The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  The seventeen-year-old Spanish king, five years Charles’s junior, was tall, with a rather pale, doughy face, protruding lips shaded by a downy moustache, his eyes heavily hooded, the outer edges of the lids brushed by soft lashes. His hair was curled in a Castilian manner that would have seemed curious to English eyes, with a wide and very prominent quiff furled above the forehead and long locks that dangled around the ears.

  According to George, ‘there passed much kindness and compliment’ between the king and the prince, Endymion Porter acting as Charles’s interpreter. Philip was particularly curious to hear about their journey across France to Madrid, evidently impressed, if perhaps a little puzzled by it. The king then escorted Charles and George back towards the House of the Seven Chimneys, their coaches hitting a pothole and nearly overturning along the way.

  Back at the embassy, Charles and George had an opportunity to recover from and assess the meeting. Despite the occasional mishap, they could congratulate themselves on an impressive achievement. James had boasted of his mission to collect his bride Anne, stranded in Norway, but he had been accompanied by an armed escort, and been travelling to a neutral country. Charles and George had come uninvited and more or less defenceless into a potentially hostile kingdom, relying on no more than charm, guile and Sir Richard Graham’s intimidating presence to keep them safe.

  Judged at least by ‘outward shows’ and ‘general speeches’, this high-risk strategy was starting to pay off. A combination of youthful recklessness, romantic imagination and even carnal impatience had succeeded in reinvigorating negotiations stalled by diplomatic inertia. The ambassadors were to be ‘condemned’, George told James, ‘for rather writing too sparingly than too much’ about the possibilities of progress. Philip, George reported, had a ‘sensible’ understanding of Charles’s position, and in Olivares he felt that, with careful cultivation, they might have an ally.

  Exhausted, isolated, exhilarated, they suddenly beheld a prospect of success. If realized it would lead to a complete realignment of European politics. The son of an indebted landowner from the English midlands would have transformed a timid, lame, stammering boy into one of the great princes of the Continent, uniting the Scottish Stuarts with the mighty Habsburgs. They would have challenged the pope’s insistence on treating all Protestants as heretics. They could put pressure on the Spanish to restore the ancestral lands of Charles’s brother-in-law Frederick, thus helping to relieve the growing tensions in the Holy Roman Empire. And to top all this, they would have secured a £600,000 dowry that would at last pay off the royal debts.

  Within days of their first introduction to the court, a public welcome was staged for Charles. Spain’s financial health was precarious, and one of Olivares’s earliest reforms as Philip’s first minister had been to impose austerity measures at court, which included a ban on extravagant clothing and lavish entertainment. To disguise this from the visitors, these restrictions had to be temporarily lifted, to reinforce the British impression of Spanish opulence and wealth.

  By tradition, a great royal celebration such as a wedding or succession was marked with the granting of a pardon. So, on Friday 14 March, hundreds of prisoners were released, including several Englishmen who had been caught committing acts of piracy and sentenced to serve as galley slaves.

  The following evening, a royal emissary arrived with two horses from Philip IV, who told Charles to select whichever he wanted to use for the procession into the city the next day. Charles went to admire them in the embassy garden and ‘took pains and pleasure to try them both, to the end that if there were a difference, he might take the less excellent to himself, and return the other to the king’.

  On Sunday, barely a week after the arrival of the two ‘venturous knights’, the main ceremonies began. James had decided to bestow on Charles the rank of ‘sworn king of Scotland’, a title the Spanish seemed prepared to acknowledge. The now familiar seven chimneys of the British embassy provided the backdrop for the arrival of royal emissaries to welcome the Scottish ‘king’. A receiving chamber had been set up, with pictures of great knights and statesmen, as well as of the English Parliament – a curious, perhaps pointed gesture, since Spain had no equivalent representative assembly.

  The emissaries conducted Charles and George to the Monastery of San Jeronimo, where they joined Philip for a meal. Afterwards, with solemn, reverential and exhausting formality, Charles spent several hours being presented to a parade of the Spanish councils, each representing the various realms, military orders and offices of state.

  The royal party then went down to the gate of the monastery, where they all mounted horses, and set off for the city. They were met at the gate by twenty-four regidores, or city officials, who unfurled a ‘large canopy of rich tissue’ lined with crimson cloth of gold under which the kings of Spain and Scotland were to parade through the streets, with George and Olivares following behind. ‘All the streets were adorned, in some places with rich hangings, in others with curious pictures’, while at various stages along the way ‘representations were made of the best comedians, dancers and men of music, to give contentment to that royal pair’.

  They were received at the Alcázar by Philip’s exquisite, if rather forbidding, twenty-year-old wife, Queen Elisabeth of France, who conducted them to three ‘equal chairs’ set up beneath a ‘cloth of state’. The queen sat in the centre, with Charles and her husband on either side. ‘The room,’ an English diplomat observed, ‘was as richly furnished as may well be imagined, but the chief riches thereof consisted in the living tapestry of ladies, noblemen and children called “menines”, which stood and garnished all the room round about close by the walls.’

  Once the formalities were completed, Charles was conducted to the opulent apartments of the palace which were provided for him for the duration of his stay. As he was settling himself in, the queen brought ‘sumptuous and curious’ welcoming presents including ‘a fair great basin of massy gold’ carried by two men, ‘a curious embroidered nightgown’, two great trunks bound with golden locks and keys, lined with tan leather and filled with ‘several delicacies of linen and perfumes’, and a desk ‘every drawer whereof was full of rarities’. ‘Fireworks were made, and torches set in all the windows of Madrid’ as the celebrations and formalities continued ‘for three nights together’.

  Charles installed George in a room next to his, and ordered that his companion was to be ‘served with a full and plentiful diet, and to be also nobly attended’. The grandees who continued to turn up every day were expected to pay their respects to George as well as Charles, in an effort to shore up his position as the prince’s chief negotiator and representative.

  A few days later, a rushed and muddled letter arrived from James in which he reported that he had broken off diplomatic relations with the Holy Roman Emperor over the Palatinate. If that business was to be ‘brought to a good end, it must now be done by the king of Spain’s mediation’, he declared. Feeling exposed and edgy at this critical turning point in their plan, he also urged Charles to speed up the ‘long delay’ in reaching a settlement, and was concerned that Philip might ‘if not lessen, at least protract the terms for payment of the dowry’. But he remained optimistic. If the Spanish ‘love themselves’, they would see the marriage through.

  ‘Here am I, now in a chamber alone,’ George wrote back to James. Charles was out hunting with Philip, as the celebrations of his arrival continued. George commiserated with James over his current health problems, in particular his lameness, and hoped that by the next letter from England, news would arrive that ‘you are marching upon your well-shaped legs again’. There was a hint of nervousness about his continued absence from James’s side, a fear that others might be trying to fill the gap he had left behind. He strained to express the debt of gratitude he owed the king – most recently for the favour shown to his ‘little deserving’ dipsomaniac brother Kit, just made Earl of Anglesey. ‘I may ease my heart in saying something,’ he wrote, ‘but never satisfy
the debt or debtors in saying enough.’

  George also enclosed ‘consolatory’ letters to be forwarded to his wife Kate and to his beloved but ‘fearful sister’ Susan, who continued to worry about his safety. Kate had maintained a regular and affectionate correspondence with her husband, sympathizing with him of the ‘grievous time of this our grievous absence’.

  ‘You could never had a one that could love you better than your poor, true, loving Kate doth,’ she wrote, ‘poor now in your absence, but else the happiest and richest woman in the world.’ She consoled herself that she was ‘that happy woman to enjoy you from all other women’, perhaps a warning not to yield to the temptations she could only imagine surrounding him in the Spanish court. Her father, the Earl of Rutland, was more forthright, warning George that if he ‘court ladies of honour you will be in danger of poisoning or killing’ and that if he had ‘whores, you will be in danger of burning’ – catching venereal disease. George’s secretary Endymion Porter, ever present as his interpreter, felt obliged to tell his own wife, Olive, to ‘remember my humble service’ to George’s wife, and pass on ‘that my lord and I wish you were both here very often’, adding a suspiciously superfluous reassurance that ‘we live very honest and think of nothing but our wives’.

  In the midst of all this, the infanta seemed to have become lost – literally so, as far as Charles and George were concerned. Kate had even sent her husband ‘spy glasses’ to help him find this distant and elusive creature.

  On the rare occasions Charles was allowed sight of his bride-to-be, Olivares noted that the prince gazed upon her ‘as a cat doth a mouse’. A cat-and-mouse game duly ensued in the days and weeks following the prince’s installation in the Alcázar. The aim seems to have been to use Charles’s carnal desires to tempt him into becoming a Catholic, linking consummation to conversion.

  The infanta played her part in the game impeccably, maintaining an air of inscrutable formality and Catholic piety. She was rarely to be seen in public, and never put in a position where she might exchange so much as a glance with Charles. For his part, Charles made regular and ever more fervent appeals to see her, but was ignored.

  Reinforcing the link between the union and religion, he was finally given another chance to see the infanta at Easter. Being, from a Catholic point of view, a heretic, Charles could take no part in the festival, though an English Catholic, a Jesuit who had become a religious refugee in Madrid, was allowed to distribute alms amounting to £2,000 on Charles’s behalf – a remarkably ecumenical concession on both sides.

  Charles’s chance for another glimpse of the infanta came on Palm Sunday, at the beginning of the week’s festivities, when the royal family processed through the corridors of the Alcazár palace. Charles was positioned behind a screen, and as the royal party passed, it slowed down, tantalizing him with ‘a very good view of the lady infanta’, possibly even a hint of her perfume.

  Then, on Easter Sunday, at the height of the celebrations, the teasing reached a climax. The frustrated ‘wooer’ was finally to be allowed a meeting with the wooed. Charles had to borrow somewhat oversized clothes from Olivares for the occasion, those he had ordered from England having yet to arrive, though he did manage to decorate them with diamonds and the insignia and garter of the Order of St George, England’s patron saint. In this ill-fitting but highly decorated garb, Charles was told to wait outside the royal chapel while King Philip finished his Easter prayers. The two then set off for the apartments of the queen, who was waiting for them with the infanta.

  A meeting of excruciating formality ensued, the couple sitting silently on chairs either side of an unsmiling queen. The chamber began to fill with the whispers of watching courtiers. Charles rose. The queen stood to hear him. The whispers subsided. The prince, whose stammer could be worse at times of heightened tension, spoke a few words, presumably thanking the queen for the opportunity to introduce himself. There was a pause for the interpreter. He then stepped past her to address the infanta directly. He kissed her hands, and told her via his interpreter that he had come to Spain to make a ‘personal acknowledgment’ of the friendship between her brother and his father and ‘to continue and increase’ it. She stared blankly at him as she listened to the translation. She replied that she greatly valued what he had said. He then enquired after her health, having heard that she had recently been unwell. She thanked him for asking. Offered no further encouragement, a tongue-tied Charles returned to his seat, and a half hour later left the room with King Philip.

  The awkwardness and lack of encouragement on the part of the infanta had the expected effect, stoking Charles’s desires. Sir Francis Cottington, their travelling companion since Dover, guessed that she ‘will be with child before she gets to England’.

  A month later, however, Charles was still awaiting a second encounter. The negotiations had once again become bogged down in disputes over religious issues, and the Spanish seemed to be dragging things out. Meanwhile, expenses were escalating, only partially relieved by the arrival in April of ships from England, bringing the much-needed clothes, more jewels (said to be worth as much as £200,000), and a party of nobles and knights to act as Charles’s entourage, including Lord Compton, the glamorous brother of George’s stepfather, and Archie Armstrong, James’s court jester.

  As the scorching summer temperatures set in, arguments with the Spanish became increasingly heated. On 24 April, King Philip arranged for a panel of Catholic theologians to interview Charles. The venue was one of the king’s private chambers, and Philip greeted Charles when he arrived. But before proceedings began in earnest, the king left, saying he could never allow himself ‘to listen to a word against the Catholic religion’. It was an ominous start to what proved to be another awkward confrontation.

  George had already attended two secret discussions, to explore the difficult issues of heresy, Catholic toleration and papal supremacy – whether the pope’s religious authority as church pontiff exceeded James’s as Supreme Head of the Church of England. This was the first opportunity for Charles himself to be interviewed on these matters. The prince claimed there was nothing to talk about. He did not ‘scruple’ about his faith.

  The mood darkened when one of the Spanish monks quoted Luke’s gospel, when Jesus says to Simon Peter, the ‘rock’ of the church and the apostle considered to be the first pope: ‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not; and thou, when thou are converted, strengthen thy brethren.’ Charles asked twice for the verses to be repeated in French. Realizing the implication that Charles needed to convert to Catholicism to be accepted by Christ, George flew into a rage, throwing his hat to the ground and stamping on it before storming out of the room.

  A stand-off ensued, with George refusing Olivares’s efforts to arrange further conferences, and Olivares denying Charles further opportunities to meet the infanta.

  Finally, Charles decided to revive the tactic that had brought him to Spain in the first place: an impetuous, romantic gesture to cut through the diplomatic deadlock. He discovered that, during May, the infanta was in the habit of visiting the summerhouse in the Casa de Campo. She went to gather ‘maydew’, the dew that gathered on freshly sprouting plants, which was believed to have medicinal qualities.

  On Saturday 17 May, accompanied by Endymion Porter to act as his interpreter, Charles called at the summerhouse. He was let into the house and the garden, but informed that she was in the orchard, which was protected by a high wall and a gate with a double lock. Fetching a ladder, Charles scaled the wall and jumped down the other side. Seeing him, the infanta ‘gave a shriek and ran back’. An elderly marquis who was acting as her guardian then approached the prince and, on bended knee, begged him to leave, as he ‘hazarded his head if he admitted any to her company’. The humiliated Charles complied, and the orchard gate was opened to let him out.

  Spring melted into summer, and the heat became so intense Charles had t
o send one of his older courtiers back to London to recover. The negotiations fell into a state of lethargic paralysis. It was now clear that Charles’s conversion to Catholicism had become a Spanish objective, if not an explicit condition, of the marriage. It even transpired that Ambassador Digby had encouraged Olivares to believe that conversion was a possibility, which it had never been, nor could be.*

  There was also the position of Charles’s sister Elizabeth to consider. The hope remained that Philip would intercede in favour of her and her husband Frederick if Charles married the infanta. But Archie Armstrong, the king’s clown, had learned from the Infanta Maria herself of the lack of sympathy in the Spanish court for Frederick’s predicament. She pointedly remarked how ‘strange’ it was that Frederick’s Protestant forces had lost to a Catholic army about half its size, suggesting that it must be the result of divine intercession.

  A despondent mood set in at the English camp. George wrote to James of the latest version of the papal dispensation for the marriage becoming ‘clogged’ with yet more conditions. Relations with Olivares, the man he had once hailed as ‘so full of real courtesy’, had broken down, and the two were now only communicating in writing.

  Before George and Charles had set off from England, James had proposed making his beloved ‘Steenie’ a duke. George had resisted the offer, fearing it would provoke the jealousy of his rivals. Dukedoms were by convention reserved for members of the royal family. To honour a commoner with such a title signalled that James might have ambitions to give George royal status, perhaps so his children could marry those of Charles’s sister, Elizabeth. By this time, James already saw George as a member of his family. His letters, including the one that mentioned the dukedom, were filled with news about George’s wife Kate and James’s beloved ‘grandchild’, Mal.