Conn had many stories to tell about the Roman court. He belonged to a circle centered on Giovanni Ciampoli, a Vatican insider and a member of the academy of lynxes. The circle included a busybody convert, Kaspar Schoppe, who had ingratiated himself with Clement VIII by devising strategies for harvesting Protestant souls during the Jubilee of 1600 and with Paul V for rebutting King James’s claim to divine-right rule. During this last exercise Schoppe uncovered and exploited Wotton’s famous indiscreet quip, “an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.” Though to Wotton he was “a mud-caked quack of the Roman curia,” a “starving turncoat,” Schoppe dug up more than dirt.133 A list he composed in the 1620s of the forty deserving intellectuals in Rome is a valuable document; it includes Conn among many other people favorable to Galileo.134 Schoppe, Galileo, and a few of the forty deserving intellectuals persuaded a cardinal, Friedrich Eitel von Zollern, to air the Copernican question with Urban. The cardinal extracted from the pope the opinion that sun-centered astronomy had not been, and would not be, declared heretical.135 Conn abetted their good work by recommending to the Barberini that Galileo proceed with the Dialogue. He left Rome a hero, not, to be sure, of Galilean advocacy, but of a poem in praise of ink, for his paradoxical portrayal in so dark a medium of the eternal glory of Mary Queen of Scots.136
Conn quickly gained the confidence of Mary’s grandson by declaring that he had no difficulty serving both the Pope of Rome and the King of England and Scotland. “The king immediately gave me his hand saying, No, Giorgio, assure yourself [I know] that.”137 The pope’s man joined the king and queen at Oxford for the performance of The Floating Island. Lady Arundel welcomed him to her table and chessboard, and, together with the queen and Endymion Porter’s wife, Olivia, helped him to make many conquests, inevitably known as Connverts.138 Like Wotton in Venice, so Conn in London made friends among the mighty to subvert the religion of the state. So many were his Connverts that the openness with which Henrietta Maria paraded them made him uneasy.139 Lady Olivia was if anything even less discreet. While her father’s last moments ticked away, she bundled him into her carriage to be brought for conversion just before his Protestant daughter arrived on a similar errand to another place. Of Lady Olivia’s deathbed rescue of her father, the learned lawyer John Selden, whom we shall consult later, observed, “[T]o turn a man when he lies dying, is just like one who hath a long time solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length makes her drunk, and so lies with her.”140 Wealthy Anglicans wishing to die Catholic took the easier course of keeping a priest at home.141
Conn soon ran into the minefield of the Oath of Allegiance. He made some progress with Charles, who was uncharacteristically open about it. “The King put his hand on my shoulder [Conn reported] and replied, it is not yet time.”142 Neither Rome nor parliament would yield.143 Conn remarked to Charles that in Rome they thought the king was above parliament. Charles replied that he thought so too but added that only parliament could change the oath.144 In none of his negotiations did Conn try to use Laud; he distrusted the archbishop for intimating friendship for Rome while urging enforcement of the penal laws against Catholics and their subscription to the Oath of Allegiance in its original form and literal meaning. Despite Laud’s love of vestments, altar rails, crucifixes, statues, and bishops, God would never (so Conn judged) make use of so weak an instrument in so great a cause as the conversion of England.145 Conn started his journey back to Rome in the summer of 1639. There he died in January 1640, leaving to his imperceptive predecessor Panzani an occhiale prospettico moltiplicatore—that is, a good telescope.146
Calvinists
When King James visited his native kingdom in 1617, he required that it observe the religious practices of the Church of England. With the Stuart genius for compromise, he told his countrymen that they were barbarians for not kneeling to receive Communion. The order to genuflect was one of the Five Articles James had declared at Perth, which defined the minimum liturgy required for conformance in Scotland; other provisions mandated confirmation by bishops and celebration of Christmas and other pre-Reformation holidays. The articles irritated the Scots almost as much as the institution of bishops, which James had imposed on them in 1612. When Charles went to Scotland for his coronation in 1633, he brought Laud and a new prayer book to ensure that the Scots approached God as decorously as the English. The following year the king ordered the Scottish bishops to devise a liturgy “as near that of England as might be.” Opposition to it provoked a discovery as fine as Bedell’s about Paul V. Reading vv as m, vvill. lavd sums to 666.147
The new liturgy was tried at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in July 1637. The congregation rebelled; Charles ordered enforcement; the people heard popery knocking at the door; and a great popular movement against the bishops began to stir.148 In February 1638, resistance organized and spread around a covenant whose subscribers undertook to defend the true religion against all comers and consequences. Charles explained that he had not intended any innovations, and would not press the prayer book provided that his loving people foreswore their covenant: for should they gain the control it asserted, he would be no stronger in Edinburgh than (the comparison haunted him) the doge in Venice, “which I will rather die than suffer.” This bravado, offered in June 1638, responded to Scottish demands for an Assembly of Clergy. The English doge agreed. By December the Assembly had swept away from Scotland the prayer book, the canons, the Articles of Perth, and the bishops.149
As war rumbled, Charles put Arundel in charge of fortifying England’s northern borders. Catholicizing members of the Privy Council, Arundel, Cottington, and Windebank, urged armed confrontation; the Exchequer being empty, they had to contain their impatience. In the autumn of 1638, as thousands signed the Scottish Covenant, Charles suffered a blow that can only inspire sympathy. His impossible mother-in-law, Marie de’ Medici, came uninvited with a retinue of 600 and a monthly cost equal to that of keeping 1,200 soldiers in the field. Charles appealed to his brother-in-law to allow her to return to France; Louis proposed her native Florence; she preferred England. To cover her exactions and prepare for war, Charles scurried after money: English bishops and other high officials contributed £50,000; loyal Catholics gave £20,000, scarcely enough for a month of war, but something toward collecting an army of untrained pressed men who could live off the land while traveling to the Scottish frontier.150
The first “Bishops’ War” began in March 1639 and ended in June. Charles’s forces, inexperienced unwilling men commanded by inexperienced committed commanders like himself and Arundel, were no match for the willing men and war-hardened officers fielded by the Scots. Uncle Christian offered to help in exchange for the Shetland and Orkney islands; his nephew declined the terms.151 Quite unconscious of the superiority of the Scottish forces, Charles complacently contemplated one of their encampments a dozen miles distant through a telescope. “Come, let us go to supper,” he said, “the number is not considerable.” Charles further demonstrated his misunderstanding of his situation by suggesting, as a basis for peace, that the Scots “take my word, and…submit all to my judgment.” They preferred a written agreement. It provided that the Scots disband their army and give back the royal castles they had taken, and that Charles disband his army and acknowledge the Assembly and the Scottish Parliament.152
Though Charles was well out of his war, he could not bring himself to rescind any act by which his father had established bishops in Scotland: the scaffolding would remain though the building be destroyed. He would also retain the authority “to call assemblies and dissolve them, and to have a negative voice in them as is accustomed in all supreme powers in Christianity.”153 War loomed once more. Where was the money to come from? The Crown tried to raise it from Spain against the cynical collateral of all English ships at that moment anchored in Spanish harbors. No deal. The queen and Secretary Windebank appealed to Rome. Urban replied that he would be happy to help a Catholic King of England. The Privy C
ouncil discussed debasing the currency. Charles required the nobles of the land and their servants to attend him at their expense. With £20,000 in hand, a promise of another £20,000 a year from the bishops, and a loan begun in the Privy Council that reached £250,000 in May 1640, Charles went to war again in June and suffered definitive defeat near Newcastle in August.154 To secure a truce, he agreed to pay the expenses of the occupying Scots; to secure the money, he called a parliament, the second in the year. The first, the “Short Parliament,” had sat for three weeks in April before Charles terminated it for airing its grievances instead of granting him subsidies. The second, the “Long Parliament,” assembled early in November and sat for twenty years. It looked around for scapegoats. A week before Christmas it sent Laud to the Tower.
The spadework for the prosecution of Laud was the pleasant task of Prynne. He soon dug up a devastating document, of which he published an account with pungent annotations under the title Romes Master-peece. The masterpiece was the reconversion of England.155 When Laud learned about it in the autumn of 1640, the plotters claimed to be well advanced. The Jesuits fomented it, of course, and Conn had abetted it by offering the king “gifts of Pictures, Antiquities, Idols and other vanities brought from Rome.” The plotters had enlisted Endymion Porter, “of the King’s bedchamber, most addicted to the Popish religion…[and] a bitter enemy of the King;” the inevitable Tobie Matthew, a Catholic priest, George Gage, a namesake of Mathew’s friend Gage, who had cleverly filled a palace with lascivious pictures to distract attention from the convent of nuns he maintained underground; and Secretary Windebank, “a most fierce Papist…the most unfaithful to the King of all men.”156 Lady Arundel “bends all her nerves to the Universal Reformation,” meets the Pope’s agent three times a day, openly entertains him at her table, and tells him everything. Prynne: “The Jesuits learn of the Serpent to seduce Men by female Instruments.”157 If the combined efforts of the fifty Scottish Jesuits said to be in London and the blandishments of the pope did not bring Charles around, he was to be eliminated by an ornament in Conn’s possession, a nut stuffed with poison. Prynne: “Jesuits make but a vaunt of poysoning Kings.”158
The English ambassador at The Hague, Sir William Boswell, knew about the plot from a chaplain serving the Queen of Bohemia; Boswell told Laud, and Laud told the king. Boswell’s assurance that the unknown informant was ready to take an oath (Laud: “A very good argument of truth and reality”) and had spent a few years in the court and city of London (“Therefore a man of note and substance”) seems to have made the archbishop, who initially thought the plot a hoax, a believer.159 And yet neither he nor Charles had acted in the emergency. Prynne again: “[Laud] will farre sooner hug a Popish Priest to his bosome, than take a Puritan by the little finger.”160 Did not Rome offer him a cardinal’s hat? Nor can the king be exonerated. Did he not order Laud to order the Dean of Exeter to stop calling the pope “anti-Christ”?161 And did both of them not connive at having the psalms sung in the Gregorian manner in the Chapel Royal?162
It was now clear that King Charles’s laxity had allowed papists to flourish everywhere, in the court, Privy Council, bedchamber, and royal bed. He had allowed Jesuits to stir up rebellion in Ireland and wars in England. To arms! The plot is “now driven on almost to its perfection.” We must act, and act together, “lest we perish through our owne private dissensions, folly, cowardice, covetousnesse, treachery, and scurrility.”163 “By what Romish Strategems, Pollicies, Councels, Instruments circumvented, abused, [and] mis-councelled [have] the Kingdomes, Churches, Religions…been for sundry past-yeares reduced”! Thus, like Americans bamboozled to look for communists under every bed, many of Charles’s subjects, remembering the Gunpowder Plot and the Armada, Gondomar and the Spanish match, were ready to believe, or feign belief, in “many hidden, or forgotten Roman Plots of darkness.”164
It was not unreasonable to suspect a conspiracy. The liberty Catholics enjoyed at Charles’s court in 1640 amazed Conn’s successor Carlo Rossetti. A Franciscan theologian, Henrietta Maria’s almoner Aegidius Chaissy, openly lectured in Oxford in 1641, and saved a few souls. It is said he almost bagged Ussher’s.165 There was no end of evidence of sedition: the queen’s efforts to enlist the aid of the Vatican, Windebank’s orders of reprieve for arrested Catholics, and the ferocious Wentworth’s Irish army, which Charles refused to disband. In spring 1641, there came a rumor of invasion by France. Persecution of Catholics increased, with one result most satisfying to Charles. Parliament expelled his expensive conspiratorial mother-in-law.166 In May, the Commons passed a “Protestation,” modeled on the Scottish Covenant, which required the swearer to uphold the Church of England; the Lords rejected it; the Commons responded by proposing the removal of Catholics from court and attendance on the Queen.167 Nonetheless, when Rossetti took leave of the royal couple, Charles allowed that if he again became master in his dominions he would treat the pope’s spiritual subjects with the greatest gentleness. The queen clarified that in that happy circumstance it might take her husband some time to decide on the measures he would take owing to his habitual inability to make up his mind.168
3
The King and his Lawyer
The English “constitution” had no logical space for the Stuart kings to exercise all the prerogatives they claimed by divine right. Their income scarcely covered their extravagant household expenses and gifts to courtiers; and for defense of the realm they depended on occasional parliaments. Parliamentary grants and military expenditures usually stayed well below £500,000, about 10,000 times the annual income of a building craftsman in London, 1,000 times a successful lawyer’s, 100 times a billionaire’s, and 10 times a prince’s. At his accession, Charles’s family debts—his own, his father’s, and the still encumbered estate of his mother—stood at well over £1m.1
The Commons usually demanded in return for its grants that the sovereign confirm its “privileges” and redress its “grievances.” Since parliaments existed only at the call of the king, and the king could meet his obligations legally only by grants from parliaments, governing required compromises on both sides. When either refused to budge, the king dismissed his sitting parliament and went away empty handed. To encourage a more cooperative spirit in the next inevitable session, he might send a few dissident members of the dissolved parliament to one of his better prisons for a period of reflection.
James had not played this game very well. Under the leadership of Edwin Sandys, the Commons of his first English parliament (1604) demanded the abolition of wardships (imposed custodianships) and purveyance (provision of goods under market value), opposed proposals for the unification of Scotland and England, and insisted that the Privileges of Parliament anteceded the Prerogatives of Kings. James dismissed it before it had accomplished anything. He did better on his second try, in 1606–7; he received £450,000, probably more in gratitude that the state had survived the Gunpowder Plot than in admiration of his stewardship. He spent much of it on court favorites and other hunting dogs. In 1608, with a debt of £538,000, the Crown was running at an annual deficit of around £100,000. Another try, in 1610, almost reached a “Grand Contract” by which the Crown would surrender wardship, purveyance, and other perquisites in exchange for £600,000 down and an annual grant of £200,000. But disagreement over impositions (duties on goods assessed without parliamentary consent) forced dissolution without decision. And so it went. James demanded subsidies without haggling from his fourth parliament (1614); it refused; he sent it packing and imprisoned four of its former members whose speeches he regarded as seditious.2
The plain speaking in parliament in 1614 was not the English way. As Wotton observed, outspoken opposition was “better becoming a Senate of Venice, where the treaters are perpetual princes, than where those that speak so irreverently are so soon to return (which they should remember) to the natural capacity of subjects.”3 Again the fatal metaphor: for if the Commons were the Senate, the king was the doge. James did not call another parliament fo
r seven years. To its advice that he desist from the Spanish match and intervene in Bohemia he replied that such questions touched inviolable arcana imperii, the “forbidden Arke of Our absolute and indisputable Prerogative,” and prohibited their discussion. The parliament of 1621 claimed free speech as an “ancient and undoubted right;” James regarded it and all other rights he acknowledged as generous gifts from himself and his predecessors.4 The Commons secured the removal of certain monopolies for the modest grant of £160,000 and its own removal for pressing execution of the recusancy laws while James was trying to make his Spanish match.5
To make do with what he had, James required effective ministers. During his first decade as King of England, he had the service of the experienced Salisbury and two of the Howard family, which he had restored to the influence it had lost for supporting his mother. James’s Howard ministers were Henry, Earl of Northampton, who “spare[d] not to conjure both priests and devils for his master’s service,” and Northampton’s nephew Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, who conjured for his master while generously helping himself. One succeeded the other as Lord Treasurer after Salisbury’s death in 1612.6 Howard power peaked the following year with the marriage of Suffolk’s beautiful and unscrupulous daughter Frances to the royal favorite Robert Carr, by then advanced to Earl of Somerset.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 9