The patent formally conferring the title arrived in Madrid in late May, with a message from James’s Lord Keeper informing George that ‘his majesty is most constant, and in some degrees more enflamed in his affections to your grace than formerly’ and that the title had been conferred so ‘your honour might be no less than the Conde-Duke Olivares the Great Privado of King Philip’. A thank-you letter overwrought with gratitude and humility made its way to England by return of post. ‘You have filled a consuming purse, given me fair houses, more land than I am worthy of, to maintain both me and them, filled my coffers so full with patents of honour, that my shoulders cannot bear more,’ George told James. ‘You have furnished and enriched my cabinet with so precious a witness of your valuation of me, as in future times it cannot be said, that I rise as most courtiers do, through importunity’ – in other words, as a result of annoying persistence. ‘For which character of me, and incomparable favour from you, I will sign, with as contented, nay as proud a heart, Your poor Steenie, as Duke of Buckingham.’
The promotion made no difference to the negotiations, however. They ground on without any sign of resolution, apparently propelled by a momentum of their own. An optimistic outlook had to be maintained. As late as July, Endymion Porter would write to his wife that a deal had been done and that he and George ‘shall be at home suddenly’. But behind the scenes, the millstones of the ‘junta grande’ appointed by King Philip to discuss the diplomatic details and a Vatican council, assembled to agree on the religious aspects, slowly and remorselessly ground down any hopes of success.
A previous English envoy in Madrid had described the Spanish court as ‘the hospital of hope and the grave of the living’. George called it a ‘labyrinth, wherein we have been entangled these many years’. A cartoon circulating in Rome, and noticed by an English envoy there, showed Charles and George trapped in a cage, James standing to one side in a ‘fool’s coat’, Philip on the other side holding a key.
If they were stuck in a cage, it was a gilded one. Escaping the inferno of the summer heat, they were left free to wander the Alcázar’s cool, marble corridors and galleries, admire the pictures and furnishings, run a finger along the bookcases in its libraries and across the inlay decorating its cabinets. And as the weeks wafted by, interesting lessons began to be learned about the power dynamics of Habsburg courtly culture – that it preferred to demonstrate its power through impression rather than expression, that it used grace to produce obedience, elegance to yield subservience, splendour to impose authority. Art was one of the chief instruments for achieving these effects, and it was everywhere.
Back home, Charles owned only twenty-four paintings, most by second-rate Flemish and British artists who had failed to make a more lucrative living in Continental courts. Philip had 2,000 by some of the great Renaissance masters – Titian, Tintoretto, Leonardo da Vinci. There were paintings from across Europe – Venice, Germany, Holland, Bohemia, France; paintings by exciting new artists such as Velázquez, who had arrived in Madrid the year before Charles; and paintings on subjects unknown to British eyes – still lives, subtle meditations on nature and death, and dream-like visions, such as Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. There were cabinets of curiosities stuffed with strange objects brought from Spain’s New World colonies and the East Indies. There were volumes on the fabled worlds of Orinoco and El Dorado, and novels relating picaresque adventures: Don Quixote, El Pícaro and Celestina, the latter a romance that included an episode uncannily like Charles’s scaling of the orchard wall to reach the infanta. There were vast tapestries that made English ones look threadbare, huge marble statues that dwarfed those in London. Charles was taken on a tour of the royal ‘garden’, where, according to a Spanish connoisseur, he was ‘much delighted with the pictures of Raphael de Urbino, and Michelangelo, and with the alabaster fountain which the illustrious great Duke of Tuscany gave my lord cardinal, the Duke of Lerma: he was served with it; it is the portraiture of Cain and Abel’.
It was flabbergasting – opulence on a scale they could barely conceive, the magnificence of an imperial court. Britain had an empire now, of sorts: the privately funded colony of Virginia had begun to flourish after a precarious start, sustained by tobacco plantations (grown using seed stolen from the Spanish). Britain had a fledgling artistic culture too, though one more or less confined to the vulgarities of the playhouse. But it had no fruits or riches to compare with these.
Both George and Charles went on a spending spree, buying up paintings and objets d’art worth over 10,000 reales each month. They commissioned Velázquez, still finding his feet as a court artist, to sketch a likeness of Charles (since lost). They carefully studied an equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma, Olivares’s predecessor as royal valido, by Peter Paul Rubens, an image that captured with such vivid intensity its subject’s majestic confidence and power neither would forget it. Charles bought two Titians, Woman in a Fur Wrap and Allegory of the Marquis of Vasto, two very different subjects, but both featuring bare-breasted women delivering a powerful erotic charge rarely seen in art available in Protestant England.
When they ventured out, they saw bullfights and fiestas and toured the great palaces built by King Philip’s Habsburg forebears. They spent time at the Escorial, the enormous, forbidding royal palace-cum-monastery-cum-necropolis dedicated to St Lawrence, set in the barren foothills of the snow-capped Guadarrama mountains. Its austere, rectangular layout was said to be inspired by the gridiron used in St Lawrence’s martyrdom.
They arranged for five camels and an elephant to be sent home to add to James’s menagerie. They attended banquets and concerts, saw a descendant of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, presented at court, and listened to singers whose voices had ‘more power to give life to all creatures sensitive and vegetative than ever Orpheus’s silver-stringed lyre had’.
Here was a model of monarchy quite different to the dingy and insular sort projected by James. This showed what they could have had and, now that the negotiations teetered on the edge of collapse, what they were about to lose.
Secret Intelligencers
Wallingford House stood next to Whitehall’s Tilt Yard, opposite the king’s London residence, and a short walk from the Houses of Parliament. In Tudor times, it had been a small plot of wasteland used as a carpenter’s yard. In the 1570s, the plot was leased by the prominent Elizabethan courtier Sir Francis Knollys, who used it to build a ‘convenient house’. The building was inherited by Sir Francis’s son, William, who later became Lord Wallingford, hence the name.
In 1618, family ties had implicated Lord Wallingford in efforts to undermine George’s position, and Wallingford lost his job as Master of the Wards, one of the most lucrative offices of state. Exiled from court and desperate to regain favour, Wallingford had agreed to sell his home to George for a very reasonable £3,000.
George had set about making it a residence fit for a favourite, with fifty-four rooms, a long gallery, a great drawing room, a dining room, a chapel with a gallery (for a choir or musicians) and a ‘White Parlour’. And, as the residence of King James’s newly appointed Lord Admiral, it would eventually become known as the Admiralty.
Before leaving for Madrid, George had hired some ‘secret intelligencers’ – spies and reporters – to keep him informed of affairs back home and ‘maintain the grandeur of his lordship’, in other words, head off attempts to undermine his position. The group met ‘frequently’ at Wallingford House with the task of sending him ‘notice of common talk or secret whispers that might concern him’.
In early May 1623 the intelligencers were busy, as the city was abuzz with news that, after the interminable negotiations, a papal ‘dispensation’ had been issued that would allow the infanta to marry a Protestant prince. In England, it was recognized by supporters and enemies of the Spanish match to be the document that would determine whether or not the match could go ahead – ‘the furnace to make or to mar the wedding-ring’.
The dispensa
tion had been delivered to James in a sealed box. It was accompanied by a letter from George and Charles asking him to be ‘secret in the conditions’ the dispensation contained, otherwise ‘it will beget dispute, censures, and conclusions’ which would be ‘to our prejudice’. John Williams, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, was among those kept in the dark, and wrote to George directly, concerned that the secrecy was breeding suspicion. ‘We all wonder at his majesty’s reservedness,’ he complained, as a result of which ‘we all think, and the town speak and talk of the worst, and of very difficult conditions’. Williams was in favour of the match, but was aware of the growing controversy at home over papal interference, and was beginning to wonder if George was having second thoughts.
Speculation erupted, and was picked up by the diarist Simonds D’Ewes. He guessed that whatever was contained in the mysterious box sent by George to James must be bad news for the Spanish negotiations, as it had ‘joyed the hearts a little of drooping Protestants’ while ‘controlling the late insolent boastings of the popish crew’. Two days later, he was confidently providing a spurious list of the conditions the pope had apparently laid down: that James ‘should renounce his style of defender of the faith; that he should declare himself an enemy of the Hollanders’ – of the Dutch Protestants who were currently providing refuge for Charles’s sister Elizabeth – ‘that he should grant a general and full toleration of the popish religion…’ and so on and so on: a scintillating catalogue of every Protestant’s worst nightmares.
James Hay – the Earl of Carlisle and James’s envoy to France – arrived in London a few days after the dispensation. He had made a brief visit to Madrid, and, according to the letter-writer John Chamberlain, was being ‘very silent’ about whatever he had discovered there. However, both Chamberlain and D’Ewes did learn that he had met the infanta, who had given him ‘leave to kneel’ before her ‘above an hour’, news that reversed the rumours of the match being off, and promoted, as Chamberlain put it, a frenzy of preparation among ‘our great ladies’ to think of how they could most graciously ‘demean themselves’ to their new princess.
However, with the rumours came counter-rumours of a rift opening up between George and Sir John Digby. The duke and the ambassador had become ‘strangers in the business’, with Digby being excluded from the negotiations. Other reports suggested that, while Digby remained close to the Spanish, George and Charles were becoming increasingly alienated. As a result, to get access to the infanta, James Hay had apparently been forced to present himself ‘through the commendatory letters of the King and Queen of France’ rather than as an emissary of James.
Meanwhile, there was wider unease about signs of growing Catholic toleration. At the opening of the short-lived Parliament of 1621, James had promised the strongly Protestant MPs that the Spanish match would not lead to the spread of Catholicism. The ‘recusancy’ laws, which penalized those who did not regularly engage in Protestant worship, would, he assured them, remain in place. However, under a secret accord with the Spanish, James was allowing Catholics freedom to worship privately in their own homes. Somehow, news of this had leaked out, and a mood of political as well as religious unrest, even betrayal began to build.
Vigilant ‘Puritans’ (a derogatory term for Protestant radicals) complained of the ‘Romish foxes’ coming ‘out of their holes’. Debate between Catholics and Protestants seemed to be officially tolerated, even encouraged. Jesuits, previously regarded as the foot soldiers of a Catholic insurgency, were preaching openly. D’Ewes recorded a ‘disputation’ at the home of a London lawyer between two Protestant theologians and two Jesuits, with ‘our side’ having to demonstrate the existence of Protestant doctrines ‘before Luther’, while ‘their side’ pointed out that their Church had been in continuous existence for ‘the first 600 years after Christ’. In the Midlands, a priest who had served in Spain during Elizabethan times was seen parading around in episcopal vestments, posing as a Catholic bishop. Londoners walking across St James’s Park on their way to Whitehall or the City could not fail to notice the building of a new Catholic chapel prominently positioned near St James’s Palace, apparently in preparation for Charles’s bride the infanta.
George’s own family contributed directly to fears of a Catholic revival. His irrepressible mother Mary had openly proclaimed her conversion, and there were suspicions about George’s wife Kate and her father the Earl of Rutland.
Fears swept through the country of a return to religious turmoil and sectarian violence – that the uneasy Protestant settlement established by Elizabeth and supposedly upheld by James, was eroding, and that the match would sweep it away. These fears sharpened when news broke in May that a deal on the match might have been done, and that Charles was about to return with his Spanish bride. A fleet was being readied at enormous cost to collect them. The 1,500-ton Prince Royal was to act as the flagship, a vessel of ‘wonderful lines, strength and beauty’, ‘one of the fairest in the world’. A bridal cabin had been prepared for the infanta, decorated with a ‘rich cloth of gold’ and furnished with a bed of ‘crimson velvet with a rich gold fringe and lace’. Three vice admirals – ‘all three, rank papists’, according to D’Ewes – had been appointed, lords Morley and Windsor together with George’s father-in-law, the Earl of Rutland, who was given command of the ship. According to John Chamberlain, everything was being ‘so carried as if were to receive some goddess’.
Around the same time, two senior members of the Privy Council were dispatched to Southampton to organize the official reception for the prince and his bride (D’Ewes noting sourly that ‘men of meaner rank might have served to have done this’), and James ordered that ‘special honour’ be shown to the Marquis of Hinojosa, sent from Madrid to join the current ambassador, Carlos Coloma. A startling figure, Hinojosa had a severely disfigured face and a ‘careless’ rather than stately carriage ‘as if he should persuade men to imagine that all that he had was within’. On his way to London, he stopped off in Canterbury, where ‘many persons’ reportedly ‘declared themselves papists’, raising worries that he could become a figurehead for Catholic agitation. A man called Broome welcomed him by toasting the ‘confusion’ that was soon to be unleashed among ‘all Protestants’.
William Whiteway, a Dorchester merchant, noted in his diary the busy traffic of magnates and emissaries between London and the western ports, and also heard a rumour that the fleet sent to collect Charles had mutinied, the Protestant crew having ‘ducked’ from the main yard Lord Morley, one of the ‘rank papists’ put in command.
The Wallingford House circle became alarmed at the cacophonous ‘tympani’ of gossip and speculation generated by all this activity, and became concerned about the impact on George’s position. They wrote him a stark letter, urging him to ‘set the match’ between Charles and the infanta ‘back by degrees’. They also warned him that he ‘must look to stand by the love of the people as well as the king’. Popular opinion was becoming increasingly nervous and hostile towards the match. ‘Unless the treaty for the great marriage was quashed’, they concluded, it could prove fatal to his standing in the government and the country. A ‘storm will fall upon your lordship’, he was warned. ‘Suffer no longer delays in Spain’, as his continuing absence had allowed a great ‘insolency’ to breed among his enemies. John Williams, the Lord Keeper and a supposed ally, was identified as a particular threat, as he was close to the estranged ambassador in Madrid, Sir John Digby, and was said to be building a ‘great and more powerful party in Court than you imagine’, powerful enough to secure George’s overthrow.
Then, on 14 June, Francis Cottington, Charles’s secretary and companion since the prince’s departure for Madrid, arrived in Greenwich with a letter from Charles and George which James was to burn as soon as he had read it. As he seems to have followed that instruction, its contents are unknown, but in reply, James told his ‘sweet boys’ that whatever they had written ‘hath strucken me dead’.
A Farewell Pillar
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sp; George and Charles had been in Madrid for three months. Frustration soured into reckless bravado. Olivares, George’s opposite number, was beginning to find Charles’s companion boorish and untrustworthy. He was disgusted by the way George would go around Charles’s apartment in the Alcázar half-dressed. He also accused the duke of trying to undermine the match and being in league with the French. George had also fallen out with the papal nuncio in Madrid, telling him that unless the Vatican proved more cooperative negotiations would only proceed with a drawn sword held over the heads of British Catholics.
There were even hints of a falling out between Charles and George as they responded differently to their predicament – George becoming angrier, Charles more frightened. But what they could agree on, was that a combination of Spanish inertia and the worsening crisis facing Charles’s sister and her husband Frederick had left the negotiations in a state of diplomatic purgatory. They found themselves officially ignored while being constantly monitored. Nothing they could say or do seemed to produce a decisive response. They were, in short, trapped and could see no means of escape. This was the news they had communicated secretly to James, that had ‘strucken’ him so forcefully.
The king responded by telling them to accept whatever terms would secure their quick release. On 7 July, Charles duly agreed to the conditions set by the Vatican and the Spanish, including a pledge on his own and James’s behalf that no laws ‘employed against Roman Catholics in England, Scotland and Ireland’ would be observed and that ‘perpetual toleration’ would be permitted ‘in private homes’.
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