The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  A Secret Matter

  Thursday, 12 February 1624, had been appointed the day of the official opening of the new Parliament, but at the last minute it was postponed by royal command until after the weekend. A heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures were blamed, though no one was sure if this was the real reason. The Venetian ambassador wondered if it was a precautionary measure, because of security fears.

  Despite the conditions, Ludovick Stuart, Duke of Lennox and Richmond, the Lord High Steward of James’s household, had turned up at 8 a.m. at New Palace Yard, the entrance to Parliament, to find it packed with more than two hundred shivering MPs who had learned of the postponement too late. Stuart was the king’s cousin and son of Esmé Stuart, the first royal favourite, and one of the few survivors of the Scottish retinue that had accompanied James to England in 1603. He had remained a loyal and constant presence in the royal household, and now as High Steward was in charge of the parliamentary ceremonials. Since so many MPs were already there, he thought he would set up a table in the outer room of the Commons’ chamber, and start to swear in the members, reaching more than a hundred before realizing the rest would freeze, so deputing sixteen volunteers to speed things up.

  It was to be Ludovick’s last official engagement. Four days later, the day of Parliament’s postponed opening, as James was putting on his robes of state and crowds gathered in Whitehall for the royal procession to the Palace of Westminster, news broke that Ludovick had died unexpectedly that morning of a fit of apoplexy. James was grief-stricken, and postponed Parliament once again, delaying it to the following week.

  On 19 February, the ceremonies finally went ahead, the king setting off for Westminster in a chariot lined with purple velvet, drawn by six horses, Charles following on horseback. Members of the Commons awaited the king’s arrival in the Painted Chamber. Lionel Cranfield, the Lord Treasurer, was making some welcoming remarks when a large section of plaster fell from the ceiling. Memories of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up James’s first Parliament were still fresh enough to prompt cries of ‘Treason!’ and ‘Traitors!’, sending members scrambling for the door, spreading such confusion that cloaks, hats and even weapons were abandoned.

  By the time the king arrived, order had been restored, and the MPs were summoned to the bar of the House of Lords’ chamber to hear his opening speech.

  Looking tired and ill, James delivered a rambling address, full of laboured similes and convoluted language. St Paul had said Christ was the spouse of his Church and she his wife, said the ageing widower. Similarly, Parliament was James’s wife, and the people the Commons represented were his children. It is the part of a good husband, he continued, to procure and maintain the love of his wife, which is done by two means: by continual cherishing of her, and communicating the secrets of his labours so he can have her best advice about what is to be done upon extraordinary occasions. And here was such an extraordinary occasion, ‘which is that of which you have often heard, the match of my son’. He had spent ‘much time with great cost’ in the negotiation of a treaty with Spain, he superfluously announced, for the ‘advancement of my state and children, and procuring the general peace of Christendom’. The treaty having been agreed in its generalities, he had allowed Charles to go to Madrid with George to deal with the particularities. But when they got there, they found the treaty so ‘raw, as if it had almost never been treated of’, and this had given the Spanish an ‘easy way to evade’ an agreement.

  This was the reason Charles and the duke had returned from Madrid empty-handed, and why, before proceeding with further negotiations, he wanted to seek Parliament’s ‘assistance to advise me what is best and fittest for me to do for the good of the commonwealth and the advancement of religion, and the good of me, my son and grandchildren of the Palatinate, and of our estates’.

  After years of James treating Parliament as a tiresome constitutional formality, the MPs were amazed and flattered to be asked their opinion – on anything, let alone ‘a secret matter’, as James called it, ‘of as great importance as can be to my state and the estate of my children’. They also interpreted James’s remarks about the Spanish to be evidence that, for the first time since he had signed the treaty of 1604 ending hostilities, he was in a mood to break off relations. The king had openly acknowledged Spanish ‘deceit’, according to the MP John Pym. James had ‘showed his dislike of the Spaniard’, Simonds D’Ewes reported. Chamberlain thought he had confessed to being ‘deluded in the treaty of the match’, and on that basis was referring the matter ‘wholly’ to Parliament.

  But James had not been quite as emphatic as those opinions suggested. He had also made it quite clear – in fact, it was one of very few areas of the speech expressed with clarity – that he did not see himself as ‘bound’ or in ‘any way engaged’ by the advice Parliament chose to offer, but remained ‘free to follow’ whatever he considered to be ‘best advised’. He also declared that ‘very fair and full promises to have satisfaction in my demands’ had been received from the Spanish, suggesting that he was far from ready to give up on them.

  Nevertheless, Parliament’s advice had been sought, and so the details would be forthcoming in helping it reach an informed opinion. James did not have the time to brief the lords and honourable members himself, but referred them to his son and his favourite, ‘who shall relate to you all the particulars’.

  The Banqueting House

  George stood at one end of the great hall, next to a table. The Secretary of State, George Calvert, was at his side, nursing a portfolio of documents. Charles was sitting next to him, and George leaned casually, or perhaps protectively, on the back of his chair. They watched the crowds gather in the opulence of the new Banqueting House, London’s first Baroque building, a gleaming edifice the shape of a cut emerald, set among the dingy medieval structures of the old Palace of Whitehall.

  It was three in the afternoon on 24 February 1624. Officers of state and senior earls sat next to the prince at the table, and on either side the bishops, judges and more junior barons were crammed onto benches. The MPs were packed six deep onto scaffolds that lined the walls. There was such a crush, some members of the Privy Council had been told there would be no room for them. James Hamilton, who had been hastily appointed Lord High Steward following the death of Ludovick Stuart, was standing at the door, checking the guest list.

  Francis Bacon had compared ambition to choler – the humour that burns in the stomach and stings the throat, but which also ‘maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring’. This was the humour that had driven George from his humble origins to become the king’s most trusted servant and beloved companion. But in Madrid it had become blocked, and when ambition is blocked, it sours, becoming ‘malign and venomous’.

  Perhaps James had recognized this. Perhaps this was why he had endured his beloved Steenie turning his attentions away from him, even against him. Because, as Bacon warned, those who are thwarted in their ambitions become ‘secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased when things go backwards’, whereas those who find ‘the way open for their rising, and still get forward’ are ‘rather busy than dangerous’. The ambition still burned strongly in the favourite, surged through every duct of his body. It had achieved the seduction of the king and his heir, but had needed a new outlet, which had now been found: the seduction of Parliament.

  As George watched the MPs jostling for space, he could feel confident that they would behave themselves. Several supportive members prominent in earlier Parliaments had been re-elected, the likes of Sir Edwin Sandys, a friend of the Earl of Southampton, and Sir John Eliot, a Cornish magistrate whom George had made Vice Admiral of Devon. Secretaries Calvert and Conway, who were MPs as well as government officials, could be relied upon to keep George and other members of the king’s inner circle informed of developments in the lobby. Sir Edward Coke, who had stirred up so much trouble in 1621, was there, but despite all the fuss over the patents, he h
ad actually helped insulate George from being directly implicated. He also owed George £2,000, which should help keep him in line.

  The duke struck a characteristically confident pose, light catching the glinting jewels and silken sheen of his lordly robes. Many were prepared to congratulate him for bringing their prince safely back from Spain, and waited in excited anticipation for what he and the prince had to tell them about their adventure. But others beheld him with a ‘sour eye’. They blamed him not just for the Madrid fiasco, but for contributing to the collapse of the last Parliament in 1621. It seemed a measure of the man’s arrogance that, having been a prime mover in recent disasters, he should now be given the chance to account for them.

  George’s tactic in the face of hostility was a disarming humility. He began by apologizing in advance for failing to express himself as well as might be expected, as he had never spoken to so grave and learned an assembly before. He then turned to Secretary Calvert and asked him to read out a letter. It was from the king to Digby, England’s ambassador in Spain, sent a few months before their departure to Madrid, which set out the diplomatic quandary they faced over the marriage treaty.

  The MPs were entranced. This was secret diplomatic correspondence being shared with a body denied access to the most anodyne domestic government papers. In 1621 they had been castigated for even daring to discuss the Spanish match. But that was just a beginning. George, his points bolstered by the occasional intervention from Charles, went on to tell them a personal tale of the slights and deceptions that the Spanish had inflicted upon the two of them in Madrid. An enthralling story unfolded of his clandestine meetings in coaches and gardens, of efforts by panels of divines to convert Charles, of traps laid out to humiliate them both. Snatches of their most private conversations were shared: ‘We must be friends and part all the world between us,’ Olivares had said – a great offer by them that would ‘swallow all’, George caustically noted. ‘Let us make a match presently and not call for the assistance of the Pope,’ the king’s duplicitous valido had apparently whispered into the prince’s ear. Convert to Catholicism and he could consummate his marriage in days. Charles had protested – he would never convert! Then Olivares had accepted that a dispensation must be sought from the pope. George saw the letter that Olivares had drafted to the Vatican, which was ‘cold and slack’. He had asked to add a postscript, putting the English point of view, but was refused.

  George told the MPs about the constant prevarications, of the efforts by the Spanish to clog the treaty with new conditions, of the growing realization that they were trying to deny the match by delaying it. The MPs were taken into the streets of Madrid, where Charles was allowed only ‘a sight of his mistress’, this beautiful young princess, dazzling and delectable in the hot Spanish sunshine. But then the Spanish snatched her away! For four or five days Charles was not allowed to see the woman he had travelled a thousand miles to woo. Deal plainly, George had told Olivares: he wanted to know if it was true that the prince would not be allowed to see his bride until the dispensation came. Olivares had confessed as much, saying that the infanta had already been ‘prejudiced in her honour’ by allowing herself to be seen in the street.

  At last, a visit with her had been allowed, but one stifled by formalities, with Charles unable to speak freely to her, the Spanish arguing that they did not know whether to treat him as a suitor or a visitor.

  George then took his audience through the final, disastrous stages of the negotiations. Repeatedly, Charles and George had asked about the Palatinate, the ancestral lands of Charles’s brother-in-law Frederick, seized by Spain’s own allies; but the Spanish refused to address the matter. George also threw suspicion on Ambassador Digby, who just a few weeks before Parliament had assembled had been recalled from Madrid and was now under house arrest in his London home. The evidence now pointed to him having made reckless promises to the Spanish king in order to keep hopes of the match alive.

  MPs, for so many years shunned by James’s government, could barely believe their ears. Things that ‘never came hitherto to any men’s knowledge’ had been publicly and generously shared, one of them noted.

  The reception George received for these revelations was rapturous. In the space of an afternoon, he had transformed himself from a spoilt minion to ‘Preserver of the Nation’, from a creature of the royal bedchamber to the ‘Darling of the Multitude’, from rival to saviour of the people’s beloved prince.

  Transcripts of the duke’s ‘Relation’ quickly began to circulate London and beyond, and within days the printing presses around St Paul’s were churning out copies of his vivid account of the ‘Spanish Labyrinth’ for popular consumption, widening his rehabilitation. The duke had become a British saint, ‘St George on Horseback – let the Dragon take heed, that stood in his way’. He was lauded as a ‘noble, wise, and a generous prince’ whose status and wealth were just reward for his ‘faithful service’ in protecting Charles in Madrid. He was a champion of ordinary people who enjoyed their ‘general love’ as well as the ‘affection and heart of the King and Prince’. A man once treated with political suspicion was now unable to ‘go or ride or stand in his gates, for press of people to behold him’.

  Even the libellers, who had until now relentlessly lampooned him in their bawdy satires, came out in support, one poem addressed to James celebrating George for having:

  … done more

  Than twenty of thy favourites before

  Give him but force his own head to maintain

  And like brave Scipio he will sack proud Spain.

  The appreciative and patriotic mood extended into the House of Commons, where the MPs began to debate with the utmost gravity the king’s request for advice on his foreign policy. One member wrote of the excitement they felt in discussing ‘a cause of the greatest weight that ever he knew within these walls’. Another urged the House not to be ‘slow to apply a remedy’ to the corruption and duplicity the duke had identified. ‘Let our principal care now be salus republicae’ – the welfare of the state. ‘If we go on, we shall be caught in a net, the poorest and basest way of being destroyed.’ They should advise the king, ‘humbly’, to break off his treaties with the Spanish, to do so speedily, and to commit ‘really and roundly’ to assisting Protestant allies on the Continent ‘by a diversive war’. The religious tone began to intensify. One MP, alluding to an obscure section of the Book of Numbers, likened Parliament to Mount Pisgah, where Balaam said he could not cure the people God had blessed. The prince’s return was ‘like Noah’s dove that brought news of the floods abated’.

  Sir John Eliot, seen as an ally of the duke, got up to speak. Eyes might be expected to roll. His previous intervention following George’s presentation of the ‘Spanish Labyrinth’ had been typically bombastic, an appeal to assert ancient parliamentary privileges that seemed designed more to draw attention to himself and to reignite the battles of James’s previous Parliaments than to advance proceedings.

  This time he excelled himself. It was the time to do rather than speak, he pronounced. There must be a quick resolution to break off all treaties. ‘War only will secure and repair us.’

  Countless Difficulties

  While Parliament wallowed in its new-found sense of importance, the government, now apparently firmly in the hands of Charles and George, began to reshape James’s foreign policy.

  The vigilant Venetian ambassador noticed that Henry Rich, one of George’s allies, had turned up in Paris. ‘I cannot find that he has any orders except to listen,’ he reported to his masters in Venice, and what he had heard was that the powerful dowager queen Marie de’ Medici was apparently ‘well disposed’ to the idea of Charles marrying her daughter, Henrietta Maria. Though substituting one Catholic princess with another presented ‘countless difficulties’, France was in ferocious competition with Spain for European dominance, and perhaps that leverage would make the Bourbon king’s diminutive fourteen-year-old sister a potent weapon.

  As the diploma
tic machinations continued, fears of a Catholic backlash, perhaps fomented by Spanish spies, began to intensify. The Privy Council ordered the City authorities in London to make an ‘exact and secret’ search of alehouses and other lodgings on the pretext of trying to recover goods stolen from the Palace of Whitehall. All ‘suspicious persons who cannot give a good account of themselves’ were to be reported to the council.

  James, meanwhile, lingered at Theobalds, claiming to be indisposed by ‘a fierce rheum and cough’. He refused to have anything to do with parliamentary affairs – even to meet government officials. George tartly pointed out to him how he found time ‘to speak with the King of Spain’s instruments, though not with your own subjects’.

  Though he had previously chided and teased James, George now began to adopt a more openly critical tone. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly bitter. He decried the king’s ‘unfavourable interpretation’ of his speech to the joint Houses, which James had described as crude and ‘Catonic’, referring to the Roman censor Cato the Elder. Having in the past indulged the king’s many ailments, on this occasion he dismissed his illness as hypochondria, noting that the same afternoon James had claimed to be falling sick he had been riding in the fields around Theobalds.

  Though his ‘rheum’ may not have been particularly serious, the king did seem to be in the grip of a debilitating melancholia. He seemed ‘practically lost’, according to the Venetian ambassador. Racked with indecision, ‘he now protests, now weeps, but finally gives in’ to whoever he sees.

  The French ambassador wrote of him ‘descending deeper and deeper into folly every day, sometime swearing and calling upon God, heaven and the angels, at other times weeping, then laughing, and finally pretending illness in order to play upon the pity of those who urge him to generous actions and to show them that sickness renders him incapable of deciding anything, demanding only repose and, indeed, the tomb’. He had developed a strange obsession with some Spanish asses that he had heard were available for sale in the Low Countries, deciding with a resolve he had failed to show in any matter of state that he must import them. His moods became as twitchy as his body, producing unexpected explosions of anger and tremors of mortifying anxiety. And relations with George inevitably began to fray, as the invigorated favourite tried to goad the resentful and awkward monarch into action. James could be mawkishly tenacious towards him one moment, sulky or paranoiac, even hostile the next. He accurately suspected that George was looking ‘more to the rising sun’ than to his ‘maker’ – more to Charles than James – and carped at what he saw as the strutting poise Charles had adopted since his return from Madrid, sneering at it as ‘a little too popular’. When the Spanish ambassadors came to complain about the insulting remarks George had made about the King of Spain, James could not bring himself even to defend him, but told them to take the matter up with Parliament.