The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Beyond an outdoor tennis court and before the high walls of St James’s Park stood the great octagonal Cock Pit itself. While the courtiers loitered round the pillared gallery placing bets, trained cockerels tore at each other with special iron spurs fastened to their feet.

  On the south side of King Street, isolated from the traffic of carts and hawkers by a high wall, lay the Privy Garden. Here, Jermyn and his friends used to mooch about its grid of gravel pathways, lined with low box hedges. The square flowerbeds were full of blossoms, from the first snowdrops at the end of January until the last Michaelmas daisies faded away in November. During the summer months a blazing succession of gaudy wallflowers and roses, tulips and poppies threw a haze of sweetly scented pollen into the air. Here, perhaps, where the damask roses and heady jasmine twined round secluded arbours, and she could temporarily hide away from the prying, censorious eyes of the English ladies, Henrietta Maria might have felt more at ease.

  Ranged around the garden to the south and east were the main buildings of Whitehall Palace, a labyrinthine collection of halls and houses; kitchens and chapels; passages and courtyards. South of these the Thames lapped against the Privy Steps, where barges constantly collected and delivered courtiers, and sometimes the King and Queen themselves.

  In the centre of the southern range of the palace were Charles’ apartments, separated from the Privy Steps by a small garden. On the other side were the smaller apartments assigned to Henrietta Maria, overlooking the garden and the river. Beyond the curtains, heavy velvet in winter and light cotton, patterned with flowers in the summer, her rooms were hung with portraits of her own family, which gave her constant pangs of sorrow as they reminded her of France.

  It was a pleasant enough walk from Whitehall across St James’s Park to St James’s Palace. Dominating the palace were the crenelated towers of its gatehouse, which guarded the approach up Pall Mall from the cluster of houses around the Charing Cross.

  The palace of St James’s had been built a century earlier by Henry VIII, whose initials, along with the ill-omened ones of Anne Boleyn, still ornamented the gatehouse. Henry had built his palace around a series of quadrangles, all made from simple Tudor brick, with flat lead roofs edged with ornamental battlements.

  The chambers of St James’s Palace were hung with bright tapestries and filled with richly ornamented furniture and art treasures, many of which had been collected by Charles’s deceased brother Prince Henry. One of the most special rooms was Henrietta Maria’s chapel, later replaced by one specially designed by Inigo Jones.

  Here, at least, Henrietta Maria could feel close to her home, and to her roots. Every morning, her Capuchin priests intoned the Catholic Mass amidst clouds of incense, at the very heart of Anglican England.

  Charles and Henrietta Maria’s apartments were close to each other on the south side of the palace, with views over the ornamental gardens to the deer grazing in St James’s Park. Looking out of their respective windows, the King and Queen could see the roofs and chimneys of Whitehall dwarfed by the great Gothic spires of Westminster Abbey.

  St James’s Palace today, largely unchanged from Jermyn’s time.

  From the start of his reign Charles I had been intent on reforming the rather dissolute, disorganised court he had inherited from his father. Strict rules, many based on Elizabethan precedents and consciously copying those Charles had witnessed being practiced in Madrid, were established to regulate every aspect of court life, even down to what people wore and how they behaved.

  Access to Charles and his wife became severely restricted and surrounded by immense layers of meticulously observed protocol. Those few subjects, the noblemen and specially sworn-in gentlemen, who were allowed to enter the King’s Privy Chamber – the entrance to the monarch’s personal rooms – were forbidden to lounge around playing cards or even chess. Access to the royal bedchamber was restricted even further: only princes, gentlemen of the bedchamber and necessary servants such as his barbers and doctors were granted ingress. Equivalent rules – over which of course Henrietta Maria had no say – prescribed the Queen’s own life and surroundings. The aim was both to promote order based around the royal couple, and to emphasise the King’s position as the epicentre of the court and thus of the realm.

  Rules that served to isolate the King and Queen from the outside world could also foster an extraordinary degree of intimacy between them and the immediate circle that surrounded them.

  On evenings when Charles decided to sleep in his wife’s bed, whether at Whitehall or St James’s, he would make his way along the corridors that joined the two sets of apartments. If it was autumn or winter a page would walk in front of him holding a taper to light the way.

  There is a story, admittedly recorded sometime after the event, that one evening, as dusk had descended and the corridors grew murky, Jermyn’s cousin Tom Killigrew was performing the task of lighting the King’s way. They went quietly, their feet scarcely making a sound over the rush-strewn corridor floor. Entering the Queen’s bedchamber, Tom had a terrible shock.

  Henrietta Maria was sitting on her bed, her slight body almost completely hidden by the tall, broad-shouldered body of Tom’s cousin, Jermyn. Later to become a successful playwright, Tom now acted quickly and resourcefully.

  He dropped the taper and then made a terrible fuss, jumping down onto his hands and knees in the doorway, scrabbling about to clear away the wax, apologising profusely and loudly to the King, who stood bemused in the corridor. By the time Tom had finished his performance and stood back for the King to look in, the Queen had composed herself and Jermyn had vanished.

  There are several other stories of similar incidents. In one, the Marquess of Hamilton walked into a room at Somerset House and caught Jermyn and Henrietta Maria cuddling. Another story relates that Charles suspected his wife was becoming too familiar with Jermyn, but was unable to confirm his suspicions. An unnamed earl, hoping to earn the King’s favour, offered to lead the King to the Queen’s chamber at a time when he thought they could catch the two together.

  Sneaking down the corridor they burst in. Jermyn and the Queen were indeed alone together, but on that occasion they were doing nothing more scandalous than talking. The King left red-faced, wondering if he had been wrong to doubt his beautiful wife’s virtue.

  Henrietta Maria was destined, in some quarters at any rate, to become an iconic figure, the piously Catholic widow of an heroic martyr-king. Like any icon, many accounts of her have become single-dimensional. They often quote a report that ‘as to faith, or sin of the flesh, she is never tempted’, and ‘no one is admitted to her bedrooms except ladies, with whom she sometimes retires, and employs herself on light, but innocent matters’.

  That seems to clear matters up until one realises these lines were written by a Papal agent, reporting what he had been told by the Queen’s own Catholic confessor – the very last people from whom one might possibly expect an unbiased, or even truthful, view.

  These views of Henrietta Maria as a faultless icon deny the possibility that, as a lonely girl in a foreign country, with a husband who trusted his male favourite far more than her, she might have felt any affection for anyone else.

  We simply do not know whether Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had a sexual relationship: but if they did, we should not perhaps be too surprised, or think too badly of them as a result.

  In autumn 1628, three and a half years after her arrival in England, Henrietta Maria discovered that she was pregnant. Throughout the winter and spring she nursed her swelling womb until, on 13 May 1629, one of the court mastiffs jumped up and knocked her, causing her to go into premature labour. She gave birth to a tiny son, Charles James Stuart, Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay.

  He was named after not one, but two Kings, but who his real father was is open to question. The new heir to the throne of England and Scotland must have been conceived about the time when Buckingham was murdered, when Charles and Henrietta Maria’s relationship was at its nadir, yet when th
e court was rife with rumours that she and Jermyn were having an affair. Can we even say with any conviction that, at this stage, Charles would even have cared very much who the baby’s biological father was, so long as his impossible, highly-strung wife fulfilled her purpose of producing an heir to the throne?

  Whoever he was, Jermyn or Stuart, the prince’s little life was over barely after it had started. By the evening of the same day he had expired. He was buried in Westminster Abbey as ‘Charles, Prince of Wales’.

  That July, Jermyn escorted poor Henrietta Maria down through the Wealden forests to the spa town of Tunbridge, where she obediently drank the foul-tasting medicinal waters. Afterwards, they travelled north-west, through the bright summer countryside to Oatlands Palace, overlooking the meadows of the Wey near Weybridge. Here Charles I joined them.

  A few months later she discovered she was pregnant again. For her confinement she chose the homely surroundings of St James’s Palace where, on Saturday, 29 May 1630, another son was born. The child was Charles’s heir apparent, the Prince of Wales and future King Charles II.

  The new prince’s appearance was extremely unusual. His skin was much darker than anyone expected. Henrietta Maria herself wrote (in French) ‘he is so dark that I am ashamed of him’. His ever-so-slightly dark complexion stayed with him for life, earning him the nickname ‘the black boy’.

  The Prince of Wales’s looks were probably inherited from his mother’s Medici ancestors, but in this aspect he was unique amongst Henrietta Maria’s children: all her subsequent offspring were fair skinned, just like Charles I.

  It was not only the Prince’s complexion that set him apart from his family. ‘His size and fatness supply the want of beauty’, Henrietta Maria wrote. Later, when the Prince was four months old, she added ‘he is so fat and so tall, that he is taken for a year old’.

  Slingesby Bethel, who served on Cromwell’s Committee of Safety during the Interregnum, even claimed to have seen letters from Henrietta Maria to Jermyn confirming that Charles II and his younger brother, the future James II, were Jermyn’s sons.

  As Prince Charles grew, his stature remained exceptional. By the time he was fully grown he measured six feet two inches, significantly taller than average men of his time.

  Had the Prince ever stood as a fully-grown man next to his father and grandfather he would have dwarfed them both: he towered even more over Henrietta Maria, who remained extremely short and slight all her life. He differed from them too in his sheer physical build. His broad shoulders and square jaw might have come from the Danish ancestors of his paternal grandmother.

  Henry Jermyn as a dashing young courtier, engraving after a lost 1630s portrait by Van Dyck. Compare this with the portrait on the right, showing Charles II as a young man of similar age.

  But the Prince’s build and looks gave him more than a passing similarity to tall, broad-shouldered Jermyn. Comparison of the few surviving pictures of Jermyn with those of Charles II at similar ages does nothing to dispel the idea, but more intriguing are the references that emerge from contemporary sources, even the domestic state papers themselves, that belie an ocean of speculation. That ‘the King was a bastard and his mother was Jermyn’s whore’ and ‘all the royal children were Jermyn’s bastards’ were not uncommon assertions amongst those who were ill-disposed to the Stuart dynasty.

  Had Charles I and Henrietta Maria remained as distant and antagonistic as they had been while Buckingham was alive, history may well have ascribed the paternity of Charles II to Jermyn without much hesitation. But Buckingham’s assassination muddied the waters considerably, by removing the main obstacle to Henrietta Maria and Charles’s friendship. Even by the time of Charles II’s birth, the royal couple’s growing closeness had all the appearance of true affection. Thereafter, observers concur that the royal couple fell deeply in love.

  It was of course fortunate for Henrietta Maria that she could begin to enjoy, rather than dread, the King’s increasingly frequent visits to her bed. Whatever she might have felt about Jermyn, she knew that her divinely-approved course of action was to sleep with and produce children by the King. Regardless of the truth about his paternity, Prince Charles’s remarkable appearance, and the knowledge of what was being whispered all around St James’s Palace, may have alarmed Henrietta Maria into trying, at least, to switch off her feelings for Jermyn, and to start attempting to love her husband in earnest. Or was it Jermyn who backed off, equally terrified by the genuinely awful consequences, for both of them, and even for his country, if they were ever found out?

  It must, in any event, have been an emotionally turbulent time for Jermyn, listening to cannons booming over Westminster to herald the birth of the heir to the throne, yet knowing how many wagging tongues were busy asserting that the infant Prince of Wales was his own son.

  Henrietta Maria’s newly awakened sexual interest in her husband did not lessen the closeness of her friendship with Jermyn. ‘But we can still be friends’, is what people in similar situations might say nowadays. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria were many degrees removed from ordinary, modern people, but they may have entertained similar hopes in this one matter.

  In most cases, couples who have spent their hitherto unrequited passion in an illicit fling, that ends of its own accord, tend, inevitably and almost always healthily, to drift apart. But when an affair ends because it must, and not because both or even just one party really wants it to, then at least one party is likely to be genuinely, emotionally bruised. And that suffering is far worse when circumstances make physical separation impossible.

  The Queen and Jermyn were both prisoners of the court, and he worked for her as well. Leading independent lives was impossible. In any case, despite six years as Charles’s wife, and despite Jermyn’s best efforts to teach her, Henrietta Maria’s English was still far from fluent, so she remained emotionally isolated from most of the courtiers around her. Whatever Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had, or hadn’t been up to, they had very little choice but to continue as best they could, together, as friends.

  While Henrietta Maria started to grow into her new life as Charles I’s lover, twenty-five year-old Jermyn made a valiant attempt to focus his mind elsewhere. Through his connection with the Queen, his own position at court became steadily stronger. He had already sat in two Parliaments, representing Bodmin (1625-1626) and Liverpool (1628-1629). This sounds important but, like many others at the time, these two Parliamentary seats comprised electors who generally voted as directed by their patrons. These patrons were Sir Robert Killigrew and Sir Humphrey May respectively, both relations of Jermyn’s. For someone like Jermyn, sitting in Parliament was no more than a trifling extension of his busy life at court, except insofar as it gained him prestige, and influence, and the chance to become the sort of man whom lesser ones might want to bribe in return for favours.

  His interest in money was not as venal as it sounds, or his later detractors were to claim. Life at court, especially looking ‘the part’, not to mention the constant gambling that was an inherent part of court life, was extremely expensive, and one small salary from the Privy Purse was nowhere near sufficient to cover it. Through Henrietta Maria’s influence, Jermyn had been granted the sinecure job of Joint Surveyor of the Petty Customs, a job entailing no work, but a fine income, that provided more funds to flow through his ever-hungry purse.

  Through his job of Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, Jermyn controlled who had access to his royal mistress and therefore played a key role in her household and, by extension, in the whole court. This too could be played to its advantage. His high standing with the Queen almost certainly contributed to his uncle, the seasoned diplomat Sir Robert Killigrew, becoming her Vice-Chamberlain. Jermyn’s father Sir Thomas became her Master of the Game, responsible for the deer and other animals that were hunted on her estates. Jermyn’s quiet elder brother Thomas added to the growing number of Jermyns employed at court by becoming Master of the Horse to the baby Prince of Wales.

  Thes
e advances were far too little, however, to satisfy the politically ambitious young Jermyn. He had seen the gargantuan influence Buckingham had enjoyed wielding in England and which Richelieu possessed in France and Olivares in Spain. Now, he wanted nothing less for himself. Henrietta Maria craved power too.

  Born the daughter of a great monarch, she wanted to share decision-making with her husband, whether it concerned what happened at court or the direction Britain took in internal and foreign policy. As we have seen, she and Jermyn may already have tried a little politicking in 1627, scheming to be rid of Buckingham. As they grew older, their desire to have a say at court and in the country could only increase.

  The place in which Jermyn sought power, Charles I’s court, occupies an unusual position in English history. In recent years, the English Parliament had often been grudging and slow in allowing taxes to be raised, and often only did so if the King agreed to their own conditions. Fed up with this, and convinced that Members of Parliament were more concerned with their own self-interests than the common good, Charles had dissolved Parliament in March 1629 and began his eleven year-long period of personal rule. From then on, the royal court, and more particularly the Privy Council within it, became by default the chief organ through which the King ruled.

  ‘The Board’, as it was also known, usually sat in the Council chamber facing the King’s bedchamber at Whitehall, though when Charles travelled to other palaces, his counsellors dutifully trotted along after him. The Privy Council usually comprised about forty men, mainly office-holders and landed aristocrats, although only a core of its members was usually summoned to attend meetings.