The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The confusion was to have devastating consequences. The marooned troops began to ‘die like dogs’ as supplies once again ran short. One man found his plight so desperate, he cut his own throat so he would ‘suffer no more’. Being ‘pressed men’, forcibly conscripted rather than volunteers, there were concerns that their treatment would ‘breed a great cry’ back home if their dreadful predicament became known.

  When he heard the news, fury and frustration poured out of George. He feared the ‘ill satisfaction’ of Parliament, were it to be reassembled to raise more money. He bemoaned the ‘good cause’ being set ‘further back’, complained of ‘the loss of time and the unfruitful expense of money’, much of it his own. All the hard work that had gone into the mission was ‘made vain’ and his judgement had been ‘infinitely charged’ – he did not specify who by, but his very reticence was an obvious clue that he meant James.

  Around the same time, the papal dispensation for Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria arrived, apparently clearing the way for the wedding to go ahead. Plans had been discussed for George to go to Paris to escort her back to England. George had even arranged for his carriages to be sent to Dover for shipping over to France.

  In the midst of all this, James’s dogged obstinacy was suddenly and mysteriously revived. His bone of contention was the papal dispensation. It now included conditions not previously agreed, prompting James to threaten to break off the entire negotiation. The situation had become so volatile, George had to pretend to shun Effiat, referring the French ambassador directly to the king. He did, however, send a message to his friend Conway, the royal secretary, in ‘blind ink’ for him to read before the ambassador’s audience, no doubt to brief him on what Effiat could say to mollify the king. In the event, Effiat ‘encountered a severe storm’ during which James, with unusual decisiveness, made it clear that he was prepared to go no further with the negotiations and considered them to be at a close.

  Meanwhile, agents arriving in London from Spain and Brussels were getting a very different reception. It was noted how welcoming James was being, how he was treating them with ‘graciousness’, and appearing receptive to their pleas to reopen peace negotiations. He told them that he wished to ‘remain at peace’ with both Madrid and Flanders.

  Confirming suspicions that a concerted effort was underway to undermine the anti-Spanish policy, George also discovered that Sir Walter Aston, who had taken over the ambassadorial role from John Digby in Madrid, had been lobbying Philip IV to send James’s old friend Gondomar back to London. George responded by sending Aston a menacing letter, reminding him that Gondomar was ‘the instrument to abuse my master, the Prince, and the state, and if now, by your means, the King should be fetched on again upon a new treaty, the blame would light upon you’.

  Rumours swirled of yet another breach in relations between George and James, with Charles positioned uneasily between the two. There was disquiet ‘in every direction’ at the rumoured return of Gondomar, and it was noted that ‘the Duke of Buckingham more than anyone else ought to take double precautions for his own salvation’, as any ‘renewal of confidence or relations with the Spaniards’ was bound to lead to ‘his fall’. Gondomar himself seemed almost to be taunting George from afar. He wrote a letter to the duke proclaiming that he was coming only to ‘procure peace’, and appointed as ‘the field of our battle’ the gallery in York House overlooking the Thames ‘where I hope your excellency shall see that the Earl of Gondomar is an honest man, and that he hath been, is, and ever will be, a faithful and true servant and friend’.

  William Whiteway, the Dorchester merchant whose business as an international wool trader meant he had good contacts on the Continent, had been monitoring developments with growing alarm. He reported in the opening days of March 1625 that ‘the state of businesses’ was beginning to ‘alter at our Court’ with the French match ‘at a stand’ and the Spaniards once more making overtures. ‘Gondomar,’ he confidently reported, ‘is coming into England to treat with the king.’

  It was as if all the struggles of the past year, begun with George’s rallying cry to Parliament, had come to nothing.

  What an Age We Do Live In

  In late February, James, who had been restlessly touring his hunting lodges in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, ‘retired for fresh air and quietness to his manor at Theobald’. His ongoing ailments and the clamour of foreign affairs had crippled and exhausted him.

  Restored a little by the tranquil surroundings, he sent a message to London begging George to join him. Charles was already there, but it was George he wanted. Despite recent tensions over the diplomatic wrangling, the lonely widower needed some pampering, and he could not abide being long without the favourite’s company. Charles wrote to George of the king’s impatience, saying he would ‘take no pleasure’ at Theobalds if he was not there.

  ‘Dear Dad,’ a frantically busy George replied, ‘I cannot come tonight.’ Depriving himself of the ‘comfort and my heart’s ease’ of being with the king, gave him ‘nothing but trouble and vexation’. But business detained him, including meetings, arranged at James’s insistence, with the Spanish agents who had recently arrived in London. ‘Tomorrow, without fail, I will wait of you,’ he promised, and would bring ‘the cunts’, his mother Mary and wife Kate. He signed off affectionately, using the curious and intimate language of gratitude so characteristic of his letters, offering his ‘humble thanks’ to the king ‘for not only clothing my outside, but filling me in, and with such precious bits as was only fit for you’.

  The king’s mood was further lowered by news of the death of yet another of his old Scottish friends: James, second Marquis of Hamilton, who had succeeded Ludovick Stuart as Lord High Steward, and now followed him into the grave. He had died on 2 March of ‘pestilent fever, as is supposed’. His body had swelled ‘immeasurably’ after he died, it was reported. Following a postmortem, physicians ascribed the swelling to some ‘malign or venomous humour of the small pox or such like that might lie hid’. Others ascribed it to poison. The king was distressed to hear talk of a Catholic priest securing a deathbed conversion, though few took it seriously. As another Scottish noble observed, Hamilton had been ‘more subject to his pleasures and the company of women than to priests’.

  Over the days that followed, the king’s gout became more troublesome, forcing him to take to his bed. He became gripped by a deep melancholy, weighed down by feelings of mortality and the ‘apprehension of danger’. News of his condition began to spread through the medical world, and physicians began to gather at his bedside, eager to cure him.

  James had an official team of medics licensed to practise by the College of Physicians and hand-picked by the king’s chief physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne. But despite their eminence and learning, the king had never been particularly impressed by them. As they endeavoured to treat him, he would become restless and impatient, ‘cursing’ them for pretending ‘any physic could be wholesome that was so troublesome’. Doctors, who made a lucrative living by dispensing elaborate medicines as well as advice, were known to be enthusiastic with their interventions, particularly when the client was rich. Now James found himself overwhelmed by them.

  A range of treatments were prescribed in the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, the official list of medicines published by the College of Physicians, for gout. Several took the form of oils, massaged into the skin. Oleum Latericium Phylosophorum – literally, ‘Oil of Philosophers’ Brick’ – was one of the novel ‘chemical’ remedies thought to be particularly effective. It comprised fragments of brick pulverized and then heated, before being mixed with oil. It was a ‘sovereign remedy’ for the gout, apparently, as well as all other afflictions of the joints and nerves. Unguentum e Nicotiana or ‘Ointment of Tobacco’ was also recommended, though given James’s famous disapproval of the weed, now being imported in bulk from the British colony in Virginia, the doctors may have tactfully looked for alternatives.

  On 8 March, his health took a tu
rn for the worse as he was struck by an attack of the tertian ague – malaria.

  Malaria was a familiar disease at the time, its symptoms readily identifiable. They took the form of intermittent fevers that occurred as ‘fits’ every forty-eight hours (a ‘tertian’ ague) or seventy-two hours (‘quartan’). Each fit comprised a succession of distinct phases. During the first ‘cold’ phase, the patient would shake violently, and sometimes experience a pricking sensation all over the skin. During the second, ‘hot’ phase, the pulse and breathing would suddenly accelerate. The shaking and pricking might intensify, and might culminate with vomiting. It was noted that any urine passed during this phase would usually be cloudy. In the final phase, the fever would subside, and the patient would begin to sweat copiously.

  This distinctive pattern was understood to result from an imbalance of the humours, which might typically be produced by the excessive consumption of certain foods, such as unripe fruit and raw oysters, and overexertion, in particular too much hunting, swimming or tennis. Treatment therefore relied on trying to restore balance by purging excess fluids. This demanded prompt and often drastic measures, as the humours (and, James seemed to believe, the doctors) became increasingly corrupted the longer they were allowed to linger.

  Various methods of purging were available, from the use of expectorants and laxatives to scarification and ‘cupping’ – incising the skin in the area of the body where the corrupt humours were thought to have accumulated, followed by the application of hot cups to the wounds, which would draw blood out as they cooled.

  In the case of a tertian fever, a ‘remollitive clyster’ (enema) was a first line of attack, injected into the rectum to cleanse the bowel of any ‘rotten and stinking choler’. Then a ‘loosing’ or ‘purging’ syrup or electuary (a medicinal paste) might be administered orally. These medicines were extremely complex to make and had varying effects. The Pharmacopoeia Londinensis suggested several purging electuaries for cases such as James’s. ‘Diacassia cum Manna’, for example, contained such ingredients as violet flowers and damask prunes mixed with tamarind and candied peel, and worked ‘gently and without trouble’. More difficult cases might demand the use of a Confectio Hamech, comprising a long list of ingredients, including senna, rhubarb, the astringent fruit myrobalan and the toxic herb wormwood, which ‘purged very violently, and is not safe given alone’.

  ‘A tertian in the spring is physic for a king,’ James’s servants would have intoned merrily, but he found the physicians’ ministrations unendurable. Chamberlain noted that ‘if he would suffer himself to be ordered and governed by physical rules’ – the physicians’ instructions – the sickness would proceed ‘without any manner of danger’. The Venetian ambassador echoed the sentiment: ‘His majesty’s tertian fever continues but as the last attack diminished the mischief, the physicians consider that he will soon be completely recovered. His impatience and irregularities do him more harm than the sickness.’

  Around this time, the ‘cunts’ turned up, Mary bringing with her a doctor called John Remington. Mary and George spent lavishly on physicians and medicines, and the countess held strong opinions on the best remedies in a market heavily populated by mystics, wise-women and empirics. Her scepticism of orthodox medicine was not misplaced. The doctors’ own claims to competency rested on slender theoretical foundations and generally poor outcomes. Even William Harvey, now celebrated as one of the greatest medical scientists of modern times, peddled remedies that can only be described as quackery.

  Earlier that year, in the aftermath of his own prolonged illness, George had sent an abashed letter to James admitting to spending £400 – at least twenty times the price of a conventional consultation – to acquire a treatment developed by an alchemist. ‘I have never given credit to those that undertake to have the Philosophers’ Stone,’ he wrote, alluding to the fabled alchemical substance that was supposed to be the elixir of life, but apparently the alchemist – dubbed by the duke ‘my devil’ – had managed to extract a compound that would preserve the king from sickness, so he felt compelled to give him some support.

  Remington was not a member of the College of Physicians. He was a humble country doctor from the Essex market town of Dunmow, where he had built up a respectable practice treating local dignitaries. New Hall, where George had gone to recover from his protracted illness of the previous year, was included in Remington’s rounds, and Mary had ordered from him a herbal ‘posset ale’ as part of her son’s treatment.

  Mayerne, the king’s chief physician, was abroad at the time James contracted his fever. He had attended Prince Henry during his fatal illness, and on the basis of that experience had drawn up a detailed list of instructions for treating members of the royal family. His first and main command (ignoring his own dubious origins as a medic) was that no laymen or unlicensed doctors should be given access to the patient. ‘Cranks and triflers, the fraudulent parasites of the great’ must be excluded at all costs. Only the heads of the profession ‘whose number is very small and select’, must be admitted, the royal ‘physicians-in-ordinary’ who made up the king’s medical team.

  The number at Theobalds was certainly select, but not so small. Deputizing for Mayerne was the seventy-year-old president of the College of Physicians, Dr Henry Atkins. He had been a trusted royal medic since James had succeeded to the English throne, sent to Scotland in 1604 to ensure the safe delivery of the sickly Charles to London. Atkins was joined by several more junior but highly experienced doctors, including a young Dr David Beton, who would not become a full fellow of the college until 1629; Dr Alexander Ramsey, who had studied in Basel in 1617; Dr James Chambers, a Scottish academic; and Dr John Craig, made a college fellow in 1616 and possibly the longest-serving of James’s physicians – all of them Scots. The other English members of the contingent included Dr Matthew Lister, a ‘censor’ of the College of Physicians responsible for policing medical practice throughout London, Dr John Moore and Dr William Harvey, who would go on to become Charles’s most devoted physician, as well as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. Sir William Paddy, another veteran as long-standing as Dr Atkins, and an ex-president of the college, was also due any day.

  In all, at least nine medics would be in attendance during the king’s illness, amounting to nearly a third of the total number licensed to practise in London.

  For all their eminence, not all of these royal doctors had unblemished records, medical or otherwise. Sir William Paddy was rumoured to have been caught naked in his consulting rooms with one of his female patients, while Dr Moore, as part of a campaign to be accepted as a fellow of the College of Physicians, had given a £20 ‘gift’ to President Atkins, which other members of the college’s ruling body took to be a bribe. He was also suspected of being a Catholic, which had led to the Archbishop of Canterbury banning him from practising.

  Nevertheless, they were all more or less in agreement on how to treat the king, and began to work in shifts to keep an eye on him as the ‘fits’ of feverish attacks began to take on their familiar pattern. A day or two into the illness, hopes were already high that the ague had more or less run its course. The king seemed to be approaching his third attack, which one of his Scottish courtiers thought would ‘do him good and no harm’, as the copious sweating would help rebalance his distempered humours.

  George was at Theobalds on 11 March, and the king was well enough to play cards with him. Around this time, Remington began to prepare the medicine the duke and Mary had instructed him to bring. It was made to the doctor’s own secret recipe, and was said to be based on mithridate, an elaborate antidote usually made to an ancient recipe comprising as many as fifty ingredients. It came in two forms: a potion for drinking and a treacle that was applied to the skin using a plaster. James was told that it was highly recommended, having been used successfully to treat feverish attacks suffered not only by George the previous year, but by Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick, and Henry Carew, the Earl of Totnes, both close to the V
illiers clan.

  George had by now installed himself in a private room near the king’s bedchamber, where the plaster, a strip of leather, was prepared by being slathered with the treacly mithridate. George and his mother then took the plaster, together with the potion, to the king’s bedside.

  The doctors were not particularly concerned with the king’s condition at that moment, and, despite Mayerne’s instructions, loath to interfere with an intervention by the royal favourite. So they left Mary to instruct Archibald Hay, the king’s surgeon, to apply the plaster to the king’s abdomen and wrists. Nothing much happened, and over the next few days he seemed to be on the road to recovery. On 16 March, the royal secretary Conway could report that the king’s latest fit was ‘less intemperate than the rest, and hath left more clearness and cheerfulness in his looks than the former’. On 18 March, the Venetian ambassador noted that ‘his Majesty’s tertian fever continues but, as the last attack diminished the mischief, the physicians consider that he will soon be completely recovered’. A fit the following day was so mild, many assumed it would be the last.

  The king was well enough to receive a translation of a book ‘reflecting’ on the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Spain, and infanta, ‘out of a recent work on the whole proceeding relating to the Palatinate, that His Majesty may judge how far it will coincide with any relation that he may be induced to put forth’. It had been sent to him by John Murray, recently made Earl of Annandale, deputed by the king to stamp Gondomar’s letters of safe conduct, and who a few days later would receive £300 for performing a mysterious ‘secret service’ on the king’s behalf.