The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  Antwerp was then a centre of Habsburg propaganda, the shelves heaving with anti-Protestant, anti-Dutch, and anti-British pamphlets. Many had the sort of sensational title emblazoned across the frontispiece of the work attacking the Duke of Buckingham. However, most were anonymous or attributed to obviously fake names like ‘Richard Thunderstruck’. The cover page of The Forerunner of Revenge, in contrast, proudly proclaimed that its sensational allegations were ‘Discovered by M. George Eglisham, Scot’, adding with surely suicidal specificity, ‘one of King James’s physicians for his Majesty’s person for more than ten years’.

  Eglisham was a colourful figure, fairly well known as the author of various works of poetry, astrological medicine and theology that had earned him the nicknames ‘Windbag’ and ‘Ass’s Fart’. As The Forerunner made clear, he considered himself of blue-blooded if not aristocratic breeding, being descended from the Lundy family of Fife, members of the magnificently titled lairds of Balgonie, and through them distantly related to the Hamiltons, one of Scotland’s most illustrious families, who in turn boasted ties to the royal Stuarts. The Forerunner proudly boasted that the author had been brought up with James Hamilton, son and heir of John, first Marquis of Hamilton, and a close friend of King James. In his and James’s ‘young years’, John had lain his right hand upon his son’s head, and a left hand upon Eglisham’s, as he presented both boys to the king to kiss the royal hand, ‘recommending me unto his Majesty’s favour’.

  In the early 1600s, Eglisham and the young Hamilton parted company, the latter following the king to England, where he would inherit his father’s title. Eglisham went to the Continent, where he enrolled at the Scots College in Louvain (or Leuven), one of several well-known ‘training camps’ for Catholic spies and insurgents. By 1604 he was back in Britain, working in Rotherham as a tutor to the children of a former magistrate and his Catholic wife.

  By 1616, Eglisham was declaring himself ‘Doctoris Medici Regii’, royal physician. He had probably acquired the title through James Hamilton, now a marquis and an important figure in James’s household. Despite the royal connection, Eglisham had struggled to establish a successful medical practice in London, having failed to acquire a licence from the College of Physicians, probably because of suspicions about his religion. This had forced him to support himself by investing in various dubious business ventures, including an attempt to corner the production of gold leaf for luxury items such as book-bindings and furniture.

  Reflecting the fringe existence of a Catholic living in London at the time, Eglisham had married one Elizabeth Downes ‘in the Clink’, a gaol in Southwark, where the Catholic priest they chose to officiate was imprisoned. They had a daughter, and moved into an apartment in Bacon House, named after Sir Nicholas Bacon, Francis’s father and Lord Keeper during Elizabeth I’s reign. But by the mid-1620s he was in financial trouble, the gold leaf venture coming under parliamentary scrutiny alongside many of the Villiers patents in 1621, and soon he was being sued by his creditors. He was also accused of counterfeiting coins with one Edward Yates, a ‘villain’, ‘pirate’ and ‘mountebank’, and of living with Yates ‘at bed and at board’, a phrase suggesting a sexual relationship.

  Until this time, Eglisham had no connection with the Duke of Buckingham, beyond the association with dubious royal patents. But, as Rubens was to read in lurid detail in The Forerunner, all that had changed in the spring of 1625, when he was called to the sickbed of his dying childhood friend, James, Marquis of Hamilton.

  The marquis was in a dreadful state, suffering a violent fever and constantly vomiting. Eglisham tried to treat him, but it soon became clear that nothing could be done.

  Eglisham described the terrifying transformation of Hamilton’s body following his death two days later. The mouth and nose began ‘foaming blood mixed with froth’. The body started to swell ‘in such sort that his thighs were as big as six times their natural proportion, his belly became as big as the belly of an ox, his arms as big as the natural quantities of his thighs, his neck so broad as his shoulders, his cheeks over the top of his nose, that his nose could not be seen or distinguished, the skin of his forehead over his eyes’. His hair began to fall out if it was touched ‘as easily as if one had pulled hay out of an heap of hay’. His torso and arms were covered with blisters as big as fists ‘of six diverse colours, full of waters of the same colours, some white, some black, some red, some yellow, some green, some blue’. When a post-mortem was performed on his internal organs, the liver was found to be green, his stomach purple ‘with a blueish clammy matter adhering to the sides of it’.

  Servants flocking to the side of their dead master shouted that he had been poisoned, and ‘that it was a thing not to be suffered’.

  A ‘jury’ of physicians was sent for to pronounce on the cause of death. Eglisham recalled the reaction of one of them, Dr John Moore, a fellow Scot, when he drew back the cloth covering the corpse. ‘At the sight thereof Doctor Moore lifting up both his hands and his hat and his eyes to the heavens astonished, said “Jesus bless me, I never saw the like. I cannot know him, I cannot distinguish a face upon him.”’ One of the other doctors remarked on similarities with the condition of the body of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who had died under mysterious circumstances in Holland the previous November.

  Seeing the amazement of his fellow doctors, Dr Lister, a censor of the College of Physicians, and known to be ‘one of my Lord of Buckingham’s creatures’, drew each of them aside ‘and whispered them in the ear to silence them, whereupon many went away without speaking one word’.

  There was never any doubt in Eglisham’s mind that his friend had been murdered and that the duke was responsible. The motive was clear, and went back to 1622, when Hamilton first learned of George’s plans to marry his niece, Mary, the daughter of his beloved sister Susan, to Hamilton’s son and heir, also called James.

  The betrothal followed the familiar Villiers pattern of entrapment, though this time with the variation that the reluctant party was the groom, and that the bride was just ten years old.

  When George had first suggested such a match, he had been rebuffed for the familiar reason that his family was too common. His father was ‘obscure amongst gentlemen’, and his mother, the countess, had been a mere ‘serving woman’. Nothing is prouder ‘than baser blood when it doth rise aloft’, Eglisham noted, which is why the duke had the audacity to attempt, through a match with the Hamiltons, an intermingling with ‘the blood royal both of England and Scotland’. There was even speculation that his objective was for his offspring to claim a line to the throne.

  Snobbery was perhaps the greatest obstacle to George fulfilling his ambitions, and the greatest provocation to achieving them. It had motivated the Earl of Rutland’s attempts to stop George marrying Kate, and had almost defeated efforts to find brides for his brothers John and Kit. He was not about to let this new attempt by a stiff-necked Scot thwart him.

  On Sunday, 16 June 1622, Hamilton and his son James the younger had been ‘urged’ by a member of the royal household to come ‘in all haste’ to Greenwich Palace, where the king and court were in residence. Mystified by the summons, they arrived ‘a little before supper’ to be told that the younger Hamilton, who was just three days shy of his sixteenth birthday, was to marry George’s ten-year-old niece Mary, the wedding to take place after the meal.

  The announcement having been made by the king before the whole court, the older Hamilton had no option but to agree to the ceremony going ahead. Young James Hamilton and Mary were duly married later that evening in the king’s apartment – one of ‘diverse young alliances and unripe marriages’ to be made around this time, observed a disapproving John Chamberlain. Eglisham claimed that, to make the nuptials ‘more authentic’, George had later that night ‘caused his niece to be laid a-bed with the marquis’s son for a short time in the king’s chamber, and in his Majesty’s presence, albeit the bride was yet innubile.

  ‘Many were astonished at
the sudden news,’ Eglisham continued, ‘all the marquis’s friends fretting thereat, and some writing unto him very scornful letters for the same.’ However, Hamilton took consolation in the thought that, since the marriage had not yet been properly consummated, it could still be annulled, and trusted an opportunity to ‘untie that knot which Buckingham had urged the king to tie upon his son’ would arise before Mary reached sexual maturity. Meanwhile, he would send his son ‘beyond the seas’ to ensure no further contact between the couple was possible.

  However, his plans were thwarted by George arranging for the groom to be promoted to the position of gentleman of Charles’s bedchamber. The young Hamilton was now effectively trapped at court, only able to venture abroad when he was appointed to the entourage that joined Charles and George in Spain during the Madrid escapade.

  Matters had reached a head early in 1625, when Mary, approaching thirteen, had become ‘nubile’, and efforts were underway by the Villiers clan to force a consummation. In the end, according to Eglisham, George’s relations resorted to kidnapping the young man – a credible accusation given previous behaviour.

  When Hamilton went to George to demand access to his son, an altercation resulted during which George accused the marquis of ‘speaking disdainfully of him and his house’. Hamilton dismissively replied that he could not recall saying anything against the duke, prompting George to point out that he had ‘scorned the notion of matching with my house, which I made unto you’, to which the marquis replied that ‘it became not the duke to speak to him in that fashion’. The French ambassador attempted to intercede, but George was enraged by the marquis’s slight.

  Eglisham affirmed what even some of George’s friends would privately acknowledge (the king included): that he could be ‘wonderfully vindictive’ when roused, his ‘malice insatiable’. Hamilton responded to his altercation with the favourite by taking immediate precautions to protect himself. The giving of gifts of food was one of the most important forms of courtly exchange, and soon after the breakdown of relations, Hamilton insisted that everything received from George’s extensive network of allies and associates at court must first be tasted by one of his servants. Then, in late February, two of them, ‘one belonging to his wine cellar, and another to his kitchen’, fell sick and died. Two days later, Hamilton joined them.

  For Eglisham, this was clear evidence of poisoning, reinforced by his own toxicological observations about the extraordinary manner and aftermath of Hamilton’s death. Infectious illness produces buboes, carbuncles and spots, he argued, not fluid-filled blisters and a ‘huge uniform swelling’. In fact, these were effects neither he nor any of the other physicians who saw the marquis’s corpse had witnessed before, except in dogs given poisons experimentally ‘to try the forces of some antidotes’.

  And as for George, ‘when my Lord Marquis’s body was to be transported from Whitehall to his house at Bishopsgate’, Eglisham noted that the duke had accompanied the cortege ‘muffed and furred in his coach, giving out that he was sick for sorrow of my Lord Marquis’s death’. But as soon as he returned to his house, ‘he triumphed and domineered with his faction so excessively, as if he had gained some great victory, and the next day coming to the King put on a most lamentable and mournful countenance for the death of the Marquis of Hamilton’.

  Rubens had himself noted George’s ‘caprice and arrogance’, and no doubt considered Eglisham’s accusations concerning the death of Hamilton to be plausible. This must have added credibility to the even more sensational allegations made in the next section of the pamphlet, in which the author set out his accusation that George’s next victim was the man who had made him: King James.

  Great Matters of Weight

  On Monday, 24 April 1626, a member of Charles’s court received a secret letter about the current state of affairs in the House of Commons and its battle with George: it noted that there was ‘some thing now on foot, which at the least makes a noise’.

  In fact, what was afoot was an attempt to muffle the noise. As members arrived for that day’s session, John Glanville MP, chair of the Committee of Twelve set up the previous Friday to investigate the case against George, made a short announcement. Over the weekend, he had become aware of ‘some great matters of weight’ which, ‘if they shall be publicly now examined, may, by the notifying thereof hinder the service and ends of the House’. He therefore proposed that the committee’s further deliberations should be conducted in private.

  Several MPs objected. Sir John Lowther, one of George’s loyalists, led the protests, arguing that the rest of the House would be ‘blinded’ by such secrecy, allowing members of the committee to ‘take what they will’ from their deliberations. He lost the vote, but as a concession, the committee agreed that members could attend the hearings just as long as they did not intervene or take notes.

  The committee duly met that afternoon, Lowther among the spectators. The venue was the Court of Wards, a cramped room down a flight of steps leading from the lobby of the Commons’ chamber. The stairwell was a favourite and rowdy haunt of members’ servants, but today, as Lowther descended the stairs, he found it to be full of distinguished physicians.

  Flouting the ban on taking notes, Lowther jotted down that day’s proceedings, his fragmented and sometimes illegible scribbles providing the only written record by an MP of what happened that momentous afternoon.

  Since James’s death, the doctors who had attended his final hours had remained silent. None dared speak out for fear of implicating himself in the mismanagement of their illustrious patient’s treatment. However, copies of Eglisham’s tract in English had started to arrive in London, around the time Rubens had first seen the Latin edition in Antwerp – ‘in the very nick’, as one contemporary put it, of Parliament’s deliberations. Whether in bundles already stored in a secret warehouse in London for a concerted campaign, or in a more haphazard fashion by Catholic supporters and agents, it was being ‘industriously scattered up and down in the streets of the City of London’, in the Royal Exchange, the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Hall, in alehouses, churches and playhouses.

  Besides the vivid details about Hamilton’s death, it contained a sensational – but to those with any knowledge of the events, credible – account of James’s final hours. It reported how, on the Monday before his death, the duke gave the king some ‘white powder’ mixed with wine, after which James became ‘immediately worse and worse, falling into many soundings and pains, and violent fluxes of the belly’. It told of how George’s mother Mary had applied a plaster to ‘the king’s heart and breast’, resulting in him growing short of breath and suffering ‘in great agony’.

  It also mentioned that the physicians, who were absent at dinner when these interventions were made, returned to their patient to find a lingering ‘offensive smell’ left by the plaster. This had made them believe ‘something to be about the king hurtful to him, and searched what it could be, and exclaimed that the king was poisoned.

  ‘Then Buckingham entering,’ Eglisham’s tract continued, ‘he commanded the physicians out of the room, caused one to be committed prisoner to his own chamber, and another to remove from court, quarrelled with others of the king’s servants in the sick king’s own presence, so far that he offered to draw his sword against them in the king’s sight.’

  Some of these allegations were already known to the committee members, thanks to the work of Sir John Eliot’s London agent. However, Eglisham’s account also contained an incriminating new charge: that, following the king’s death, the duke had forced the physicians who attended the king to sign ‘a testimony that the powder which he gave the king was a good and safe medicine’.

  In his introduction to The Forerunner to Revenge, Eglisham had implored Parliament to investigate his claims, since only ‘the whole body of a Parliament’ had the power to ‘lay hold upon him’. The committee at least was up for the job. Besides Eliot, it included several MPs with grudges against George and patrons wh
o were his enemies. John Glanville, well known as one of England’s top lawyers, had been pressed by George into acting as secretary during the disastrous Cádiz escapade, seemingly in revenge for obstructing a subsidy bill during the previous Parliament. The mission had reduced his family to poverty; it had forced him to endure weeks of severe seasickness, which ended with him being marooned in Ireland, and only just managing to get back to London in time for the new parliamentary session. Other members included Edward Herbert, a kinsman of George’s rival William, the Earl of Pembroke, who appeared to be orchestrating the duke’s downfall, and Christopher Wandesford, a childhood friend and mouthpiece of Sir Thomas Wentworth, a member of a powerful family and a well-connected government critic who had been ‘pricked’ by George to become a sheriff, preventing him from standing for election.

  As the twelve took their seats in the committee chamber, the doctors were brought in one at a time to give their testimony, Lowther watching from the side, scribbling surreptitiously in his notebook.

  Eight doctors had agreed to testify to the committee, including many of the team who dealt with James during his final hours. But several key figures were missing, notably Sir William Paddy, who had arrived at the king’s bedside two days before his death, Henry Gibb, the royal groom who had been dismissed for trying to obstruct George’s interventions, and perhaps most crucially the mysterious ‘doctor from Dunmow’, John Remington, who had supplied the medicine George and his mother had used.

  Despite the absences, the testimony given over the following two days was sensational. With varying degrees of cooperation, depending on their closeness to Charles and George, and subject to their desperate efforts to exonerate themselves while implicating their opponents, they all agreed that the substance of Eglisham’s account was true: that a plaster and potion had been administered to the king at a vital stage in his recovery, and that he had subsequently suffered a sharp deterioration in his condition. Furthermore, none of them had been told in advance what had been in the medicine, let alone witnessed the making of it.