The White King

by Leanda de Lisle

  The new Lord Admiral had, however, come to realise that he couldn’t depend on an aging king to secure his future. Buckingham needed the goodwill of James’s teenage heir–and he had begun to take a serious look at the prince who would one day be king.

  Charles was born in Scotland on 19 November 1600, a day of Gothic horror and of royal triumph. It began with the decomposing bodies of two Scottish noblemen being gibbeted and quartered at the Mercat–or Market–Cross near the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh. The traitors’ heads were then stuck on poles and their quarters were packed in salt and sent for public display in Dundee, Stirling and Perth.

  It was early the following morning that a messenger arrived from Fife at Holyrood Palace and gave King James the news that his wife, Anna of Denmark, had delivered a son at 11 p.m. A delighted James tipped the messenger £16 and when the sun came up James left Edinburgh for Dunfermline Palace to see his ‘Annie’ along with their newborn child.3

  The heads of the twenty-two-year-old John Ruthven, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, and his twenty-year-old brother, Alexander, would remain on view in Edinburgh through the lifetime of James’s new son. The noble brothers had been killed in August 1600, during what James believed was a kidnap attempt against him made in league with ministers of the kirk. Their motive was the fear that James was poised to impose Crown-appointed bishops over the kirk’s Calvinist councils–known as presbyteries–and so place it under tight royal control. The brothers never had an opportunity to answer the kidnap charges, but their rotting bodies had been propped up in court, tried and found guilty of treason. This had left James free to advertise his vengeance for insults to the Stuart crown dating back to the overthrow of his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, and he would now crush all remaining opposition to his rule.

  By the time James’s cousin Elizabeth I of England died on 24 March 1603, his notoriously violent kingdom was at peace. Nevertheless, it was said that James was as delighted to leave Scotland as if he had spent forty years in the wilderness and was now to enter a land of milk and honey: England was known to be as rich as Scotland was poor. His wife and children were to follow him south–save for Charles, who had to be left behind.

  The kirk disapproved of the Scandinavian Anna for her ‘night waking and balling’ as well as her Lutheran beliefs. But this dancing queen, the sister of King Christian of Denmark, had done her royal duty in producing heirs. Charles had an elder sister, Elizabeth, who was four years his senior, born on 19 August 1596, and a brother, Henry, born on 19 February 1594, who was a full six years older. But a younger brother had died only months earlier and Charles’s health was also fragile. He had been born with a lingual deformity, possibly ankyloglossia or ‘tongue tie’. This would have made feeding difficult, and the two-year-old Charles was undersized. It was only the following year, in 1604, and after James had sent a physician back to Scotland along with £100 for drugs and other medical necessities, that Charles was brought to his father’s new kingdom.4

  A year later, Charles faced a threat to his life of a different kind. On 1 November 1605 one of his servants, Agnes Fortun, was questioned by a member of the royal ceremonial guard about Charles’s daily life, ‘the way into his chamber, when he rode abroad, how attended etc’.5 Four days later it emerged that this man, Thomas Percy, was part of an extremist conspiracy. A group of Catholics had planned to blow up the Palace of Westminster during the opening of Parliament, killing King James, the eleven-year-old Prince Henry, England’s peers and members of the House of Commons. They had then intended to kidnap the surviving royal children, but feared it would be particularly difficult to smuggle Charles out of London. One plan was to inflict a superficial stab wound, so that the four-year-old could not be moved before the Catholic takeover was complete. Happily the Gunpowder Plot was foiled, and the would-be bombers were either killed or executed. It was Charles’s first direct experience of the murderous consequences of resistance theory.

  Charles, meanwhile, had continued to struggle with his disabilities. Some of his earliest memories must have been of trying to talk and communicate. His garrulous father once threatened to have the tendons under Charles’s tongue cut to help him articulate. Besides the problems with his speech, Charles’s legs lacked strength and he had trouble walking. But with courage and determination he came ‘through temperance and exercise to have as firm and strong a body as any’.6 By 1609 he was able to dance at the celebrations for his brother Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales, and he soon walked so quickly it was said he almost ran. Charles also found singing lessons helped him control his stutter and he later advised other sufferers that ‘the best and surest way is to take good deliberation first, and not to be too sudden in speech’.7 It enabled him to express himself far more eloquently than the stammering Louis XIII.

  Being a second son, in a hereditary monarchy, Charles had to grow used to being treated as second best. When James spent £800 on a ‘chain of stone’ and an insignia of the Order of the Garter for Henry, he gave Charles a jewel worth only £130. In letters James wrote to Henry as ‘our dearest son’ and to Charles as merely his ‘dear son’.8 But Henry’s treatment reflected respect for rank as much as any emotional bond. Charles enjoyed security and family love such as his father had never known. He would remember his parents’ affection all his life and there were no signs of jealousy towards Henry who bore the heavier responsibilities. On the contrary, Charles admired and emulated his cleft-chinned and martial brother. He played with soldiers and read enough about war to be complimented on his knowledge of military affairs. He also shared Henry’s passion for art.

  Britain had become something of an artistic backwater following the Reformation. For Calvinists all religious images, even crucifixes, were idolatrous, and in England and Scotland over 90 per cent of religious art–which was most art–had been destroyed since the Reformation. Henry embodied the aspirations of a new era, collecting mannerist painting from Italy and the Netherlands, as well as Florentine bronzes.

  Charles was overseeing the preparations for a masque to celebrate Elizabeth’s forthcoming marriage when he was told that Prince Henry was ill. It was October 1612 and Elizabeth had matured into a golden-haired sixteen-year-old, admired for a tenacious memory and discerning judgement.9 Her groom was a contemporary, the Calvinist Frederick V, Prince-Elector of the Palatinate and, as such, already leader of a German military alliance known as the Protestant Union. Plans were being laid for Prince Henry to be married as well, possibly as early as the following year. Catholic brides from France or Savoy were mooted. This, James hoped, would boost the role he aspired to of peacemaker in Europe with his family acting as a bridge between religions. Henry, however, was now in the last stages of typhoid fever. Charles dashed to see him and stayed at his brother’s bedside while doctors treated Henry by tying a dead pigeon to his head.10 Charles was thirteen days short of his twelfth birthday when, on 6 November 1612, he watched Henry die.11

  The following spring of 1613 Charles had to say farewell to his last sibling, Elizabeth, on board the ship that was bound for her new German homeland. Her leaving, she recalled, left her heart ‘pressed and astounded’.12 It was painful also for Charles who alone now bore the weight of national expectations as James’s ‘dearest and only son’, the sole male heir on whom the Stuart crown in England depended.13

  The Spanish ambassador the Conde de Gondomar thought the twelve-year-old Charles a ‘sweet, gentle child’.14 In a cruel age Charles detested cruelty. ‘None but cowards are cruel,’ he later observed.15 He found people difficult to read and preferred his books to the competitive world of the court. He proved a better scholar than Henry had been in his studies. These included theology, French and Latin, while he particularly enjoyed history, music and mathematics. He liked having the time study gave him to weigh up arguments, and distrusted the instant judgements that come with instinct, marking his autograph books with a favourite Neostoic motto, ‘If you would conquer all things submit yourself to reason.’16 The static na
ture of the past, the precision of rules and logic, made them less disconcerting than courtiers with hidden agendas.

  There was another less cautious side to Charles: a physical restlessness and a ‘nature inclined to adventures’. This made him ‘apt to take extreme resolutions’, if encouraged by those he trusted.17 For now, however, his energy was directed in line with his strong sense of the responsibility of his position, and he pursued a new physical regime to further improve his health. By April 1613, only five months after Henry had died, the Venetian ambassador had noticed an improvement in Charles’s physique. Nine months later Charles added running to his programme, taking a group of servants on a long circuit past the handsome houses around his residence, the ‘pleasant and splendid’ St James’s Palace. They soon found they were unable to keep up with him or even to finish the course.18

  As Charles continued to grow stronger, and he began to perform successfully at the joust, his mother, Anna, encouraged his interest in the ancient chivalric Order of the Garter. Charles showed no trace of his father’s contempt for women and had a warm relationship with his mother, teasing her when she was ill that he missed not only her company, but also her ‘good dinners’. They shared an appreciation of beauty and courtly ceremony, and he found the chivalric and spiritual values of the Order of the Garter appealing. The knights were called on to defend the church and the weak, especially women, to be loyal to each other and to obey their king. The Garter insignia of St George killing the dragon represented the conquering of sin and of rebellion–the first sin having been an act of rebellion against God that brought disorder into the world.19* Almost two-thirds of fifty volumes found in Charles’s personal library at Whitehall at the end of his life would be connected to the Order, many of them gifts from Anna.

  Charles’s closest childhood companion at this time was a boy called Will Morray, or in modern spelling, ‘Murray’, whose uncle Thomas was Charles’s tutor. The family was Scottish, a reflection of James’s decision to favour his native-born subjects amongst his family’s closest servants. Charles, in consequence, spoke English with a slight Scottish inflection, detectable in his spelling of ‘hes’ for ‘has’.20 William is also said to have been his whipping boy: legend has it that if Charles was badly behaved, it was Murray who was beaten. Yet there was no vogue for whipping boys in the early modern period. Louis XIII was beaten when he was a child king, as James had been. The tale is a literary phantom. Its origins lie in fiction, conjured in the aftermath to the English publication of James’s tracts on divine right, with their assertion that you could not legitimately raise your hand against God’s anointed. It has gained acceptance simply by repetition and because it appeals to our modern dismissal of divine-right theory as ridiculous and perverse.21

  As James’s heir Charles accompanied the king on his progresses and attended all major state occasions. James did not think it necessary for Charles to visit Scotland or, indeed, Ireland. England was by far his greatest kingdom and James boasted, with some justice, that he could rule Scotland from London, at the stroke of his pen. He did, however, expect Charles to study his Scottish writings, while he also acted as his son’s spiritual instructor.22 James’s most significant tract in this regard was a ‘how to rule’ handbook that had been written for Prince Henry and was entitled the Basilikon Doron or ‘Royal Gift’. It was the contents of this ‘gift’ that had so disturbed the Ruthven brothers and their kirk allies in 1600.

  In the Basilikon Doron James traced the sedition and instability that he had faced in Scotland to the beginning of the Scottish Reformation. In England, Henry VIII had claimed a ‘Royal Supremacy’ over the church, giving England’s monarchs the power to direct religious change. In Scotland, by contrast, the kirk was founded in defiance of royal authority and, James recalled, ‘many things were inordinately done by a popular tumult and rebellion’. For this James blamed the ‘fiery ministers’ of the kirk who had sought to take advantage of his period as a child king, seeking to create a ‘popular’ government, in which they would ‘lead the people by the nose and bear the sway of all rule’. The Basilikon Doron hammered home the dangers of ‘popularity’–by which James meant demagogy which led to violent disorder–and its antidote, which was hierarchy, in church and state. James saw no clash between his Calvinist beliefs and his support for an episcopate (that is, church government by bishops). Episcopacy dated back to the earliest Christian times and he saw it as a pillar of monarchy, imposing control on those fiery ministers who, like the Pope, sought to usurp royal authority.

  James had not yet felt able to bring the Scottish kirk into full alignment with the Episcopalian Church of England, as he would have liked, but there were now bishops–who dressed like ordinary ministers–working alongside the kirk’s presbyteries.

  James’s lessons left Charles convinced that the Church of England was ‘the best in the world’, keeping ‘the middle way’ between the ‘pomp of superstitious tyranny’ of a Catholic Church led by the Pope, and ‘the meanness of fantastic anarchy’, represented by Protestants who rejected an episcopate.23 For others, however, the Church of England’s combination of Calvinist theology and Catholic structure was not so much a golden mean as a ‘leaden mediocrity’: a dangerous ‘mingle mangle of the popish government with pure doctrine’.24

  The word ‘popish’ did not mean merely Catholic. It referred to a form of spiritual and political tyranny that challenged the scriptural authority of ‘true’ Protestantism, while also threatening its political security at home and abroad. It was associated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but could be applied to Lutheranism or any reversal of Calvinism. For it to be used about long-established aspects of the Church of England was indicative of the depth of divisions between English Protestants. Indeed some would later judge it was here, in the half-reformed Church of England ‘he had received from his fathers’, that the source of Charles’s future troubles lay.25

  English Protestantism is usually dated from Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533. In fact Henry had ushered in little more than a nationalised form of Catholicism. It was under his son, the boy king Edward VI, that the Reform Protestantism of Switzerland and Strasbourg was first introduced to England. Edward VI had died aged only fifteen in 1553, leaving the process incomplete. A five-year hiatus under the Protestant-burning Catholic Mary I had followed. Then in 1558 the Protestant Elizabeth I had succeeded to the throne and it was assumed that she would continue to push the Reformation in England forward. Elizabeth, however, had proved to be a protestant of a very conservative kind.26

  The Church of England owed its Catholic structure to the religious settlement established at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, when other ‘popish’ elements in the church were also retained. The term ‘Puritan’ was coined in the 1560s to describe those ‘hot’ Protestants who wished to abolish the use of a white clerical over-garment called a surplice. For Puritans the surplice was a remnant of the vestments Catholic priests wore for the Mass. It was therefore valid for mainstream Calvinists to complain about their use. Yet they were damned as fanatics, or ‘Puritans’. For Elizabeth surplices were simply part of the ceremonial style she preferred in her religious services and which she maintained in her royal chapels, along with a Catholic tradition of choral music abhorred by Calvinists as a distraction from prayer. By the 1590s Elizabeth’s example had encouraged a new religious movement within the Church of England whose members shared her tastes. But neglect of other aspects of her religious leadership had left many of her subjects ignorant of the basic tenets of their Protestant faith.27 It was the Puritans, as the most evangelical members of the church, who had done most to address this problem.

  Puritans were distinctive from other Calvinists in their attention to moral detail and their shunning of the impious, often forming ‘godly’ communities to encourage each other.* The sermons heard from their pulpits were full of showmanship, similar to the evangelical revivalism of later centuries. With Protestantism facing the challenges of the
Counter-Reformation, they had attracted ‘the most ardent, quick, bold, resolute’ recruits, and had ‘a great part of the best soldiers and captains on their side’.28

  In 1587 England had gone to war with Spain on the side of the Calvinist Dutch rebels against Habsburg rule in the Netherlands. Although Elizabeth is rightly remembered for her inspiring defiance of the Spanish Armada in 1588, what little enthusiasm she had ever had for the war had soon waned. She had disliked aiding rebels against a fellow monarch, and resented the huge financial burden of the war. This helped to turn her own favourite, the glamorous soldier-scholar Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, against her. Essex had belonged to a generation who believed it was the duty of the nobility not to simply obey royal orders, but to work for the commonwealth–a term that came from ‘commonweal’, meaning the public good. That meant showing dedication to great causes. For Essex, England’s war with Spain was such a cause: one necessary to the very survival of Protestantism in Europe.29

  By the time Charles was born in 1600 the English Crown had been impoverished by inflation and by generations of land sales. Elizabeth was £400,000 in debt and desperate to make peace. On 3 February 1601 Essex attempted to raise London against the queen, hoping to invite James to London as her successor. His efforts failed and he was executed as a traitor.30 Yet Elizabeth went to her grave with ballads still being sung at court in praise of Essex.31

  As soon as James had become king he had immediately set about healing the wounds left by Elizabeth’s reign. At the beginning of 1604 he had addressed the urgent need for reform of the Church of England at the Hampton Court Conference. He was extremely knowledgeable on issues of theology and had proved largely successful in splitting moderate Puritans (who wished to get rid of popish surplices and set prayers) from those he judged radical (which included any who wished to abolish episcopacy). James had since built a well-trained and effective clergy, commissioned the superlative translation of the Bible into English known today at the ‘Authorised Version’, or the King James, and he allowed a broad range of opinion to flourish.