The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  Plenty there to shock a provincial audience: the reference to Ganymede; to Juno, the Roman name for Zeus’s wife, supposedly jealous of her husband’s lustful infatuation with his cupbearer; to effeminacy (‘shadow of a woman’), and to prepubescent boys used by older men for sexual entertainment (‘smooth-chinned catamite’). Also, the littering of references to ‘bawbees’, Scottish pennies, ‘Scotch barnacles’ and a ‘Scotch boot’ made contemporary parallels all the more obvious.

  For an ambitious gentlewoman, though, a recent widow facing obscurity and penury, it was perhaps not these scandalous pronouncements that would stick in the mind, nor Malvole’s relentless diatribes against a duplicitous and deviant elite that had usurped his position. It would have been a soliloquy given by Malvole’s antagonist Mendoza, a powerful speech delivered direct to the audience describing what it was like to be a royal favourite:

  What a delicious heaven it is for a man to be in a prince’s favour! … O sweet god! O Pleasure! O Fortune! O all thou best of life! … To be a favourite! A minion! To have a general timorous respect observe a man, a stateful silence in his presence, solitariness in his absence, a confused hum and busy murmur of obsequious suitors training him; the vassals licking the pavement with their slavish knees … O blessed state! What a ravishing prospect doth the Olympus of favour yield!

  All We Here Sit in Darkness

  Following the death of her husband, Mary Villiers no longer had any property of her own. She had been allowed to stay at Goadby Marwood, but as tenant rather than mistress, with an antagonistic stepson for a landlord. This was a very weak position if she was to realize her impossibly ambitious plans to get George into the royal court. She also had to think of her daughter. Susan’s sweet nature and good looks had attracted the interest of an eligible husband: William Feilding, the son of a Warwickshire gentleman. Though a man of ‘modest abilities’, he was heir to estates that yielded an annual income of £200, enough to keep Mary’s daughter relatively comfortable and independent. However, William’s father was demanding a dowry of £2,500 – a vast sum for an impecunious widow. If she was ever to pay it, her only hope was to find a rich husband of her own.

  Sir William Reynor was in his eighties, a former Sheriff of Nottingham with several lucrative estates to his name and no male heirs. He had also known Mary’s late husband – indeed he was one of his largest creditors, being owed £330 by Sir George in 1592.

  Though some suspected that Mary had ‘compassed by … enticement and persuasions’ the aged widower, others claimed that he had been ‘an earnest suitor for marriage’. And why not? She was ‘beautiful and provident’, and in her early thirties, the same age as Sir William’s daughter by his first marriage.

  However, within a few weeks of the wedding, it became clear that Sir William was not prepared to provide the support for her family that Mary expected. So, on 23 September 1606, his new bride decided to take matters into her own hands.

  Suffering from ‘some extremity of sickness’, Sir William had moved from his house at Stanton-upon-the-Wolds, Nottinghamshire to his family’s main property at Orton Longueville in Cambridgeshire. Hearing the news, Mary, together with a band of her most loyal servants, set off on the fifteen-mile journey to Stanton. There they ‘entered into the dwelling house … and with false keys, picklocks, and other instruments and engines, broke open the doors and locks of the parlours, chambers, studies and closets, and did rifle and ransack the said chambers, parlours, studies, closets, chests, trunks, and cupboards and did convey away £2,000 in money’.

  Stanton had a large sheep farm, and a secure ‘wool house’ stood next to the main house to store the fleeces. Mary had a key to one of the doors, but there was a second blocking the way, so she ordered her men to break it down. Bales or ‘staples’ of wool amounting to £300 in value were revealed, which were loaded onto a cart. Mary set off back to Goadby with the portable loot, sending the cart on to Leicester, where the wool was to be sold.

  Unfortunately for her, Sir Robert Pierpoint, a friend of Sir William’s, seems to have been alerted to the break-in and, with ‘diverse others’, managed to intercept the cart, which they returned along with its load to Stanton.

  Sir William was in no condition to recover his property, but the following month, ‘while sick in body but of good and perfect remembrance (thanks be to God)’, he drew up a will excluding his new wife and her children from his inheritance. Instead, everything was to go to Elizabeth, his daughter by his first marriage. He died a month later, and Mary promptly attempted to have a legal ‘caveat’ or stay put on the execution of her dead husband’s will, which seems to have been unsuccessful.

  Around the same time, Elizabeth, Sir William’s daughter and sole beneficiary, took action. She had powerful connections. Her first husband, and the father of her daughter Anne, was Henry Talbot, son of the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. Her second was the irascible MP Sir Thomas Holcroft, who not only boasted close links to Robert Cecil, the king’s chief minister, but had a history of violence involving at least two ferocious altercations, one resulting in a fatality.

  Drawing on these links, Elizabeth was able to bring a case against Mary which culminated in February 1607 with a hearing before the Star Chamber. There Mary was accused, ‘at the relation of Sir Thomas Holcroft’, of ‘conspiracy, fraud, unlawful assembly and embezzlement’. These were serious charges, brought by the Attorney General, the government’s chief lawyer, and heard in England’s highest court, presided over by members of the Privy Council and the country’s most senior judges. A widow less formidable than Mary might have been overwhelmed by the onslaught. But she would not be intimidated, arguing that she had been forced to take the goods ‘under distress for a fifteenth’ – to pay overdue taxes due on her husband’s property.

  The outcome of the case is unrecorded, but it hardened Mary’s resolve to rebuild her family’s fortunes. Drawing on her contested gains, she managed a swift conclusion of Susan’s marriage negotiations, and within weeks had found a more suitable candidate for a third husband.

  Sir Thomas Compton was quite unlike Sir George Villiers or Sir William Reynor, boasting neither a flamboyant lineage nor prospects of an imminent inheritance. He was a log merchant variously described as ‘low-spirited’ and ‘backward’. History bothers to record only one incident from his youth, concerning a quarrel with a ‘roaring captain’ called Bird. Bird had taken to taunting young Compton for his slow-wittedness, eventually goading him into a duel. The challenge was accepted but, in a further provocation, the captain insisted that, in order to stop his opponent running away, the confrontation should take place in one of Sir Thomas’s ‘saw pits’, a deep, narrow trench in the ground used for the manufacture of planks. They duly met, and the blustering captain, brandishing his sword, shouted ‘Come, Compton, see what you can do now’, whereupon Sir Thomas ran him through with his weapon, ‘which,’ as a chronicler of the incident noted, ‘should teach us that strong presumption is the greatest weakness’.

  Mary, a shrewd judge of men and opportunity, made no such presumption about the slow log merchant. She had met him via his mother, Frances Hastings, daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, who had links with the Beaumonts. Sir Thomas’s fortunes were on the rise. His father Henry was a Warwickshire landowner with extensive estates, and his brother William, Lord Compton, was a glamorous star of the Accession Day Tilts, the annual jousts that celebrated the date of the monarch’s accession to the throne. Through his marriage to the daughter of the alderman Sir John Spencer, London’s lord mayor, William was also heir to a fortune said to be the biggest in the country.

  It was probably William’s celebrity that led to ‘Master Thomas Compton, brother to the Lord Compton’ being selected as one of the members of a lavish embassy appointed by King James in 1604 to go to Spain. The aim was to finalize a new peace treaty that would end decades of war. This was a controversial policy that to many English politicians revealed the Scottish king’s suspected Catholic sympathies. For Jam
es, however, it was a natural development. Scotland had no history of enmity with Spain, and his new English administration was so cash-strapped, he could not afford any further costly confrontations with Europe’s maritime and economic superpower.

  Thomas had received his knighthood from the king on his return from Madrid, enhancing further his financial position and connections to the royal court – exactly the qualities Mary needed in a husband. They were married some time after October 1607.

  Meanwhile, Mary’s efforts to improve George’s prospects through his education were proving unproductive, his tutor Anthony Cade finding that he was ‘by nature little studious and contemplative’. So, ‘not without aim (though far off) at a courtier’s life’, she decided to focus on developing his more social or ‘conversative’ qualities, ‘as dancing, fencing and the like’. He quickly flourished, his teachers deciding that he was of such ‘dextrous proclivity’ that he should be taught on his own rather than with his brothers, for fear he would be held back.

  While his conversative qualities began to flourish, when he turned sixteen, in May 1609, it was decided that George needed to ‘gain experience’. Mary’s new husband Sir Thomas drew on his courtly connections to procure a pass from the king’s Privy Council allowing George, chaperoned by his elder brother John, to ‘repair unto the parts beyond the seas’. They left for France later that year, accompanied by four servants.

  Little is known about the adventures of the two Villiers boys. Letters home appear to have been sparse, forcing a desperate Mary to resort to astrology to find out what was happening to them. She had been consulting the famous astrologer-physician Richard Napier since 1609, mostly on matters concerning her health and that of her fragile youngest son, Kit. However, in the autumn and winter of 1610, she asked Napier to draw up several ‘horary’ astrological charts, perhaps hoping, like many mothers and wives in her position at the time, that the stars would cast at least a dim light on the welfare and whereabouts of her absent boys.

  It was not until 1612 that she opened the door at Goadby Marwood to see them safely returned, three years after they had set out. A mother’s unbounded delight must have been multiplied by the transformation of her beloved George. While his ‘natural’ demeanour was unchanged, and though he had managed to avoid the ‘affected’ manners that were the ‘ordinary disease of travellers’, it was obvious he had acquired a dazzling polish. Sojourns in places like Blois, the country seat of the French monarchy, and Angers, famous as a centre for learning the noble arts such as horse riding, had lent him the Gallic air of sophistication and ‘nobility’ that, thanks to French influence over the Scottish court, was now becoming highly prized in England.

  George would remain at Goadby for a year under the ‘wing and counsels’ of his mother, so that she could add finishing touches. Then, some time in late 1613 or early 1614, she decided he was ready.

  ‘Where the court is,’ wrote John Holles, an MP and desperate seeker of royal office, ‘there shines the sun only; all we here sit in darkness.’

  Mary had spent a lifetime in the darkness, in the penumbra of the provincial gentry where prominence and wealth shaded into obscurity and penury. The time had come for the Villiers family to head into the light, and George would lead them there.

  Debateable Lands

  The easy road from Leicester to London was seventy-eight country miles, according to a travel guide from the time of George’s journey to the capital. It followed a well-trodden route. The traveller would set out along Fosse Way to High Cross, a journey of some sixteen miles, where the old Roman road to Winchester intersected with Watling Street, leading to London.

  Once the journey taken by thousands of pilgrims heading for the shrine of St Alban, the road was now thick with young men like George, second sons and younger brothers jostling to make a name for themselves through courtly celebrity rather than religious devotion.

  Though George had experience of travelling, to any twenty-year-old looking forward to a life in the capital, the approaches to London must have been daunting. The first landmark on the final leg of the long journey was ‘Mount Calvary’, a hill made up of bones excavated from London’s overflowing cemeteries, topped by a windmill. A little further on, the main road began to drop down as it entered the gentle slopes of the Thames valley. From here, the exhausted traveller had his first view of the capital.

  Mass migration from the countryside, the arrival of so many hopefuls like George, had turned London and its surrounding towns and villages into a sprawling conurbation, threaded together by the broad ribbon of the Thames and the rivers feeding into it. The City itself, separated off from its surroundings by its imposing but disintegrating Roman wall, was dominated by the Gothic bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral, rising out of a thicket of church spires. To the west, upriver from the City, hugging the banks, lay a cluster of aristocratic mansions and cramped lawyers’ inns, leading on to the palace complexes of Whitehall and Westminster, the London bases of the Crown and Parliament respectively.

  Continuing down towards Aldersgate, the traveller now found himself sinking into the melee of a great slum that had formed around the fringes of the City wall, passing the stinking ditch at its foot, filled with rotting food, sewage, carcasses and other debris of city life. Using a handkerchief to cover his nose, he carried on, following the line of the wall towards Smithfield meat market, where the stench of decay was replaced by the tang of slaughter. Cow Lane curved round towards the river, revealing a large painted sign of an Arab warrior, famous for its ferocity, which marked the location of the Saracen’s Head Inn, the terminus for journeys from Leicester.

  The new arrival had a chance to wash off the dust in Holborn’s ‘conduit’, a spout fed by the Fleet River which filled a trough opposite the inn’s entrance, before following the slope of Snow Hill down to Ludgate. Here was the fulcrum of the city. On the far bank of the Thames, the Globe Theatre was just visible, recently reconstructed after cannon fired in a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII set its thatched roof ablaze. To his left, through the archway of the city gate, the precincts of St Paul’s could be seen, where booksellers and pamphleteers had their stalls, selling useful books such as a Guide for Cuntrey men In the famous Cittey of London.

  George would turn his back on the City, heading up Fleet Street and the Strand, passing Charing Cross as he made his way to the Palace of Whitehall, the king’s London seat. Here was a disappointingly empty thoroughfare, lined with low-rise buildings. Those on one side catered for royal entertainments – tennis, cockfighting, bearbaiting, bowls. Behind a long wall was the tiltyard where George’s step-uncle, William, Lord Compton, had performed daring feats, and beyond lay gardens, orchards and stables leading into St James’s Park, the king’s private hunting ground. On the opposite side of the thoroughfare, next to the river, were the royal apartments.

  For a young man who had travelled so far, from provincial obscurity, via some of the Continent’s most sophisticated centres of aristocratic culture, who had heard about if he had not seen the great royal palaces of the Louvre in Paris and the Escorial in Castile, Whitehall would have seemed underwhelming, even a crushing disappointment. Originally built by Cardinal Wolsey when he was Archbishop of York, and surrendered to Henry VIII following Wolsey’s plunge from grace, it was little more than a ramshackle complex of squat buildings.

  The main point of architectural or navigational significance was a structure that joined together the two sides of the palace complex – east and west, court and cockpit, work and play. The Holbein Gate (named after Henry VIII’s favourite painter, who is thought to have lived there) was a graceful three-storey structure of chequered stone and flint with two octagonal turrets. But passing through the gate seemed to lead nowhere, or rather into a courtyard and another gate, beyond which lay Westminster, a separate palace that acted as the seat of Parliament.

  The result was a royal residence that daunted its visitors not through the architecture of grandeur, or intimidation, but conf
usion. With some two thousand rooms, the Palace of Whitehall, like the royal court in general, was designed literally to amaze anyone who attempted to navigate its corridors and conventions. It was a labyrinth, with the king as the minotaur, and his bedchamber his lair.

  To the yeoman at the guard chamber, George would have been just another provincial turning up in his country weeds, the connection to Lord Compton sufficient to get him into the presence chamber, one of the outer reception rooms that served as a meeting place for petitioners and other visitors, and a very occasional venue for royal appearances. Young hopefuls would mill around there, hoping for a chance to make themselves known to one of the privy councillors or, even better, a gentleman of the bedchamber, as they emerged briefly from the passageways that led deeper into the palace.

  Mild interest was aroused by the new arrival. The Villiers name rang distant rural bells, and the Compton connection added a dash of glamour. But there was condescension too. George had decided to dress himself in ‘French garb’ to cut a dash, but it failed to impress. This was still another country bumpkin ‘in no greater a condition than fifty pounds a year is able to maintain’.