The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  The shrewdest amongst them soon learned that the best way of engaging Henrietta Maria’s interest in something was to share a relaxed flagon of wine or a vigorous game of tennis with her charismatic Equerry, Henry Jermyn. Once he had agreed something needed to be done, he could easily talk to the Queen about it, and she, with equal ease, might then persuade the King.

  By the start of 1640, we hear that Jermyn was arranging for Sir Harry Vane to replace Sir John Coke in no less a position than Secretary of State, one of the most powerful, official posts in the realm. An observer wrote that Jermyn ‘had engaged her [the Queen] by all the ways of his own supplications, and by the humble mediation of his friends’, and that Henrietta Maria had become so determined to see it happen that those who opposed it ‘will break up on a rock if they persist to espouse the business any longer’.

  Jermyn had spent a decade imitating Cardinal Richelieu’s ability to ingratiate himself with and influence the people around him. Ministers and aristocrats of the stature of the Earl of Leicester, Charles’s ambassador in Paris, and even the great Marquess of Hamilton, royal commissioner in Scotland and next in line to the throne after the Stuarts themselves, were soon exerting themselves to cultivate the strapping young man who, only a few years earlier, had been a disgraced prisoner in the Tower of London.

  Indeed Hamilton was so keen to gain Jermyn’s good graces that he gave him free reign in disposing of all the positions and offices that were in his patronage.

  What heady greatness seemed to stretch out ahead of him! Yet even as Jermyn’s influence mushroomed, the very world in which he had been bred to flourish was falling under a sinister shadow.

  At the root of the terrible social convulsions that lay ahead lay a massive crisis of confidence, that in many ways we are still trying to work through to this day. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had held a virtual monopoly on what people were supposed to think about the great questions that trouble humanity – where we come from; how to conduct ourselves towards each other; what will happen after we die.

  Charles I as he wished to be seen – an all-conquering, divinely-ordained sovereign.

  The answers the Church provided were dazzlingly complex, and ultimately so unsatisfactory, that in the early sixteenth century a wave of protestants, led by Martin Luther, had finally rebelled, breaking away from the Catholic Church and establishing their own Protestant sects. But, for all its faults, the Medieval Catholic system had at least been consistent. The majority, who had no real desire to think for themselves, had no reason ever to have to.

  Protestantism offered freedom of thought, but it opened a Pandora’s Box of questions. If one thing, such as who was in charge of your church, could be questioned, then what about the rest? Did the sun go around the earth, or was it really, as Galileo had suggested, the other way around? Must we really love our loathsome neighbours?

  Even the age-old myth that we came from Trojans, who came – by the indefatigable logic of the Medieval church – from Noah, who came from Adam and Eve, had started to seem less certain than before. But if that myth was not true, then it opened up a vertiginous problem: if we did not come from them, then from whom? Francis Bacon’s Natural Science had already set out on its tentative course that, just over two centuries after the English Civil War, would lead to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – and it was to be two centuries of very angst-ridden soul-searching indeed.

  Closer to hand was the question of religious observance itself. In 1537, the questioning of Catholic authority led to Henry VIII’s Protestant Reformation, that replaced the Pope with the King as head of the Church, ‘Defender of the Faith’, within his own dominions. But like all revolutionaries who question their leader’s authority, and then overthrow them, the English monarchs set themselves up for the inevitable follow-on question: if we didn’t have to obey that leader, why must we obey you?

  To defend their position, the English monarchs offered the only real argument they could – the very same one used by the Popes – that it was God’s will. It was by Divine Right that the monarch held the office of Defender of the Faith. It was a belief to which Charles, like his father, clung with more tenacity than a barnacle to a rock. And in Charles’s mind, the argument that secured his position as both King and Defender of the Faith also conferred on him a great obligation: to provide one, unified church to enfold and protect all his subjects.

  As to the nature of that church, the devil lurked, as ever, in the particulars. Had Charles been like Henry VIII’s son Edward VI, his church would have tended towards the lower, grittier, Calvinistic end of the Protestant spectrum, with spartan churches, unadorned ministers and plain-speaking sermons, leaving the congregation’s souls naked under the all-seeing eye of God.

  As fate would have it, though, Charles happened to favour a more Baroque establishment, not Roman Catholic, but not too far removed from it either. He, and not the Pope, was the Head of the Church, but below him, like the Pope, he liked his frocked archbishops and bishops and all the tiers of clergy, all of whose jobs it was to perform elaborate ceremonies that mediated benevolently between the people, and the Almighty.

  Charles’s preference was far from universally popular in England, where many hankered for the more austere, Calvinistic type of Protestantism. This was the type of Protestantism that had taken hold in Scotland, fired in the mid-sixteenth century by the Calvinistic fervour of John Knox. Here, the emphasis lay on democratic assemblies representing the local church ministers and elders. God dealt personally with all, rather than delegating his grace down through a long chain of church officials.

  Over the ensuing decades, the Church of Scotland vacillated over the question of whether they should administer themselves purely through assemblies of ministers and elders, or whether to retain the old Catholic office of bishops. In 1610, James VI and I had increased the power of the bishops, but their status remained considerably less than that of their English counterparts.

  Then, in 1637, came the single, great error of judgement. Rather than allow the two national churches to continue to operate separately, Charles I, misguided terribly by his English Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, decided that the Scots must start following the English system, and he issued a new Book of Common Prayer for Scotland, that must be used in all services.

  On Sunday, 23 July 1637, the Bishop of Edinburgh conducted a service in his cathedral. In accordance with the newly-revised rites, he turned his back on the congregation, just as priests had done before the Reformation. God loved his people, but instead of his grace flowing directly down to each of them individually, it was now being channelled symbolically through the Bishop.

  Behind him, the Bishop heard a clamour of protest, and a stool hurtled past his mitred head and smashed against the altar.

  Within days the protests at Edinburgh Cathedral had become the focus of a much wider frustration. When James VI of Scotland had inherited the English throne in 1603, his people thought they would rule Britain. But off King James had ridden to London, with his sons in his train. Now, Charles had spent so much time amongst the English that he might as well have been one, for all the care he took of them.

  Members of the nobility, gentry and clergy and burgesses of the towns met together to form a council called the Tables, aimed at asserting the traditional liberties and laws of Scotland and its national church. In February 1638 the members of the Tables, in open defiance of the King’s authority, signed their names to the Scottish National Covenant. From now on, the church would be Presbyterian, administered solely by local meetings of ministers and elders, the presbyteries, and General Assemblies of their representatives. That autumn, the General Assembly took the final step of the Scots’ collision course with royal authority by formally sweeping away the bishops altogether.

  These developments suited the French First Minister Cardinal Richelieu very well. It was the elegantly devious Cardinal’s policy to keep his neighbours, including Charles, as weak as possible. His
secret agents in Scotland promised the rebels French support if they continued to refuse to use the King’s Book of Common Prayer.

  So there it was. Charles I had what he saw as a simple desire to impose a blessed unity across the entire realm. Now the English were dusting off their muskets and the Scots were burnishing up their claymores.

  For a supremely confident young man like Jermyn, with his sights set on ever-higher offices within the inner circle of the court, these developments probably did not seem nearly so ominous as they do to us now. As far as he was concerned, these disobedient subjects of the King simply needed teaching a lesson, after which they would return to full obedience to the Crown. That Charles would succeed was beyond question.

  Richelieu had no doubt of this either, but simply to prolong the English king’s struggle, he threw in a new and extraordinary obstacle for him to overcome. Since she had been exiled to Holland, Henrietta Maria’s mother Marie de Medici had been longing to come to London. So now, the Cardinal’s agents encouraged her to set off.

  Just as a tiny hole in one of the dykes that protect Holland from the sea can suddenly burst into a jet of water, that breaks down the whole barrier and allows a colossal weight of water to overwhelm the polders beyond, so did the formidable matriarch rise from her bed and embark on a course of action that nobody could prevent.

  Having the old dowager and her vast retinue of outlandishly dressed servants to stay for an indefinite period was the last thing Charles wanted, when every penny he had was needed for the impending war. But worse than the expense was Marie herself – Italian Catholic by birth; intimate friend of the Pope and ex-regent of virulently Papist France. He might just as well have invited the Pope to St James’s and started burning his Protestant subjects all by himself.

  On Thursday, 13 September 1638, Jermyn rode over London Bridge with a retinue of servants and bodyguards. At the Sussex town of Rye, which in those days had a wide river navigable by large ships, Jermyn boarded a specially chartered frigate. As the royal standard streamed from the mast-top, his ship carved a furrow of white foam through the green-grey waters of the English Channel. From Dieppe, he rode hard down the highway to Paris. Flanked by both English ambassadors, he swept into the royal audience chamber at the Louvre and bowed low before Louis XIII and Queen Anne.

  In his most eloquent French, Jermyn presented Charles and Henrietta Maria’s congratulations on the birth of their new son and heir, called Louis – the future Louis XIV. As before, Jermyn’s presentation of compliments was intended only as a cover for his secret mission. In a private audience, he begged Louis and Richelieu to withdraw their support for the Scots rebels and to allow Marie to return to Paris, thereby diverting her from her descent onto London.

  Jermyn had learned a lot since he had first entered the Louvre, as a mere attendant of Lord Kensington’s, back in 1624. In the years that had followed he had been back thrice. On each occasion he had studied the protocol and personalities of the French court with ever increasing keenness. He was already amongst the Englishman most adept at negotiating with the French.

  But for all that, he had no hope of succeeding this time. Neither Louis nor his first minister would so much as acknowledge that they were having anything to do with the Scots. And all Jermyn achieved regarding Marie was a nebulous promise to reconsider the terms of her exile, which of course they did not act upon.

  So, despite Jermyn’s efforts, Marie crossed the Channel and bore down on St James’s Palace.

  ‘How shall I recognise her?’ asked one courtier.

  ‘She brings with her six coaches, seventy horses and a hundred and sixty in her train’, retorted another dryly, so the task of spotting her should not be too difficult.

  As predicted, the presence of Marie and her priests in St James’s Palace made Anglicans and Puritans alike tremble with indignation. It reminded them of the Catholic Masses being said there daily in Henrietta Maria’s private chapel. It seemed as if the entire royal court had been infested with Papists.

  In February 1639, desperate to see an end to the rumbling complaints and the vast cost of the visit, Charles and Henrietta Maria sent Jermyn back across the storm-tossed Channel to try again. But if Jermyn had any real hope that Louis and Richelieu might have changed their minds, he was disappointed. Back home amongst the sumptuous tapestries of St James’s, he explained awkwardly to Marie that her son would never allow her to go back to France.

  Jermyn’s next task was to report to Charles. To do so he was faced with a long ride north to York, where the King was now assembling an army to subdue the Scots, whom he described contemptuously as ‘such beggarly snakes [who] dare put out their horns’.

  Having delivered his report, Jermyn hurried back to join Henrietta Maria in London. But at the end of May messengers brought them worrying news from the north. The Scots had responded to Charles’s threat by raising their own army to defend the Covenant, with the Earl of Argyll at its head.

  A cold, scheming man, Argyll had acquired his family estates before his father’s death and repaid his good fortune by keeping the old earl in poverty. Having treated his own father thus he seems to have had no compunction about defying the King himself. Indeed, far from attacking Scotland, Charles was now being forced to defend England from invasion.

  Riding north again in June, Jermyn found the King’s army braving the brisk North Sea breezes at Dunse Low near the border town of Berwick-on-Tweed. Facing them across the dunes were Argyll’s army of pike and musket-wielding Covenanters. The fight for Madagascar had only been a piece of poetic fiction: now Jermyn braced himself for his first, real-life battle.

  Before the first shots were fired, however, the pallid King’s courage crumbled. A messenger rode out from Charles’s camp to tell Argyll that Scotland could keep its Presbyterian Covenant. The two armies withdrew and Jermyn galloped uneasily back to join Henrietta Maria at St James’s. He was painfully aware, as he wrote later, that affairs in Scotland ‘are not so settled as was to be wished’.

  By now Jermyn and the Queen were under no delusions about how fundamentally ill-equipped Charles was for dealing with crises. When tact and diplomacy were required, the King could be intractably stubborn. When firm leadership was called for, he dithered or backed down. Help was clearly needed. Both they and Archbishop Laud cajoled Charles into summoning Thomas Wentworth, soon to become Earl of Strafford, from Ireland to Whitehall, to become his special advisor on military affairs.

  Tall and thickset like Jermyn, ‘Black Tom’ had gained his nickname from his dark hair, and because of the heavy-handed approach he took to anyone who crossed his path. As Lord Deputy of Ireland, Strafford had stamped out piracy, inflicted severe punishment on corrupt English officials in Dublin and used corrupt juries to make the whole of Connaught into Crown property. When the Queen had asked him to give various posts in Ireland to favourites of hers, he had refused. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria may not have liked Strafford much, but they couldn’t help admire his dogged single-mindedness and superlative military skill. These were exactly what Charles needed to restore his dwindling authority in Scotland.

  Charles’s troubles, however, were now spreading south of the border. Since 1629, he had ruled England without summoning Parliament. Under the terms of Magna Carta he could not raise financial subsidies without Parliament’s consent.

  Only a tax called Ship Money was exempt from this rule. But when Charles tried levying it in 1636 and again in 1639, there were widespread protests and rioters in London smashed shop windows. In April 1640 he summoned what would later be called the Short Parliament, hoping – indeed, expecting – thus to rally the nation behind him, and to obtain a substantial financial subsidy to pay for troops to help him restore his authority in Scotland.

  This was the first Parliament to be called for eleven years. Its members were likely to include a considerable body of landed gentry and merchants with a considerable back-catalogue of grievances to air. Therefore, as many courtiers as possible used their influenc
e with – and power over – the small numbers of people who were actually entitled to vote, to have themselves elected. By such means, Jermyn was elected to a seat with which he had no discernible family or property connection – Corfe Castle in Dorset.

  Not all the Parliamentary seats, however, could be occupied by men as loyal to the Crown as Jermyn. And none were more disaffected with Charles’s period of his personal rule than John Pym.

  A former Exchequer clerk, Pym had represented his native Taunton in the Parliaments of the 1620s, during which he had been a leading voice against the Duke of Buckingham. Pym was one of the growing body of men who disliked the increasingly Catholic tendency within the Church of England and court. He believed it was Parliament’s duty to restore the balance.

  During the Short Parliament, this plump man with his pudding-bowl haircut, ‘spoke much, and appeared to be the most leading man, for besides the exact knowledge of the forms and orders of that Council, which few men had, he had a very comely and grave way of expressing himself, with great volubility of words… and had observed the errors and mistakes in government, and knew well how to make them appear greater than they were’.

  Under Pym’s emerging leadership, the majority of members, Anglican gentlemen from the shires, demanded that Charles must address their complaints before any discussion could be had of money. To them, war with the Presbyterian Scots smacked of a Catholic conspiracy, nurtured in the Queen’s court. Instead of voting the King more money for the war, they decided to issue a petition opposing further fighting.

  Charles’s furious response to this was to dissolve Parliament after a mere three weeks – hence its name ‘the Short Parliament’. Greatly encouraged by this display of English disunity, Argyll’s Covenanting army – that very force raised in Scotland to defend their national church from the perceived Catholic tendency of Charles’s court – came storming south.