Exactly how Jermyn came to be quite so proficient in French is unclear. We know that, in 1618, two of Sir Thomas’s sons were given permission to travel abroad. These were probably his elder brothers, Robert and Thomas, leaving thirteen year-old Jermyn behind, but when they came back, better-versed than before in foreign tongues, they and their tutors may have topped-up the basic learning he would have received at home. Later, as Jermyn evidently had some talent for French, he may have sought out French diplomats and their households at James I’s court. What is important, however, is not so much what French he learned, but the fact that he had an easy and fluent talent for picking the language up. It was this talent, above all else, which would serve him so very well in the future.
To be at court, to inhabit that mysterious, dangerous, glamorous, sanctified world: this became Jermyn’s sole ambition. It was the only world both sides of his family knew, and the only one for which he had been trained. It was his good fortune that the things courtiers had to do well – eating, drinking, dancing and flattering – were among his favourite occupations.
But to succeed at court and earn the trust of kings, Jermyn needed to serve his apprenticeship under a high-ranking courtier. In 1622, at the age of seventeen, his gift for languages secured just such an opportunity, as a Gentleman in Attendance on Lord Bristol’s embassy to Spain.
Jermyn’s star had started to rise at last.
II
THE MADRID EMBASSY
1622 – 1623
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education… things to be seen and observed are the courts of princes, specially when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic, the churches and monasteries…
Francis Bacon, Essays: ‘of travel’ (1625).
Jermyn’s patron in Spain, John Digby, the first Earl of Bristol, had a difficult task on his hands: to negotiate a marriage treaty between the King’s Anglican son Prince Charles and the Catholic daughter of the Hapsburg King Philip III of Spain.
That was a tough job in itself, but there was more. James I’s daughter Elizabeth was married to a German prince, Frederick of the Palatine of the Rhine, who had been elected King of Bohemia in 1619. Opposed to his election, the King of Spain’s cousin the Hapsburg Emperor had ransacked Prague, defeated Frederick and expelled him from the Palatine. In negotiating the marriage alliance, Bristol was also expected to gain the King of Spain’s agreement to help Frederick regain his lost German patrimony.
Young Jermyn’s task was less complicated. Besides running necessary errands for Lord Bristol, his job was simply to augment Bristol’s entourage, as befitted the ambassador of a monarch of the power and majesty of James I.
Just over a decade after the seventeen-year old Jermyn arrived in Spain, he was painted by Van Dyck. The painting reveals a handsome young man with a straight nose, intelligent eyes and a small goatee beard sprouting fresh from his firm chin, all framed by lustrous auburn hair. His tall, imposing torso is depicted clad in a fine satin doublet embroidered with gold. The crisp expanse of his white lace collar emphasises the broadness of his shoulders.
At the Spanish court, Jermyn would have added to this appealing appearance a short cloak trimmed with fur and pearls, flung rakishly over his shoulder; a pair of baggy breeches of soft leather covering his muscular thighs down to the knee; white silk stockings stretched over the shapely, athletic curve of his calves; polished shoes fastened with golden buckles and, by his side, a state-of-the-art cup-hilted rapier dangled in a jeweled scabbard, adding extra panache to his precocious teenage swagger. He must have been an eye-catching spectacle for Spanish girls of noble blood, or of any blood, for that matter.
When not obliged to attend the endless ceremonial receptions, Jermyn could put on less ostentatious clothing to explore the streets of Madrid. His companions were the other boys on the embassy, including Bristol’s ten year old son George Digby, an inquisitive boy with fair hair, large blue eyes and a long, straight nose.
They were joined sometimes by thirty five-year old Endymion Porter, a Gloucestershire squire turned court wit. Porter soon picked up on the Spanish pronunciation of ‘Harry’ and gave Jermyn his long-standing nickname, ‘Arigo’. It was Endymion above all who took Jermyn under his wing and showed the teenager around.
Founded only sixty-three years earlier by the forward-looking King Philip II, Madrid was the new royal and administrative capital of Spain. The city was laid out around a series of squares, the greatest of which, the Plaza Major, had only just been finished.
Here, locals and visitors alike could watch matadors bating and killing bulls. On the corner of the square stood the house where Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, had lived until his death, on the same date as Shakespeare, seven years earlier.
Like the town’s layout, Madrid’s heady mixture of Baroque and classical styles were completely unfamiliar to a boy used to Jacobean bricks and Tudor beams. Had he ever peered suspiciously into any of the city’s numerous Catholic churches, Jermyn would have smelt the overpowering odour of incense and glimpsed the idolatrous statues of the saints, the Virgin and even of Christ himself.
Did Endymion also take the boys to watch with disgust mingled with boyish fascination while Jews and Protestants who had defied the Holy Inquisition were burned to death? Jermyn knew only too well that when his father was a boy, the Spanish Armada had only narrowly failed in bringing the same religious terror to England’s shores.
Of equal fascination, no doubt, were the city’s taverns, where it is not hard to imagine Endymion plying the boys with watery red wine, while they watched Spanish girls wandering past through the sultry afternoons.
If his later career is anything to go by, however, Jermyn would not have been too completely bored by the tedious nature of the marriage negotiations, and was probably rather entranced by the principal character with whom his master was negotiating.
In Spain it had become accepted that the King, whose burden of ruling was likened to that of Atlas supporting the world, should have a favourite – called a privado or valido – to share his toil. The privado’s power was exercised not so much through high office, such as membership of the Council of State, but more through personal influence over the monarch, acquired through force of personality and free access to the royal person, which was acquired by the holding of seemingly trivial domestic positions, such as that of caballerizo mayor – Master of the Horse.
When Jermyn reached Madrid, the newly ascendant privado was Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, soon to become Duke of San Lúcar la Mayor. Young and ambitious, Olivares had gained the Spanish King’s friendship and seemed unstoppable in his pursuit of power. Here was a highly charismatic role model for young Jermyn to observe at close quarters.
On Friday, 7 March 1623, several months after Jermyn’s arrival in Spain, there was a sharp knock on Lord Bristol’s door. Jermyn dashed down to answer it. Two men stood on the doorstep, broad-brimmed hats pulled down over their faces and long cloaks concealing their bodies. In a suspiciously well-heeled English voice one of them demanded to see the ambassador. It was only once they had stepped in and swept off their hats that Jermyn realised he was in the presence of the two most powerful men in the whole of Britain besides the King himself.
The man who had spoken to him so sharply was George Villiers. Only slightly shorter than Jermyn, Villiers was a remarkably handsome man, normally to be seen sporting the most ostentatious clothes it was possible to buy. Aged thirty-one, he was also one of the most dangerously fickle products of the English court. King James I, obsessively in love with Villiers, had dismayed his counsellors and friends by promoting this son of a country squire up the social scale to become a marquess. Two months after his arrival in Madrid, Villiers was further promoted by James, to become Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham was fully to England what Olivares was to Spain – the privado – the royal favourite.
The second man whom Jermyn en
countered at the door was much shorter, with a long, pale face; baleful pink-rimmed eyes; shoulder-length brown hair, and clean-shaven except for a thin moustache. He was James I’s eldest surviving son, the twenty-three-year old Charles, Prince of Wales and future King Charles I. The wan Prince looked awkward while Buckingham laughed at Jermyn’s confused apologies at not having addressed them properly in the first place. The Prince then trotted meekly upstairs after the Duke of Buckingham, to make a surprise entrance on poor, unsuspecting Lord Bristol.
Like Essex before him, Buckingham was keen to manipulate foreign policy for his own aggrandisement. His purpose in coming to Madrid with the Prince – both incognito – was to speed up what he had decided was an ineptly conducted negotiation.
In fact, Buckingham could do no more to sever the Gordian Knot of Spanish court bureaucracy than Bristol. Even the subsequent arrival of a whole train of extra courtiers, including Lord Kensington and Jermyn’s father Sir Thomas, could not help Buckingham inveigle the King of Spain into agreeing to England’s impossible terms. Placing all the blame for this on Bristol himself, Buckingham swept the Prince back off to London in a huff.
Bristol returned to England in disgrace. Jermyn went with him, but was still too junior to share in any of his master’s ignominy. Indeed, young Jermyn had conducted himself so well on the Spanish embassy that he was immediately assigned to another one, to Paris – and destiny.
III
COURTING THE LOUVRE 1624 – 1628
She is a lady of as much beauty and sweetness to deserve your affections, as any woman under heaven can be: in truth, she is the sweetest creature in France, and the loveliest thing in nature. Her growth is a little short of her age, and her wisdom infinitely beyond it. I heard her, the other day, discourse with her mother and the ladies about her with extraordinary discretion and quickness. She dances – the which I am witness of – as well as ever I saw any one: they say she sings most sweetly; I am sure she looks as if she did…
Lord Kensington on Princess Henrietta Maria, 1624
(Memoir of Henrietta Maria, 1671)
The failure of Prince Charles’s marriage negotiations in Spain forced Buckingham to turn to the Hapsburg’s greatest rivals, France.
In February 1624, a new embassy was dispatched to Paris to propose a marriage alliance between Charles and Princess Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, sister of Louis XIII, King of France.
To conduct these fresh negotiations, a new ambassador was chosen in the form of Henry Rich, Viscount Kensington, a handsome thirty-four-year old, who epitomised the courtly grace and panache so beloved of the French court. And travelling with Kensington as a Gentleman in Attendance was a younger man well on his way to emulating such refined elegance – Henry Jermyn. But as he approached the gates of Paris for the first time, Jermyn had absolutely no idea what a momentous impact the coming weeks would have on the rest of his life.
That word, Paris, conjured up images of style and chic in the minds of the young people of the seventeenth century just as it does today. Admittedly, the Seine, like the Thames, was clogged with raw sewage, and swathes of its population were scythed down by the same plagues and diseases. But that did little to diminish the wonder that this great European capital inspired in the minds of its English visitors.
In the previous century, King Henri II of France had married Catherine de Medici, daughter of the Duke of Urbino, whose family epitomised the highest achievements of the Italian Renaissance.
Catherine had an inspired vision for Paris. Everyone still believed, then, that when the Trojan ancestors of the Franks came from France, they had founded Paris, naming it after Priam’s wayward son, he whose abduction of Helen had caused the Trojan War. Now, she felt, it was time for the city to live up to its grand, mythical past. Under her influence, the decaying Medieval centre of Paris was cleared away to make room for the first classically-styled buildings and gardens ever built there, including the Tuileries Gardens, based on those at the Pitti Palace in Florence. Later, in 1600, Catherine’s Florentine cousin Marie de Medici married Henri of Navarre, who had recently converted to Catholicism to become Henri IV of France. Marie and Henri continued Catherine’s work, including finishing the Pont Neuf, whose twelve stone arches linked the Isle de Cité with both banks of the Seine.
On the triangular tip of the Isle, a visitor such as Jermyn could admire the elegant three-sided ‘square’ they had built there. In the centre of the square stood a life-size statue of Henri IV on horseback, standing on a pedestal describing the famous military victories that had earned him the epithet ‘the Great’.
Among Henri and Marie’s numerous other projects was the Cours la Reine, which was finished in 1616. On balmy summer evenings the most fashionable Parisians would be driven in their open carriages past the Louvre, and then up through the Cours la Reine’s triple avenues of stately elms to the fields called the Champs Elysées, named after the Elysian Fields of classical mythology, where the great and good heroes of old went when they died. These were wonders that England could not even begin to match.
Although not as big as the great palace it is today, the Louvre that Jermyn and Lord Kensington entered was still one of the most impressive buildings then standing in the world.
While trumpets blasted out in welcome, their carriages and horses clattered noisily over the palace drawbridge, past liveried musketeers standing stiffly to attention. The enormous palace was in fact a string of interconnected buildings starting with the twelfth century Medieval fortress with arrow slit windows and imposing towers surmounted by pointed slate roofs.
The elegant Petite Gallerie connected its south-western tower to a long range of classical pavilions and salons full of carved columns, cornices and elegant marble staircases connected by airy galleries, all strung like a vast necklace along the banks of the Seine.
At the western end, the complex turned abruptly north through the Gallerie de Diane to connect with Catherine de Medici’s Tuileries Palace, whose terraces ran directly into the sumptuous flowerbeds and tree-lined avenues of the Tuileries Gardens. Jermyn and his friends could walk awestruck over black and white marble floors past walls painted with bright frescos or hung with rich tapestries depicting heroic battles and the classical gods.
From the galleries they could gaze out through tall cypress trees to the sparkling waters of the Seine. One gallery was lined on each side by pictures of all the kings and queens of France, right back to their mythical Trojan founders. In another salon Jermyn could have seen an inlaid globe of the world suspended from the ceiling by gilt chains.
Everywhere he could see classical statues including the terrifying presence of ‘Diana of the Ephesians’, said to be the very statue that had uttered oracles in her temple in Ephesus, to the south of Troy, in the long centuries before the coming of Christ.
As the doors to the great audience chamber were flung open, the hubbub of the assembled French nobility would have given way to fascinated silence as the English party entered. It was at that moment that Jermyn’s eyes fell for the first time on the French royal family. First was Louis XIII sitting stiffly on his richly gilded throne, his cold face expressionless between two long dark curtains of lank hair. Next to him sat his tubby, blonde-haired young wife Anne of Hapsburg, another daughter of Philip III of Spain.
With them was enthroned the King’s formidable mother Marie de Medici, with her double chin and penetrating brown eyes, her jewelled clothes reflecting a dazzling rainbow of colours in the light of the candelabras that shone overhead.
And then Jermyn’s eyes fell on the girl who, if Kensington’s negotiations were fruitful, would become the next Queen of England: Henrietta Maria.
Even if she was not a daughter of Henri IV, the fourteen-year old princess would have stood out in her own right. ‘Little Madame’, wrote a delighted Lord Kensington, ‘is the loveliest creature in France and the sweetest thing in nature’.
Her clear face, with its full cheeks and delicate nose and chin, was framed by d
ense ringlets of lustrous dark, Italianate hair. Diamonds sparkled from her hair, and her ears, and around her soft neck, white as alabaster, that curved down into the rich lace top of her silk dress. But what Jermyn must have noticed most is that which is most apparent from the portraits painted of Henrietta Maria as a girl – the glint of candlelight in her large, dark brown eyes, and the enigmatic smile that lingered shyly on her lips.
Henrietta Maria de Bourbon was born on Wednesday, 29 November 1609, daughter of the Catholic Henri IV and his second wife Marie de Medici. Henri IV had been the Protestant Henri of Navarre, but had abandoned his religion with the memorable words ‘Paris is worth a mass’, in order to inherit the French throne. When Henrietta Maria was only six months old, an assassin attacked King Henri in the streets of Paris and stabbed him to death. The French throne passed to his son, Henrietta Maria’s brother Louis XIII, and their mother Marie became France’s dominating Queen Regent.
Henrietta Maria lived with her siblings and nurses near Paris at the royal summer palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was named, entirely coincidentally, but perhaps rather fortuitously, after the saint who had given rise to Jermyn’s surname. Here, Henrietta Maria spent a happy enough childhood, until she was seven. Her elder brother the King had by then become deeply resentful of his mother’s power and ordered the murder of Marie’s hated advisor Concini. Soon afterwards he sent his mother into virtual exile in the Castle of Blois.
Marie went off to Blois in the mother of all Italian huffs. She took her little daughter Henrietta Maria with her, but that turned out to be not such a bad thing. For it was due to their being forced to live together in the relatively cramped confines of the castle at Blois that Marie’s tastes began to rub off on her daughter. Both were already devout Catholics, fervently devoted to the Pope, the Virgin Mary and the communion of saints. But now, from her mother, Henrietta Maria learned to understand and love classical architecture, and also to appreciate fine paintings: Rubens and Van Dyck, after all, were personal friends of Marie’s.
The King's Henchman Page 4
