The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  By a bold people’s stubborn arms oppressed,

  Forced to forsake the land he once possessed,

  Torn from his dearest son, let him in vain

  Seek help, and see his friends unjustly slain.

  Let him to base unequal termes submit,

  In hope to save his crown, yet loose both it

  And life at once, untimely let him die…

  Aeneas had been forced to forsake Troy, and saw many of his friends slain, but the rest of the curse did not fall on him. How ironic it was that Charles, who believed himself to be descended, via the Welsh ancestors of the Tudors, from Aeneas’s great grandson Brutus, was to become the recipient of all these other outpourings of jilted Dido’s venom.

  Ever since Jermyn’s attempt in 1641 to quell Parliament using the King’s army in the north, Parliamentarian propaganda had identified Jermyn and, by association, Henrietta Maria, as being amongst the most enthusiastic promoters of the war. While in public they both voiced their support for a peace plan proposed by Kensington, their general policy was indeed to encourage the King to fight rather than compromise with his enemies. Their deep conviction was that the prerogative of power should lie with Charles alone. In any event, Parliament had declared Jermyn a traitor and had even impeached Henrietta Maria, in absentia, in May 1643. No room was left for compromise: the Royalists simply had to win.

  Together with his new friend Cowley, Jermyn spent many hours at an Oxford scholar’s writing desk in his temporary home overlooking the peaceful Fellows’ Gardens at Merton, composing articles for the propaganda newsbook Mercurius Aulicus.

  To be feared less than Parliament, he realised, was proving to be of no advantage to the King’s cause. So when Rupert proposed that Royalist troops should exact the same sort of reprisals on civilians who had helped Parliamentarians as the enemy practised on those who helped Royalists, Jermyn supported him. Henceforth houses were burned, women raped and men beaten and robbed by Royalists as well as Roundheads. The war was a real one and Jermyn shared Rupert’s iron resolve to win it at whatever price.

  The political intrigue and the seventeenth century office politics which had riddled the peace-time court in London was nothing compared to the insecurities, jealousies and back-stabbing that seethed behind the ramparts of Oxford that winter. Lord Percy tried to persuade Charles to dismiss Jermyn from the Queen’s household, arguing that, as the most instrumental figure in the Army Plot, his presence in Oxford cast the King in a bad light. As in the Eleanor Villiers scandal, Charles may have been tempted by this excuse to separate Henrietta Maria from her favourite, but a stern rebuke from his wife made him drop the idea.

  ‘The fault is partly yours’, she chided her husband, ‘for if a person [like Percy] speaks to you boldly, you refuse nothing’.

  A more serious challenge to Jermyn’s position came from George Digby, the straight-nosed and slightly conceited son of the Earl of Bristol and one of Jermyn’s companions on the embassy to Madrid, right back at the start of his career. Digby had chosen the Royalist side over the Parliamentarians, but at The Hague, his pompous behaviour towards the Prince of Orange had done nothing to help the cause, and had greatly diminished his standing in Henrietta Maria’s eyes.

  The ambitious young courtier was acutely jealous that the Queen rated Jermyn’s diplomatic skills far higher than his own. Charles – perhaps deliberately – took precisely the opposite view, promoting Digby to the Privy Council and making him, not Jermyn, his second Secretary of State. From this new position of power, Digby felt confident enough not to conceal his personal contempt either for Jermyn or Jermyn’s friend, Prince Rupert.

  As soon as the winter frosts were over and enough green grass had begun to sprout up to feed horses on the move, Rupert marched away to relieve Newark from a Parliamentarian siege. Once the Prince had left, Digby did everything he could to undermine him, so Jermyn became the Prince’s protector. When Digby talked Henrietta Maria into opposing Rupert’s appointment as military President of Wales, Jermyn had to persuade her to change her mind.

  Aware that Digby was deliberately starving Rupert of supplies and intelligence reports, Jermyn sent him both. The effort was enormous. ‘This is of more trouble to me’, Jermyn commented once, ‘than it would be pain to me at parting of my flesh and bones’. But overall, he succeeded. ‘I find Prince Rupert nor all the numbers in arithmetic have any efficacy, but are cyphers’, a courtier commented wryly, ‘without lord Jermyn’.

  But mere concerns over troop movements and siege works took second place in the minds of some courtiers to more trivial concerns which added a somewhat surreal touch to life in Oxford. One of the oddest was a certain Mrs Frescheville’s ‘most violent ambition to have her husband created a Baron’.

  Having been bombarded with evidence of the hen-pecked Mr Frescheville’s right to two baronies, Charles delegated to Jermyn the somewhat daunting task of giving her a warrant for only one. As the parchment was snatched out of his hand, Jermyn started to explain the situation, but Mrs Frescheville’s rage was unstoppable and she fell ‘into intemperate expressions both of the King and Queen’. By all accounts, Jermyn retreated from this unexpected battlefield without daring to put up a fight.

  * * *

  Throughout the winter, Henrietta Maria and Jermyn lived together at Merton College, while Charles slept in his own, cold bed across the meads in Christ Church College. This does not mean that she was spending the nights with Jermyn – indeed, surrounded by ladies of the bedchamber, that would scarcely have been possible. Yet we cannot rule out the possibility that, increasingly irritated by her husband’s failure to measure up to the decisive military genius of her late father, and increasingly dependent on Jermyn, with his soul composed of ‘the eagle and the dove’, Henrietta Maria was seeking solace – we do not know whether we can correctly add the word ‘again’ – in her Lord Chamberlain’s arms.

  In any event, Henrietta Maria became pregnant again. Now, as the March days lengthened, news reached them that Roundhead troops were closing in on Oxford.

  The prospect of a siege unnerved Henrietta Maria considerably. Morbid visions of delivering her new baby straight into the waiting hands of a coarse Parliamentarian gaoler swarmed through her mind. Perhaps too, if the baby was actually Jermyn’s, she did not want to give birth under Charles’s nose. For either or both reasons, she told Jermyn she wanted to leave Oxford before the siege began.

  ‘I was never more against anything in my life than this remove’, Jermyn told Rupert. There was no telling what disasters would befall them on the open road. And just as serious, for Jermyn, was that his renewed absence from the court would allow Digby to gain more political ground at his expense.

  But despite all his impassioned arguments, Henrietta Maria remained adamant. Her bones ached due to fever and her voice was weak from coughing, but she set off, with a detachment of Jermyn’s regiment as a bodyguard, on Wednesday, 17 April 1644. Her anxious husband went with her as far as Abingdon. There he stood and waved farewell as her little party started winding its way away through the Vale of the White Horse. He would never see her again.

  Urgent business for Rupert detained Jermyn at Oxford another week. Then, he said his farewells, final ones, as it transpired, to the King and to his own father, now a sprightly seventy-three-years old, still puffing away at his clay pipe. And then he came galloping after Henrietta Maria, to be by her side once more.

  In order to protect her from the jolting of a carriage, the Queen was carried in a litter, an enclosed coach carried on shafts slung between oxen. As this ungainly conveyance lurched along she coughed weakly and nursed her belly.

  With her travelled a small collection of attendants, a select microcosm of her once enormous entourage of ladies, gentlemen, monkeys and dwarfs. In the litter with her was Jeffrey Hudson, a midget from Rutland, whom Buckingham had presented to her, probably as a veiled insult to her own relatively short stature, but whom she had come to love as a surrogate child. Her chief lady-in
-waiting the Duchess of Richmond, sat with the Queen, trying to comfort and amuse her. Jermyn and Will Crofts rode by the side of the litter, their careworn faces growing brown in the strong spring sun. Behind them marched their soldiers carrying pikes and muskets over their shoulders.

  They passed through the Somerset fens made bright by pied daisies, blue violets and golden swathes of buttercups. But rather than listen to the skylarks warbling overhead, their ears strained in case they heard the rumbling of Roundheads galloping after them. Passing Bridgewater they lumbered through the quiet Devon lanes until at last they reached the safety of Exeter and the welcoming smile of its governor, Jermyn’s cousin Jack Berkeley.

  Even as Henrietta Maria prepared herself for the ordeal of giving birth, news reached them that the army of their old Parliamentarian adversary Lord Essex was marching on the city.

  Jermyn was sanguine that Exeter could withstand a siege of two months, ‘there being provisions and ammunition amply for so long time’. He was far more concerned about Henrietta Maria, wracked with what is now thought to have been tuberculosis, ‘ill at ease and full of fears’ and still ‘not brought abed’.

  In the seventeenth century, the chances of an average woman dying in childbirth were almost seventy times higher than they are today. Henrietta Maria’s debilitated condition made the odds greater still. She herself was convinced she would not survive. She even entrusted Jermyn with a last message to take back to the King.

  On Sunday, 16 June 1644, she went into a long, dangerous labour, resulting in the birth of a healthy baby girl, Henrietta Anne. ‘Anne’ was chosen to flatter Anne, Queen Regent Anne of France: ‘Henrietta’ could have been after Henrietta Maria herself, or her father or, again, it is not impossible that the Queen intended this female form of Henry to honour her friend and guardian, Henry Jermyn.

  Perhaps, we may speculate, the name commemorated an even closer connection between Jermyn and the little princess – of father and daughter. It is impossible to say for sure. But the biological truth is not so important or relevant as the emotional truth that, throughout her life, the dominant father-figure in Henrietta Anne’s life would always be, not Charles I, but Henry Jermyn.

  Henrietta Maria survived, but only just. Temporarily unable to see through one eye, she had lost the feeling in an arm and could scarcely breathe, whilst her legs felt like ice. Jermyn insisted she must rest. But ‘it was not possible’, Jermyn told Digby, ‘for her to overcome the apprehension she had of being shut up’. She decided she could only be safe in France and ‘therefore exposes herself to more dangers than those she could have undergone in this city in respect of her health and the sea’.

  Roundhead soldiers patrolled the countryside outside the city walls, forcing her party to split up and leave in small groups. It was impossible to take the baby princess with them, for her cries would have given them away in an instant. Feeling wretchedly powerless, they had no choice but to leave her behind, to be nursed by Lady Morton.

  A mere three miles out of Exeter, Henrietta Maria’s party heard Roundheads coming, and were forced to hide under a pile of rubbish, she trying desperately not to cough while the enemy soldiers poked about nearby. Only once they had gone away could she join Jermyn, little Jeffrey Hudson and the rest of her attendants, as arranged, in a hut on the Plymouth Road.

  Their excruciatingly slow flight took them around the southern edge of Dartmoor, past Totnes, where they probably saw the very stone onto which Brutus was said to have stepped, when he first came ashore to fight the giants. Now, fleeing their own monsters, they hastened over the Tamar into Cornwall. A Parliamentarian propagandist described their journey, with Henrietta Maria in her litter and Jermyn

  riding by her, and upon every stop (as she made many) the courtier’s officious hand appeared to support her weak body upon occasions of stirring or removing herself in the litter, and when she was pleased (contrary to the directions of her physicians) to walk on foot, his arm (which she conceives as mighty as the strongest pillar of this land) warranted her health more than… the most skilled physicians.

  Jermyn was even ready, wrote the propagandist, sarcastically, to throw his fine cloak down over any mud they encountered, a clear allusion to the story of the gallantry Sir Walter Raleigh was said to have shown to Elizabeth I.

  The Royalist Francis Basset, who saw them passing through Launceston, told a truer story. ‘Here is the woefullest spectacle my eyes yet ever looked on, the most worn and weakest pitiful creature in the world, the poor Queen shifting for an hour’s life longer’.

  A devious Jermyn scowls at the world from this unflattering anti-Royalist cartoon of him, printed during the Civil War

  At last they reached the tiny harbour-town of Falmouth and its granite manor house, Arwenack, the ancestral home of Jermyn’s mother and of his Killigrew cousins. Henrietta Maria’s nerves may have been soothed by their excited chatter, and she may have relaxed a little, gazing out with her one good eye through the narrow casement windows, across the brilliant blue waters of the Fal estuary. Meanwhile, Jermyn could ride up the hill to inspect the powerful Tudor fortress of Pendennis and to confer with its governor, his cousin Sir William Killigrew.

  The stronghold seemed almost impregnable, yet nothing would induce Henrietta Maria to remain on British soil any longer. With the Killigrews’ help, Jermyn engaged ships to take them to France. On Sunday, 14 July they boarded a man-of-war and set sail with an escort of ten Cornish merchantmen.

  The escort was certainly necessary. Scarcely had they left the protective range of Pendennis’ cannons than Parliamentarian sails appeared on the horizon. The prospect of capture was unbearable. The Queen ordered Captain Colster that, if it seemed certain they would be caught, he must light the gunpowder in the hold and blow them all to pieces.

  Arwenack, Falmouth, home of Jermyn’s mother’s family, the Killigrews.

  The chase continued right across the Channel until, within sight of Jersey, French ships appeared and the Parliamentarians turned away. But even then, safety was not ensured. As fast as their enemies’ sails disappeared, black clouds sped across the sky and a gale blew up, scattering their own fleet and driving the Queen’s ship out towards the perilous Atlantic. Colster’s men battled frantically with the sails, forcing the storm-tossed vessel ever closer to the Breton coast until at last they were nearly cast onto the rocks of a wild cove at Chastel near Brest.

  Clinging to the sides of their ship’s longboats, the Queen, Jermyn and their companions were rowed through the crashing surf. Their clothes saturated by the cold salt water, they scrabbled about trying to steady themselves on the murderous rocks. And then, just as safety finally seemed assured, they saw the dark shapes of peasants running down into the cove, brandishing hoes and scythes. Jermyn and Crofts could not use their pistols because the powder was drenched. Instead they dragged their rapiers out of their damp scabbards and Colster brandished his cutlass.

  At their feet, the two-foot high Jeffrey Hudson brandished his own tiny sword, fiercely keen to protect the Queen by any means he could. Above the boom of the tide and the howling of the wind, Jermyn shouted out that he was the Lord Jermyn, Lord Chamberlain to the Queen of England.

  The uncomprehending peasants shouted back in their guttural Breton that they would kill them for being pirates, and bore down on them. Jermyn shouted even louder, in his best French, trying to make the peasants understand that they were not pirates. Waving his rapier towards the Queen, who was floundering about in her long skirts in the surf, coughing violently and trying to catch hold of the lap-dog Mitte, Jermyn finally succeeded in explaining to the peasants that they were in the presence of none other than Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, daughter of the King Henri IV of France.

  After an uncomfortable night spent in the peasants’ hovels, Henrietta Maria and her company set off slowly for Bourbon, where she intended to relax and, as was her wont, drink its bitter but supposedly medicinal spa-water. But Jermyn took a different route, galloping away alone to
Paris. After a 375-mile ride across the parched fields of northern France he presented himself, dusty and exhausted, in the office of the new French First Minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Having secured formal permission for Henrietta Maria and her retinue to enter France, Jermyn then galloped back to be at her side again.

  He found the Queen resting at the beautiful Château of Amboise overlooking the broad sweep of the Loire Valley. With its high white towers with slate-blue roofs, Amboise had been the beloved retirement-place of Leonardo da Vinci, only a century earlier. Now it served as a temporary haven for Jermyn and Henrietta Maria before they embarked in their stately barges to travel up the Loire, past Orléans and Nevers and into the very heart of France.

  The bitter mineral waters of Bourbon soothed away the worst of Henrietta Maria’s toothaches, migraines, agues and coughs. She never fully recovered her health and her cough was to plague her for the rest of life. But when they began their slow journey to Paris that autumn, they both felt refreshed.

  Their arrival in Paris had the air of a triumphal march, the French royal family riding with them in their gilded carriages over the Pont Neuf while the crowds cheered the return of Henri IV’s daughter. Jermyn’s mind was already brimming with schemes to help Charles win the war. Some were in effect already. As they entered Paris, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria looked forward eagerly to being able to enter London again soon, riding at the head of an all-conquering invasion force.