After two years’ exile the Queen’s favourite sailed back up the Thames to return to the court, the home of everything he considered worth having or doing, and especially, of course, of Henrietta Maria herself. Little did he suspect, however, the extraordinary, imaginary journey on which he was about to embark.
V
SIR WILLIAM D’AVENANT’S DREAM OF MADAGASCAR
1635 – 1637
Some climb, and search the Rocks, till each have found
A Saphire, Ruby, and a Diamond:
That which the Sultan’s glistering Bride doth wear,
To these would but a Glow-worm’s eye appear:
Sir William D’Avenant, ‘Madagascar’ (1637).
Soon after Jermyn returned from exile, his old friend from the Madrid embassy, Endymion Porter, introduced him to a man who was to have a profound impact on the way Jermyn viewed himself and his world, and indeed on the way we now view him.
The man’s name was William D’Avenant, poet and playwright. A year younger than Jermyn, and the son of an Oxfordshire innkeeper, D’Avenant liked to boast when drunk that his real father was William Shakespeare himself. His chubby cheeks, bulbous eyes and long chin may not on their own have been particularly unattractive, had he not also suffered from the pox. Contracted, as he readily admitted, whilst being ‘valiant in a strange bed’, syphilis had eaten away the bridge of his nose, leaving the lower part sticking out like a spaniel’s snout.
Yet through D’Avenant’s ugly façade shone an exceptional intelligence capable of appreciating and communicating ideas of astonishing beauty. This gift, coupled with his witty tongue, had attracted the curiosity of Jermyn’s kinsman and possible mentor, Francis Bacon, who had instilled in D’Avenant a love of Natural Science – the new philosophy of learning about the world through direct observation and experimentation. This became a dominant thread in D’Avenant’s work. He also became inspired by Bacon’s idea that, by understanding the world, man might one day be able to control it.
It was a noble vision worthy of a century that would see the invention of clocks and compasses, thermometers and microscopes. In 1610, by using the newly invented telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, Galileo had proved the planets revolved around the sun. Isaac Newton, born in 1642, would later discover gravity. Robert Boyle, whose brother married Jermyn’s first cousin Elizabeth Killigrew, would suggest that matter was composed of atoms and show how sound moved through air.
To such men, science was not an end in itself. It might be a means to enable mankind to overcome disease, famine, war and old age. But having done so, they hoped that science would elevate human souls towards God.
Another method of elevating souls, and of promoting a more general appreciation of science, was poetry. In the preface to his epic poem Gondibert, which set out and recommended Bacon’s scientific goals, D’Avenant described his dream of a new nobility of spirit that would permeate society. He hoped that, as the seventeenth century progressed, western Europe and especially Britain, would rival and eventually surpass the achievements of Classical Greece and Rome.
For a Golden Age to come about, and for such nobility of spirit to permeate society effectively, D’Avenant had first to inspire its future leaders. And in that context it is fascinating that, out of all the courtiers laughing and joking in the chambers of Whitehall and St James’s, the man on whom he chose to focus most of his efforts was Jermyn.
Superficially, Jermyn seemed like just another jovial drinker, a loud, arrogant fop who laughed at bawdy jokes and whose bright sword flashed up at the first hint of a brawl. But D’Avenant, like Cowley, after him, seems to have been astute enough to recognise a greater depth to Jermyn’s soul – or at least, perhaps, the potential for one – and also saw Jermyn’s potential to gain a status in England equal to that of Richelieu in France.
Through his poetry, D’Avenant tried to instil noble sentiments in Jermyn’s mind. In his poem ‘To Henry Jarmin’ (in those days there was no concept of standardized spelling) D’Avenant listed the categories of men who stultified progress and kept Europe wallowing in the Middle Ages. He listed statesmen, seeking power because they were ‘too haughty to obey’; proud scholars who concealed the world’s simple truths behind Byzantine complexity and impenetrable terminology, and soldiers who fought only for their own glory. Addressing Jermyn as ‘Arigo’, the nickname Jermyn had acquired on his boyhood embassy to Spain, D’Avenant told him that these were stereotypes to avoid:
This not implies, to be more proud than they,
But bravely to be proud a better way;
And thus (Arigo) I may safely climb,
Raised with the boast, not laden with the crime;
Those with their glorious Vices taken be,
But I (most righteously) am proud of thee.
In his poem ‘When Colonel Goring was believed to be slain’, D’Avenant tried to make Jermyn think about the Golden Age by actually taking him there. A false report reached St James’s that the young courtier George Goring had been killed fighting the Spanish at the siege of Breda. D’Avenant’s poem described an invented voyage in which Jermyn and Endymion Porter go in search of Elysium for Goring’s soul.
While the spray falls on their faces, they stand in the prow of their ship, gazing ahead and singing alternate verses about their brave quest. Guided not by the compass but by Homer, the poet who had first sung of lofty Troy, back at the very dawn of Classical Greece, Jermyn and his companions expect to find Goring happily living on the shores of Elysium, rejoicing in the company of brave Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes who fought at Troy, and the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and those magnificent generals, Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Bold and optimistic, Jermyn and Endymion Porter do not mourn but rather praise their dead friend as the crested waves bear them ever forward. But ultimately they realise that, if once they step ashore on Elysium, they will never be able to return alive. Turning their ship back for home, they console themselves that the poet’s words can still take them where their physical bodies cannot travel.
Elysium was the stuff of Greek imagination. It existed outside the material world, as an ideal, a metaphor. So, finally and most spectacularly, D’Avenant created another poem, to take Jermyn on another imaginary voyage, but this time to establish a new, enlightened society on a real island on the other side of the world – a real Elysium, on which thoughts both imaginary and practical could find a foot-hold: Madagascar.
On Tuesday, 23 February 1636, soon after his return from Jersey, Jermyn appeared in a masquerade at the Middle Temple entitled The Triumphs of the Prince D’Amour. Masquerades were entertainments involving sumptuous scenery and costumes, music, dances and poetry. Although sometimes thought of as having been a distraction from the real world, masquerades filled an essential role in Charles’s stilted, etiquette-bound court. By their means, the King’s attempted to display, explain and instill his political ideology into his higher-ranking subjects.
In a scene in this particular performance, the centre of the stage was occupied by a lawyer dressed as the flamboyantly dressed Prince d’Amour, flanked by two teenage boys, Charles Louis and Rupert. These were the Palatine princes, the two elder sons of Charles’s sister Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, she whose husband Frederick had been driven out of the Palatine by the Hapsburgs 16 years earlier. They had come from their home-in-exile at The Hague in the Dutch Netherlands on behalf of their mother, who wanted Charles to give them money and soldiers to recapture the Palatine. He would not, but the princes, especially Rupert, would soon play a significant part in a war that was much closer to hand.
They were not the only court luminaries on stage. On this occasion Henrietta Maria herself danced beside Jermyn and his friends, including Kensington and Goring. As ever, the costumes were splendid and bright with many classical and mythical allusions, whilst moving scenery added depth and excitement to their frolics.
During the 1620s, the architect Inigo Jones had designed and produced the court
masques, with librettos provided by the playwright Ben Jonson. As the years passed, however, this pair of artists grew to absolutely loathe each other, so in the 1630s Jones started to work with other playwrights, finally forming a lasting collaboration with D’Avenant. While Jermyn and his companions danced on the stage of the Middle Temple, it was D’Avenant’s libretto, not Jonson’s, which was sung by the solemn baritones and cheerful sopranos.
In the weeks following the masque, Rupert and his brother spent a good deal of their time with Jermyn, Endymion Porter and D’Avenant. They hunted together in St James’s Park, played cards, dice, chess and tennis in St James’s Palace and practised shooting muskets in the rough meadows beyond the palace walls. As they laughed and joked, Endymion Porter amused them by showing off his treasures, including ‘turtle shells… dragons’ blood and diverse sorts of other gums’ that had just been brought to London from the fabulous island of Madagascar.
But what was Madagascar? Millions of years ago, in a phase of geological time that was completely inconceivable to Jermyn and his contemporaries, who all concurred that the world was only some five and a half thousand years old, there had existed a great continent in the southern hemisphere, later known as Lemuria. As the world’s plates shifted, Lemuria sank below what is now the Indian Ocean. As it buckled and shattered, fire and brimstone spewed up through the boiling waters to form great volcanoes, and the volcanoes in turn became Madagascar.
Twice the size of Britain, the island lies along the eastern coast of Africa. The natives called the highest peak of the Ankàratra mountains Tsi-àfa-jàvona – ‘that which the mists cannot climb’. Below it rolls a vast plain, 5,000 feet above sea level, whose edges run down through the lemur-infested jungles to coral inlets, dunes and lagoons. In Jermyn’s day, it was inhabited by a mixed population of Polynesian and African settlers, along with some long-standing Arab colonists.
At this time several English merchants became obsessed with the idea of establishing a colony there. ‘Madagascar’, one wrote later,
may well be compared to the Land of Canaan that flows with milk and honey. Rivers of sweet waters and fragrant fountains flow out of the valleys and the mountains; a land of wheat and barley, of vine yards and fig trees and pomegranates; a land wherein thou shalt eat without scarcity; neither shalt lack anything therein; a land whose stones are iron and out of whose mountains thou may dig brass.
Such enthusiastic and imaginative visions fired the fertile imagination of Porter, and he transmitted his excitement to his friends. Soon the headstrong Rupert could talk of nothing else but the riches of Madagascar. Forgetting about the lost Palatine, Rupert enthused Jermyn with schemes to sail to Madagascar with their gallant companions and become masters of its riches.
Rupert’s mother Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia was horrified, complaining bitterly about the ‘romance some would put into Rupert’s head of conquering Madagascar where Porter they say is to be his squire when he shall Don Quixote-like conquer that famous island…. I did not like it… besides’, she added, sagely, ‘I thought if Madagascar were a place either worth the taking or possible to be kept, the Portuguese by this time would have had it’.
The astute Queen was right. As Porter told the wide-eyed Palatine princes, Portuguese colonists had been lured to Madagascar with tales of its great natural wealth, eager to rip the silver from the virgin soil and strip the precious spices from its great rain forests. They stayed there a few years until the war-like ruling tribe, the Sàkalàva, speared their missionaries to death.
A few years later, an attempt at colonisation by the Dutch was similarly eradicated. But Rupert, Jermyn and Endymion Porter had no doubt they would succeed where lily-livered foreigners had failed.
For over a year they tried to raise ships and capital from the East India Company, but all the time the Queen of Bohemia maintained her pressure on Charles to forbid the dangerous journey. Eventually she succeeded and, like a naughty schoolboy, Rupert went trailing home to The Hague.
The great voyage to Madagascar never took place. But the Madagascar which enticed Jermyn and Rupert with its promise of untold wealth was only loosely connected to reality. In the sixteenth century, a mix-up of map coordinates led to the belief that Mogadishu in Somaliland was located on the island which was, up to then, called San-Lorenzo. The island of San-Lorenzo consequently became known as Mogodoza, which was then corrupted into Madagascar. As far as anyone in Western Europe was concerned, therefore, the account that Marco Polo had written about Mogodishu was an accurate description of the island of ‘Madagascar’. The Venetian explorer’s account was in fact more highly coloured than anyone else’s. According to Polo, Madagascar was even home to the last of the rukhs, mythical birds so enormous in size that they could carry off live elephants in their dreadful talons, and then kill them by dropping them down from great heights.
It was to this island of misplaced location and magical fantasy that D’Avenant decided to take his friends in his poem, ‘Madagascar’. Dedicated to Rupert, it was published as the centre-piece of a volume of poems dedicated to Jermyn and Endymion Porter.
In ‘Madagascar’, D’Avenant let Rupert’s much sought-after ships put out to sea at last, a strong wind billowing in their white sails as they ploughed south through the surging waves of the Atlantic. Aboard the flagship stood Jermyn, Endymion Porter and Rupert, the latter brandishing Charles I’s trident as a symbol both of his role as admiral and of Britain’s desire to dominate the oceans. From high up in the sky, the poet watched as they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the east coast of Africa to the great island of Madagascar.
The sight of the great galleons lowering their anchors drew gasps of awe from the Madagascans assembled on the shore. A ‘long-lost scattered parcel of mankind’, D’Avenant called them, while also making the point that they still retained a savage innocence. The Madagascans were instinctively drawn to the royalty of Rupert’s straight nose, his deep brown eyes and his lustrous curly brown hair that spilled down onto his broad shoulders. They acknowledged him unquestioningly as their over-lord. Prince Rupert had become Charles’s viceroy in Madagascar. But in this poem, which was entirely a product of D’Avenant’s imagination, their peaceful enjoyment of the island was not destined to last.
Heralded by their martial drums, the Spanish arrived, sent thence by their greedy king who, in his madness, had even laid claim to the sun. D’Avenant, who loathed war, made the Spanish propose an alternative to a pitched battle. Two champions alone from each side would fight and settle the ownership of the island. Rupert was quick to choose his –
…both I spy
March to the List; whilst either’s cheerful look
Foretold glad hopes of what they undertook
The champions were of course the flame-headed Jermyn and Porter.
You may esteem them Lovers by their hair;
The colour warns no Lady to despair;
And Nature seemed to prove their stature such,
As took not scantly from her, nor too much;
So tall, we can’t misname their stature length
Nor think’t less made for comeliness than strength.
The combat began. Rapiers flashed under the African sun as two pairs of champions duelled, parrying and thrusting up and down the beach. For a while the two pairs seemed locked in an even contest. Both armies gaped in wonder at the skill being displayed before their eyes. But Jermyn and Endymion Porter had the upper hand:
Each did disguise the fury of his heart,
By safe and temperate exercise of Art:
Seemed to invite those thrusts they most decline,
Receive, and then return in one true line:
As if all Archimedes’ science were
In duel both expressed, and bettered there…
Soon, the bodies of the two Spaniards lay twitching, their ruby blood seeping out onto the white sand. The contest was won, but the dishonourable Spaniards reneged on their agreement. Their war cries filled the air as
they surged forward, rapiers and pistols at the ready. But even as they charged, Rupert’s brow began to darken. With god-like fury worthy of his uncle Charles (D’Avenant was stretching the point here) he descended on the foe. Those Spaniards who were not hacked to pieces fled back to their galleons and were never seen again.
In D’Avenant’s imagination the island brimmed with riches. In the fantasy world of the poem, Jermyn and his friends started digging down into the rich soil and almost immediately their eyes were delighted by the glitter of gold. When they dived below the warm waters of the Indian Ocean they found trees of rainbow-coloured coral
… where Mermaids lie,
Sighing beneath those precious boughs, and die
For absence of their scaly lovers lost
In midnight storms, about the Indian coast…
In the shallow waters they found centuries-old oysters, their shells gaping open, inviting the English adventurers to gather up their pearls. The only problem was that the pearls were so heavy only the strongest divers could carry them to the surface!
D’Avenant went on to imagine Jermyn and his companions climbing on the rocks above the beach, crying out with delight as they found sapphires, rubies and diamonds.
There was more. Black ambergris, a cholesterol-based substance formed in the intestines of sperm whales and highly prized as a fixative for perfumes, was washed ashore in such profusion that the stupid sailors were found using it as shoe polish. Hastening into the woods, Jermyn and his companions delighted in tasting and smelling the rich profusion of exotic fruits. Then, the natives led them to a grove where silk worms spun their threads so quickly they made Persian silk worms seem clumsy and lazy in comparison.
The King's Henchman Page 8
