Disgrace And Favour

by Jeremy Potter

  Swallowing his resentment, he accepted the assignment with as much grace as he could muster. In Edinburgh it was soon reported from York that the King had agreed to the discharge of twenty of the Scottish Gentlemen of his Bedchamber. Carey’s name was among them. Worse followed: another had been appointed to his wardenship. The King’s word was not to be trusted. Inwardly outraged, he dared not show offence. In despair he paid suit to the Duke and begged for his counsel.

  The Duke smiled at his discomfiture and advised him to make himself useful to the Queen. If the sun refused to shine on a man, what choice had he but to cut his losses and turn his face towards the moon?

  ‘The Queen will have need of a new Chamberlain in England,’ he said. ‘The post will be yours if I recommend you to Jamie, and if the Queen will have you.’

  To aid his courting of the Queen, who was ill and inaccessible, Carey summoned his wife. He had seen all too little of her in the past few weeks. Her coming cheered his existence like a bright tapestry on a naked wall. He had been sick in body since his fall, and dispirited at the King’s deceit. She comforted his body by night and his spirits by day, promising that as she had lost him one sovereign’s favour so she would gain him another’s.

  Together they planned how to lay siege to the Queen. Happily, custom decreed that the Ladies of Elizabeth’s Bedchamber must continue their attendance on her body until it was buried. Lady Carey therefore enjoyed a lead over other English suitors. She obtained entrance to the royal apartments and leave to assist the Queen’s Scottish ladies at the sickbed. These she questioned closely about their mistress.

  Queen Anne was a golden-haired, milky-skinned princess of Denmark, empty-headed and starved of pleasure. Scottish Calvinism oppressed her. Her gaiety as a young bride had brought such grim disapproval from the elders of the kirk that her mouth had become pouted with discontent. To them the dancing and masquerading she loved were devil’s work: her delight in jewellery and fine dresses put them in mind of Jezebel. To James her attraction had lain in her dowry - the long-coveted isles of Orkney. She had long since ceased to expect love from him: their coupling was an animal duty for the purpose of producing heirs, a court ritual to be endured.

  The greatest grief of her life had been the abduction of her eldest child. Prince Henry, the object of all her love, was snatched from her when a babe in arms, to be brought up in Stirling castle in the bleak care of the Earl of Mar, hereditary custodian of the heir to the throne. In nine years she had been permitted barely a sight of him. Hardened by deprivation, her feelings had turned to hatred and her desires towards revenge.

  James had explained the political necessity, patiently but in vain. In Scotland the heir was a standing threat to the occupant of the thone. Had not he himself been seized by malcontents and crowned at the age of thirteen months while his mother, the Queen, was still alive? Anne saw nothing but an unnatural act - one of many committed by her husband. She grew vindictive. If James hurt her, then she would hurt him. After many petty skirmishes she discovered him most vulnerable in religion.

  Although a Lutheran from birth, to spite the would-be champion of Protestant Europe and all his Presbyterian councillors and kirk she became a convert to Rome and installed three Jesuits in her household.

  Her revenge was blessed. The normally garrulous Council was struck miraculously dumb with dismay, and James endured agonies of embarrassment and fear. If openly acknowledged, his wife’s conversion might even have cost him the throne of England. Only her own ambition for the prize of a richer crown caused her to preserve an unwonted discretion. In her own private chapel she prayed morning and evening for the day of reunion with her son.

  No sooner had James left for the south than she took the road to Stirling to recapture the boy. The Earl of Mar was away with the King, but the Countess defended the castle like a man, stoutly refusing to let the Prince out or the Queen in. Anne rode back to Edinburgh in a fit of tantrums and, on the day of Carey’s return with the Duke of Lennox, suffered a miscarriage. Lady Carey found her lifeless and hysterical by turns, seemingly set on spoiling her husband’s hour of glory by dying a martyr to a mother’s frustrated love.

  When reports of the drama reached the King, the Earl of Mar was ordered home to appease the Queen. He was to hand over the Prince to her and accompany them both to London.

  The Queen rallied sufficient strength to announce her refusal to receive the Earl. She demanded first a public apology from him. She would never meet him otherwise, she wrote to the King, and would never come to England except with the Prince and without the Earl.

  The King reluctantly interrupted his civic receptions and hunting to plead with her. He reminded her of the Earl’s faithful service and begged that she would forget her grudge against him. Did she not want to be crowned at Westminster? Her answer came back post-haste. She would rather never see England at all than be beholden to the gaoler of her son.

  It was the Careys who resolved the quarrel. Acting on their advice, the Duke interceded with the King and new orders came from England. The Earl must hand the Prince to the Duke, the Duke should then hand him to the Council, and the Council would hand him to the Queen. When the Queen and Prince made their move to England, the Earl was to remain in Scotland.

  The Queen’s recovery was immediate. She rode in her carriage to Stirling the same day and returned to Edinburgh in triumph with her son. Preparations for the journey south were speedily completed.

  At Berwick she was met by the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s Bedchamber, their former mistress now buried. They had travelled the long distance only to be summarily rejected. With few exceptions - Lady Carey and Carey’s sister, Lady Scrope, among them - the Queen preferred her Scottish ladies, allowing the English nothing but permission to retire immediately to their homes.

  The favour shown to the Carey family did not extend to its head. At the castle Carey came unexpectedly face to face with his brother George, who furiously attributed his downfall to Carey’s disobedience at Richmond.

  ‘So you have come to seek a post with the Queen instead?’ Carey asked him.

  ‘I do not seek one: I am already appointed. The King has been graciously pleased to grant me the office of chamberlain to her Majesty.’

  It was Carey’s turn to show wrath. ‘That post is promised to me,’ he declared, his feet planted foursquare in his brother’s path.

  ‘Promised by whom?’ Lord Hunsdon sniffed and widened his nostrils as though the breath of his brother at close quarters was too much for him.

  ‘By the Duke, on the King’s behalf.’

  ‘Promises are one matter, Robin; fulfilment another. You will quickly learn that lesson now we have a Stuart wearing the English crown. Let me pass if you please.’

  Their hands rested on their sword-hilts. George looked grey and despairing and already half-way to death. Without flinching Carey stood aside. Lord Hunsdon learned his own lesson quickly enough for himself. He went at once to the Queen, and when she adamantly refused to have him he took his grievance to the Duke and told him at length of his brother Robert’s misdeeds. The Duke took note of the misdeeds and assured him that his brother would not be appointed. He promised to speak with the Queen.

  The audience was lively. Her Scottish chamberlain, Master Kennedy, contenting her well, the Queen announced that she intended to keep him. In vain the Duke pointed out that the King had charged him with responsibility for her household appointments. So many Scots men and women about her to the exclusion of English would make her unpopular in England. She pouted and dismissed him. He wrote to the King, who replied threatening to have the chamberlain’s staff broken over Kennedy’s head, but the Queen would not be moved and the Carey brothers, blaming each other for the disappointment, remained without office.

  Quarrelling all the way, they accompanied the Queen to Windsor, both now soliciting the Duke for the post of chamberlain to Prince Henry. Guardianship of the heir would be decided on the advice of the Council, the Duke told them. Appl
ications should be made in that quarter. They were duly made, but the Council had its own nominee.

  In London the new King and Queen were greeted by the populace and the plague together, and their coronation on St James’s Day was rain-sodden and poorly attended. The Bishop of Winchester preached the sermon and, to make his right to the throne plain to all, James commanded him to take his text from the book of Romans: ‘The powers that are, are ordained by God.’ The Queen amused herself in creating a scandal: she refused to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England.

  After the ceremony the court hurriedly withdrew from London, and at Hampton Court the King settled down to enjoyment of his new possessions while his ‘little beagle’ Gecil governed the country for him. Three more Howards became earls, and Cecil himself a baron. Ralegh was dismissed from his post as Captain of the Guard and arrested. After interrogation he attempted to kill himself in the Tower. In London in one week in July, fourteen hundred people died of the plague. One of the victims was George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon and former Lord Chamberlain.

  For twelve empty months Carey kicked his heels at court, idle and humiliated, living in the Queen’s household by grace of his wife’s appointment. Every opportunity of advancement was blocked by Cecil, the spider at the centre of all webs. Appeals to the King brought no response. Despite the anger raging inside him, Carey resolutely kept a cheerful countenance. Preferment would not come from showing resentment at broken promises.

  One evening over supper his wife made mention that the Queen was pining for her other son. In the unveiling to the world of the precocious Prince Henry, his younger brother Charles had all but been forgotten, an unregarded weakling abandoned in Scotland. While Henry grew strong and his expectation of life lengthened, no one would have taken a wager on his brother’s surviving the coming winter.

  Lady Carey grieved for the boy, and Carey felt a surge of hope for himself. They talked through the night, and in the morning she sought an audience with the Queen. The following day, with the summer sun shining on his cheek like a blessing from heaven, he once more took the road to the north.

  The boy lived in the care of Alexander Seaton, Earl of Dunfermline and Chancellor of Scotland, a friend from the time of Carey’s embassies. The Earl received him hospitably, but at his first sight of the young Prince even Carey’s stout heart grew faint with misgiving. The child had inherited his father’s spindle legs and swollen tongue. Aged four years, he could neither walk nor speak. His ankle joints were frail and supported by iron boots. The royal physician proposed to give him the power of speech by cutting the sinew under his tongue.

  The King raised no objection to the Queen’s plea that Charles should be brought to England, despite the hazards of the journey. For the third time Carey escorted a Stuart across the Border. This time there were no welcoming ceremonies. He rode at snail’s pace behind the Prince’s carriage, side by side with the Earl, who was anxious only to surrender his charge alive.

  At court few suitors sought the post of minding a Prince who lived in the shadow of death. When, with the King’s consent, the Queen announced Lady Carey as her choice, Carey’s enemies on the Council rejoiced. Charles’s demise would accomplish his final disgrace.

  Yet the passing of time revealed them in error. They had counted without the heart of the woman for whose love, long ago, Carey had ruined his career. With the boy she was all gentleness and understanding; with all others unyielding in his cause. She removed the leg irons and refused to allow the tongue sinew to be severed. In the latter case she acted in direct defiance of the King’s command. The young Prince’s strength grew with his confidence. Soon he was not only walking but marching like a soldier, and earnestly gabbling and stammering by the hour like his learned father.

  At the Queen’s insistence and in the first flush of James’s gratitude, Carey became master of Prince Charles’s household with sole charge of all appointed to his service. At last the clouds were lifting.

  The Prince

  I

  The years brought ease and discontent. Carey enjoyed office, but power escaped his grasp and the effeminacy of the court sickened him. He would have been happier leading a soldier’s life on the Border. The great ride had proved a profitless folly: under Cecil’s influence the ingrate King had turned against him. For ever, it seemed.

  One flicker of light brightened the twilight. The circle of Prince Henry beckoned. On the threshold of manhood, Henry was early in putting his father to shame. The timid James had sired a manly heir, and while the King drank and swore, the foulest-mouthed man in his own kingdoms, the Prince grew from boyhood sober and shunning profanity. Pious and diligent in public worship, he gravely impressed on his courtiers how fervently he held the name of God sacred. All the pleasure in the world, he declared, was not worth a single oath.

  When the two were together, the contrast was marked indeed: James shambling and slovenly, Henry with the dignity and carriage of a king. The Prince loved horses, but not hunting, which remained his father’s favourite pastime. He learned to shoot with guns as well as bows. He trained his mind in rigorous daily study and his body with tireless exercise, tilting, running at the ring and playing tennis for three or four hours at a stretch. He bought Lord Lumley’s famous library of books and manuscripts collected from the dissolved monasteries and installed it in one of his palaces. He sang and danced, became a patron of writers and painters, was hailed as witty and wise. He could never be kept idle, yet none of his occupations was childish or without purpose.

  It caused no surprise when the King took alarm at the pace of the Prince’s advance. Henry treated his father with due respect and deference, but his glance grew piercing, his frown forbidding, and the King soon became frightened of him. The boy would have me buried already, he complained in his cups.

  It was soon being said that Henry would rule England as Elizabeth had done. Meanwhile the business of government was too tedious for James. Other pursuits proved more pleasurable: there were deer and hares to be killed, disputations to be held with the clergy, and young men to be fondled. In affairs of state, Cecil and the Howards continued to serve him - and themselves as well. They accumulated offices and earldoms and employed the wealth of the nation to buy themselves land and build themselves palaces. Cecil’s at Theobalds became so magnificent and tempting that the King took it for himself. Undeterred, Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, ordered another no less magnificent to be built at Hatfield. Powerless, Carey and his friends could only watch the good fortune of their enemies and pray for the day when Henry would be crowned.

  Two more of his enemies were scaling the heights by way of James’s bedchamber. Young Robert Kerr, the Scottish running page from the rascally Border clan, had captured the royal heart and lived at the King’s side in the place vacated by the Queen. A sojourn in France had mended the rawness of his manners, and softened his accent. His name had been anglicized to Carr and, a peer of England, he had become Viscount Rochester.

  Behind him, jealous of the King’s affection, stood Thomas Overbury, whom Carey had refused to aid and who now refused to aid Carey. The friendship formed at Cessford, and seen by him at Norham, had survived. Overbury possessed the brains which Carr lacked: he advised him on every step and each led upwards. It was said that Carr ruled the King and Overbury ruled Carr.

  Misgivings ripened among Cecil and the Howards. At first they had welcomed Carr as a diversion to keep the King’s time occupied and his temper sweet. But Overbury, who became so haughty that he refused even to recognize Carey when they met, before long began to play high with Cecil too, behaving like a member of the family condescending to a hired attorney.

  Her place usurped by catamites, the Queen had withdrawn to palaces of her own. Long accustomed to the King’s strange tastes, she made it known that her acquiescence could be bought. On state occasions husband and wife continued to meet and perform their ceremonial duties in public amity, but her goodwill remained ever dependent on the receip
t of funds sufficient to satisfy her many extravagances. Even if the Exchequer ran dry, her passion for jewellery and costly masques must be indulged.

  While his father lived in perpetual motion between Whitehall and Hampton Court, Greenwich and Eltham, Windsor and Woodstock, Theobalds and Royston and Newmarket, and his mother fretted over her grievances in Denmark House and Oatlands, Henry divided his time between St James’s, Richmond and Nonsuch. Carey lived with his wife, attendant on the Queen, at the second of these sets of rival palaces, but spent what time he could at the third. Prince Charles, still a child, was in lodgings beside the cockpit at Whitehall with his tutors. Carey’s duties were therefore nominal and he was free to become a member of Prince Henry’s household. In London the path between Denmark House on the Strand and St James’s in the park became familiar at every hour of day and night. In Surrey he could ride from Oatlands to Nonsuch within the hour, and on the river a boat would carry him from either, up or down stream, to the palace of Richmond at Shene.

  There Carey was always made welcome. Henry had adopted the King of France as a worthier model than his own father, and listened intently to reminiscences of the fighting in Normandy which had helped to win a kingdom for a valiant Protestant Henry. Even that King’s conversion to Rome did not affect his admiration, although he wished his followers to be aware that in his case London would not be worth a mass.

  The admiration met with a warm response. The King of France presented the Prince with a riding master and gifts of arms and armour. In Paris it became known that he was resolved to cultivate such a promising sprig despite the decadent stock from which it sprang. King James he slyly flattered by tributes to his wisdom, acclaiming him as the British Solomon and leaving others to remark that Solomon was the son of David and David was the name of Rizzio, the devoted secretary of James’s mother.