The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  More romantic souls knew of St Albans’ long devotion to Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, whom he had served for forty three years. The less romantic scoffed, recalling prolific tales that it was the Earl, not Charles I, who was the true father of Henrietta Maria’s children, including Charles II himself.

  Court insiders, furthermore, knew that the 73-year-old Earl of St Albans had retired from his last position, as Charles II’s Lord Chamberlain, four years ago.

  Which made what happened next seem extremely peculiar indeed.

  St Albans’ carriage rumbled through the crowded streets of Windsor until the coachman pulled back on the reins outside the lodgings of the French ambassador. The footmen in their austere black and white liveries jumped down, one pounding on the ambassador’s gate, another opening the carriage door, a third bringing down the Earl’s special chair. Their strong hands supported the Earl’s arms as he eased himself out of the carriage and into the chair. He was then borne swiftly out of sight into the dark interior of the house.

  Hidden from the eyes and ears of the town gossips, St Albans’ footmen set his chair down in the elaborately furnished drawing room, bowed to the gentleman they saw standing there, and departed neatly. Paul de Barillon, Louis XIV of France’s ambassador to Charles II’s court for the last year, made his own obeisance to the old man, who took off his broad-brimmed hat in return.

  A long career in diplomacy and many nights in the gambling salons of London and Paris had made St Albans’ appearance extremely familiar to Barillon. Age – helped along by three-quarters of a century of almost uninterrupted consumption of courtly delicacies: roast quails and partridges, stags’ tongues and sirloin steaks, marrow patties and crayfish, meat jellies and custards, and all the other heavily-larded wonders of seventeenth-century high-living, and all washed down with what must have amounted to a shipful of the finest Bordeaux wines and brandies – had turned the once strikingly-handsome Cavalier into a barely recognisable shadow of his younger self.

  The Earl’s brown wig was so lustrous that you might almost forget the bristles of his real, white hair underneath, cropped short to deter lice. His bloated face seemed worn out by his many years’ over-indulgence. The careworn eyes were framed and half-concealed between drooping eyelids and sagging bags, the pupils now white and almost sightless.

  St Albans’ full lips seemed pale compared to the maze of blood vessels mottling his nose. Below his face his chins rolled down into a thick lace neck-cloth, which in turn gave way to his long, and bulging, waistcoat.

  Over this, on its blue ribbon, hung the glittering image of St George slaying the dragon, the insignia of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Besides this and the blue Garter band strapped just below the knee of his swollen left leg, the Earl’s attire was expensive but plain – black velvet and white satin. His fleshy right hand, with its brown patina of liver-spots, grasped a silver-topped cane. His black shoes with their white ribbons were disproportionately over-sized, padded with cotton to ease the perpetual pain of his gout.

  The Earl of St Albans’ appearance was extremely familiar to Barillon, as was his history. Indeed, knowing about the Earl of St Albans was near the top of the list of requirements for any prospective ambassador to the Court of St James. Very few but Lord St Albans knew both Charles II and Louis XIV equally on such intimate terms, nor understood so well the perplexing twists and turns of their minds.

  Still, his sudden arrival in the French Ambassador’s lodgings now must have filled the younger man with intense anticipation. The future of Britain and France lay in the gouty hands of this elderly, retired courtier, who had come to discuss a highly-secret plan for Europe – a plan which could prove explosive if the enemies of Louis XIV and Charles II ever caught scent of it.

  So when the Earl began to speak in his fluent if somewhat old-fashioned French, the Ambassador listened with extreme attention. St Albans related how God, the Divine Architect of the Universe, had used his secret, sacred geometry to create the world. Two and a half thousand years ago, Brutus, great grandson of Aeneas, settled Albion’s hills with descendants of survivors of the siege of Troy. After Brutus died, the land became miserably partitioned and remained so until Charles II’s grandfather, the magnificent James VI of Scotland, had inherited the throne of England and Wales, and the Lordship of Ireland. Known thenceforth as James I, he had at last brought the entire British Isles under one glorious ruler.

  The Earl enumerated Charles II’s possessions in the East and West Indies including the rich jewels of Bombay and Barbados, the growing trading-stations clinging to the west coast of savage Africa, and all the colonies penetrating the wild forests up the eastern seaboard of North America, not least Jermyn’s own vast estates in the Northern Neck of Virginia.

  Then he spoke of France, whose people were descended from the Trojans, too, and whose kings derived their ancestry from Aeneas’s cousin Priam, the last king of Troy. Once hopelessly divided into semi-autonomous fiefdoms, France was now, too, united under the centralising power of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and now, too, expanding into colonies around the world, often abutting and sometimes in conflict with those of Britain.

  Barillon nodded politely at this tiny barb, knowing that the Earl would unfold his plan next. Running his plump fingers through the air, St Albans traced the world map of the Britain and France’s adversaries. He told the ambassador of the powerful commercial empire of the Dutch Republic, rival to both Britain and France.

  Sweden and Denmark, he said, and the north German trading towns of the Hanseatic League, not to mention the multiplicity of German princedoms, disunited by religious denomination, were useful as allies, irritating as enemies, worth keeping an eye on, but seldom of very great consequence. The realms to the east were of even less consequence. There lay Poland, whose throne Louis XIV was planning to acquire for his family. Beyond lay the barbarous Russian Tsardom.

  To the south, Portugal, clinging to the Iberian coast, with her own trading empire, was firmly allied to both France and Britain through Charles II’s marriage to Queen Catherine. Out of all the Italian states, Savoy, Mantua, Naples, Rome and the rest, only Tuscany, ruled from Florence by St Albans’s old drinking-companion Cosmo de Medici, was a genuine friend to France. The rest allied themselves to whichever greater European power they happened to be looking at when the wind changed.

  The Earl sighed speaking of Venice and the great struggle of the Doge and his heroic ally Prince Rákóczy in Transylvania, against the galleys and scimitar-wielding armies of the Sultan, which pushed forth unchecked from the portals of Turkish Constantinople. The Sultan’s only virtue, the Earl told Barillon, was the trouble he was causing the Hapsburgs – the greatest enemy of Louis XIV and Charles II.

  He emphasised this point, colour rising in his cheeks as he delineated the territories of the Holy Roman Empire including Bohemia, the Protestant kingdom that had been so sorely crushed by the Hapsburg emperor when the Earl was still a boy.

  His finger passed across the world to the other Hapsburg domain, Spain, with all her swathes of gold-bearing jungle in South America. Spain, the Earl repeated angrily, whose Inquisition aimed wipe out man’s ability to think freely, just as her soldiers had annihilated the noble empire of the Incas.

  Habsburg Spain, whose armies had been ejected from the Dutch provinces by the House of Orange and the English volunteer armies at the beginning of the century, still occupied the southern Netherlands from Antwerp right up to Lille with its ruthless armies, and remained the most pernicious thorn in the side of northern Europe.

  As long as Parliament had the power to vote Charles II money through taxation, the Earl said, it could continue its obstructive stance: opposing the Closer Union of the two crowns of England and France, against the Spanish. Both the Houses of Lords and Commons were packed full of men only too happy to drink French wine and follow French fashions. Yet the moment anyone suggested co-operating with France against the Hapsburgs, the politicians howled with protest, waving the
ir ridiculous order-papers as if anywhere in their beer-addled brains they had the slightest idea of how foreign policy worked. So deep-seated in their Anglican upbringing was the Francophobia of the majority of Members of Parliament, they would rather Britain became mediocre allies of the republican Dutch and the haughty Hapsburgs, than fight for future greatness by the side of France!

  Barillon had a pretty good idea of what the Earl would say next. If Louis XIV would send sufficient money – Charles II would not need to ask Parliament to grant him taxes. Free of Parliament, Charles could honour the promises he had already made, eight years earlier, to form a special relationship with Louis XIV.

  Between them they could conquer and divide the Spanish Netherlands. The King of France’s claims to the Habsburg throne of Spain could be made good, and South America would be theirs for the taking. Charles II’s nephew, William of Orange, could be helped to overthrow the States General – the Dutch Republican government – and take up his place as sovereign in the Dutch provinces. Thus united and vastly increased in their joint power, the armed force and commercial weight of Louis and Charles would become invincible.

  It was a brilliant and audacious plan that would promote Britain into a super power in Europe at the expense of the Habsburgs – and it was the Earl’s own, secretly sanctioned by the King in private conversations. This was why, although Charles II had a host of ministers who would ordinarily have undertaken such work, the King had entrusted these incredibly sensitive negotiations to an old man, born a mere squire, who no longer held any official position whatsoever.

  I

  THE EDUCATION OF A COURTIER 1605 – 1622

  You’ve lived in Court, where wit and language flow,

  Where judgements thrive, and where true manners grow;

  There great and good are seen in their first springs,

  The breasts of Princes, and the minds of Kings;

  Where beauty shines clothed in her brightest rays,

  To gain all loves, all wonder, and all praise.

  Thomas Killigrew,

  The Prisoners and Claracilla, 1641, dedication

  Late one afternoon towards the end of January 1605, seventy-three years before the September day when the Earl of St Albans’ coach left Windsor Castle, England lay under a blanket of snow.

  Villagers dragged what little firewood their lords had allowed them home to their cold, dank cottages. Farmers sat by warm hearths in village alehouses complaining about the weather. Young nobles, splendid in their thick beaver-fur hats and richly-braided doublets, admired the elegant spirals their sharp skates were carving on the frozen surfaces of lakes.

  In the middle of a deer park by the Thames, three miles west of the market town of Twickenham, stood Hanworth House. Heavy velvet curtains were drawn across all the glazed windows of the Tudor mansion. Above, on the sharp-pointed roofs, a forest of corkscrew-shaped red brick chimneys belched out smoke from the well-stocked hearths beneath.

  The house was full of noise. After racing hard across the snowy deer park to beat the gathering dusk, a hunting party had arrived home. Wolfhounds and mastiffs pushed through the boots of servants and huntsmen, skidding over the reed-strewn floorboards of the icy hallway. The hunting party piled into the glowing warmth of the Great Parlour, where the largest of the mansion’s hearths blazed.

  The yelping of dogs and chattering of people drowned out the perpetual noise of the house’s principal occupants.

  As in every house in Stuart England, rats outnumbered humans many times over. Behind every panelled wainscot they scuttled about on their endless quest for smaller vermin and scraps of food left behind by men and dogs.

  Every day the servants threw pieces of bread and butter laced with arsenic into the corners of the rooms. Yet nothing had ever stilled the scratching footfalls of the vermin.

  Collapsing into the high-backed oak chair closest to the roaring fire, the head of the household, Sir William Killigrew, vied with his sons-in-law to relate the best tales of the day’s carnage.

  With a tight lace ruff round his red neck and a grey goatee beard and clipped moustache partially covering his rosy face, Sir William was the epitome of an Elizabethan courtier.

  Like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir William Killigrew’s roots were planted deep in the iron-red soil of the West Country. He owed his advancement at court to his brother, who had married the sister-in-law of the Queen’s First Minister, Lord Burleigh – a connection which might seem trivial to us today, but at that period meant everything.

  As a result, Sir William had served Queen Elizabeth I as a Gentleman of her Privy Chamber. The complex ceremonials and codes of court behaviour that both baffled and excluded outsiders had become second nature to him. By 1605 Elizabeth had been dead for two years, and a new king, James VI of Scotland and I of England, sat on the throne, but her memory still loomed massively over the nation’s consciousness.

  Few could ever have presumed to call Elizabeth I a friend, but Sir William had rejoiced in the knowledge that his sovereign held him in high esteem.

  While she was still young enough to enjoy vigorous exercise, Sir William had been one of those fortunate courtiers with whom she loved to ride, the hounds baying after a noble stag, the sun shining on her rosy cheeks. When she was old, with white makeup daubed thick over her harrowed face, she would sometimes bring her retinue of ministers and priests, scribes and poets, musicians and tumblers, cooks and ladies-in-waiting, to stay at Hanworth.

  Here, Queen Elizabeth could sit with him and watch the herds of deer run through the bracken in the short, golden autumn afternoons. Her last visit had been four years ago. She had passed the time sitting for one of the last portraits ever painted of her. The visit coincided with the baptism of the daughter of Sir William’s errant son-in-law, Sir Thomas Jermyn. The girl had been named after Elizabeth I. Though it was not recorded at the time, it is likely that the Queen was the child’s godmother.

  Now, little Elizabeth Jermyn was upstairs with the nurses, chasing about with her two brothers, Robert and Thomas, and all of her Killigrew and Berkeley cousins.

  With Sir William in the warm parlour were the grandchildren’s parents. These included Sir William’s daughter, also called Elizabeth, and her husband Sir Maurice Berkeley, the scion of an ancient family whose pedigree stretched back to the Norman Conquest. Everyone hoped the baby she was carrying would turn out to be a boy – and eventually it did. The child would become Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia.

  Also in the parlour was Sir William’s daughter Catherine, a small woman with a sweet smile, blushing in the warmth of the room and of seven months’ pregnancy. Her unborn child was destined to own a great swathe of Virginia too, but his life and destiny were firmly rooted in Europe – and Europe’s destiny, perhaps, too.

  Sir William looked up to see his other son-in-law, Sir Thomas Jermyn, the husband of Catherine and father of her unborn child.

  Thirty two-year old Sir Thomas was seldom seen without the thin stem of a clay pipe sticking out between his handsome goatee beard and thick, dark brown moustache. He was one of the first people to have enjoyed the thick, sweet smoke of the tobacco leaves that his friend Sir Walter Raleigh had brought back from the Americas. He would continue to indulge the hobby all his life, stating in the Commons once that ‘he has long used it and finds no hurt’.

  Although he was now a moderately successful courtier, his close friendship with Elizabeth’s heart-throb favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, had brought him perilously close to falling foul of Elizabeth I’s spy network, that she had inherited from the days of Lord Burleigh (who was Sir William Killigrew’s sister-in-law’s brother-in-law) and his protégé Francis Walsingham.

  Sir Thomas had served under Essex on three expeditions, fighting for the Protestant Henri of Navarre against the Catholic King of France, then attacking the Spanish in the Azores and, most recently, subduing Catholic rebels in Ireland. The latter two were expensive failures, and when Essex ca
pped incompetence with flagrant disobedience to the Queen’s orders, he found himself faced with disgrace.

  Essex’s solution was to blame everything on the Queen’s counsellors, and tried to raise the citizens of London in a rebellion aimed at overthrowing them. This foolhardy escapade failed and Essex was arrested. Sir Thomas, who had acted as Essex’s spokesman, was in danger of guilt by association, and only managed to distance himself from the Earl’s circle just before the arrests began.

  On Monday, 26 November 1599, while Essex awaited trial, Sir Thomas made a prudent marriage to Sir William Killigrew’s daughter Catherine, thus bringing himself within the network that included the powerful family of the late Lord Burleigh.

  Their first child, a daughter, was born in November 1600. Naming her after Elizabeth I was another step calculated to atone for Sir Thomas’s past connections with Essex. Just as well, a mere three months later, the Earl was beheaded.

  On this snowy day at Hanworth, however, this family link to the old court, young Mistress Elizabeth Jermyn, the Virgin Queen’s probable godchild, fell into a terrible fit.

  Alerted by the screams of children and nurses, the family went hurrying upstairs. They found the child sweating and shivering violently. The bread and butter she had found on the floor had seemed appealing to her. She had forgotten the adults’ continual warnings to keep away from it because it contained arsenic to kill the rats. Already, the chemical began its terrible work, distending Elizabeth’s stomach and causing her to vomit black bile in violent spasms from her contorted insides. Within Cradling the bump of her unborn child and choking back her tears, Lady Catherine told her father she could not bear to give birth in a house stained with such an appalling tragedy. Accompanied by their retinue of servants, she and Sir Thomas left a few days later, huddled in a carriage with furs piled over their knees for warmth.