Despite James’s intervention, George and Charles decided not to make themselves known to their hosts but instead invest in periwigs to ‘overshadow their foreheads’. Maintaining a curious overconfidence in their skills at the arts of disguise, and eager to experience the city as tourists rather than dignitaries, they decided to break their journey and spend the day sightseeing.
Roughly the same size as London in terms of population, Paris far outclassed the English capital in grandeur and style. The formidable queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, a daughter of the powerful Florentine banking family, had introduced the Renaissance to medieval Paris, commissioning magnificent piazzi and palazzi modelled on the landmarks of her homeland. This would have provided Charles and George with their first experience of a post-medieval urban landscape: Baroque mansions instead of looming citadels, elegant rows of matching townhouses instead of jumbled alleyways of hovels, straight avenues of slender trees instead of winding paths and rutted roads, light instead of dark. They could cross the recently completed Pont Neuf onto the Île de la Cité and admire from the river the Louvre and the spires of Notre Dame, the Place Dauphine – enough to overwhelm a visiting prince and favourite with awe and envy.
That evening, they passed through the formal gardens of the Tuileries and smuggled their way into a viewing gallery in the palace, from where they could watch the French king ‘solacing himself with familiar pleasures’ – Wotton’s prudish allusion to Louis’s supposedly dissolute character – and the queen mother feasting ‘at her own table’. ‘Tom’ and ‘John’ congratulated themselves on the effectiveness of their new periwigs. One Monsieur Cabinet, ‘lately ambassador on England’, had seen them both, yet failed to recognize them. Later that evening, emboldened by their anonymity, they overheard that rehearsals for a royal masque were underway, and approached Marie de’ Medici’s Lord Chamberlain, seeking permission to watch it. Accepting their pose as minor members of the English gentry (or perhaps indulging them, having been forewarned by the king’s officials of their true identity), he allowed them entry ‘out of humanity to strangers’, where they had ‘full sight’ of the French queen, Anne of Austria, the elder sister of Charles’s bride-to-be Infanta Maria, and Henrietta Maria, Louis’s thirteen-year-old sister.
The sight of Anne, a vivacious twenty-one-year-old, had a powerful effect on both men. Her vivacious spirit had ‘wrought in me a greater desire to see her sister’, Charles reported in a letter home, penned later than night. George commented that of all the women he saw that evening, the queen was the ‘handsomest’. She had married the youthful Bourbon king when they were both fourteen – a match cementing an alliance between two great dynasties in exactly the manner intended by the escapade of James’s venturous knights. The marriage had flourished in the early years, but a series of miscarriages and Louis’s dalliances at court, together with the dominating presence of Louis’s mother, had soured the relationship. As a result, Anne had spent the last year in a state of dejection, restricted in her movements, her friends and finances meticulously managed by Marie de’ Medici.
As she pirouetted entrancingly across the dance floor, enjoying a rare moment of freedom, Anne’s eye caught that of George in the throng of spectators, and, despite the absurdity of his periwigged disguise, was as struck by his looks as he was by hers. Later that evening, after Charles had returned to their lodgings, he approached her. It is hard to imagine a more reckless act. If he was caught, it would not only ruin his reputation and seriously embarrass James, but bring the entire Madrid mission to an end, setting back the Spanish match by months if not permanently. In the event, affirming once again his sublime self-assurance and the delirious, life-affirming potency of risk, he found himself let into her apartment. What transpired is unknown, but the repercussions were severe for Anne. Her indiscretion with this apparently unidentified visitor was reported back to her husband, whose outrage led to a ban on all males entering her quarters except when he was present, which was rarely.
Oblivious to the scandal he had caused, George, together with Charles and their companions, set off in the early hours of the following morning for the next leg of their trip through the Loire and Gascony. The going was difficult. Possibly caught out by the Continental calendar, which was ten days ahead of the English one, they found they were travelling during the fast for Lent, and, in the depths of winter, food had become scarce. They stopped off for a night at Bordeaux, where they bought clothes to help weather the cold. Unable to resist choosing five fetching riding coats ‘all in one colour and fashion, of a kind of noble simplicity’, their aristocratic couture and carriage attracted local interest and came to the attention of the Duc d’Epernon, who invited the visitors to call at his chateau in nearby Cadillac. Cottington had to put the duke off, explaining they were ‘gentlemen of mean degree, and formed yet little in courtship’ – commoners, in other words, whose fine French clothes disguised a lack of breeding and courtly manners.
This brought them, famished and exhausted, to Bayonne, where Charles sat on his horse with a smoking pistol in his hand, George and his servant stood next to a haystack trying to recover from their exertions and the rest of the party looked on with amusement and empty stomachs at a dead goat lying on the road with a bullet in its side. They took the carcass back to their lodgings, where they feasted on it. It was their first proper meal for six days.
Their coats once more attracted the unwelcome attentions of a local noble, this time the Comte de Gramont, the town’s governor. Being a strategic port on the Atlantic coast, the arrival of the unlikely posse had aroused suspicions and they were threatened with being detained. But somehow they once again eluded arrest, and ‘he let them courteously pass’.
And so began the final leg of their French journey. Setting off on the road along the coast heading south, they ran into Walsingham Gresley, steward to Sir John Digby, carrying dispatches from Madrid to London. Breaking protocol, Charles and George opened the letters to see if there was any news concerning the Spanish match, but found only cypher and, in the parts they could read, evidence of Spanish prevarication – particularly on the vital matter of getting dispensation from the pope for the Catholic infanta to marry a Protestant prince. Concerned about the effect of this news on the king, and anxious to get to their destination as quickly as possible, they kept the letters and prevailed upon Gresley to accompany them out of France and into Spain.
Guided by their experienced escort, the party rode through the wild fringes of the Basque country, passing the Pyrenees where the mountains fall towards the sea, and crossed into Spain. In the ancient border town of Irun, Charles and George penned a letter to their ‘dear dad and gossip’, reporting that they had arrived ‘free from harm of falls’, and in ‘as perfect health as when we parted’. They could also not resist bragging that they had made it across France ‘undiscovered by any Monsieur’. Having ‘saucily’ opened Gresley’s letters, they claimed to be reassured from the parts they could read that their journey was worthwhile, as it would defeat Spanish efforts to stall the negotiations ‘upon pretext of making preparations’. Signing off as ‘your majesty’s humble and obedient son and servant Charles and your humble slave and dog Steenie’, they sealed the letter and sent Gresley on his way.
They felt more at ease on Spanish roads, Charles a Don Quixote, George his rather grand Sancho Panza, ‘venturous knights’ heading south through the hills of Navarre. Only one event stuck out of an otherwise uneventful final leg of their journey: they met a Spanish diplomat who had visited England, and Charles struck up a conversation with him, mentioning his memories of Spanish embassies in London. He recalled a son of one of the ambassadors, mentioning that he was far too ugly for a beautiful wife, not realizing he was addressing that son. The diplomat immediately challenged Charles to a duel, and was only prevented from going ahead with it by being told his adversary’s true identity.
The House of the Seven Chimneys
At 5 p.m., on 7 March 1623, Sir John Digby was sitt
ing in his privy chamber in the House of the Seven Chimneys, the ambassador’s elegant sixteenth-century residence on the Calle de las Infantas in Madrid, when a servant came up to his room to report that a mysterious English messenger had arrived. He brought news that the ambassadorial courier, Gresley, had ‘fallen into thieves’ hands and all his letters taken away’. He also said the visitor had injured his leg so would not be able to get up the stairs to the ambassador’s chamber.
Digby sent down his son, who returned a little later in a flustered state to announce that the messenger was none other than the Marquis of Buckingham, George Villiers. ‘In a kind of astonishment’, Digby then came down himself, to discover George in the hall, and Charles waiting outside ‘in the dark’.
The ambassador managed to disguise his reaction better than George his identity, but the bewilderment and dismay must have been profound at what he later described as this ‘sudden & unthought arrival’. A solid, round-faced forty-three-year-old man from the English midlands, Digby was no novice to the shocks and banalities that characterized the world of diplomacy, but he had never encountered anything as impetuous, confounding and potentially disastrous as this.
Nevertheless, here they were, with George flourishing letters from James making him ‘extraordinary ambassador and principal commissioner in all the treaty’. Speed was now of the essence, with George demanding that they immediately ‘discover the wooer’ – reveal Charles – to the Spanish king, because the swift reopening of ports following their departure from England meant that news of their secret mission was likely to reach Madrid ‘within twelve hours’ of their arrival.
Despite the clear indication that he was being demoted and sidelined, Digby stifled his indignation and humiliation, ‘called for pen and ink’, and dispatched a post that night to England reporting the pair’s safe arrival. He also set about engineering the delicate business of breaking the news of Charles’s arrival to the Spanish court, in violation of all the usual rules of royal and diplomatic protocol.
He sent a message to Gondomar, mentioning only that George had appeared at the embassy, seeking an audience with King Philip. The former ambassador to London turned up at the House of the Seven Chimneys early the following morning, bragging that he had known of Charles’s presence within hours of the prince’s arrival. The reunion with George was a warm one, the disgruntled Digby watching as they embraced and exchanged fond memories of Gondomar’s visits to George’s riverside house in London.
Gondomar went off immediately to break the news to Gaspar de Guzmán – Conde de Olivares and Duque de San Lúcar la Mayor – Philip IV’s valido – chief minister and favourite, a man whose influence over the Spanish king was not dissimilar to George’s over James. On seeing Gondomar in such an agitated state, Olivares was said to have asked him jokingly if he had come to announce the arrival of the King of Great Britain, to which Gondomar’s sardonic reply was that it was only his son.
At four in the afternoon, a coach arrived for George and Digby. They were joined by Gondomar and Sir Walter Aston, a permanent member of the embassy staff. The coach took them to a discreet location in the grounds of the Alcázar, the imposing palace built by Charles I and Philip II on the site of the Islamic citadel that gave it its name. As they passed by the fortress’s massive bastions, George could not be but impressed by the scale of a structure that dominated the surrounding landscape, sitting on the edge of a ravine that plunged down to the Manzanares river and overlooked the vast Casa de Campo royal hunting park.
The coach came to a halt and rocked violently as the huge figure of Olivares climbed in and squeezed onto the seat facing George. The necessary courtesies concluded, Digby and Gondomar were asked to leave so the two royal favourites could be alone, with Aston acting as interpreter.
The count-duke’s imposing physique, sombre dress and startling looks were quite at odds with George’s delicate frame, flamboyant tastes and handsome features. Dressed in black velvets and silks, his jowly head, tiny in proportion to his massive body, protruded from a ruff of the finest white gauze, suggesting a small body hiding in a giant’s costume. Dark hair cut with a high fringe emphasized the imposing dome of his forehead, which sloped down to deep-set eyes. Thick red lips protruded through the whiskers of a beard trimmed into a long brush, and a wide moustache reached almost to his sideburns, acting as an ornate plinth for a prominent, knobbly nose. A great key was stuck in his belt, to demonstrate his capacity to open and lock the doors of power.
He had the settled composure of an aristocrat with an impeccable pedigree – Olivares’s family traced its roots to Spain’s eleventh-century nobility. He was also bred in the arts of diplomacy, his father being Spanish ambassador to Italy, so any hint of condescension towards this upstart envoy of an upstart prince would have been well hidden.
Though there might be something intriguing, even quixotic about this ludicrous English adventure, it was an irritating interruption to the valido’s busy schedule. Olivares had to deal with foreign as well as domestic affairs on a scale unimaginable even to England’s Lord Admiral. He had to manage colonies that girdled the globe, from Peru to the Philippines, and Spain’s unruly northern European possessions in Flanders, while supporting the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family, whose grip of the Holy Roman Empire was, in large part thanks to Charles’s impulsive brother-in-law Frederick of the Palatine, threatened with disintegration. In this great map of responsibilities, Britain was a small island floating in a sea of inconsequence whose king was a relatively minor and not particularly prepossessing character on the global stage, and whose military power, as he would later complain to Gondomar, was exaggerated.
Nevertheless, the sheer audacity of the escapade had piqued royal interest, so Olivares escorted the little party by a ‘back way’ to the king’s privy chambers.
If George was daunted by meeting the most powerful monarch in Europe, he did not show it. The Habsburgs were famous for their aloofness and solemnity, and courtly manners in Spain demanded a certain decorum lacking in James’s more turbulent household. So when George launched with ‘alacrity and freeness’ into the royal audience with Philip, a terrified Digby, already irritated at being upstaged, expected a diplomatic incident. Yet, to his amazement and perhaps with a touch of jealousy, he noticed that even the famous Habsburg reserve could not resist the Villiers charm, and for the first time in the old ambassador’s decades of experience he witnessed all the ‘Spanish gravity’ being ‘laid aside’.
The same day, Gondomar announced to Charles that an ‘Englishman’ had been made a member of the Council of State, the Spanish equivalent of the Privy Council. It turned out he meant himself, as the count claimed to have become ‘an Englishman at heart’. Thus planting himself at the centre of the negotiations, he arranged for the prince to have his first sight of the princess.
Despite the informality and warmth that seemed to have developed between the two sides, there was no prospect of the ‘wooer’ prince having an impetuous tryst with his lover. If Charles was to be given even a glimpse of the infanta, it would have to be under the conditions of the strictest Spanish propriety. The next day, a Sunday, Gondomar and George accompanied Charles in an ‘invisible coach’ (meaning with curtains drawn) to the Paseo del Prado, a boulevard on the outskirts of the city that ran through an ancient monastery meadow. There they waited for the king, his queen and the infanta, who were to parade through later in the morning and stop at a strategic location for a rest.
Crowds gathered, and the carriages duly arrived. Charles could identify the infanta by a blue ribbon tied around her arm. According to Endymion Porter, when the prince looked at her through the gap in the curtains, he developed ‘such a liking to his mistress that now he loves her as much for her beauty as he can for being sister to so great a king’. ‘She deserves it,’ Porter added, in a letter to his wife, ‘for there was never seen a fairer creature.’
Though supposed to be incognito, ‘the searching vulgar’ somehow managed to spot
Charles, and ‘did so press about the coach to see him, that we could not pass through the streets, insomuch that the King’s guard was forced to beat them from it and make way through the multitude’. According to Porter, they knew who Charles was, ‘and cried “God bless him”, and showed as much affection generally as ever was seen among people, only they took it ill he showed not himself to them in a more public manner’.
Later that evening, Olivares told George in the typically exaggerated language of courtly diplomacy that ‘the king longed and died for want of a nearer sight of our wooer’, initially suggesting that he would come to meet Charles at the embassy. There was horror at the suggestion. The receiving of a monarch in such a relatively humble setting would put Charles in considerable debt to his host. Instead, it was decided that more neutral territory should be found for the rendezvous, agreement settling on a return to the Prado.
Thus began an extraordinary piece of courtly theatre described by George and Charles in an excited joint letter sent to James the following day. Olivares came to the embassy in his coach to collect George, and the two set off. According to George, they then encountered Philip, King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, Duke of Milan, ruler of the Netherlands and Count of Burgundy, Emperor of the Americas and the Philippines, ‘walking in the streets, with his cloak thrown over his face, and a sword and buckler by his side’. The coach door was opened, and ‘he leaped in, and away he came to find the wooer,’ Charles, who was waiting for him at an appointed place along the Prado promenade.
The King's Assassin Page 14
