They also made him sign the Test Act, forcing all non-Anglicans out of office: although technically exempt from it, the King’s brother James, the Lord High Admiral was forced, nonetheless, to resign his post soon after.
Then, in January 1674, feckless Buckingham revealed the details he knew of the Grand Design. When Charles slung Buckingham out of the Privy Council, Parliament retaliated by accusing Arlington (whose Catholicism was still secret) of treason. Terrified of suffering Hyde’s fate – or worse – Arlington persuaded Charles to abandon the Grand Design and make peace with the Dutch later the same month.
By a cruel irony, it was the Lord Chamberlain’s job to proclaim the Anglo-Dutch peace. Standing unsteadily in his heavy robes of office, his new white staff of office clutched in his trembling hand, Jermyn announced to the world that Charles would give no further aid to the French.
Every time the crowd cheered, more of Jermyn’s dreams disintegrated. Nine months later, when Arlington was finally able to resign as Secretary of State, Jermyn sold him his office of Lord Chamberlain and retired.
Earlier that year, according to Baroness d’Aulnoy, Jermyn had joked with Epicurean stoicism that ‘a poor old man such as I, is good for nothing, not even to scare the crows’.
Now the loss of Henrietta Maria; the death of Henrietta Anne; the failure of the Grand Design; the derisory laughter of ‘Miledy’ and his increasing ill-health crowded in on him. He bade farewell to Charles, though doubtless still urging him to remember Henrietta Maria’s dream of harmony between England and France. As the autumn rains splashed the newly-laid pavements of St James’s Square, Jermyn’s coach rattled out of the mews behind his house and set off towards Suffolk. The old crow was flying home at last.
Rushbrook Hall, Jermyn’s old family home near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, now belonged to his eldest nephew, Thomas Jermyn. Thomas, who lived in Spring Gardens near Charing Cross, had agreed readily to his uncle moving back there.
From his house in St James’s Square, Jermyn brought his furniture, including two cabinets intricately inlaid with Henrietta Maria’s monogram, which Henrietta Anne had probably given him out of the contents of Colombes.
There was also a chest bearing Charles I’s monogram, containing two of the late King’s shirts and a night cap: cherished relics of the past. In addition, Jermyn brought his collection of portraits. Over Rushbrook’s dark Tudor panelling, his servants hung bright portraits of Charles I; Strafford; Hamilton: Nell Gwyn; Louise de Keroualle; his long-standing friend Rupert and his old kinsman and mentor, Francis Bacon. Amongst these friends hung Van Dyck’s portrait of Jermyn’s younger self, proud and confident in his black satin suit and white lace collar, and Sir Peter Lely’s portrait of him wearing his Garter Robes, the paint barely dry on his old, careworn head placed, according to the practise of the day, onto the body of a much younger model.
Most precious of all, though, was his personal copy of one of Van Dyck’s most lovely portraits of Henrietta Maria, dressed in blue silk decorated with gold, and holding in her hand two pink roses.
The countryside around Rushbrook was teeming with wildlife, but Jermyn was too old now to ride with hounds or aim a musket at whirring clouds of partridges and pheasants.
His eyesight was too poor for him to see much of the autumn countryside, where the River Lark snaked through the brown fields. But even though he could hardly see it, the drizzly emptiness of the Suffolk countryside could only enforce his feelings of failure and desolation.
Jermyn’s many friends in London missed his genial presence. His friend Saint-Évremond wrote him two long letters, entreating him to come back and offering to ‘suffer myself to lose at chess’ for Jermyn’s gratification. Ormonde promised him a game of ‘tick-tack without odds’; Mary of Modena, the new, Catholic wife of James, Duke of York, offered a vole of Ombre and the French ambassador, Honoré Courtin would provide news of foreign affairs.
And Cardinal Mazarin’s beautiful niece Hortense Mazarin, who now lived in London as yet another of Charles’s mistresses ‘will ease your scruple about Visits; she will not take it ill that you just sit by her without seeing her’. Saint-Évremond continued:
A man of honour and politeness ought to live and die in a capital City; and, in my opinion, there are but three capital Cities in Europe, Rome, London, and Paris. But Paris is no longer a place for your Lordship to live in; of the many friends you had there, some are dead, and others are imprisoned; Rome cannot suit with you; nor can the Disciple of St Paul like a place, where St Peter’s successor is the sovereign; this goodly and great City, called London, daily expects you; and here, my Lord, you ought to fix your abode.
Free conversations at table, with a few guests; a game of Ombre at Her Royal Highness’s [Mary of Modena], and Chess at home, will make you as easily wait the last period of life at London, as Monsieur des Yveteaux did at Paris. He died at eighty years of age, causing a Saraband to be played to him, a little before he expired, ‘that his soul’, as he expressed himself, ‘might slide away the easier’. You’ll not pitch upon Music to soften the hardships of that voyage. A Vole at Ombre, and three aces eldest hand against three nines at Crimpo, will determine your days with as great satisfaction.
Saint-Évremond knew Jermyn was determined to stay in the countryside, but was clearly concerned about it.
I’ll not give you six months life, if you stay in the Country with those melancholy thoughts you have taken up there. But why, my Lord, should you resolve to pass winter in a Country where the Horses are a hundred times better looked after than we are? Where there are Mayernes [i.e., doctors] to cure the diseases of the Race-horses, and little better than Farriers to cure those of the men.
You will tell me now, that you are scarce able to see, and that you are troubled with so many indispositions that the World is weary of you. My Lord you take the thing wrong; ‘tis the Country, and not the World that is weary of you. In the Country, people judge of you by the weakness of your sight; your Infirmities there are taken for faults; and you can’t imagine what a despicable opinion your robust Country Gentlemen have of an infirm Courtier. Here in Town, my Lord, you are valued for the strength of your Judgement; your Infirmities are pitied, and your good Qualities reverenced.
As winter set in, Jermyn travelled fifteen miles east to his nephew Harry Jermyn’s new house, Cheveley Park. Now a Catholic and soon to marry Will Crofts’ niece Judith Poley, Harry had at last stopped behaving like a reckless teenager.
Under Jermyn’s guidance, he had bought an old Tudor manor close to Newmarket racecourse and rebuilt it as a classical mansion, with beautiful flower gardens and terraces modelled on those at Saint-Germain.
On Saturday, 2 January 1675, huddled cosily by a blazing fire in the great drawing room at Cheveley, Jermyn scratched a letter to his old friend the Duke of Ormonde, the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the days of the Civil War, ‘to give you a little account of my self…
after having been these three months at my own house in this neighbourhood I am come hither and am going with the master of it to London within five or six days for some domestic affairs.
I think when I go to Clarendon House and miss you there and find my own deprived of the honour of your presence which it had some times the delight of with so much satisfaction, I shall come as quickly back as if I had nothing to do there, and in all events not be very long from retiring to these quarters…. as long as there remains with me any taste for the things of this world, meeting you again at London… I think would give me the most contentment and am with all forms of truth and respect as is the mark of this I am, My Lord, Your Grace’s most humble and most obedient servant,
St Alban
Ultimately, Jermyn did indeed return to London – but not because of Saint-Évremond’s letters. At the beginning of 1678, three months before his 73rd birthday, something more enervating shook Jermyn out of the torpor of his old age.
Charles II had decided to revive the Grand Design.
XXIII
‘JOINING TOGETHER TO SURPASS ALL OTHERS’
1678 – 1685
Fill the Bowl with rosy Wine,
Around our Temple Roses twine,
And let us cheerfully awhile,
Like the Wine and Roses smile.
Crowned with Roses we contemn
Gyges wealthy Diadem.
To day is Ours; what do we fear?
To day is Ours; we have it here.
Let’s treat it kindly, that it may
Wish, at least, with us to stay.
Let’s banish Business, banish Sorrow;
To the Gods belong Tomorrow.
Abraham Cowley, ‘The Epicure’.
Jermyn’s new development of St James’s was now virtually complete. Standing in the square, a man with better eyesight than Jermyn could look north up Duke of York Street to where it ran into Jermyn Street, and see beyond that the rising walls of St James’s Church.
Jermyn was still struggling with the Anglican authorities to have St James’s made into a parish – it was at the time merely part of the larger parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields – but in the meantime, on his brief return trip to London in 1676, he had laid the foundation stone and commissioned his long-standing friend Sir Christopher Wren to build his church.
Wren repaid his mentor handsomely with his design for St James’s Church. The barrel-vaulted roof was a prototype for the style Wren later used on St Paul’s Cathedral. For the tops of the pilasters towering above the altar Wren, had designed bosses decorated with Jermyn’s coat of arms, which can still be seen there today.
The magnificently carved pulpit was the work of the most talented carver in London, Grinling Gibbons, a protégé of Evelyn’s, and who had recently been promoted to become a Grand Warden of the Freemasons.
By 1678, St James’s Square was fully built. Jermyn had overcome the problem of persuading people to build his planned ‘thirteen or fourteen great and good houses’ by dividing the plots into smaller ones, and selling them off freehold.
St James’s Square as Jermyn left it, drawn by Sutton Nicholls in the early 18th century
He sold his original house and built another – and better – one in the north-west corner of the square, at a cost of £15,000 (roughly £1.2m in modern money). Now, twenty elegant houses, inhabited by an eclectic mixture of royal mistresses, royal officials and relations of Jermyn’s, stood behind the unified façade of the completed Square.
The discerning John Evelyn was certainly impressed. Jermyn’s ‘large and magnificent structures’, he wrote, had brought about ‘a renaissance’ in English classical architecture.
Despite this triumph, St James’s Square was not precisely as Jermyn had intended. Practicalities of costs and the annoying habit of builders changing his plans led to the square not being fully symmetrical. He had wanted four roads to enter the square at the exact centre of each side, but instead only three did so, the fourth being replaced by two side-roads leading down to Pall Mall, that broke the square’s southern corners.
Fully unified squares were a new architectural development in northern Europe. They were introduced to Paris by Henrietta Maria’s parents and had been brought to England by Inigo Jones, who built the Piazza at Covent Garden in 1631. But these always combined houses with shops. Jermyn’s innovation was in creating a square exclusively ‘for the conveniency of the Nobility and Gentry who were to attend upon his Majesty’s Person, and in Parliament’.
Unified squares denote social cohesion imposed on individuals. To men like Jermyn, they represented the defining power of monarchy. Richelieu made this explicit in Paris, placing a statue of Louis XIII in the middle of the Place Royale. In London, and with the same end in mind, Jermyn built his square as close as possible to St James’s Palace.
Its enclosed, uniform design was intended to give the area the feel of a palace courtyard. For Jermyn, St James’s Square was a physical embodiment of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the book written under his ægis to give philosophical structure to monarchy. His aim in building St James’s Square was to remind all who saw it, and any government ministers and Members of Parliament who might live there, that the King was in charge.
Since the collapse of the Grand Design, Charles’s now exclusively Anglican Parliament had grown increasingly hostile towards the Crown. Whenever Charles asked for more money to govern the kingdom, Parliament increased its demands for the exclusion of the King’s openly Catholic brother and heir, James, Duke of York, from the line of succession. Parliament favoured instead the brothers’ courageous Protestant nephew, William of Orange who, in 1677, had married James’s daughter Mary.
The only alternative to being beholden to Parliament was for Charles to have another source of income in the form of financial subsidies out of the brimming coffers of the King of France, a solution that had been much discussed before, but never implemented. Some money was forthcoming in 1677, but a permanent arrangement was needed. Nobody was better suited to guide Charles’s ministers through the bewildering intricacies of French diplomatic etiquette, or indeed of the Sun King’s devious mind, than Jermyn.
This is why the King had recalled his most trusted of henchmen back to London in 1678, and it is what kept Jermyn happily occupied over the next three years.
There were many times in this period when Jermyn, although a retired statesman with absolutely no official position seemed to know the King’s mind far better than any members of the government, as Ambassador Paul de Barillon observed. Indeed, without power or position, Jermyn seemed to exercise the most extraordinary, fatherly influence over the nation’s future.
The French were obstinate. They wanted England to be Catholic and on their side, but at the least cost to them. Jermyn’s quiet diplomacy continued, talking to French ambassadors and envoys in the salons of those two alabaster-skinned royal mistresses-cum-French agents, Hortense Mazarin and Louise de Keroualle.
Meanwhile, Protestant revolution simmered, mobs howled for Catholic blood and ministers rose and fell with alarming speed. Parliament even sent one Lord Treasurer, Thomas Osborne, to the Tower for what they perceived as his treasonous negotiations with France over the subsidies.
By 1681, England had faced crisis. Charles’s coffers were empty. Before it voted him a penny in taxes, Parliament wanted war with France and the absolute guarantee that the Protestant William of Orange would be the next monarch.
The consequences of both for Louis would be dire. In this game of diplomatic Ombre, Jermyn found himself holding the trumps. On Good Friday, 1 April 1681, French Ambassador Paul de Barillon agreed to a down-payment of 2,000,000 livres (about £12m in modern money), and a subsequent annual pension of 1,500,000 livres, conditional on Charles not summoning Parliament for three years.
Right back in 1662, Jermyn had written of his project for the Closer Union of French and English crowns that
If it please God to continue those beginnings… [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.
Nineteen years later, Jermyn had turned this hope into reality.
Jermyn waited for a couple of weeks for Louis to thank him – in vain. On Thursday, 21 April, his courtliness tempered by the abrupt impatience of the elderly, he told Barillon that a token of France’s gratitude would be appropriate.
Embarrassed, the ambassador consulted the Sun King, who told him to give Jermyn a diamond studded box, worth 1,500 livres (about £9,000 in modern money), which the former ambassador to France, the Francophobic Denzil Holles, had turned down. So Jermyn received Holles’ box, James returned from exile and Charles settled down to rule without having to summon Parliament, an Absolute Monarch within his own realms at last.
Jermyn’s coat of arms, with the addition of the greyhound supporters that proclaimed his devotion to Henrietta Maria, granted when he became an earl, and the Garter riband inscribed ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal Y P
ense’: ‘shame on him who thinks this evil’. Missing from the scroll below is Jermyn’s enigmatic family motto ‘Ab orient nec ab occidente’: ‘Neither from the East nor from the West’.
In Jermyn’s last years, the bright world retreated down a darkening tunnel as his eyesight continued to deteriorate. But surrounded by his nephews and friends like Saint-Évremond and Hortense Mazarin, he was not as lonely as he had once feared he would be.
Another friend, despite all their erstwhile political differences, was sixty-five-year old Lord Arlington ‘to whom’, Saint-Évremond had written in 1677, ‘you yielded the title of the first gouty Man in England’. Arlington was retired as well now, but still sported the black patch on his nose, ostentatiously concealing the Civil War scar he claimed was there.
Arlington’s main residence was now Goring House at the west end of St James’s Park. Many years later, rebuilt and enlarged, it would receive its present name – Buckingham Palace.
Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 September 1683, Jermyn set out for Goring House in his coach, attended by his footmen liveried in black and silver, to visit his old friend and sometime adversary.
After eating and drinking with what his fellow guest John Evelyn considered ‘an extraordinary appetite’, Jermyn retired to the Ombre table. He was so blind now, Evelyn noted, that he needed a servant-boy to sit next to tell him what cards he was holding.
Thus Evelyn recorded the full, debilitating effect of a lifetime of almost unlimited soup and gold.
Jermyn and Arlington probably reminisced about the old days in France, when the younger man had cultivated Henrietta Maria’s Lord Chamberlain with gifts of Piedmont wine and truffles.
They may also have speculated about the future. The foundation stone had just been laid for a new palace at Winchester, commissioned by Charles from Sir Christopher Wren. Conveniently near France, this would be an English Versailles, a new capital for the Absolute monarchy that Jermyn had created.
The King's Henchman Page 27