The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The announcement produced a mood of euphoria in Madrid, with three days of fireworks and fiestas to celebrate the liberation of British Catholics after nearly a century of oppression.

  A departure date of late August was set, and in the meantime everyone carried on with a desultory performance of nuptial expectation. Even in their letters to James, Charles and George wrote as though the wedding was going ahead. The reason was revealed in a short note written days before their scheduled departure. Unusually, it was penned by Charles, George lying sick with a severe fever, and was presumably conveyed to James via a messenger he did not normally use. ‘You are betrayed in your bedchamber,’ the prince announced starkly, as a result of which the Spanish ambassador in London, Hinojosa, had somehow got hold of all the letters they had written to him.

  A few days later, George, recovering from his illness, wrote to James.

  The tone is abject. He informs the king that his ‘humble heart’ is ready to ‘consider my own defects and unworthiness and how fruitless a servant I have been’. He lists his failings and regrets: that the ‘great business’ of the match had achieved so little ‘for yours, your son’s and the whole nation’s honour’, that his absence from the king’s company continued, and that they had been forced to give away so much to the Spanish.

  On 1 September, George sent another note, his final from Madrid, written without Charles’s knowledge, to reassure James of ‘his perfect recovery’ from his sickness, and revealing that ‘my heart and very soul dance for joy’ at their imminent reunion, ‘from sadness to mirth, nay from hell to heaven’, his thoughts being ‘only bent of having my dear Dad and master’s legs soon in my arms’.

  They were at the Escorial, the royal palace-cum-monastery. Charles was out hunting with King Philip in the surrounding foothills, their final expedition. Philip had suggested a further day’s delay as arrangements were not yet in place for him to escort the prince to Valsaín, the royal summer lodge just outside Segovia, for their formal farewells. Charles politely demurred. So arrangements were made for Charles and George to take their official leave later that day.

  Before departing, Charles signed the documents that appointed Philip to act as proxy in the prince’s forthcoming marriage to the infanta, which was to take place within ten days of the pope ratifying the deal. Philip also presented Charles with a magnificent portrait by Titian of his great-grandfather Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. It was a profound and generous acknowledgement not only of the prince’s artistic taste, but of the Spanish king’s hopes for a union. The picture beautifully captured Philip’s lineage and expectations, depicting the figure who had through marriage as well as conquest helped unite the Habsburg dominions, and suggesting that, were the Stuarts to join such a bloodline, it would close a rift that had begun with the divorce of Henry VIII from Katherine of Aragon, and was now threatening to tear Europe apart.

  On an outcrop of rock in the grounds of the Escorial, at a spot subsequently commemorated by a tall, undecorated ‘columna del adiós’ (the pillar of farewell), Charles and George took their leave of Philip. Heading for Segovia, they stopped at the Valsaín lodge for a meal. A gun salute welcomed them into the city later that afternoon, and they were given a tour, which like most royal tours involved visits to factories as well as palaces – in this case a mint, where Charles beheld a large gold coin being made to be presented to him as a gift from the city’s burghers. At the castle, there was a set of arms combining those of England and Castile, in honour of another and long-forgotten Spanish match, between King Henry III of Castile and Catherine of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt.

  The formalities dispensed with, Charles sat down to write two letters, one of thanks and reassurance to Philip, the other a note to Sir John Digby at the House of the Seven Chimneys, who was to remain to clear up the mess left behind. The ambassador was commanded ‘not to deliver my proxy’, the letter which was needed to allow the wedding to go ahead in his absence. Those five words brought to an ignominious end all the efforts of the last decade and the past few months of adventure and angst.

  On 18 September 1623, George and Charles sailed for England. It had taken a little over six months to turn a romantic escapade designed to sweep the infanta off her feet into a squalid fiasco mired in turgid diplomacy.

  Fool’s Coats

  When George’s father-in-law the Earl of Rutland was sent to Santander to pick up George and Charles, he was welcomed by Archie Armstrong. The king’s fool announced he had given his new ‘fool’s coat’ to Charles, his old one to George, and ‘when I come to England, I will have fool’s coats for you all’.

  It was that mood of mockery and humiliation that on 5 October 1623 welcomed them home at Plymouth, following a rough voyage. Allowing themselves only a short rest, they set off for London as fast as they could on post-horses, making such haste ‘that few followed them’. They became lost around Guildford, with some thirty miles to go. Coming to the village of Godalming, they stopped at a house for refreshments. Paying in Spanish gold, the ‘gentlewoman’ who served them, one Mrs Wyatt, guessed who Charles must be, and boasted the first kiss the prince gave since his return to home shores. As they were leaving, a poor woman who had seen him at Mrs Wyatt’s home asked to kiss his hand. When he offered it, she clung on to it. Puzzled by her reaction, Charles asked her to let go, but she ‘desired him first to promise he never to go again to Spain’.

  The news reached London at three in the morning. A servant shook London’s lord mayor awake to tell him of the prince’s approach, and the mayor went personally to break the news to the king, who was staying at Theobalds. The city’s sergeants dashed madly about town ‘raising up the constables and other officers, who raised up every household’. By 7 a.m., despite persistent rain, bonfires were being set alight at almost every door. The young lawyer, Simonds D’Ewes, wandering around the city in amazement, counted more than three hundred fires between Whitehall and Temple Bar, the City’s western entrance – a distance of a few hundred yards.

  Reaching London Bridge, George and Charles found George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, waiting for them in the drizzle. Abbot had complained as far back as 1614 that the king and prince had become ‘enchanted by the false, fraudulent, and siren-like songs of Spain’, but restrained himself from gloating, as he welcomed the two soaked adventurers into Lambeth Palace, his home on the south bank of the Thames, opposite the Palace of Westminster. The couple then took the archbishop’s barge to York House, George’s riverside residence, where they had breakfast. The duke’s watergate, the entrance to the house facing the river, became crowded with dignitaries, allies and enemies alike, the ‘press of people’ becoming ‘so great that no man could get in or out’. After an absence of six months, many could not believe George and Charles were back, and wanted to see them with their own eyes, having been ‘deceived so often’ by false reports.

  Elsewhere in the kingdom, the scepticism was maintained – at least that was the explanation for the absence of celebrations outside the capital. But in London, the bonfires ‘seemed to turn the City into one flame’. Carts carrying firewood had their loads tipped onto the street and set alight, and sometimes the carts were thrown onto the flames too. Shops were shut, a holiday was declared, bells were rung and there was ‘mirth and jollity’, particularly among the ten or so condemned prisoners due to be executed that morning who ‘were all saved and set free’. There were street parties, ‘with all manner of provisions, setting out whole hogsheads of wine and butts of sack’. The tower of St Paul’s Cathedral was festooned with torches, while inside the xenophobic words of Psalm 114 became ‘a new anthem’, celebrating ‘when Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from among the barbarous people’.

  ‘I have not heard of more demonstrations of public joy than were here and every where from the highest to the lowest,’ noted John Chamberlain. ‘The only thing to be lamented,’ the young, earnestly puritanical D’Ewes added, ‘was the great excess and drun
kenness of this day, the two usual faults of Englishmen upon any good hap.’

  As desperate ambassadors and dignitaries continued to shoulder their way into York House, George and Charles left by carriage, heading for Royston in Hertfordshire, where James was nursing his gout. As they drove along the Strand, crowds gathered to cheer them, George enjoying the moment, bareheaded and bowing to them, while the more reserved Charles kept his hat on, but waved and smiled.

  The prince was impatient, even desperate, to see his father, and at Charing Cross told the driver not to go via the City, which had become choked by the fires, but head off up St Martin’s Lane, at that time little more than a muddy lane heading north. Whipped on by the coachman, they hurtled through puddles, and, as they approached a flooded stretch of road, a shout was heard: ‘for God’s sake to beware and stay a little’. It was a local miller’s boy, who warned the coachman he was entering ‘a dangerous deep place’. The coachman slowed, and the boy ‘guided them safely through’ – another providential deliverance.

  James, meanwhile, raced south from Royston to meet them at Theobalds. He was waiting for them as they came up the drive. As their coach pulled up at the bottom of the steps, the king flew down to them, and they ran up to him, the three meeting in the middle ‘where the Prince and the Duke being on their knees, the King fell on their necks and they all wept’. There was ‘ecstasy of joy on the Prince’s return, which has cured the King’, wrote Sir Edward Conway, the king’s secretary. ‘The embraces and familiarities between him, the Prince, and Buckingham, are just the same as though they had not been an hour absent.’

  The three retired to the king’s bedchamber. Attempts to overhear the discussion proved inconclusive. ‘They that attended at the door sometime heard a still voice, and then a loud; sometime they laughed, and sometime they chafed, and noted such variety as they could not guess what the close might prove.’ The three emerged later for supper, the king appearing to ‘take all well’. He announced that ‘he liked not to marry his son with a portion of his daughter’s tears’, meaning that he was not prepared to submit Charles to a dishonourable match for Elizabeth’s sake.

  Across the country, confusion reigned. The day after the reunion, the Privy Council announced that ‘the marriage goes on just as before the Prince went to Spain; it is to be consummated by proxy before Christmas, and the Infanta to come in March’. The king also dispatched a letter to Digby. The perplexed English ambassador had been left in Madrid with a proxy that Charles had ordered him to rescind, and which the council in England was now declaring would be ‘consummated’ by Christmas. James tried to clarify, writing in terms that suggested the marriage would go ahead as planned, but only after Digby had secured King Philip’s ‘clear’ agreement to ensuring the ‘restitution of the Palatinate and electoral dignity of our son-in-law’ – in other words that Charles’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick be allowed to return to his ancestral lands in Germany. This requirement, the king airily added, had always been ‘understood and expected’ as a condition of the marriage, and implied it was entirely achievable.

  Meanwhile, the news-mongers were getting mixed signals from government officials and nothing from the royal household. Some assumed the match negotiations were finished. One diarist had heard that the infanta had decided to enter a monastery rather than marry the prince. Others assumed that the fact that the prince and duke had returned empty-handed simply meant that the marriage was delayed.

  Hinojosa and Coloma made their way towards Royston in the hope of congratulating the prince on his homecoming, but in an apparent snub found themselves diverted to a village ten miles short of their destination, where they were to await further instructions in a local inn.

  ‘Matters are still kept so secret that we know not what to judge of the match,’ complained the well-placed Chamberlain. The week following Charles and George’s return, and after a prolonged absence due to illness, James had gone to London and held secret meetings with the Spanish, and soon after it was noted that orders were being issued for various Jesuits held on sedition charges to be freed.

  George seemed to be as powerful as ever, his ‘carriage in all the business’ being ‘much applauded and commended’ as ‘brave and resolute’. But his falling out with his Spanish counterpart, Olivares, was also widely reported. Would this change the king’s attitude to him or the Spanish? Perhaps it was nothing more than posturing; the ‘Northern and Southern favourites’ – George and Olivares – were bound to ‘look proudly one upon another, when they met in the same cockpit’.

  Bedraggled members of the entourage who had sailed with the prince from Santander did not reach the capital until three days after the prince, and were barely noticed by the revellers who had welcomed George and Charles. Among them was another Spanish ambassador, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who was to join Hinojosa and Coloma in the increasingly cramped embassy in Holborn. He was followed a month later by a fourth member of staff. Though he came from Brussels, Diego de Mexía was ‘another Spaniard’, Chamberlain caustically noted; ‘it seems they mean to hold a council table here’.

  A deadly incident heightened the mood of confusion and foreboding. On the evening of Sunday 26 October, three weeks after the prince’s return, 300 worshippers gathered in the upper storey of a large garret adjoining the French embassy in Blackfriars to attend an evening service given by a Jesuit priest. During the sermon, the floor gave way, collapsing through the room beneath into the building’s basement, killing the preacher, another priest and ninety of the congregation. Within days, the streets were littered with ballads and pamphlets reporting what came to be known as the ‘Fatal Vesper’.

  Puritan writers were eager to seize upon the incident as an apt and providential demonstration of the weakness of the theological foundations of Catholicism. By way of evidence, some even pointed out that there had been no fatalities in similar incidents of floors collapsing in Protestant churches. It was also noted that, by the New Style ‘Romish calendar’, which had been in use on the Continent since 1582, 26 October was 5 November – the anniversary of the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Catholic insurgents had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

  There was a twist to the story that unsettled the critics’ religious complacency. It turned out that a number of the casualties of the Fatal Vesper had been Protestants, drawn by the mood of religious toleration. This aspect of the incident involved confronting the most sensitive matters of official policy, matters that had become ever more delicate since the prince’s return. A pamphlet containing a lurid account of the Blackfriars incident was rushed out the week after it took place, but was ‘called in’ – that is, censored – for touching on such delicate matters. Another pamphlet, titled Something Written by occasion of that fatal and memorable accident in Blackfriars, managed to escape official attention. It openly declared the ‘memorable accident’ to be the result of the king’s ‘lenitive courses’ towards Catholics. It noted how, as a result, ‘the papists grew of late so audaciously bold, that they durst even boast again of the king’s pardon and grace, and tell us to our faces, we are heretics, and for nothing but the fire, and to be consumed to cinders’.

  The king took little interest in these matters, instead revelling at having George and Charles back with him. ‘“Welcome home” is still the only business at Court,’ a councillor noted impatiently. The world had to wait as the king clutched possessively to his two sweet boys.

  As the weeks passed, it became clear that all was not well. Tensions began to build over James’s persistence with the marriage. Despite all the humiliations the Spanish had inflicted on his son, James would not countenance any kind of retaliation. He clung tightly to the idea that Spain would help restore the Palatinate. He would not listen to his two boys’ insistence that such hopes were futile. They had spoken to the Spanish king, they had negotiated with Olivares, they knew that Spain would never threaten war with the Holy Roman Empire over the Palatinate; they had heard from the valid
o’s own lips that it was a ‘maxim of state that the king of Spain must never fight against the Emperor’.

  The king made a show of welcoming the Spanish ambassadors who had arrived since Charles’s return. A somewhat chaotic reception was laid on for them at Whitehall, where they were received by James in his privy chamber. After a brief meeting, he escorted them ‘by the way of the Stone-gallery’ to meet Charles. They presented the prince with a letter from King Philip, apparently urging the prince to proceed with the match for the sake of peace and religious toleration as well as to requite the passionate love he had expressed for the infanta. Charles received it coolly, with a ‘Spanish gravity’ that contrasted with his enthusiastic wooing of the infanta in Madrid, and with ‘no more capping nor courtesy than must needs’.

  These overtures were followed up, at James’s insistence, with a great feast for the ambassadors, hosted by George at York House. Paid for by £300 from the royal exchequer, it was a splendid affair. A Spanish account illustrated by an engraving showed James and Charles seated at one end of a table beneath a canopy bearing the royal coat of arms, with the Spanish ambassadors either side of them, and courtiers crowded all around. The meal began with an antipasto of cold meats followed by twelve pheasants piled in a dish and no fewer than 480 partridges and ‘as many quails’, and concluded with a masque and a selection of sweetmeats.

  All was not as it seemed, however. John Chamberlain observed that George had arranged the event ‘rather pro forma than ex animo’ – out of duty rather than conviction. He did not attend the feast in person, though he may have appeared in the masque, which he had commissioned from his loyal servant John Maynard. The text does not survive, but the theme was Charles’s homecoming, his arrival back in England from Madrid represented as a deliverance in a way that seemed calculated to insult the Spanish guests of honour.

  It was also noted around this time how those who had been among Charles’s entourage during the Madrid escapade had begun to ‘speak liberally’ of their ‘course usage and entertainment’ in Spain, where they had found nothing but ‘penury and proud beggary, besides all other discourtesy’.