The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  ‘Since that evening,’ Bautru’s report continued, ‘no day has passed that the Duke of Buckingham has not incognito and by the connivance of the duchess seen the queen and sometimes spoken to her.’

  The duke’s antics culminated with an almost comically flamboyant as well as hair-raisingly dangerous effort to reach the queen’s private apartment in the Louvre Palace. He had requested a secret interview with the queen at which he could deliver direct into her hands a letter ‘related to the means of bringing about the downfall of Cardinal Richelieu’. This implicated her in a plot against the king’s powerful chief minister, and Bautru, aware of the effect of reporting this to his master, tactfully put her indiscretion down to her Spanish temperament. Being ‘accustomed no doubt to the chivalric and adventurous gallantry’ of that kingdom, she ‘saw in these demonstrations only a subject to divert her mind,’ Bautru insisted. And certainly the fantastical method dreamed up by the Duchesse de Chevreuse to smuggle George into the queen’s apartment would seem to confirm he was right, because by this time romantic gallantry had turned into melodramatic farce, complete with stage tricks and cross-dressing.

  According to an ancient superstition, the ghost of a white lady would be seen wandering through the Louvre just before the death of a monarch. It was rumoured that she had appeared around the time of George’s visit, though the news had been kept from the king so as not to alarm him. It was therefore decided that George would steal into the palace wearing a black cloak, beneath which he would be dressed as the white lady. If he was discovered by a member of staff, he could manifest himself as the ghost and, during the resulting confusion, make his escape.

  As though preparing for a masked ball, George put on his elaborate disguise in his rooms at the Chevreuse residence. He donned a ‘white and fantastically shaped robe, painted with black tears’, with a representation of the face of death painted on the front and the back. A ‘pellicle’ or film made of gold leaf coated with soft, white wax contrived by an ‘ingenious mechanician’ was then laid over his face, with holes for the eyes, nose and mouth. He put on a cap ‘equally fantastical as the other parts of his dress’, enveloped himself in an ample black cloak, covered his face with a black velvet veil and put on a sombrero.

  In the dead of night, he and the Duchesse de Chevreuse set out into the silent streets of the city, heading for the Louvre. A secret knock opened a rear door to the palace, where a ‘confidential servant’ of the duchess had been waiting for his mistress and the mysterious guest, introduced as an Italian astrologer. George was then conducted up secret staircases and through dark passages, ‘to which, for a long time back, none have had access’ but the ‘creatures’ of the duchess.

  George and the duchess reached the queen’s chamber undetected to find her alone. Her lady-in-waiting, ‘Mademoiselle de Flotte’, had been sent away on a ‘pretence’. When George took off his cloak to reveal his costume, Anne ‘jested graciously’ at its laughable effect, which, according to Richelieu’s spy, left the duke’s amour propre – his self-esteem – ‘wounded’. The queen, ‘perceiving the pain she had caused him, gave him, by way of compensation, her hand to kiss’. George presented her with the ‘confidential letter’ that had been the pretext for his visit, and he and the queen withdrew to a nearby ‘oratory’ to read it, leaving the duchess to wait in the queen’s chamber. The door to the oratory was left half open, but the mischievous duchess closed it.

  From an antechamber came a loud knock, apparently a warning signal from the queen’s valet that the king was approaching. George tumbled out of the chapel, threw on his cloak, and escaped ‘like a thief’, leaving the duchess behind. ‘In his hurry and confusion his hat fell off and his cloak flew open, and being seen for a moment in his apparition dress by some of the lower servants, caused them not a little terror.’ The panic led to Richelieu being summoned, who arrived to find the queen’s apartments in a state of ‘much agitation and confusion’, the servants asserting that they had seen the ghostly white lady.

  * * *

  By late May 1625, arrangements for Henrietta Maria’s much-delayed departure from Paris were in the final stages, and in early June a fleet of ships which had been riding at anchor off the coast of Kent since 8 May, was dispatched for Boulogne. The new ‘Queen of England’, escorted by her brother King Louis, left Paris in the evening of 22 May ‘amid shouts of applause and a countless throng of people, accompanied by the guards, by the people of the city, by Buckingham, by the other English and by all her suite’. The French king, suffering from a bad cold, parted company with the convoy at Compiègne to head for his hunting lodge at Fontainebleau, while Henrietta Maria and George continued on towards Boulogne.

  At Amiens, about eighty miles from the coast, they were joined by Queen Anne and the queen mother. Here they lodged in a house on the banks of the River Somme, and Marie de’ Medici took to her sickbed, having caught her son’s cold. The queens’ presence caused a stir that reached far beyond the limits of the modest, provincial French city. In London, Sir Henry Mildmay had heard of the historical conjunction of the ‘three queens’ so close to the English Channel, and begged Charles for permission to go and pay his respects, but was denied leave from the frantic preparations for Henrietta Maria’s arrival.

  Anne now flouted the king’s orders against her venturing out unescorted and decided to go for an evening stroll in the gardens, which ran alongside the river. With difficulty, she got hold of the keys from the captain of the guard and, together with the Duchesse de Chevreuse and a ‘little court’ of other women, and her equerry, left the house. There, in the gardens, they found George, and Anne and he walked together for a while. As the evening light faded, Anne somehow managed to become detached from her entourage as she and George turned down a path leading to a pergola, which hid them from view. After a while, she cried out for her equerry, who came running to find her flustered but unharmed. There was no sign of the duke, who had disappeared into the dusk.

  In London, a lack of news and the constant delays meant that ‘commotion was general everywhere’, feeding wild rumours that the long-awaited marriage had been stopped. So when in the final days of May news arrived that Henrietta Maria’s journey to Boulogne was imminent, it was greeted with relief and a frenzy of activity. Charles’s baggage was hurriedly dispatched to the coast, along with ‘cavaliers and ladies’ who were to act as a royal escort. George’s sister Susan and mother Mary were sent across to Boulogne, while a number of other countesses and baronesses, plus the ‘Duchesses of Richmond and Lennox with a numerous train of ladies’, booked accommodation in Dover and Greenwich, where the king and his new queen were expected to stay some days.

  Messages flew across the Channel urging the new queen to hurry along. Charles told her ‘not to stay anywhere, but to come straight to him’. It would not be the first of his instructions that she chose to ignore.

  Charles reached Dover on 4 June, fretting about his bride’s arrival. His secretary sent an urgent message to George telling him not to come ‘until he can bring the queen to his hand’. The king had apparently spent two hours sitting on a balcony at his lodgings, staring out across the Channel, wondering whether he should cross to meet his wife at Boulogne. ‘Reasons against the King’s passing to Boulogne,’ wrote his secretary tersely: ‘the precedent an abasing of the Kings of England; concessions to be feared from the Papists’ importunities; necessity for holding the Parliament; and possible danger from his Majesty’s putting himself in the power of another King’. No one wanted a repeat of what had happened when he was a prince in Spain.

  Reluctant to leave her sick mother, Henrietta lingered in Amiens, but was eventually cajoled into continuing to Boulogne with her brother Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, the only member of her immediate family to accompany her. As she was about to depart, her mother gave her a letter of advice, written by one of her priests. It told her to give thanks to God for being called into the world to serve a great and glorious purpose, and explained that she was bein
g sent into a country of heretics to help relieve the Catholics of their oppressions and to use her charity to try and bring the unfortunate English back to the true faith. She must love and honour her husband, the letter insisted, but in a way that suggested it to be a secondary duty, as a means of securing his conversion.

  On the morning of 6 June, Henrietta and her brother prepared to leave Amiens. Anne came in her carriage to see the party off, accompanied by Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine, one of the queen’s senior ladies-in-waiting. George came to kiss Anne’s gown, screening himself with the carriage curtains so he could have a private moment with her. Louise-Marguerite, sitting alongside, saw the depth of their feelings, and, despite a reputation as a court gossip, reassured the queen that she would say nothing to the king about what she had witnessed.

  The party set off on its long journey, reaching Boulogne three days later. Henrietta arrived reportedly ‘in good health and very merry’. At 5 p.m. she was seen on the beach, gazing across the Channel towards her new homeland, standing so near to the water that the sea ‘was bold to kiss her feet’.

  That evening she was introduced to George’s mother and sister, with Sir Toby Matthew, a Catholic convert (and son of the strongly Protestant Archbishop of York) acting as their interpreter. They found Henrietta to be more mature than expected, Sir Toby poetically describing her as sitting ‘upon the very skirts of womanhood’. He observed ‘nobleness and goodness’ in her countenance, but also ‘a little remnant of sadness, which the fresh wound of parting from the Queen Mother might have made’. She was ‘not afraid of her own shadow’, he noted, and was impressed to learn that she and her brother Gaston had ventured out of the harbour in a dinghy, despite signs of a storm brewing over the Channel. He perceptively wondered if she ‘might carry some steel about her’.

  Later that day, the weather deteriorated sharply, and plans for a quick departure were abandoned. As winds and seaspray lashed the coast, a small boat, battered by the tempest, struggled into Boulogne harbour with the latest dispatches from London. George claimed that amongst the correspondence was a letter from Charles that needed to be taken directly to the queen mother.

  Rushing to Amiens, George found Marie de’ Medici still convalescing. He discussed with her the pressing matter he claimed to be the reason for his unexpected reappearance. He then asked to see Anne of Austria, who was also in bed ‘and almost alone’. His request caused such consternation among the queen’s ladies-in-waiting that they insisted upon the queen mother being consulted first. Marie seemed to have no objection: he had just come to see her in bed, so why not the queen? Discretion prevented the ladies-in-waiting from pointing out the age difference between the fifty-year-old queen mother and the twenty-four-year-old queen, so they were forced to relent.

  George was reluctantly shown into Anne’s bedchamber, which was now crammed with all the ‘princesses and ladies’ that could be found, summoned to ensure the interloper behaved. George seemed unconcerned by the audience. He knelt next to the bed, but one of the ladies-in-waiting ‘had him up quickly’, insisting he should use a chair. He refused, claiming that it was the English custom to kneel before a queen. He said ‘the most tender things in the world’ to her, but she asked him to leave – though, it was noted, ‘without perhaps being very angry’. He did so, and after glimpsing her again the next morning ‘in presence of all the court’, set off back to Boulogne.

  By Sunday 12 June, the storm had cleared. A fleet of twenty British ships had gathered off shore ready to escort the queen to Dover. George, with Henrietta Maria, his mother and sister, boarded the flagship the Prince Royal. The flotilla set sail that morning, heading into choppy seas.

  And So the Devil Go with Them

  Since King James’s death, Britain had undergone what one of Charles’s servants called a ‘great earthquake’. A mood of disorientation prevailed. The official tone was reassuring. ‘In his reverence to so good a Father,’ Charles had confirmed all the late king’s acts ‘and in his favour to his ministers all his choices’. Members of the government were told that for the time being their jobs were safe.

  However, it soon became clear that changes were afoot. Officials were put on probation. With a steely resolve few had expected, Charles told one ‘amazed’ minister, a prominent Spanish supporter, to conform to the new regime’s anti-Spanish stance or lose his office ‘sooner than you are aware’.

  George was made first gentleman of the royal bedchamber, receiving the golden key, ‘the emblem of his office, so that he can, whenever he pleases and at any hour, enter that chamber as well as any other part of the palace occupied by His Majesty’. Fresh elections had been announced for a new Parliament, due to assemble in May 1625. Gondomar’s safe passage was formally revoked. And at an extraordinary meeting with the Privy Council, the king made his ministers swear to the three things James supposedly recommended before his death: a ban on any further negotiations with the Spaniards, the preparation of the royal navy for war, and the hastening of the French marriage.

  Charles also established a more disciplined courtly culture. ‘Whoever may have business with him must never approach him by indirect ways,’ an agent from Tuscany reported back to his master. No more creeping about by ‘back stairs or private doors leading to his apartments’; no more bribing of ‘retainers or grooms of the Chambers, as was done in the lifetime of his father’. From now on, all approaches were to be by ‘public rooms’ and on days of the week set apart for that purpose. A precise and rigid timetable for the day was enforced, starting with a ‘very early rising for prayers’, followed by ‘exercises, audiences, business, eating and sleeping’.

  There was a slackening of interest in the sports so beloved by his father, Charles commanding the return to their previous uses of the ‘remote parks and chases’ that James had used for hunting. Court became more austere. The debauched banquets had stopped, informality in address and attire was frowned upon. There was even talk of Kit Villiers being banished from Charles’s entourage, as the king ‘would have no drunkards of his bedchamber’.

  Speculation was also rife about the sort of government that Charles would lead. He seemed ready to play a more active part in daily affairs than his father, but through a cabinet of close advisors, led by George, rather than a full Privy Council.

  The orderliness left a favourable impression on the Venetian ambassador. ‘He professes constancy in religion, sincerity in action and that he will not have recourse to subterfuges in his dealings,’ he reported.

  A breath of fresh air at court, then, but outside it was foul. London had been hit by plague. It was rumoured to have started in the same house and on the same day of the year as the previous outbreak, which had coincided with James’s succession. Bills of mortality, posted on church doors, listed the deaths of parishioners and were lengthening by the week. Charles’s first Parliament, essential to raising the funds needed to provide military support for Mansfeld’s efforts to retake the Palatinate and for the proposed anti-Habsburg league, was indefinitely delayed.

  The king’s nuptials were also disrupted. The sickness had spread to all areas of London and into the suburbs, and there were fears it might reach the king’s palace at Greenwich. Four hundred and one Londoners had died the week the queen was due to arrive. Adding to the tally of bad news were reports that besieged Breda, the outpost of the Dutch Republic on the border with the Spanish Netherlands, had finally succumbed to Spanish attack. In such doleful circumstances, there was no jollity at the marriage, one Cambridge don observed.

  Henrietta’s twelve-hour Channel crossing had been rough, the queen among those suffering badly from seasickness. It was late in the evening by the time Dover harbour was reached, the fleet’s firing of its guns in salute a damp squib in the desultory conditions.

  The passengers disembarked to discover that Charles was not there to greet them, but in nearby Canterbury, where the accommodation was more comfortable. Henrietta was to spend her first night in Dover Castle, a cold, dank m
edieval fortress perched on the top of the cliffs overlooking the harbour. The bed she was offered was said not to be fit for a servant, let alone a queen, while her disgruntled retinue found themselves being farmed out to rougher quarters in the surrounding countryside. The English ambassadors in Paris had promised her an earthly paradise, but she had found herself in a primitive hovel.

  Charles arrived at ten the following morning, while Henrietta was at breakfast. He waited for her in the presence chamber. She ‘made short work’ of her meal, and went down to meet him, falling to her knees and pledging in French that she had ‘come to your Majesty’s country to be at your service and command’. She kissed his hand, but Charles lifted her up and ‘wrapped her up in his arms, and kissed her with many kisses’. He tried to say a few words to her, but his stammer made him bashful, so he stared at her shoes. Henrietta assumed he was checking to see if she was wearing heels, and lifted her skirts so he could see that ‘I stand upon my own feet … This is how high I am, neither higher nor lower.’ She came up to his shoulder – a pleasing comparison, it was agreed, flattering the king’s diminutive stature.

  Following introductions to her extensive entourage, which included several Catholic bishops, they shared a lunch of pheasant and venison. Her confessor stood at her side throughout, telling her to watch what she ate, it being the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist (according to the French calendar, rather than the English one), during which she would be required to fast.

  As they were preparing to leave for Canterbury, where they would spend their first night, the strain of the formalities briefly gave way. After the queen had climbed into the carriage with the king, Henrietta’s female companion piled in after her. Charles was extremely sensitive about who was allowed close to him, and the surprise appearance of the interloper caused him to shrink away and shout at her to get out. This provoked an outburst from the queen, who insisted she remain. The French ambassadors hurriedly intervened, crowding round the coach door to explain that it was customary for the queen to have an attendant with her, especially when she was surrounded by people of a different religion and language. Charles eventually relented, but with bad grace.