Disgrace And Favour

by Jeremy Potter

  Ralegh, it seemed, had once concocted for her a cordial to mend a fever. She had taken it and the fever had vanished. Carey must go to the Tower and beg Ralegh to prescribe a similar draught for the Prince. He must take it to St James’s and ensure that Henry swallowed it, whatever the doctors might say.

  At the Tower the Queen’s mandate allowed him access to the prisoner. It was all but twenty years since the two had met, and for nearly half that period Ralegh had been confined to these lodgings, his life spared by a last-minute reprieve from the scaffold. Like the caged lions in the menagerie below, he lived in defiant dignity and some style, a rare specimen of manhood. Cared for by his own servant, he was permitted to have books and writing material and chemical apparatus for scientific experiment. Outside he enjoyed the private use of a walk along the battlements. From this he could view the world beyond his reach, the world whose history he had amused himself by writing and displeased the King by publishing. He was handsome still but grey, and those proud eyes which had been angered by Carey at Enfield were haunted by the humiliation of failure.

  ‘God bless and lead you through these troubled times, Sir Robert.’ His grip was firm, but no longer as firm as Garey’s. ‘What news? Tell me whether or not this is an auspicious day. I hear the church bells but not their message. Do they ring for the anniversary or the Prince?’

  It was the seventh anniversary of thanksgiving for deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot. Carey explained that the usual prayers in all churches were being augmented by special services of supplication for the recovery of the Prince. He waited impatiently while Ralegh made up the cordial and wrote a letter to the doctors stating its properties.

  ‘If this does not save his life,’ said Carey as he took it, ‘I fear that nothing will. The fever has quite conquered the doctors. It cannot be long now before it overcomes the Prince as well.’

  ‘The secret of this medicine,’ said Ralegh, tapping the glass, ‘was taught me by a Jew from the Levant. It has never failed except when opposed by a stronger potion. You may read,’ he added grimly, ‘what I have set down here.’

  Carey leaned over his shoulder and spelt out the last two sentences of the letter: ‘This cordial will certainly cure His Highness of a fever. It will prevail against all feverish ailments, poison alone excepted.’ Poison alone excepted: those words were heavily underscored.

  At St James’s the Prince’s condition had not improved. The doctors were debating the rival merits of cordials and bleeding Their number had grown, despite the Prince’s express desire. The physicians favoured bleeding, which was surgeon’s work. The surgeons argued for cordials, which would settle responsibility on the physicians. Sir Thomas Mayerne read Ralegh’s letter aloud. A hush of suspended breath fell at the mention of poison. One by one they examined the concoction, some dipping fingers in it and dabbing it cautiously on their tongues. Unanimously they refused to feed it to the Prince.

  When Carey remonstrated he was told that a cure compounded by a prisoner of state was a political matter. The cordial would be passed to the Council. If the Council gave permission it might be tried. He urged in vain that there should be no delay. Shoulders were shrugged and other cordials administered without effect.

  The King, a short distance away in Whitehall, had not come to visit the sick Prince. When told that hopes of recovery were fading, instead of rushing to his son’s bedside he removed himself hurriedly from London and took refuge in the former palace of the Cecils at Theobalds. Was his flight a sign of guilt? Had he been overtaken by remorse? Did he fear infection? Or could the timorous unifier of two kingdoms not bear the proximity of death? The excuse trailing in his wake was the last. It was phrased in his own ornate prose: His Majesty felt unable to linger so near the gates of sorrow.

  Mindful of his son’s soul, however, he despatched a substitute. Archbishop Abbot was rowed over the water from Lambeth to say prayers in the Prince’s chamber and prepare him for life beyond the grave: the same office as his predecessor had performed for the reluctant Elizabeth.

  In the small hours of the following night the Council completed its sitting. It had reached a decision that Ralegh’s cordial might be administered. By that time the Prince lay all but dead. When he was raised and the liquor forced down his throat, a spark of life returned to his face. It faded at once and he relapsed.

  Carey could not suppress his disappointment. He was savage with grief. ‘Too late,’ he cried, his scowl sweeping the room with unspoken accusations of murder. Doctors and councillors alike averted their eyes. Carr and the Howard earls withdrew affronted. Which of them, he wondered, had prolonged the Council’s debate? Only Overbury had the courage to meet his look: he returned it with his customary disdain.

  Before dawn the Prince of Great Britain was dead. Tomorrow’s King had become yesterday’s Prince, and the lives of all those who thronged the bedchamber would be different. Some lamented only their lost ambitions.

  In the circumstances of alarm there was little prospect of a decent interval for mourning. The quarrels of the living took precedence over respect for the dead. Ministers faced public consternation, and another Popish plot was suspected. The Prince’s mother roundly announced in public audience the same day that her son was the victim of murderers. A report of her words was carried post-haste to the King, who gave immediate orders for the body to be cut open to prove the accusation false and attempt to quell the rumours which were rippling through the two realms and beyond.

  The post-mortem was conducted in the presence of the Elector Palatine and a large assembly of the court. The surgeon’s knife was plunged into the Prince’s stomach. His liver was extracted and seen to be pale and leaden. His spleen was displayed and judged to be unnaturally black, his lungs spotted and corrupted, his gall bladder full of wind. One by one severed fragments of the illustrious Prince were held up to view. When the intestines of the stomach had all been taken out and meticulously examined, dissection of the head began and water was discovered in the passages of the brain. In this way the six doctors, headed by the King’s physician, sought to demonstrate in public that no poison had been found in any part of the body. They then issued their certificate. ‘The truth of this relation we make good by the subscription of our names, November 7,1612.’

  It could not have been expected that the findings would still the rumours. Were not these the very butchers and apothecaries who had attended the Prince, and was there anyone unaware that poisons were known which left no trace? Some blamed the death on Carr, some on the Howards. Others continued to direct their aim at wider targets.

  At St Martin’s in the Fields the Bishop of Bangor, chaplain to the court, saw fit to preach a damning sermon against the Council itself. Some members were secret Papists, he declared, and he denounced them from the pulpit for attending private mass on Sundays before the court sermon, and for having wives who covertly reported the Council’s business to their Jesuit confessors. He confided in the congregation that the Prince had complained to him shortly before he died that the true religion of the country lay bleeding from the wounds inflicted on it by the King’s ministers.

  Other preachers followed the bishop’s lead. The Council fulminated against what it described as ‘pulpit hornets’, but feeling ran so high that it dared not imprison them. Indeed whisper had it that the hornets planted their stings by special licence to divert attention from the King and return his wife’s fire. If that was the case, the ruse succeeded. As a Papist with her own Jesuit confessors, the Queen was incensed.

  ‘Papists are loyal,’ she told Carey. ‘Your own Elizabeth will soon be one of us.’ She spoke from bed in a darkened room where she had retired to nurse her sorrow.

  Carey bowed to conceal his surprise and avoid his wife’s eye. ‘If the Prince was poisoned,’ he replied, ‘the culprit will be Carr.’

  ‘Carr!’ The Queen’s contempt was bitter. ‘Carr is a creature. He has no will of his own.’

  ‘He is governed by Overbury.’

  �
��Not in a matter such as this. Do you suppose that an Overbury would dare to kill the heir to the throne? No one would order that but’ - she paused only for a second - ‘but the King himself.’

  ‘Your Majesty!’

  Carey was shocked into silence on hearing his own suspicions voiced. It was his wife who exclaimed, and the Queen ignored her.

  ‘It is twenty-three years this month since I first met the King in Oslo. He had crossed the sea in winter to marry me. My hair was like gold then and my skin like ivory. He tried to kiss me at our first meeting and I had to tell him it was not the custom. I have borne him seven children since - and three more miscarried. I loved Henry, my eldest, so much that I could not bear him out of my sight. The King could not bear him in his - he slandered me in declaring that he was not the father. His jealousy of Henry has driven him insane: why else do you suppose he is hiding in the country? If you do not believe me, go to the funeral and mark his countenance. I know him better than anyone living. He took Henry from me as a baby and now he has deprived me of him for ever. This time I shall be avenged. Find proof of his guilt and I shall reward you well.’

  Carey bowed again to the tousled, half-seen figure on the bed. The gold hair was silver now and the ivory skin chalk. His wife hustled him, wondering, from the room. Was this the path to preferment or the scaffold?

  The King did not attend the funeral, nor did the Queen. Prince Henry’s dismembered body was sewn together and carried to Westminster in a coffin surmounted by a wax effigy dressed in his robes as Prince of Wales. The ceremony, it was said, evoked more grief than any other for many hundreds of years. Downstream in the chill of the Tower, Ralegh, who would have been a free man within two months if the Prince had lived, spoke for all when he mourned ‘the rising sun which set ere scarce it shone’.

  The Favourite

  I

  Tomorrow’s king was no sooner dead than out of mind. Time was too precious to squander on grief. By removing both Secretary of State and heir to the throne within six months, God in His wisdom had cleared a path for those bold enough to reach upwards. In the ensuing struggle, no competitor could afford the handicap of sentiment or scruple.

  Charles, Duke of York, had lived in his brother’s shadow since birth. Suddenly he appeared in public, dazed like a woken child, open-eyed among the throng of sycophants. Because his parents would not attend the funeral, he was cast in the role of chief mourner. Carey walked six paces behind him, ready to catch his unsteady young charge as he stumbled tearfully along the road to Westminster at the head of a procession which took four hours to pass. Aged twelve, the boy was still a weakling, scarcely able to bear the weight of his robes.

  His speech was halting too, and his writing as slow. He showed no aptitude for scholarship nor for sport. Although he had become heir to the throne of two kingdoms, he would blush like a girl when addressed. In affection and pity his father and mother called him Baby Charles still.

  How long would he keep his office of governor to the Prince, Carey wondered, and what loss would he suffer if he were turned out? In his heart he did not believe that this prince, either, would live to be crowned. Nor, it seemed, did the King, who had announced that the marriage of his daughter to the Elector of Palatine would not be delayed by prolonged court mourning. After Charles and any heirs of his body, James intended to settle the succession on the eldest son of the Princess Elizabeth and the German Elector, and the sooner they produced him the better.

  Elizabeth Carey alone believed in Charles’s survival. She had nourished and become a second mother to him. What health and confidence he possessed, he owed to her. ‘How I detest this buzz of flatterers around him,’ she told Carey when they lay in bed together on the night of the funeral. ‘His Highness is shy and delicate and they will bring him no succour.’

  ‘One of them will doubtless deprive me of the governorship,’ Carey replied, ‘but it seems barely worth retaining if something better can be secured. Charles is to his brother as James to Elizabeth. The future lies with the Elector. Should I not go with him to Heidelberg after the wedding?’

  ‘Indeed you should not.’ His wife spoke indignantly. ‘You shall not surrender custody of the Prince, for his sake and for your own. From whom does he inherit his clumsiness? James falls from his horse twice a week. Charles may be king tomorrow.’

  The sharpness of her voice surprised him. On the Border in the early days of their marriage, she had been as pliant as a shoot of willow. During the years in London she had grown more and more unbending. The passage of time and the softness of life at court had dampened his own spirit, while hers had caught fire.

  ‘The King will decide the governorship himself,’ he told her, ‘or Carr will make the choice for him. In either case I shall not be the one appointed. We may plot and protest, but it will be in vain. No one can frustrate the royal will in such a matter as this.’

  ‘The Prince can do it’, she replied. ‘He knows that you do not care for him, yet he recognizes how you protect him. I believe, too, that he will never allow himself to be parted from me.’

  ‘The Prince speak up for himself? Never!’

  ‘Do not scorn the boy, Robin. He may be weak but he is obstinate. He likes his own way as much as the rest of us, and the Queen will support him. She is determined to have him in Denmark House and oversee his education herself.’

  ‘That will never be permitted. She would turn him to Popery. Do you not recall how Henry was seized from her in Scotland?’

  ‘He is religious, but firmly Protestant. If he were converted it would be at his own wish, with his own understanding, for his own comfort.’

  ‘Is that the path you are treading, Elizabeth?’

  She would not answer him and in the darkness he could not read her face. The Queen’s chapel and Father Abercromby, her confessor, remained hidden in the private apartments, to which his wife had access but he had none except when summoned.

  ‘For Jesus’ sake,’ he groaned, taking her in his arms, ‘do not let Rome come between us. Remember what Ralegh said when the King would have Henry marry the Infanta of Spain: two religions cannot lie in one bed.’

  ‘Then if I change, you must change too.’ She kissed him lightly.

  He did not return the kiss. Twenty years before he would have settled the argument by climbing on top of her and forcing her with every thrust of his body into acquiescence. Now the effort required willpower he no longer possessed. Age was the enemy. His last memory of Cecil returned: the spent hunchback with the protruding skull foretelling death had been younger than himself. This world or the next? To what end should he direct his ambition at fifty-five?

  ‘Never think to draw me towards the Catholic traitors of the Spanish party,’ he said angrily. ‘I have fought Popery by land and sea. Papists have killed my friends at my side. Would you have me betray my past? Would you have me suspected as a conspirator against the King’s life? Would you have me fall into mortal error?’

  ‘You exaggerate, Robin.’ She put a hand to his cheek to soothe him. ‘The King does not disown or persecute his loyal Catholic subjects, nor they him. It is priests, Jesuits above all, whom he cannot abide. Your fighting past is far behind you, we none of us know what is truth and what is error, and you need have no fear that Rome will spoil your prospects of advancement. Is not Northampton a Catholic and now supreme on the King’s Council?’

  ‘I would not pursue advancement in the face of my religion.’

  How he despised the King! The law was unequivocal, but not the ruler of the realm. Despite his enduring terror at the memory of the Gunpowder Plot, or perhaps because of it, James did not discriminate against Catholics if, like Northampton, they were powerful and discreet. He would show magnanimity, he announced: he would strive for reconciliation and union, his role would be that of peacemaker, blessed healer of wounds. On Protestant Europe their self-proclaimed champion bestowed, not leadership, but vacillation. Instead of armies he sent them sermons. His policies sprang from cowardi
ce: of that Carey entertained no doubt. His Catholic friends and advisers at home, his appeasement of Spain, his middle way - all served to protect him from the pistols and daggers of Popish assassins.

  Northampton was the most dangerous man in England. The battle for power was between him and the two youths whom Carey had first met at Norham and had never imagined would rise above him: Carr and Overbury. With the office of Secretary of State still vacant, Northampton had come to dominate the Council, as Elizabeth Carey truly said. Unbid, he had assumed Cecil’s task of conducting affairs in London while the King continued to amuse himself in the country.

  Limpet-like, Carr remained at the King’s side and Overbury at Carr’s. Neither had achieved the coveted Secretaryship, but they received Northampton’s letters to the King and the royal approval was granted or withheld on their advice. James, who had declared that he would be his own Secretary of State, remained as idle as ever. He did not intend to lose Carr’s company by burdening him with the business of government, but it seemed that he did not mean anyone else to govern without him. His Robin could be relied on to be loyal and loving to the royal person, to protect his ‘dear dad Jamie’ from any plot by Northampton. Overbury was another matter, but even the drooling, doting King recognized that his favourite was too thick-headed to unearth a plot without assistance. It tantalized Carey to think how in other circumstances he himself might have rendered that assistance or, better still, have succeeded to the Secretaryship of State. What promises the King had made him and had broken so lightly! To what heights might he not have aspired if the Prince of Great Britain had lived!

  Long after his wife had fallen asleep, Carey lay staring at the bed curtain. He recalled the soldierly bearing of the Elector at the funeral and the stoop of Northampton whispering secrets to his nephew Suffolk even as the coffin was lowered into the vault where the Prince was to lie beside his unhappy grandmother, the executed Queen of Scots. Although an Earl, Northampton had obsequiously deferred to Carr, a Viscount, in breach of the rules of ceremony. It was said that he showered Carr with expensive gifts and fawning letters, calling him ‘sweet lord’ and beseeching at all times to know his will so that it might be obeyed. The battle was being fought like a love match. Carr, as Carey had seen for himself that day, behaved towards Northampton like a man wary of treading on a snake. He wished neither to respond nor to give offence.