The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Historians remain divided over whether Jermyn and Henrietta Maria became husband and wife.

  If she had married Jermyn, Henrietta Maria would not have been unusual in her family. She had shared her nursery with her father’s numerous illegitimate offspring. Her mother’s lover Conchini was loathed throughout France. Her widowed sister Christine of Savoy scandalised Europe with her affair with Count Philip San Martino d’Aglie. Her father-in-law James I shared his bed with the Duke of Buckingham and referred to him in private as his ‘wife’. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth of Bohemia was rumoured to have married Lord Craven. Her nephew Rupert may have married his mistress Francesca Bard. Of her own children, James and Mary were later to contract secret marriages with commoners, and Charles II may well have married his mistress Lucy Walter.

  When considering the pros and cons of marrying the Count de Lauzun, her niece Mademoiselle de Montpensier wrote,

  I had read the history of France… in which I found examples of persons of inferior rank to [Lauzun’s], having married the daughters, the sisters, the granddaughters, and the widows of monarchs. Besides this, I decided that there was little real difference between men like these and those born of a more illustrious house; the one having far greater merit and elevation in their souls – the true measure of respective ranks.

  Henrietta Maria, however, shared none of her niece’s égalitarianism. Earlier indiscretions with Jermyn were one thing, but marrying him was another. Truer to Jermyn’s situation were the words put in the mouth of his alter-ego Theander in The Platonic Lovers by D’Avenant:

  If I should think t’ enjoy

  Her by the tame and formal title of

  A wife, I were but simply gulled by my

  Ov’rweening and too saucy ignorance,

  As knowing well my birth, my fortune, and

  My years make me unfit for such a hope.

  Besides, and contrary to much ill-informed gossip, Jermyn remained an Anglican all his life. However much she loved him, Henrietta Maria could not have countenanced marrying him without a proper Papal dispensation, and no evidence of any such document has ever come to light.

  How Charles II and his siblings rated the likelihood of their being Jermyn’s stepchildren, if not actually his offspring, is not recorded. The closest to a comment comes from a story written by the Baroness d’Aulnoy, based on conversations she may have heard first-hand in the 1670s. In her tale, Charles II’s illegitimate son James, Duke of Monmouth argues with Jermyn about love:

  ‘Ha!’ cried the Duke, ‘how ungrateful you are to complain, considering how your evils have been softened by the good that one cannot buy. I know sufficient of the History of the last Court to be aware of your antecedents, nor do I deny that you well merited your good fortune, that you are kind to me because—-’

  At these words, Lord [Jermyn] laughed so loudly that Prince Rupert and the Duke of Buckingham hearing it, called them to come back.

  Behind Jermyn’s laughter is hidden the closest we may ever have come to hearing the truth.

  The French army quelled the Fronde and, in June 1649, Prince Charles returned to Paris from the Netherlands, where he had been staying since the failure of the 1648 uprisings.

  Since his father’s death he was now Charles II, the nineteen-year-old exiled monarch of England and Scotland.

  Although Jermyn was officially no more than a servant of Henrietta Maria’s, his closeness to the Queen and his fatherly influence over the young Charles II made him the King’s leading henchman, the ‘employed and trusted’, as Secretary Nicholas was to write bitterly several years later ‘as Premier Minister in the management of all his Majesty’s greatest and most secret affairs’.

  With the young King at his side, Jermyn was busy devising schemes to bring about the Restoration. Jermyn understood very well the importance of propaganda, and was fortunate in having a circle of extremely talented writers living under his patronage at the Louvre.

  These included William D’Avenant, who was writing an epic poem, Gondibert, about an exiled prince’s struggle to regain his throne, with a preface advocating an ideal society unified under strong, hierarchical government. The preface included a reply in which the young King’s mathematics tutor, Thomas Hobbes, sketched out the philosophy of his own forthcoming book, Leviathan.

  Published in 1651, Leviathan would eventually become one of the most influential philosophical works of the century. It was written in the Louvre, during the time when Jermyn dominated the royal household there, and, in parts, there is a remarkable overlap with the views he held. It argued the case for royalty at a time when Jermyn was desperately trying to use any means he could to restore the monarchy. It surely cannot be entirely coincidental that Hobbes just happened to write this extraordinary book in the very place and time when it could be of most use to Jermyn.

  A further piece of indirect evidence that suggests Jermyn’s close involvement in the writing of Leviathan is the readiness with which Hyde heaped condemnation on a book that in no respects contradicted his own efforts to restore the King. It makes considerable sense, in fact, to see Leviathan as the centrepiece of Jermyn’s propaganda war against Cromwell’s Commonwealth.

  Hobbes argued that society was an uneasy truce between individuals seeking personal happiness, who agreed to surrender part of their freedom to a higher, sovereign authority, which he called ‘the great Leviathan’, in return for it protecting them against others. This sovereign authority could be a monarchy, autocracy or democracy.

  On the whole, Hobbes thought a monarch, whose succession was not open to dispute in the way that a dictator’s was, and who was far less likely than an assembly of men to disagree amongst himself, or to fall under the sway of demagogues (Pym and Cromwell, for example), was the best choice. In England, Hobbes argued, Charles I had been the sovereign authority. Parliament had been no more than a group of messengers acting as intermediaries between King and people.

  Echoing what Charles I had said at his trial, nobody had the authority to try the King, because the King was the sovereign authority.

  The arguments of Hobbes and D’Avenant gave a philosophical structure to Jermyn’s views of the monarchy. Although Jermyn and most of his relatives had sat in the House of Commons, his own well-being had always depended on the strength of the Stuart monarchy. His and Henrietta Maria’s mutual self-interest coincided with the doctrine of Divine Right, drummed into them both through court propaganda from their early childhoods. Besides, the only alternative to monarchy in Britain could not be classical democracy – which everyone at the time agreed could never work in anywhere larger than a Greek city – but Parliamentary power.

  When the wealthy Parliamentarians tried to grasp power from the King, they acted in the interests of the middle and upper classes, not of the people as a whole. The majority of the English people were not represented in Parliament at all. Their liberties had been eroded by numerous laws imposed by Parliament, favouring landlords over tenants and employers over labourers. Parliament’s Enclosure Acts continued to force small farmers out of secure tenancies and into an increasingly uncertain labour-market. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s concern for the wellbeing of the English people was admittedly somewhat distant, but it was probably genuine. In their hearts, they believed the people would be better off living under a strong Stuart monarchy than under Parliament.

  Though not normally associated with Jermyn, Leviathan was a central element of Jermyn’s efforts to restore the King. Cowley likened the solid reasoning it contained to ‘the Shield from Heaven, to the Trojan Heroe given’. Before Aeneas’s monumental battle to secure his foothold in Italy, his mother Aphrodite asked her husband Hephaestus, the smith of the gods, to put his servants to work forging a magnificent suit of armour, and a shield, depicting the future glory of Rome.

  That shield was given by mother to son, to protect him in the battle that was to come. Here, in Leviathan, was a shield of words, forged at Jermyn’s behest, by which Henrietta Maria might ho
pe to avert further bloody conflict and see her son safely enthroned at last in London.

  The people whom Jermyn most wanted to persuade to restore Charles II to his throne were the Scots Presbyterians. For all their disobedience to Charles I, they had been incensed by Cromwell’s execution of their monarch. So desperate was Jermyn to gain Scottish support, that he even tried behaving like a Presbyterian. Curbing his customarily flamboyant lifestyle, he attended services at the austere Huguenot chapel at Charenton, just south of Paris, and prompting the Anglicans to start calling him ‘the Louvre Presbyter’, and ‘the Baal of the Louvre’ – or sometimes just ‘His Greatness’.

  His postal diplomacy with Scotland led to a successful meeting between Charles II and the Scottish delegates at Breda in the Netherlands in May 1650.

  Here, the young King agreed to uphold the Presbyterian Covenant, in return for the Scots’ military support. With Jermyn’s blessing, he sailed away to join Lord Argyll at the head of the Covenanting Army. Meanwhile, Jermyn’s spies and agents primed the networks of Royalist conspirators in England, concentrating on the English Presbyterians and perhaps utilising networks of Freemasonic Lodges to mobilise support as well.

  Jermyn planned to support the rising with troops transported from France in ships loaned by Henrietta Maria’s son-in-law William of Orange. But this plan was thrown awry when, in October, the Prince suddenly caught smallpox and died. His wife Mary, who was only nineteen, was left heavily pregnant and, on Monday, 4 November, she gave birth to a son.

  Jermyn made a hasty journey over the frozen roads of northern Europe to The Hague, where he found Mary’s Buitenhof Palace draped in heavy mourning. Through Stephen Goffe, whom he employed as his political agent in the Netherlands, Jermyn tried to cajole the Dutch States General into honouring the late Prince’s promise of ships, but they would not do so. But thanks to Jermyn, they did confirm the right of Mary’s son to succeed to his father, and arranged for her to be co-regent until the boy came of age.

  While he was there, Jermyn also oversaw the baby’s baptism. The child was named William Henry. The second name was well used in both the English and French royal families, but its use here may also, perhaps, imply Mary’s tacit acknowledgment of Jermyn’s role as defender of the Stuarts. Much later, the boy would become England’s king, remembered in history as ‘William of Orange’.

  Having settled Mary’s affairs in Holland, Jermyn returned to Paris. He planned to join Charles II in Scotland, where he intended to assume the office of the King’s principal Secretary of State. However, the work of co-ordinating the different risings in England kept him in Paris, unless it is true, as Sir Christopher Hatton alleged, that Henrietta Maria would not let him go for fear of the dangers he would face there.

  She was right to be apprehensive. Cromwell’s agent discovered and prevented the English risings. Instead of triumphant dispatches containing news of Charles II’s victories, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria heard what happened next from the stream of broken refugees who came stumbling back to Paris.

  At Worcester on Wednesday, 3 September 1651, Scottish claymores and dirks were pitted against the pikes and rapiers of Cromwell’s army.

  The pikes and rapiers won. When the bloody encounter was over, Cromwell was the unquestioned master of England. The young King fled, making his famous escape in disguise, hiding in the oak tree at Boscobel whilst Roundhead soldiers sniffed around below him. When he reached the Louvre two months later, Charles’s shirt stank so badly that the first thing Jermyn sent for one of his own for the lad to wear.

  In June 1652, Jermyn and Charles became embroiled in a new bout of France’s on-going civil-war, the Fronde.

  The Prince of Condé and Henrietta Maria’s own brother the Duke of Orléans had hired the Duke of Lorraine’s mercenaries to make another assault on Mazarin’s forces, led by the Marshal de Turenne.

  Jermyn, who was banking heavily on Mazarin’s gratitude, proposed Charles as a mediator in the dispute. As the two armies drew closer in meadows just south of Paris, however, it was Jermyn himself who found himself galloping to and fro’ between the two commanders, trying to obtain Lorraine’s agreement to withdraw.

  Finally, with the front lines less than a cannon-shot apart, Lorraine agreed. Jermyn spurred his horse across the now very familiar stretch of meadow, brandishing the signed treaty above his head. Peace had been restored, but when he and Charles returned to Paris, they found that the city itself had fallen into Frondeur hands.

  For an uncomfortable few weeks, the English royal household found themselves trapped, yet again, in the Louvre, with dwindling food supplies. Outside, in the stinking streets, the mob chanted anti-English slogans, accusing Jermyn of a catalogue of misdeeds, from sleeping with the Queen to plotting to sell France to Cromwell.

  Finally, the Duke of Orléans himself smuggled them out of the city at night. As dawn broke over the Seine valley, they rode up, cold and exhausted below the comforting ramparts of Saint-Germain, where the French royal family was waiting to welcome them to safety.

  It was not until Thursday, 21 October 1652, that Jermyn could join the Bourbons and Stuarts at the balustrades of the palace gardens to watch the final showdown between Turenne and the Frondeurs. Even at such a distance they could see the flashes of the cannons firing and heard the booms echoing over the water meadows. Eventually, the noise stopped and the anxiously-expected messenger came pounding up to the palace. Turenne had won.

  They had packed their meagre belongings already. Charles was given a place of honour in the procession, with Jermyn not too far behind, riding next to Henrietta Maria’s carriage as they started their triumphant journey back to Paris.

  Since 1649, Jermyn had spent almost four years as the effective ‘Premier Minister’ of the exiled Court. For the first two, he had continued, as before, to hold absolutely no official government post at all. It was not until spring 1652 that he was even appointed to the Privy Council – which shows how effective the entirely notional position of privado was, and how ineffective the Privy Council, could be.

  Throughout this period, Jermyn’s old adversary, Sir Edward Hyde, had been tirelessly seeking ways to oust him from the new King’s affections. Playing on the young King’s bad habit of agreeing with whoever was talking to him at the time, Hyde successfully (and quite falsely) made Charles suspect that Jermyn’s ally Sir Robert Moray was a traitor. He insinuated (probably rightly) that a plan of Jermyn’s for Charles to marry a French princess would alienate support from otherwise loyal Englishmen.

  Hyde also contrived the somewhat perverse (and incorrect) argument that Hobbes’s Leviathan was really a pro-Cromwellian tract. Following his arguments through to their logical conclusion, Hobbes had stated that ‘the obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them’. It was a logical but foolish thing for Hobbes to have written, and which Jermyn had failed to correct, and a gift to Hyde’s rhetoric – but it was ridiculous to suggest that he (and Jermyn) were closet Republicans and, in any case, offending lines applied just as much to Cromwell as Charles.

  It greatly helped Hyde that Charles, now twenty-three, was becoming increasingly intolerant of his doting but rather overbearing mother. Because she and Jermyn so often spoke with one voice, it was not difficult for Hyde to transfer some of Charles’s irritation with her onto Jermyn himself. And ironically, the fact that Hyde so often disagreed with Henrietta Maria and Jermyn suddenly began to count in his favour with the independent-minded young King.

  Jermyn’s reaction to this was to make one of the most stupid blunders of his entire career. At Christmas 1653, without bothering to check any of the evidence, he and Prince Rupert came to the Privy Council and accused Hyde of being in treasonous correspondence with none other than Oliver Cromwell.

  Both Hyde and the King reacted with incredulity. Under Hyde’s ruthless cross-examination, the witnesses who were supposed to have firm evidence of this treason c
rumbled, and were forced to admit they were acting on mere hearsay. The affair ended with Hyde and the King closer than ever, and Jermyn’s credibility in shreds.

  We do not know why Jermyn made such an uncharacteristic blunder. He may simply have followed the impetuous Rupert’s lead. There is also the possibility that Jermyn was ill: in June 1653, we know for sure that he suffered a severe fever, from which Rupert is reported to have cured him using charms brought back from his recent voyage to Africa. It is possible that the cure hadn’t been as complete as was thought, and that Jermyn’s customarily sharp mind was still out-of-sorts. Whatever the reason, Jermyn, normally so politically shrewd, was capable of making mistakes, and this was the worst of them.

  And now greater misfortunes contrived to play into Hyde’s hands as well.

  For a long time, Cardinal Mazarin had been negotiating a peace treaty with Cromwell, whose naval power he had every reason to fear. As part of the treaty, all the Royalists in Paris, except for French-born Henrietta Maria and her immediate household, would have to leave. Jermyn was supposed to be the Royalists’ most adept negotiator at the French Court. When he finally had to admit that he could not persuade Mazarin to continue supporting Charles II, his favour with the King plunged yet further.