The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  A short journey through the snowy morning brought them to the north bank of the Thames. Here stood the sprawling complex of Hampton Court, which that ill-fated royal minister, Cardinal Wolsey, had built and given to Henry VIII three quarters of a century before.

  At Hampton Court, they embarked in Sir William’s barge, decked out in the Killigrew livery of a golden field emblazoned with magnificent black eagles.

  With a splash of the watermen’s oars the barge began its journey over the steely cold waters of the Thames. Huddled around the glowing brazier they watched as the snowy fields of Twickenham, Hammersmith and Fulham slipped past.

  Around them, the river bristled with birdlife, from ruffian cormorants to great flotillas of mallard and teal. Recently a seal had been spotted in the river. The Jermyns did not see it that day, but otters and water voles ran among the dead reeds on the riverbanks and splashed into the icy water in search of trout and salmon.

  Ahead of them, clearly visible even from Hampton Court, they could see the smoky haze which hung over London. Though the myth was now under fire from sceptical scholars, most people still believed that London had been founded over a thousand years before Christ by Trojan Brutus, and named Trinovantum, or ‘new Troy’, a name they still used occasionally. After a period of neglect, it was rebuilt just before the Romans came by Brutus’s descendant, King Lud, whose statue still gazed imperiously down on Londoners passing to and fro through the city’s Lud Gate. Lud’s city, or ‘London’, was now home to 350,000 inhabitants. Throughout the world, only Naples, Paris, and colossal Constantinople could boast a larger number of denizens.

  Many more barges like the Jermyns’, rowed by the brightly-liveried watermen, conveyed passengers of all classes up and down the great highway of water. Between the barges pushed wherries with their single square spritsails and the vessels of the lightermen, the special class of boatmen who carried goods of all descriptions from the great galleons and galleasses moored in the Upper Pool, down-river on the eastern side of London Bridge.

  Now they passed by the tall tower of Lambeth Palace standing almost alone amongst the snowy pasture-land on their right and saw the Privy Steps leading up to Whitehall Palace on their left. Lights shone out into the gloomy afternoon haze from Whitehall’s jumble of narrow casements and Gothic arched windows. Inside, clustered round their blazing fires, King James I and his court transacted the daily business of eating and dancing, scheming and plotting.

  Beyond Whitehall they passed by the ornamental gardens of the mansions in the Strand, over which they could just see the towers of the gatehouse of St James’s Palace.

  After the Strand came Temple Bar and the jumble of human dwellings which comprised the City of London itself. The boats were even more numerous here and by the shore women could be seen with their white arms plunged into the freezing water, washing clothes. Shivering horses stood knee-deep in the river while the buckets they carried were filled with water to be taken up through the narrow streets and sold to the wealthier citizens for drinking, cooking and, very rarely, for washing.

  Over the whole scene loomed the crinkled Gothic towers of old St Paul’s Cathedral, built, it was believed, over the site of Brutus’s temple of Apollo. In its shadows, the inhabitants of the great city were alternately freezing for want of fuel or risking igniting their timber houses by the heat of their blazing fires. Such a fog of smoke spewed forth from their teeming chimneys that it almost masked the dizzying stench of the sewage lying in the semi-frozen mud outside their bolted doors.

  So closely packed were the wooden houses of pauper and merchant alike that sociable citizens from one side of a street could lean out of their top-floor windows and shake hands with neighbours living opposite.

  Towards twilight, the Jermyns landed at one of the wooden quays that jutted out from the muddy banks of the river. Their carriage was waiting to convey them past Cornhill into the heart of the city, to Sir William’s town house in the parish of St Margaret’s Lothbury, near what is now the Bank of England.

  Here Lady Catherine mourned her way through the last two months of her pregnancy whilst an anxious Sir Thomas fidgeted helplessly, puffing nervously at the long, thin stem of his clay pipe. Towards the end of March Lady Catherine went into labour.

  Many women died giving birth or succumbed soon after to infections picked up birthing their infants. But in the midst of the stench and squalor and rats and all the heaving, sweating human multitude outside her windows, Lady Catherine survived the childbirth, and produced a healthy baby boy.

  They named him Henry, probably after the Protestant hero Henri of Navarre, although perhaps with a respectful nod as well to James I’s son, Prince Henry.

  The boy was baptised in the Anglican parish church of St Margaret’s Lothbury, near Sir William’s house, on Friday, 29 March 1605, which happened to be Good Friday, two days before Easter.

  He was bound up securely in swaddling clothes, and would remain constricted until his wriggling limbs encouraged him to start toddling. Then, if God ordained he should live so long, he would be put into a dress with a lace cap on his head, just like a girl, until his seventh birthday. From then on Jermyn would dress like a miniature adult in hose and doublet, even including a padded codpiece to enable him to imitate the swaggering costume favoured by grown men at the time.

  1614 Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (Yale Center for British Art).jpg”. Caption --- Lady Catherine Jermyn (née Killigrew), mother of Henry, painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

  Although the Jermyns and their extended family rejoiced at the successful birth, little Henry’s chances of surviving to the age of one were less than fifty per cent. Besides cot deaths from unknown causes, diseases such as smallpox and measles took their toll on numerous babies, and many adults as well.

  The odds of him living beyond his first birthday were decreased sharply by the mere fact of his being in London. The lice that roamed through most Londoners’ hair carried typhus on their bloated bodies. As the spring days lengthened, the rotting piles of horse and human manure which lay outside the windows became nurseries for millions of flies which crawled over meat in the kitchens leaving lethal diarrhoea germs behind in their footsteps. When summer came the mosquitoes that swarmed over the banks of the Thames injected countless Londoners with malaria.

  Yet more feared than any of these diseases were the bouts of bubonic plague. People thought it was borne by stale air, but in reality it was carried by the fleas who sucked the blood of the rats, and which allowed the pestilence to sweep in deadly, periodic waves through the City of London.

  To give little Henry a better chance of survival, Lady Catherine took him on the first of many journeys of his eventful life. At some point after March, probably once the warmth of late spring had dried out the muddy roads, their carriage transported them out of the City and through Mile End, escorted by a retinue of servants wearing Sir Thomas’s livery of black and silver, armed with pistols and halberds to defend them against the murderous robbers who lurked in Waltham Forest.

  They proceeded north along the well-beaten road that led to Newmarket in the Cambridge fens, where the court loved to come to watch horse racing. At Newmarket the road divided and they took the easterly route, over the gentle hills of western Suffolk to the market town of Bury St Edmunds.

  It was the duty of the mayor and aldermen of the town to turn out in their finest regalia to great the arrival of the greatest landowners in the area, each ready with deferential words of congratulation for the proud parents.

  From Bury, the route home led two miles south-east along a lane so narrow that the flowering branches of hawthorn trees brushed against the sides of their carriages, and its musty smell made their hearts beat faster in expectation. At long last they rounded the last bend and Lady Catherine could hold her baby boy up so he could see for the first time his ancestral home: Rushbrook.

  Rushbrook Hall, p
ictured here in the 18th century, but very much as Jermyn would have known it in his boyhood.

  Rushbrook Hall was built on three sides of a square, open to the south to form a courtyard. Its walls were of small, locally-baked red bricks. The porch through which Lady Catherine carried her son was made of finely-cut Barnack stone plundered from the dissolved Abbey of St Edmund’s in the decades following the Reformation.

  Surrounding the house was a moat, a relic of earlier more troubled times, and one which would provide some comfort to the family later when the Civil War began. Beyond the Hall came the barking of hounds in the kennels, the whinnying of fine horses in the stables and the low murmur of doves in the cone-shaped dovecote.

  Little Henry’s ancestors had owned Rushbrook since the day, three and a half centuries before, when an earlier Sir Thomas Jermyn had married the heiress of the Medieval estate. But the family’s roots were planted even deeper in the local soil.

  Their very surname commemorated a distant ancestor who had prayed with all the Catholic fervour of the Middle Ages to St Germain, the saint whose relics had long been the most treasured possession of St Edmund’s Abbey.

  Henry’s family tree had sprouted many branches, and through male and female lines he was related to much of the East Anglian nobility and gentry, and many more influential people further afield.

  The Jermyns’ involvement with the royal court had only begun quite recently. They had remained relatively obscure landowners until the time of Henry’s great-great-grandfather Thomas Jermyn, who was knighted as a reward for escorting Henry VIII’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves to London in 1539. Even since then, although they had served the Crown faithfully in war and peace, they had never really stood out as courtiers.

  Near Rushbrook Hall stood St Nicholas’ Church, rebuilt by Henry’s great-great-grandfather in a far more simple, Protestant style than the elaborate Gothicism of the earlier, Catholic era. Inside the church, young Henry could touch the cold stone and engraved brasses of his family’s tombs and monuments in the east chapel.

  Instead of a chancel arch, the church had a stout beam bearing the royal motto, misspelled, dieu et mon droiet and the royal arms of Henry VII. God was above everyone, even wealthy landowners. And between God and man, acting as the divinely anointed intermediary between the two, was the King.

  For religion, Henry was brought up under the influence of his grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, who belonged to the Puritan wing of the Anglican Church, dedicated to eradicating all traces of Catholicism from his worship. For schooling, Henry was most likely sent to Bury St Edmund’s grammar school. This is not, however, known for certain – although his nephews certainly went there, the records of his own generation were destroyed by fire.

  Doubtless Henry read, or was forced to read, the staple books of the time, first and foremost the Bible, perhaps in Myles Coverdale’s first, 1535 English translation, or else the King James version, that was finished when Jermyn was six.

  After this came, with almost equal importance, Homer’s Iliad, about the fall of Troy, and Virgil’s Aeneid, about Aeneas’s escape from the burning ruins of Troy, and long journey to Italy, where he and his Trojan followers settled, and where his descendant Romulus later founded Rome. That staunch Christians read so much overtly pagan literature may seem strange to us, but the Church Fathers had long since established that humans, Trojans and all, were descendants of Noah, and the gods, if they had existed at all, were simply glorified kings of old.

  After these stirring tales came the British sequel to the story, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth century History of the Kings of Britain, that related how Aeneas’s grandson Brutus left Italy and led a further party of displaced Trojans to Britain, where they killed the giants and founded London, though Henry is more likely to have read the story through its fifteenth century re-telling, John Hardinge’s Chronicle, whilst the story of Brutus’s eventual successor, Arthur, was best known through Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. And maybe, too, he struggled through The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser, first published only 15 years before Henry’s birth, a complex retelling of these stories circling around an allegory of Elizabeth I herself.

  In Henry’s time, these stories were still read as popular literature and most people accepted them as being true. Only an intellectual minority had started to question them, and thus to start groping their way towards what would eventually coalesce into a new, scientific view of British and, more generally, human origins.

  The myths had played an important psychological role in Britain’s consciousness, providing a mythical explanation for a significant reality – that Britain had once been a Roman colony, and continued to be the cultural inferior of Rome. The 1537 Reformation, however, when Henry VIII tore the English church out of the Pope’s grasp, asserted that England could look Rome in the eye on spiritual matters. In Jermyn’s time, the dream that Britain might rival Rome in terms of culture, civilisation and empire hardened into a genuine aspiration – and little did young Henry’s tutors imagine that this tousle-headed boy fidgeting on his stool would one day stand at the forefront of this momentous shift in national identity.

  Whilst Henry’s imagination may have been fired by these stirring tales of Troy and ancient Britain, he had no burning desire to study for study’s sake. He would have agreed with his future friend Saint-Évremond, who once remarked that life was ‘too short to read all sorts of books, and to burden one’s memory with a multitude of things, at the expense of one’s judgment’.

  Henry’s talents lay in more practical matters. He learned to write, and thus to communicate, in clear, fluid handwriting, which compares favourably to the crabbed hands of his more academically orientated contemporaries, such as Sir Edward Hyde and Secretary of State Nicholas. His training in mathematics set him in good stead for understanding a little of geometry, and juggling debts and calculating interest both for himself and, as it turned out, for two generations of the Royal Family.

  Tall elms shaded Rushbrook Hall in the summer and sheltered it from the buffeting winds that swept across Suffolk from the North Sea each winter. Beyond the elms lay the deer park where young Henry could watch his parents and their guests riding after their hounds. Clambering over the palisades of the deer park, Henry could run down through the water meadows to the willow-lined banks of the River Lark, the rushy brook which had gave Henry’s ancestral home its name.

  He was never alone. He had two elder brothers, boisterous Robert and the shy, scarcely noticeable Thomas. Butterflies would rise up from the pollen-filled grasses every time they scampered through the meadows with their wooden swords, playing at Trojans versus Greeks, or English sailors attacking Spanish men-o’war. His grandfather’s grazing sheep and cattle would start in alarm every time their youthful mouths emitted high-pitched ‘booms’ of cannon fire or shrieks of laughter as they tumbled together through the fragrant seas of thyme and marjoram.

  Fortunately for the adolescent Henry Jermyn, his grandfather’s Puritanism did not extend much beyond the heavy oak doors of St Nicholas’s Church. Life at Rushbrook revolved around hunting parties, great feasts and extended visits from the neighbouring gentry. These included the Crofts family from nearby Little Saxham and the Bacons from Redgrave, a family that included one of the most interesting men of the age, Francis Bacon.

  With his full, pointed beard and a perpetual twinkle in his eye, Bacon, later to become Viscount St Albans, is sometimes credited with being the real author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Beyond doubt is his authorship of a series of books defining and promoting Natural Science.

  Bacon’s notion of studying the world through direct observation, rather than simply dredging conclusions out of the comparison of other peoples’ theories, was revolutionary. It enabled his followers in the seventeenth century to break away from the Medieval scholasticism which had prevailed since the Dark Ages, and led directly to the birth of modern science.

  Bacon had known Sir Thomas through mutual ass
ociation with the Earl of Essex. He was also a nephew by marriage of Sir William Killigrew’s brother Henry, another connection that sounds obscure to modern ears, but was highly significant in an era when whole careers rose and fell on the basis of family ties. This opens the intriguing possibility that Francis Bacon himself may have been an early mentor of Jermyn’s, walking by the Lark with him, explaining his polymath ideas of cities and architecture, of statesmanship, and of how best to influence people at court.

  Jermyn’s grandfather Sir Robert employed a composer, George Kirbye from Bury St Edmund’s, who wrote madrigals for the family to sing and tunes to which they could dance. As it was one of the courtly arts, Jermyn practised hard at dancing, easily surpassing his father, who was well known as the clumsiest dancer at court.

  Jermyn also learned to ride, to shoot with crossbows and pistols, and to play tennis. Skimming impatiently through the wordy fencing manuals that were so popular at the time, he would have parried and thrusted with his brothers, rapidly becoming adept at sword-play. This was another courtly skill that would stand the teenage Jermyn in very good stead.

  He also had a great talent and enthusiasm for French. His obvious interest in the language made him stand out in an age when, just like today, few Englishmen bothered to master foreign languages to any great degree of fluency.

  Most of James I’s courtiers could speak a bit of French, but they were so bad at it that, when communicating with Frenchmen, they preferred to attempt speaking Latin instead. Most of the ambassadors representing the French and English kings in their respective courts had to rely on interpreters to make themselves properly understood.