The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  They reached Canterbury in time for supper. The queen went early to the marital bed, Charles following some time later. Servants saw him bolting the seven doors leading into the suite, allowing only two valets to stay to undress him. Once they had finished, they too were told to leave.

  The royal couple lay in until seven the following morning, when the king emerged ‘very jocund’, a mood he maintained as the couple made their way back towards London.

  On Friday 17 June, they reached the capital, sailing in along the Thames, a huge flotilla in their wake, crowds, thinned by the plague and the relentless rain, lining the shores. Plans for the royal couple to remain at Greenwich had been shelved. Delays had already led to the cancellation of Charles’s first Parliament three times, and the king insisted it must now go ahead, as planned.

  Lord Keeper Williams, responsible for helping to organize the parliamentary session, had been worried about the plague. He reported to Charles’s secretary that an infected broker had recently brought the disease from the City to Westminster. ‘Searchers’, hired to monitor the plague’s spread, were scouring the vicinity of Whitehall, dressed in protective clothing, with nosegays dangling under their nostrils. They were concerned that the victim, now dead, had given the disease to the six relatives who shared a house near the palace, and were infecting local inhabitants. Williams revealed that a very sick woman had the night before been carried in a coach in a ‘very suspicious’ fashion ‘in the very way and passage of his Majesty to the House of Parliament’. Williams begged the king to ‘come no nearer than Greenwich’, but if he insisted on entering Westminster, asked George to persuade him to do so ‘in the most private manner that can be devised and to avoid with all possible diligence all concourse of people’.

  Undaunted by the risks, Charles appeared the following afternoon before both Houses of Parliament, dressed in full regalia, including the robes and crown of state. This was presumptuous, as he had yet to be formally crowned – ‘a very ancient, sacred and weighty ceremony’, as Lord Keeper Williams had reminded him. Some wondered if he was trying to avoid taking the coronation oaths to uphold the English law, religion and welfare of his subjects, so he could ‘remain more absolute’.

  As always, the parliamentary session began with prayers, which caused consternation among members of Henrietta’s entourage invited to attend as royal guests. To avoid having to listen to the heretical babbling, her bishops got up to leave. But in a gesture perhaps calculated to reassure the most strongly Protestant Members of Parliament, Charles called for the chamber doors to be locked, ‘and so enforced the popish lords to be present, some whereof kneeled down, some stood upright, and one did nothing but cross himself’.

  The king then told the assembly that, being ‘unfit for much speaking’ – a reference to the ‘deficit and impediment of his tongue’ – he would keep his speech short. His brevity concentrated a stark message: that, while his father may have been ‘too slack to begin so just and so glorious a work’ as to break with Spain and fight to regain the Palatinate, Parliament itself had agreed to it, and must now help pay for it. ‘I hope in God that you will go on to maintain it as freely as you were willing to advise my father to it.’

  The following week, the ‘ceremony of the formal proclamation’ of the royal marriage took place in Whitehall Palace, witnessed by the Duc de Chevreuse and other French nobles. ‘Nothing could be more splendid than this festival,’ wrote one observer. But a sour note was introduced. For the first time since his succession to the throne, Charles had agreed to dine in public with his French guests. Henrietta, however, declined her invitation to attend, preferring to eat in her own apartment for reasons left unexplained. She was also absent from a banquet at York House hosted by George, which featured as its centrepiece a six-foot-long sturgeon caught in the Thames.

  Meanwhile, the mood in the House of Commons was turning hostile; a prince ‘bred up’ in Parliament and a favourite hailed as its champion suddenly found themselves its enemy. MPs were disgruntled that Charles had put their lives at risk by summoning them to the epicentre of a deadly sickness, and became desperate to escape the capital’s noxious airs. Suspicions were also growing that the king had granted secret concessions to the Catholics in order to secure the marriage. Members began to wonder about the benefits of the French match over the Spanish one.

  In this hostile environment, George tried to cajole the Commons into granting a new subsidy. Two were offered, worth perhaps £140,000. On 8 July, the king sent a message to the Commons, pleading for more, and providing a detailed list of costs already incurred, many of which had been paid for by the king and duke out of their own pockets: £20,000 by the king on the navy, more than £44,000 by the duke, with costs running at £200,000.

  The next day the Commons responded by ordering that ‘no new matter should be received into the House, and to send to the Lords to know when they would be ready to adjourn’. During James’s reign, they had been banging on the chamber doors to be let in, and fought equally hard to stay there. Now they were pleading to be let out. Charles eventually agreed, and arrangements were made for them to reconvene in late summer in the safer environs of Oxford.

  In the interlude of political calm, George started work on mounting a strike against Spain. The scale and ambition of the plan was breathtaking. It would avenge the humiliations of the Palatinate and the Spanish match, as well as solve Charles’s money problems. He would assemble a fleet at Plymouth to blockade the Spanish port of Cádiz and attack the flota, the Spanish treasure fleet that took advantage of seasonal winds to carry silver and other precious commodities from the Americas. Ships and soldiers were ordered to make for Plymouth and await orders, while details of the plans were kept secret. ‘The din of preparation is heard, but where is the thunderbolt to fall?’ asked an Italian agent.

  Soon, a fleet comprising twelve naval ships, twenty armed merchantmen and fifty barges was ready at Plymouth, along with an army of restless conscripts, surly with hunger and boredom. The pressure to send them on their way was building, but lack of funds was hampering efforts to ensure they sailed with sufficient supplies for a dangerous and potentially lengthy campaign.

  George was eager to lead the mission. When James had made the son of a landlocked county with no naval experience Lord Admiral, it had exposed him to a certain amount of ridicule, and he wanted to prove himself. But his friends, including the MP and Vice Admiral of Devon, John Eliot, persuaded him not to go. He was needed in England, they told him, to continue efforts to build an anti-Habsburg league. Indeed, his activism had produced some progress on that front, with several countries, including Holland, Denmark and Sweden, agreeing to attend a conference to discuss the matter in the Hague.

  Instead George appointed Sir Edward Cecil as the fleet’s commander. Though no seaman, he was a veteran soldier with experience of fighting the Spanish and had been a member of the Council of War set up the previous year to plan military operations. He had also championed Charles and George’s policy, impressed that they had ‘resolved to stand staunchly for the good of their country and to be revenged of the falsehood of the Spanish’.

  The Spanish were making moves of their own, though. George’s supporters found news of Gondomar, the Spanish envoy, taking up residence at the French court, ‘not easy to contemplate with a quiet mind’. Sinister rumours were circulating of a Scottish earl and an Irish earl, both living in Brussels and fighting on the Spanish side, returning secretly to their homelands to foment rebellion and mount an attack on London.

  Hostilities had already broken out on the domestic front. The king’s relationship with the queen and her entourage had failed to improve and by summer looked close to collapse. The issue over Henrietta’s refusal to ride with her husband without her retinue of ladies had reached levels of petty vindictiveness, with Charles choosing to travel in smaller coaches, so her companions could not fit in.

  In the face of all efforts to coerce her, Henrietta proved to be impressively indomit
able, and neither the twenty-four-year-old Charles nor the thirty-three-year-old George could work out how to handle the sixteen-year-old princess. George counselled patience and kindness, as both agreed ‘it was not in her nature’ to be so difficult, but the work of ‘ill instruments’ – or the monsieurs as they were now known, her entourage of French nobles and priests.

  While she was staying at Hampton Court, and Charles had left for the royal manor in Oatlands, George decided to talk to her. Comte de Tillières, the former ambassador accused of being ‘too much Jesuited to be a friend’ and now one of the leading monsieurs, was in attendance that day. He had built up a powerful dislike of George during the marriage negotiations in Paris, which was reflected in his record of the encounter. He accused the favourite of menacing Henrietta with threats, of telling her he would make her ‘the most unhappy woman in the world’ if she did not submit to her king. Whatever was said, it upset the French, who were confounded when, the next day, ‘the same person, no longer remembering his speech, or wrongly imagining his offences to be courtesies, came to beg her to accept his wife, his sister and niece as ladies-in-waiting’. Henrietta tartly observed that England’s famous Queen Elizabeth had only had two ladies to attend her, and she already had three. Another three would be greedy. As a concession, she agreed to leave the decision in the hands of the ambassadors in her train, who, after consulting one of their bishops, reached the inevitable conclusion that no English ladies should be allowed in Henrietta’s immediate circle, a result which George was duly forced to accept.

  Plague was now everywhere. The court, which had been chasing around the country to avoid it, was apparently spreading it. The agent of the Grand Duke of Tuscany reported that 5,000 people had succumbed in the last week of July 1625 alone. ‘The magistrates, in desperation, have abandoned every care; every one does what he pleases, and the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed.’ ‘As for me,’ the agent added in a personal aside, ‘I sit with my boots on, ready for flight, which besides the cost is a source of great perturbation of the mind.’

  In late July, the students and dons of Oxford were, by royal command, told to vacate their rooms to make way for the parliamentarians, who were assembling for a new session. The plague moved in too, so Charles’s hopes of clearing the air after the last meeting in London were dashed.

  The king gave a short opening address to both Houses on 4 August 1625 in the grand setting of Christ Church college. He described himself as, like them, a member of parliament, and repeated the message he had delivered in London that they had voted for the break with Spain, and must now pay for the consequences.

  Removing to a lecture theatre in the university’s Divinity School, which now acted as their debating chamber, the MPs continued to discuss their own grievances while ignoring the king’s demands. They set about investigating what had happened to the money already voted through. ‘The king’s estate, like a ship, has a great leak,’ one MP complained. ‘A kingdom can never be well governed where unskillful and unfitting men are placed in great offices,’ said another.

  With each speech, the focus of discontent began to solidify into the form of the duke. George wanted to defend himself, but by convention could not enter the Commons’ chamber uninvited. So, as the session of 5 August drew to a close, his loyal instrument Sir George Goring got to his feet and introduced a motion asking that the duke be asked to attend the House and address its concerns.

  On 9 August, George came before the restive parliamentarians and delivered his response to the criticisms. He reminded them ‘that I had the honour to be applauded by you’, and that it was their ‘counsels and resolutions’ which had led to the royal government’s current policies. He then went on to list his achievements since the previous year: the liberation of the Alpine passes of Valtellina, which had previously been in Spanish control; Spain having to fight on a new front in Italy; the kings of Sweden and Denmark committing to the anti-Habsburg league. He listed all the parliamentarians’ complaints, and dealt with them succinctly. He recalled the death of King James – about which, the Commons’ reporter observed, he spoke ‘fetchingly, his eyes and his tongue witnessing it’ – and the funeral, and his journey to France, and all the other contingencies that had interrupted the government’s plans and increased its costs. And he urged them again to sustain what they had started, and not to delay, but have a ‘care and regard of the season and of your own healths’, because ‘if you lose time, your money cannot purchase it’.

  On this occasion, his charm was not so effective. The following day, Charles sent a message to the Commons via the chancellor, reminding them that his affairs ‘require a speedy match’ before winter set in and the plague reached the fleet and army at Plymouth. This prompted two days of debate, culminating with John Glanville, a Plymouth MP and Devonshire lawyer, declaring that the House of Commons would vote through ‘all necessary supply to his most excellent Majesty’ when ‘convenient’ and in ‘a parliamentary way, freely and dutifully’ – in other words, at a time of its own, rather than the king’s choosing. It was a devastating refusal of Charles’s pleas of urgency.

  Sir Edward Villiers, George’s elder half-brother, now a Leicestershire MP, made a lame effort to support calls for more immediate action, but he was too late. Black Rod, the parliamentary usher, was at the door with news that the king had issued orders that Parliament be dissolved.

  Charles’s administration stumbled on through the following months. In October, the fleet at Plymouth, already depleted by the constant delays, was dispatched to Cádiz. John Glanville was sent as the mission’s secretary – in revenge, it was said, for his declaration in Parliament.

  Soon after, George went to the Hague, where the main actors in his proposed anti-Habsburg league were to meet. The negotiations, ‘prosecuted with heat’, resulted in an agreement with the Dutch and Danish, but hardly the pan-European operation that was needed to take on such formidable opposition. The French wanted nothing to do with it.

  George arrived home in early December to the chilling news that ships from the fleet sent to Cádiz had been seen straggling into the southern ports of England and Ireland, their hulls leaking and their crews starving and diseased. It turned out that they had been caught up in winter storms as they were making their way to Spain. Prevented from intercepting the treasure fleet, some of the ships diverted straight to Cádiz to mount an attack, but a series of tactical blunders culminated with the troops being withdrawn after they became drunk on looted wine. It was a devastating end to a bad year. The world was ‘out of tune in every way’, lamented an ailing John Chamberlain.

  Pageant provides a good distraction at times of national crisis, but Charles’s English coronation, belatedly held on 2 February 1626, nearly a year after his father’s death, was barely noticeable. Continuing outbreaks of plague and lack of money meant a low-key affair, without crowds or cavalcades. Not even Charles’s queen would come. Nothing could prevail upon Henrietta to attend what her confessors, and even the professors of the Sorbonne, unanimously agreed to be a heretical rite.

  After weeks of wrangling, it was suggested that the crowning could be performed in the French manner, outside the doors of the abbey, with the religious service conducted privately after, but this was rejected by the English, partly out of ceremonial dogmatism, partly because of the relentless wet weather. In the end, it became clear the queen would not participate, nor even spectate, despite being offered a closed box with curtains screening her from the congregation.

  So George acted as Charles’s consort that day, travelling with him by royal barge up the Thames. They were supposed to land at the steps of the riverside house of Sir Robert Cotton, which had been expensively refurbished and carpeted for the occasion. His house was also packed with ‘ladies and gentlewomen’ Cotton had invited ‘to see their sovereign and his followers pass through the garden into the palace at Westminster, where they were to put on their robes’. But the barge overshot the steps and
landed instead at the stairs leading to the back yard of Westminster Palace. According to one of Cotton’s guests, who had joined his host to watch the king arrive, the palace steps were ‘dirty and inconvenient’, their ‘incommodity increased by the royal barge’s dashing into ground and sticking fast a little before it touched the causeway’. Some wondered if this was a snub against Cotton, who was supposedly responsible for an incendiary speech given the previous year in which George had been compared to an earlier royal favourite who had brought ‘misery to the kingdom’ and ‘poverty to the king’.

  Notwithstanding the barge’s lurching arrival, Charles was seen leaping out ‘lightly’ upon the landing stage, George following after him. They went into Westminster Hall, where the robing ceremony was to take place on a wooden scaffold raised in the middle of the hall. A fascinated spectator standing next to the stairs leading up to it watched how Charles and George ‘came close together’ as they ascended the steps. George offered his hand to the king, but Charles instead put his hand under the duke’s arm. ‘I have more need to help you than you have to help me,’ Charles was overheard to say affectionately, perhaps referring to the Cádiz fiasco.

  And so, king and companion, as husband and substitute wife, processed to Westminster Abbey for the main ceremony. George knelt before the king to present him with the ancient regalia and place the spurs on his heels. After the anointing, Charles stood to be hailed by his subjects, but was met with a moment’s awkward silence, until one of the lords shouted out ‘God bless the king!’, and everyone else joined in.