The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  ‘Brilliant.’

  GILLIAN TINDALL

  ‘A moving love story between a commoner and a royal, as well as a breathtakingly fresh window into the courts of Charles I and Charles II, and the foundation of London’s West End.’

  FIONA MOUNTAIN

  Charles II’s succession to the throne came at a time of national turbulence: his father had been beheaded, Oliver Cromwell had usurped his right to reign. England was at sea among Europe’s constantly shifting allegiances. But Henry Jermyn, a Suffolk commoner, lover to the queen mother and possibly even father to the king, was there to keep the royal family together.

  Jermyn’s deft way of secretly manipulating government and raising an army almost prevented Civil War. He was instrumental in saving the monarchy and set in motion the rise of the British Empire. A duellist, soldier and spymaster, Jermyn was close to the great men of the 17th century: Francis Bacon (his kinsman), Louis XIV, Cardinal Richelieu, Inigo Jones, Samuel Peypys, Christopher Wren and Thomas Hobbes (whose Leviathan he inspired).

  The King’s Henchman is a story of love, family, regicide, adversity and last-minute escapes, set against the backdrop of bloody Civil War. It is also the remarkable love story of a commoner and a royal who together shared a vision for Britain and created St James’s Square and Greenwich Park as its first grand expression.

  Anthony Adolph wrote the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry of Henry Jermyn and has studied him, and pieced together his life from primary sources, over the past 20 years. A genealogist educated at Durham University, he has written several books on genealogy and presented programs for the BBC and Channel 4. He is a distant relative of Oliver Cromwell and lives in Canterbury.

  THE KING’S HENCHMAN

  Stuart Spymaster and Architect of the British Empire

  by

  Anthony Adolph

  Dedicated (to misquote Bishop Spratt) to Scott Crowley – ‘that in these Papers my name and Mr Crowley’s name shall be read together for posterity’.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prelude: The great coach (Thursday, 12 September 1678)

  1 Education of a courtier (1605-1622)

  2 The Madrid embassy (1622-1623)

  3 Courting the Louvre (1624-1628)

  4 Two disputed cases of paternity (1628-1635)

  5 Sir William D’Avenant’s dream of Madagascar (1635-1637)

  6 ‘Speak with Mr Jermyn about it’ (1637-1640)

  7 ‘Do something extraordinary’ (1641)

  8 Colonel Lord Jermyn (1641-1643)

  9 ‘The strongest pillar in the land’ (1644)

  10 ‘Some succour for England’ (1644-1645)

  11 The ‘Great Hell-cat’ (1645-6)

  12 ‘The Louvre Presbyter’ (1646-1649)

  13 ‘Our own condition is like to be very sad’ (1649-1656)

  14 The Château of Colombes (1656-1660)

  15 Restoration! (1660-1662)

  16 ‘Grand Master of the Freemasons’ (1662)

  17 Somerset House (1662-3)

  18 The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664-1666)

  19 The road to Breda (1666-1667)

  20 The Grand Design (1667-8)

  21 Saint-Denis (1669)

  22 The Secret Treaty of Dover (1669-1678)

  23 ‘Joining together to surpass all others’ (1678-1685)

  24 ‘The Funeral of Glory’? (1685 – present)

  Elegy: (Wednesday, 2 January 1684)

  Appendices:

  The calendar in the seventeenth century

  Red herrings

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes on sources

  Copyright

  Please note that all spellings have been modernized and dates are given in modern form.

  FOREWORD

  But I (most righteously) am proud of thee.

  Sir William d’Avenant, ‘To Henry Jermin’.

  The Great Fire ravaged the City of London at the start of September 1666. The stone walls of old St Paul’s Cathedral exploded in the intense heat, and molten lead from its roof flowed through the nearby gutters like lava. Panic spread in waves among the terrified Londoners as the flames rampaged through their homes and shops.

  Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, heard news of the fire from mariners along the quayside at Calais, where he waited impatiently for the wind to change so that his ship could set sail and carry him home. Behind him in Paris fretted Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother, whom he had served with such loyalty that most people assumed he was her secret husband and even the real father of her son the King, Charles II.

  Around Jermyn, on either side of the Channel, spread a vast spider’s web of informants and agents, Freemasons and Presbyterians, junior British courtiers in his pay and French officials who smuggled him news of the business of Louis XIV, the Sun King. But none of them now could speed him information on what he most wanted to know.

  How far west had the fire spread, and how many Londoners had been killed? Had Whitehall perished, with its marbled Banqueting House where the previous king, Charles I, Henrietta-Maria’s husband, had been beheaded in 1649? And what had happened to the embryonic new city he was building on the Queen’s dower lands in St James’s which, by a series of leases and freehold grants, were now his too?

  Since the 1660 Restoration, which he had done so very much to bring about, Jermyn’s masons had applied their set squares and compasses to the work of planning, levelling, squaring and civilizing the rough fields beyond the western edge of London. He had laid out the ground-plans of elegant straight streets of fine, classically-styled houses around one magisterial square, St James’s Square, all so radically different to the old hotchpotch of the City.

  Much of the City was indeed devoured by the fire. But at the same time Jermyn set sail, his new city was being saved both by the wind and the unstoppable energy of Charles II. The King fought the Great Fire like a military campaign, creating a successful firebreak beyond the Strand between old London, and the new London in the West End.

  Over the heady Restoration years which followed, Jermyn’s St James’s continued to rise up, a new city whose broad, paved, clean, well-lit streets became the blueprint by which the City of London itself would be reconstructed. Inspired by Jermyn’s vision for a new Rome, and for the new Empire which Britain’s overseas colonies were soon to become, the fields spreading north and west of St James’s blossomed under a new patchwork of squares, each vying with Jermyn’s original to become ever more liveable, elegant and refined.

  It is easy to find a single word or phrase to sum up the lives of the subjects of most biographies, because often they have only been one noteworthy thing: ‘writer’, ‘prime minister’, ‘general’, ‘artist’, and that says it all. Jermyn defies such an easy description. One of the many inspiring things about him is the way his career was so multifaceted, opening up many fresh windows into the riotous and turbulent world of Stuart Britain.

  ‘Favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria’ is one phrase sometimes used about Jermyn. From 1626, until he broke his wand of office over Henrietta Maria’s open grave in 1669, Jermyn served continuously in the Queen’s household. Unofficially, she had known and trusted him even longer, since they had first met in Paris in 1624 – ever since she had recognised in him what a poet described as ‘a soul composed of the eagle and the dove’.

  Henry Jermyn lived in an era in which Charles I was busy enforcing the Divine Right of Kings, excluding virtually all his subjects from power. Yet in doing so he created a situation in which a handful of royal favourites could exercise very real power of their own – as in France. Jermyn’s contemporary and equivalent in France, Cardinal
Richelieu, was nothing, after all, if not a royal favourite. In England, Henrietta Maria was one of the few with direct access to Charles’s ear, and it is ironic that Jermyn, though he was only the younger son of a Suffolk squire, had access to hers, and thus found himself able to exercise ever greater power as Charles I’s power became more absolute.

  Much remains uncertain about Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s love life, but one thing is very obvious. Throughout his career, Henry Jermyn was close enough to the Queen of England for many stories to arise, to gain currency and to continue to buzz about the Stuart court long after all the main participants had died. Throughout seventeenth century Europe, too, Jermyn was widely believed to be Charles II’s father, and both of them were aware of the gossip.

  After the imprisonment and 1649 execution of Charles I, Jermyn was the closest thing Charles II had to a father-figure. Bearing this in mind, we can start at last to understand the exceptional manner in which Charles II acted towards this most loyal and resilient of Stuart courtiers. Because the King’s interactions with his leading courtiers had such a major impact on England’s history, it is of genuine importance to understand the peculiarly filial attitude lying at the heart of the King’s complex feelings about Henry Jermyn.

  Yet Jermyn was so much more than a royal favourite. A treatise could be written about Jermyn’s role as a diplomat. That is a title which, in Jermyn’s case, covers an extraordinary range of activities, from Jermyn’s junior role in the embassy which brought the young Princess Henrietta Maria over from France as a bride for Charles I, through to his covert negotiations with English Freemasons and Royalists, which were pivotal in the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and then his obscure and secretive negotiations with the French which kept Charles II secure on his throne to the very end.

  ‘Diplomat’ also helps explain Jermyn’s own self-deprecating style, for he maintained a diplomat’s inscrutability right up to the end. Only now, once Jermyn’s shadowy power-broking has been pieced together, can we appreciate how it preserved the Stuart monarchy, despite all the massive upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century.

  Was Jermyn also a spymaster? He did not run an organization comparable to MI6 or the CIA, for the simple reason that structured organisations like these had not yet come into being. But he grew up in a court saturated with a culture of spying and intrigue, inherited from the time of Elizabeth I’s great spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532-1590). Everyone with their eye to preferment was both a spy for their patrons, and spymaster to their own ad hoc ring of underlings and informants.

  John Cooper wrote of the success of Walsingham as a spymaster that

  … his agents were his own servants and clients, operating as individuals rather than as cogs in a departmental machine. The gathering of intelligence was lubricated by patronage and profit. Yet it is this absence of bureaucracy which makes Walsingham’s achievement so remarkable. Success or failure depended on his ability to keep alert, to spot the connections in the avalanche of information and to keep his people loyal.

  The same could easily be said of Jermyn, but his case was more remarkable still. Walsingham operated first as an underling of the great Lord Treasurer Lord Burleigh, and then as Secretary of State. Yet for the majority of Jermyn’s career, during which his spy network was so pivotal to the cause of the Stuarts in the Civil War and Restoration, he held no official government positions at all. Jermyn’s intelligence network was, nonetheless, just as important as Walsingham’s, and his lack of any official position allowed him much freer reign to act in the king’s interests.

  Although the modus operandi of a man who was both Freemason and spymaster almost allowed Jermyn’s fame to blow away into oblivion, his great spirit of Restoration confidence, of the new planning and building of London, has never left us. Before Jermyn, British towns and cities grew up randomly. Yet once Jermyn had created St James’s, an area with an overall, masterfully-planned effect – and once he had introduced the concept of planning regulations to ensure the effect he wanted was achieved – everyone started imitating him.

  From Georgian Edinburgh to Regency Brighton; from elegant, well-planned additions to towns and cities right across the British Isles and the expanding British colonies, and right down history to the broad new squares of the King’s Cross development in 21st-century London, the spark of architectural vision which Henry Jermyn ignited blazes on.

  My own relationship with Henry Jermyn started with a surprise encounter whilst reading about Queen Henrietta Maria in Joseph Gillow’s Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics in my university library. My interest in the period had been fired by finding I had a family connection to Oliver Cromwell, the nemesis of Charles I. It did not take long to find Henrietta Maria working vigilantly to bring Cromwell down, and there by her side was the shadowy figure of Jermyn.

  Gillow wrote that rumours of the Queen secretly marrying Jermyn could not be true, because in her funeral oration she was described as an exemplary, almost saintly woman. Even as a young history student I was aware that funeral eulogies are the last place you would expect to hear the truth about someone’s past. I took Gillow’s words as a challenge. I was determined to explore those rumours in more detail, and to discover the truth.

  The task proved harder, and more stimulating, than I could possibly have imagined. Many books about the Stuart era mention Jermyn, but often only as a footnote, not an active protagonist. Another major obstacle – and the reason why nobody had attempted a full biography of Jermyn before – is that all his correspondence with Henrietta Maria has vanished. Out of the thousands of letters they must have written to each other, none are known to have survived. There might be some in a secret part of the Royal Archives at Windsor (the archivists there say there aren’t) but, sadly, it is likely that Jermyn and Henrietta Maria destroyed their letters themselves. Much of what the Queen and her (rumoured) lover would have written about, both personal and diplomatic, was simply too sensitive. The repercussions for Charles II, had such letters been discovered soon after their deaths, could have been disastrous for him.

  At the start of the twentieth century, an ancestral nephew of Jermyn’s, the Reverend Sydenham Hervey, made an attempt to collect his letters to others, and any original references to him in reports and letters. But everything was scattered hopelessly throughout British and French archives. I was immensely lucky, working a century later, in having access to many more indexes, off- and on-line, in being able to obtain photocopies and print-outs of letters from microfilm, and also in having use of the invaluable inter-library loan system.

  By such means I was able, over two decades, to piece together the story. It was a huge jigsaw puzzle, and slowly a picture of the lives which Jermyn and Henrietta Maria led together began to emerge.

  Jermyn Street and the whole area which Jermyn developed around St James’s Square remains a stunning, physical monument to the lives, cares, achievements, and love (of whatever kind) of Jermyn and Henrietta Maria for each other. I hope this book may serve as a similar monument to them, in words.

  St James’s Square today, seen from the garden at the centre of the square. The dark building in the middle of the picture is Chatham House, and stands on the site of Jermyn’s second house, in which he died in 1684.

  PRELUDE

  THE GREAT COACH

  – Thursday, 12 September 1678 –

  ‘Paint then St Albans full of soup and gold.’

  from Last Instructions to a Painter (1681),

  attributed to Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

  Thursday, 12 September 1678.

  The gates of Windsor Castle were thrown wide open with a deafening crash. Thrown into golden relief by the hazy sun, a great coach came clattering out. Street hawkers and pickpockets jostled fine gentlemen in long wigs, all desperate to flee the pounding hooves of the carriage’s six enormous white horses.

  The coachman cracked his whip. The pounding grew louder as the coach gathered speed and hurtled down the narrow st
reets. Some street-side gawpers rushed with crazy courage up close to the vehicle to try to catch a glimpse of which of the celebrities of Charles II’s court might be sitting inside.

  Was it debauched Prince Rupert of the Rhine? Could it possibly be the dashing Earl of Rochester, whose outrageous poems about courtesans and penises make everyone gasp? Or was it the glamorous Nell Gwyn, former orange-seller turned royal mistress? Or perhaps another of Charles II’s many lovers, such as the aristocratic Barbara Villiers, whom the besotted king had made Duchess of Cleveland? Or even his latest French favourite, dark-eyed Hortense Mazarin?

  The coach’s dark interior yielded no secrets. But as the coach rumbled past, the unusually simple coat of arms painted on the carriage doors flashed before the crowd’s eyes.

  The shield was jet-black with three shining points of light against it. First was a five-pointed star, fierce in its blazing whiteness. Below was a crescent moon, lying on her back, her horns cradling her companion. Underneath the crescent was another star, also five-pointed. Supporting the arms were two greyhounds, their collars decorated with the fleur-de-lys emblems of the Bourbon dynasty.

  As they swept off their hats, it was only the elegant gentlemen of Windsor, well-versed in decoding the esoteric mysteries of heraldry, who could comment on whom the coach concealed.

  Inside the coach was Henry Jermyn, the Earl of St Albans. The young rakes of Windsor knew the Earl as the builder of the most modern and fashionable part of London including Jermyn Street and St James’s Square. To much older men he was the formidable courtier who, right back in the 1640s, had almost managed to bring an army to London to close down Parliament, and who thus, almost, averted the Civil War.