The King, however, attended religiously and attentively. Although the council always deferred to the King’s will, he was usually happy to follow its advice, sometimes even when it pronounced a unanimous opinion contrary to his own.
Implementing the Board’s decisions fell mainly to the two secretaries of state, Sir John Coke, and Lord Dorchester, who was succeeded on his death in 1632 by Sir Francis Windebank. Coke and Windebank were astonishingly efficient administrators and neither seem to have held ambitions to wield genuine power in their own right. Usually they were more than happy to follow the King’s wishes.
In his heyday, Buckingham, like Richelieu and Olivares, had held two unofficial and subtly different roles, those of privado, on whose whispered advice the King acted most, and First Minister. Whilst the term ‘First’ or ‘Prime Minister’ had not yet come into official use in England, the concept of a ‘prime’ minister’, to whom the King delegated the majority of the day-to-day running of the realm, had.
Since Buckingham’s death, the mantle of this unofficial role had fallen on the shoulders of Charles’s Lord Treasurer, Richard Weston, Lord Portland, a pretentious man who once paid a large sum for a forged pedigree connecting him to royalty. But though Charles esteemed Portland for his quiet financial efficiency, he lacked the verve and relentless ambition – and apparently the ability to build up a power base by creating a patronage network similar to Buckingham’s – to be a true royal favourite or privado.
Yet because power now lay, literally, in the King’s house, other people at court, without any ministerial position, though often with some ceremonial position, had the opportunity to exercise a degree of power simply through their privileged access to the King’s ear, and the role of privado was up for grabs.
In September 1628, Jermyn’s mentor Lord Kensington succeeded Buckingham, albeit briefly, as the King’s Master of the Horse, a position that guaranteed close access to Charles, especially during the large amount of time he spent hunting. Kensington seems to have had real ambition to succeed Buckingham as first minister and royal favourite or privado. His attempts to secure Buckingham’s old position of Lord Admiral for himself, however, failed. In the final analysis, Charles simply did not hold him in sufficiently high regard.
Kensington was replaced as Master of the Horse by the Marquess of Hamilton, another very influential member of the King’s court, who carried the peculiar distinction of being next in line to the Scottish throne after the Stuart family. He vied with Kensington for the highest, unofficial honour, but he never quite convinced the King of his indispensability either.
Kensington, meanwhile, remained prominent, using his own friendship and influence with Henrietta Maria to attempt a come-back, in 1636, by gaining office of Groom of the Stool. The job entailed responsibility for the King’s chamber pot, a position that sounds quite revolting to modern ears, but one that guaranteed an equally very un-modern degree of intimacy with the sovereign, and thus offering considerable opportunities for any aspiring favourite.
Ultimately, however, both Kensington and Hamilton were wasting their time, for Charles never replaced Buckingham with another male favourite. As early as the end of 1628, however, the amount of affection he was directing towards Henrietta Maria led one courtier to anticipate that he ‘had so wholly made over his affections to his wife that he dare say that they are out of danger of any other favourite’. But that courtier was wrong: the King did have a privado: it was none other than Henrietta Maria herself.
Yet, as a woman, and Queen, she could not possibly become First Minister. And thus, below the gilded ceilings of Whitehall, a new rivalry emerged.
Whilst Portland lacked his predecessor’s outright hostility to Henrietta Maria, he was keen, none-the-less, to continue Buckingham’s anti-French, pro-Spanish policies. That was enough to earn him both Henrietta Maria and Jermyn’s animosity. And, in any case, a royal court big enough to accommodate one Buckingham was not sufficiently large to accommodate both Portland, and Henrietta Maria – not to mention her ambitious Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Henry Jermyn.
Early one morning at the end of March 1633, Lord Portland and his family heard a horse’s hooves clattering outside their door, and a voice shouting up for Portland’s son Jerome Weston.
Opening the window, they were astonished to see Jermyn in his flamboyant silk suit, his ruddy hair tousled by the gallop. The angry young man demanded to see Jerome, who came to the window. Jermyn then demanded that he should come with him to Spring Gardens, the pleasure gardens between Charing Cross and St James’s Palace, to fight a duel with Lord Kensington over the Queen’s honour.
The man Jermyn and his friends really wanted to remove from power was Lord Portland, but the opportunity to lash out at him through his son was too good to miss.
The ‘Queen’s quarrel’, as the affair became known, had started when both Jermyn and Jerome were sent, independent of one another, to Paris. Jermyn’s stated aim was to congratulate Henrietta Maria’s sister-in-law, Queen Anne, on surviving a near-fatal coach crash.
The real purpose of his visit was more likely connected to Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de’ Medici. In 1631, Marie had clashed violently (again) with Louis XIII, but Richelieu had outsmarted her, and she was packed off to exile in Brussels. Henrietta Maria wanted her mother to come to London, but the thrifty Portland prevented this by persuading Charles that such a visit would cost the treasury too much money.
Instead, Henrietta Maria wanted Richelieu to allow Marie to return to Paris. Or, better still, she dreamed of removing both the Cardinal and Portland together. A plot was launched amongst Richelieu’s enemies in France to replace the devious Cardinal with the dashing Marquess de Châteauneuf. Henrietta Maria was keen to offer her tacit support for this plot, and it is likely that Jermyn’s visit to Paris was connected to these machinations.
Lord Portland’s son Jerome had also been sent to Paris, but in his case the mission was for the King. Realising some skulduggery was afoot, Jerome started intercepting letters written between suspected plotters – postal espionage was rife in those days – and quite by chance found a letter from Lord Kensington to the gallant Châteauneuf. Tucked within it was another, written by none other than Henrietta Maria herself. Delighted with his discovery, Jerome had hurried back to London to present the unopened correspondence to his father and the King.
To Lord Kensington and Jermyn, this interception was a direct affront to Henrietta Maria’s honour – and a fabulous excuse to lash out at the Portland family. When Jermyn delivered Kensington’s challenge to Jerome, however, Lord Portland refused to allow his son to respond. Challenging people to duels was one of the dissolute activities Charles had proscribed in his strictly ordered court, so Portland sent a messenger to the King – who had feared something like this might happen in any case – who promptly placed both Kensington and Jermyn under arrest.
Kensington apologised immediately. But on this occasion Jermyn’s usual suave courtliness was overtaken by his passionate loyalty to Henrietta Maria. When summoned to answer for his actions before the Privy Council, his behaviour was described as ‘petulant and fleering’.
Jermyn was probably dressed at the time as he normally did, only perhaps with even more care, in his finest black satin coat, with the sleeves slashed debonairly to reveal his crisp white shirt underneath: his breeches, also of costly black satin, disappeared into an enormous pair of white buck-skin boots. Sweeping off his black hat, which was richly plumed with ostrich feathers, he stood in front of the long Council table like an arrogant magpie. He argued that the Queen’s honour amply justified his actions. How dare the Privy Council suggest otherwise!
For two months Jermyn remained under house-arrest while his friends and family begged him to apologise for having delivered Kensington’s challenge. Eventually, bored and no doubt very anxious to be reunited with Henrietta Maria, he gave in and said sorry. He was released at the beginning of May 1633.
Charles stoutly resisted th
e efforts of Jermyn and the Queen to topple Portland, who continued as Charles I’s ‘first minister’ until 1635, when he died. In the interim, however, a far more pressing problem arose for Henrietta Maria and Jermyn. The cause this time was not politics, but sex.
Whilst Henrietta Maria was now enjoying married life with Charles, and seeing her power and influence growing at court, Jermyn had been trying to fill his life with work, politics, and intrigue. But his emotional life was in ruins. Small wonder he had behaved so hot-headedly in the Queen’s Quarrel. Finally, having perhaps deliberately avoided other women as a token of his true devotion to the now unattainable Henrietta Maria, he finally gave way to the temptation of distracting and consoling himself with one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour.
There is no record of whether Eleanor Villiers, the niece of the late and largely unlamented Duke of Buckingham, was pretty or plain. If the majority of her family were anything to go by, however, she was probably very attractive. She certainly liked sex and, if Jermyn’s later account of their affair is true, her desires for physical satisfaction far overrode any consideration of what the consequences might be.
Perhaps it was in her arms Jermyn could try his best to forget the more exalted royal lovemaking going on in the Queen’s bedchamber. But according to Jermyn, ‘there never passed one word between us touching marriage’.
After a while they split up. Perhaps it was Eleanor’s lust that led her into other men’s beds. Or maybe she left Jermyn when she realised that she could only possess his body but never his heart. After a very brief fling with Lord Newport, who was no more interested in her emotionally than Jermyn had been, she suddenly fell in love with her first-cousin, Lord Feilding. That the two started sleeping together was well known because someone caught them in the act and spread the news around Whitehall. But Eleanor did not seem to care. As Jermyn wrote later, ‘she hath herself confessed to me she loved my Lord Feilding more than any man living’.
Just as Jermyn emerged from his house arrest in May 1633, however, disaster befell them both. Eleanor discovered she was pregnant and her condition was too far advanced to enable her to convince Feilding that the child was his.
Scandalised, her cousin distanced himself from her. Forced to choose between her two former lovers, either of whom could theoretically have caused her pregnancy, Eleanor opted for Jermyn.
Jermyn was appalled. He had no interest in marrying a woman he did not love and accepting paternity of a child that could have been Newport’s or even, for all he really knew, someone else’s. But far more than that, even though marrying Henrietta Maria was out of the question, it seems that he could not bear the idea of making marriage vows to anyone else.
In her 2011 novel about the relationship of Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, Cavalier Queen, Fiona Mountain allows her fictional Jermyn to express what the real one may really have thought, in a speech she imagined him making to the Queen: ‘I liked Eleanor well enough. There are plenty of other pretty girls I like well enough. But I will not settle for someone I can live with, when I have found someone I cannot live without. I am willing to remain a bachelor all my life, so that I may devote myself to your service.’ These are made-up lines, but it is possible that they encapsulate Jermyn’s true feelings on the matter very well indeed.
To the great delight of the gossips and the mortification of the Villiers clan, Jermyn announced publicly that he would not marry Eleanor.
When Eleanor’s aunt, the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, offered Jermyn the colossal sum of £8,000 as a dowry, he must have hesitated. He sent back a haughty refusal. On Tuesday, 4 June 1633, incensed at this affront to his family’s honour, Eleanor’s brother Lord Grandison challenged Jermyn to a duel.
As before, news of the duel reached Charles well in advance of the event. A duel combined with sex outside marriage was precisely the sort of thing Charles feared would wreck the highly charged moral atmosphere of his court. In fact, it was one of the very few sex scandals that emerged in the entire course of his personal rule. In another, that led to the trial of Lord Castlehaven for sodomy and rape, Charles was so prudish as to forbid women to attend the proceedings on the grounds that they would ‘ever after [be]… reputed to have forfeited their modesty’. Now, thoroughly weary of Jermyn’s disruptive behaviour, he sent him, Grandison and, for good measure, Eleanor herself, to the Tower of London.
In Jermyn’s time, the Tower was both a functioning fortress and a royal residence. On the southern side, a stone wharf lined with cannons faced the Thames, broken at the centre by the Traitors’ Gate.
On the other three sides a deep ditch separated the outer walls from the rough pastures of East Smith Field and Tower Hill, on which stood the well-worn posts of a much-used scaffold. Within the Tower’s outer walls, piles of cannon balls lay stacked up ready for use in the event of foreign invasion or civil uprising. In the powder house lay, stacked barrel-upon-barrel, the nation’s invaluable store of gunpowder.
Clustered around the Norman keep, known as the White Tower, was a range of Medieval buildings including the King’s lodgings and the Jewel House where the Crown Jewels sparkled in their secluded splendour. Strolling in the King’s Privy Garden or entertaining his aristocratic drinking partners in his suite of rooms, Jermyn’s life there would certainly not have been uncomfortable or perhaps even very dull. But knowing that Henrietta Maria knew all about his affair, yet not being able to see her and explain himself, must have been torture for the young man.
Guided by his father, Jermyn wrote Charles an eloquent and reasoned account of his relationship with Eleanor, that he hoped would secure his release. But the Villiers family were not prepared to let Jermyn to escape so easily. By refusing marriage, Jermyn was doing more than disgracing Eleanor: he was tarnishing the illustrious name of Villiers and the memory of the great Duke of Buckingham.
As the summer passed and Eleanor’s pregnancy advanced, the Villiers family’s protests to the sympathetic Charles grew more strident. He was far from unsympathetic.
Besides his natural affection for his late mentor’s family and his hopes of raising the court’s moral standards, Charles may have had other reasons for being harsh on Jermyn.
The fact that he had never caught Jermyn with his wife did not mean that he may never have suspected their intimacy. This, surely, was a good chance for the pallid King to gain some measure of revenge, or even to be rid of Jermyn for good. Therefore in September Charles sent Jermyn an abrupt ultimatum: marry Eleanor or be exiled.
But there was no real choice for Jermyn. Aside from any consideration of his feelings for Henrietta Maria, Jermyn could not marry a woman he had publicly disowned: the scandal of that really would have wrecked his chances of advancing further at court. His only real choice was to assert his innocence by accepting exile. With immense sorrow and trepidation he climbed aboard the French merchant ship that was to carry him to France. Jermyn was leaving behind his country, his career and the woman he loved. He had no idea what the future would bring.
Screaming in pain and frustration, Eleanor went into labour. Jermyn’s father Sir Thomas, clearly feeling guilty by association, sent a midwife to assist with the birth. Throughout, Eleanor never ceased to swear ‘with deep oaths’ that the child was Jermyn’s.
Without hope of a husband or of regaining her position at court, Eleanor became a spinster aunt living quietly with her Villiers relatives. She died in 1685 and was buried with her relatives in Westminster Abbey. Her daughter, also called Eleanor, married a Jamaican sugar planter called Philip Dakins. When she died in London in 1694, Eleanor Dakins left a small legacy to one of Jermyn’s nieces, whom she at least asserted was ‘my cousin’. Despite all Jermyn’s denials, it seems that Eleanor Villiers had never changed her story that he was her daughter’s father.
Even before Charles’s ultimatum had reached Jermyn, it had been softened by Henrietta Maria’s influence. Although Jermyn was sent into exile, he had not been dismissed from the Queen’s household.
J
ermyn’s ship had scarcely unfurled its sails before Henrietta Maria commenced the long process of persuading Charles to allow her favourite to come back. Had Buckingham still lived, she could never have succeeded. But now she and Charles were lovers as well as husband and wife. Ultimately, she hoped, the King would refuse her nothing.
The first part of Jermyn’s exile – about which very little, sadly, is recorded – was spent in Paris, where he benefited, no doubt, from his already friendly relationship with the French Court.
As a first step towards his rehabilitation, Jermyn was allowed to leave Paris for Jersey. Since 1631, Jermyn’s father had been Jersey’s absentee governor. To the suggestion that Jermyn should now become the resident Lieutenant Governor, however, the island’s Dean, Jean Bandinel, responded brusquely. The islanders had suffered enough abuses from Whitehall, he protested, without having a young philanderer like Jermyn foisted on them. When Jermyn stepped ashore there in 1634, therefore, it was merely as a private individual, though while he was there he was put in charge of destroying the island’s tobacco crop, a step taken to promote the tobacco-based economy of the new colonies in America.
From the ramparts of Elizabeth Castle, Jermyn could look out across the narrow stretch of sea which separated the island from the coast of Normandy, but for all the hunts and balls to which the Governor’s son was doubtless invited, Jersey was a wretched place for a high-spirited and ambitious young courtier.
Once she had worn her husband down sufficiently, Henrietta Maria sent Jermyn a letter telling him to write to the King to apologise profusely for his behaviour and beg delivery from his languishing condition. Jermyn did so and, probably rather against his better judgement, Charles relented.
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