The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  Whether George had a chance to see the patient’s reading material is unclear, as he went to deal with pressing business in London, leaving Mary at the king’s bedside to keep him comfortable and entertained. The duke was back at Theobalds by Monday 21 March, thirteen days into the illness, when the king seemed well enough to get out of bed.

  James had managed to walk a short distance the day before, but had felt a ‘heaviness at his heart’, and returned to bed. Despite the signs of improvement, he was still anxious, insisting to the bemused physicians that the next fit would surely be worse because the previous one had been so mild.

  At about 4 p.m. that Monday, George and his ‘folks’, including his mother, came into the sickroom with the plaster and potion that had been applied the week before. At the time, James was being attended by doctors Harvey, Beton, Craig, Lister and Ramsey – a formidable group. Soon after, they were joined by Dr Moore, apparently at the behest of Mary and George. Dr Beton was surprised and a bit put out to see Moore there, as he was ‘no sworn physician to the king’.

  In violation of Mayerne’s instructions, Moore was allowed to remain and the other doctors looked on as George personally administered a dose of Remington’s mysterious potion. Some of the physicians were worried that the king might be entering the ‘prohibited time’, the three-hour period in the lead-up to an expected fit when the use of medicines was considered to be dangerous, but they apparently stifled their concerns. Only Dr Lister was brave enough to speak up, saying the king should ‘forebear’ the treatment, but he was ignored. Doctors Lister, Harvey and Beton then left the room.

  Those remaining watched as the king’s barber-surgeon Archibald Hay once again adjusted the king’s nightgown to expose his abdomen. He then pressed the plaster onto the side of his stomach, and onto his wrists. George gave the patient another sip of the potion.

  The king started to suffer a violent fit. His symptoms were later described as panting, raving, swooning. His pulse became irregular. He was offered a third helping of the potion, but it was refused. Dr Craig went to George’s room and in front of the duke and Mary made some ‘plain speeches’ complaining about what they had done. Craig was dismissed from court. Henry Gibb, one of his grooms of the bedchamber, also registered a protest. At midnight, the king told Gibb to take the plaster off.

  The following day, Tuesday 22 March, a fortnight into the illness, Lord Keeper John Williams rushed to Theobalds. He had just heard the alarming news that the king’s sickness had suddenly become ‘dangerous to death’. Dr Chambers, who had been absent since the previous Saturday, also arrived, and was shocked to see the transformation in the king’s condition. James was given some broth, which produced a bowel movement considered to be of ‘large benefit’. He relapsed into a deep sleep. He revived a little later that day, and a small communion service was held in the room, James sharing the sacrament with Charles, George and other members of court, who beheld the ceremony in tears that mixed ‘comfort and grief’.

  Around this time a delegation of the doctors went to see Charles, and asked that only they be allowed to treat James. Their request was ignored.

  That night, Chambers and Ramsey, two of James’s Scottish doctors, were left in charge. Chambers heard James muttering about the treatment he had received, describing the potion George had given him as making him ‘burn and roast’. It was supposed to be a posset of gillyflower, a soothing medicine. ‘Will you murder me and slay me?’ the king had apparently said.

  The following days were a blur of frantic efforts by the physicians to treat the king’s sudden and catastrophic decline. Fits were now lasting twenty hours, and when they abated the king’s pulse slowed dramatically. An ‘uncertain change’ was noted in his urine, which indicated ‘an obscure and hidden malignity’. Purges were dispensed to try to emit the rotting humours, which resulted in a copious bout of diarrhoea, during which the king produced ‘burned, bilious, and putrid things’. His speech began to fail, his tongue and throat swelled and, unable to drink, he suffered a violent thirst. Scabs were noticed on his tongue.

  In the midst of this melee, two foreign agents, unimaginatively codenamed ‘X’ and ‘XX’, dispatched letters to their spymaster, Jean Baptiste Van Male, based in Brussels, the capital of the Spanish Netherlands. They had both somehow managed to penetrate the royal bedchamber at Theobalds, and were at the king’s side throughout his illness. X reported the ‘strange tragedies’ he had witnessed involving ‘plasters and potions’, which had brought the king close to death. XX was even more concerned, declaring that he feared for ‘all Christendom’ because ‘the duke hath the absolute power and possession of the prince’ and, if James should die, he would ‘endeavour the ruin’ of not just the Habsburgs but ‘all Catholic princes’.

  XX also enclosed a letter written ‘late at night’ from Theobalds relating the events of Monday 21 March. According to the anonymous correspondent, the king had been suffering ‘an ordinary ague and his fits lessening by fair degrees’ when the duke, either to treat it or ‘for a worse end’, did ‘force the king to make a plaster on his stomach and a scurvy drink inwards without so much as acquainting any one doctor therewith though 8 were in the house’. As a result, ‘that night he was one hour dead, and two hours more senseless, not knowing anybody’. The letter reported that Dr Craig had accused the duke of having as good as given the king ‘poison’, provoking a furious denial from the favourite, who consulted James Ley, a former judge who was at Theobalds, about bringing legal action against the doctor. George also ‘prevailed’ on Charles – whose presence throughout the king’s illness went curiously unnoticed by others – to have Craig and the recalcitrant groom Henry Gibb thrown into gaol. The duke, it was also noted, had used the royal stamp, which the king had with him at the time because he was too weak to sign official documents, to authorize a warrant ‘to stay the Count of Gondomar from coming hither’.

  ‘Fie upon this time what an age we do live in,’ XX had lamented.

  On Friday 25 March, the elderly Sir William Paddy arrived, and, on seeing the king, pronounced there was nothing more the physicians could do for him other than pray. After a crisis meeting the following day, the physicians handed over the king’s care to George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Williams. By dawn on Sunday, it was clear that the end was close. The king indicated that he wanted his old friend Williams to lead the prayers. ‘Come, Lord Jesu, come quickly’, the bishop whispered several times, as the king’s breathing became more irregular. James’s soul ‘began to retreat more inward and so by degrees he took less notice of external things’. Just before noon on Sunday, 27 March 1625, with ‘lords and servants kneeling on one side, his archbishops, bishops and other of his chaplains on the other side of his bed, without pangs or convulsions at all, Solomon slept’.

  * * *

  Within a quarter of an hour members of the Privy Council, who had rushed up from London, had met and pronounced Charles king. A hurriedly improvised ceremony was staged at the main entrance of the house, the traditional place to mark the crossing of a great personal and national threshold. There, the new monarch was proclaimed by the Knight Marshal. Secretary Conway dictated the resounding declaration: ‘That whereas it has pleased God to take to his mercy our most gracious sovereign King James of famous memory, we proclaim Prince Charles his rightful and indubitable heir to the kingdom of England, Scotland, France and Ireland.’ Flustered by the significance and pace of events, the unfortunate Knight Marshal, who was repeating Conway’s words, declared Charles the ‘rightful and dubitable heir’. A potentially excruciating gaffe was more likely to have produced smiles rather than embarrassment, because, for the first time in nearly eighty years, the English throne was passing directly from father to son. The ideal of primogeniture, the fragile underpinning of hereditary monarchy, had been fulfilled.

  The instant the ceremony was completed, James Howell, who had been with Charles and George in Madrid, jumped onto his horse and set off for London to break
the news. He arrived to find the City gates shut, apparently in response to the news of the king’s death, and was annoyed to find that someone had managed to get there before him. Charles and George departed soon after in the king’s carriage, reaching St James’s Palace some time mid-afternoon. George was put in a room ‘as near to the king as conveniency might be’. After they had refreshed themselves, they went to St Paul’s Cathedral, where Bishop Laud was to give evensong. Laud was given the news just as the service was about to start.

  ‘I ascended the pulpit, much troubled, and in a very melancholy moment,’ Laud recorded in his diary. An effective preacher, he began to speak no doubt eloquently about the loss of a beloved sovereign, but found he was interrupted by loud sobs. Looking down into the congregation, he could see they were coming from the Duke of Buckingham, and perhaps out of sympathy for his friend and patron, as well as respect, he ‘broke off’ his sermon in the middle.

  Recovering himself, George later went to Charles’s chamber ‘and continued with him alone in very private and serious discourse for more than two hours’ while the rest of the palace, exhausted by the day’s events, slept.

  Those lying awake in the new king’s antechamber, listening to the faint murmurings of the two men through the door, might have marvelled that Charles was ‘so much favouring’ James’s favourite. As George’s biographer, Sir Henry Wotton noted, the state of a favourite is usually ‘at best tenant-at-will, and rarely transmitted’. His honours and status do not usually survive his patron. Jealousies and rivalries that have built up over the years might be expected to be unleashed by the change in regime. Yet George was already as comfortably ensconced in the new king’s bedchamber as he had been in the old. Indeed, some who listened might have wondered who was more in command.

  Charles’s succession was proclaimed that night at Whitehall and Cheapside, but celebrations were muted by a persistent drizzle – weather suited, noted the political writer James Howell, to the ‘cloudy’ mood of the times. The realm, Howell wrote to his father some weeks later, had been left in a precarious state, with the new king ‘engaged in a war with a potent prince, the people by long desuetude unapt for arms, the fleet-royal in quarter repair, himself without a queen, his sister without a country, the crown pitifully laden with debts, and the purse of the state lightly ballasted’. He nevertheless hoped that God will ‘make him emerge, and pull this island out of all the plunges, and preserve us from worser times’.

  Not everyone was pessimistic. Chamberlain found a short elegy that he thought he should share with his friend in Holland, Dudley Carleton, though perhaps more out of hope than conviction. It played on the well-known association of the appearance of comets with historic events:

  Q. Can a king die, and we no Comet see?

  Tell me, Astrologers, how can this be?

  A. Heaven’s Beacons burn but to give Alarm

  Unto a State of some ensuing harm.

  The Angels carrying up our blessed King

  Did still with Musique his sweet Requiem sing.

  No Innovation being to be heard

  Why should Heaven summon men unto their guard?

  His Spirit was redoubled on his Son

  And that was seen at his Assumption.

  ACT IV

  We the Commons

  Poisonous Applications

  His charcoal moving across the paper in graceful arcs and sweeps, Peter Paul Rubens put the finishing touches to his sketch of George, being careful to capture the lively frizz of the duke’s long hair. He paid close attention to his eyebrows, delicately delineating each strand to emphasize their shape, and finished off the moustache with touches of a tawny-red chalk to catch the colouring. He tinted the lips with the same colour, giving them the sort of full, rounded quality that came to be known as ‘Rubenesque’.

  The irises of the eyes, which looked slightly askance at him, were filled in with cross-hatching and a light smudging of the chalk. A circle was drawn around them to give them definition. Rubens picked up a pen, dipped it into an inkwell, and marked a sharp punctuation point in the centre of each eye, bringing a startling intensity to the duke’s gaze.

  The sketch was to form the basis of two new commissions from George for an equestrian portrait that would become the centrepiece of the main reception room in York House, and a ‘plafond’ or ceiling painting, for his bedchamber.

  Rubens had already been given a commission to work on pictures to decorate the new Banqueting House in London, but there had been a dispute over the quality of the work he had produced, which turned out to be by his studio staff rather than his own hand. He had been forced to take it back and offer a replacement. Here was his chance to redeem himself.

  George had seen Rubens’s work in Madrid, including a magnificent portrait of the Duke of Lerma in full armour mounted on a white steed, a military treatment which captured with vivid intensity the subject’s majestic confidence and power. That was the sort of quality the artist was now expected to reproduce for George. The plafond was to represent George’s astonishing social ascent using a classical theme. He would be featured in an almost Christ-like pose being conducted up to a temple in the heavens by Mercury and Minerva, with the figure of Envy pulling at his ankle, and a lion representing Anger threatening to bite his foot. A considerable fee of £500 had been agreed for the works – nearly twice the price the almost bankrupt duke had paid for Titian’s Ecce Homo.

  Rubens was seated with a bandaged foot, a cobbler having wrenched it fitting a boot. As he sketched they talked. He was a diplomat and politician as well as a sought-after artist, a devout Catholic who acted as a confidential advisor and agent of Archduchess Isabella, governor of the Spanish Netherlands and aunt of Philip IV of Spain. A meeting with George provided him with a chance to size up a significant political figure, and one of the archduchess’s main antagonists.

  They talked about the need for peace between religions as well as nations, Rubens later recalling the duke as showing a ‘laudable zeal’ for the ‘interests of Christianity’. Rubens had heard the military threats that had accompanied James’s final weeks, and expressed the hope that, now Charles was securely installed on the throne, his father’s more peaceful approach to diplomacy might be revived, focused on preventing rather than stirring up war, the ‘scourge from Heaven’.

  Yet from behind the easel, the shrewd eye of the artist could see little to reassure him. George’s expression has both a relaxed and threatening quality to it, a suggestion of what Rubens later characterized as ‘caprice and arrogance’. The hint of a smile could be misleading, as an upward curve at the corners of the mouth was exaggerated by the flick of the long whiskers of his moustache. He emanated a vitality that teetered between the tragic and the heroic, the mercurial resolve of a man who had everything and nothing to lose. ‘He seems to me forced by his own daring either to triumph or to die gloriously,’ Rubens would recall.*

  It was May 1625, Paris in the spring. Rubens had been summoned from his Antwerp studio by the formidable French queen mother, Marie de’ Medici, to deliver fifteen of twenty-four paintings she had commissioned for the Palais du Luxembourg. They had been due a few months later, but she had insisted on them being installed early, even though some were unfinished, as she wanted them in place for the marriage by proxy of her daughter, Henrietta Maria, to Charles.

  George was there for the same occasion, and was due to take the bride back to meet her groom in London as soon as the celebrations were over. The betrothal, a small affair involving just members of the royal family and English ambassadors, had taken place in the Louvre on 28 April 1625 (8 May in France, which used Europe’s New Style calendar), a month and a day after James’s death.

  The wedding itself had been on 1 May (11 May), with Charles de Lorraine, the Protestant Duc de Chevreuse and a distant cousin of Charles, acting as the king’s proxy. The princess had dressed in a lavish gown of gold and silver thread decorated with diamonds and fleurs-de-lis, the fabric making the train so heavy i
t took three women to carry it. In the late afternoon, Henrietta Maria had been led from the archbishop’s palace along an arcade raised on pillars and swathed in satin to the great west door of Notre Dame, where Chevreuse, in a black velvet suit with slashed sleeves, was waiting for her on a specially erected stage. The ceremony was conducted in the open, with Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld presiding, intoning a liturgy acceptable to both sides. Onlookers, including the English ambassadors, could admire a demonstration of ecumenical toleration, a Catholic princess, god-daughter of the pope, exchanging vows with the representative of one of Europe’s most powerful Protestant figures. But as soon as the ceremony was over, Henrietta Maria and her entourage disappeared through the doors into the church for a private mass, leaving the proxy groom and English ambassadors to stand outside.

  As celebrations to mark the wedding had begun in Paris, London was in mourning for the death of King James.

  The late king had lain in state in Denmark House for a month, his body ‘seared and wrapped in lead’ inside a sumptuous coffin filled with ‘odours and spices’ to cover the smell of putrefaction, and decorated with purple velvet, ‘the handles, nails, and all other iron-work about it being richly hatched with gold’. A life-size effigy dressed in state robes had been placed on top of the coffin, the painted, wooden head bearing James’s crown laid on a purple velvet cushion. Despite Protestant disapproval of idol worship, the effigy became a holy relic for the thousands of members of the public who poured into the chamber of sorrows to pay their respects.

  George, meanwhile, had suffered another collapse in his mental as well as physical health, suffering from an ‘impostume’ or purulent cyst that ‘broke in his head’ and made him ‘somewhat crazy’. He became so weak, he had to be carried around the streets in a chair. Whether it was grief or remorse, it was intense. The royal secretary Conway saw him become ‘sorrow itself’: if ‘grief and sickness not shorten his days as friends fear it will’, it seemed possible he might commit suicide. Charles tried to console the duke, promising to be an even more gracious master than his father. At one point, he even showed a hint of impatience, suggesting that if George were to show any more anguish, it would be to suggest ‘want of confidence’ in the new king.