The White King
Page 34
17. Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), p. 265.
18. Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–42’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), p. 244; John Adamson, ‘The Tudor and Stuart Courts’ in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (1999), p. 112.
19. CSPV 1625–6 (25).
20. The Speeches of the Lord Digby in the High Court of Parliament (1641), p. 24 (BL, E196/6, 7).
21. Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings (2014), p. 25, quoting Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? (2005), pp. 104–5.
22. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 105.
23. Chris Kyle, Theatre of State (2012), pp. 109–10; tapestries purchased by Henry VIII celebrated the peace Romulus and Remus brought to Rome after civil war; quotations from Journal of the House of Lords, Vol. III.
24. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 161.
25. Scott, Leviathan, p. 157.
26. This land edged into the neighbouring counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 262.
27. The old merchants also included the Merchant Adventurers who had traditionally controlled the cloth trade to Germany and the Low Countries. The Levant and East India Companies traded with southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near and Far East. These companies were used to working hand in glove with the king. They paid taxes, negotiated with the Crown directly to the monarch, outside Parliament’s control, and in exchange were granted privileged access to trade and a limited membership.
28. The Americas required risky investments in production that the great merchant companies did not wish to make. The new merchants were involved in tobacco and later sugar, pioneering the Africa, West Indies, Virginia and New England trades in slaves, crops and provisions. Brenner, pp. 685–6; by ‘godly’ they meant the elect, predestined by God to enter heaven.
29. It was said that as a schoolboy at Eton, Robin had fallen out of bed just as the axe fell on his father’s head, crying out ‘his father was killed… his father was dead’. The Devereux titles and estates had reverted to the Crown until James’s accession in 1603. Then, as the heir to James’s ‘martyr’, he went from zero–having neither titles nor estates–to hero of the new Stuart age. Unfortunately James later arranged a disastrous marriage for Essex with the wicked Frances Howard, daughter of a favoured councillor. Essex had been scarred by smallpox and his bride found him repulsive, cuckolded him, then tried to poison him. When that failed, she had their marriage annulled on grounds of his impotence. She later successfully poisoned a knight who had threatened her plans to marry her lover, Robert Carr, Buckingham’s predecessor as royal favourite. For more on this amazing case see Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I (1998).
30. Scott, Leviathan, p. 129.
31. CSPV 1625–6 (138).
32. Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, Vol. I (1891), p. 513.
33. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Political Thought in Early Stuart Britain’ in Barry Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (2003), p. 283.
34. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 108.
35. Even those who supported the war often had different priorities from Charles. For the king it was a dynastic imperative: his sister was his heir, and the Palatinate the inheritance of her eldest son, who could one day be King of England and Scotland. Others saw the restoration of the Palatinate in terms of a Protestant crusade, and Charles could not appeal to this sentiment without alienating potential Catholic allies in Europe.
36. Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 97.
37. Birch, p. 33.
38. A diamond signet made for her in 1628 that was a gift from Charles bears the monogram HM (an M scored through with an H). She certainly never viewed herself as Mary!
39. The poet John Donne.
40. Sir Simonds d’Ewes, Autobiography and Correspondence, Vol. I (1845), p. 272.
41. Birch, p. 40.
42. Walter Devereux: Letters of the Earl of Essex, Vol. III (1853), p. 296.
43. Taylor, the water poet, commented in verse that ‘to be thought a Londoner is worse, than one that breaks [into] a house, or steals a purse’. Creighton, p. 518.
44. Christian IV avowed religious motives, but he also hoped to expand his territories at Habsburg expense.
45. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), p. 43; Henrietta Maria’s almoner, the Bishop of Mende, the head of her religious household, had heard that Buckingham hoped to improve his reputation by having her household expelled and renewing Catholic persecution.
46. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 48. This would have seemed no idle threat. Of the four queens executed under the Tudors, three had enjoyed strong French connections. Anne Boleyn had been a lady-in-waiting at the French court, before she went on to marry, and then fatally to anger, Henry VIII. Lady Jane Grey, who was executed when she was only a year older than Henrietta Maria, had been allied to France against the pro-Spanish Mary Tudor. Mary, Queen of Scots, was half French and a widow of a King of France, where she was remembered as little short of a martyr, hounded to her death by Elizabeth’s Protestant servants.
47. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume I: 1603–1631, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2015), p. 574, note 6.
48. Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 17, Rubens to Palamede de Fabri sieur de Valavez, 26 December 1625.
49. Quoted in Bellany and Cogswell, p. 198.
50. Clarendon, Vol. I, p. 49.
51. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 39.
52. Donovan, p. 17, Rubens to Valavez, 26 December 1625.
Chapter 5: Enter Lucy Carlisle
1. Just as Charles had been absent for the Mass following their proxy wedding so, once again, their religious differences were being emphasised. She had also refused to attend the Garter and Bath ceremonies. Also see Louis XIII’s view in CSPV 1625–6 (454).
2. William Lilly, A Prophecy of the White King and Dreadful Dead Man Explained, quoted in Jerome Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford’s Flies: Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution (1993), p. 73.
3. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds d’Ewes, openlibrary.org, p. 176, https://archive.org/stream/autobiographyan01hallgoog#page/n192/mode/2up.
4. For a detailed discussion and description of James’s coronation see Leanda de Lisle, After Elizabeth (2005), pp. 261–8.
5. Calvinists believed that Christ had died only for elect souls predestined to heaven before the beginning of time. Arminius had argued against this that it was possible to fall from God’s grace by committing sins. This infuriated Calvinists, who thought it too close to the Catholic belief in free will–that what we choose to do in this life (good or evil) affects where you go in the next (heaven or hell).
6. Psalm 96.
7. Their pamphlet had a ring of truth. Buckingham had motive and means to kill James. Furthermore, it would not have been the first poisoning to have taken place at James’s court. Another of James’s favourites, a man called Robert Carr, had been convicted, along with his wife, Essex’s former spouse Frances Howard, of killing a man with poison. See Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James I (1998).
8. Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 225.
9. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 1323.
10. Pym was to act as one of Warwick’s trustees when he mortg
aged his estate in September. He had also supported a proposal in the Commons by Warwick’s kinsman Nathaniel Rich that the war be privatised, with a private navy based in Bermuda, paid for by private subscribers, which would deny Spain the wealth of the West Indies by attacking their shipping. This fleet would not have been liable to the usual taxes and the Council of War would, in effect, have run Charles’s foreign policy in the interests of a group of political gentry and nobles. It proved too radical to go further, however, and the more important matter of Buckingham’s impeachment now took priority; Christopher Thompson, ‘The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group, 1625–1629’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 22 (1972), p 80.
11. William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (1809–26), eds. Thomas Bayly Howell et al., Vol. II, p. 1324 (Impeachment of Buckingham, 1626).
12. Bellany and Cogswell, p. 238.
13. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), pp. 42–5.
14. Bishop of Mende to Cardinal Richelieu, 24 July, quoted in Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds.), The Politics of Female Households: 4 (Rulers & Elites) (2013), p. 318.
15. Anne Boleyn’s eyes, it was said, ‘could read the secrets of a man’s heart’; Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen (2008), p. 9 and note 16; Raymond A. Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Spring 1985), p. 215.
16. Julie Sanders, ‘Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Women/History, December 2000), pp. 449–64.
17. Wolfson, p. 317.
18. CSPV 1626 (680).
19. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Petrie, p. 45.
20. CSPV 1626 (712).
21. Belvoir MSS QZ/6/12/1626 (date added in a different hand): ‘Monsieur demande je de robe se tant que je peu pour vous escrire sen me tant come prisonniere que je ne peut pas parle a personne ny se tans descrire mes malheurs ny de me p[re]taundre seullement au non de dieu ay espetie dune pauure prinssese audessos poir et faite quelque chose a mon mal je suis la plus affligee du monde parles a ta Royne mamere de moy et lyuy montres mes maleurs je vous Aisa dieu et a tous mes pauures offisiers et a mon amie st gorge a la contesse de tilare [?] et tous fammes et filles qui ne mou blie pas je ne les oublieres pas aussy il sontes quelque remede a mon mal ou je me noeurs je ne puis je adieu cruel adieu qui me fera morir si dieu na pitie de moy au pere sauues [?] qui prie dieu pour moy et ammie que je tenus tousjours.’My translation is modernised and altered for sense. There is a transcript of this letter in the rare Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc., (1885), Vol. II.
22. Comte de Tillierès, Mémoires (1863), p. 135.
23. James was given five camels by the King of Spain in 1623. Perhaps they had been described to Elizabeth as looking like Carlisle, or perhaps she had seen a camel in the royal menagerie before 1613, or somewhere elsewhere in Europe since.
24. Victor Tapie, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (1984), p. 180.
25. ODNB, Charles I.
26. See Appendix, ‘Lucy Carlisle as Milady de Winter’.
27. Clarendon quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 165.
28. Michael P. Winship, ‘Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 3 (July 2006), p. 440.
29. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 226.
30. TNA SP 16/75; Wolfson, p. 321.
31. Smith, p. 14.
32. Henry VIII sent his friend Henry Norris to the scaffold simply to help him get rid of an inconvenient wife and in a manner that appealed to his narcissism (Norris was cast as Lancelot to his King Arthur). Elizabeth I was a master at passing the blame for her unpopular decisions on to her servants. The case of William Davidson, who she claimed (untruthfully) had delivered the warrant for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, without her permission, is the most notorious example.
33. CSPV 1626–8 (542).
Chapter 6: Exit Buckingham
1. Proceedings in Parliament 1628, Vol. 2, p. 58.
2. Ibid., p. 8.
3. Indeed, it would not be until 1789.
4. Quoted in Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars (2009), p. 19. Five per cent of the members of the Commons had refused the loan; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), p. 226.
5. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 111, quoting Sir Robert Phelips; R. C. Johnson and M. J. Cole (eds.), Commons Debates 1628 (1977), p. 40.
6. Robert Lockyer (ed.), The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (1974), p. 439.
7. Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (2015), p. 326.
8. Acts of the Privy Council, Vol. 43 (1617–28), pp. 492, 505.
9. CSPV 1628 (738).
10. Three versions of the portrait were dispatched in May, June and October to recipients who were probably determined by the queen: Madame Nourrice (or ‘nurse’, Françoise de Monbodiac, the first of the queen’s original French Catholic chamberers), the Duchess of Saxony, and Charles’s sister Elizabeth, the ‘Winter Queen’ of Bohemia. Thank you to Erin Griffey for this information.
11. Erin Griffey, On Display (2015), pp. 80, 81.
12. Unbound letter, Belvoir: ‘La Reine dAngleterre a la Reine sa mere 53 1628 [number and date added in a different hand] Madame je nay voulu lesser partir garnier desy sans assurer vostre Maieste de mon tres humble seruise lors que mr de beaulieu estoit ysy yl me dit que vostre maiest [?] desiroit auoir mon pourtraict mes yl ne foit pas fait asses tost pour qui lenportasse maintenant que sette aucation sest presantee je dit a garnier qui le danit a mr de beaulieu pour le presantir a uostre Majeste je null jamais puisse [?] entreprandre a luy envoyer sans le commandemant que jaue reseu de sa part estant sy tard que jay honte que lon le voye mis vostre Majeste ny pranderapas parte ny a labillemantque le pentre asy malfait que jesupliray vostre Majeste de le fere la beler elle le regarde seullemant commes tres humble seruante qui nauiltre pasy on aumon de que salle que vous lastentes toute sa vie comme elle est Madame Vostre tres humble et tres obeisante fille et seruante Henriette Marie’. Garnier was her lady-in-waiting Françoise de Monbodiac, who was an ally of Buckingham, while Mr Beaulieu was an English courtier. This letter has a partial translation (which I have not used) in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol II. Another possible example of Henrietta Maria’s dissatisfaction with an artist who had not done justice to her clothes comes ten years later. Cornelius Johnson corroborated with the artist Gerard Hoockgeest on a full-length miniature of Henrietta Maria, depicted strumming a mandolin with a spaniel playing at her feet (displayed at the Weiss Gallery, London, in 2016). Johnson was particularly talented at painting clothes but even the wonderful movement he gives her dress in this miniature, and the shine of the silk, did not impress the queen. A catalogue compiled by the surveyor of the king’s pictures in 1639 describes the dress as unfinished, and it was dumped in store.
13. CSPD 1628–9 (267–81). The knife that killed Buckingham is today in the keeping of his sister’s senior heir, Alexander Fielding, 12th Earl of Denbigh.
14. Unbound letter, Belvoir, dated 23 August 1628 by reference to the death of Buckingham: ‘je nay peu rettenir du four je suplie vostre Majeste de croyre que je fait tout se qui esttoit en mon pouuoir a cause que vostre Majeste me lauoit commande et que je desire de luy obeir en tout de puis ma lettre escrite mr le duc de Bukingham et mort je croy que vostre Majeste le saura aues non pas comme yl a estte tue avec un couteau aumilieu de lieux sans hommes et est tumbe otit mort sans dire rien du tout que je suis mort et lhomme qui la fait dit to
ujours quil a fort bien fait yl est ariue ysy vn abe quy est fransois sest le plus mechant homme de la terre des choses quil dit et des aranques quil escrit yl serante de auoir fait les aferes sous mr le cardinal mes yl en est malcontant a ce mis est amuse de seu il est venu ysy. A la Royne Madame ma mere.’ There is a transcript/description in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. II.
15. Unbound letter, Belvoir, from Queen Marie of France: ‘30 aoust 1628 Mon cousin Je uous en uoye una lettre que ma fille la Rayne d’anglesttere ma escreite pour mo[n]strer au Roy uous uerres en que estat ella est et en que missez’ ella c’troue [?] digne de compassion Roxane uous dire des nouelles plus particvlieres estant le derniere quil a [?], e c’que l’on croine’ a c’bien desebellas [?] Vous bai seres les mains au Roy de ma pearle et que ce le prie de ne concerne c’bones graces, et a uous mon cousin ie uous prie de croyre que uous n’aues persone qui soit plus que moy Vostre affectionne cousina Marie de Tours le trentieme aoust [in left-hand margin, written sideways] La contess’ de la Hoye et morte La Rayne desire Madame de Leuen’ pour dame d’Honor et pour dame d atour la Mony a luy ay dict que pour la mony le Roy nonli accuselera iamais.’
16. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, p. 37.
17. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), pp. 14, 15, 16.
18. TNA: PRO SP 16/116 f. 4.
19. CSPD 22 November (34); CSPV 21 (603).
20. On 24 August he asked for the constableship of Windsor or the keepership of Hampton Court; CSPD 1628–9 (267).
21. Scott, pp. 110, 111.
22. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Force, Love and Authority in Caroline Political Culture’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 37.