The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Infinite Privacy
IN 1607, JAMES fell in love.1 At the tilt to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, Sir James Hay employed a young Scot to present his shield and device to the King. Robert Carr was twenty-three years old, handsome and a fine horseman, but that day his skill failed him, and his horse threw him, breaking his leg. James was immediately concerned, and more so when he recalled that Carr had been one of the young men he had brought down from Scotland to run alongside his coach, only to lay them off when he found that in England the vogue for running footmen had passed.2 Arrangements were made to tend to Carr in court, with the King’s own medical experts to attend him. Carr had spent the intervening years in France where he had acquired enough of a veneer of culture to impress James during his frequent visits to Carr’s sickbed. Though the King ‘found no great depth of literature or experience’, Carr presented ‘such a smooth and calm outside’ that James persuaded himself that ‘there might be good anchorage, and a fit harbour for his most retired thoughts’.3
Carr was not of course the first young man to receive such attentions from James.4 Before his marriage, the King had taken Alexander Lindsay as his constant bedfellow, leading to Lindsay being dubbed ‘the King’s only minion and conceit’;5 he raised Lindsay to become Lord Spynie, and arranged a lucrative marriage for him. The hero of the Gowrie debacle, John Ramsay, had occupied a similar position from 1600. Philip Herbert, younger brother of the Earl of Pembroke, had been a favourite for a couple of years from James’s accession in 1603. James had married Philip to Susan de Vere, daughter to the Earl of Oxford and niece of Sir Robert Cecil, in a lavish court wedding in December 1604, and in the following year Herbert was created a baron and then Earl of Montgomery.6 Each in turn had receded from the King’s attention, and a new, younger man had taken his place. James’s intimacy with these men seems to have been taken for granted by contemporary court observers – and not given too much attention. While the King was undoubtedly overly generous to his favourites, freely showering them with gifts and titles, he made no attempt to push any of them into high office or to give them a place at the Privy Council table. Robert Carr, however, was to be different.
With Carr, James cast himself in one of his favourite roles, the kindly schoolmaster, and gave his student Latin lessons every morning, prompting Lord Thomas Howard to quip that ‘I think some one should teach him English too, for, as he is a Scottish lad he hath much need of better language.’ Howard’s comment is typical of the jealous reactions Carr’s rise occasioned among English courtiers, but even he could see why the Scottish lad had done so well so fast. ‘This fellow is straight-limbed, well-favoured, strong-shouldered, and smooth-faced, with some sort of cunning and show of modesty; though, God wot, he well knoweth when to show his impudence.’7 His looks were more fully described by Arthur Wilson who wrote that Carr was ‘rather well compacted than tall; his features and favour comely, and handsome, rather than beautiful; the hair of his head flaxen, that of his face tinctured with yellow, of the Sycambrian colour: in his own nature, of a gentle mind, and affable disposition’.8 A natural charmer of the ladies, Howard continued, Carr was now ‘most likely to win the Prince’s [James’s] affection, and doth it wondrously in a little time. The Prince leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smoothes his ruffled garment, and, when he looketh at Carr, directeth discourse to divers others. This young man doth much study all art and device; he hath changed his tailors and tiremen many times, and all to please the Prince, who laugheth at the long grown fashion of our young courtiers, and wisheth for change every day.’ James had turned down many suits, and just discharged eighteen courtiers, Howard went on, just because they didn’t meet his new Carr-inspired tastes in couture. Any prospective suitor would be well advised to be ‘well trimmed; get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the King saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it be not all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and bushy’.9 It was not long before James’s infatuation with Carr was a source of open mockery. To get on at court now meant being able to praise the new favourite. ‘Will you say the moon shineth all the summer? That the stars are bright jewels fit for Carr’s ears? That the roan jennet surpasseth Bucephalus, and is worthy to be bestridden by Alexander? That his eyes are fire, his tail is Berenice’s locks, and a few more such fancies worthy your noticing? We are almost worn out in our endeavours to keep pace with this fellow in our duty and labour to gain favour, but all in vain; where it endeth I cannot guess, but honours are talked of speedily for him.’10
Honours came speedily indeed. By the end of the year, James had knighted Carr and made him one of his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, ensuring that he would be on hand at all times; on 30 December, John Chamberlain wrote of him as a ‘new favourite’.11 In March 1608, James presented him with ‘a tablet of gold set with diamonds, and the King’s picture’, a token more often given between lovers than master and servant.12 The following January, Carr received estates at Sherborne that had been seized from Sir Walter Ralegh. In March 1611, James created Carr Viscount Rochester, which placed him in the House of Lords, the first Scot to achieve this accolade; James also specified that he was to have precedence over all barons.13 A month later, Carr was made Knight of the Garter, replacing Sir George Home of Spott, Earl of Dunbar, who had died in January 1611, and in 1612 he became a Privy Councillor. But it was with the death of Salisbury that the new Viscount Rochester’s career really took off. James decided not to replace Salisbury immediately as his Principal Secretary. As Viscount Fenton reported in June 1612, ‘For the office of Secretary, his Majesty does still reserve that for himself.’ Despatches came in to Sir Thomas Lake, who delivered them to Rochester, and he to James; they were returned to Rochester, who replied following directions from the King – and Rochester sealed them with the signet.14 In his casual bestowing of high administrative office to an intimate favourite, James was following in his mother’s footsteps: many of the complaints about Rochester as de facto Secretary were the same as those made of David Riccio half a century earlier.
There was a short period when it was noted that ‘Viscount Rochester has been in some disgrace’, but ‘his tender attentions to the King’ during an illness ensured that the disgrace was short lived.15 In his first years with James, Carr was canny enough or lazy enough to rely on the King’s direct favour to maintain his position, rather than aligning himself to any court faction, claiming that he’d move nowhere ‘save where the King had his interest’. But Carr was soon to be forced into battle, when he fell in love with a married woman who occupied a very particular position in the factional life of English politics. Lady Frances Howard was the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and been married in 1606 to Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex, then only fifteen years old. The match had been one of James’s pet projects: by marrying the scion of the Essex family to a young beauty of the Suffolk camp, he hoped to defuse a potential court antagonism. Instead, he seems only to have pushed that antagonism into the marriage itself. The young husband and wife never shared a home, and Essex soon went off to the Continent. By the time he returned in the last months of 1609, Frances and Carr were lovers. For three years, the affair continued until Lady Frances tired of the pretence, and decided to rid herself of her husband. Plotting with her father Suffolk and her great-uncle Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, Frances determined to divorce Essex on grounds of his impotence, and marry her lover. But, understandably, Essex refused to play along by declaring to the world that he was impotent, and instead Frances was forced to allege that Essex had been bewitched, and that he was impotent only in relations with her.16 Neatly forgetting that he had encouraged the Essex marriage, James threw all his weight behind Frances’s divorce suit; his loyalties now lay firmly with Rochester.
Facilitating Rochester’s marriage was one thing; watching his friendship with another man was less easy for the King. The Viscount came with an i
ntimate friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, whom he had met in Scotland in 1601. Literate and urbane, it was Overbury who had given Rochester the veneer of sophistication that James hoped promised greater intellectual and emotional depths. Now Overbury took on much of the work that was delegated to the favourite, including allegedly receiving most diplomatic despatches from James’s ambassadors abroad, often bypassing both Rochester and the King. He soon began to develop a ‘very insolent’ attitude, not least by claiming publicly that it was all due to him that Rochester had done so well. As part of his secretarial duties, Overbury was happy enough to write Rochester’s love letters to the Countess of Essex, but when Rochester started to talk of marriage, he lost patience. Overbury, as Bishop Goodman writes, ‘did much abuse the family of the Howards’, and he knew his position with his friend would be untenable if Rochester married into the Howard family – a fact that became apparent even to Rochester.
James’s antipathy towards Overbury was soon obvious to the public. John Chamberlain reported that James ‘hath long had a desire to remove him from about the Lord of Rochester, as thinking it a dishonour to him that the world should have an opinion that Rochester ruled him and Overbury ruled Rochester’. James decided that Overbury would be much better off in a continental diplomatic appointment – perhaps to the Archduke, or in France, or better still Muscovy. Ellesmere and Pembroke were despatched to inform Overbury of his good fortune, but Sir Thomas turned down the post, citing his lack of languages. They replied that he was young enough to pick up the native tongue quickly, but he declined again, citing his ‘indisposition of body and want of health’, as he was troubled with ‘the spleen’. A change of air might be a good remedy, they persisted. Now Overbury refused ‘stiffly’, saying ‘that he was not willing to forsake his country’ and that ‘he hoped that the King neither in law nor justice could compel him to leave his country’. James, ‘incensed’ at this refusal, imprisoned Overbury in the Tower in April 1613, and insisted to the Privy Council that this act should not be construed as any form of attack on Rochester: ‘he had and still did take more delight in his company and conversation than in any man’s living’.17 Rochester went through the motions of trying to secure Overbury’s release, but he understood that this state of affairs was better for him.18 In early August, it was rumoured that Overbury would submit to the King, and ‘have leave to travel, with a private intimation not to return until his Majesty’s pleasure be further known’. He would be getting off lightly since there had been ‘much ado’ to keep Overbury from suffering ‘a public censure of banishment and loss of office, such a rooted hatred lieth in the King’s heart towards him’.19
Meanwhile, Frances’s bizarre claim that her husband’s impotence was specific only to their marriage, and was caused by bewitchment, was referred to a specially appointed commission, comprising four bishops, four doctors of the Civil Law, and two Privy Councillors – until James realised that the commission was likely to vote against the divorce. Then he and Suffolk employed strong-arm tactics, arranging private conversations with the more tractable members of the commission, and ‘persuading’ them to see the case for the divorce. Bishops Neile and Andrewes, and councillor Sir Thomas Parry had their judgement ‘reformed’ in this way. But he was less successful with his Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot. Abbot had been a surprise choice to replace Bancroft as Archbishop in 1611. It was widely assumed that James would pick Lancelot Andrewes, his favourite preacher, in the same manner that he notoriously promoted his chaplain Robert Abbot and his editor James Montagu to bishoprics. Instead, he chose Abbot, an academic and, worse, a Calvinist. James let Abbot know that he had been advanced not for any learning, wisdom or sincerity but through the recommendation of the late Earl of Dunbar, ‘whose suit he cannot forget nor will suffer to lose his intention’;20 Abbot had been Dunbar’s chaplain, and a visitor to Scotland, where he attempted to promulgate James’s ecclesiastical polity. Now James may have regretted his loyalty to Dunbar. Abbot withstood several private discussions with the King. ‘What a strange and fearful thing it was,’ he later wrote, ‘that his Majesty should be so far engaged in that business, that he should profess that himself had set the matter in that course of judgement; that the judges should be dealt with beforehand, and in a sort, directed what they should determine.’ Finally, James summoned the commission to Windsor and spent three hours explaining to them the merits of the case: Abbot fell on to his knees and pleaded tearfully to be taken off the commission. James refused.
The tears and kneeling having failed, Abbot appealed to James’s intellectual vanity. He wrote to the King arguing that witchcraft-induced impotency was discussed in neither the Scriptures, nor in the writings of the Church Fathers, nor in the records of councils of the primitive Church. It may have existed under the rule of the Roman Church, but now, in enlightened post-Reformation days, it had disappeared. The Essexes should turn to prayer or medicine to solve their marital woes. James rose to the challenge with a wonderfully imaginative response. Abbot could not expect the Scriptures, the Fathers or the councils to provide an exact answer, he claimed, but those sources said nothing that would make such a divorce impossible. In those early days the Devil had probably not discovered impotency through witchcraft, but had invented it during the papist years. ‘Look [at] my Daemonologie,’ James advised. The Reformation had not broken Satan’s power – indeed, was not this case before them vivid proof of that? Abbot was merely prejudiced against the Countess of Essex, a dangerous thing in a judge; he should recall how Christ had admonished us not to judge others. James, on the other hand, was completely impartial; now he called on Abbot ‘to have a kind of faith implicit in my judgement, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity’. The best thankfulness that Abbot, ‘you that are so far my creature’, could use towards the King was ‘to reverence and follow my judgement and not to contradict it, except when you can demonstrate unto me that I am mistaken or wrong informed’. Failing to win Abbot over, James finally proved the uprighteousness of his conscience by fiddling the figures: realising that he had five commissioners for and five against, he merely added two more amenable bishops to the list, and gained a seven to five victory on 25 September.21 Rochester was now free to marry his Frances. In October 1613, despite his residence in England, Rochester became Lord Treasurer of Scotland, and, for the marriage, James created Rochester Earl of Somerset, so that the erstwhile Countess of Essex could remain a Countess.22
The marriage took place on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1613, in the Chapel Royal.23 The King footed the bill – even though Crown lands worth £10,000 had to be sold off just to provide jewels for the bride. He also gave away the Countess, who was ‘married in her hair’, her free-flowing tresses symbolising her virginity, even though some observers felt that the date, place and minister of the marriage were unfortunately chosen: as Chamberlain pointed out, it ‘fell out somewhat strangely that the same man, should marry the same person, in the same place, upon the self-same day’ when the first husband was ‘yet living’. Despite James’s expenditure, Chamberlain was not impressed by the occasion: ‘Speech and expectation goes far beyond the matter,’ he commented, since the marriage had taken place ‘without any such bravery as was looked for.’24 The wedding day was capped with a masque composed by Thomas Campion in which married love between a man and a woman was piquantly evaluated against male–male friendship:
Some friendship between man and man prefer,
But I th’affection between man and wife.
What good can be in life,
Whereof no fruits appear?…
How can man perpetual be
But in his own posterity?25
The feasting and revels lasted right through the holiday period until Twelfth Night, when they were capped by a second, rival wedding, at ‘Queen’s Court’, Somerset House, as another Robert Ker, the Earl of Roxburgh, married one of Anna’s favourites, Jane Drummond. By the time the celebrations drew to a close, James was tired, and made a speedy re
treat to Newmarket.26
Somerset’s continued ascent was remarkable. By now he was also wealthy: in the year before his marriage he was said to have got through some £90,000,27 and in April 1613 he even offered to lend £22,000 to help out the King.28 In politics, the Earl’s modus operandi was praised by the Spanish ambassador Sarmiento, who noted that at the Council table, Somerset ‘showeth much temper and modesty, without seeming to press and sway anything. But afterwards the King resolveth all business with him alone, both those that pass in Council and many others wherewith he never maketh them acquainted.’29 John Chamberlain complained that ‘there is no man (but one) so near that knows any thing of secret, but all things are carried in scrinio pectoris [in the secret space of their hearts] between them two’.30 When James opened Parliament in April 1614, Sarmiento noted that it was Somerset who led a horse to the right of the King as he processed, acting as Master of the Horse, even though that post belonged to the Earl of Worcester.31
In the months following the marriage, the Howards consolidated their status. As 1614’s Addled Parliament drew to its untidy close, the elder Howard statesman, the Earl of Northampton, became seriously ill. Surgeons operated on a tumour in his thigh but, as with so many invasive operations of the period, infection set in and, within a week, Northampton was dead of gangrene.32 This blow to the Howards was tempered when James bestowed on Somerset the dead Earl’s offices of Lord Privy Seal and Warden of the Cinque Ports. In July, James made two further key appointments, naming Somerset’s father-in-law Suffolk as Lord Treasurer, ‘with many good words, as that he had made choice of him not for his learning in Greek and Latin, or for that he could make epigrams and orations, but for his approved fidelity and integrity’, another glancing blow at the memory of Salisbury. Suffolk’s fidelity and integrity would prove to be no remedy for James’s financial woes: soon even the victuallers providing the court’s food were being forced to allow the King credit; within a few months, James was openly selling titles. At the same time, Somerset was named as Lord Chamberlain, at the head of James’s household, thus sealing his control on the King’s intimate life; James commented that ‘no man should marvel that he bestowed a place so near himself at his friend, whom he loved above all men living’.33