The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  While George lingered in his sickbed, rumours that James had been poisoned began to circulate. The Venetian ambassador had heard the whispers of ‘poisonous applications’, and thought the ‘common people’ would want to enquire into them. At least one newsletter reported Dr Craig’s expulsion from the king’s bedside. But the allegations were vague and drowned out by an outpouring of sermons and eulogies. One, a complex work by the celebrated poet Hugh Holland, was addressed to George, calling on him ‘to help us in our weeping’, and wondered how one who bore ‘the name of George the Dragon-killer’ had failed to kill the ‘dragon-fever’ that had taken the king. It was strange that James should have died of a mild ‘tertian’, but in the end Holland blamed the royal doctors, who ‘for the Crowned head’ had ‘no physic’ – at least, none that worked.

  The funeral took place on 7 May. As many as nine thousand people dressed in black, at royal expense, assembled for the event. Even on an occasion calling for a tone of restrained solemnity, the emphasis was on splendour: £28,000 – nearly double the entire budget for Elizabeth I’s funeral and monument – had been spent on cloth alone. Charles had to borrow £60,000 from City merchants to cover the costs.

  The heavy coffin was carried from Denmark House to Westminster Abbey in a magnificent funeral chariot with ‘pillars, rails, valence and fringes’, covered with a large pall of velvet with ‘deep’ fringes of gold and silk.

  The procession was enormous and somewhat disorganized. It was led by 300 ‘poor men in gowns’, who followed servants of the royal household, ‘door-keepers, pot-scourers, turnbroaches’ – spit turners – ‘bell-ringers, watermen’ and so on, followed by tradesmen, ‘arras-makers, gilders, potters, cutlers, fruiterers, ale-brewers’ and ‘provision-makers-extraordinary’, followed by ‘grooms of all offices’, followed by yeomen, followed by officers of London’s lord mayor, followed by the ‘blanch-lion pursuivant-at-armes-extraordinary’, in escalating order of precedence through the ranks of burghers, mayors and ambassadors, knights, barons and earls, culminating with the hearse, followed by the ‘chief mourner’ Charles, supported by the earls of Arundel and Rutland, George’s father-in-law.

  The cortege trundled along the Strand as the crowds watched in respectful silence. It turned down into Whitehall at Charing Cross, passing the Banqueting House and coming to a halt at the great west door of Westminster Abbey. The coffin was taken from the hearse and conveyed by the pall-bearers up the soaring Gothic nave to the altar, where the ‘offer for the defunct’, the receiving of the body, was performed. Charles then retired, and a two-hour sermon was given by Lord Keeper Williams. Entitled ‘Great Britain’s Solomon’, the text was the eleventh chapter of the first book of Kings, which tells the story of Solomon’s funeral.

  George, barely recovered from his sickness, was an uncharacteristically restrained presence, unnoticed by official and ambassadorial accounts of the event, walking alone behind the king and his entourage, leading James’s favourite steed, the usually vivacious duke weighed down by his drizzle-soaked mourning clothes.*

  Later that day, he was visited by his old friend Sir George Goring, who had just arrived from Paris with news about the proxy marriage celebrations underway in France. Henrietta Maria, he told George, had announced that she would come to London the following week.

  George’s response was a violent switch in mood. His illness and melancholy vanished, along with other pressing business, such as planning for Charles’s coronation, dealing with the intricacies of summoning a new Parliament and putting the navy on a war footing. Regret and hesitancy were replaced by impetuosity and brio as he announced he would leave for Paris immediately to collect the queen.

  During James’s final weeks, when the old king was trying to reopen negotiations with the Spanish, George had made preparations for a formal state visit to France. He had already ordered a magnificent wardrobe, including a rich, white satin and velvet suit covered with diamonds and, for more formal occasions, a purple satin jacket embroidered with pearls. He had arranged for an entourage comprising 160 musicians and a 200-strong team of labourers, cooks, footmen, gentlemen, grooms, pages and huntsmen, all clothed in new livery, along with twenty-two watermen, wearing ‘skycollared’ taffeta tunics bearing anchors and George’s arms in gold thread. He had already dispatched to Dover his coach, upholstered in rich velvet and decorated with gold lace.

  The duke now moved so swiftly that even these preparations could not be completed in time and had to be abandoned. Instead, recapturing the spirit of the ‘venturous knights’ who had left for Madrid two years earlier, he left London with just three trusted associates, Goring among them, and a few servants. They sailed from Dover on 12 May, a good wind taking them across the Channel in just four hours. Seized by an extravagant, generous mood, he tipped the master and crew of the ship £70 for the quick crossing, and in a gallant gesture that must have aroused local excitement, gave £30 to the wife and daughter of the postmaster in Boulogne, a belated gift for their help when he and the prince had passed through two years earlier disguised as Tom and John Smith.

  George and his company galloped to Paris, arriving two days later. He stayed (at his own expense – running to as much as £200 a day) at the home of the Duc de Chevreuse, Charles’s proxy at the wedding. The French duke was well placed to introduce George formally to King Louis, and to overcome any awkwardness that might arise from his disguised visit in 1623. Furthermore, Marie de Rohan, the twenty-four-year-old Duchesse de Chevreuse (and mistress of England’s ambassador in France, Henry Rich, the dashing Earl of Holland) was a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria, the French queen.

  George’s formal introduction to Parisian society caused a sensation few Englishmen have matched before or since. Overcome by a manic, almost wild exuberance, he dazzled the French nobility, flourishing in the courtly milieu of gallantry and extravagance later immortalized in Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. Dressed in his diamond-studded white suit, George was ‘the best made man in the world, with the finest looks’, gushed a member of Anne of Austria’s household. The daughter of Anne’s secretary thought he had a ‘great soul’ as well as a beautiful face, and noted how he seemed to embody lofty and noble thoughts, scintillatingly combined with dangerous and shameful desires. He filled the ladies of the court with joy, ‘and something more than joy’, provoking envy among the court gallants, and jealousy among the husbands. The Comte de Brienne reflected the mood, noting sourly how the Duke of Buckingham absolutely shone, dancing with ‘great applause’ while rivals were made to look on. He should restrain himself, thought the count: be more respectful and less vain.

  Vain or not, tout le monde wanted to emulate him. In the capital of European style and sophistication, the English hunting cap the duke wore proved to be such a hit that before long every man at court was to be seen wearing one, the style becoming known as un boukinkan. Everyone seemed to fall in love with him, yearned to be near him, wanted to please him. At one of the many masques laid on for his entertainment, he danced with his usual energy and grace, but in the process lost one of the diamonds from his suit. To his delight, it was restored to him the following morning.

  The one person who did not submit to his charms was Henrietta Maria. During his visit two years before, he and Charles had glimpsed her through the tresses of their periwigs as she rehearsed a ballet with her sister-in-law Anne of Austria. It was like ‘a stolen taste of something that provoketh the appetite’, as George’s friend and biographer Sir Henry Wotton put it salaciously. Now she was fifteen years old, pious, strong-willed and reserved, with looks that were subject to close scrutiny and divided opinion. One of her relatives cruelly described the shock of Henrietta’s failure to match up to her portraits, the reality being ‘short, with long, dry hands, uneven shoulders, and teeth sticking out of her mouth like fangs’. However, even the relative had to concede that she had ‘very beautiful eyes, a regular nose, and a delightful colouring in her face’.

  Despite his ability to spe
ak her language, and a sympathy for Catholic rites and culture, George’s efforts to win her over were rebuffed. She missed a meeting with the duke in favour of greeting a cardinal who was visiting Paris. When George questioned her priorities, she told him she was merely displaying the courtesy due to an emissary of the pope. There had been optimistic efforts to get her to accept a French translation of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer as a gift, but she had shown no interest in engaging with the religion of her new home. Instead, she prepared for her departure in a mood of frosty compliance, choosing a large retinue of familiar ladies-in-waiting, advisors and confessors to insulate her from the foreign, heretical world into which she was about to be immersed.

  George would not allow her haughtiness to dampen his mood. He gorged on the city’s ability to cater for the most refined tastes and basic appetites, thriving on the sense of adventure and lack of responsibility. As well as commissioning his portrait from Rubens, he made regular visits to the Duc de Chevreuse’s barber to have his hair curled and his beard and moustache trimmed, a service he found so pleasing he paid £100 to take one of the barber’s assistants back to England. He also visited the formal gardens of the Tuileries with his gardener John Tradescant, who had arrived some days after him with a cart carrying ‘my lord’s stuff and trunks’, and they bought exotic plants for the ever-expanding Villiers estates back home.

  Reflecting his surging confidence, George also decided to approach the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, about his plan to create a league of nations, Catholic as well as Protestant, capable of taking on the Habsburg empires of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor.

  The cool, sophisticated eminence rouge was a very different character to the bumptious duke – restrained where George was exuberant, scholarly and calculating where George was self-taught and instinctive. Richelieu’s eyes, pulled down by their sloping lids, his arched eyebrows, aquiline nose and pursed lips gave an impression of sharpness and focus as he listened politely to George’s grandiose plan. France now shared with Britain concerns that gave them common cause, George told the cardinal. For example, just as Britain was trying to save the Palatinate in Germany, so France had its own concerns over the port of Genoa in northern Italy, and the Valtelline, a state on the Swiss border that commanded the passes connecting Germany to northern Italy. Both were in Habsburg hands, and being used by Philip of Spain to send troops into Germany in support of the emperor.

  George proposed Britain and France join together with other states across the Continent and its religious divide to form a grand military alliance capable of challenging Habsburg dominance. Denmark, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and several embattled states in Germany were all ready to sign up, he claimed. Great fleets of British ships were in place in Plymouth and Portsmouth to attack the coasts of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. They could land British armies in Flanders which, with the aid of the famous French cavalry, could capture Dunkirk, link up with Count Mansfeld, and recover Artois, the region of Flanders that France had ceded to the Spanish Netherlands. With Habsburg forces facing a battle on two fronts, the Palatinate would be liberated, and France would control the Alpine passes into southern Germany, severely weakening imperial and Spanish efforts to encircle France’s easterly and southerly land borders.

  The restrained Richelieu listened to George’s epic geopolitical vision with polite consideration, but, with Jesuitical precision and clarity, dismissed it. He was prepared to support Mansfeld’s troops in Holland for a further six months, but that was all. He had other issues to contend with. Just before George’s arrival in Paris, a Huguenot leader, the Duc de Soubise, had led a Protestant revolt at La Rochelle, one of France’s strategic Atlantic ports. The rebels were occupying Ré, an island which lay at the opening of the harbour, allowing them to blockade the port. Soubise, Richelieu might have coolly noted, had been welcomed in London when he visited in 1622, and no doubt many of his British co-religionists still supported him and his mutinous forces in a misguided belief that they shared common cause. Religious differences between kings Louis and Charles, in other words, could not be ignored.

  In an effort to distance himself from Soubise and keep the focus on his plans for an anti-Habsburg league, George insisted the situation in La Rochelle was not about religion, but Spanish efforts to stir up trouble. Richelieu dismissed the idea, making it clear that all the evidence pointed to this being another outbreak of the wars of religion that had been tearing at France for over half a century. And while they were still underway, he could not afford to stir up hostilities abroad by having a formal military alliance with the British.

  King James’s taunts about the capricious French might have echoed in George’s mind: ‘where is your glorious match with France, and your royal frank, monsieur?’

  Anne of Austria

  George’s love life was a subject of constant speculation. His wife Kate had to endure endless rumours about his sexual antics, rooms falling silent when she walked in, lewd songs echoing through the London streets. In a letter she wrote to George while he was with Charles in Madrid, she described herself to him as ‘that happy woman to enjoy you from all other women’, as if he needed reminding. She was also aware that she lacked the beauty of so many of her husband’s admirers. Should she die, she once told him, he would surely have ‘a finer and a handsomer, but never a lovinger wife than your poor Kate is’. She had never sought to measure herself by an ability to dance a flirtatious pirouette or cast a coquettish look; she knew that what she brought to their relationship was pedigree and pragmatism.

  In France, however, George’s responsibilities to her, and to their daughter Mal, seemed far away, as a mood of wild, self-destructive recklessness seemed to overcome him. This manifested itself in his efforts to gain access to the French queen, Anne of Austria, continuing the pursuit begun during his visit to Paris with Charles.

  His persistence was provoked by more than Anne’s famous grace and beauty. She was an enemy of Cardinal Richelieu, whom she found interfering, as well as sister of Philip IV of Spain and Charles’s former fiancée, the Infanta Maria. Just as he had been drawn to the wife of Olivares in Spain, George evidently found the same yearnings for sexual revenge and conquest surging in response to the frustrations of his negotiations with Richelieu.

  However, what George did not realize was that he was under surveillance. Richelieu had appointed an agent, Nicolas de Bautru, to follow him during his visit. A report of his findings surfaced in the nineteenth century, revealing the extraordinary combination of determination, ingenuity and burlesque that went into George’s efforts to get close to the queen.

  Madame de Chevreuse, the wife of his host the duke, was Anne’s lady-in-waiting, and agreed to act as his go-between. With her own reputation for infidelity well known, he found he was able to have regular private audiences with the duchess under the pretence of being her lover, whereas in reality she was his confidante. And she demanded a high price for her help. Not only was he already making a large contribution to her household costs, but in return for securing an encounter with Anne, it was said the duchess demanded a diamond necklace and a loan of 2,000 gold coins.

  George’s antics of 1623 had resulted in Anne being banned by the king from having any private contact with men in her apartments. So George needed a less direct route to the queen’s affections. His campaign of seduction, which seemed consciously designed to re-enact the masquerades of courtly romance, began with a midday ‘collation’, staged for the queen at the Duchesse de Chevreuse’s home.

  As would be expected, Anne arrived in her carriage to find herself received by a group of footmen dressed in her hosts’ livery. ‘With inconceivable temerity,’ one of the servants stepped forward to let down the carriage step, usually the function of a royal flunkey. As the queen stepped out of the carriage, the servant laid his hand on the royal ankle. Glancing down to see who would dare take such a liberty with the royal person, she found herself staring into the face of the Duke of Buckin
gham. That afternoon, when she was walking in the gardens of the Chevreuse residence, one of the gardeners approached her with fruits and flowers – again the duke, who this time ‘dared to utter a compliment’ which was seen to make her blush. Later, he appeared as a fortune teller, and by means of this disguise spoke twice to her, the first time nudging her arm, the second time appearing to tell her fortune, which aroused such confusion in the queen that the Duchesse de Chevreuse made signs to George to back off.

  When it came to the evening’s masque ball, attended by Richelieu and the king, George appeared yet again, now disguised as a devil, dancing twice in a ‘ballet of the demons’. At the climax of the ‘gorgeous pageant’, a group of noblemen disguised as emperors, sultans and moguls of exotic lands, from Tartary to Peru, approached the queen to pay homage to her ‘beauty and merit’. This time George was the Grand Mogul, having taken the role from the Duke of Guise, who had been persuaded to surrender his costume and act as the Grand Mogul’s sword-bearer in return for a loan of 3,000 gold coins. Some of the guests noted that the Grand Mogul’s costume, a ‘blaze of jewels’, included diamonds from the English crown, ‘which, through an excess of foolish confidence, the King of Great Britain had allowed his favourite to bring away with him to France’, the spy Bautru noted. Later, just before the foreign potentates were about to unmask themselves before the king, the dukes of Buckingham and Chevreuse had to cram themselves into a nearby closet so they could swap costumes, the Duchesse de Chevreuse acting as lookout.