A particular flashpoint with the Puritans was the writings of an Arminian royal chaplain called Richard Montague, who had downplayed the differences between the Church of England and Catholicism and defended the use of religious images. At the Earl of Warwick’s request there was a conference on Montague’s writings at Buckingham’s residence, on 11 and 17 February. The hope was that the conference would conclude in a robust confirmation of the Church of England’s Calvinist traditions that would set Charles on a more conservative path. When, instead, it ended without any public repudiation of Montague’s doctrines by Buckingham, it became a turning point for Warwick and other hot Protestants. It would be almost impossible to change Charles’s religious policy without Buckingham’s backing. Since he would not give it, Buckingham’s destruction became a priority.
The plan was to impeach Buckingham for corruption. The difficulty lay in finding anyone prepared to give evidence against the powerful favourite. But then, in April 1626, a new and shocking allegation was made.
A pamphlet had appeared accusing Buckingham of having murdered James with the plaster and syrup that he had supplied for the king in his last days. Written by a Catholic Scottish physician, it was a piece of Habsburg black propaganda, aiming to sow confusion amongst their English enemies. It worked brilliantly by confirming a long-held suspicion that behind the beautiful face painted by Rubens lay corruption and wickedness.7 The pamphlet sold quickly and its contents were soon repeated in news-sheets. Ben Jonson’s current play The Staple of News was satirising this fast-moving new media, with a character list of disreputable owners and disorderly writers. But news-sheets helped satisfy the contemporary thirst for comment and gossip and the media was far more powerful than Charles yet realised.
A parliamentary select committee immediately began cross-examining James’s doctors. The evidence they uncovered was riveting. Buckingham had twice violated rules that only the royal physicians could prescribe and administer drugs, and one doctor insisted that what Buckingham had given James was ‘no better than poison’.8 Although there was no proof of murder, this implied more sinister secrets might yet be uncovered.
The House of Commons laid formal charges against Buckingham before the Lords on 8 and 10 May 1626. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the MP John Pym had been working diligently to make the accusations as hard-hitting as possible. A heavy-set Puritan of forty-two, Pym preferred simple dark cloth and a collar of white linen to Warwick’s lace and silk. He had begun his working life as a clerk in the office of the Exchequer, where, it was later said, he had improved himself by hard work rather than natural talent. Nevertheless, he had gained notice as an MP ‘for being concerned and passionate in the jealousies of religion’.9 He was politically and personally close to Warwick and he was involved in many of the same colonial ventures.10
Thirteen offences were listed. All the forms of corruption in royal government had converged in Buckingham, it was said, ‘drawn like one line in one circumference’.11 The last of these offences accused him of an ‘injury’ to King James in ‘an act of transcendent presumption and of dangerous consequence’.12 This threatened not only the ruin of Buckingham’s career and reputation; potentially it also threatened his life. Yet the man who made the poultice and cordial Buckingham had given James was a respected doctor who was also employed by Warwick.
Charles dissolved Parliament on 15 June, before the impeachment case against Buckingham reached the Lords. Not only was Charles left without the subsidies he had sought, MPs had also refused him the traditional life grant of the customs duties known as Tonnage and Poundage, and described another customs duty, known as Impositions, as a ‘grievance’. This had deprived him of income he needed for his very financial survival. But Charles believed the case against Buckingham nothing more than a surrogate attack on monarchical authority. Ensuring he got his subsidies, vital though that was, had, in the end, not been the most important thing to him. The war abroad had opened up a new front at home in which, he believed, he faced enemies who were less anxious to do their duty at a time of war, than to dictate royal policy and appointments. These men wanted to manipulate public opinion for their own ends, and their narrow interpretation of Protestantism only encouraged their sedition and demagogy. They were the forces of disorder that it was the duty of the monarchy to stand against.
Charles would have to find new means to raise money, since he had to push ahead with the war urgently. Louis XIII had signed the long-threatened Franco-Spanish peace, and the Habsburgs would now only be growing stronger.
Henrietta Maria’s priests were, meanwhile, punishing the young king for his persecution of Catholics by persuading his wife to refuse him sex on the church’s many Holy Days. They also ruined his mealtimes by saying grace as loudly as possible, in competition with his Protestant chaplains.13 More seriously, with war approaching, Charles feared her household was riddled with spies.
In June 1626, a year after Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England, Charles decided it was time to exchange her French servants for English ones. This was usual practice and many English families, anxious to see their relatives in the queen’s household, had been busy ensuring their daughters had been practising their French. Buckingham, however, had persuaded Charles that his friends and relations should predominate. Their names included that of the woman Buckingham was said to have lined up to be Charles’s mistress: the twenty-six-year-old Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle.14 If so, this posed a formidable threat to the sixteen-year-old queen.
Like Henry VIII’s Anne Boleyn, from whose sister she was descended, Lucy Carlisle’s ‘bright… conquering eyes’ held many men in their power.15 The poet John Suckling confessed to voyeuristic fantasies, describing how watching her walking in Hampton Court’s gardens ‘I was undoing all she wore / And had she walked but one turn more / Eve in her first state had not been / More naked or more plainly seen.’ Yet Lucy was more than merely the ‘killing beauty’ of the age. Powerful men stood ‘in awe of her wit’ and some were even a little afraid of her cruel put-downs. One victim described her as ‘the most charming of all things that are not good, and the most delightful poison ever nature produced’.16
Lucy Carlisle’s mother had been a Devereux, making her a first cousin to the Rich brothers, the earls of Holland and Warwick, as well as to the Earl of Essex, while her own brother headed the great Percy family of the Earls of Northumberland. As for her relationship to Buckingham–she was said to be his lover.
Henrietta Maria warned Charles ‘she would never have confidence’ in any of Buckingham’s choices and had ‘a great aversion’ for Lucy Carlisle in particular.17 Over the following weeks her French servants helped block the new English members of her household from attending on her.18 In August Charles lost patience. Buckingham was told to ‘send all the French’ back across the Channel, ‘like so many wild beasts’.19 Henrietta Maria was allowed to keep several favoured priests, which meant her religious rights would be upheld. But the ill-tempered manner in which she had lost servants, whom she considered ‘family’, had left her distraught. Charles’s ‘wild beasts’ had included a Mme St George, who had been like a surrogate mother to her since she was in the nursery.
In the closed private archives of Belvoir Castle lies one of the greatest collections of civil-war manuscripts in the world. Many of these documents are unknown to historians and among them are many royal letters. One was now written by Henrietta Maria to the banished head of her ecclesiastical retinue, the Bishop of Mende. She had been forbidden from communicating with anyone unless in the presence of her English servants.20 She complained to Mende she had to hide away to write to him, ‘like a prisoner who cannot talk to anyone, neither to describe my misfortunes, nor to call upon God to pity a poor, tyrannised princess and to do something to alleviate her suffering’. Miserably, she announced, ‘I am the most afflicted person on earth. Talk to your queen [Marie de’ Medici] my mother about me and reveal to her my woes. I say Adieu to you, and to all my poor servants, and to my f
riend St George, to the Countess of Tillières, and all the women and girls who (I know) have not forgotten me. I have not forgotten them either.’ With all the drama that a teenager can summon she concluded, ‘Is there any remedy for my suffering, which is killing me? Goodbye bitterness. Goodbye to those from whose actions I will die if God does not have pity on me. To the wise Father who prays for me and the Friends I hold to me always.’21
Henrietta Maria continued for a time to assure Charles she would ‘find it very difficult to accommodate herself to the humours of the Countess of Carlisle’. Yet, within a few months, Lucy had become the queen’s great favourite.
Henrietta Maria was bored by the formality of Buckingham’s female relations. Unlike Charles, she was uninterested in the strict observation of hierarchy and had been used to a relaxed atmosphere with her French friends. Now they had gone, she found she enjoyed the intimate supper parties Lucy threw for her. In a court filled with cautious ‘frenemies’ Lucy was outrageously frank in her opinions. She joked and gossiped, her eyebrows plucked high, as if caught in mock surprise at her own words. Henrietta Maria also had a teasing wit and she ended up relishing Lucy’s company.22* But Henrietta Maria had something more important in common with Lucy–both women were political animals and they were using each other for political ends.
For Lucy Carlisle, male admirers were a means to power and influence. In James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, she had married a Scotsman who was much older than herself and far from handsome: Charles’s sister, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, called him ‘camel face’.23 He was, however, a highly successful diplomat. Lucy’s only child had died as an infant and the international political world of which Carlisle was part had become the central focus of her life. She had made sure she stayed close to Buckingham because he was the greatest man in England–after the king. Since Charles was too dutiful a monarch to take her as an official mistress, Lucy considered the advantages of a friendship with the queen. As Mme de Chevreuse’s activities in Paris demonstrated, a queen’s affections were a useful power base and one Lucy hoped to make good use of. Yet Henrietta Maria was no mere stooge. Although only sixteen, she had hard-headed motives of her own for making Lucy her favourite.
Charles’s cause was going from bad to worse in Europe. His uncle, Christian IV of Denmark, had suffered a crushing military defeat in August. Buckingham, however, was now encouraging Charles into a war with France that would see the British kingdoms fighting both of the great powers–France and Spain–at once. His reasoning, as Lord Admiral, was that Richelieu’s build-up of French naval forces posed a threat to England. Charles fretted that ‘the chief design both of our enemies and our ill-affected friends is to dispossess us of that sovereignty in those seas to which… all our ancestors have enjoyed time out of mind’.24 Yet even Buckingham’s own mother suspected that his anxiety over the navy also owed much to a personal sense of rivalry with the cardinal.
In the spring of 1627 the tensions exploded in a trade war, with English and French ships clashing on the high seas.25 Buckingham wanted Charles to respond aggressively. Henrietta Maria believed Charles would do better to improve his relations with Louis so that France might aid him in his war against the Habsburgs. She sought reconciliation and showered favours on courtiers who advocated her policy. Principal amongst them were Lucy and her husband, who had a long history of being anti-Spanish and pro-French, in the same manner as Lucy’s cousin, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland.
Lucy’s political differences with Buckingham later inspired a series of scandalous accounts of her plotting with Richelieu against her former lover. This malicious (and untrue) gossip was later repeated in Dumas’ Three Musketeers with Lucy’s part reinvented in the character of the fictional Milady de Winter.26 In fact, far from being deadly enemies, Buckingham remained on reasonable terms with Lucy ‘Milady’ Carlisle. As war with France became inevitable he needed her as a point of contact with Henrietta Maria.
It was not just Buckingham who pressed Charles to go to war with France. Charles’s godfather, the Duke de Soubise, begged him to aid the Huguenots against Louis. The French king had used English ships, which had been lent to him for the war with Spain, against these Calvinist rebels, and then had broken a treaty agreement made in February 1627 to lift the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. In April Charles travelled to Portsmouth to oversee in person the preparations for an attack which he hoped would relieve the French port.
To pay for his double wars Charles had resorted to some desperate, and in legal terms, highly dubious, forms of fundraising. He had deployed the royal prerogative to raise compulsory loans from his subjects. The reaction was widespread disobedience. Several ‘patriot’ peers refused to pay out, or gave as little as they could get away with. They included Essex and Warwick, along with Warwick’s fellow colonising aristocrats, the ‘proud, morose and sullen’ William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, and his son-in-law, Theophilus Clinton, Earl of Lincoln.27 The ‘patriots’ argued that the forced loan was part of a project to ‘suppress Parliament’ and they organised resistance in their home counties, warning that to pay it was to ‘make ourselves the instrument of our own slavery’.28
Charles’s Arminian clergy backed his actions from the pulpit, while Puritan divines helped promote the political initiatives of the ‘patriot’ peers. Amongst them was a radical preacher called Hugh Peter, whom Warwick had brought from Essex to London. Above average height, with a large nose and dark eyes set wide apart, Peter was the son of a merchant from Cornwall, and had a liking for good food, bad women and plenty of wine. Not, perhaps, a typical Puritan, but his sermons were fluent, witty and persuasive, with Peter issuing aggressive pleas for God to reveal to the king ‘those things which were necessary for… government’, and the queen to ‘forsake idolatry’.
Charles threatened peers who refused to pay the loans with prison, and four were sacked from their local offices. Seventy-six gentlemen were punished more harshly. They were jailed for refusing to pay and Charles made an example of five knights by denying them bail. Lower down the social scale, townsfolk across the country were threatened with having their houses torn down if they did not agree to the loans, while in London many of the City’s handicraftsmen, shopkeepers and new merchants nevertheless also stood up to the Crown, egged on by preachers like Hugh Peter.29
Other unpopular measures taken in the war effort included soldiers being billeted on private households and martial law declared for reasons of national security. For Charles, however, the heavy political cost would all pay off in the event of a victory in France. Henrietta Maria, meanwhile, assured Buckingham that, although she had sought peace, now it had come to war, ‘she must prefer her husband’s honour before all the world’.30
On 27 June Charles launched the greatest naval offensive England had ever made against France. Over a hundred ships crossed the Channel under Buckingham’s command. They disembarked at the Île de Ré near La Rochelle, on 12 July. Cardinal Richelieu took personal charge of the French response. A painting by the nineteenth-century artist Henri Motte imagines Richelieu in armour and scarlet silk, standing at the edge of a churning sea. The real scenes, as they unfolded, were scarcely less dramatic. Buckingham’s cannon proved too few and too small to break the island’s garrison fortress. The duke and his army were left trapped in heavy rains for weeks, with the men falling prey to illness and disease. Louis XIII entrusted the government north of the Loire to Marie de’ Medici once more, as he joined his army on the mainland in person, to oversee operations along with Richelieu.
By October Buckingham was desperate for reinforcements, but a shortage of money and contrary winds saw a fatal delay in the promised arrival of a force under Henry Holland. Eventually, on 27 October, Buckingham withdrew his men through the island’s salt marshes under attack by the French. It was said ‘no man was more fearless, or more ready to expose themselves to the brightest dangers’.31 But the casualties were heavy. Of Buckingham’s 7,000 men only 3,000 reached Portsmouth in
November. Amongst those killed was Sir Charles Rich, younger brother of the earls Holland and Warwick.
It was an historic defeat, worse than the disasters of Breda and Cadiz combined. ‘Every man knows that since England was England, it never received such a dishonourable blow’, one Cornishman wrote. Reports of Buckingham’s courage did nothing to dent public fury. He was accused in ballads and news-sheets of ‘treachery, neglect and cowardice’. The angriest were those who had served under him and were now left unpaid. Buckingham had spent over £10,000 equipping himself and his servants for the campaign. His essentials had included £367 8s 6d for a silver perfuming pan. It was true that a duke was expected to keep up appearances, and perhaps also to be pleasantly scented, even while on campaign. Yet many of his men and their families were starving, and in February 1628 a group of sailors attacked his London house.
Charles’s money was all spent and his debts were growing exponentially. Parliament was the quickest and most effective way to raise the taxes to pay them off. A number of Charles’s councillors were anxious to call one and to use the opportunity to heal the wounds created by the forced loans. Charles blamed himself–and Parliament–for the failure to send reinforcements to the Île de Ré, and was appalled by the mobs at Buckingham’s gate. Henry VIII or Elizabeth I would have thrown Buckingham to the wolves.32 Charles did not yet understand it was more important for a monarch to inspire loyalty than to be loyal. He thought it honourable to take personal responsibility and feared for his friend. But he also feared for French Protestants. ‘Louis is determined to destroy La Rochelle and I am no less resolved to support it,’ Charles assured the Venetian ambassador, ‘otherwise my word and my promises would be void, and that I will never allow.’33
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