The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  James’s isolation seemed to intensify by the day: his squirming impatience with the demands made upon him, his need to escape his officials and take refuge in the country, his restless rides through the forests and chases of Hertfordshire or Cambridgeshire. He pondered on what had happened to his two ‘sweet boys’ since their return. His George had become another George, no longer his Steenie. The lustre of his charisma and energy was tarnished now it was no longer focused on the king, but aimed in other directions, towards Parliament and people, activism and innovation.

  The Forger of Every Mischief

  As the king moped in the countryside, a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament continued to ponder its official response to the king’s invitation to advise on the Spanish match. George was voted in as a member, while Charles, now thriving in his role as an enthusiastic member of the House of Lords and parliamentary activist, hovered respectfully on the fringes. According to the Venetian ambassador, ‘there was no lack of divers opinions as well probably as of divers passions’ among the committee members as they debated on what they should say, and intense wrangling broke out between militant MPs and more moderate Lords on matters of religion and the economic impact of war.

  Charles, who seemed to have forgotten his bashfulness, seized the moment. Addressing the committee in a ‘prudent, friendly and most praiseworthy’ manner, and with George there to urge him on, he ‘worked wonders’ in getting agreement on what might be said to his father, and pledged eternal gratitude for the support he was getting. He even ventured into the House of Commons. It was his first time, as the chamber was usually considered forbidden territory for royals. But he was welcomed, and he listened attentively as they deliberated the evidence he and George had presented.

  Reinforcing the bond of trust, Charles released more confidential documents to back up what George had said in his Banqueting House speech. These showed that it was the Spanish who had initiated the idea of the prince marrying the infanta in 1614, and they who had been responsible for the breakdown in relations. He also produced a letter he had written to his father from Madrid to refute allegations of a cowardly plan to ‘steal away from Spain through fear’ when it became clear he and George were trapped there. The letter showed that, far from trying to slip off back to England, Charles had accepted his predicament as a Spanish prisoner, telling his father ‘to think no more’ of him as a son, but consider him ‘lost’. He had urged the king to focus all his affections and the kingdom’s prospects upon his sister Elizabeth, the exiled queen in the Hague, and her children, who would now become the heirs of the Stuart line.

  Efforts were made to keep James engaged with the parliamentary deliberations. George went to Theobalds to tell him of the latest thinking, but James maintained his surly and uncooperative mood, refusing to commit himself to anything that might bring his long-cherished role as mediator and peacemaker to an end. All he would say was that he felt no obligation to follow whatever was proposed – if anything, he was inclined to ignore or reject it.

  Back in Westminster, the committee tried to ignore James’s recalcitrance. There was, by now, general agreement on what the advice should be: that, for the sake of the Palatinate, the king should break decisively with Spain and that, in return, Parliament would pledge to raise the funds needed to put the country on a war footing.

  On the morning of Friday 5 March, there was a hint of nervousness in the Commons as the committee reported its deliberations to the House. Sir Isaac Wake, the representative for Oxford University and a noted Puritan academic, girded loins by reporting the seizure of letters coming from Rome which showed that the Spanish king had no intention of letting the Palatinate return to Protestant hands. While he was in the midst of speaking, Wake was interrupted by the Attorney General and sergeant-at-arms, carrying a message from the duke with news that the king would make himself available that afternoon to receive Parliament’s advice at Theobalds.

  Delegates were swiftly chosen and duly dispatched. After a nervous two-hour coach journey, they arrived at Theobalds in the late afternoon. The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, appointed to act as spokesman, presented their findings to James. The advice was clear and succinct: the alliance with Spain could ‘not any longer be continued’ without the loss of ‘the honour of your majesty, the safety of your people, the welfare of your children and posterity’, and so must be ended.

  Initially, James seemed ready to accept the advice. He thanked the members of both Houses for their advice in ‘this great business’ given by ‘unanimous consent’. He had heard that there were MPs who had ‘cast jealousies and doubts between me and my people’, and was pleased to learn that the parliamentary committee had ‘quelled those motions, which otherwise might have hindered the happy agreement’ between king and Parliament that he hoped to reach.

  But, but, but: James, at fifty-seven years of age, considered himself to be an old king, and an old king must be allowed to express doubts. After all his efforts to maintain peace, becoming embroiled in war was madness. Resorting to a typically misogynistic image, he explained that belligerence was so far from his nature that unless it was ‘as some say merrily of women, malum necessarium’, a necessary evil, he would not consider it. And since improved offers were still arriving from Spain on the restoration of the Palatinate, he remained hopeful of a peaceful settlement. Furthermore, though he accepted that he had ‘craved’ Parliament’s advice, his first consideration in deciding between war and peace must still be his conscience and honour. Then there was the issue of money. If he was to commit to war, assurances must first be made that it would be properly financed.

  I am old now, he repeated, and ‘like Moses beholding the Promised Land from a high mountain’ he hoped to glimpse the Palatinate restored before death caught up with him – but, he added, that did not mean it would be right to go to war over it, as it was ‘an unchristian thing to seek that by blood which may be had by peace’.

  As he proceeded, his mood darkened. No king, he claimed, had received less help from Parliaments than he. This had left his own necessities ‘too well known’ – his personal debts and extraordinary expenses. And these ‘disabilities’ had been made worse by Charles’s visit to Madrid, the sending of ambassadors to negotiate treaties, the maintenance of Elizabeth and her reckless husband Frederick in the Hague, and a ‘great debt’ he owed the King of Denmark, ‘which I am not yet able to pay’. Furthermore, he had to take into account the lack of support from Protestant princes and states on the Continent, who were ‘all poor, wrecked and disheartened’. And as if that were not bad enough, war would disrupt trade, which would decimate customs duties, one of his few reliable sources of revenue. And even if Parliament voted through new taxes, it would take time to collect them, forcing him to borrow more money, at rates of interest that would ‘eat up a great part of them’.

  Nevertheless, despite this litany, he thanked them again, and felt reassured of their love for him, because it was the heart that ‘opens the purse’ and not the purse that opens the heart. It was therefore up to them to appoint treasurers to work out the costs of what they proposed, and how they would pay for it. If they could promise the means to make war then … well, he still would not make a commitment. In a string of conditional clauses that left even learned heads spinning, he asserted the ‘peculiar prerogatives’ that made matters of war and peace his to determine, but seemed to promise that he would consult Parliament on any treaties leading to war – not so Parliament could vote on them, but because being backed by a parliamentary promise to prepare and pay for war, it would give him more leverage to sue for peace.

  The despondent and confused delegates were left to go back to London and pick through the archbishop’s notes. The MP Edward Nicholas, an ally of George, despaired. The king appeared to have dismissed the warnings Charles and George had given about Spanish duplicity. ‘The papists began to brag,’ he lamented, and Archbishop Abbot was left so discouraged that he absented himself from the House of L
ords the following morning to take to his sickbed.

  The queasy archbishop managed to make his way to Westminster later in the day to attend a conference of both Houses chaired by Charles. The aim was to craft a new version of the king’s answer to Parliament’s advice, with ‘amendments’ to bring it closer to what he should have said.

  The prince took the new draft to James, who was so exhausted by the whole business that he accepted it. On Monday, the revised answer to Parliament’s advice was read out to MPs, and copies were distributed among the members so they could study it.

  The following week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered a report on the royal debt. It provoked uproar. The total was nearly £700,000. The enormity of the figure spread a mood of dismay and anger through the chamber. Efforts were made to calm the House. ‘Let us not lay all the blame upon the king,’ said Benjamin Rudyard. ‘We have had our own heats and passions,’ he reminded them, and wittily warned that if they complained too much, ‘we may blow up ourselves without gunpowder, even with our own breaths’. Edwin Sandys, the Earl of Southampton’s man and now an ally of George, took a more hard-line approach. There was no greater enemy to action than delay, he said. James had asked their advice, and they had given it. ‘Let us say to the King,’ he suggested, ‘Sir, if your Majesty will declare yourself in pursuit of our advice, we will assist your Majesty with our persons and fortunes.’

  The negotiations continued. ‘Matters go on uncertainly,’ Chamberlain reported. ‘The King’s speeches needing interpretations, and the Houses being as wary and suspicious as though dealing with enemies’. ‘Every day brings its novelty,’ observed the Venetian ambassador, noting how James had become ‘variable, tricky, inscrutable, determined upon peace, dominated by fear only and the forger of every mischief.’ MPs ‘fear his Majesty’s nature’, and it seemed likely that he was on the verge of dismissing Parliament so he could ‘return to the vomit of his feeble negotiations’.

  Eventually, James’s patience ran out. No one was listening to him, and ‘when Jupiter speaks he should have his thunder’. If Parliament wanted him to consider its advice, then it would have to pay. He named his price: £900,000 – a fantastic figure that would impose a crippling burden of tax on a fragile economy. Charles and George ‘turned pale’ when they heard it, according to the Venetian ambassador. ‘The prince was exceedingly perplexed, and spoke not a word that night, and Buckingham wept,’ a government official observed. In an effort to get the king to withdraw the demand, George wiped his face and entered the royal bedchamber. ‘Shut in there’ by the prince, he knelt before the king, asking for some ‘milder explanation’ for his demands. But he was rebuffed.

  The following day, in an act of almost suicidal defiance, George sent the king a letter threatening to end their relationship. A distance had grown between them, he wrote. He yearned to wait upon the king more often, but James was going ‘two ways, and myself only one’. This had resulted in ‘so many disputes’ that ‘till you be once resolved, I think it is of more comfort and ease to you and safer for me that I now abide away’.

  The endless negotiations came to a sudden halt, and silence descended on the proceedings. Then, a few day later, an MP friendly to George noted that ‘the wind has turned’. On 19 March, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, a moderate and measured member of the anti-Spanish camp, came up with a compromise. ‘The king in his wisdom knows that generals dwell too much in the air,’ he told the House of Commons, so the best way to reassure him that Parliament would pay for any immediate threat of breaking with Spain was to work out the costs themselves. He had a figure ready: around £300,000 to repulse any attempt by the Spanish to invade, with a commitment for ongoing costs in the event of war.

  In what seems to have been an orchestrated manoeuvre, Sir Thomas Edmondes, the treasurer of the royal household, and effectively acting as a royal spokesman, got up and mentioned a similar figure as acceptable. Despite the obvious makings of a deal, MPs had built up such a head of steam that it took two days of heated debate before a resolution along the lines Sir Benjamin had originally suggested could be passed. It was then put to the House of Lords to be presented as a joint ‘proposition’ to James.

  On Sunday 21 March, an agreement of sorts was finally reached. An ailing James, along with the prince, the duke, delegations from both Houses of Parliament and ‘an infinite assembly of people’, attended an open-air sermon delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Whitehall on the theme of the nature of divine love. The dignitaries and delegates then repaired to James’s bedchamber in order to hear George’s ‘justification’ for the remarks he had given in his Banqueting House speech concerning the King of Spain, and James responding with a ‘full and royal acquittal, approbation and commendation of the duke’.

  The aim was to reinforce George’s position at the apex of the new policy, and as the fulcrum in the seemingly closer relationship now emerging between king and Parliament. The king gave reassurances of his trust in George, declaring himself ‘unworthy’ of such a servant if he did not trust him. In a striking image, he commended the favourite for having run his head ‘into the yoke with the people’.

  Over the following two days, Parliament drew up a ‘proclamation’ to present to the king setting out what had been agreed on the ‘great matter’ of tax and Spain, securing a unanimous vote in favour in both Houses. Only one awkward earl abstained, ‘although the Prince and the Lords had laboured him much to the contrary’ – George’s obstinate father-in-law the Earl of Rutland.

  Finally, on 23 March, just before the recess for Easter, a ‘resolution’ was read out in the Commons and proclaimed across the city and beyond that the king was going to break with Spain – unleashing a night of carnivalesque revels not seen since the prince and duke had returned from Madrid, celebrated with bonfires in the streets. As had become customary, crowds of unruly apprentices gathered outside Exeter House, the Spanish embassy in Holborn, and threw stones at the windows.

  A Game at Chess

  On 5 August 1624 crowds packed the Globe, Shakespeare’s theatre, for the premiere of a play to be performed by the King’s Men called A Game at Chess, by Thomas Middleton. The conceit for the play was clever: the characters were chess pieces, the stage a chessboard, and the drama was the playing out of the game. But it was hardly sufficient to explain the interest.

  The draw, it turned out, was another kind of game, a guessing game.

  In the opening ‘Induction’, the ghost of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was to be seen centre stage looking around in wonder, asking how he had managed to find a place that has escaped his ‘designs’ and ‘institutions’ – escaped Catholicism, in other words. ‘I thought they’d spread over the World by this time.’

  His servant, Error, lies at his feet, and he kicks him awake. ‘What have you done?’ Error demands to know. He had been enjoying a dream of ‘the bravest setting for a game’ that ‘had ever my eye fixed on’. ‘Game? What game?’ Ignatius asks.

  Error: The noblest Game of all, A Game at Chess, Betwixt our side, and the White House, the men set In their just order, ready to go to it.

  Listening to these lines, noting that Ignatius was dressed in black Catholic vestments, a London audience would soon begin to catch on to what was happening. This was an allegory of some sort. The ‘Black House’ was Catholic Spain, making the ‘White House’ Protestant Britain.

  Right from the start, the script invited the audience to puzzle over hidden messages. Ignatius’s first words were: ‘What Angle of the world is this?’ – as well as a corner, an angle could refer to the tribe that first inhabited England. There was a fat bishop – surely Marc Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, the sophisticates would have noted. The reforming Catholic archbishop had been welcomed to England by King James in 1616 and was famous for his corpulence and greed. Just two years before the play’s premiere, in 1622, he had been found to be in secret contact with the Vatican in Rome. He had returned there soon after, chest
s of hoarded wealth confiscated from him as he tried to make his escape.

  One of the most controversial clues came in a bawdy scene towards the end of the play. The Black Knight asks his servant, the Black Pawn, to fetch his ‘chair of ease’ and mentions the ‘foul flaw in the bottom of my bum’. This, as everyone from the groundlings up would have realized, must surely be a reference to James’s old friend Ambassador Gondomar, famed for his influence over the king, as well as an anal fistula.

  There was the White King, the White Knight, and the White ‘Duke’ – the term used for a rook. Given how few dukes there were in England, these identifications were easy: James was the king, obviously, making the duke George, with Charles the knight, a suitable designation given the prince’s recent adventure in Spain. There was also a Black ‘Duke’, described as ‘an olive-faced ganymede’ – surely Olivares, King Philip’s valido. This would obviously make Philip IV the Black King.