by Simon Schama
But then James’s problems of the purse were self-inflicted. Compared with the famously tight-fisted Elizabeth he was a bottomless well of prodigality. From the very beginning of his reign he threw money at his Scottish companions and courtiers, provoking one parliamentarian to characterize the treasury as a ‘royal cistern wherein his Majesty’s largesse to the Scots caused a continual and remediless leak’. But James had come from a relatively poor country with limited resources (which had not, however, stopped him from piling up debts), and in England he obviously felt himself to be in hog heaven. Lands, monopolies, offices, jewels, houses were all showered on favourites, who then took their cue from the king by themselves spending colossally more than they could afford. The entire court culture was drunk on spending, and there was plenty to spend it on: elaborate masques (average cost £1400 a year) devised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, in which mechanical contraptions were constructed to make men appear to be flying through the air or swallowed by the oceans; fantastic costumes, encrusted with carbuncle gems; immense dresses for the ladies, pseudo-Persian, billowing beneath the waist, or breasts revealed above, covered only with the most transparently gauzy lawn (a fashion that, to the horror of godly ministers, became ubiquitous at court). Feasting was Lucullan. In 1621 – a rocky year for Crown-country relations – one such banquet costing more than £3000 needed a hundred cooks for eight days to produce 1600 dishes including 240 pheasants. The Jacobean court’s devotion to futile excess was perfectly epitomized by the novelty of the ‘ante-supper’ invented by the Scots lord James Hay, later Earl of Carlisle. Guests would arrive to ogle a vast table magnificently set with food, the only point of which was to be inspected, tickling the saliva glands into action before the whole thing was removed, thrown away and replaced by identical food that had just come from the kitchens.
The craze for conspicuous waste was contagious. Anyone within the wide circle of the court (which James made a lot wider by creating no fewer than thirty-two earls, nineteen viscounts and fifty-six knight baronets, the last a wholly new invention) who wanted to be taken seriously needed to build on the spectacular scale demanded by fashionable taste and by a king who was constantly on the hoof between hunting lodges and who, even more than Elizabeth, expected to be entertained in palatial style. James made himself so much at home in his courtiers’ houses that one desperate host wrote a letter to his bulldog, Mr Jowler, asking him, since he had the royal attention, if he would not mind urging departure on the king. Inevitably, the ‘prodigy houses’ that had been going up in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign became even more prodigious in James’s time. With Britain at peace, its aristocrats travelled more freely and widely in Europe and brought back with them exuberantly Mannerist designs for stone-clad façades and intricately carved interior panelling. The show places of the Jacobean grandees, like Robert Cecil’s Hatfield (the Hertfordshire estate given by the king in exchange for Cecil’s sumptuous Theobalds), the Earl of Pembroke’s Wilton in Wiltshire or the most prodigious monster of them all, the Earl of Suffolk’s Audley End in Essex (on which James passed his famous backhand compliment, ‘too big for a king but might do well enough for a Lord Treasurer’), boasted galleries as long as football pitches, and, now that the English glass industry had been properly established, great ranges of windows to light them. Even the furniture of the houses – beds, desks and cabinets – sprouted putti and sphinxes, obelisks and miniature temples. Draperies were required to be especially stunning and often renewed. Some £14,000 were spent just to furnish the Countess of Salisbury’s (by definition temporary) lying-in chamber with white satin, embroidered with gold and ornamented with pearls. Nothing was too fantastic not to be diverting, especially the stunning gardens, which, since they now featured complicated riddles and allusions to the classics, embedded in statuary, fountains and grottoes, now required specialized hydraulic engineers, like the de Caus family, to design and maintain them.
All this was, of course, ruinously expensive, and many of the most ambitious builders were duly ruined. The most prodigal of all, the king (whose spending was at twice the rate of Elizabeth), drove successive treasurers to distraction attempting to find ways to support his extravagances. There were old ways and there were new ways, but none of them ever came up with enough money and all of them created resentment. The old ways featured the exploitation of ‘Crown rights’ like the ‘purveyances’, the right granted to the Crown to set prices for goods and services, ostensibly for the household, at well below market rates. Over time it seemed easier, especially to the Crown, to settle for money sums that represented the difference between purveyance prices and market prices, instead of the goods themselves. What had begun as something necessary to the dignity of the Crown had degenerated into a racket. That the honour of the Crown – still an important element in its authority – was shabbily compromised by James’s creation of more than 800 new knights at £30 a head was obvious from all the jokes showing up in libels and ballads featuring figures like ‘Sir Fabian Scarecrow’, whose landlady coughed up the necessary for his knighthood.
None of these expedients was likely to endear the Crown to its subjects, especially out in the country, where knighthood and aristocratic hierarchy were still treated with reverence. Likewise, when the government sold tax ‘farms’ (the right, in return for an up-front sum, to run a tax-collection or customs operation as a private business), it seemed to be delivering the helpless consumer to a private individual who had an interest in maximizing his take in a period of continuing low wages and high prices. In many respects it was no worse than their experience in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. But then there had been hope, by now gone, that James’s government would be an improvement. By 1610 it was clear to Robert Cecil, now given the thankless job of Lord Treasurer in addition to being Secretary of State, that something had to be done to find a more dependable source of income for the Crown. In that year he did his best to sell a ‘Great Contract’ to parliament, in which the Crown would relinquish its feudal rackets, like purveyances and ‘wardships’ (the right to manage the property of a feudal minor), in return for a guaranteed annual revenue of £200,000. The deal came to grief when, simultaneously, James decided to demand compensation for the abolition of wardship officers and parliament came to the conclusion that it had overpaid. In the general bitterness, the row over money turned constitutional. Dissolving the uncooperative parliament, James denounced the Commons who had ‘perilled and annoyed our health, wounded our reputation, embouldened an ill-natur’d people, encroached on many of our privileges and plagued our purse’. Lord Ellesmere believed that the Commons’ presumption in denying the king adequate funds had encroached on the ‘regality supreme’ of the Crown by parading a concern for ‘liberty’ that, if not checked hard and fast, ‘will not cease until it break out into democracy’.
Without its life-line, the government staggered on, although Robert Cecil did not, dying of stomach cancer in 1612. He was hardly gone before the predictable attacks on ‘Deformity’, including one very pointed polemic by Francis Bacon, appeared. With Cecil collapsed both the moral and actual credit of the Crown. London brewers (hitting the king where it hurt) refused to supply any more ale without advance payment. A Dutch goldsmith, from whom James asked for a £20,000 loan on security of jewels he had bought from him, turned James down on the grounds that others had contributed to the purchase price! It did not help that the king now entrusted the Treasury to one of the Howard clan, the Earl of Suffolk, whose reckless prodigality at Audley End ought to have been an immediate disqualification. But the bigger the debt the more impressive the player, the king seems to have felt.
Little went right in the years ahead. In 1612 Henry, the Prince of Wales, the paragon of Protestant patriots, lauded as virtuous, intelligent, handsome on a horse and (compared to his father, old Rex Pacificus) refreshingly interested in bloodshed, died. The outpouring of sorrow at his huge funeral was genuine. In contrast to the defunct Protestant hero, his replacement as Prin
ce of Wales, Charles, had been such a puny child that no one expected him to survive infancy, and even at the age of five he needed to be carried around in people’s arms. He was tongue-tied (in glaring contrast to his father), solemn and very short. After Prince Henry died the golden suit of parade armour that had been made for him was passed down to the new Prince of Wales. It was too big for him. Much of his subsequent life would be spent trying to grow into its imperial measurements.
To compensate for a death, two great weddings were celebrated the following year, 1613. At the time there seemed reason only for rejoicing, but both unions turned out to be extremely bad news for the peace and good order of James’s realm. The more auspicious of the two matches was the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the prince-elector of the Rhineland Palatinate. If the court had had to suffer the loss of its own native Protestant son in Henry, the son-in-law, Frederick, seemed a reasonable replacement. The festivities, held in mid-February, were, as usual, rowdy and excessive, culminating in an elaborately staged mock naval battle on the Thames between ‘Turks’ and ‘Venetians’, during which the paper and paste-board port of Algiers went up prematurely in flames.
The second marriage crashed and burned even more spectacularly. The match was between Frances Howard, the daughter of the spendthrift Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Suffolk, and James’s current favourite, Robert Carr (Scottish page of Lord Hay, the great party thrower), whose shapely length of leg caught James’s eye when Carr was injured in the tilts. Carr, whom the Earl of Suffolk described as ‘straight-limbed, well-favoured, strong-shouldered and smooth-faced with some sort of cunning and show of modsty, tho, God wot, he well knoweth when to show his impudence’, had been promoted at dizzy speed, first in 1611 to the Viscountcy of Rochester, where he had been endowed with Henry II’s immense pile of a castle, and then in November 1613 to the even grander earldom of Somerset. For the nuptials Ben Jonson produced a masque called Hymenaei, designed, in its rapturous extolling of marriage, to draw a veil over the unsavoury circumstances in which the union had come about. For Frances Howard had been married before, in 1606, at the age of thirteen, to the second Earl of Essex, then fourteen. But – so it was later claimed in the proceedings for annulment – the marriage had not gone well, at least not in bed. Not much was kept private in the world of the Jacobean court, especially since this kind of gossip was meat and drink for the printed courants or news-sheets, which, much as tabloids today, lived off stories of spooky astral occurrences and the juicy adulteries of the rich and famous. In Frances Howard they had a story beyond their wildest dreams.
Even before she had met Carr, stories of Essex’s impotence were doing the rounds, along with rumours that Frances had obligingly unburdened Prince Henry of his virginity. In 1613, to the horror of his friend and political adviser Sir Thomas Overbury, Carr made it clear that he wanted to convert their affair into a marriage. It was a period when the power of the Howard clan was at its peak, and when the king found it virtually impossible to deny Carr anything, not even a wife, for even if the king were a sexually active gay, he seemed completely without jealousy where the heterosexual needs of his young protégés were concerned. And once she had made her mind up, Frances was simply unstoppable. Her marriage to Essex, she insisted, had never been consummated and not for want of her trying her best. (She was later accused of feeding Essex drugs to guarantee his impotence.) A commission of the Church was appointed to judge whether there was a case for divorce based on the claim of non-consummation, which (to the consternation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who begged the king to be excused) involved the prelates of England solemnly listening to detailed evidence concerning the failure of the noble earl to introduce his member satisfactorily into the well-disposed orifice of the countess. A physical examination found that she was indeed virgo intacta (although it was later said that Frances had insisted on veiling her face during the inspection and had actually substituted a virgin hired for the imposture, which in light of her subsequent inventiveness cannot be entirely ruled out). When the reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury demurred over supplying the correct result, the king stacked the jury by adding bishops who were less exacting in their judgement. The Essex–Howard union was declared no union at all, and the new marriage sanctioned.
There was, however, one obstacle to the realization of marital bliss between Frances Howard and Robert Carr, and that was Sir Thomas Overbury, who annoyingly continued to refer to her as ‘that base woman’ and to counsel Carr to break off the alliance with someone he thought little better than a whore. To shut him up, Overbury was offered a foreign embassy, which, to general consternation, he declined. Declared an affront to the king’s majesty, he was locked away in the Tower, where he died in September 1613.
For a while Frances and Somerset enjoyed a prolonged honeymoon. But about eighteen months after the wedding, in the summer of 1615, it emerged that Overbury had not simply died in the Tower but had been murdered, by the unusual method of a poisoned enema. The lowdown on Overbury’s death had come from an apothecary’s assistant, who, before dying, had confessed that he had been paid £20 by the Countess of Essex to do the deed. An investigation produced an extraordinary story that the Lieutenant of the Tower had noticed that tarts and jellies and the like, delivered from the Countess for the prisoner, looked and smelled suspicious, especially when one of his own men had already confessed to attempting a poisoning. Scared of offending the most powerful woman in the country after the queen, the poor Lieutenant did what he could to protect the target of her fury by intercepting the lethal provisions and replacing them with food prepared by his own cook. But there was no intercepting (or even suspecting) an enema filled with mercury sublimate. Although Somerset himself had known nothing of the murder scheme, once confronted with the fait accompli, he made feverish attempts to cover up the traces of the crime, bribing where necessary, destroying documents where essential. With the appalled king pressing the investigation, going in person to the council and ‘kneeling down there desired God to lay a Curse upon him and his posterity if ever he were consenting to Overbury’s death’, the plot unravelled. Once exposed, the sinister cast of plotters – a crook-back apothecary from Yorkshire who had supplied Frances with a whole range of poisons, including ‘Powder of Diamonds’, white arsenic, and something called ‘Great Spider’, and Anne Turner, dress-designer-cum-procuress, famous for popularizing yellow-starched fabrics, who passed the poisons to Overbury’s gaoler – made the most lurid productions of John Webster seem understated by comparison. Confronted with the damning evidence, Frances broke down and pleaded guilty. Somerset, able with some conscience to plead not guilty of advance knowledge, was none the less convicted of having been at the very least an accessory after the deed. The commoners were, needless to say, given the horrible deaths reserved for poisoners; the nobles, of course, were spared by James and kept confined in the Tower, where Somerset contented himself with periodic exercises in interior redesign.
To those out in the shires whose theology divided the world into the legions of Christ and the battalions of Antichrist, the Howard–Somerset affair, featuring as it did all the prime transgressions – fornication, murder, criminal suppression of the truth, perhaps even witchcraft – was the clearest evidence that the court was indeed a Stuart Sodom, an unspeakable sink of iniquity. Puritan manuals on the right ordering of the commonwealth never tired of stressing the patriarchal family as the building block of a just and godly state. It was surely not accidental that the chief mover in bringing the king’s attention to the likelihood of a hideous plot was himself an evangelical Protestant, Sir Ralph Winwood, the Secretary of State. To men like Winwood, the decency and integrity of the social and political order were at stake, for everything about that social order seemed to have been perverted in the Howard plot, involving as it did protagonists at the apex of the social and political pyramid. The proper deference of wife to husband had been demonstrably violated by the subjection of the pathetic Somerset to his frightening
wife. Frances and her confederate Anne Turner seemed the incarnation of all the misogynist nightmares that haunted Jacobean culture: the insatiable, demonically possessed succubus, the fiend who destroyed through carnal congress. Could there be any doubt that the manner of poor Overbury’s death must have been devised by the anally obsessed Devil? James himself seems to have concluded that Turner was, indeed, a sorceress.