The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Under Rupert’s rule, D’Avenant’s make-believe Madagascar prospered. The natives accepted his government unquestioningly, and lived happily under it. Jermyn and Porter watched ships from India and China arriving to trade, so that all the wealth of the East soon poured through Madagascar. In the poem, the Golden Age had begun again.

  In the real world, 150 settlers, inspired by such visionary writings as D’Avenant’s, set sail for Madagascar in October 1644. They made it there safely, and established a colony south of Tuléar. The depth of St Augustine’s Bay allowed their galleons to anchor close to the shore and the jungles provided a rich harvest of food.

  Yet they had reckoned without the low-lying swamps and deltas that fed into the bay. Countless diseases, unimagined by D’Avenant, lurked there, waiting eagerly for just such a group of hapless Europeans. Within months, most of the colonists were inhabitants of nothing more than their own graves.

  A further attempt at colonisation was made in 1649-50, on the island of Assada to the northwest of the mainland, but here a disagreement with the local king led to the deaths of most of the settlers. France finally established a lasting presence in Madagascar, but Jermyn still hoped that one day an English flag would flutter permanently over the island of his dreams.

  When Jermyn heard in 1655 that a fleet of colonists under Admiral Penn was sailing south down the French coast, he wrote wistfully from Paris that ‘they may be for Madagascar; their victualing makes it possible they are for some remote and hot part’.

  Jermyn was very much a man of action, not a philosopher. D’Avenant’s dreams of Madagascar probably amused and entertained him, but that was all. D’Avenant knew this, of course. Through his poetry, therefore, D’Avenant hoped to elevate Jermyn’s mind so as to make him a beneficial force in the practical world of English politics. He also sought to inspire Jermyn by encouraging him to learn about another more practical art-form: classical architecture.

  In Jermyn’s time, Britain was still liberally scattered with Roman remains. Francis Bacon’s home, St Albans just north of London, was littered with Roman ruins, and indeed London’s Roman walls were still a conspicuous part of its topography, albeit misattributed in popular imagination to the British King Lud. Travelling in Spain, where the drier climate favoured their preservation, Jermyn probably saw more and better examples of Roman temples, amphitheatres and aqueducts.

  It was in Madrid, too, and later in Paris, that Jermyn saw many examples of a new trend sweeping across Europe, a style called classical architecture. This sought to create new palaces, churches, bridges and even gardens according to the rediscovered principles of Roman architecture. Just as the Romans had copied the older, Greek principles of building to arrogate a monumental grandeur to their cities, so too had the educated Italians and Spaniards of the sixteenth century re-learned what the Romans had done, so as to confer an air of nobility on their own towns and palaces.

  Marie de Medici had taught her little daughter Henrietta Maria to appreciate classical design, too, and it may have been she who explained its principles to Jermyn.

  One of the ways Henrietta Maria tried to feel more at home in England was by commissioning new classical buildings. She was lucky in this respect to have inherited the services of England’s only skilled classical practitioner from Charles’s mother Anne of Denmark: Inigo Jones.

  Born in 1573, Jones, the son of a London cloth-worker, developed an early enthusiasm for architecture and was fortunate in finding a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. Pembroke paid for him to visit Italy, where well-preserved Roman remains were two-a-penny. Fascinated, Jones studied each classical ruin and every new building built in the classical style and read every treatise on the subject he could find. He learned how to calculate the exact weight a Corinthian column could support and how to create buildings with perfectly harmonious proportions.

  Besides several substantial commissions from Anne of Denmark and then from Henrietta Maria, Jones undertook private work for other buildings that Jermyn could see under construction around him in London. Jones’s new squares at Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields had a direct influence on Jermyn’s later decision to build a classical square at St James’s.

  The house Jones designed for Jermyn’s progressive cousin Sir Peter Killigrew in Blackfriars, not far from St Paul’s Cathedral, had simple geometric proportions and clean-cut use of brick and stone, both precursors of the design Jermyn used later for St James’s. But it was Jones’s almost continuous employment by Henrietta Maria over the next two decades that was to bring Jermyn into really close contact with classical architecture.

  The project which affected Jermyn and Henrietta Maria most was the development of Greenwich. Behind the ramshackle Tudor palace at Greenwich, that fronted the Thames, Inigo Jones had already started work on a small classical lodge for Anne of Denmark. Under Henrietta Maria’s patronage, he redesigned and enlarged it to create the Queen’s House, her ‘House of Delights’. By 1635, Henrietta Maria and Jermyn could gaze proudly at its gleaming white walls, perfectly straight with crisp, clear corners and elegant proportions.

  Four years later the marble interior, complete with Ionic columns and ceilings painted in contemporary Baroque style, was finished. The first Italian-style villa to be built in Britain since Roman times, the Queen’s House glowed like a great Mediterranean pearl amongst the jumble of red bricks and jutting timbers of Old England. Utterly avant garde, it attracted many admiring glances, but still more disapproving grumbles. Bluff Englishmen muttered that it was a foreign house built by Papists. Henrietta Maria and Jermyn loved it.

  Had it been left to Henrietta Maria alone, Jermyn might never have done any more than simply admire classical architecture. But it was surely D’Avenant who encouraged Jermyn to think about it for himself, and listen attentively when Inigo Jones’s expostulated the profound philosophy that underlay his work. Between them, they made Jermyn want to grasp hold of the world around him and change it for the better.

  This heady period of courtly education saw the genesis of a very grand design indeed. London had been founded as a new embodiment of Troy, the paradigm of ancient cities, and then rebuilt by Lud and inhabited by the Romans, but it was now in a very sorry state. What if it were rebuilt, in the new classical style, not as another Troy, but as a new Rome? What glories could Britain attain, if its beating heart was a city worthy of Augustus?

  Nothing could be done, as yet, about the sprawling mass of the City, but to the north of St James’s lay meadows, the Bailiwick of St James’s. Save for a couple of houses in the lane running north from the palace (later named St James’s Street), the land was completely undeveloped. Better still, they were part of the dowry that had been conferred on her when she married the King.

  In 1640, Jermyn and Henrietta organised a survey of this land, their minds teeming with plans and visions of what it could become. But alas, events conspired, not to destroy their plans altogether, but certainly to delay them for many years to come.

  In March 1636, Jermyn celebrated his thirty-first birthday. With Eleanor Villiers and her toddler daughter safely excluded from court, Jermyn was free to devote his days entirely to his beloved Henrietta Maria. Whether dancing with her in a masque or leading her by the hand through palace gardens, his duty as her Gentleman Usher conferred on him the exquisite obligation to be in her presence from morning to night.

  However much Henrietta Maria may have fallen in love with Charles I, and developed a successful sexual relationship with him, it seemed that nothing could dislodge Jermyn from the very core of her psyche. Even while Jermyn was in exile, Henrietta Maria had sought a philosophical framework to justify their unconventional relationship and, on a wider level, the relationships between herself and her attendant ladies, and the host of attractive yet (theoretically, at least) inaccessible young men who strutted about the court.

  She found what she wanted in the writings of Honoré D’Urfé, Castiglione and of her own great-grandmother Margueritte of Navarre
, both of whom advocated the idea of Courtly Love. For a gallant young man to adore a lady chastely was to make her précieuse. Far from being unfaithful to her husband, it was acceptable for such a précieuse lady to respond to such loving advances – provided it remained entirely non-sexual. It sounded perfect.

  Indeed, because such love was purely spiritual, it was thought to be a form of religious devotion, pleasing to God. Arguing that the Courtly Lover ‘covets but honest matters, and therefore may the woman grant him them all without blame’, Castiglione argued that it was acceptable for married ladies to hold hands with their gallant admirers. For such couples to exchange kisses was praise-worthy as an act of ‘knitting together both of body and soul’.

  Far from concealing her now completely chaste love for Jermyn, therefore, Henrietta Maria made it fashionable. Soon the already heady atmosphere of Whitehall and St James’s was thick with the coos and sighs of courtly lovers.

  As an important step towards popularising courtly love, the Queen had commissioned D’Avenant to make it the subject of a masque. The Temple of Love was performed on Shrove Tuesday, 1634. The following year, D’Avenant developed the same theme in a play, The Platonic Lovers, which he dedicated boldly to Jermyn himself.

  In his play, D’Avenant disguised Jermyn and Henrietta Maria thinly as the main protagonists, Theander (a Greek name meaning ‘god-man’) and Eurithea (‘broad-goddess’). When Theander enters Eurithea’s chamber late at night, she asks him,

  Where have you been so long?

  Alas, wherefore do I ask, since I

  So lately found you in my dream?

  This happiness is too great to last!

  Envy or fate must lessen it, or we

  Remove ‘mongst the eternal lovers, and

  Provide our habitation near the stars!

  Of course, Platonic Lovers must necessarily remain childless. This was certainly to be Jermyn’s fate with regard to legitimate offspring: that he may have been the true father of Eleanor Villiers’ daughter, and perhaps of one or more of Henrietta Maria’s children too, remains an open question which prudent D’Avenant avoided. Drawing on essays written by the childless Francis Bacon, D’Avenant justified childlessness in a speech delivered by Jermyn’s character to another pair of platonic lovers – beautiful lines, just as appropriate for childless couples today as ever they were in the seventeenth century:

  …. you two may live,

  And love, become your own best arguments,

  And so contract all virtue, and all praise;

  Be ever beauteous, fresh and young, at least

  In your belief… and then you may

  Beget reflections in each other’s eyes;

  So you increase not children but yourselves,

  A better, and more guiltless progeny;

  Those immortal creatures cannot sin.

  When Theander is interrupted with the question ‘But who shall make men, sir? Shall the world cease?’, he replies

  I know not how th’are made, but if such deeds

  Be requisite, to fill up armies, villages,

  And city shops; that killing, labour, and

  That cousining still may last, Phylomont,

  I’d rather nature should expect such coarse

  And homely drudgeries from others than

  From me.

  These were beautiful sentiments. But whilst the words are D’Avenant’s, they are not what he really believed. The father of a large brood of children, the poet seems to have been genuinely concerned for Jermyn’s future as ‘a sad platonical servant’. Eurithea’s pragmatic maid prophesies (perfectly correctly) that Theander’s name, if he continued ‘…ignorant o’ th’ use of marriage thus, must perish with Himself. I believe those babies he and Eurithea do beget by gazing in each other’s eyes, can inherit nothing. As for Plato’s love-laws’, she adds scornfully, ‘they may entail Lands on ghosts and shadows’.

  Indeed, D’Avenant had his doubts as well whether red-blooded Jermyn would survive this new regime of non-physical courtly love. Eurithea describes Theander as

  …an odd kind of lover. He comes

  Into my lady’s chamber at all hours;

  Yet thinks it strange that people wonder at

  His privilege. Well, opportunity

  Is a dangerous thing; it would soon spoil me.

  D’Avenant certainly did not think that Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s love had always been Platonic. At the end of the play, the narrator rather daringly addresses the audience,

  Since not these two long hours amongst you all,

  I cannot find one will prove Platonical.

  The play was first performed at Blackfriars in 1635. To whom could these lines have been addressed other than Jermyn and Henrietta Maria themselves?

  Through his time spent by Henrietta Maria’s side in the Stuart Court, Jermyn was heavily influenced by ideas about improving the world, especially through architecture. Yet it would be over two decades before Jermyn could translate any ideas of his own into action. For while he and the Queen laughed – or blushed – at D’Avenant’s words at the end of The Platonic Lovers, they little suspected the extraordinary degree to which the mettle of their relationship was about to be tested by the traumatic times that lay ahead.

  VI

  ‘SPEAK WITH MR JERMYN ABOUT IT’ 1637 – 1640

  How wicked am I now? no Man can grow

  More wicked, till he swears I am not so;

  Since Wealth, which doth authorise Men to err,

  Since Hope (that is the lawfull’st Flatterer)

  Were never mine one hour, yet I am loath

  To have less pride than Men possessed of both;

  ……

  And thus (Arigo) I may safely climb,

  Raised with the boast, not loaden with the crime;

  Those with their glorious Vices taken be,

  But I (most right’ously) am proud of thee.

  Sir William D’Avenant, ‘To Henry Jermyn’ (1637) – (as in his other poems, Jermyn is referred to by his Spanish nickname, ‘Arigo’.)

  Jermyn’s coat of arms depicted a crescent moon between two stars. Since his triumphant return from exile, both these stars were firmly in the ascendant in the gilded firmament of Charles I’s court that, while Parliament remained dissolved, was the epicentre of power in Stuart Britain.

  His close relationship with the King’s privado, Henrietta Maria, had done wonders for his family’s fortunes. In 1638 Jermyn’s pipe-smoking father Sir Thomas Jermyn was appointed Comptroller of the Royal Household, a post that entailed checking the accounts of the clerks responsible for buying provisions for the royal household. Shortly afterwards Sir Thomas was promoted to be the King’s Vice-Chamberlain. Jermyn’s quiet elder brother Thomas, meanwhile, became a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber, a less important role which involved just about anything from keeping the monarch company to helping him get dressed in the morning.

  Financially, Jermyn was not doing too badly. He had collected a succession of sinecure jobs and grants of land providing a huge income of over £4,000 per annum – the equivalent of some £2 million in today’s money. Such comparisons are always fraught with difficulty due to the very different nature of economic life in Jermyn’s day, but broadly speaking this figure (and the consequent jealously it inspired) is similar to the salaries now being earned by highly-paid international businessmen.

  Later, Jermyn’s enemies accused him of being ‘full of soup and gold’: of having an excessive love of worldly goods and luxury. He certainly made sure he had a great deal of both, and obviously enjoyed money, good food and drink and all the other trappings of the high life in the Stuart era. Yet there is no particular evidence that Jermyn’s love of luxury was abnormal in the context of the court, where sumptuous clothes and ostentatious behaviour were de rigeur. To put things in context, when Jermyn compared his income to those of the great aristocrats of Charles’s court, who derived incomes from their own great swathes of Britain, he still remained
comparatively rather poor.

  Perhaps what really inspired his enemies’ animosity was not so much his money, or his power, as the apparent ease with which he had risen high enough to gain them. But then, anyone who is extremely good at a difficult task has the ability to make what they do look effortless.

  An important step in Jermyn’s continued rise took place on Monday, 2 September 1639, when he was prompted to became Master of the Horse (or Equerry) to Henrietta Maria.

  Technically, Jermyn had to walk by the Queen’s horse when she rode in state, or went hunting. In practice, a Master of the Horse was expected to serve his master or mistress in the most confidential and intimate matters. In skilled hands, it allowed the holder of the office to wield much of the power and influence vested in the master or mistress. Olivares, after all, had been Philip IV of Spain’s Master of the Horse, and Buckingham had held the same office under James I and Charles I. Why, Robert Dudley, Master of the Horse to Elizabeth I, had played his cards so well he almost married her!

  Jermyn, of course, was only Master of the Horse not to a crowned monarch, but to a queen consort, but these were unusual times. Charles I, with his pallid complexion and baleful eyes, ruled England and Scotland. But especially after Lord Portland went to his grave in 1635, the King’s vivacious privado, Henrietta Maria, could perhaps be said to have ruled him.

  Courtiers and even government ministers who desired anything from a small favour to a major change in policy learned quickly that the person they really needed to convince was the Queen. Once she believed something needed doing, Henrietta Maria could usually persuade Charles to order it. But etiquette prevented courtiers from crowding up to the Queen clamouring for favours.