The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  9. Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 36.

  10. Mark Kishlansky, Charles I (2014), p. 12.

  11. Nearly thirty years later Charles still had a small bronze pacing horse that Henry had admired and which he had brought him on his deathbed to cheer him up.

  12. Oman, p. 63. The ship, the Prince Royal, had been named after Henry, and may be the ship that inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  13. ‘A pattern for a King’s Inaugeration’ in James VI and I: Political Works, ed. J. P. Sommerville (2006), p. 229.

  14. Gondomar quoted in Gregg, p. 33.

  15. Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (BL, Humanities, C.46.i.1.), annotation by Charles I; thanks to Sarah Poynting for this reference and transcription.

  16. ‘Si vis omnia subicere, te subice rationi’ (a misquotation from Seneca–it should have ‘tibi’ after ‘omnia’). Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this information.

  17. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, observed that Charles had ‘a nature inclined to adventures’. Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (2003), p. 75; for ‘extreme resolutions’ see Dorset to Salisbury [York], 27 June 1642, HMC Hatfield, xxii, 372.

  18. William Benchley Rye, England as seen by Foreigners (1865, revd edn 2000), p. 133; Andrew Thrush, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/periods/stuarts/death-prince-henry-and-succession-crisis-1612–1614.

  19. Ronald Lightbown, ‘Charles I and the Art of the Goldsmith’ in Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Late King’s Goods (1989), pp. 233–55.

  20. It is often asserted that Charles spoke with a Scottish accent, although no contemporary comments on it. I discussed this with Sarah Poynting, who is editing a comprehensive book on Charles’s writings. She has found no real evidence that he did, beyond a few traces of Scottish spelling–such as ‘hes’ for ‘has’. I do think, however, that this suggests an occasional and slight Scottish inflection.

  21. The first reference to Murray being a whipping boy that I can find dates from long after Charles’s death, in Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Times (1724/1833), Vol. I, p. 436. Earlier, Thomas Fuller’s Church History (1655) had claimed Barnaby Fitzpatrick was whipping boy to Edward VI. This in turn (it seems to me) was probably influenced by Samuel Rowley’s 1605 play To See Me is to Know Me in which Henry VIII mentions having had a whipping boy. The play was written shortly after James’s tracts on divine right were published in England. I am not aware of any earlier such stories.

  22. James dedicated a collection of his writings to Charles in 1616.

  23. Eikon Basilike, p. 167; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 13.

  24. John Jewel, quoted in Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen (2008), p. 196; Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment (2014), p. 65.

  25. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. II (1902), p. 84.

  26. For the first decade of her reign Elizabeth felt not much less threatened by Protestants than by Catholics, and with good reason. Edward VI’s Privy Councils–who had imposed the first Protestant Prayer Book on England when he was eleven–had treated her poorly. On his death in 1553 his councillors had then backed her exclusion from the succession, along with that of her Catholic half-sister Mary, in favour of her married cousin, Lady Jane Grey/Dudley. Fearful that even now they would prefer a married queen she kept her married Protestant heir, Jane’s sister Katherine Grey/Seymour, imprisoned, and bastardised her children. It was only after Katherine’s death in 1568 that Mary, Queen of Scots, became the greater threat. See de Lisle, Sisters, or relevant chapters in Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story (2013).

  27. De Lisle, Tudor, p. 356.

  28. De Lisle, After Elizabeth, p. 29.

  29. It was also key to England’s victory against the papal Antichrist in the war on evil.

  30. As Elizabeth had never trusted the nobility, Protestant or Catholic, she had worked hard to nurture the affections of the common sort. Unfortunately her great subjects had learned that they too could appeal to public opinion–a dangerous legacy for her Stuart successors. Essex had been loved as a hero of the war with Spain, and was expert at self-promotion. By contrast his leading rival Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, was detested. Elizabeth had always ensured her officials bore the blame for unpopular decisions. The result was that the people blamed Cecil for the failings of her government–and not the queen.

  31. The ballads being sung about Essex at court were reported in a contemporary journal; see de Lisle, After Elizabeth, p. 8.

  32. Traditionally an English king was expected to live off his own resources. Only in exceptional circumstances would Parliament raise the taxes known as subsidies that the Crown needed to pay their extraordinary expenses. It was a system designed in the Middle Ages and was no longer fit for purpose. Inflation and corruption in both assessment and collection meant Parliament’s subsidies were worth a fraction of what they had been under the Tudors. One had plunged in value from £130,000 at the end of Elizabeth’s reign to £55,000 in the early 1620s, and that is without counting the effects of inflation. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 200.

  33. Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion (2010), p. 28.

  34. Clarendon quoted in Smith, pp. 13–14.

  35. BL, Add. MS 19368, f. 112.

  36. James VI and I: Political Works, ed. Sommerville, p. 230.

  37. ‘A pattern for a King’s Inaugeration’ in ibid., p. 249.

  38. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 151.

  Chapter 2: Becoming King

  1. The Letters of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, ed. L. M. Baker (1953), p. 54.

  2. John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. I (1721), p. 40.

  3. Specifically there were efforts to prove the legitimacy of William Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the senior grandson of the Tudor princess Lady Katherine Grey. Henry VIII had demoted the Stuart line of his elder sister Margaret in line of succession in order to protect his children from a potentially powerful Stuart rival. In their place he had promoted descendants of his younger sister. In 1554, Mary I executed the senior of these, the so-called nine days’ queen, Lady Jane Grey, for treason. Jane was regarded as a virtual Protestant martyr. The second sister, Katherine, was Elizabeth I’s heir, but Elizabeth saw her as a threat and had refused to recognise her marriage to Hertford’s father. This had made his father a bastard and had ensured the accession of the Stuarts. Early in James’s reign Hertford had attempted to restore his tainted royal blood by marrying James’s cousin, Arbella Stuart, and so uniting the lines of Henry VIII’s two sisters. He was sent to the Tower from where he escaped, while Arbella starved herself to death there in 1615. Hertford had subsequently married the 3rd Earl of Essex’s favourite sister, Frances. The attempts to prove his legitimacy were being made in June 1621 by the 2nd Earl of Essex’s close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, Vol. III (1824), p. 239. In the same year Hertford began building a vast tomb for his grandparents at Salisbury Cathedral, one which advertised Elizabeth I’s unfair treatment of the couple. Hertford also commissioned several large-scale copies of a miniature of Katherine with his father as a baby in the Tower. He kept a picture of his great-aunt, Lady Jane Grey, and of his first wife, Arbella Stuart. (Longleat House, Seymour Papers, Vol. 6, f. 241, will of Frances Seymour, 1674: ‘I do also give and bequeath to my s[ai]d grandaughter [sic] the lady Frances Thynne… my picture of the Lady Arabella my dear Lord’s first wife now hanging in the dining roome, and the picture of the Queen Jane Grey, now hanging in my chamber with another the picture of my Lady Katherine.’ Thanks to Dr Stephan Edwards for this reference.)

  4. Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning (BL, Humanities, C.46.i.1.); Loquacity, XXXI, p. 315, Rr2r. Contra. Thanks to Sarah Poynting for this re
ference and transcription.

  5. Sir Simonds d’Ewes quoted in Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 9.

  6. Michael C. Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625 (2009), p. 41.

  7. Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), p. 87.

  8. The University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain has calculated what is called the inbreeding coefficient for each individual across sixteen generations of the Habsburgs, using genealogical information for Philip IV’s son Carlos II and 3,000 of his relatives and ancestors. The inbreeding coefficient indicates the likelihood that an individual would receive two identical genes at a given position on a chromosome because of the relatedness of their parents. By the time Philip’s eventual heir, Carlos II, was born (mentally and physically disabled), the inbreeding coefficient had increased considerably down through the generations, from 0.025 for Philip I to 0.254 for Carlos II–almost as high as would be expected for the offspring of a marriage between a parent and child or brother and sister.

  9. Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King (1980), pp. 31, 32.

  10. Ibid., p. 41.

  11. Rubens to Palamede de Fabri sieur de Valavez, 10 January 1625: Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 61. I have altered the translation here from ‘the greatest amateur of paintings’ to make more sense to the modern ear; also see Donovan on James and art, p. 86.

  12. Bellany and Cogswell, p. 11.

  13. John Colin Dunlop (ed.), Memoirs of Spain during the Reign of Philip IV and Charles II, Vol. I, p. 30 (print on demand).

  14. Although Buckingham promises having once ‘got hold of your bedpost never to quit it’ he may not have been referring to a sexual relationship, but of his desire to regain physical proximity to the king as the fount of honour, patronage and power. It was not unusual to greet a king by embracing his legs. Nevertheless it is difficult to imagine such letters being written to, say, Henry VIII. Bellany and Cogswell, pp. 12, 13.

  15. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 84.

  16. Ibid., p. 104.

  17. Mark Charles Fissel (ed.), War and Government in Britain, 1598–1650 (1991), pp. 111, 112; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 32.

  18. The war policy had its opponents. There were MPs and peers who regretted the failure of the Spanish alliance. They saw Spain as a means of containing the growing maritime power of the Dutch and the threat this posed to English commercial interests. Meanwhile the advocates of war differed on how best to achieve their aims. Some wanted to employ a mercenary force to attack Spanish Flanders, so forcing the Habsburgs to divert troops from the Palatinate. Others hoped to see royal support for their privateering and colonising efforts in the Americas.

  19. Bellany and Cogswell, p. xxiv.

  20. Ibid., p. 219.

  21. Ibid., p. 84.

  22. CSPD 27 March 1625 (2).

  23. Ellis (ed.), Vol. III, p. 244.

  Chapter 3: A Marriage Alliance

  1. Hackneys were licensed to ply for trade from 1625, with charges regulated by Parliament.

  2. CSPV April 1625 (17).

  3. Charles’s late mother, Anna, was reputed to have been a Catholic convert. But Anna’s brother was the Lutheran Christian IV of Denmark, not the King of France, and she had also had the tact to die while the Thirty Years War was still in its infancy.

  4. Quoted in Mark Kishlansky, Charles I (2014), p. 18.

  5. Charles Cotolendi, La Vie de très-haute et très-puissante princesse, Henriette-Marie de France, reyne de la Grande-Bretagne (1690), pp. 10ff; Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth Century France and England (2013), p. 30 and note.

  6. Cotolendi, pp. 10ff; Stedman, p. 30 and note; CSPV 1625–6 (61).

  7. CSPV 16 May (61); Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), p. 36.

  8. A True Discourse of all the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and flighty CHARLES, King of Great Britain, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of FRANCE (1625), p. 8.

  9. CSPV 9 May (47).

  10. Griffey, p. 52.

  11. CSPD 14 May 1625: Charles borrowed money off the Feilding family, for example, and they have kept the receipts for the funeral expenses they paid for.

  12. Yet more diamonds glittered at his spurs, his sword, his girdle, his hatband, and he wore with a feather that was all of diamonds. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, tr. Katherine Wormeley, Vol. I (1886), pp. 31–7; Collection des Mémoires Relatifs a l’histoire de France, ed. A. Petitot (1824), Vol. XXXVI, pp. 342–9; Richelieu, Mémoires, ed. A. Petitot (1823), Vol. V, p. 89.

  13. Mémoires de P. de la Porte, eds. Petitot and Monmarque, Series II, Vol. LIX (1817), pp. 297–9.

  14. Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), pp. 29, 30.

  15. Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), p. 14; Charles had shown loyalty to many of his father’s former office holders, confirming them in their former places. This was disappointing for all those who hoped for a shake-up and new preferment.

  16. Full name: Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac. On the garden, see Diary of John Evelyn, 27 February 1644.

  17. The gardens were reputed to be amongst the finest in the kingdom.

  18. The title Earl of Warwick, first held by their father, had previously been held by the Dudley family. It thus linked the Rich family to the Dudley family’s history: the anti-Spanish stance of the Puritan leader Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was the 2nd Earl of Essex’s stepfather, and to those Edwardian Protestant reforms spearheaded by Leicester’s father, and which culminated in the radical 1552 prayer book. Most famously, it was previously a Plantagenet title, held by the fifteenth-century Warwick the Kingmaker.

  19. Warwick had joined the recently defunct Virginia Company in 1612 and was one of its largest stockholders. He was also a founder member and largest stockholder in the 1614 Somers Island (Bermuda) Company. Further colonial enterprises would follow.

  20. Equivalent to a King of England’s Groom of the Stool.

  21. For contemporary descriptions of her, see note 36 in Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 75–95; Richelieu, Vol. IV, p. 74.

  22. A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII (1989), p. 193.

  23. Mémoires inédits de Louis Henri de Lomenie Comte de Brienne, Vol. I, pp. 331, 332.

  24. Some observers believed that Buckingham’s attentions exceeded what was decent, and, it is said, infuriated Louis when he heard about them.

  25. CSPV 1625–6 (92).

  26. See Griffey, Appendix I, pp. 40–1.

  27. Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion (2010), p. 51, note 36.

  28. CSPV 1625–6 (153).

  29. Griffey, pp. 40–1.

  30. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), p. 9.

  31. Griffey, p. 40.

  32. CSPV 1625–6 (117); Gordon Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome (1935), p. 77 and note 2.

  33. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 239. Shorter and longer versions of this letter exist–and may have been given to the queen at the same time. The shorter, with minor variations, survives in two manuscripts in the Parisian Archives nationales under the title ‘Instruction de la Reine Marie de Medicis’. The longer version of the letter, which may contain additions by Cardinal de Bérulle, is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France under the title ‘Instructions données par Marie de Medicis ä sa fille Henriette de France, Reyne d’Angleterre’. I have quoted from the longer version. For the further details on these letters (and more
), see Karen Britland’s brilliant PhD thesis for the University of Leeds, ‘Neoplatonic identities: Literary Representation and the politics of Henrietta Maria’s Court Circle’ (2000), esp. pp. 41, 42.

  34. Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Vol. II (1902), p. 86.

  35. CSPD 9 June 1625.

  Chapter 4: ‘Under the Eyes of Christendom’

  1. Karen Britland, ‘Neoplatonic identities: Literary Representation and the politics of Henrietta Maria’s Court Circle’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2000), pp. 43, 44. This is my own loose translation of an anonymous tract purporting to have been written by the queen on her leaving France, dated 1625.

  2. Celia Fiennes, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/fiennes/saddle/saddle.html.

  3. Henrietta Maria suffered from scoliosis–a curvature of the spine that reduced her height; Dominic Pearce, Henrietta Maria (2015), p. 40.

  4. Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. I, p. 30.

  5. Basilikon Doron in James VI and I: Political Works, ed. J. P. Sommerville (2006), p. 42.

  6. Mme de Chevreuse was heavily pregnant and when she gave birth to a daughter in July, before her return to France, Charles would play godfather to her baby girl.

  7. BL, Add. MS 72331, No. 174, Wooley (17 June 1625); Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 198.

  8. CSPD 25 June (91); Birch, p. 35.

  9. Originally a Spanish three-metre dance, and considered quite erotic. The French court developed a slow version.

  10. Thoinot Arbeau in 1599.

  11. Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2006), p. 15; in fact Henrietta Maria would not conceive for several years, and aged fifteen she may still have lacked the physical maturity to do so.

  12. David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 108.

  13. James Larkin, Stuart Royal Proclamations (1983), p. 34.

  14. Birch, p. 31.

  15. Ibid., p. 30.

  16. The Duc de Saint-Simon is the Frenchman in question, date 1698. Although many biographies of Henrietta Maria state that she spent the night at Denmark House I can find no contemporary reference for this. Several mention Whitehall; see Birch, pp. 31, 33; ‘Whitehall Palace: Buildings’ in Montagu H. Cox and Philip Norman (eds.), Survey of London: Volume 13, St Margaret, Westminster, Part II: Whitehall I (1930), pp. 41–115, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol13/pt2/pp41.