The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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Diplomatic reports from this period testify to a sharp decline in James’s health, both physical and mental. The Venetian ambassador wrote home that James seemed ‘practically lost; he comes to various decisions and inclines to his usual negotiations; he does not care to fall in with the wishes of his son-in-law and the favourite. He now protests, now weeps, but finally gives in.’ It was reported that the King had become obsessed with importing Spanish asses from the Low Countries, ‘making great estimation of those asses, since he finds himself so well served with the mules to his litter’. Tillières, the French ambassador, wrote sadly that ‘the King descends deeper and deeper into folly every day, sometime swearing and calling upon God, heaven and the angels, at other times weeping, then laughing, and finally pretending illness in order to play upon the pity of those who urge him to generous actions and to show them that sickness renders him incapable of deciding anything, demanding only repose and, indeed, the tomb’.7
On 16 February 1624, Parliament was ‘expected to have begun, the King ready to have gone, thousands of people gathered to see him, the Lords in their robes’ – until news reached James of the sudden death of the Duke of Lennox, early that morning of apoplexy.8 The opening was postponed for three days, and Lennox was buried the following day at Westminster in the Chapel of Henry VII, with Bishop Williams officiating; on 19 April he was afforded a splendid funeral, ‘celebrated with great pomp, his portraiture being drawn in a chariot from Ely House … to Westminster’.9 James opened Parliament on Monday 19 February with a meandering and defensive opening speech.10 He had always tried to rule well, he claimed, and he deserved the love of his people. Now he needed the advice of his Parliament. How could the treaties with Spain be dealt with in such a way as to advance religion and the common good, and to restore the Palatinate to Frederick? He knew that there was talk that in negotiating with Spain he had sacrificed religion to political expediency, ‘But, as God shall judge me, I never thought or meant it, nor ever in a word expressed anything that savoured of it.’11 ‘Never soldiers marching the deserts and dry sands of Arabia where there is no water, could more thirst in hot weather for drink, than I do now for a happy end of this our meeting. And now I hope that after the miscarriage of three Parliaments this will prove happy … Consider with yourselves the state of Christendom, my children and this my own kingdom. Consider of these, and upon all give me your advice … you that are the representative body of this kingdom … [be] my true glasses to show me the hearts of my people.’12
Five days later, in Whitehall’s Banqueting House, Buckingham met with a joint meeting of Lords and Commons to give the details of the past year’s relations between England and Spain, pointing up the duplicity of the Spanish at every opportunity. The Spanish ambassadors objected to James about the Duke’s characterisation of their King, but Buckingham’s was precisely the message the parliamentarians had been waiting to hear: he was cleared by both Houses of any blame in his dealings in Madrid. Buoyed by this account, the Commons and a small group of lords decided to petition the King to break off negotiations with Spain. But while Buckingham was back in Westminster, James had been in contact with the Spanish ambassadors, and was being tempted back towards negotiations with Philip.13 He seems to have attacked Buckingham, since the Duke wrote angrily to the King, complaining of the ‘unfavourable interpretation I find made of a thankful and loyal heart in calling my words crude Catonic [severe] words’, and the suspicion that he was prone ‘to look more to the rising sun’, Charles, ‘than my maker’, the King. James had cried off a meeting with him, giving as an excuse the ‘fierce rheum and cough’ he had caught while hunting that afternoon; ‘notwithstanding of your cold,’ Buckingham wrote bitterly, ‘you were able to speak with the King of Spain’s instruments, though not with your own subjects.’14
Buckingham rode to Theobalds on 4 March to defuse the situation. James, mollified by this display of apparent humility, agreed to receive the proposed parliamentary deputation, although he still refused to commit himself to accept their advice. On 11 March, the Commons came to the resolution that only when there was a formal assurance that all negotiations between the King and Spain had ended, would they be ready ‘to assist His Majesty with both our persons and abilities in a Parliamentary course’.15 James demanded on 14 March a specific vote of five subsidies and ten fifteenths to cover the ‘great business’ of the military effort, plus one subsidy and two fifteenths annually until his debts were covered – a total of some half a million pounds.16 On hearing the King’s demands, which Parliament was sure to reject, Charles and Buckingham ‘turned pale’, according to the Venetian ambassador, ‘and the Prince never uttered a word the whole day’.17 It was left to Buckingham to act as an intermediary between King and Parliament; he persuaded James to reword his response according to Parliament’s modifications, and on 17 March informed the Houses that the King had accepted their terms, dropping his call for annual payments, and asking for six subsidies and twelve fifteenths for war expenses, some £780,000. James promised to accept Parliament’s advice and to break off the treaties with Spain.18 Parliament offered three subsidies and three fifteenths, about half of what was required; Buckingham took the draft declaration to James, who insisted on only a few amendments. A few days later, a delegation from both Houses met the King at Whitehall; there James accepted their advice to break off the treaties, but clarified that he would only be committed to war to the extent that Parliament fulfilled their promise to assist him. He expected more than the three subsidies: this would do ‘at least to make a good beginning of the war’ but ‘when the end will be, God knows’. Conduct of war was his own affair: ‘I desire you to understand, I must have a faithful and secret council of war that must not be ordered by a multitude, for so my designs might be discovered beforehand. A penny of this money shall not be bestowed but in the sight of your own committees. But whether I shall send twenty thousand or ten thousand, whether by sea or by land, east or west, by diversion or otherwise, by invasion upon the Bavarian or the Emperor – you must leave that to the King.’19
Buckingham’s display of political savoir faire had come as a shock to the Spanish ambassadors in England, who had (like many others) dismissed him as a mere favourite. Now they attempted to turn James against him. In early April, they told James that he was ‘a prisoner, or at leastwise besieged, so as no man could be admitted to come at him’, that the Duke had made strategic alliances with ‘all the popular men of the state’, as part of his masterplan to assume government himself. Buckingham had ‘oftentimes bragged openly in Parliament, that he had made the King yield to this and that’, they continued; Britain was ‘not now governed by a monarchy, but by a triumviri, whereof Buckingham was the first and chiefest, the Prince the second, and the King the last; and that all look towards solem orientem [the rising sun, Charles]’. To combat this, they urged that James must show himself to be ‘as he was reputed, the oldest and wisest King in Europe’ by freeing himself from his captivity and danger, by ‘cutting off so dangerous and ungrateful an affector of greatness and popularity as the Duke was’. According to the Spaniards, this touched a nerve with James who admitted that recently he had had ‘good cause to suspect’ Buckingham, and especially his influence over Prince Charles. When his son rode to Madrid, James continued, ‘he was as well affected to that nation as heart could desire, and as well disposed as any son in Europe; but now he was strangely carried away with rash and youthful counsels and followed the humour of Buckingham, who had he knew not how many devils within him since that journey’.20
Buckingham’s troubles did not all stem from the Spanish. At the same time, the court was buzzing about the news of the return from France to England of Arthur Brett, a young kinsman of Lord Treasurer Middlesex who had tried before to inveigle his way into James’s affections. The Venetian ambassador saw Brett’s return as part of a scheme by Middlesex to oust Buckingham,21 and the Duke, it seems, had similar apprehensions. Middlesex, a blunt-speaking man, had had the nerve
to tell the Prince in a Council meeting in 1622 that public good outweighed private feeling in the case of royal marriages, and that ‘he ought to submit his private distaste therein to the general good and honour of the kingdom’. Charles had retorted sharply that the Lord Treasurer should ‘judge of his merchandises, if he would, for he was no arbiter in points of honour’. Now Middlesex had emerged as perhaps the most vocal opponent of the pro-war policy. Buckingham decided that the time had come to act and on 5 April one of his protégés, Sir Miles Fleetwood, brought charges against Middlesex in the Lower House, and Middlesex was shortly after impeached on charges of financial corruption.22
As the case progressed, James sounded out various peers and realised that ‘most did love to warm themselves in the light of the rising sun’, that they supported Charles. He urged the Prince and Duke to abandon the impeachment, telling Charles ‘that he should not take part with a faction in either House, but to reserve himself, that both sides might seek him; and chiefly to take heed, how he bandied to pluck down a peer of the realm by the arm of the Lower House, for the Lords were the hedge between himself and the people; and a breach made in that hedge, might in time perhaps lay himself open’.23 When the Duke refused to abandon the impeachment, James raged at him: ‘By God, Steenie, you are a fool and will shortly repent this folly and will find that in this fit of popularity you are making a rod with which you will be scourged yourself.’ Charles, he declared with wonderful foresight, ‘would live to have his bellyful of Parliaments, and that when he should be dead, he would have too much cause to remember how much he had contributed to the weakening of the Crown by this precedent he was now so found of.’24 As it became clear that the Lord Treasurer would indeed sink, James called Bishop Williams to Greenwich to give his advice. Williams, who had himself been vocal in the hearings against Middlesex, was candid: ‘Sir, I must deal faithfully. Your son, the Prince, is the main champion that encounters the Treasurer; whom, if you save, you foil yourself. For though matters are carried by the whole vote of Parliament, and are driven on by the Duke, yet they that walk in Westminster Hall, call this the Prince’s undertaking, whom you will blast in his bud, to the opinion of all your subjects, if you suffer not your old, and perhaps innocent servant to be plucked from the sanctuary of your mercy. Necessity must excuse you from inconstancy, or cruelty.’25 Realising that to fight for the Lord Treasurer would be to fight against his son, heir and the next King, James admitted defeat. Middlesex was found guilty by the Lords, deprived of the office of Lord Treasurer, imprisoned in the Tower, and fined £50,000.
Buckingham missed the fall of Middlesex. On the very day that the Lord Treasurer was charged in the Commons, the Duke, perhaps worn down by the constant travelling and negotiation, fell ill and had to retire to his estate at New Hall. But his enemies took advantage of even this brief absence to push further their case with the King. The current Spanish ambassador, Father Diego Lafuente (Padre Maestro), alleged to James that Buckingham had deliberately sabotaged the marriage to the Infanta as part of a deal with the Elector Frederick. Buckingham had designs to marry his daughter to Frederick’s son; by keeping Charles childless, Buckingham’s hypothetical grandson would one day gain the British thrones. It was a far-fetched, and presumably baseless, accusation, but it served to unnerve James.26 A few days later Inojosa alleged further that Buckingham had been negotiating with various lords, and they had concluded that if James ‘would not accommodate himself to their counsels, they would give him a house of pleasure, whither he might retire himself to his sports’, and Charles would take the reins of government.27
This last possibility stung James – no doubt because it was horribly close to the state of affairs in which he had so long luxuriated. Leaving St James’s for Windsor for the annual St George’s Day Garter ceremonies, James sent Buckingham on ‘a slight errand’ just as he was about to join the King and Prince in their coach; Buckingham burst into tears, and asked to know what he had done to offend his master. James also wept, crying out that he was the unhappiest alive, to be forsaken by those dearest to him, before driving off to Windsor with Charles. Buckingham took to his couch at Wallingford House, refusing to see anybody until, at the insistence of Lord Keeper John Williams, he followed the King to Windsor and begged for a reconciliation, becoming as ‘inseparable as his shadow’. James accepted him, but was still committed to the idea of an investigation.28 By the time the two men returned to London on 5 May, Buckingham was still ill, and took to his bed at Wallingford House. By 10 May, it was said that his survival was uncertain, and James came to spend three hours by his bedside. As Buckingham convalesced, James sent him regular gifts of cherries, and ‘the eyes, the tongue and the dowsets [testicles] of the deer he killed in Eltham Park’. When the press of suitors threatened a relapse, James placed a guard on Buckingham’s lodgings, giving rise to Spanish rumours that the Duke had gone insane, as his brother had done, or that the King did not trust him.29 But James’s regained love for Buckingham seemed genuine. On his final visit to Wallingford House he had prayed on his knees alongside the Duke’s bed, calling on God to cure his beloved Steenie or to give him the sickness. Nor would he now permit the Spanish ambassador into his presence: ‘If I admit Maestro,’ he said, ‘it will kill the Duke with grief.’30
After a brief period of convalescence with the King in the fresh air of Greenwich, Buckingham fell ill with fever again and retired to New Hall. James sent him and Kate gifts of ‘excellent melons, pears, sugared beans’, strawberries, raspberries and ‘assurance of better fruit planted in your bosom than ever grew in paradise’. Their correspondence from this period is passionate: James’s letters, wrote Buckingham, had ‘more care than servants have of masters, than physicians have of their patients … Of more tenderness than fathers have of children, or more friendship than between equals; of more affection than between lovers in the best kind, man and wife.’ James was ‘my purveyor, my goodfellow, my physician, my make, my friend, my father, my all’.31 But, as ever, Buckingham could not feel secure. There were rumours that James was talking to the Spanish ambassadors, and that he had met with the Earl of Bristol on his return from Madrid, and was planning to be lenient at his trial. There was also the more easily confirmed news that Middlesex was already out of gaol, and Arthur Brett was back at court.32
On 29 May 1624, James prorogued Parliament, promising to recall it ‘towards the winter’. The session ended with another display of royal anger, as James launched into a tirade against the Commons and, more problematically, refused to give his assent to a number of bills. James had claimed that the restitution of the Palatinate was the only valid reason to declare war and insisted that this be included in the preamble to the subsidy bill. Seeing that the Commons had refused to do so, James asserted his right to ‘alter it and set his marginal note upon it’.33 On the day Parliament was prorogued, James dined, as he did frequently, with Lancelot Andrewes, now Bishop of Winchester, and Neile, Bishop of Durham, on hand to provide learned discourse. Parliament’s intransigency was playing on James’s mind. He asked whether or not he could take the money of his subjects without parliamentary sanction. Neile replied ‘readily’: ‘God forbid, Sir, but you should; you are the breath of our nostrils.’
Andrewes was more equivocal. ‘Sir, I have no skill to judge of Parliament.’
‘No put-offs, my lord,’ exclaimed the King, ‘answer me presently.’
‘Then, Sir,’ replied Andrewes, ‘I think it’s lawful for you to take my brother Neile’s money, for he offers it.’ The bishop’s rejoinder provoked laughter, but not from the King, who realised the wisdom behind the wit.34
Parliament had granted three subsidies, designed first to strengthen naval forces for a war which, it was assumed, would be fought at sea, and second, to provide support for the Dutch against Spain. Together the subsidies amounted to £253, 139, 12 shillings and tuppence three farthings. Charles and Buckingham ignored the figures. Over the next few months, they budgeted £720,000 for military preparations,
not including the navy; £240,000 to Ernst von Mansfeld to pay for the levying of more English soldiers to fight in the Protestant cause (the last of the 1619 volunteers had recently surrendered); and another £360,000 to the King of Denmark to finance his entry into the Thirty Years’ War. They envisaged leading a huge European alliance against Spain, and committed themselves recklessly, with no financial underpinning. On only one matter did they come to an agreement with James: that Charles should pursue a marriage with Henrietta Maria, the sister of King Louis XIII of France.
These negotiations made real headway when Buckingham returned to court in mid-June. The French had caveats. They did not want to alienate Spain. They worried about the treatment of Roman Catholics in England. James had assured the Commons that no marriage treaty would include concessions to English Catholics. When France demanded a marriage settlement on a par with that negotiated with Spain, James lost interest, saying it was impossible. Buckingham disagreed, and set out to isolate James by winning over first Charles and then a new French ambassador, the Marquis d’Effiat, who arrived in late June. He certainly made a favourable impact on d’Effiat, who wrote back to Louis claiming that the Duke ‘was the unchallenged ruler of England. The King … loved him so deeply that he let him do what he liked and saw everything through his eyes. The Prince looked on him as the sole source of his happiness and contentment. And as for the ministers, they were all Buckingham’s creatures and held their places only during his good pleasure.’35