The White King
Page 35
23. Communion tables had stood altar-wise in the royal chapels since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and at Whitehall the table had also been railed in by the end of James’s reign. This was not done, however, in the parishes. The Communion-table issue was significant because altars are what Jews–and Romans–used for a sacrifice. They were central to the Catholic worship because, in the Mass, at the moment of consecration Christ’s death–his sacrifice–becomes present. The bread and wine are adored as Christ’s body and blood, a belief Calvinists judge idolatrous.
24. The Puritan in question was Peter Smart, who would be fined for his comments.
25. They included other great nobles such as the Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, his son-in-law, the Earl of Lincoln, and the twenty-one-year-old Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, but also lesser gentry from East Anglia and the West Country, lowly London citizens and radical ministers; Brenner, pp. 169, 272.
26. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 92.
27. TNA: PRO, SP 16/106/55 quoted in ODNB.
28. Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), pp. 117, 118.
29. Letters of King Charles I, ed. Sir Charles Petrie (1935), pp. 76, 78.
Chapter 7: ‘Happy in the Lap of Peace’
1. Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. I, p. 356.
2. This letter was found in a folder at Belvoir, marked by the 9th Duke of Rutland ‘Sell’. Henrietta Maria, 1629, to Cardinal Richelieu: ‘Mon cousin je reseus si viuement les obligations que je vous et toujours vne et selle que je sois maintenent de la part que vous prenes en lafliction qui mest ariuee que je croyois esttre ingrate sy je ne vous ren Remersiois par le sieur danery vous assurant que vous nobligeres jamais personne qui en toutes amations vous temoygnera avec plus daffection que moy quelle est Vostre affectionee cousine Henriette Marie’. NB in this rushed letter she omits the ‘R’ to her signature.
3. Belvoir MSS QZ/6 f. 7.
4. CSPV 1630 (366); Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution (2016), pp. 128–9.
5. Belvoir MSS QZ/6/8. King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria to the Queen of France on the birth of Prince Charles, 29 May 1630: ‘Madame La joye que j’ay, joint avec le haste de vous mander bien promtement de l’heureuxe acouchement de ma famme, ne me permett, que de vous dire, que Dieu mercie, la Mere & le fils se portent fort bien, remettant le reste a ce Porteur Mr Montague j’espere que vostre joye pour ces nouvelles ne serest plus indubitable, que vostre confience en moy que je suis Madame Vostre tresaffectionne fils et serviteur Charles R Ma femme pour vous monstré qu’elle se port bien a voulu que je escrive ce ci au son nom, affin que sa main vous tesmoinge cest verite V[ost]re tres humble et tres obeisante fille et servante Henriette Marie’. The translation in the text is modernised. A facsimile of this letter is reproduced in Alfred Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters etc. (1885), Vol. I.
6. Thomas Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), pp. 24–9; Charles’s brother-in-law, Frederick, and Louis XIII were named as godparents, as was Marie de’ Medici.
7. Letter to Madame St George: Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (1857), pp. 14, 15.
8. John Adamson, ‘Policy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography, and Counsel in Rubens’ Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’ in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds.), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2016), p. 2.
9. 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. 323.
10. Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 1.
11. Jonathan Brown and J. H. Elliott, A Palace for a King (1980), p. 49.
12. Donovan, p. 1.
13. Adamson, p. 37.
14. In the vulnerable–the old, or teenage boys–a woman’s sexual needs could even lead to death for their male victims. The fifteen-year-old Arthur Tudor, the first husband of England’s last Catholic queen consort, Katherine of Aragon, was supposed to have died of exhaustion responding to his wife’s sexual demands. Henry VIII’s sister, Mary Tudor, was also said to have inadvertently killed the aged Louis XII of France by the same means.
15. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Spring 1985), p. 218.
16. CSPV 1629–32 (209), (337); 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. 327.
17. HMC 45: Buccleuch Vol. III, p. 347.
18. This was enough to fund the Dutch army in its war with Spain for much of the following year, 1629; Adamson, p. 45.
19. Ibid., p. 57.
20. ‘A golden lion on a red field’, the Latin text of the grant to Rubens proclaimed, ‘taken from our own royal armorial bearings’; ibid., p. 58.
21. In 1631.
22. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 100.
23. BL, Add. MS 4181.
24. This is from a chronicle composed by Magdeburg mayor Otto Guericke (1602–86). A census in February 1632 found only 449 citizens left in the rubble of the destroyed city.
25. A sixteenth-century alchemist’s text had predicted a lion–or hero–would ‘proceed from midnight’–that is the north–to ‘pursue the eagle’, the symbol of the Habsburgs, ‘and after some time overcome it’. For this text see Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541), Magischer Propheceyung vnnd Beschreibung, von Entdeckung der 3. Schätzen Theophrasti Paracelsi (1549), printed as a supplement by Johan Nordström, Lejonet från Norden. Samlaren. Tidskrift för svensk litteraturhistorisk forskning N. F. 15 (1934), pp. 37–9.
26. Carola Oman, The Winter Queen (1938, revd edn 2000), p. 82; Birch, pp. 225–8.
27. The Letters of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, ed. L. M. Baker (1953), pp. 86–8; Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, pp. 301, 302.
28. Letter to Sir Thomas Roe, quoted in Oman, p. 329.
29. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, Volume II: 1632–1642, ed. Nadine Akkerman (2011), p. 3.
30. Quoted in David Scott, Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power (2013), p. 146; in October 1633 Charles had all references to his sister and her children deleted from the Book of Common Prayer’s ‘collect’ or prayer for the royal family.
31. John Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), pp. 170–1.
Chapter 8: The Return of Madame de Chevreuse
1. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 67.
2. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 94.
3. 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. 454, 456, 463.
4. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 94.
5. Barbara Donagan, ‘A Courtier’s Progress: Greed and Consistency in the Life of the Earl of Holland’, Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1976), p. 328.
6. Wentworth would later be made the Earl of Strafford by Charles.
7. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, pp. 67, 94.
8. Sanders, p. 455.
9. William Prynne, On the Unloveliness of Lovelocks (1628).
10. Quoted in John Adamson, ‘Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England’ in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1994), p. 174; see also Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and the Order of the Garter’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2013), p. 353.
11. CSPV October 1637 (329).
12. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green
(1857), pp. 15, 16.
13. TNA: PRO 31/9/7B.
14. Cust, ‘Charles I and the Order of the Garter’, p. 343.
15. James Callow, The Making of James II (2000), pp. 33, 34.
16. Quoted in Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (2007), p. 149.
17. Robin Blake, Anthony Van Dyck (1999), p. 325; one such apron, which survives in private ownership, is embroidered with black-work figures of men gardening. It belongs to the heirs of a former Master of the Royal Wardrobe.
18. Eleanor, Countess of Sussex, quoted in ibid., p. 331.
19. The physician and naturalist Martin Lister complained how the ladies of the court ‘were mighty fond of being painted in dishabille’, and this ‘cut out of business the best English painter of his time, Cornelius Johnson’.
20. Gregorio Panzini quoted in Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (2004), p. 53.
21. PRO C82/2096 f. 28.
22. Not until the nineteenth century did it appear as it does today, clad in dull grey-white Portland stone.
23. In 1638 Van Dyck was also preparing an oil sketch for a series of tapestries depicting the history and ceremonial of the Order of the Garter, that would hang on the walls of the Banqueting House.
24. The customs duties known as ‘impositions’, the collection of which the Crown had long claimed as a prerogative right, had netted £70,000 a year in the first decade of the century. Now impositions raised £218,000; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), pp. 282, 241.
25. He was a member of the Saybrook Company that was establishing a settlement in what is now Connecticut. The origins of this company lay in a grant of land made by Warwick in 1632 to Viscount Saye and Sele, and Lord Brooke, as well as to John Hampden, John Pym and others. Brooke’s brother-in-law Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who was also later involved in the Connecticut settlement, would be a key figure in the later opposition of Charles.
26. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 331.
27. CSPV October 1637 (329).
28. Ibid.
29. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, pp. 129–32, 196; Sir Philip Warwick, Memories of the Reigne of Charles I (1701), pp. 78–82; Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs etc. (1853), Vol. I, p. 99.
30. John Winthrop first used the phrase in a sermon in 1630.
31. Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), p. 37.
32. Sir Philip Warwick quoted in David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), p. 56.
33. CSPV October 1637 (329).
34. David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), p. 16.
35. As far as Richelieu was concerned fighting the Habsburgs in alliance with Protestants abroad and tolerating the heretic Huguenots at home, were entirely compatible with his master being ‘the first born son of the [Catholic] Church’. For Richelieu, Louis’ status as an anointed king meant that his enemies were God’s enemies. He also suppressed any Catholic movement whose objective was spiritual renewal independent of royal authority. King James would have approved. Ronald G. Asch, Sacral Kingship Between Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment (2014), pp. 76, 79.
36. Charles had seemingly come close to a French alliance, but that had faded by the summer of 1637, with the king fearful of Dunkirk falling into French hands if the Spanish Netherlands were fatally weakened; Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), p. 75.
37. Zahira Veliz, ‘Signs of Identity in Lady with a Fan by Diego Velázquez: Costume and Likeness Reconsidered’, Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 2004), p. 91, figure 19 and note 101.
38. CSPV 1636–9 (432).
39. CSPV 1636–9 (438).
40. ‘Upon Madam Chevereuze swimming over the Thames’
I was calm, and yet the Thames touch’d heaven to day,
The water did find out the Milky way,
When Madam Chevereuze by swimming down,
Did the faire Thames the Queen of Rivers crown.
The humble Willows on the shore grew proud
To see her in their shade her body shroud;
And meeting her the Swan (wont to presume)
Bow’d to her whiter neck his sullyed Plume…
Bright Chevereuze the whole difference ends,
Adding so great a treasure to the waves,
As the whole earth seemes useless, but for graves.
(Musarum Delicice: OR The MUSES RECREATION, 1656).
41. Ben Jonson’s Expostulation with Inigo Jones.
42. Earl of Strafford, Letters and Dispatches (1739), Vol. II, p. 194; this is dated May 1638.
43. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (2000), p. 117.
44. CSPV 1636–9 (447).
45. William Laud, Works (1847–60), Vol. VII, pp. 452–3, Vol. VI, pp. 379–80, Vol. IV, p. 114.
Chapter 9: ‘A Thing Most Horrible’
1. CSPV 1636–9 (528).
2. A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, The Just (1989), p. 27; her accent is indicated by her spelling.
3. Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (1849), Vol. II, p. 343.
4. CSPV 1636–9 (534).
5. TNA SO 3/12 November 1638.
6. Charles observed in the Eikon Basilike that the ‘greatest fault’ men later found with the English prayer book was that ‘it taught them to pray so oft for me’.
7. The dukes of Venice (doges) could not even open foreign dispatches without officials standing over them; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Vol. II (1721), p. 83; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), p. 335; David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (2004), pp. 15–19.
8. An Allegory of Marriage, in Honour of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese del Vasto. Van Dyck had used the same symbol in a portrait of the Countess of Southampton. For more on this picture see Michael Jaffé, ‘Van Dyck Studies II: La belle & vertueuse Huguenotte’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 979 (October 1984), pp. 602–9, 611.
9. Interestingly the current Earl of Denbigh, whose family had a large collection of Van Dycks commissioned from the artist, still owns one of these ‘studio’ paintings of Charles in armour with his hand on a transparent sphere.
10. Sir Henry Slingsby, Diary (1836), p. 10.
11. Gilbert Burnet, The memoires of the lives and actions of James and William, dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald (1677), p. 55.
12. Christopher Thompson, ‘Centre, Colony and Country: The Second Earl of Warwick and the “Double Crisis” of Politics in Early Stuart England’, unpublished thesis, pp. 47, 48; BL, Egerton MS 2648, ff.1r–2r. See The Winthrop Papers, 7 vols (1928–47), Vol. III, ed. Stewart Mitchell (1943), p. 230. Cf. Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (2003), pp. 232–8.
13. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle 1625–41’ in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics, Patronage (2008), p. 31.
14. Charles and Henrietta Maria commissioned a commemorative volume of elegies and verse; Carolyn Harris, Queenship and Revolution (2016), p. 128.
15. Slingsby, p. 11.
16. Ibid., p. 30.
17. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006), p. 84; Parker, p. 336.
18. Sarah Poynting, ‘The King’s Correspondence during the Personal Rule in the 1630s’ in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds.), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (2006), p. 87.
19. Had he beaten the Scots in 1639 Charles’s future and that of his kingdoms would have been looking very different. There would have been no second Bishops’ War to fight, and no pressing need to recall Parliament. The Thirty Years War had reached its climax. In 1640 S
pain would be undermined by rebellion and, as the future of Protestantism in Europe looked brighter, so Puritan zeal might have withered. No wonder Warwick and other oppositionists had been preparing the ground for emigration to Massachusetts. For more on this see John Adamson, ‘England Without Cromwell’ in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History (1997).
20. Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (2006), pp. 178–86; Purkiss, pp. 163–4.
21. Wentworth was also made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to enable to him to govern the country through a deputy while he was absent; ODNB.
22. David Nichol Smith, Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (1918), quoting Sir Philip Warwick, p. 66; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. D. Macray (1888), Vol. I, pp. 197, 341–2. A stooped neck is caused by trapezius muscles being in constant tension.
23. 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. 31.
24. Ibid., p. 32.
25. Warwick quoted in Smith, p. 66; Clarendon, Vol. I, pp. 197, 341–2.
26. John Forster, Eminent British Statesmen (1836), Vol. II, p. 352.
27. Her late husband had bequeathed her a wine customs grant in Ireland.
28. HMC, Lord de L’Isle and Dudley MSS, Vol. VI, p. 157; John Adamson, ‘Policy and Pomegranates: Art, Iconography, and Counsel in Rubens’ Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy of 1629–30’ in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds.), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2016), p. 18.
29. Chevreuse was also busy at this time plotting another Huguenot revolt in La Rochelle; J. H. Elliott, ‘The Year of the Three Ambassadors’ in Hugh Lloyd Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds.), History and Imagination (1981), p. 169; R. M. Smuts, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 366 (January 1978), p. 42.