The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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Buckingham had regained his confidence, and celebrated by throwing a great feast at Burley-on-the-Hill; James made a public endorsement of the Duke by accepting an invitation as guest of honour. In a last ditch attempt to undo Buckingham, Arthur Brett was persuaded that now was the moment to return to court. In July he suddenly appeared before the King while he was hunting in Waltham Forest, grabbing hold of the King’s bridle (or stirrup, in some accounts), begging to plead his case. James was reportedly ‘much offended’ at the intrusion, and galloped away, ordering the Earl of Warwick to forbid Brett from coming into his presence again (he was later arrested), and sending word that Middlesex should move away from the court, as his sentence required.36
During August, Buckingham and d’Effiat put pressure on James to submit to the terms of the marriage, and James agreed to order the suspension of all prosecutions of recusants. But then a new chief minister was appointed in France: Cardinal Richlieu. Richlieu insisted that James should sign a formal written undertaking, a demand that deeply offended the King. James despatched a harshly worded response to France, and Buckingham (who had again been ill and away from court) was forced to intercept the letter and smooth things over with d’Effiat. Observers watched the King carefully for signs of his relative goodwill to France and Spain, but many, including even the highly experienced John Chamberlain, remained mystified.37 By the end of September 1624 James agreed to promise in writing that English Catholics would be freed from persecution. On Sunday 21 November, the French match was concluded, and Thomas Carey, ‘a privado of the Prince’s Bedchamber’ was sent into France ‘with a love letter and some rich and rare jewel’ for the Princess; in London, the organ in St Paul’s was played for two hours ‘on their loudest pipes’, followed by bells, bonfires, and ‘a great peal of ordnance at the Tower’.38 This had been very much the doing of James, Charles, Buckingham and to some extent Secretary of State Sir Edward Conway. It was reported that some other Privy Councillors had to be told what was being celebrated by the bonfires they saw in late November; the Archbishop of Canterbury quipped that there were now two Privy Councils in England, and that of the two, ‘that of Newmarket was the higher’.39
The French ambassadors followed James to Theobalds, Royston and then to Cambridge where James received them on 10 December. James was ‘so ill troubled with a universal pain in shoulders, elbows, knees and feet’ that he was forced to leave the entertaining of his guests to the Prince. The articles were agreed and signed with only the King, Prince, the two ambassadors, Buckingham and Secretary Conway in attendance, deliberately excluding the lords of the Privy Council who were also in the King’s retinue; this was to reduce the number of men who knew that James and Charles had also signed a separate ecrit particulier, in which they gave their undertaking to free Roman Catholics from prosecution.40
James was increasingly frail. When he came to sign the treaty, his hand was too afflicted with arthritis, and he had to use a stamp. A planned comedy was cancelled as he felt himself too ill to attend. James took to his bed, once again leaving the entertainment of his visitors to his son, the Lord Keeper, and the Earl of Warwick, and was still there on the 18th, ‘pained with the gout in his hands and arms’.41 It may have been after this encounter that James wrote a strange letter to Buckingham, begging him to come to him quickly with his family:
Notwithstanding of your desiring me to write yesterday yet had I written in the evening, if at my coming in out of the park such a drowsiness had not corned [sic] upon me, as I was forced to sit and sleep in my chair half an hour. And yet I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christenmass a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow-life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.
My only sweet and dear child,
James R.42
James went to Whitehall for the holiday festivities but ‘kept his chamber all this Christmas, not coming once to the chapel or to any of the plays’.43 On Christmas Day, he heard Lancelot Andrewes preach on Psalm 2. 7, the seventeenth and last Christmas sermon by Andrewes he was to attend. Occasionally, ‘in fair weather’ he went out in his letter ‘to see some flights at the brook’.44 The Twelfth Night masque, Ben Jonson’s The Fortunate Isles and their Union, was put off until 9 January, when James attended it seated with the French and Venetian ambassadors and agents from the King of Spain and the Archduchess.45
Early in the New Year, he made his usual journey to his favourite haunts of Theobalds, Royston and Newmarket, this time with Charles in attendance while Buckingham remained in control in London. In late January, the Duke fell ill again. Charles forwarded a message from the King: ‘he commands me to tell you [that] he is extremely sorry for your late sickness & likkwise for your delay of coming hither, but he assures himself that ye will not lose an hour of time of coming away out of that filthy town as soon as your pressing occasions will permit you, & that ye may see how mischiefs come by planets & never one single, he has commanded me to tell you, that he is as ill tormented at this time in his right elbow and knee, as he was at Cambridge, but he hopes that your coming merrily hither with the counts [i.e. the Villiers women] in your company to be his nurses will make him a whole man again.’46 The ‘pressing occasions’ keeping Buckingham in London concerned the English army commanded by Mansfeld. Buckingham had wanted to land the army in France, but King Louis refused. According to Charles, James was convinced that ‘this juggling proceeds from the importunity of the Jesuits and Spanish faction with that King’,47 and he was easily persuaded to follow Buckingham’s suggestion to allow Mansfeld to go directly to Holland instead, and the ships set sail on 31 January. But their fate was miserable. Some men were put ashore at Walcheren, but the others were forced to sail to Gertruidenburg; there, frost made it impossible for them to land, and they were left to the mercy of a virulent infection that killed hundreds, their bloated corpses pushed overboard to pollute the beaches. When the survivors eventually landed, they starved to death. In England, the terrible news was met with public outrage – and the finger of blame was pointed not at Mansfeld, but at Buckingham.48
In February, news reached Paris that the papal dispensation for the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria had been issued, but it demanded changes to the articles signed by Louis and James. But then Buckingham heard from his friend Lord Nithsdale in the Vatican that the dispensation was ‘free and unclogged’ – suggesting that the French were lying to force further concessions from England. James was unsurprised. ‘Where is your glorious match with France?’, he demanded of Buckingham, ‘and your royal frank Monsieurs?’ Buckingham was himself disgusted at the French ‘shitten mouths’. He urged James to ‘roundly let the ambassador know you so much prize your honour that neither in a circumstance nor form will you make any alteration’. James needed no encourgement to follow that advice and when he met with d’Effiat (without Buckingham in attendance), despite giving in on a few details, it was France who had to climb down.49 In mid-March Buckingham sent his coaches to Dover in preparation for his journey to Paris to bring back Charles’s new bride. But his plans were to be altered.
On 28 February, at Royston, James knighted Sir Richard Bettenson of Essex – a routine occurrence, but this was to be his last knight.50 It was at Theobalds in the early days of March 1625 that he fell ill with the ‘tertian’, a malaria-like fever characterised by paroxysms every two or three days. At first no one was too worried: the Countess of Bedford wrote to a friend that ‘there was no more doubt of his safety than of every man’s that hath an ordinary tertian ague’,51 and John Chamberlain reported that the King was in no ‘manner of danger if he would suffer himself to be ordered and governed by physical rules’, that is, by the r
ules of physicians.52 But characteristically, James delighted in ignoring medical advice, trying instead to allay his fever by holding his hands in cold water, and drinking prodigious amounts of small beer.53 When his fever abated temporarily, he tormented his doctors by demanding of them where they thought his ague had gone. Buckingham rushed to be by the King’s bedside, but by the time of his ‘seventh fit’ on 16 March, they had become ‘less intemperate’ and Secretary Conway reported that it had ‘left more clearness and cheerfulness in his looks than the former’.54 Recovery seemed to be indicated on the 23rd as convulsions were reported to grow ‘less and less’,55 but suddenly James started to deteriorate, and the convulsions became more violent. News came that another of his favourites, Hamilton, had died, and James was plunged into a depression. ‘I shall never see London again’, he realised.56
Buckingham was at his King’s bedside throughout. A week into the illness, the Duke and his mother remembered that, during a recent illness, Buckingham had been relieved by the remedies of one Dr John Remington, a country practitioner from Dunmow in Essex. He sent for Remington’s medicines, and mother and son administered plasters (poultices) without the knowledge of the royal physicians. One plaster ‘eat down into his belly without the least hurt of disturbance of nature’, but, shortly afterwards, James took a turn for the worse, and the physicians protested that their work had been undermined. They refused to give James any more physic until the plasters had been taken off, which was done; and the next three fits were said to be ‘easier’. But then on Monday 21st, the plasters were applied once again, and James ‘grew worse and worse’, and his surgeon Mr Hayes had to be wakened to take them off. Then one of Buckingham’s servants named Baker made a julip, which the Duke brought to James himself; James took two draughts, but refused a third. After his death, it was claimed, the physicians were presented with a bill to sign, affirming that the plasters and the julip were safe, but most refused to do so, pointing out that they had no idea what the ingredients of either were.
Buckingham was now in control, and had one of the physicians, the Scot John Craig, dismissed.57 But another, George Eglisham, took his revenge a year later when he published at Frankfurt a Latin tract with a sensational story. Buckingham, he claimed, had given the King a white powder that made him extremely ill. The physicians declared that the King had been poisoned, but Buckingham expelled them violently from the sickroom, threatening to draw his sword. Buckingham’s mother then knelt before the King and craved justice against these accusations that she and her son had poisoned him. ‘Poisoned me?’ said the King, ‘and with that, turning himself, swooned.’58
One source claims that, while he was still lucid, James had three hours’ private talk with Charles, sending all his attendants two or three rooms away, ‘to be out of hearing’.59 If true, he had grasped his last chance for a proper conversation. ‘Late at night’ on the 24th, Conway wrote to the Earl of Carlisle:
This last night was the tenth night of his Majesty’s fever, which exercised such illness on a weak body, which, being reverenced and loved with so much cause as his Majesty hath given, struck much sense and fear into the hearts of his servants that looked upon him. Yet to deliver to you the state clearly, this day his Majesty hath taken broths, hath had large benefit of nature, and slept well. And, more to your comfort, his Majesty did, with life and cheerfulness, receive the Sacrament in the presence of the Prince, the Duke, and many others, and admitted many to take it with him; and in the action and the circumstances of it, did deliver himself so answerable to his writings, and his wise and pious professions, as did justly produce mixed tears between comfort and grief; and this day, and now this night, he recovers temper, rests, in appearance to us, strength, appetite, and digestion; which gives us great hope of his amendment, grounded not only upon desire, but upon the method of judicious observation.60
On the night of Friday 25th, a stroke loosened the King’s face muscles, so that his jaw dropped. His swollen tongue, combined with huge quantities of phlegm, constantly threatened to suffocate him: it was said that ‘his tongue was swollen so big in his mouth, that either he could not speak at all, or not be understood’.61 He was also afflicted with severe dysentery, suffering, it was reported, ‘in filth and misery’.
Sensing he was near death, he called for his trusted Andrewes, but Andrewes was himself ill with ‘a sore fit of the stone and gout’.62 Instead Lord Keeper John Williams and George Abbot came. After failing to engage the King with cheerful conversation, Williams knelt beside the bed and told the King that the end was near. James asked to partake of the Communion, repeated the Creed, declared himself in love and charity with his neighbours, and received the Sacrament, according to Williams, ‘with that zeal and devotion as if he had not been a frail man but a cherubim clothed with flesh and blood’. Conway wrote how James ended the Creed by saying ‘There is no other belief, no other hope!’ and when Williams asked him whether he would have the absolution read, answered ‘As it is practised in the English Church I ever approved it; but in the dark way of the Church of Rome, I do defy it.’63
On Saturday afternoon, his physician Sir William Paddy told him ‘that there was nothing left for me to do but to pray for his soul’.64 The King called for his son Charles and tried to speak to him, ‘but nature being exhausted he had no strength to express his intention’. Williams prayed with the King, and read out forty-one ‘sentences’, short devotional phrases that James attempted to repeat, ‘but his soul began to retreat more inward and so by degrees he took less notice of external things’. The end came on Sunday 27 March 1625, just before noon, when with ‘lords and servants kneeling on one side, his archbishops, bishops and other of his chaplains on the other side of his bed, without pangs or convulsions at all, Solomon slept’.65
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On the night of Monday 28 March, the corpse of King James was brought from Theobalds back to London, travelling through Smithfield, Holborn, Chancery Lane, and down the Strand to Queen Anna’s old residence, Denmark House, to lie in state until 10 April. As he had been twenty-two years earlier, James was welcomed to the capital ‘by all the nobility about the town, the pensioners, officers, and household servants, besides the Lord Mayor and aldermen’, but according to John Chamberlain the solemnity was lost: ‘it was marred by foul weather, so that there was nothing to be seen but coaches and torches’.66
From the outset, the accession of King Charles was hailed as a fresh new start for British royalty. To the public, the twenty-four-year-old was already a dashing figure, due to his romantic exploits in Madrid and his committed military stance against Spain; to the Commons, he seemed to be well informed and receptive to their point of view. By the end of his reign, in stark contrast, James had become a distant, aloof monarch; his occasional forays into public life were hopelessly compromised by an innate distaste for crowds and an almost instinctive knack for putting his most offensive thoughts into words. Twenty-two years of what many perceived as negligent government, a grossly lavish lifestyle, and an unsavoury parade of pretty young favourites, was at an end, and not before time.
Immediate reactions to the new King focused on the destruction of James’s corrupt Bedchamber. Already James’s men, sent to Denmark House to attend on the late King’s body, were worried, ‘apprehensive that by their absence they might be dispossessed of their places and lodgings’. They were right to be concerned: they had been quietly ousted, and Charles’s smaller personal retinue had moved into lodgings next to his own at Whitehall.67 The Countess of Bedford reported on 12 April that Charles was showing all the right signs of being his own man: ‘for ought anybody yet can discover, he makes his own determinations, and is very stiff in them’. Already, the Countess wrote, he had ‘changed the whole face of the court very near to the same form it had in Queen Elizabeth’s time’, cutting down on his personal retinue, letting the Privy Council go no further than the Privy Gallery, and permitting only the Gentlemen of his Bedchamber to go beyond. The new King was pious, never
failing, ‘morning and evening’, to come to prayers in his closet, and listening attentively to sermons: ‘so as there is all good signs that God hath set him over this kingdom for a blessing’.68
John Chamberlain confirmed that ‘The King shows himself every way very gracious and affable, but the court is kept more strait and private than in the former time. He is very attentive and devout at prayers and sermons gracing the preachers and assembly with amiable and cheerful countenance, which gives much satisfaction, and there is great hope conceived that the world will every way amend, if the necessity of the time constrain not the contrary now at the first.’69 The Venetian ambassador Zuane Pesaro was similarly impressed. ‘The King’s reputation increases day by day. He professes constancy in religion, sincerity in action and that he will not have recourse to subterfuges in his dealings. His attention to those things renders him more popular, and he conducts himself with every propriety.’ Charles was seen to spend many hours of his day reading a book, which was thought to be a manuscript collection of edifying maxims. Well briefed on matters of state, Charles made a point of appearing in the Privy Chamber every morning, ‘in the presence of all the lords and officials of that apartment. He detains some in conversation and salutes the others and leaves them all happy and devoted.’70 The finishing touches were put to the picture when Charles married Henrietta Maria by proxy on 1 May, and six weeks later welcomed his bride at Canterbury.
And yet this same gilded youth was to become the most despised of kings, the man who pushed the country into Civil War, was forced from his throne, tried for treachery, and died on the scaffold on 30 January 1649, in front of what had been his own Whitehall Palace. Why Charles should have fallen so precipitously has exercised the minds of historians, politicians and biographers for three and a half centuries, and no critical consensus has been reached. But some of the most rooted causes may lie not in his reign, but in that of his father. For Charles’s accession in March 1625 was not the clean start so lauded by contemporaries. James left many legacies, not all of them good. Even as he lay dying, his most recent foreign policy decisions were proving themselves murderously disastrous on the ground. His finances were hopelessly compromised. A series of scandals – the Overbury murder, the fall of Bacon and Middlesex – had shaken public confidence in government. His series of fraught encounters with the English Commons had left the Crown constantly on the defensive.