The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  A mood of awkward confusion descended on the House. The Lords had been expecting to deal with Charles’s charges against the former ambassador, but now had a countercharge to consider. After some discussion, it was decided that the king’s charges should take precedence, but Digby protested that this would effectively stop his case from being heard.

  In a characteristically abrupt and disconcerting change of mood, George suggested a compromise: that both cases be heard at the same time. The intervention seemed to calm frayed nerves, and the House reverted to procedural consultations to consider how this might be done.

  Meanwhile, it was decided that Digby should be ‘committed in the Gentleman-usher’s House’, though with the concession that he would have ‘access of friends to be permitted to come unto him’ to help him prepare his defence. As he was taken away, in a burst of ‘angry passion’ Digby demanded to know why George was not being treated in the ‘same manner’.

  The following day, the finalized list of charges drawn up by the Committee of Twelve was presented to the House of Commons. Twelve of the charges were already known and had been debated, covering everything from corruption to extortion. Now they were joined by a thirteenth. It was carefully worded, carrying the merest ‘whisper of poison’, as the Tuscan agent put it. It was that the duke did ‘unduly cause and procure certain plasters, and a certain drink or potion to be provided for the use of his said majesty’, which were applied ‘without the direction or privity of his said late majesty’s physicians, not prepared by any of his majesty’s sworn apothecaries or surgeons, but compounded of several ingredients to them unknown’.

  On the same day, a letter from Charles was read out in the Lords. His continuing loyalty to the favourite was obvious from the opening sentences. He knew ‘more than any man’ of George’s ‘sincere carriage’, and dismissed Digby’s suit as an attempt to silence the duke, as he was to be the main witness in the charges the king had brought against Digby. He urged the Lords to ‘put a difference’ between his charges against the ‘delinquent’ Digby, and Digby’s charges against George and ‘not to equal them by a proceeding pari passu’ – side by side. He also commanded them ‘not to match the imprisonment of the one and the other, as the Earl of Bristol desired, the ground being so different and unequal’.

  Despite the intervention, the attack on the duke had by now achieved a momentum that not even Charles could stop. On 3 May, the Commons passed a motion to send a delegation to the House of Lords at the earliest opportunity to present the thirteen charges it had drawn up, and to demand the duke’s impeachment. Eight MPs, selected from among the Committee of the Twelve, were duly appointed to deliver the evidence. Given the magnitude of the task, it was agreed that they would be accompanied by a further twelve ‘assistants’. Over the following week, as other parliamentary business continued around them, the delegates practised and polished what they would say. By 6 May, each had been allotted his role: Dudley Digges to introduce the charges, Christopher Wandesford to argue the case regarding the ‘certain Plaisters, and a certain Drink’ administered by the duke, and John Eliot to provide a conclusion.

  Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, matters surrounding Digby’s trial were escalating. With an eye on the poisoning allegations, Digby had introduced a new piece of evidence. It concerned a conversation between George and the Marquis of Hamilton just before the marquis’s death. Apparently, the duke had discussed with Hamilton a plan to have Digby committed to the Tower to prevent him telling King James about the duke’s role in the collapse of the Spanish match. On 8 May, George stood up to respond to the allegation. While condemning the use of ‘my dead friend’ the marquis ‘who cannot answer for himself’, he accepted that the allegation was essentially correct, simply adding that his comments had not been made ‘out of any malice’ towards Digby, but because even if the ex-ambassador ‘had been my brother, considering his carriage in this business, I should have thought the Tower the fittest lodging for him’.

  Later that morning, a message arrived from the Commons to the Lords asking for a ‘conference’. With anxieties surrounding their most powerful member growing, the Lords agreed to ‘admit a meeting but not a conference’. In other words, they would sit and listen, but they would not discuss.

  At 2 p.m., delegations from both Houses met in the Painted Chamber, eight Lords – including George’s enemy William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke – facing twelve MPs and their eight assistants, carrying a thick bundle of papers.

  Dudley Digges introduced the proceedings with an elaborate analogy. Recalling the work of his father Thomas, a famous astronomer, he compared the king to the sun, the great offices of state to the planets, and George to the ‘blazing star’ that had appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia in 1572, an apparition that had caused consternation, presaging, it was believed, a disturbance to the cosmic order. ‘Such a prodigious comet the Commons takes this Duke of Buckingham to be,’ Digges proclaimed, ‘against whom, and his irregular ways, there are, by learned gentlemen, legal articles of charge to be delivered to your Lordships, which I am generally first commanded to lay open.’

  The charges duly followed, listed by Digges and his colleagues, in an outpouring of conjecture and evidence running to 30,000 words on paper and many hours in a hot and increasingly tense chamber. They culminated with Christopher Wandesford introducing the thirteenth charge. He was nervous, later conceding to his fellow MPs that George, who was in the room but sitting apart from the Lords’ delegation, listened to the charge ‘with more confidence than I could deliver it’.

  Stiffening his resolve, Wandesford asserted that the duke, ‘contrary to his duty, and the tender respect which he ought to have had of his majesty’s most sacred person’, had administered medicines to a sick James which had ‘a strange smell, and an invective quality, striking the malignity of the disease inward’ causing ‘great distempers, as droughts, raving, fainting, an intermitting pulse’, as well as other ‘strange effects’, which ultimately led to the king’s death. Quoting learned opinion, Wandesford added ‘that if one that is no physician or surgeon undertake a cure, and the party die under his hands, this is felony’, in other words, the most serious sort of crime. He wondered if what George had done was ‘a fatal error in judgment only’, or ‘something else’. In reply, the MP cited the story of Julius Caesar, provocatively quoting the famous words used in Shakespeare’s play, when Caesar’s friend Brutus assassinates his leader: ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  Sir John Eliot provided the conclusion. He had lost none of his fury and disgust at the behaviour of his former patron. Arousing profound discomfort among members of the Lords’ delegation, he compared Villiers to Sejanus, the corrupt favourite of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, and the subject of a controversial play by Ben Jonson which depicted him as a rapacious royal catamite who used poison to kill off his enemies.

  As the official record of the event noted with a brevity lacking in the MPs’ submission: ‘Sir Dudley Digges, having made the Prologue, and Sir John Eliot the Epilogue, in the impeachment of the duke, they were both by the King’s command committed to the Tower.’

  In the Commons there was uproar. The MPs pledged that while their colleagues were imprisoned, all proceedings would be broken off, and with cries of ‘rise, rise’, the chamber emptied. The following day the members gathered in silence, not even allowing the Speaker to read out the order of the day. Then John Wylde, the MP for Droitwich, stood to deliver a speech. In an almost funereal tone, he lamented the loss to the Commons of ‘two whose excellent parts and indefatigable labours are fresh in our memories’. He claimed that the arrests had put in danger the ‘broad charter of our great inheritance gained with so great cost, so often confirmed’ – Magna Carta, the bulwark of personal liberty and political rights. After he had sat down, the silence continued until Dudley Carleton, the king’s vice chamberlain, stood to justify what Charles had done.

  Carleton’s speech, which began with rambling remarks about his youthful experiences
at sea, drew a hostile response. Ignoring angry interruptions, he revealed the reason for the arrests. It was not Digges’s characterization of the duke as a ‘prodigious comet’ threatening to destroy the settled order of the political cosmos, nor even Eliot’s description of the favourite as ‘full of collusion and deceit’. ‘The cause,’ Carleton said, ‘is a high offence the king takes at certain scandals and words passed in that speech touching the end of the last king which was inferred as hastened by a drink and plaster.’ Under interrogation, both Eliot and Digges had refused to repudiate what they had said. Indeed, Digges had made things worse. In an outburst perhaps provoked by his interrogators, he told them he had nothing more to say about James’s medical treatment ‘in regard of’ – in order not to damage – ‘the King’s Honour’. This implied that he believed Charles was in some way implicated. Digges had subsequently and vehemently denied this, but five witnesses attested otherwise, and, as far as Carleton was concerned, a failure to acknowledge the king’s innocence was as bad as proclaiming that he was ‘not worthy to wear the crown’ – a treasonous charge.

  This was why the two MPs had to remain in detention. It was why the House should take heed: if it continued to take such ‘tumultuary licence’ in debating the matter, it might find itself abolished, like representative assemblies elsewhere in Europe.

  Yet even as Carleton tried to intimidate Parliament at Westminster, a mood of desperation and fear had set in at the king’s palace in Whitehall. The state of the treasury was by now worse than ever. The clamour from creditors, officials and suppliers had become deafening. Thousands of unpaid sailors and soldiers who had returned from failed military adventures had started to migrate to London. Southwark had become so overrun with them that the Privy Council was forced to close the Globe Theatre to prevent it becoming a focus for ‘riotous action’, and to give local magistrates time to gather the officers they would need ‘for the suppressing of any insolences or mutinous intentions’.

  The night of the MPs’ arrests, Charles was overheard in the royal bedchamber in a state of despair. ‘What more can I do?’ he asked George. ‘I have in a manner lost the love of my subjects. What woulds’t thou have me do?’

  George would not relent. His confidence seemed bolstered rather than weakened by the attacks. He would have the king defy the scoundrels. Having been accused of taking on too many offices, Charles must offer him another. Though he lacked a university education and freely admitted to being no scholar, it emerged he was to be nominated as the next chancellor of the University of Cambridge, a royal appointment. The provocative announcement caused yet more uproar. The university dons resisted fiercely. But, with what has coyly been described as a ‘less than scrupulous counting of votes’, their objections were overcome.

  Leaving his enemies aghast, George then delivered to the House of Lords an answer to the impeachment charges that dextrously made them almost impossible to prosecute without mounting a direct attack on the king.

  The duke began in a familiar tone of disarming humility. He accepted that he may have been ‘raised to honour and fortunes’ beyond his merit, but hoped that he would be able to restore the good opinion of his critics. He then gave each of the charges the Commons had brought against him the dignity of a considered response, explaining his actions and challenging his accusers, while throughout reminding their lordships that all he had done was at the command and with the knowledge of the king.

  George then concluded with a legalistic point invoking memories of the fall of his predecessor, Robert Carr. He reminded their lordships that he had received a general pardon from King James, which had been reconfirmed by Charles ‘at the time of his most happy inauguration and coronation’. He had even brought along a copy of the document, helpfully pointing out that it bore the great seal. So, even if he was guilty of any of the crimes he was accused of, he was immune from prosecution.

  A few days later, on 12 June, the Commons received a copy of George’s replies. It was referred to a subcommittee while discussions continued about a remonstrance against the arrest of Eliot and Digges. A letter was also sent by the king threatening the dissolution of Parliament if a subsidy bill was not passed within the week.

  At three that afternoon, the windows of the Commons’ chamber were rattled by gusts of wind and a sudden and violent downpour of rain and hail. Those unfortunate enough to be caught outside in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster noticed the strange ‘turbulency of the waters’ of the Thames, and a mist rising up in a great whorl ‘like the smoke issuing out of a furnace’. It was noted that this storm had ‘bent itself towards York House’, George’s Thames-side residence, ‘beating against the stairs and wall thereof’ before it ‘ascended higher and higher till it quite vanished away’.

  Two days later, a delegation went to the king with a copy of the remonstrance that had occupied the Commons since the arrest of Eliot and Digges. Charles said he would respond the following day, which he did with a summons of MPs to the House of Lords. There, one of the king’s officials announced that Parliament was immediately dissolved.

  An MP who had kept a diary of the session’s momentous events ended his final entry for the Parliament of 1626 with a Latin aphorism: Sic abeant omnes et cessat gloria regni. ‘So they may go away, and all the glory of the kingdom ceases.’

  The Devil and the Duke

  Like all of London’s theatres, the Fortune Playhouse was situated just outside the City’s walls, beyond the reach of the authorities. Rebuilt in 1621 following a fire, it had been considered one of London’s more refined as well as most commercially successful open-air venues, the profits generated by its owner, Edward Alleyn, going towards the founding of a school in Dulwich. By the summer of 1628, it had fallen into decline, drawing a rabble of apprentices and ‘apple wives’, beggarly street sellers. Just two years before, a crowd of cashiered sailors had run riot there, refusing to stop in the king’s name as they ‘cared not for the king, for the king paid them no wages’.

  On Friday, 13 July 1628, Dr John Lambe, recently turned eighty, joined the jostling crowd to see the Fortune’s latest production. He was a sinister and by now notorious figure in London, mentioned in The Forerunner of Revenge as one of the ‘ringleaders of witches’ Eglisham claimed George Villiers had ‘frequently consulted’. He had a long history as a mystic, quack and sexual predator. In 1622 he had been arrested on a historic charge of attempting ‘to disable, make infirm and consume the body and strength’ of a young pupil, and for having ‘invoked and entertained evil spirits’. He was remanded in Worcester Castle awaiting trial, where forty fellow inmates subsequently died under mysterious circumstances. He was then transferred back to the capital, to the King’s Bench prison, where a relatively relaxed regime allowed him to set up in practice as a medic and fortune teller, attracting a string of visitors, some of them high-ranking women. This financed a lavish lifestyle, which included a suite of two rooms furnished with keyboard instruments. In 1623 he was indicted for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, who had been sent to his prison cell with a basket of herbs. He was tried and sentenced to be hanged. However, in the summer of 1624, the Lord Chief Justice intervened, apparently on behalf of the king. The evidence was reviewed, and on the basis of perceived weaknesses in the case, he was issued a royal pardon and took up residence in a house next to Parliament.

  This is when Lambe’s name became associated with George. Around the time of his release, the scandal surrounding the pregnancy of Frances, the estranged wife of George’s brother John, was captivating the court. Among the rumours in circulation was ‘an imputation laid on her that with powders and potions she did intoxicate her husband’s brains, and practised somewhat in that kind upon the Duke of Buckingham’. This had apparently been ‘confessed by one Lambe a notorious old rascal’. George had ordered an investigation, at which witnesses claimed that Frances had been seen going to Lambe’s house dressed in ‘the habit of a maid servant, with a basket on her arm’, where her lover, the b
rother of the Earl of Suffolk and the presumed father of her child, awaited her.

  Though the association would suggest that George was at odds with Lambe, over the following months the link with the Villiers family seemed to hint at an alliance. In 1627, it was reported that George’s mother, Mary, ‘solicitous to know what would become of her son’, had consulted Lambe about George’s future. Peering into a crystal ball, he claimed to see ‘a big, fat man, with a reddish face, brown beard, an iron arm, and a long dagger’.

  By the time John Lambe was making his way to the Fortune Playhouse that summer day of 1628, his name was well enough established as an associate of the duke for the two to be linked in a number of popular songs, one satirizing George’s riposte to the charges brought against him by the Commons:

  Nor shall you ever prove, by magic charms

  I wrought the king’s affection, or his harms,

  Or that I need Lambe’s philtres to incite

  Chaste ladies to give my foul lust delight.

  The pair may even have been the subject of a ‘scurvy book’, since lost, entitled The Devil and the Duke, which had caused ‘much inquisition in Paul’s Churchyard’, the location of London’s booksellers.

  So when Lambe took his seat in one of the galleries overlooking the one-penny ‘groundlings’ in the theatre yard, many were aware of his notoriety and his association with the duke.

  Whatever play was put on that day, it generated a surly mood, and as the audience was filing out into Golding Lane some ‘boys of the town and other unruly people’ decided to follow Lambe as he made his way back towards the City.

  Heading along Chiswell Street towards Moorfields, the doctor became concerned for his safety and took refuge in a tavern near the City walls, where he stayed until about 9 p.m., hoping to lay low until the mob dispersed. He emerged to find the crowd still there and, hiring a group of sailors for protection, made his way through Moorgate and down Coleman Street. Reaching Lothbury, the street of coppersmiths and chandlers, the crowd had become even more menacing, so he took refuge across the junction in the Windmill tavern, an old converted synagogue on the corner of Old Jewry. While he was sheltering there, the building came under attack, and the landlord forced him back onto the street, where he found his escort of sailors had deserted him. Now terrified for his life, he set off down Old Jewry and briefly managed to take refuge in the house of a lawyer. The mob threatened to tear the building down unless he was ejected, and he found himself once again on the street. The crowd fell upon him ‘with stones and cudgels and other weapons’. The constables had by then been alerted, but either chose not to intervene or arrived too late.