The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  A few days later, another Parliament opened, and once again Charles’s estrangement from his wife was painfully prominent. She would not accompany him on the official procession to Westminster, but instead watched the ceremony from a room in the palace gate, a ‘convenient stronghold’ on Whitehall.

  George suggested she would get a better view watching from his mother’s apartment elsewhere in the palace complex. Tillières, Henrietta’s chaperon, was suspicious about this, suggesting it was an attempt by the duke to show to Members of Parliament that she was on good terms with the duke and his mother the countess. Initially, the queen agreed, but, according to Tillières’s account, the journey involved walking across a muddy and wet garden, so she declined the duke’s invitation, saying the conditions would spoil her dress and coiffure. This was duly communicated to the king, who took it as another snub. And so, while the mounted escort stood in the rain waiting for the pageantry to begin, and the MPs and Lords sat in the Painted Chamber waiting for the king’s arrival, the quarrel escalated, until Charles declared that he would cancel the entire event if she did not do as he commanded.

  Henrietta relented, and stood alongside Mary, Countess of Buckingham, as the desultory parade passed by. They watched together as George struggled with the bridle on his horse, which had started to come loose. After two attempts at a fix, it fell off, causing the duke to plunge onto the wet cobbles along with the plume of feathers decorating the horse’s head, a humiliation which was ‘by many reputed ominous’.

  As the wet, miserable spring of 1626 merged into a sodden summer, morale in the royal household hit its nadir. In July, Henrietta decided she would go into retreat at Denmark House, the former home of James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, and now the home of the queen’s French entourage. As part of a ‘special season of devotion’, she also decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Tyburn, London’s place of execution, where many Catholics had met their deaths on charges of treason. She reportedly walked through the streets barefoot, her confessor egging her on as he rode alongside in a coach. When she reached the execution site, she knelt at the foot of the gallows, and prayed for Henry Garnett, a Jesuit hanged, drawn and quartered for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot.

  Such antics had left Charles despairing, and increasingly determined to be rid of the interfering French. He wrote to George, addressing him using James’s pet name ‘Steenie’, that ‘necessity urges me to vent myself to you in this particular, for grief is eased being told to a friend’. He commanded George to ‘advertise to my mother-in-law’, Marie de’ Medici, ‘that I must remove all those instruments that are causes of unkindness between her daughter and me, few or none of the servants being free of this fault in one kind or other’. An ambassador extraordinary was duly dispatched to Paris, arousing considerable curiosity.

  A few weeks later the king and queen were in London. Though pockets of the plague persisted across the capital, they had come for the betrothal of George’s three-year-old daughter Mary, James’s beloved ‘grandchild’ Mal, to the seven-year-old Charles Herbert. Herbert’s uncle was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, George’s one-time sponsor and more recent rival. It was a match designed to entwine the Villiers line with that of an ancient branch of the Anglo-Welsh nobility, to be consummated once Mary had reached maturity.

  On the afternoon of 31 July, Charles appeared in the queen’s apartment. According to one account, he found her with ‘some Frenchmen her servants unreverently dancing and cavorting in her presence’; according to another she was suffering from toothache. Either way, he took her by the hand and led her to his lodgings, where he ordered all his servants to leave, and locked the door. In what was turning out to be a coordinated manoeuvre, one of the king’s secretaries together with the yeomen of the guard started to round up Henrietta’s entourage, the women howling and lamenting ‘as if they had been going’ to their ‘execution’.

  As this was going on, Charles revealed to Henrietta that he was sending all her servants and companions back to France. Her distress was alarming. She burst into tears and pleaded with Charles to relent in a manner that would have ‘moved stones to pity’. She became angry, screaming at him ‘loud enough to split rocks’. She begged that he at least let her say goodbye to them, but he refused. Then she ran at the window, and beat her fists against the panes of glass until they smashed and her hands bled.

  It was to no avail. Charles sent a letter to ‘Steenie’ commanding the duke to ‘send all the French away tomorrow’ by any means necessary, driving them off ‘like so many wild beasts’ if required, ‘and so the devil go with them’.

  All Goes Backward

  As the bitter winter of 1625 set in, Sir John Eliot, Vice Admiral of Devon, stood on the cliffs overlooking Plymouth Sound, watching in despair as the fleet sent a few weeks earlier to attack Cádiz straggled back into port.

  The horror of the disaster had first appeared on the horizon on 9 December. Ghostly hulks started to drift into harbour, bodies being tipped over the gunwales as they approached. A hundred or so ragged, diseased soldiers appeared in the town, the mayor forced to buy them clothing, accommodation and firewood out of his own pocket, ‘without which they would have perished’.

  Two weeks later, Eliot wrote to the king’s secretary. Ships were still arriving, and the vice admiral had been touring the taverns and billets, listening to the fractured and confused accounts of what had happened. One Captain Bolles, ‘who has died since’, told of the ‘scarcity and corruption of the provisions’, producing appalling mortality among the troops. ‘Yesterday seven fell down in the streets,’ Eliot wrote. ‘The rest are weak, and unless there be a present supply of clothes there is little hope to recover them.’

  The situation would not improve. By Christmas, thirty-one ships had made their way back to Plymouth, out of ninety that had set sail, the remainder either lost at sea, or forced to shelter in ports as far away as Ireland. A picture emerged of a farcical mission poorly planned and badly executed, resulting in a humiliating withdrawal from Cádiz before serious contact with the enemy had even begun.

  A sense of gloom descended upon the country. John Chamberlain struggled to capture the mood in one of his letters. ‘All goes backward,’ he lamented, ‘both in our wealth, valour, honour, and reputation.’ It was clear that ‘God blesses nothing we take in hand’, whereas in Queen Elizabeth’s time ‘all things did flourish’. There were those that complained of matters being ‘ill managed’, he added, who ‘glance and aim at somebody for misleading and carrying his rider awry’. He dared not name him, even in a personal letter, but everybody knew that ‘somebody’ to be George Villiers. Chamberlain’s image was of the favourite as a bucking and bolting horse who was carrying his king, as well as the kingdom, to a terrible fall. This was a perception now shared by John Eliot.

  The vice admiral had long been a friend and supporter of George. According to at least one source, they first met on the Continent in 1609, when George was touring Europe with his older brother. In 1618, George had nominated him for a knighthood and made him acting Vice Admiral of Devon. By the early 1620s, Eliot was considered by both court and Parliament as ‘powerful with the Duke’ as well as ‘affectionate to the public’, a useful combination.

  George and Sir John were of a similar age and background, both coming from the ranks of England’s minor gentry. However, in temperament, they could not have been more different. While George’s ambitions were boundless, Eliot’s were more provincial. He served as a local magistrate and the MP for his Cornish birthplace, St Germans near Plymouth, where he continued to live. As vice admiral, his primary duties were the local administration of the navy, pressing men from the district for military service, boarding ships at Plymouth and Falmouth to check their goods, surveying wrecks, and organizing vessels to police the Atlantic approaches to the Channel, which were then prone to attacks by pirates.

  Where George admired audaciousness and impulsiveness, Eliot, despite a sometimes explosive temper, saw himself
as cautious and conservative. George made it his maxim to find ‘new ways’ to explore ‘old courses’. Eliot was suspicious of novelty, and looked to precedents from the past rather than opportunities in the future to justify his political convictions. This made him a staunch champion of the supremacy of the Crown in national affairs, a defender of the royal prerogative as well as parliamentary privilege. ‘No man may dispute against it,’ he argued in Parliament, ‘it being an inseparable adjunct to regality.’

  As a public figure, he was seen as pompous, naive and a bit of a windbag. But he was respected as a man of conscience and conviction who could be trusted. He also had some awareness of his flaws and battled to correct them. As a teenager, he had attacked a neighbour who had criticized him to his father, inflicting a minor wound with his sword. He immediately showed such remorse that his victim forgave him, and became a close and lifelong friend.

  Eliot had been loyal to George, too, happily accepting the favourite as his overlord and supporting his policies in Parliament. Once, while serving a spell in prison for an argument over the ownership of a pirate’s bounty, he had even refused an offer of early release, because he would answer only to George, who at the time was in Madrid with Charles.

  When he was released following George’s return in 1623, he had vigorously supported the favourite’s project for an anti-Habsburg war, serving on several parliamentary committees involved in putting the country on a war footing, and championing a sharp military response to Spanish duplicity, regardless of the financial consequences. ‘A sudden pain,’ he declared, was better ‘than a continued grief’.

  But the sight of the shattered fleet returning to port, and the horrific aftermath of billeting hundreds of diseased and starving soldiers, produced in Sir John a profound sense of betrayal. Despite voting for George’s war and perhaps having some culpability for its failure, the conviction grew that a terrible mistake had been made, and that the favourite must be held responsible for it.

  The Knot Draws Near

  In London, desperate appeals for money were coming in on a daily basis. The treasury could not even afford to pay the wages of the sick and miserable seamen and soldiers gathered in Plymouth, which meant they could not be discharged, forcing local ratepayers to pay for their upkeep. Unrest was spreading, and unless it could be staunched, a terrible reckoning was expected.

  Henrietta Maria’s dowry of £120,000, though much smaller than had been expected from the Spanish match, had gone some way to meeting military costs, but it was now all spent, and George, with Charles’s agreement, was reduced to trying to pawn the English Crown Jewels in the Hague in his efforts to stave off imminent bankruptcy. The jewels had been valued at £300,000, but the offers he received were so paltry he had been forced to bring them back home and negotiate a more modest loan of £100,000 from London merchants.

  The shortfall made a recall of Parliament inevitable, and writs were issued for fresh elections. In an effort to ensure a more cooperative session, Charles and George revived the feudal custom of ‘pricking’ potential troublemakers – appointing them as sheriffs, who by tradition were confined to their counties while in office and so prevented from attending Parliament in Westminster. Several prominent critics were successfully removed this way, but such heavy-handed electoral interference only succeeded in stirring up resistance among those who were allowed to stand, among them Sir John Eliot.

  Opposition was poorly organized, however. Owen Wynn, a legal clerk, noted that the ‘many great and active spirits’ who had been agitating against George were in need of ‘a good director’. So, Sir John, despite a perception that he was still loyal to George, appears to have decided to adopt the role.

  On 15 January 1626, as the official opening of the new Parliament approached, Eliot drew up a list of detailed ‘instructions to his agent’ in London. The agent’s identity is unknown, but it was someone well enough connected to have access to the court, the chamber of the Privy Council and the Royal Exchange, London’s meeting place for merchants and bankers. He was also in a position to make discreet enquiries of such figures as Philip Burlamachi, a powerful merchant who was central to the government’s efforts to finance ongoing military costs. This agent was expected to send daily reports back to Eliot in Cornwall, addressing them to one ‘Ab. Jennens’.

  Meanwhile, and presumably with the help of this agent’s reports, Eliot was involved in drawing up a planning document entitled ‘Perticular misdemeanours of the Duke’ for the forthcoming Parliament. It began by declaring that George was ‘vicious ergo not fit to be so near a king’, and set out charges that might be brought against him.

  The plan was to adopt the same process that had led to the downfall of George’s mentor, Francis Bacon. The House of Commons would effectively act as the prosecutors for an impeachment case heard by the House of Lords. However, George was a far more formidable figure than even the former Lord Chancellor. He not only had the support of a huge network of dependents but the backing of an apparently submissive king. Bringing down such a figure called for testimony and evidence of such compelling credibility that not even Charles could ignore it.

  Several lines of attack were explored in the document: George’s ‘juggling’ in matters of religion, his attack on prominent government figures (including his ‘horrible oppression’ of Francis Bacon), rumours of his sexual antics with various women of court, his threatening behaviour towards Henrietta Maria, as alleged by the French ambassador.

  The document also alluded to George’s ‘foul and unchristian-like carriage’ towards King James during his final hours.

  Garbled and confused rumours linking George to poisoning had been circulating since the previous year. In November 1625, a north-country cattle drover called Christopher Hogg, returning from a long journey to a fair in Norfolk, had run into a ‘man clothed in black seeming to be a minister’. The man asked ‘what news there was in the south’, and Hogg told him that the Duke of Buckingham, along with his father-in-law, the Earl of Rutland, had been committed to the Tower of London for attempting to poison Charles.

  Hogg’s interrogator turned out to be a Northumberland clerk named Martin Danby, who reported what he had heard to a local magistrate. The magistrate had the unfortunate drover arrested and questioned. Protesting that he was only a ‘poor labourer’ who had been hired ‘to drive and look to the cattle he had in charge’, Hogg eventually confirmed what he had told Danby, and a report was sent to both George and Rutland. George did not respond, but on 26 December, the furious earl wrote from Belvoir Castle to the royal secretary, demanding that the king be made aware of the ‘aspersions’ being cast against him and his son-in-law, protesting that if he had ever had a ‘thought to hurt his majesty, sweet Jesus will damn him perpetually’.

  Eliot’s contacts and agent had managed to dig up some of these stories. They had also discovered, presumably from a source within the court, that George had administered a ‘posset and plaster’ to James when he was ‘almost recovered’ from his tertian ague, with the result that the king ‘never looked cheerful but said he was killed’. The protests and expulsion of Dr Craig and Henry Gibb, the royal groom, were also mentioned.

  Yet despite an abundance of suspicions, there was little evidence to back them up, let alone witnesses prepared to testify in public.

  Charles opened Parliament on 6 February 1626, generously embracing the right of members to review ‘the great, weighty, and difficult affairs of the Kingdom’, but reminding them of his resolve ‘to confine this meeting to a short time’. In other words, if they did not produce a tax bill promptly, they could expect to be smartly dismissed.

  The initial response was muted, the following days spent in dealing with procedural matters. Then, on 10 February, following a series of motions relating to charitable gifts, elections and committees, John Eliot got to his feet.

  Shattering the administrative mood, he recalled the failures and horrors of their last Parliament, and what the current one might do to correct
them. He began by reminding the honourable members that they had unfinished business. When they had last met, in the Divinity School at Oxford with plague raging outside, they had passed two subsidy bills, yet before they had even begun to discuss other matters, they had been dismissed. ‘The business it is we should come for, the country’s business, the public care, the common good, the general affairs of king and kingdom: not the mere satisfaction of any private ends or hopes’ – that business had, Eliot claimed, ‘overslipped us’.

  ‘I am for supply,’ he told his fellow MPs, but not just the supply of money to the royal coffers. There were other deficits to consider, ‘supply in government, supply in justice, supply in reformation, supply in aid of our long-neglected grievances’. And these were the supplies that the Commons must attend to first.

  ‘Methinks I hear some courtier saying to me: you go now too far,’ Sir John speculated. But he had barely begun. He went on to complain about how the money the last Parliament had given to the king had not been properly accounted for, how ‘so much wrong’ had been done to his majesty which had been ‘unpunished’, how the military and financial losses that the country had sustained had been casually disregarded, ‘losses abroad, losses at home, losses to our friends, losses to ourselves!’

  Reaching the highest pitch of indignation, even despair, he implored the Speaker, as representative of his fellow MPs, to ‘cast your eyes about’ and behold the terrible state the country is in. ‘Our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished; not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but, as the strongest predictions had discerned and made it apparent beforehand, by those we trust.

  ‘I could lose myself in this complaint,’ Eliot confessed, ‘the miseries, the calamities’ he had witnessed having ‘so strong an apprehension on me’. As a result, he believed the House should make ‘no mention, no overtures, nor motion’ to any other matter before these grievances had been addressed.