The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Music was another delight, and dancing too. Two years’ incarceration at Blois passed quickly enough, and then Marie was allowed to return to Paris, to share limited power with Louis. The Louvre became home and here Henrietta Maria’s courtly education continued as she blossomed into a beautiful, young, and eminently marriageable princess.

  Henrietta Maria. There are many portraits of Henrietta Maria, but this is a very special one. It is Jermyn’s own copy of one of Van Dyck’s portraits of the Queen: the face is probably by the artist himself, and the rest by his assistants. It hung in his house in St James’s Square, and ended up at his ancestral home, Rushbrook. It is reproduced here with the extremely kind permission of the present owner.

  In the months following the arrival of the English embassy, Lord Kensington and his colleagues wrangled with their French counterparts over the size of Henrietta Maria’s dowry and the composition of her household. The talks went on so long that, thirteen months after they had arrived, Kensington and Jermyn heard that James I had died, and Henrietta Maria’s prospective husband had become King Charles I.

  Henrietta Maria’s active mind was full of excitement and apprehension. She had been brought up with a single purpose, to become a King’s consort. Everything she had heard about Charles was positive, especially his looks and his courtly charm.

  Yet he was heir to a Protestant throne and the majority of his people were heretics. How could she expect to fare in the cold, barbarous Kingdom of England? Every night, whilst the English party gorged their way through mountains of roast boars and suckling pigs, the inquisitive Princess made tentative efforts to learn more about her future husband and home.

  It was a difficult task. She had no talent for language, and she pronounced the smattering of the few English words she did know so badly that most of the English party could barely understand her, and their French was so terrible that she could not comprehend their replies. Lord Kensington, who could speak French, had the inscrutability of a true diplomat, and would not even show her the locket containing Charles’s likeness, which she knew he had in his chamber.

  But there was one exception: the very tall, handsome young man with a polished manner, and such wonderfully broad shoulders.

  Henry Jermyn, who had wasted no time improving his French, could understand her very well even if she talked animatedly about her hopes and dreams for the future. Better still, Jermyn could reply without faltering too much.

  As they talked, they became friends, and Jermyn fell completely under her spell.

  There is a painting, attributed to John Hoskins, which shows Henrietta Maria with her hair curled in dense ringlets around her temples, except for one lock which had been allowed to grow so long it tumbled down, tied loosely by a pink satin ribbon, over the silky white skin of her shoulder.

  Jermyn could hardly have failed to notice these appealing details in real life. He can hardly have felt anything other than delight at the prospect that, when he returned to England, this beautiful princess would be going with him. He had always been groomed to become a courtier, but so far being at court had been an end in itself. Now, the same prospect was charged with an emotional frisson that may have seemed almost overwhelming.

  On Monday, 23 May 1625, the young princess Henrietta Maria of France finally set off for England, to marry the new king, Charles I. A great retinue left Paris with her, including her new household of maids and ladies, nurses and priests. The English ambassadors went too, with their attending gentlemen, including young Henry Jermyn, all their servants and a colossal baggage train worthy of the army of Alexander the Great himself.

  Exactly a month after their departure, they came up the steep hill to the forbidding stone edifice of Dover Castle, where the young King was waiting to meet them. Charles approached his new wife. Both were nervous, and after an awkward embrace, he stepped back and she burst into tears. Early that evening, Henrietta Maria entered the dank Great Hall of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, to be married as the darkness gathered outside.

  Even as she repeated her vows, she may have spared a glance and a nervous smile for her tall friend standing solemnly with the rest of the congregation in the nave, his handsome face lit up by the flickering candlelight. Did Jermyn struggle with pangs of jealousy that night, as Charles left the banquet table to pay a fumbling visit his new bride’s bed in the Abbey gatehouse?

  The next day the great procession of English and French courtiers and servants marched out of the North Gate of Canterbury, its bright pageantry doing its best to rival the swathes of wild roses and poppies festooning the roadsides.

  At Gravesend they embarked in a fleet of richly decorated barges, the royal barge itself towed by a vessel propelled by twelve strong rowers, with a flotilla of subsidiary barges carrying musicians and trumpeters. And in the evening, while soft June rain pattered on the barges’ awnings, they arrived in London. Charles, Henrietta Maria – and Jermyn too – had arrived home.

  One of the many questions Henrietta Maria no doubt wanted answering – and which Jermyn very probably tried to explain to her – was how and why George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, exercised such power at Charles’s court.

  The truth was that, shaken by James I’s death, Charles clung childishly to his late father’s favourite for advice and counsel. The power-hungry Buckingham, certainly not ready to relinquish his pre-eminence at court, was delighted to bestow both advice and counsel in lavish proportions.

  But Buckingham knew that keeping a monopoly of Charles’s affections would not be as straightforward as it had been with the distinctly bisexual James. Buckingham now had an adversary of his own making in the form of the spirited girl who sat enthroned at Charles’s side. Was he to lose his hard-won influence to a mere female? Unwittingly, Henrietta Maria had walked straight into the web of a particularly spiteful and devious enemy.

  Once Charles and Henrietta Maria were married, Buckingham lost no opportunity to whisper in the King’s ear about Henrietta Maria’s faults. He pointed out how damaging it was for the country that she would not attend the state opening of Parliament or the Coronation, because she was a Catholic, and the ceremonies included Protestant services.

  She preferred her own exotic clothes to the more modest English fashions. Her French household were treating the English courtiers with contempt. Her priests were arousing popular suspicion that Charles himself would become a Catholic. She was not bothering to learn English.

  Under Buckingham’s careful nurturing, Charles’s animosity towards Henrietta Maria started to grow. At his favourite’s suggestion, the King decreed that, to make her sound more English, she should be called Queen Mary. He told her to adopt an English hairstyle. He forced Henrietta Maria to accept Buckingham’s sister and other female relatives as members of her retinue that, until then, had been exclusively French. She saw them as the spies they really were, and her resistance helped widen the divide, just as Buckingham had hoped.

  The effect of all this on Charles and Henrietta Maria’s sex life was devastating. Whilst contemporary records are not quite detailed enough to tell what happened when Charles did visit the Queen in her bedchamber, we know that they were spending increasing amounts of time apart, and having furious rows when they met. Small wonder no sign had appeared as yet of an heir to the throne.

  The nadir came in June 1626. Abruptly ushering Henrietta Maria’s French attendants out of her chamber, Charles told his wife that her retinue was to be sent home. First outraged and then terrified, she fell to her knees, weeping and begging the King to reconsider. Yet even as Henrietta Maria cried, she heard her faithful friends being ushered into carriages in the courtyard below. Flinging herself at the window, the near-hysterical Queen smashed several panes of glass to cry out to them, but all she could do was sob into her damaged hands while the carriages commenced their miserable journey back to France.

  After the wails of her departing entourage had faded away, Jermyn was one of the few people – perhaps the only one – wi
th fluent French, whom Henrietta Maria could trust to listen sympathetically to her troubles. Here was a man who, as the poet Cowley wrote, appeared to have ‘a soul composed of the eagle and the dove’, and perhaps that is really how she saw him as well – a hero, protecting her from the world, whose inner self was, for her, as soft and gentle as one of the white doves of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Of that, we can but speculate, but it is certainly no surprise that, when her new and much reduced English household was appointed, Jermyn did his utmost to persuade Charles and Buckingham to include him in it. And Charles agreed. From then on Jermyn had the happy obligation of attending Henrietta Maria every day as Gentleman Usher of her Privy Chamber.

  But despite Jermyn’s presence, Henrietta Maria grew unhappier. She strove to be a good Queen, yet Charles now treated her with open contempt. Buckingham had the temerity to remind her how Charles’s great-great uncle Henry VIII used to deal with unsatisfactory wives. Henrietta Maria was never to enjoy happiness nor power while the Duke remained dominant.

  Jermyn, too, had no reason to love Buckingham. He had seen how unfairly Buckingham had treated poor Lord Bristol for the failure of the Madrid embassy. Buckingham had also lashed out at Jermyn’s kinsman, Francis Bacon, charging him with bribery and stripping him of his office of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Yet, up to now, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria can only have toyed with dreams of how Buckingham might lose his power.

  Then, in 1627, the Duke excelled himself. He persuaded Charles to declare war on France.

  Buckingham’s pretext for doing so was the continued persecution by the Catholic Louis XIII of the minority of his subjects who were Protestants or, as they were known colloquially, ‘Huguenots’. Many Huguenots had gathered for safety in the town of La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast, where they were now being besieged by the French King’s forces.

  Imagining himself as the hero of the Protestant cause, Buckingham set sail in June 1627 with a fleet of English ships carrying arms and soldiers to help the La Rochelle Huguenots. In the crowded streets, mobs of Londoners, those distant, flee-bitten descendants of the sons of Troy, or so they believed, screamed out their hatred of the French Catholics. At court, men drank hearty toasts to the downfall of Papist King Louis.

  Henrietta Maria herself withdrew to the peaceful Northamptonshire spa-town of Wellingborough. She made the plausible excuse that she needed to drink the spa’s mineral waters, that bubbled up from the local springs, for the sake of her health and fertility. With her went her entire household, and of course that included Jermyn.

  In August, Henrietta Maria chose Jermyn to travel to Paris to deliver personal messages to the Queen’s family, especially to her brother Louis XIII, who was ill.

  There may, however, have been much more to it than that. We know from reports written by the Venetian ambassador in Paris that, having delivered his supposedly personal messages to the King, Jermyn was rapidly referred on to Louis’s First Minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who ‘saw him gladly’.

  Jermyn was ushered into parts of the Louvre he would never have seen before, past rooms where clerks transcribed royal proclamations and dark anti-chambers where spies and informers waited for their appointments with spy-masters, until he was brought into a sumptuously furnished office.

  Kneeling, the fledgling diplomat Henry Jermyn kissed the ring of the most powerful, most infamous man in the whole of Europe, Cardinal Richelieu.

  With his long patrician nose, grey goatee beard and penetrating eyes, Richelieu cut an elegant figure in the flowing scarlet robes of a Catholic Cardinal.

  The elegantly devious Cardinal Richelieu

  Richelieu was another man of the same calibre as Olivares and Buckingham. Having risen to his exalted position as the favourite of Henrietta Maria’s mother Marie de Medici, the Cardinal was now virtual ruler of France on behalf of Louis XIII.

  Richelieu may simply have probed Jermyn for any secret overtures of peace from Charles I, and been disappointed to find that he carried none. However, with Buckingham at war with Richelieu’s France and thus the avowed enemy of Henrietta Maria, it seems possible that Jermyn’s mission to Paris was not a purely social one. He may, perhaps, have proposed some scheme, contrived between himself and Henrietta Maria back in Wellingborough, aimed at engaging the Cardinal’s help in engineering the Duke’s downfall. We know that, soon afterwards, Buckingham’s secret agent, Walter Montagu, was arrested whilst travelling through France. Was this due to a tip-off from Jermyn and Henrietta Maria?

  More certainly, we know from the Venetian Ambassador’s reports that, at this time, Richelieu formed clear plans to strike out, not randomly at England, but specifically at Buckingham. The Cardinal threatened making an alliance with the Dutch and the Spanish against England, hoping, specifically, to frighten Charles into backing out of Buckingham’s war and thus, effectively, into dropping his favourite.

  Failing that, the Cardinal would send a great fleet to England, not to invade but merely, as the Venetian ambassador wrote a few weeks later, ‘to set Buckingham’s party by the ears’.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, however, evidence is lacking to make a direct link between Richelieu’s sudden intention to strike out at Buckingham, and Jermyn’s visit to Paris. It is likely, however, that Jermyn’s journey to Paris marks the start of the life-long involvement of himself and Henrietta Maria in international politics.

  In the end Richelieu’s fleet proved unnecessary, for Jermyn and Henrietta Maria turned out not to be the only people with grudges against Buckingham. An army officer called John Felton had developed a passionate hatred of the Duke, who had blocked him from receiving a promotion.

  On the morning of Saturday, 23 August 1628, Buckingham was swaggering in his usual ebullient fashion through a crowd of officers and local dignitaries at the Greyhound Inn, Portsmouth. The atmosphere was relaxed, as he threw a few suave little quips out to his fawning audience. Nobody noticed Felton pushing his way through the crowd.

  Suddenly, a knife flashed as Felton lunged at Buckingham, stabbing deeply into the Duke’s chest. The blow sent Buckingham staggering backwards, his hand groping desperately for the hilt of his rapier. But before he could draw it out of its scabbard he had collapsed, blood pulsing through his bejewelled silk doublet, and within minutes he was dead.

  IV

  TWO DISPUTED CASES OF PATERNITY

  1628 – 1635

  … an odd kind of lover. He comes

  Into my lady’s chamber at all hours;

  Yet thinks it strange that people wonder at

  His privilege. Well, opportunity

  Is a dangerous thing; it would soon spoil me.

  D’Avenant, The Platonic Lovers (1637)

  Like most European courtiers, Jermyn and his colleagues were kept constantly on the move. Daily life involved following the King and Queen on a never-ending progress from palace to palace including Windsor Castle in Berkshire, Hampton Court in Middlesex and Theobalds in Hertfordshire.

  The Queen’s own household sometimes made its own journeys between her dower palaces, which stretched like gilded daisy-chain from the crumbling Plantagenet palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire down the Thames to Oatlands near Weybridge and continued on to Wimbledon; Sheen; Nonsuch; Somerset House in London and finally fragrant Greenwich.

  The court also made journeys further a-field, taking Jermyn and his colleagues to stay with noblemen in the shires or to bet vast wagers on horse races at Newmarket in Cambridgeshire, fifteen miles west of Rushbrook. But Whitehall and St James’s were the main royal residences and it was above their gilded towers that the golden lions of England on Charles’s royal standard were most often to be seen writhing and snapping in the breeze.

  Coming down King Street from Charing Cross – in modern terms, walking south down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, though it was mostly countryside then – the first thing you saw of Whitehall Palace were the battlemented towers of the imposing Gothic gatehouse, which had been designed by the German painter Hans Holbe
in. To the young Jermyn, it must always have seemed as immensely impressive as Henry VIII had intended it to be. After he had seen the Classical splendours of Madrid and Paris, maybe it seemed less so: less monumental, more of a Medieval fantasy than an imperial portal. And such thoughts may have passed through Henrietta Maria’s mind too, as she approached the Holbein Gate for the first time: unless she was filled with a dark foreboding of the future, and saw it as the prison gate that was about to close on her girlish life.

  Beyond the Holbein Gate, Whitehall’s skyline was a forest of vaulted and arched roofs; battlements; black and white chequered towers topped with pointed domes; spires decorated with brightly painted heraldic beasts and countless smoking chimney pots. A fantastic, picturesque jumble maybe, but far removed from the striking elegance of the Louvre.

  Through the gate lay a world with which Henrietta Maria would eventually become extremely familiar, but which may at first have seemed an incomprehensible labyrinth of strange edifices, full of unknown faces, each chattering in that incomprehensible, haughty language of the English.

  To the north of the gate lay a complex mostly devoted to courtiers’ lodgings, known as the Cock Pit. It was dominated by the great, enclosed tennis court Henry VIII had built to entertain himself and his restless hangers-on. This was not the modern game of Lawn Tennis, which was only invented in the late nineteenth century, but Real or Royal Tennis, which is still played today by a coterie of enthusiasts. Jermyn and his friends worked up vigorous sweats playing long volleys, the ball bouncing off the roof with a resounding crash and down onto the opponent’s side of the central net. Points were scored by hitting the ball through windows behind each player or through the gallery windows that ran down the north side of the court. Games became heated. Once, a dispute over the complex rules as to where the ball had landed led Jermyn into a furious argument, followed by a stiff royal reprimand.