The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Jermyn had regained a great deal of Charles’s confidence, but Hyde, recently made Baron Hyde and promoted from Chancellor of the Exchequer to Lord Chancellor, the titular head of the legal profession, was still the King’s chief advisor – the ‘first minister’.

  Jermyn understood the reason for this only too well, explaining to Lord Aubigny that when Hyde had the King ‘with him among his papers, and shows him this and that letter of intelligence, and comments upon them, and that the king, who likes not to be over pressed with such knotty and intricate things, would divert himself, he may lead him to a resolution’. So, whilst England was the primary focus of his attention, Jermyn also gave considerable thought to what was happening in the King’s court in Brussels, and how he might be able to prise the limpet Hyde off the great rock that was the King.

  Before he left Colombes, Charles had signified his renewed confidence in Jermyn by granting him an earldom. Jermyn chose the title of Earl of St Albans.

  Jermyn chose this partly in memory of his kinsman Francis Bacon, who had been Viscount St Albans. But St Alban himself was the legendary founder of English Freemasonry, and it may be significant in this context that, whilst history remembers Jermyn as Earl of St Albans, he himself always signed himself ‘St Alban’. It was to the English Freemasons that Jermyn may now have looked for support in his bid to oust Hyde and become first minister himself.

  Besides Freemasons, Jermyn definitely sought support from the English Presbyterians. He told them truthfully that, after the Restoration, the staunchly Anglican Hyde would be ‘implacably bitter’ against them, whereas he, Jermyn, would strive for religious toleration. He hoped these groups would create a groundswell of opinion against Hyde, which would help convince Charles to give Jermyn his old position back.

  Jermyn’s main weapon against Hyde, however, was to build the Restoration on a French guarantee of Charles’s well-being which Jermyn, not the Chancellor, had negotiated. ‘Otherwise’, as Hyde’s friend Dr Morley commented sardonically, ‘the Lord Chancellor cannot be put out nor Jermyn brought in’.

  In March 1660, after his customary prevarications, Cardinal Mazarin agreed to Jermyn’s request for military backing. It was not until April, however, that the Cardinal granted permission for Charles to return to France, whence he could launch his triumphant return to England.

  As soon as Jermyn knew that permission had been granted, he raced off to deliver the good news to the King, who was now staying with his sister Mary at Breda, on the border between the Netherlands and Spanish-controlled Flanders.

  Meanwhile, however, the diplomatic strategy set in motion via the English agent Mordaunt had worked. The former Cromwellian General George Monck now believed that the restored monarchy was all that could save England from anarchy. Under his aegis, a full Parliament was called, and it voted to restore the King.

  The very same day as Jermyn reached Breda Castle, full of plans to bring Charles back to France, the messenger arrived from London to bid the King come home.

  Suddenly, there was no need to go to Paris. Instead, Charles processed triumphantly to The Hague, where an English ship, hastily renamed the Royal Charles, awaited him. At Colombes, and despite the disappointment at the change of plan, Henrietta Maria heard the news ‘with all the marks of joy imaginable’. Carriagefuls of French nobles rolled up to her little chateau to congratulate her. Returning to the Palais Royale, she held a grand ball to celebrate the amazing news. She invited every Englishman in Paris to the ball, and as many French nobles as would fit in.

  And Jermyn? His place was with the Queen, and his duty was to convey the King’s apologies to Mazarin, for not taking up his offer. With fireworks and toasts behind and ahead of him, his solitary coach rumbled back over the potholed roads of northern France.

  He had done an amazing amount to achieve the Restoration of the monarchy, yet in his latest efforts to supplant the power of that most tenacious of adversaries, sharp-minded Lord Chancellor Hyde, he had failed.

  Charles II entered London on Tuesday, 29 May 1660. Passing regally through the crowds with Hyde not far behind, he reserved a particularly cheery wave for Mordaunt’s wife, whom he spotted watching from a balcony. The same morning, Henrietta Maria sat at her bureau at Colombes, gazing out with tearful eyes towards the distant ramparts of Saint-Germain. To her eldest son she wrote, ‘you may judge of my joy, and if you are torn to pieces over in England, I have had my share here in France’.

  Finishing her letter, she set off with Jermyn for Chaillot to hear her nuns singing Te Deums. Afterwards, they processed into Paris, the Queen coughing triumphantly as the crowds cheered and waved. That evening, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria watched as celebratory fireworks exploded over the high roofs of the Palais Royale.

  The Restoration had been a major goal of Jermyn’s. The lost world of his early years had been miraculously regained. The fight for his own power and influence, however, was still to be resolved: and the battlefield where that fight would be waged was no longer in France, but in the corridors of power in Whitehall.

  XV

  RESTORATION! 1660 – 1662

  Where’s now the royal mother – where?

  To take her mighty share

  In this inspiring sight,

  And with the part she takes,

  to add to the delight!

  Ah, why art thou not here,

  Thou always best, and now the happiest queen,

  To see our joy, and with new joy be seen?

  How well thy different virtues thee become,

  Daughter of triumphs, queen of martyrdom!

  Abraham Cowley, ‘Ode on the Return and Restoration of Charles II’ (1660).

  At the beginning of June 1660, Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, set foot on English soil for the first time in sixteen years.

  On the quayside around him he heard a sound that had become thoroughly unfamiliar – men and women speaking English.

  The dashing Cavalier colonel who had sailed away from Pendennis Castle with Henrietta Maria had changed a great deal. Despite all their money worries, sixteen years of French soup and gold had added considerably to his waistline, although his upright stature and broad shoulders still preserved him from looking too overweight.

  The goatee beard and moustache he had sported so gallantly in his youth had vanished: his lined face was now shaved fashionably clean.

  Since 1624, when Louis XIII started wearing artificial hair over his thinning locks, periwigs had become commonplace amongst mature European gentlemen. Worn initially to defy signs of aging, they had developed to become the height of fashion for men of all ages. Now the sumptuous curls of Jermyn’s new wig clustered around his furrowed brows and cascaded lustrously down over his shoulders.

  At the Palace of Whitehall on Wednesday, 6 June, Jermyn took his seat at the Privy Council (to which he had been appointed in 1652), the body through which the newly restored King ruled England. A few members were good friends of his, such as Prince Rupert, the young Duke of Buckingham –who had survived his spell in Cromwell’s gaol – and Jermyn’s young cousin, Charlie Berkeley, a talented soldier and high-spirited drinking-companion of the King, who was also a close friend of Jermyn’s nephew Harry Jermyn.

  But the Council was dominated by Lord Chancellor Hyde, now a late-middle aged man like Jermyn, his flaxen hair turning grey and perhaps already hidden under a wig similar to Jermyn’s, his waistline also much enlarged, but in no respects any less sharp or energetic in his work than he had been twenty years earlier.

  The majority of members shared Hyde’s lofty anti-French, pro-Anglican sentiments.

  One of the first things Hyde proposed was to dismiss the French ambassador, because he had previously served under Cromwell. It was a move calculated to offend Cardinal Mazarin, so Jermyn objected. Not one person backed Jermyn up.

  The ambassador’s dismissal was part of Hyde’s policy of aligning Britain with the Hapsburg countries of Spain and Austria and against France. If Jermyn had not been in Lon
don, these policies would have been fulfilled.

  Yet Jermyn’s personal relationship with Charles II still counted for a great deal. The King had known Jermyn all his life. He knew the rumours that this tall, clever, incredibly well-informed and profoundly reliable man was his father, but more than that he remembered and valued the fatherly role Jermyn had played in his life. Therefore, even as Hyde’s Privy Council thought they were deciding on one set of policies, Jermyn had a quiet drink with the King and persuaded him to take on a completely different set – based around a closer alliance with France.

  Throughout the Commonwealth period, Jermyn had struggled to preserve friendship between the English and French royal families. He did so partly at Henrietta Maria’s behest, for she belonged to both; partly because he felt that France was the exiles’ strongest potential ally; and also because he knew that such a friendship was the surest footing on which his own power could rest.

  In the very different world of Restoration England, Jermyn continued to press for continued Anglo-French unity, and for the same reasons. The policy of Anglo-French co-operation was known as the ‘Closer Union’, a term Jermyn first used himself in a letter to Charles in April 1661. Its details emerge through the correspondence and events of the ensuing decade, leading up to the Secret Treaty of Dover in 1670.

  In its grandest form, as it emerged over the next decade, Jermyn’s scheme promoted a Europe dominated by Henrietta Maria’s family, particularly her son Charles, her grandson William of Orange and Louis, who was (the likelihood of his really being Mazarin’s son aside) her nephew. If these three could rely on each other’s armed support, they could quash their national parliaments and count on each other’s support if any of their subjects rebelled. United, they could overcome the Hapsburg powers: this in turn would lead to their joint domination of central Europe and the carving up of the fabulous wealth of the Hapsburg colonies in South America.

  It is impossible to say precisely when any individual element of this plan was first considered, or by whom. But all the evidence suggests that, even if the original idea was not Jermyn’s – though it may well have been – it was a plan that he embraced and promoted wholeheartedly.

  It does not seem unlikely that Jermyn could indeed have been the man who first dreamed up such an audacious scheme as the Closer Union. Early documentary evidence of Jermyn’s enthusiasm for the scheme, in its most basic form of the English and French crowns’ pledge of mutual assistance against enemies, external and internal, includes a letter he wrote in July 1662. Here, Jermyn wrote that Charles and Louis ‘will be preserved so very much by the happy union that is now between them which continuing they will have very little to fear either from foreign enemies or domestic embroilments’.

  The plan clearly appealed to Charles more than a Hapsburg alliance precisely because of the importance it placed on his own, immediate family ties. In June 1660, therefore, and without consulting Hyde, the King sent Jermyn’s nephew Harry Jermyn to apologise to Mazarin for the ambassador’s dismissal.

  Charles also agreed to appoint Jermyn as Ambassador Extraordinary to France, to renew the ancient Anglo-French treaties and sign a new treaty with France, each side promising to send armed assistance should the other be attacked. Charles also concurred with Jermyn that his little sister Princess Henrietta Anne should marry Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, who had recently inherited the title of Duke of Orléans. Charles himself would marry Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of France’s ally, the King of Portugal, thus bringing Portugal into the anti-Hapsburg coalition.

  All of these policies ran contrary to those of Hyde’s government. Thanks to the extraordinary, almost father-son relationship that existed between the King and his henchman, it was Jermyn himself who now directed England’s foreign policy.

  When Jermyn set foot back on English soil, he did so alone. The Queen simply could not face seeing her desecrated chapel at Somerset House or the collapsing roofs of her other palaces. The thought of being amongst the very crowds who, as she imagined, had jeered her husband as he went to the executioner’s block, filled her with horror.

  Yet in the autumn, she summoned Jermyn back to collect her, and they landed safely at Dover on Friday, 26 October.

  The Queen had changed her mind because her second eldest son James, Duke of York, had just announced his previously secret marriage to a commoner, none other than Chancellor Hyde’s own daughter, Anne. The Queen’s aim in returning was to force him to dissolve the marriage, but nothing she could say could persuade him to do so.

  Worse events then unfolded, for first her youngest son Henry and then her daughter Mary contracted smallpox and died.

  Mary, who had come over to England that autumn as well, was a widow and had, for several years now, been conducting a semi-illicit romance with Jermyn’s twenty-four-year old nephew, Harry Jermyn.

  An unflattering description of Harry, the second son of Jermyn’s quiet older brother Thomas, states that he had a big head and thin legs. But he was also very athletic, an accomplished swordsman and an enthusiastic soldier, who had spent most of the previous decade serving in the French and later the Spanish army, alongside James and his equally high-spirited cousin, Charlie Berkeley.

  Copy of an old photograph of a portrait of Jermyn’s rakish nephew Harry Jermyn

  A series of diplomatic missions to Holland on behalf of his uncle, and his accompanying of the Duke of York on visits there, had brought Harry into frequent contact with Mary who, according to her advisor Daniel O’Neill, was ‘pleased with Harry Jermyn’s love’. Once Mary knew she had smallpox she decided, according to the veteran gossip, Samuel Pepys, to marry Harry.

  If this marriage really took place, it was on or about Thursday, 20 December 1660. Regardless of the truth or not of this, there is no doubt at all how Mary felt about Harry’s uncle. She had always regarded him as her family’s defender. Now, in her will, the princess made Jermyn one of the executors of her estate.

  Mary’s death shook Henrietta Maria into making her peace with James, his new wife Anne, and even with Lord Chancellor Hyde himself. She did so on New Year’s Day, 1661. Then, she left Whitehall with Jermyn immediately, embarking from Portsmouth nine days later under a brooding sky.

  As soon as they left the shelter of the harbour a gale struck, tearing at the sails and driving the ship and its terrified occupants back onto Horse Sands. They ran aground with a sickening crunch, convinced they were about follow Mary to the grave. But, as Henrietta Maria had always been fond of commenting, no English queen had ever been drowned. They were rescued and brought safely to shore. Their next attempt was more successful and they crossed safely to France.

  Mary of Orange, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, young widow of William II of Orange and mother of William II of Orange. By ‘van Honthorst’, and reproduced with very kind permission of the present owner

  Early in the morning of Saturday, 16 March 1661, Jermyn’s coach crunched down the frost-encrusted gravel of Colombes’s driveway and out onto the rutted road towards the distant smog of Paris. Instead of his own coat of arms, the doors of his coach were emblazoned with those of Charles II. This was the day of his official entrée into Paris as the King’s Ambassador Extraordinary.

  After the formal procession of carriages sent by the other foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, Jermyn reached the French Court at the Louvre.

  Here, under the eyes of the French nobility, he proceeded past the scarlet-liveried musketeers and into the great audience chamber. Jermyn swept the long plume of his black velvet hat across the inlaid marble floor before him and crooked his knee in an elegant bow.

  He was in the presence of Louis XIV, the most powerful man in Europe, a monarch so exalted that, if courtiers saw his dinner being carried down the palace corridors, they were obliged to salute it.

  The twenty-three-year old King, with his narrow eyes, Roman nose and arching eyebrows, was wearing black. Seventeen days ago, Cardinal Mazarin had died. Rather than appoint a
new First Minister, Louis had surprised everyone, including Jermyn, by deciding to rule France personally. Mazarin and Richelieu before him had created the Absolute Monarchy in France. Now Louis had become France’s first truly Absolute Monarch, the Sun King, radiating glory from the centre of his great domain.

  Though conducted in the most ritualised, courtly fashion, Jermyn’s conversation with Louis would have been very different to most dialogues between kings and new ambassadors, who may never even have met face to face before. Besides being absolutely fluent in French, Jermyn had, most unusually, spent some sixteen years at the French Court. He had known Louis from the time the King was a small boy, who used to march up and down the courtyard of the Palais Royale, beating his toy drum. His effectiveness as an ambassador therefore had the potential to be immense.

  On his deathbed, Cardinal Mazarin had urged Louis to foster closer ties with Charles. Jermyn now told Louis that the creation of such closer ties with France was exactly what Charles wanted.

  Jermyn had already completed the negotiations for the marriage of Henrietta Anne and Louis’s brother Philippe. Four days after his entrée, Jermyn returned to the Louvre for the formal signing of the contract. After the signatures of the French royal family appears his own title, Earl of St Albans, translated into French – ‘Comte de St Alban’.

  Henrietta Anne had grown up with the Queen and Jermyn in France. She had never known Charles I. Jermyn was the closest person she had known to a father, and she (the vexed question of Eleanor Villiers’ baby aside) was the closest he had known to a daughter. Henrietta Anne’s wedding, on Sunday, 31 March 1661, was a proud day for him personally. And Jermyn was delighted too when Louis told Charles that the marriage would be ‘a new tie which will draw still closer the bonds of our friendship’.