The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  In November, James’s loyal servant Thomas Erskine revealed to his kinsman the Earl of Mar the toll the turmoil had taken on the king’s health: ‘both of his gout and I think, as many other so, of his mind likewise. I can write no more what will be the conclusion of the match. You can not imagine how the world is possessed of the vexation that his majesty has in his mind. It may come that young folks shall have their world, I know not if that will be first for your lordship and me.’

  ACT III

  The Greatest Villain in the World

  The Honey and the Sting

  The mission to Madrid had been a disaster. George had been away from court for months, opening a space at James’s side for rivals to fill. He had been frolicking in the Spanish sunshine while England had endured one of the worst summers in years. And he had returned having accomplished nothing, expecting ‘malice and revenge’, leaving the prince humiliated and George’s allies alienated.

  Yet his reception had been rapturous. He was ‘much applauded and commended’ for his actions in Madrid, and the decision to come back empty-handed was regarded as ‘brave and resolute’. Even Thomas Erskine, who latterly had admitted to having ‘little cause to like well of Buckingham’s love and affection to myself’, felt he could not but ‘wish him well and love him the better of his behaviour and carriage at this time’, which the earl perversely thought had brought honour rather than opprobrium to Charles and the kingdom.

  As George leafed through the letters of support pouring into York House, he noticed one from his old mentor Francis Bacon. Since plummeting from power in 1621, Bacon had been living in exile, suffering from poor health and depression, riding ‘at anchor all your Grace’s absence’, as he put it to George, and as a result his ‘cables are now quite worn’. ‘My Lord, do some good work upon me,’ he implored, ‘that I may end my days in comfort, which nevertheless cannot be complete except you put me in some way to do your noble self service.’

  Times were ‘stirring’, he warned George in another letter, so full of ‘dissimulation, falsehood, baseness and envy in the world, and so many idle clocks going in men’s heads’. It made him grieve that he could not be at George’s elbow, ‘that I might give you some of the fruits of the careful advice, modest liberty, and true information of a friend that loveth your Lordship as I do’.

  George was responsive. Although he had maintained an image of resolve and confidence since returning to England, Spain had left a bewildering and contradictory set of impressions: envy at the confidence and opulence of Philip’s court; love of the glorious beauty, austere elegance and teasing reserve of Spanish arts, architecture and etiquette – the Alcázar, the Escorial, the glimpses of the infanta on the Paseo del Prado; disgust at the poverty and ugliness of peasant life; contempt for and alarm at the malicious workings of the Catholic authorities; amazement at their influence over the most powerful monarch in Europe; fascination at coming up against his Spanish equal and opposite, Philip’s formidable valido, Olivares; the feeling of fear and excitement at engaging in the seductive charm, rampant bullying, magical thinking and demonic deception that make up the process of negotiation – George a witch, Olivares the devil.

  George sent off a quick if typically convoluted reply to Bacon, mixing up the original maritime metaphor so that he could allude to the ‘country fruits’ of advice that had first cemented their relationship: ‘The assurance of your love makes me easily believe your joy at my return,’ he wrote, ‘and if I may be so happy, as by the credit of my place to supply the decay of your cables, I shall account it one of the special fruits thereof.’

  It was not long before Bacon was at George’s door, clutching a sheaf of notes. The former Lord Chancellor cut a pathetic figure, like a lost dog returning to his master, trembling with expectation, weak with illness and neglect. Exile had been like living in darkness, he said. Just six years ago, when the king and George had been in Scotland, James had left Bacon the keys of the kingdom. He had been living in the very home that George now occupied, York House, which Bacon had enlarged and embellished as a concrete symbol of his status. Now he was forced to live in his cramped chambers in Gray’s Inn, the lawyers’ enclave just a short walk away, in a state ‘I cannot call health but rather sickness, and more dangerous than felt.’

  He had not given up, though. From the darkness had emerged a succession of books – masterpieces, some of them, on politics, religion and most notably natural philosophy, setting out the conceptual foundations of modern science. George had been bombarded with them; one even made its way to Madrid. He had received them with polite gratitude and bafflement, but nothing much had resulted. Nevertheless, while he had gently rebuffed Bacon’s pleas for restitution, hopes had been kept alive. The previous year, for example, George had arranged for him to be allowed once more within ‘the verge’, the twelve-mile zone around the court which those who had lost the king’s favour were forbidden to enter. Now he was back at York House, albeit as guest rather than host.

  Reflecting the sensitivities surrounding the subject matter, and the importance he attached to the advice he was seeking, George insisted their meeting – Bacon grandiosely called it a ‘conference’ – be kept secret. The favourite needed to be able to discuss candidly his situation, his confused feelings, his perilous position, both reliant on the king, but now at odds with him. His response to the Madrid escapade was anger towards the Spanish, but it was unclear perhaps even to George whether such feelings were the result of personal pique or political conviction. To his peers, he was still the king’s catamite. His opinions were ignored, except by those who out of necessity of employment or rank had to take notice of them. His ambitions were seen as self-serving and resented by those who already possessed the titles and estates he had sought. But there was more to him than that, and he needed to show it. He had once expressed doubts – ‘disgusts’, as they were described – concerning the Spanish match in the earliest days of the negotiations, but had gone along with it for the sake of the king, and been caught up in the romance. Now the disgusts were revived. The Madrid escapade had demonstrated that the match would be a disaster, for Charles, for the kingdom and for Europe.

  Bacon seemed to recognize all this. He marvelled at the duke’s position, that he had come home ‘with so fair a reputation’. But he warned it would ‘vanish like a dream’ unless he ‘do some remarkable act to fix it and bind it in’. He quoted a Spanish proverb: ‘He that tieth not a knot upon his threads looses his stitch.’

  What remarkable act, then, would tie the knot, fix and bind his reputation as a leading political as well as courtly figure, a man of national consequence rather than just a royal plaything? ‘I that live in darkness cannot propound,’ Bacon claimed, but it boiled down to a decision over the match: either he should force it through, or end it. Both options were dangerous. One meant alienating the people, the other undermining the king, and if he did not take the ‘king’s way’ he might lose his own way.

  Bacon also warned him about his position in a court that was becoming increasingly factious. Three groups were ‘considerable in this state’: ‘papists’ who hated George; Protestants, including Puritans, whose ‘love’ was ‘yet but green’ – unripe, in other words; and ‘particular great persons’ – he was probably thinking of the likes of the earls of Arundel and Pembroke – ‘which are most of them reconciled enemies or discontented friends’, so, not to be trusted. There was also ‘a great many that will magnify you and make use of you for the breaking of the match or putting the realm into a war’, but who as soon as the business was done, or if it failed, would ‘return to their old bias’.

  So what to do?

  One suggestion was to persuade the king to call a Parliament. Bacon had been a victim of the 1621 session, the impeachment by his peers in the House of Lords leading to his downfall. So he was naturally cautious. He held it ‘fit’ to summon one, ‘when there have passed some more visible demonstrations of your power with the King, and your constancy in the way yo
u are in: before, not’. In other words, he should not openly call for a new Parliament until he could show that he was able to align the king’s will to Parliament’s, because it would be much more difficult to achieve the reverse.

  He ended his advice with one other matter, ‘tender to be spoken of’: George’s relationship with Charles. While he should keep close to the prince, he should be sure it would not result in the king finding himself ‘the more solitary’.

  Overall, George should remain aloof from the arguments and alliances that would flare up as tensions intensified. ‘It is good to carry yourself fair,’ Bacon said. Do not ‘trust too far nor apply too much but keep a good distance’. George should play his own game, ‘showing yourself to have, as the bee hath, both of the honey and of the sting’.

  The English Junta

  George reacted to Bacon’s carefully drafted advice with typical brashness, adopting some of his ideas while almost carelessly discarding others. He made an attempt to keep the king happy by taking part in the busy exchange of letters with Philip of Spain which James insisted on maintaining. But he was realistic and blunt enough to tell the king that all efforts at appeasing the Spanish were probably futile, and that his reputation was being ‘taken away by the Spaniards’. He also publicly declared his support for the Hispanophobes, provocatively telling a ‘Flemish gentleman’ accompanying an envoy of the Spanish Netherlands that he marvelled ‘how such worthy gentlemen could tolerate the Spanish yoke’.

  The prince joined in, telling his father that he felt he could no longer trust the Spanish. ‘Do you want me to go to war, in my twilight years, and force me to break with Spain?’ a distraught James asked, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  Meanwhile, George set about putting together a political coalition in support of an anti-Spanish policy. It was hard work. In December 1623, Bacon noted, perhaps with a touch of told-you-so, that ‘you march bravely, but methinks you do not draw up your troops’.

  George began by turning his charms on William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke and current Lord Chamberlain. Herbert was a popular parliamentary figure and prominent opponent of a Spanish match. However, the Baynard’s Castle conspirator who had introduced George to court back in 1615 had become resentful of his protégé’s rise through the ranks. Now he found himself exposed to the full force of George’s charm. At first he resisted, but with Charles’s encouragement, he eventually became ‘reconciled’.

  George adopted a similar approach with other leading members of the anti-Spanish clique. Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, had been exiled following a heated row with George in the House of Lords which nearly came to blows. Wriothesley had subsequently been arrested on charges of ‘mischievous intrigues with members of the Commons’. George now welcomed him back into favour, and the grateful earl became a prominent champion of the prince and the favourite’s policies. Henry de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, a veteran soldier who had fought for James’s son-in-law to save the Palatinate, had languished in the Tower for twenty months following an imbroglio involving one of George’s relatives; his release was now secured, and George backed his marriage to the highly eligible Lady Diana Cecil, from a family with close ties to the Villiers clan. Oxford wrote in fulsome gratitude to George, accepting that he was now bound to the favourite ‘in a perpetual acknowledgement’. George also persuaded the king to receive William Fiennes, Lord Saye, after he had fallen out of favour for protesting against the king’s use of extra-parliamentary levies to raise money to support his daughter Elizabeth in the Hague.

  Where the honey had been applied to these magnates, a little more of the sting was required with others. John Williams, the Lord Keeper, was like so many enemies a former ally – a ‘discontented friend’, as Bacon put it. An ambitious, restless, bumptious figure, he was liked by James for his wit and erudition, and had strong parliamentary connections. However, he was strongly pro-Spanish, and blamed George for the failure of the match.

  George responded by staging an encounter with Williams in the Shield Gallery at Whitehall, at which he showed the Lord Keeper to be ‘dead in his affections’. As well as the favourite’s displeasure, rumours began to circulate that Williams might be asked to surrender the great seal of state, making him a lord keeper with nothing to keep. In face of the unrelenting pressure Williams began to yield, and, by early February 1624, George was able to tell his chaplain that a reconciliation had been achieved.

  James would have been aware of these manoeuvres, and had suspicions about their purpose, but George seemed oblivious of the dangers. The man he had once described as ‘my maker, my friend, my father, my all’ became almost peripheral to his plans, as he focused his attention on Charles. The friendship of James’s two ‘sweet boys’, forged in the heat of the Madrid negotiations, had now become stronger than ever: George helping to give Charles a princely bearing and assertiveness that surprised and impressed the court, Charles giving George’s ideas and interventions a legitimacy that even the king was loath to challenge.

  ‘They are very closely united’, the Venetian ambassador noted, fearing that these ‘two young men’ might ‘come off badly in opposing the obstinate will of a very crafty King and the powerful arts of the most sagacious Spaniards’.

  A select group of privy councillors, identified with dark irony by the Spanish term ‘junta’, began to form around the pair. They met regularly and in secret, discussing ways of dealing with both the match and the Palatinate crisis. As packets of diplomatic correspondence passed between London and Madrid, continuing what many now saw as a delusional negotiation, Charles and George began to push for the recall of Parliament. They argued that the popularity that they had attracted since their return from Madrid would encourage the House of Commons to put the Spanish under serious pressure, perhaps enough to get concessions on the Palatinate, and, if that failed, a vote for the tax rises needed to support its military recovery.

  The junta convened on several occasions in late November and early December to thrash out the issues, and by mid-December they had managed to secure a majority in favour. George then went to James, who was still languishing in the country, complaining of feeling ill and old. The favourite persuaded him to come to Whitehall. He arrived ‘against his will’, and during a series of meetings held in complete secrecy, Charles, George and their supporters set about persuading him of the benefits of a new Parliament, presumably on the grounds that it might wring further concessions from the Spanish, which in turn might revive efforts to conclude the match. Somehow, eventually, they got him to relent, and he returned to the country.

  While he remained away, Charles summoned another meeting of the junta, to call for a vote on whether to continue with negotiations over the match. During a first round, five councillors came out in favour of continuing with the Spanish. Four abstained. Three voted against, including Charles – under the influence of George, rivals claimed, as he ‘engrosses the Prince’s favour so far as to exclude all others’. Charles forced another vote, having managed to swing some of the abstaining ‘neuters’ to his side, but was shocked to find that William Herbert, now supposedly an ally, refused to shift from the fence, ‘alleging that if the Spaniard performed the conditions agreed on, he saw not how the King in honour could fall from the conclusion’.

  ‘What passed is not known,’ reported the usually well-informed John Chamberlain. The ‘variety and uncertainty of reports and surmises’ had left him clueless.

  It was noted, however, how much the French were now in favour. Perhaps the sister of the French king Louis XIII, Henrietta Maria, though just fourteen years old, and also a Catholic, offered more promising prospects as a marriage partner for Charles. An ambassador arrived from Paris, making his entry into London ‘very magnificently with all his retinue in good order and with store of torchlight which gave the more lustre to all his long show and to his own bravery, indeed very rich and gallant’. He had brought gifts of horses, dogs and hawks from the French king, which
had raised an ailing James from his gouty pain and lethargy. The hawks were said to ‘fly at anything’ – kites, crows, magpies, whatever came in their way – and the king was eager to try them out.

  The growing rift between the king and his sweet boys, his growing efforts to avoid confrontation or decision, his desire to stay in the country and enjoy his French hawks and his English hounds, emphasized what Bacon had feared: the king’s isolation. James felt too weak to stand up to either the Spanish or his son and favourite. He was handing out wild concessions to both, desperate to maintain their approval, but instead earning their indifference.

  Rather than opening up a dangerous gap between the favourite and the king, these developments had the unexpected effect of revealing to James how badly he needed his George. In late December, he poured intense, pathetic feelings into a letter addressed to his ‘only sweet and dear child’, a salutation recalling their romantic correspondence during the early years of their relationship.

  In an extraordinary declaration of deep and sincere feeling, the widower king fantasized about how the coming festivities might mark a new start in their relationship, how he and his Steenie ‘may make at this Christmas a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter’.

  ‘For God so love me as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you,’ the king wrote, in his jittery hand. ‘And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.’