles’s bride. He even offered the favourite an annual pension of 6,000 ducats which, unlike a long list of other senior figures in James’s government, George, initially at least, refused – not in a mood of patriotic indignation, but tactfully on the basis that he had yet to do anything to deserve it. But he did give the Spanish ambassador access to crucial correspondence, and when the king asked Gondomar if he trusted George, he replied that he did. ‘You do well to do so,’ said James, ‘for he is as Spanish as you are!’

  Now that Gondom
ar’s embassy was drawing to a close, James was becoming increasingly emotional at the prospect of losing his close friend, and Charles hoped his Twelfth Night masque might lift his father’s spirits as well as provide a suitable send-off.

  The great hall at Whitehall had been fitted out ‘like a theatre, with well secured boxes all round’. A stage had been erected at one end, with the king’s throne placed before it, ‘under an ample canopy’. This was the setting for the masque by the ever-popular Ben Jonson. It was entitled Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, and promised a series of tableaux, dances and drinking songs to celebrate Comus, ‘the God of Cheer, or the Belly’. Anticipation had been building over the holiday season, and the Venetian diplomat Horatio Busino sent a detailed and excited account of the event back to his masters.

  It began a little inauspiciously, Busino and his fellow citizens, ‘all perfumed’ for the event, finding themselves ‘so crowded and ill at ease’ in their assigned box ‘that had it not been for our curiosity we must certainly have given in or expired’. They had to endure the ‘additional infliction’ of a member of Gondomar’s staff, ‘who came into our box by favour of the master of the ceremonies’ Charles. He asked for ‘two fingers breadth of room, although we ourselves had not space to run about in, and I swear to God that he placed himself more comfortably than any of us’.

  Nevertheless, Busino and his compatriots managed to distract themselves by ‘admiring the decorations and beauty of the house’ with its ‘festoons and angels’. Six hundred of the ‘most noble and richly arrayed ladies’ were there, wearing ‘delicate plumes over their heads, springing from their foreheads or in their hands serving as fans; strings of jewels on their necks and bosoms and in their girdles and apparel in such quantity that they looked like so many queens’. He also noted a ‘mixture of husk and straw’ among the ‘grain’: some of the ‘plump and buxom’ women displaying their ‘bosoms very liberally’, while those who were ‘lean’ went ‘muffled up to the throat’. Farthingales were much in evidence, emphasizing the hips and rear, but he was unimpressed to discover that the women were all wearing ‘men’s shoes or at least very low slippers’. ‘They consider the mask as indispensable for their face as bread at table,’ he noted, ‘but they lay it aside willingly at these public entertainments.’

  After a two-hour wait in the stifling atmosphere, cornets and trumpets ‘to the number of fifteen or twenty’ blasted a fanfare to announce the arrival of the king with his honoured guest, followed by the male members of court. James processed into the hall, and seated himself on his throne. Gondomar was placed on a stool next to him, while ‘the great officers of the crown and courts of law’ sat upon benches behind him. Then, possibly on Charles’s signal, a large curtain dropped, revealing a scene of a tent made of gold cloth, standing in a field against a background painted blue, powdered all over with golden stars. The figure of Atlas then appeared, whose ‘enormous head was alone visible up aloft under the very roof of the theatre’, his eyes and head moving ‘very cleverly’.

  What followed was an array of scenes and effects that clearly impressed the Venetian: twelve masked boys dressed as frogs, a guitar player in a gown ‘who sang some trills’, high priests wearing gilt mitres, culminating with a dozen ‘cavaliers’ all attired in crimson hose, with plaited doublets of white satin trimmed with gold and silver lace, who descended from the heavens in pyramid formation, ‘of which the prince formed the apex’. Once they had landed, they began to dance, ‘preserving for a while the same pyramidical figure, and with a variety of steps’.

  Up until this stage, Busino seemed to be enthralled by the spectacle; but then things began to go wrong. Charles, in his role as the leading member of the dance troupe, was evidently struggling. He managed to ‘cut few capers’, but soon ran out of breath – ‘owing to his youth’ Busino charitably explained, but more likely due to his physical infirmities. English members of the audience began to get bored. ‘Nothing in it extraordinary,’ the jaded letter-writer John Chamberlain later pronounced. ‘The invention proved dull.’

  Suddenly James (‘who is naturally choleric’, the Venetian noted) lost his patience. He shot to his feet and shouted at the revellers: ‘Why don’t they dance? What did they make me come here for? Devil take you all, dance!’ Catastrophe. All Charles’s hard work seemed to be undone. But then George, the new Marquis of Buckingham, ‘sprang forward, cutting a score of lofty and very minute capers, with so much grace and agility that he not only appeased the ire of his angry lord, but rendered himself the admiration and delight of everybody’. The mood lifted and the hall was alive with capering cavaliers, one managing thirty-four dances, but none coming up ‘to the exquisite manner of the marquis’.

  George may have eclipsed the prince, but he had also saved him, and over the following months, Charles seemed eager to embrace the favourite as a friend rather than a rival to his father’s attentions. The new alignment was cemented when a family argument broke out over Anne of Denmark’s will. The queen had fallen dangerously ill around the time of the Twelfth Night masque and had summoned her son to her bedside. Charles had suggested to his mother that she leave her jewels to him, which she apparently agreed to do. Since they were rumoured to be worth an astronomical (though probably exaggerated) £400,000, it was perhaps not surprising that the cash-strapped James was furious at the news, and soon after George sent Charles a letter warning him of the king’s reaction.

  Charles wrote in desperation back to George, appealing for help. He addressed him using James’s pet name, ‘Steenie’.* ‘There is none that knows me so well as yourself what dutiful respect and love I have ever, and shall ever, carry to the king.’ George would therefore know the ‘grief’ Charles felt at his father’s displeasure. He claimed to have acted on a ‘command’ James had given him ‘a while ago that I should use all the means I could to make the queen make a will, whereby she should make over to me her jewels’. He had therefore assumed he would receive the king’s ‘approbation’ for doing ‘that which I thought he had desired’. He explained he was not claiming any right to the jewels, and begged George to tell his father ‘that I am very sorry that I have done anything that may offend him and that I will be content to have any penance inflicted upon me, so he may forgive me’. He had never meant to displease him, yet he accepted that he deserved ‘to be punished for my ill-fortune’.

  The pathetic plea was George’s cue to recall the advice of his mentor Bacon, and ‘humbly interpose’ himself in the prince’s miserable position.

  George did so by staging a great feast for the king and Charles in London, ‘the end whereunto it was designed, of reconciling’ the prince with his father and the favourite. Charles grabbed at the opportunity with all-too-evident relief, declaring the event a ‘Friends’ feast’. James responded by deciding that it was also the ‘Prince’s feast’, and drank a toast to his son. With the cup in his hand, he could not restrain himself from also raising it to George, as well as other members of the family, including Mary, along with Lady Hatton – now a firm friend as well as a sister-in-law – and several other members of the Villiers ‘race’, drinking a ‘common health to all the noble family’, which the king ‘professed he desired to advance above all others’.

  The Spanish Match

  As the Christmas revels were underway, Queen Anne lay alone in her sickbed pondering her boy’s future as well as her own mortality. Since the death of her eldest son Henry in 1612, she had been central to plans concerning Charles’s marriage prospects, princes and kings from various foreign courts, including Tuscany and Savoy as well as Spain and France, courting her support for their daughters. Reflecting her religious sympathies, she had initially supported the idea of a Spanish match. In this she had been heavily influenced by her politically shrewd and witty lady-in-waiting Jane Drummond. Drummond had been Charles’s wet nurse in Scotland and had close links to the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, who paid her a generous pension to spy on Anne’s court and influence the queen’s deliberati
ons.

  With the queen’s support, negotiations over the match had begun to gain traction. A treaty for the marriage was circulating as early as March 1615, and discussions had continued since, with new drafts going back and forth between London and Madrid. Religious issues had remained a sticking point, but Anne’s backing had at least offered hope of overcoming them. It was even suggested that the queen and Drummond could provide a suitably Catholic establishment to accommodate the infanta when she came to live in England. And a plan had been discussed that would allow the infanta to raise her children, even the heir to the British throne, in the Catholic faith for the first few years of life – a major and highly controversial concession that was bound to provoke public hostility.

  Then, in 1617, Anne had aroused shock and consternation by renouncing the match in favour of either Christine or Henrietta Maria, the two young sisters of the French king, Louis XIII. It turned out the queen had been vacillating for some time, confiding to the Venetian ambassador that she would ‘sooner see’ Charles ‘married in France than in Spain’ as early as 1615. A falling out with Sir John Digby, James’s ambassador in Madrid, seemed to harden her view. She had then dismissed Drummond, on the pretext of her interfering in the appointment of a member of Charles’s staff.

  One explanation for the volte-face was the arrival of the Frenchman Piero Hugon as her page. She was known to have a penchant for male favourites in her inner circle. Hugon’s predecessor Robert Lloyd (or Floyd), a ‘sewer’ in her privy chamber, had been knighted and raised to the curious rank of ‘Admiral to the Queen’, before suffering a mysterious fall from grace around the time of Hugon’s arrival. Having swiftly displaced both Lloyd and Jane Drummond in the queen’s ‘affairs of trust and expense’, Hugon had become heavily involved in her religious devotions, giving him the opportunity to shift her sympathies away from Spain and towards a daughter of France.