The King's Assassin

by Benjamin Woolley

  Not everyone was prepared to disapprove of the use of the duke’s medicine. Chief among George’s supporters was William Harvey. Harvey has been hailed the Isaac Newton of medical science, his discovery of the circulation of the blood revolutionizing medicine’s view of how the body works. He would also go on to become a trusted personal doctor of Charles. At the time of James’s death, he was one of James’s ‘sworn physicians’, and in attendance through most of the king’s final illness.

  Harvey was a cold fish, a dedicated anatomist and a royalist. Charles’s patronage was central to his scientific ambitions – he received deer foetuses from the royal parks for his dissections – and he responded to the poisoning accusations with a kind of languid confidence that suggested he knew the charges against George would never stick. He had been at the king’s bedside during the crucial final days, and witnessed most of the main events, including the administering of the plaster and potion. When asked of his medical views concerning the duke’s intervention, he accepted that he was unable to give one as the ingredients were ‘not known’. Nevertheless, he ‘gave way to it, thinking it could do no harm’. He thought it ‘not against his opinion nor consultation’ since the king ‘desired it’. Harvey saw no reason to suspect the duke’s claim that it was a medicine he had himself used in the past. James ‘took diverse things’, the doctor pointed out.

  Archibald Hay, James’s surgeon and now in Charles’s service, backed up the tenor of Harvey’s testimony, though with less assurance. He accepted he had applied the plaster, but was vague as to whether he had taken it off. ‘No physician disliked it,’ he insisted, though he later admitted some were ‘not content’. As to its ingredients, Hay claimed that it had first been ‘tasted’ by John Baker, one of the duke’s servants. He thought that Baker, a barber, had mixed the ‘posset’ or potion in the duke’s chamber. None of the medics tasted it before it was given to the king, as far as he knew, but he saw the king ‘taste of it’. He obviously found it unpleasant, as Hay had then mixed it with gillyflower, a clove-scented plant, to make it more palatable.

  As for the ingredients, Hay confirmed what some of the other doctors had presumed, that there was a compound in a ‘box’ that was the basis of both the plaster and the potion. Hay guessed that it was probably a ‘treacle or mithridate’, one of the highly elaborate concoctions used by doctors to treat various illnesses, including fevers. Two of Charles’s physicians-in-ordinary agreed, David Beton saying that ‘the smell of it was like some treacle composition’, while Matthew Lister identified its smell as similar to ‘London Treacle’, a local and widely used remedy. However, other doctors were not so sure: Alexander Ramsey and Henry Atkins, the two Scottish doctors who were first to give evidence, denied that they could identify it.

  Despite the differences, they all confirmed Eglisham’s claim that, soon after James’s death, they had been told to endorse a recipe for the medicine the duke and his mother had used, which showed it to be made up of harmless ingredients. They also identified John Moore, alongside Sir William Paddy, as the doctor who had presented it to them.

  Moore’s testimony to the committee was a confusing story about writing a letter to the ‘maker’ of the medicine asking for its ingredients, and receiving a reply identifying it as London Treacle with ‘juice of citrons’. Following the complaints from the other physicians concerning its use, a ‘note was made at Sir William Paddy’s instance that it was not hurtful’ – presumably mentioning the recipe that the doctors endorsed. But Moore could supply no evidence that either the contents of the letter or Sir William Paddy’s ‘note’ identified the potion’s ingredients.

  The generally consistent picture that was emerging took a sinister and strange turn on the final day of submissions. It began with a report from committee member Christopher Wandesford, who had been given permission to leave the House to interview witnesses. He had talked to James’s other surgeon, Gilbert Primrose, who confirmed that James had felt ‘much worse’ after the application of the plaster. Furthermore, ‘a little before the king died’ James had produced ‘a great deal of black matter’ with a ‘very noisome’ stench. It had emerged ‘without purging’ – in other words, spontaneously.

  The committee then interviewed Robert Ramsey, a mysterious figure with an even more mysterious story. Ramsey reported several exchanges the previous month with an Irishman called Piers Butler, some sort of magician claiming to have ‘strange faculties’. Butler said he had connections with the duke, and had discovered earlier that month that one Rennish – perhaps John Remington, the Doctor of Dunmow – had set to work ‘to distill the spirit of toads’, an ingredient associated with witchcraft:

  Round about the cauldron go;

  In the poison’d entrails throw.

  Toad, that under cold stone

  Days and nights has thirty-one

  Swelter’d venom sleeping got,

  Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

  (Macbeth, Act IV, sc. i)

  Bemused by Ramsey’s testimony, the committee turned without further ado to its final witness, John Craig, the Scottish doctor who had been excluded from court by George for his protests at James’s treatment.

  Exile had given Craig the leisure to reconsider his highly vulnerable position. At first he seemed to make light of what had happened, confirming that the unauthorized plaster had been used on the king, but claimed that ‘it was quickly removed’, and that the attending physicians ‘saw no effect of any hurt done by it’. However, under further examination, he did admit that when it was applied a second time, the king ‘did dislike the laying on of the plasters and it did heat him more’, in other words, produce feverish symptoms.

  He confirmed that he was the doctor Eglisham had mentioned being excluded from court, but claimed he never said the words attributed to him, specifically that the medicine given to James by George ‘was as bad as poison’.

  Much of this was already familiar to the committee members, but Craig then let slip a crucial and shocking new detail: he revealed that, at the height of the crisis, he and another (unnamed) doctor had gone to Charles, ‘to desire him that he would advise the Lord Duke to remit all to the care of the physicians’.

  Until this moment, no one had even considered the whereabouts of the heir, still less speculated what he knew of George’s antics. Indeed, the official record and the committee’s witnesses had been altogether silent about Charles’s involvement in the final hours of his father’s life.

  Perhaps it had not been surprising to discover that the king was close to his father’s sickroom. But it had occurred to no one that he had known, even been consulted about the unfolding medical drama. Deadly questions seared the lips: Why had he failed to intervene? Why had he not insisted that his father’s treatment be left to the physicians? Why had he ignored the doctors’ pleas that medical protocol be followed – a protocol that had been developed in response to the mysterious death of his own brother, Prince Henry? What answer could there be to such questions that did not beg even more alarming ones? Had he turned a blind eye? Could it even be that he had conspired with George?

  What about the testimony of all the other doctors? How come none of them had mentioned this? What, for example, about William Harvey, who had witnessed the plaster being applied? He must have known of Craig’s attempt to appeal to Charles. Yet he had remained silent on the matter. Those on the committee with links to Harvey’s medical rivals may have been aware of how close he now was to Charles – a view that would be confirmed just a few weeks after he appeared before the committee, when he received a gift from the king of £100 for his ‘pains and attendance about the person of his Majesty’s late dear father, of happy memory, in time of his sickness’. Just a few months after that, he would also receive the curious and potentially incriminating award of a royal pardon, granting him immunity for past crimes.

  Such thoughts had to be expunged, however – or at least suppressed. Any hint that the king was going to be brought into the af
fair risked Parliament’s instant dismissal, charges of treason and a fresh harvest from Tyburn’s tree.

  And yet, the thoughts must have been insistent – the bond between Charles and the duke following their return from Madrid, which they had seen for themselves when George had stood at the prince’s shoulder and told them of the ‘Spanish Labyrinth’. Then there was the rupture between James and George in the following months, and George’s seamless transition from being favourite of the father to becoming favourite of the son. There was Charles’s obvious and growing dependency on George; his youth, his impressionability, his reluctance to speak for himself – the multiplicity of indications that he was yet another to be ensnared in George’s ‘magic thraldom’.

  The day following Craig’s testimony, John Glanville, the committee chair, revealed to the whole House the ‘substance of proof’ or findings of their investigation. The conclusion was coy but nevertheless incendiary: that the plaster and potion had been ‘applied at prohibited times’, when the king was vulnerable to new fits if the wrong kind of medicine was used. They asserted that this had been ‘done by the direction of the duke’, that the treatment had been applied twice, that it had made the king’s condition worse and that on the third attempt, was refused by James. Furthermore, as Eglisham had claimed, doctors Paddy and Moore had presented the other physicians with a ‘bill’ claiming that it listed the ingredients of the duke’s medicine, which they had endorsed even though none of them were in a position to confirm that it was the true recipe.

  ‘The opinion of the committee,’ Glanville concluded, was that these allegations should be ‘annexed to the duke’s charge’ as a ‘transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’.

  A Silly Piece of Malice

  The doctors’ testimony touched a nerve. Charles ordered that Alexander Ramsey, the first physician to appear before the committee, be put under house arrest. At the same time, an order was issued for the apprehension of Piers Butler, the Irish mountebank who had linked George with the mixing of poisonous potions. Butler appears to have fled for the coast, presumably with the intention of escaping to the Continent or Ireland, and pursuivants were sent to Kent, Bristol and Chester to find him.

  Little is known about Butler. He claimed to be related to the earls of Ossory and Ormond, and a man named Piers Butler with those connections had been in contact with George on several occasions the previous year, seeking a knighthood from the king. He may have been the ‘devil’ George had mentioned hiring for a princely sum in a letter written to King James around 1624. George had told James of this devil’s ability to mix an antidote that would ‘preserve you from all sickness ever hereafter’. It was made out of a ‘towrd’, which could be a corruption of toad, as mentioned in the testimony Robert Ramsey gave to the Committee of Twelve. But as well as being one of George’s clients, Butler also seemed to be one of his enemies. He had been seen in a cellar tavern near Denmark House bragging that he had a bullet with which ‘he should have killed the Duke of Buckingham’.

  Whatever his relationship to George, he was clearly identified as a liability at a vulnerable time for the duke, so considerable effort and expense was made to apprehend him. It seems he escaped, leaving behind unsettling corroboration of an association voiced by Eglisham that George was ‘infamous for his frequent consultations with the ringleaders of witches’.

  Attempts were also underway to track down the source of Eglisham’s tract. Charles’s security apparatus was bereft of any secret intelligence or leads, so had to rely on a clue contained in the book itself. Eglisham had mentioned ‘a paper found in King Street’, the thoroughfare connecting the palaces of Westminster and Whitehall, that contained a list of George’s enemies. The paper, he revealed, had been discovered by Anne Lyon, who came from a noble Scottish family with connections to the Marquis of Hamilton. She had handed the paper over to the marquis, who found not only his own name on the list, but that of Eglisham.

  Charles instructed Henry Wotton, an old friend of George’s and now provost of Eton College, to investigate this claim. Wotton wrote a few days later to George to announce his findings, enclosing a copy of his report. ‘I have seen many defamatory and libellous things of this nature, abroad and at home, though for the most part always without truth, yet oftentimes contrived with some credibility,’ he explained in the covering letter. ‘But this appeareth in the whole contexture utterly void of both.’ He had found Anne Lyon living in Windsor with a sister and ‘a gentlewoman of her attendance’. Arriving with a copy of Eglisham’s tract, and worried that the ‘somewhat harsh and umbrageous’ nature of his business might make her reluctant to talk, he ‘laboured to take from her all manner of shadow touching herself’. However, he had no need for concern, because when he showed Anne the passage in The Forerunner mentioning her, she was so furious at being ‘traduced for a witness of this foul defamation’ that she was happy to tell him everything she knew.

  As with so many details in Eglisham’s pamphlet, this one turned out to be more or less accurate. The paper had been found by a ‘carman’ called Smith, who had given it to the footman of Anne’s mother, who had brought it to Anne. She described it as ‘half a sheet of paper laid double by the length, and in it was written in a scribbled hand the names of a number (above a dozen) of the Privy Council’. There was no mention of poison, though she had seen signs of some additional words ‘which were scraped out’.

  The Marquis of Hamilton was one of those listed, and written next to his name was the curious entry ‘Dr. Eglisham to embalm him’. As the marquis had been away at that time, Anne Lyon had initially shown it to Alexander Heatley, secretary to Ludovick Stuart, the Duke of Lennox. Heatley did not think it was necessary to trouble his lordship with the matter as he thought it was probably a list of names drawn up by a lawyer, presenting a case to one of the government’s courts or councils. Anne then showed it to a servant of the marquis, who gave it to Hamilton, who simply put it in his pocket. ‘Whereby may appear to any reasonable creature,’ Wotton concluded, ‘what a silly piece of malice this was.’

  Dissolution

  ‘The arraignment of the Duke of Buckingham occupies the exclusive attention of the House of Commons,’ Amerigo Salvetti wrote on 28 April 1626, in his weekly report to his Florentine masters. ‘The excitement grows daily as new and important complaints are brought forward. The Members sit twice a day to expedite the business in hand.’

  On 1 May, the MPs’ high-stakes deliberations were interrupted by the arrival of a thirteen-year-old boy at the entrance to the chamber. It was George Digby, the son and heir of John Digby, Earl of Bristol, with a petition on behalf of his father.

  Still under house arrest, ex-Spanish ambassador Digby was now demanding that either he be released and allowed to take his place in the House of Lords or tried for his supposed offences. The young Digby’s petition claimed that the ‘honour and good name’ of his father had been ‘much wronged by many sinister aspersions cast upon him by the Duke of Buckingham’, and he pleaded with the MPs in their ‘high wisdom’ to give his father ‘satisfaction’.

  The same day, the vilified duke was just down the corridor, in the House of Lords. With an air of neutral interest, he watched as John Digby knelt at the bar of the Lords’ chamber. The government’s Attorney General began to read out the charges against him when Digby got to his feet and turned to George. ‘I accuse that man the Duke of Buckingham of high treason,’ he cried, ‘and will prove it.’

  In the hush that followed, nervous eyes turned on George, who was sitting just a few feet away. The recent tide of criticism had taken a toll on him. The Venetian ambassador had an audience with him in mid-May and noticed a ‘pallor of his face’ that betrayed ‘deep uneasiness at the embarrassments in which he finds himself’. While George still spoke of his affairs with ‘temperate vigour’, the ambassador could see his mind was ‘tossed by a thousand agitations’, and he was nervous whether Charles would be able to uphold his authority ‘in order to counteract th
e activities of the parliamentarians’.

  Now faced by his principle accuser, in the House of Lords, George managed to maintain an appearance of unruffled calmness, allowing Digby to speak, and pledging not to interrupt him, because ‘he has been his friend’.

  A furious denunciation followed, beginning with the former ambassador’s account of Charles and George’s unexpected arrival at the House of the Seven Chimneys. It was the duke who had lured Charles there, Digby claimed, having promised the Spanish that the heir could be converted to Catholicism, ‘the which conversion he endeavoured to procure by all means possible’. It was the duke who had worked his occult ‘power’ on the young Spanish king Philip ‘for the procuring of favours and offices, which he bestowed upon base and unworthy persons, for the recompense and hire of his lust’. And it was the duke’s behaviour that had in the end ‘so incensed the king of Spain and his ministers, as they would admit of no reconciliation nor further dealing with him’.

  Then came the bombshell, timed to cause George as much damage as possible. A few days before the start of James’s final, fatal illness, the king had asked Digby to return to London so he could ‘hear him against the said duke’ concerning the collapse of the Spanish match negotiations. But George had learned of the summons, ‘and not long after, his blessed majesty sickened and died’.

  The final accusation brought George to his feet. How dare Digby ‘touch upon the late king’s death’, the duke shouted, and threatened that if he did not ‘prove it, then he may have lex talionis’ – the law of retaliation, an eye for an eye.