The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  This outcome has been taken as a sign of a catastrophic misjudgement on James’s part. But Goring’s original message had been aimed at Gondomar and the young King of Spain, rather than the MPs. Just before Goring had stood up to make his speech, one of his colleagues, the intemperate but glamorous Sir Edward Sackville, had suggested hypothetically to the Commons that, if James were to threaten direct military action over the Palatinate, ‘it will not be long before we discover plainly whether the king of Spain be our enemy or no. Which if he be, then will the king without question, understanding our affections and inclinations, proclaim a general war against him and then shall we have our desires.’ Goring’s statement had effectively been a high-stakes challenge designed to put this proposition to the test. The hawkish MPs had assumed that the Spanish king would be shown to be their enemy. But they had not known about the secret letters James had seen between King Philip and the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, which suggested the perplexed teenage Spanish king might show himself to be a friend, willing to push for the peaceful restoration of the Palatinate as part of a marriage settlement, if only to counterbalance the rampant and destabilizing ambitions of his older, more assertive, German cousin Emperor Ferdinand.

  The initial signs were that James’s gamble had failed. In the immediate aftermath of the vote on the Commons protestation, Gondomar had suggested to his masters that he might threaten to break off relations with James and return straight to Madrid. He had also alerted a colleague in Brussels to the possibility of an attack by the English on Spanish Netherlands.

  However, within a few months of Parliament’s dismissal, there were clear signs of a shift. In early 1622, reflecting a warming of relations with Spain, James sent Digby back to Madrid to resume the marriage negotiations. Soon after, news reached London that the Spanish king wanted Gondomar back in Madrid to take part in the discussions, and James, eager to encourage the growing mood of cooperation, gave his blessing to the recall.

  Just before he was due to depart, Gondomar was invited to dine at Greenwich with the king, Charles and George. All three had over the past two years spent considerable time with the urbane ambassador, and were going to miss him. James was visibly moved by the prospect of losing his old friend again, and took a diamond ring from his finger to give to Gondomar, making him promise to return. Charles did the same.

  As he was about to leave, the prince also took the ambassador aside to tell him ‘in great trust and secrecy’ that he was prepared to go to Madrid ‘incognito with two servants’ to woo the infanta. It was an astonishing offer, honouring with appealing gallantry his mother’s dying request. Gondomar took it as a sign of the prince’s sincerity, and even that he might convert to Catholicism.

  Since the Continental crisis had brought his marital prospects to the fore, Charles had certainly undergone something of a transformation – the timid, hesitant, twenty-one-year-old prince emerging as a passionate and assertive champion of the Spanish match. Having been for so long neglected and dismissed, he had literally become the embodiment of his father’s foreign policy and country’s destiny, its only hope of success.

  The prince had been sending letters to Digby in Madrid, pestering him for a portrait of the bride. What he eventually received depicted a young woman in her late teens with fair hair and a round face with blue eyes, a pale pink complexion, full mouth and the distinctive protruding Habsburg lip – not beautiful, perhaps, but attractive enough for an infatuated young man. The ambassador accompanied the picture with tantalizing descriptions of her at a masque, dancing ‘as well as any that ever I saw’. ‘And I dare boldly say unto Your Highness,’ the ambassador added, perhaps to test the prince’s recently acquired linguistic skills, ‘that it was not so seldom as an hundred times repeated that night “Plugiera a Dios que el Principe de Inglatierra la viese. O que linda, que hermosa, que angel”’ – if only, please God, the Prince of England could see her, how exquisite, how beautiful, how like an angel she is.

  Endymion Porter, George’s secretary and Spanish envoy, filled out the picture: ‘She has fine hair and complexion, of a middling stature, being of late well grown, she hath the fairest hands I ever saw, she is very straight and well bodied and a likely lady to make you happy.’ Not to mention, another diplomat added, a dowry that would be ‘the greatest portion that was ever given in Christendom’, capable of solving his father’s chronic financial problems at a stroke without having to pander to another Parliament.

  Charles began to wonder when he should start writing love letters to his angel. Having received a note from her modestly expressing her devotion, he contacted Gondomar in Madrid, asking him to pass on to her his best wishes, and thanking the ageing diplomat for acting ‘in that honourable office, of my principal Alcahuete’ – his procurer or pimp.* Charles, in short, had become besotted with the idea of the Spanish match, to such an extent that his father teasingly referred to it as his son’s ‘codpiece point’.

  Behind the transformation of the once timorous, retiring adolescent into this assertive, rapacious prince stood the figure of George, his sexual magnetism adding a propulsive dynamism to Charles and James’s dynastic hopes. He worked tirelessly to promote the match, reassuring Gondomar when Spanish enthusiasm seemed to droop that the prince was ‘full ripe’ for the nuptials, and that there was a longing to see ‘an issue proceed’ from the prince’s ‘loins’.

  Through these interventions, a passionate, volatile royal ménage was born. A heady combination of erotic desire and political ambition had brought together the two troubled figures of James and Charles, luring them into a daring mission that promised to transform Britain’s place in Europe and save the Continent from a catastrophic war.

  Periwigs

  On 11 March 1623, a small group of men, unshaven and scruffy, but curiously well dressed, were chasing a kid goat on the road leading to the French city of Bayonne. With Lent prohibiting the serving of meat in local inns, a gruelling cross-country trek from Paris to this southwestern corner of the Basque country had left them famished and exhausted, and they were desperate for a decent meal.

  Two of the men were known as Tom and John Smith, poor disguises for Prince Charles and George Villiers. The others were their servants and bodyguards. They had been on the road for nearly a fortnight, and doubts must have begun to set in as to what on earth they were doing there.

  They had spotted the goat on the road as they approached the town. George’s Master of the Horse, Sir Richard Graham, a man from the Scottish borders, had suggested catching the creature. Overhearing this, ‘Tom’ (Charles) chided him from resorting to his wild borderland ways and insisted that they should pay the owner for whatever they took. Having found the goatherd, they gave him ‘good contentment’, and George, together with one of his servants, began chasing the kid around a haystack. Losing patience, Charles shot the creature from his horse ‘with a Scottish pistol’.

  After Charles had first broached to Gondomar his plan to travel ‘incognito’ to Madrid, developments had proved frustratingly slow. Sexual, political and diplomatic frustrations became entwined. Encouraging letters had been received from Spain, but as late as Christmas 1622, there were still no signs of concrete progress. ‘Talk of the Spanish Match lay somewhat dead,’ reported the lawyer and diarist Simonds D’Ewes. Carlos Coloma, Gondomar’s replacement as Spanish ambassador in London, described a meeting with James and Charles during which the prince kept muttering of Spain making him wait for a ‘remedy’. In reply to Charles’s letters about the delays and begging for news about the infanta, John Digby noted that ‘the little god’ – Cupid – ‘hath been somewhat busy with you’.

  Then, on 2 January 1623, George’s secretary, Endymion Porter, had returned from a mission to Madrid with new proposals. Porter had connections to the Spanish court going back to his childhood, and there were hopes he could draw on them to get an insider’s perspective on Spanish intentions. The expedition had been an exhausting and dangerous one, during which Porter had lost one of
his servants in the sea, suffered a broken shoulder, been imprisoned at Calais, and lost most of his papers. But he had good news – or what was taken to be good news, when good news was all the recipients could bear to hear: reassurance from the Spanish king and his ministers that they were prepared to intercede at least diplomatically in the Palatinate crisis, and that they were serious about Charles marrying the infanta.

  Breaking diplomatic protocol, Gondomar had also written a personal note to George in Spanish (rather than French, the usual language of diplomatic correspondence). He described the envy he felt for the carrier of the message, ‘since he will get to kiss the hands of the marquis of Buckingham personally’. He also sent kisses for the hands of George’s mother Mary and his wife Kate. Then, echoing George’s carnal language, he revealed that as far as the Spanish were concerned, ‘the decision has already been made, and with very great enthusiasm that the Prince of Wales should mount Spain’.

  Encouraged by these diplomatic signals, Charles and George set about persuading James to allow the secret expedition to go ahead, skilfully exploiting the king’s weakness of romance. ‘How gallant and how brave a thing it would be,’ they told him. James was reminded of his own marriage to Anne, how that too had been delayed, at first by the endless negotiations that had made him look like an ‘irresolute ass’, then by a tempest in the North Sea which had carried his bride’s ship off to Norway. He had acted the chivalrous suitor, declaring when he heard the news of her detour that he would sail to Norway and fetch her himself, ‘ay, upon the instant’.

  The memory of that great venture cast a nostalgic glamour across his sweet boys’ scheme. Nevertheless, when George and Charles spelled out some of the details, he fell into a ‘great passion with tears’. He had gone to fetch Anne with a military escort of 300 men. These two were proposing to go with just two servants, on a journey of more than a thousand miles across land during the depths of winter. He feared for their safety, worried about losing the son he was supposed to protect and the man he loved.

  To reassure the king, George and Charles offered to take Endymion Porter along with the prince’s secretary, Sir Francis Cottington, who had led the most recent negotiations in Madrid and had extensive experience of the Castilian court. This eased James’s concerns a little, as both had made the journey from London to Madrid many times, and would be prepared for eventualities that George and Charles ‘would never think of’. He balked at their insistence that neither escort should be told the true nature of the expedition until the point of departure, so it was agreed that George and Charles would inform them beforehand in secret.

  In the event, it was James who told Cottington. Sir John’s reaction was ‘such a trembling that he could hardly speak’. When they later all met, he voiced his opposition. His objections were concerned with the diplomacy as much as safety. He pointed out that for such a tiny, vulnerable party to turn up in Madrid uninvited would expose the prince to terrible risks and make it impossible to challenge Spanish demands in any subsequent negotiations.

  George was furious with Cottington’s bid to undermine the scheme, pointing out he was only being consulted so he could advise them on the best route.

  Cottington’s intervention added to James’s anxieties. ‘I am now so miserable a coward, as I do nothing but weep and mourn,’ he wrote to George. ‘I rode this afternoon a great way in the park without speaking to anybody, and the tears trickling down my cheeks, as now they do that I can scarcely see to write.’ He pledged to ‘pry into the defects’ to harden his heart against the whole idea, ‘and of every mote to make a mountain’. But it was no good, for as his efforts ‘proceed from love’ so they could not ‘but end in love’.

  And so it proved – love prevailed, or at least a pragmatic realization that, without some sort of bold intervention, James was not going to be able to keep alive his hopes of recovering the Palatinate for his son-in-law by peaceful means.

  A carefully coordinated plan swung into action at seven in the morning on Monday, 17 February 1623. A sullen Cottington, having just written his will and said goodbye to his wife of four days, set off from Holborn for Dover with the objective of hiring the ship that would take the party across the Channel. He was accompanied by a puzzled Porter, who had been kept in the dark. Charles and George left Theobalds, and headed for New Hall, George’s Essex home. That evening the two feigned casual bonhomie at a lavish dinner held for the prince and local dignitaries. The following morning, they slipped away, disguised in false beards, accompanied by Sir Richard Graham.

  The journey that followed was described by Sir Henry Wotton, a contemporary of George’s and a seasoned traveller himself, who did not spare posterity from the farcical as well as notable details.

  The quickest route to Dover was via Gravesend, where a ferry crossed the Thames estuary. Here the plan faced its first obstacle, as neither George nor Charles had thought to bring any change. Paying the ferryman with a gold piece worth 22 shillings, suspicions were aroused that these were two wealthy men setting off to duel on the Continent, an activity the king had recently banned. The ferryman dutifully reported them to a local official, who immediately alerted the authorities in the nearby city of Rochester.

  The party had by that stage managed to hire some post-hackneys (small horses used by couriers) and passed through the city unnoticed. But on the road to Canterbury – barely forty miles into a journey of around a thousand – they spotted the French ambassador, escorted by the ‘king’s coach’, coming towards them on the way from Dover to London. Fearing they would be recognized, they ‘baulked at the beaten road’, forcing their horses ‘to leap hedges’ as they continued on a less conspicuous but much slower cross-country route.

  Eventually reaching Canterbury, they went to the nearest stable to hire fresh horses, but found themselves confronted by the mayor, who had been tipped off by the authorities in Rochester about the suspicions of the ferryman at Gravesend. Perhaps overawed, possibly terrified by having to confront the aristocratic belligerents, the mayor claimed to have a warrant for their arrest from the Privy Council, the Royal Master of Ceremonies and the Lieutenant of Dover Castle, ‘all of which confused fiction’ prompted George to unmask himself and explain that, in his capacity of Lord Admiral, he was taking some ‘slight company’ on a confidential mission to review the royal fleet at Dover. ‘This, with much ado, did somewhat handsomely heal the disguisement’, and the party was allowed to continue.

  Their ‘disguisement’ did not have long to recover, however, before a baggage post-boy, commissioned to deliver their luggage, somehow got a ‘glimmering of who they were’, forcing George to silence him with bribes and intimidation.

  No doubt exhausted by these continuous emergencies, they finally reached Dover at six in the evening, where they were met by Porter and Cottington, who were waiting with one Kirk, a Scotsman, and James Leviston, a groom of the prince’s bedchamber. It was too late to sail that evening, so they lodged at an inn and left early the following morning, by which time the weather had turned ‘tempestuous’. Enduring a rough crossing during which George, the Lord Admiral, suffered acute seasickness, they arrived in Boulogne at two in the afternoon.

  Having finally reached foreign soil, they abandoned their disguises and set off on the main road for Paris. However, two days later, as they approached the outskirts of the city, they met two German tourists who happened to be returning from a trip to Newmarket, where they had seen Charles and George riding with the king in the royal coach. Recognizing the illustrious travellers, the intimidating Sir Richard Graham was forced to ‘persuade them they were mistaken’. This, as Wotton pointed out, was easily done, ‘the very strangeness of the thing itself’ convincing them of the impossibility that ‘so great a prince and favourite’ could be ‘so suddenly metamorphosed into travellers, with no greater train’. It was enough ‘to make any man living unbelieve his senses’, if not conclude the prince and favourite had taken leave of theirs.

  The next hazard was
getting through Paris without being recognized. For such high-ranking foreigners to enter the capital uninvited had the potential to cause a serious diplomatic incident, and could even lead to their arrest. James had raised this very point before their departure, and they had strenuously argued that they would be able to get through the city before news of their adventure got out. So they were annoyed to find a messenger from England waiting for them with instructions from James that they should inform the French king of their arrival.

  Bridling at the interference, they wrote back, insisting that everything was fine and they could manage on their own. But a reply arrived post-haste that humiliatingly contradicted their reassurances: ‘My sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance,’ James wrote soothingly, ‘I thank you for your comfortable letters. But, alas, think it not possible that ye can be many hours undiscovered.’ He explained that, despite the hedge-leaping and balking at the beaten Dover road, they had been spotted by the French ambassador, who had already made attempts to get news of their clandestine adventure to Paris. James had closed all the ports to prevent him, but there are ‘so many blind creeks to pass at’ that he could not guarantee that the ambassador’s efforts had been thwarted. As a result, he felt he had no option but to send a letter ‘of my own hand’ directly to Louis XIII ‘to show him that respect that I may acquaint him with my son’s passing unknown through his country’. As a final, irritatingly meddlesome piece of advice, he reminded his ‘Baby Charles’ that he should probably write a thank-you letter to the French king once he had reached Spain.