The courtiers’ star, the kingdom’s eye,
A man to draw an Angel by.
Fear’s despiser, Villiers’ glory,
The Great man’s volume, all time’s story.
Epilogue
I first encountered the accusation that George Villiers had a hand in King James’s death while researching The Herbalist, a book about the seventeenth-century apothecary Nicholas Culpeper. Part of that story concerned the king’s physician, Dr William Harvey, and I was intrigued by his relaxed attitude to the treatment of his patient in his final hours, particularly when I discovered that, just after James’s death, Charles had awarded Harvey both a pension and a general pardon.
Historians of the period have generally adopted Harvey’s attitude, dismissing the accusations of the Commons’ Committee of Twelve as politically driven. Nevertheless, I decided to send a dossier of evidence to John Henry, Professor of Accident and Emergency Medicine at Imperial College, London. Henry was a world-renowned toxicologist who helped solve several notorious poisonings, including that of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, murdered using radioactive polonium-210 in 2006. I received no response and thought no more of it.
Six months later, and a month or so after The Herbalist was published, the phone rang. ‘He was probably poisoned,’ Professor Henry announced, with barely any preamble. And he knew the likely toxin. I asked him how sure he was. Not beyond all reasonable doubt, he replied, but certainly on the balance of probabilities.
A curious figure, John Henry was the son of an Irish GP based in London. He followed his father into the medical profession, and while studying at King’s College in London, noticed a strange rash on his body. He asked one of his tutors about it, and was assured there was nothing to worry about. He decided to run his own tests, which revealed that he had a rare condition called Henoch-Schönlein purpura. As well as producing a rash, the disease attacks other parts of the body, including the kidneys. In 1968, while on a trip through Italy, he developed a throat infection, and was treated with a powerful antibiotic. Two years later, it was discovered that the treatment had destroyed one of his weakened kidneys. Told he did not have long to live, he was forced to give up medicine as a profession and undergo dialysis twice a week.
A kidney transplant in 1976 allowed Henry to restart his medical career, and his attentions turned to clinical pharmacology. As experience had shown him, the well-known medical adage ‘the dosage makes the poison’ applies also to the circumstance. A compound that acts as a medicine at one time can be toxic in another. An antibiotic that can save the life of one patient can threaten the life of another.
Henry rose to become a consultant in accident and emergency medicine, and was a founder of the pioneering poisons unit at Guy’s Hospital. But the effects of his condition forced his retirement in 2004, the year I contacted him about King James. In April 2007, his transplanted kidney failed, forcing its removal; he died of internal bleeding weeks later.
Direct but affable in manner, Professor Henry was rigorously forensic when it came to his work, celebrated for his flashes of diagnostic brilliance. When a scaffolder was admitted to hospital with a broken leg, Henry recognized from his reddened conjunctivas (the lining of the eyelids) that the cause of his accident was probably related to cannabis use. Similarly, the green tinge of another patient’s urine sample revealed that her drink had probably been spiked with a powerful sedative. Henry came to international attention for suggesting the facial lesions suffered by the Ukrainian politician Viktor Yushchenko were the result of consuming food laced with dioxin, and for helping to identify the poison given to Alexander Litvinenko as radioactive polonium-210.
Professor Henry was also eager to find medical explanations for historical events. For example, after I contacted him about King James, he suggested an investigation into the Salem witch trials. He hypothesized that the women accused of demonic possession shared a hereditary disease common in the close-knit communities of East Anglia, from where many of the New England colonists originally came.
Henry was not a conventional rationalist in the mould of a Sherlock Holmes, however. In 1959 he became a ‘numerary celibate member’ of Opus Dei, the Catholic order founded in 1928 and made notorious by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. He met the movement’s founder, St Josemaría Escrivá, in 1972 while he was undergoing dialysis, and attributed the success of the subsequent kidney transplant not just to medical science but to the saint’s intercession.
An Irish Catholic living in London in the latter decades of the twentieth century would have found it hard to ignore the reverberations of the religious and political eruptions that shaped the reign of James and Charles Stuart four centuries before. The Troubles still raged in Northern Ireland and London was a regular target for IRA bombs – a legacy of colonial policies shaped by the Stuart regime. Every Bonfire Night, the sight of children with a ragged sack fashioned into a roughly human shape, asking for a ‘penny for the Guy’, provided a reminder of Guy Fawkes’s ‘powder plot’ to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.
So, was the death of King James just nature taking its course, or a product of the political forces shaping those poisonous times? Was it opus Dei, or opus hominis?
At one level, it seems more than likely that George Villiers, assisted by his mother, was James’s killer if not his murderer. His insistence on interfering with the king’s treatment at a vital point in the patient’s recovery from a familiar disease seems to have helped the king into his grave, whether intentionally or not.
However, on the basis of the medical evidence, Professor Henry was clear it was probably murder, and he identified aconite as the likely poison, derived from a genus of plant known as wolfsbane or monkshood. Recent medical research conducted in Asia (where derivatives of aconite are used in a variety of treatments) has shown the compound’s deadly action and effects. It was also well known in the seventeenth century, herbals such as Culpeper’s containing numerous antidotes to treat accidental poisoning.
Aconite certainly seems to explain the mysterious symptoms James suffered in his final hours, and poison was very much a weapon of the age, coursing through the veins of a corrupt body politic. And, thanks to James’s timely illness and the duke’s intimate access to the royal person, George had both the opportunity and means to use it. But what of motive? Why would he have murdered the man who had made him?
Eglisham’s suggestion was that Buckingham wanted to unite the Villiers line with the Hamiltons so that his future grandchildren would be in line to inherit the throne, a theory easy to dismiss as overwrought. However, it does not appear to be the motive that was in the minds of the Committee of Twelve MPs when they were interrogating the doctors and formulating their impeachment charges.
They had a far simpler explanation as to why George had ‘hastened’ the king’s death. He was acting with Charles, the two of them conspiring to clear the way to realizing the more majestic, stately conception of monarchy they had dreamed up during and following their adventure to Madrid – a conception that James had obstructed, and Charles would so catastrophically realize.
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in his pearl jacket, by Michiel J. van Miereveld, 1625.
Villiers family portrait, British School, c.1628. [left to right] Susan, George’s sister; Kate, George’s wife; Mary or ‘Mal’, George and Kate’s eldest child; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in the same pearl-studded jacket he wore posing for Miereveld; his son and heir George, propped up on a cushion probably by Mary, Susan’s daughter; John, George’s mad older brother; Mary, Countess of Buckingham, George’s mother; Christopher or ‘Kit’, George’s feckless younger brother.
Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. James’s favourite and George’s rival.
Esmé Stuart, James’s cousin and first favourite.
James VI of Scotland, I of England, by Paul van Somer, c.1620, soon after his relationship with George had begun to flourish.
Anne of Denmark, dressed in huntin
g gear. James’s formidable and independent wife and George’s early patroness, by Paul van Somer, 1616.
Francis Bacon, George’s brilliant, extravagant, pompous mentor.
Sir Edward Coke, judge, MP and Bacon’s rival.
George and Kate as models for Venus and Adonis by Anthony Van Dyck, c.1620.
George’s wife Kate by Van Dyck, c. 1633.
George, Kate and their children Mary and George, painted in 1628 by Gerrit van Honthorst soon before George’s assassination.
Charcoal portrait of George, sketched by Peter Paul Rubens during his visit to Paris in May 1625.
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, Charles’s older brother, by Isaac Oliver, c.1612
Charles when he was Duke of York, by Robert Peake the Elder, c.1612, around the time of Henry’s death.
Frederick, Count Palatine and King of Bohemia.
Elizabeth, Frederick’s wife and Charles’s sister, the ‘Winter Queen’.
Conde de Gondomar, Spanish ambassador and close friend of James.
Infanta Maria of Spain, Charles’s first fiancée.
Philip III, King of Spain and Maria’s brother.
Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII of France and Maria’s sister.
Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Conde-Duque de Olivares and Philip IV’s valido.
Endymion Porter, George’s Spanish secretary, by Van Dyck.
Sir John Eliot, MP for Cornwall, Vice Admiral of Devon.
Supper with James, engraving by Melchior Tavernier, 1623–4, showing James as guest of the Spanish ambassador Mendoza at the height of tensions between James, George and Charles.
Henrietta Maria, Charles’s French queen, by Van Dyck, c.1632.
Dr William Harvey, who attended James in his final hours and became Charles’s most trusted physician.
Sketch for equestrian portrait of George commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens in 1625. The finished painting, which hung at York House, was destroyed by fire in 1949.
Title page of A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of John Lambe, 1628, an engraving depicting Lambe’s death.
Van Dyck’s 1630 family portrait of Charles, Henrietta Maria, their children and pets, known as the ‘great peece’.
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