The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  It was now Jermyn’s job to bring all his pieces together. That same evening, he took Goring to Percy’s chambers in Whitehall. Here, in the presence of Percy, Wilmot, Ashburnham, Pollard, Berkeley and a new conspirator, Captain Neville, Goring was sworn to secrecy and admitted to their plot. Jermyn then revealed to the stunned circle of men his more ambitious plot of bringing the army south and capturing the Tower. Most were uneasy about the plans. ‘We disliked them’, Pollard later asserted, ‘because Sir John Suckling and they were in it…. we did not very much like the men, for Suckling, Jermyn and D’Avenant were in it’. But that was Pollard’s view with hindsight. At the time he fell in behind Jermyn’s lead, just like the rest of them.

  After the meeting, Percy and Jermyn reported back to Charles. Having previously, if nervously, supported Jermyn’s scheme, the King now called it ‘vain and foolish, and he would think of them no more’. He had really lost his nerve, or was speaking simply of the scheme to bring the army down, and not of the Tower Plot.

  What happened next, however, confirms that Charles had his doubts. The Lord General of the Army, Lord Northumberland, had malaria and needed replacing. His brother, Harry Percy favoured the moderate Lord Kensington, but Jermyn and Goring wanted to see the much more hard-line Lord Newcastle take charge. In this case, Jermyn did not have his way, for on Friday, 9 April, the King chose Kensington and, by implication, a more passive role for the armed forces than storming down to London.

  Charles may have made this decision through cowardice. He may, however, have had a more realistic view than Jermyn’s of the unconditional support he could expect from the whole army. Indeed, it later transpired that some of the officers had been decidedly unenthusiastic about the prospect of having Goring as their Lieutenant General.

  The result of this decision was a surprising one. Goring, trusted by King and Queen alike, told Lord Newport about the plot. This was the same Lord Newport whose brief liaison with Eleanor Villiers had become public knowledge due to Jermyn’s refusal to marry her in 1633. As a result of this Newport bore Jermyn a bitter grudge and it is no surprise, therefore, to find that it was he who repeated everything Goring had told him to Pym himself.

  Goring may have been disloyal. He may have betrayed the plot in a fit of pique when he realised he might not become Lieutenant General after all. He may even, as Professor Russell has argued, have done so at the King’s connivance. Charles may have hoped that the fact that he could bring the army south if he so chose might be enough to intimidate Parliament into obedience. It is true that, during these months, Jermyn and Suckling spread stories that the French would send armed help for the King. These stories were quite without foundation, and were presumably spread for the same purpose of trying to cow Parliament. If scaring Parliament was the plan, however, it was a foolish one – and if the King did indeed instruct Goring to leak details of the plot for this purpose, then he had made a deliberate decision to betray Jermyn. But all that is mere speculation.

  Initially, Pym said nothing to Parliament about the plot, but he did take immediate steps to conclude Strafford’s trial before the army could start marching south.

  Ever the expert on Parliamentary proceeding, Pym sprang to his feet in the Commons on Wednesday, 21 April, and proposed that the House should pass an act of attainder. This was a seldom-used Parliamentary device, whereby they could declare Strafford guilty without having to finish the trial. Only 59 members, including Jermyn’s brother Thomas and Endymion Porter, voted against the motion that declared Strafford guilty. In the streets of London the mob howled for the immediate execution of ‘Black Tom’ Strafford.

  Like Pym, Jermyn knew he had to act quickly.

  Five tense days later, a small fleet of Dutch ships glided up the Thames and weighed anchor by the Tower. Aboard was young Prince William of Orange, nervously anticipating his nuptials with Princess Mary. More importantly from Jermyn’s point of view was the Prince’s bodyguard of four hundred heavily armed Dutch soldiers. Although the Army Plot seems to have been abandoned after Kensington’s appointment as Lord General on 9 April, the Tower Plot was still definitely active.

  At Suckling’s behest, one of Strafford’s Irish officers had started recruiting Londoners as soldiers on the pretence of sending them to serve under the King of Portugal. The real aim, though, was to use this new mini-army of one hundred men to overpower the guards that Parliament had set about the Tower, and let in the Dutch bodyguards. Once the Tower, and the nation’s precious supply of gunpowder was in royal hands, Parliament would be, literally, powerless.

  The Royalists decided to act on May Day. The day dawned bright and clear and soon the temperature began to rise. Dressed in his most ostentatious uniform, Suckling sent his recruits marching up to the Tower, where they asked to be admitted. The Lieutenant of the Tower, however, was not fooled by their story – that they had come on the King’s order simply to guard the Tower and its munitions against possible general disturbance. The gates of the citadel remained shut and Suckling’s men had no choice but to withdraw.

  The next day the Royal Family and the remnants of their subdued court assembled at the King’s Chapel at Whitehall for the wedding of William and Mary. Despite the ominous dread of civil unrest that pervaded the proceedings, the adults made an effort to feast and toast the child bride and groom, and nothing untoward happened.

  On 3 May, the House of Lords asked Kensington, Hamilton and Essex to ask the King to disband Suckling’s soldiers. Charles refused. The Lords sent another, larger deputation demanding the discharge of the recruits. Meanwhile, independent of the King, they appointed none other than Jermyn’s adversary Lord Newport to take command of the Tower.

  On Thursday, 4 May, the blow fell. Whilst the House of Lords argued over whether or not to execute Strafford, Pym heaved himself onto his feet in the Commons. In his loud voice he revealed how close the Tower Plot had come to succeeding. Then he revealed everything Goring had told Newport about Jermyn’s Army Plot. The Commons listened to him in shocked silence.

  Parliament knew they had been provoking the King and his court, and had heard rumours of reprisals. But it was quite another thing to hear evidence of an actual plot to use armed force against them. They immediately voted for Strafford’s execution. They also sent a messenger to Whitehall asking Charles – they could not order him, for he was the King – to detain every member of the Queen’s household, for questioning in connection with the plot.

  We can well imagine the pale King trembling with anxiety. Henrietta Maria flushed with indignation, expostulating in French and English at the appalling impertinence of the English Parliament, who presumed to tell their divinely-anointed sovereign what to do: her father would never have stood for it! Jermyn gave in to his frustrated anger, incredulous that someone – presumably he did not know whom – could have betrayed his plot to Pym.

  Then the sickening realisation swept over all of them that, like Strafford, Jermyn would be arrested, tried and condemned to death for High Treason.

  Unlike Strafford, however who, as a peer of the realm, would ‘enjoy’ the privilege of a quick – or quickish – death by being beheaded, Jermyn was a commoner. He would be strung up at the gibbet on Tower Hill and left to dangle while the noose tightened round his neck.

  When he was almost dead from strangulation, the rope would be cut, allowing his body to crash down to the ground. Revived by the shock, Jermyn would watch as the executioner’s knife plunged into his belly, ripping away the tender flesh. The executioner would then thrust his hands into the wound to wrench out suppurating handfuls of Jermyn’s intestines, bowels, stomach and liver and throw them down to tremble in the blood flooding out of Jermyn’s convulsing body. While Jermyn was still semi-conscious, the executioner would take up his axe and one by one chop off his groaning victim’s legs and arms. Only at that point would the pain and blood-loss allow Jermyn to abandon consciousness and seek relief in death.

  There was nothing Charles could do to protect Jermyn f
rom this dreadful fate, so long as he remained in England. While the Queen’s anger turned to despairing grief, Charles scratched his signature on a special warrant allowing Jermyn to travel to France. Without time even to change out of his fine black satin suit and white calfskin boots, Jermyn stuffed money and jewels into his pockets. Kissing the hands of Charles and Henrietta Maria, he hurried down the Privy Stairs and clambered into a boat that carried him swiftly across the Thames to Lambeth.

  If he paused then and looked back, what did he see? Through his tears at his separation from his beloved Henrietta Maria, Jermyn he would have seen Whitehall and behind it the high gate towers of St James’s, the palaces around which his whole life had revolved. Places where, until that very afternoon, he had been pre-eminently powerful. Where Henrietta Maria would now be sobbing alone, without him to protect her.

  His feelings were probably of impotent rage against Parliament and everything it stood for; of profound disbelief that such a thing could happen. And a desperate, even childlike hope that, somehow, everything would be made right.

  By the time dusk was falling over St James’s, Jermyn was already galloping down the road to Portsmouth. There, he presented himself, exhausted, to the new governor – Goring. Jermyn had no idea that all this was Goring’s fault. His friend now feeling guilty for what he had done, decided to make amends by helping Jermyn to escape. Jermyn toyed briefly with the idea of staying in Portsmouth and sending dispatches to Paris, begging for reinforcements, but dismissed the idea almost at once.

  On Friday, 7 May 1641, as Parliamentarian soldiers galloped into the town brandishing orders for his arrest, Jermyn’s ship heaved anchor. The vessel’s sails billowed in the gentle breeze and it glided serenely out of Portsmouth harbour. As the setting sun turned the English Channel into a dazzling sea of gold, Jermyn’s ship bore him away toward a new and uncertain future in France.

  VIII

  COLONEL LORD JERMYN 1641 – 1643

  At Aldbourne with sad eyes they view our Horse;

  The valiant Jermyn stops their hasty course…

  What was an Host to him? he charged it through;

  With unfeared noise the bullets round him flew.

  Though causeless was their hate in peace before,

  He showed in war none could deserve it more.

  Cowley, The Civil War part 3, (1643).

  Many years later, Jermyn is reported to have said of Henrietta Maria ‘that the fortunes of the most exalted & those that appear the most fixed are subject to the greatest changes’.

  It was now that this change began in earnest. ‘I have fallen into unimaginable miseries of every kind…’, the tearful Queen confided to her sister Christine of Savoy. ‘The people who are faithful to our service [are] sent away and indeed pursued for their lives, because they have tried to serve the King’.

  She had been planning to leave London, for Portsmouth at least, for several weeks. In her distress at Jermyn’s departure she resolved to go – perhaps even to follow Jermyn to Paris. Alarmed, her priest, Fr Philip, begged her not to go. If you go now, he told her bluntly, you will convince the world that you are Jermyn’s mistress.

  Disconsolate, she set off instead for Oatlands, with Jermyn’s father puffing his pipe anxiously by her side. Terrified of the consequences if he refused, Charles signed Strafford’s death warrant.

  The Earl of Strafford was taken to Tower Hill on Wednesday, 12 May. Archbishop Laud stretched his hand out through his own prison bars to give him a final blessing, before fainting. Bravely facing a mob of over 100,000 people, Strafford placed his head on the block, and down fell the executioner’s axe on ‘Black Tom’s’ neck.

  Prince William of Orange and Marie de Medici both took ship from London. Marie died the following year, virtually destitute, at the Brussels home of her friend the painter Peter-Paul Rubens.

  A few months later Jermyn was tried in absentia. As his friends and family feared, he was indeed sentenced to death for High Treason. More immediately, and also as a direct result of his Army Plot, Parliament passed an act preventing itself from ever being dissolved. It seemed that the whole world Jermyn had known had fallen to pieces. After he stepped ashore at Dieppe, Jermyn found a crest-fallen Sir John Suckling waiting for him, with news of their fellow Army Plot conspirators. Young Harry Percy had been wounded while escaping from England, and was lying in a fever at Calais. Poor D’Avenant had been caught and was standing trial in London.

  Downhearted and angry, Jermyn rode down the dusty road to Rouen, where he met Walter Montagu. Following Henrietta Maria’s example, Montagu had become a Catholic and was soon to become Abbot of Pontoise. The two men arrived together in Paris. Montagu was a favourite of Queen Anne, but despite this there was nothing he or Jermyn could say to persuade Cardinal Richelieu to help Charles.

  While they kicked their heels in Paris, reliant on loans and the kindness of the French court for their sustenance, they were joined by Percy. Then one morning, to Jermyn’s joy, D’Avenant came riding up. Pym was happy to execute soldiers and statesmen who crossed his path, but apparently executing poets risked turning them into martyrs, and this he would not do. It turned out, too, that the staunchly Republican poet Milton had intervened on his fellow writer’s behalf. So D’Avenant had been allowed to go.

  In the end, it was Suckling, that foppish soldier-scribbler, who was the least fortunate, but it was not Pym who killed him. His own servant, who merely intended to rob him, hid a razor in Suckling’s boot. When Suckling pulled the boot on, he severed a vein in his foot and bled his way to an agonizing death.

  In February 1642 Henrietta Maria boarded the Lion at Dover and braved the North Sea to take Princess Mary to join her new husband in The Hague. Mary had not gone straight there after her wedding because she was so young: now, however, she gave Henrietta Maria just the excuse she needed to slip away abroad.

  The King had tried to arrest Pym and his colleagues, but they had been warned, and evaded them. Parliament was now stronger than ever. Charles now planned to go north, to join his army and declare war on Parliament. Hidden in Henrietta Maria’s luggage were some of the Crown Jewels, which she intended to pawn for money to raise arms and men for the Royalist cause.

  Jermyn’s first reaction was to join her at The Hague. But when he reached the Dutch frontier, the surly border guards barred his way. The Dutch parliament, the States General, whose sympathies lay with Parliament, had refused permission for any of the Queen’s ‘poor traitors’ to cross their borders.

  While Jermyn languished in the Spanish-ruled province of Brabant, Henrietta Maria complained to Charles, ‘I have nobody in the world in whom to trust for your service, and many things are at a standstill, for want of someone to serve me’.

  Eventually, the Prince of Orange persuaded the States General to order the border guards to turn a blind eye to Jermyn and his friends. They travelled rapidly north under the immense canvas of the Dutch sky, through a flat landscape crisscrossed with ditches and dykes, each lined with rows of green willows and silver-leafed poplars.

  On the night of Tuesday, 14 June 1642, while the Puritan burghers of The Hague snored peacefully, the Queen’s coach clattered down the Staedt-Straat, the street leading to the gates of her temporary residence, the New Palace. Out into the moonlight stepped three cloaked figures: Percy, D’Avenant and Jermyn.

  Taking the Queen’s chaotic paperwork in hand, Jermyn set to work finalising the loans she had secured on the pawned Crown Jewels, buying ammunition and hiring ships and men.

  On bright mornings, while the seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, Parliamentarian agents lurking about the bustling quays of the main Dutch seaport, Hellevoetsluis, were unnerved to see upwards of eighty Englishmen and volunteer French officers, especially Jermyn and the dashing Marquess of Vieuville, merrily toasting the first supply-ships departing for England.

  Jermyn’s influence on royal policy, which had been curtailed so dramatically in May 1641, was now re-established in a profound manner
. Charles and Henrietta Maria communicated by a secret code, involving the substitution of letters by numbers. Henrietta Maria used to infuriate the King by misreading her code sheet and thus sending him unintelligible messages.

  Once she painstakingly deciphered a letter from her husband only to find that it contained a testy criticism of her mistakes. ‘It is a great trouble to me’, she ciphered back laboriously, ‘to write the number of letters which I must write in cipher; for, since I have been in Holland, I have almost always pains in my eyes, and my sight is not so good as it was’.

  She asked the King to allow Jermyn to cipher her letters for her, reminding him ‘as to our affairs, he knows them already, for you know how you and I trust in him, and that we have always found him faithful’.

  From then on, Jermyn ciphered Henrietta Maria’s letters to the King and deciphered the returning correspondence too. He became thus uniquely and automatically privy to the most intimate correspondence between the separated King and Queen.

  And because Jermyn was writing the Queen’s letters for her, there was nothing she could not discuss with him. Jermyn’s ideas could reach to the very heart of Henrietta Maria’s decisions, making it impossible in most instances to determine where Henrietta Maria’s ideas stopped and Jermyn’s started. They were just as D’Avenant had characterised the perfect union of lovers in another of the poems in Madagascar,

  Live still, the pleasure of each other’s sight;

  To each, a new made wonder, and delight;

  Though two, yet both so much one constant mind,

  That ‘twill be art and mystery to find

  (Your thoughts and wishes being still the same)