The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  X

  ‘SOME SUCCOUR FOR ENGLAND’ 1644 – 1645

  But to this end your Highness must enter into a true knowledge of our affairs, and must begin to think on what in all appearance may bring us through; and to resolve yourself not to use only ordinary means, but to use all other whereof we may stand in need.

  Jermyn to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, 6/16 August 1644

  The French court that gave such a warm welcome to Henrietta Maria and her Lord Chamberlain was very different to the one Jermyn had known before the war.

  On Sunday, 4 December 1642, while he and the Queen waited for the wind to change at Scheveningen before sailing to England, Cardinal Richelieu had died. Five months later Louis XIII followed him to the grave, leaving the widowed Queen Anne to become Regent of France on behalf of her little son Louis XIV. For her First Minister she had turned unhesitatingly to Richelieu’s debonair Roman protégé Giulio Mazarini, Cardinal Mazarin.

  Three years Jermyn’s senior, the Roman-born Cardinal had a handsome, rounded face with expressive brown eyes and a moustache and beard clipped immaculately to form a ‘T’ shape across his pursed pink lips.

  But appearance aside, Mazarin and Jermyn had a great deal in common. Both were consummately good at being courtiers. They had devoted their lives to serving queens and had won vast amounts of power and money as a consequence. Like Jermyn, Mazarin’s relationship with his royal mistress went far beyond mere servitude. The boy-King Louis XIV was born twenty-three years after Louis XIII and Anne’s wedding. Few writers then or now have doubted that Cardinal Mazarin was the real father of the young King of France.

  At Jermyn’s request Mazarin and Anne gave Henrietta Maria use of the old royal apartments in the Medieval heart of the Louvre. The Louvre is one of the buildings most closely associated with the French nation, yet while Jermyn and Henrietta Maria lived there a surprising amount of English political decisions were made under its roof.

  With the French court now enjoying the newer Palais Royale over the road, the Louvre was no longer the sumptuous palace either Jermyn or Henrietta Maria remembered. Its rich tapestries and furniture now adorned the walls of the Palais Royale, leaving the Louvre’s cold corridors echoing with the clatter of the royal printing press and the coarse laughter of the masons who were busy building, chiselling and hammering stones for a new gallery running north from the section where they lived.

  Jules, Cardinal Mazarin

  From the streets nearby they could hear the catcalls and curses of the tradesmen. A fetid smell arose from the rubbish piled in the moat, masked only in high summer when it was surpassed by the stench of the Seine.

  Gradually, though, it became home. Cowley, D’Avenant and Jermyn’s cousin Jack Berkeley were amongst those who escaped from England to join them. Cowley became Jermyn’s secretary, ciphering all his business letters – but he did not, as his biographer later claimed, cipher those of Henrietta Maria. That most secret of work remained Jermyn’s exclusive preserve.

  Better for their spirits than the Louvre was Henrietta Maria’s childhood residence, Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Mazarin and Anne gave them use of apartments in the Château Neuf at Saint-Germain, and they spent as much time there as possible enjoying what Jermyn termed its ‘country air’.

  Set on a wooded escarpment the palace complex of Saint-Germain centred on a towering, octagonal Italianate castle called the Château Vieux, built almost a century earlier and occupied by Henrietta Maria’s brother Gaston of Orléans. Nearby stood the Château Neuf, built two stories high out of warm-coloured brick by Henrietta Maria’s parents. Down the steep slope below tumbled the famous ‘hanging gardens’ – terrace upon terrace full of statues; fountains and frescos – right down to the meadows.

  From the balustrade in front of the château, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria could gaze out over the Seine valley as it curved away southeast towards the chimney-tops of Paris, five miles distant. It was a beautiful view, but it was also one that served as a sharp reminder of something both Henrietta Maria and Jermyn felt with equal concern – how far they were becoming from the centre of things.

  In his first audience with Mazarin, Jermyn begged successfully for his soup and gold, persuading the Cardinal to grant Henrietta Maria a pension. Out of this he tried to feed and clothe their household and the many Royalist exiles who flocked to join them. He also had to provide the constant flow of the supplies Charles’s armies needed so desperately. Even supplementing the pension with loans raised on the Crown Jewels was not enough, so Jermyn turned to other means.

  Jermyn’s father Sir Thomas died in January 1645, harassed with fines levied by a vindictive Parliament, and smelling strongly of stale tobacco. Jermyn inherited his father’s Governorship of Jersey and obtained royal licenses for ships to plunder any merchantmen from Parliamentarian London that happened to sail past.

  By a special patent, Charles granted Henrietta Maria the monopoly on selling tin from Royalist Cornwall. A fleet of loyal merchant vessels, including Captain Colster’s, ran to and fro across the Channel, landing tin in the French ports and returning with Jermyn’s newly-purchased military supplies. A typical letter from Jermyn to Secretary of State Digby, who was with the King in England (Friday, 9 May 1645), tells Charles that the Flemish Captain Haesdonck

  is gone from Dunkirk three weeks since with four frigates, 6,040 muskets, 2,000 pair of pistols, 1,200 carbines, 150 swords, 400 shovels, 27,000 lbs of match and 50,000 lbs of brimstone. I hope he has arrived before now. His arms were all embarked before [Capt] Allen arrived there, so that I cannot assure you that Allen will be provided with that proportion which I sent you word would be sent to the Marquess of Montrose. The Queen has sent 400 barrels of gunpowder to Dartmouth, of which 200 have arrived there, and the rest will presently. She could not get the merchants to undertake the transport of these powder barrels without enlarging her credit for them in case they should not be paid in England.

  Such a complex task of juggling loans, creditors, merchants and sea captains would have been almost impossible even without the obstructions created by the Dutch States General and the English Parliamentarian navy, to say nothing of the weather. And, whenever things went wrong, Digby lost no opportunity of placing the blame on Jermyn.

  Then in May 1645, and without any warning, Digby persuaded Charles to transfer the tin monopoly to Sir Edward Hyde, the head of the Prince of Wales’s household in the West County.

  The sudden loss of income expected from the next shipment of tin had a devastating effect on the Louvre’s system of rolling debts. Jermyn had just obtained an advance of money from the French to enable him to send supplies to the glamorous Scottish royalist Montrose, secured on the Queen’s French pension for the next four months.

  He had expected to pay the loan back with profits of fifteen shillings per hundred-weight from the next tin shipment. Now that these profits were to go to Hyde, Jermyn had to use a gift of money (20,000 pistoles, worth very roughly £10m in modern terms) from the French court, which he had intended to use to pay for the Dutch ships to sail England, to send further supplies to Montrose instead. He had also to raise a further personal loan from the Venetian merchant Cantarini to redeem one of the pawned Crown Jewels, before it was lost forever.

  The winner in this inter-Royalist tussle, Sir Edward Hyde, was the son of a family of prosperous Wiltshire gentry.

  A thickset man even when young, he had a prominent double chin, eyes more contemplative than penetrating, and long, fair hair. His brilliant mind brooked no idleness in the country, so he had trained as a lawyer at Oxford and the Middle Temple in London.

  Hyde had rapidly become one the best lawyers in the profession, with a well-deserved reputation for fair-mindedness, coupled with a strong sense of loyalty to his friends. Becoming a Member of Parliament, he sided initially with Pym, attacking corrupt royal judges and helping to prepare the motion that sent the Earl of Strafford to the executioner’s block.

  But Hyde was also a staunch Angl
ican and, when it emerged that Parliament was not whole-hearted in its support of the Established Church, yet the King was, he changed sides adroitly. Rapidly promoted in 1643 to be Chancellor of the Exchequer – the head of the Royalist government’s finances – Hyde was ever afterwards as implacable a Royalist as Jermyn, working indefatigably to serve first the King and then the young Prince of Wales, who was put into his care in 1645.

  Hyde also had a sharp wit, but it was tempered, as Bishop Burnet complained, with ‘too much levity’. Whilst he shared Jermyn’s love of good food and drink, and eventually grew extremely rotund, he never openly consumed either excessively. Unlike Jermyn, Edward Hyde was never the jovial life and soul of the party.

  Worse still, Hyde’s relative abstinence from physical excess was not matched in his ability for self-praise, which allowed him to write of himself ‘his integrity was ever without blemish, and believed to be above temptation’. This left him open to charges of pomposity yet, as Burnet continued, he ‘would disparage the pretensions of others, not without much scorn, which created him many enemies’.

  Hyde first encountered Jermyn in 1633, when the Villiers family called on him to help persuade the King to force Jermyn to marry the pregnant Eleanor. To a man of Hyde’s high morals, Jermyn appeared to be nothing but a feckless bounder, and this was an impression of his rival that the lawyer never amended. That they were united only in their common loyalty to the Crown is amply demonstrated by the dispute over the tin trade.

  ‘You will make an inconsiderable contemptible benefit to the Prince’, Jermyn told Hyde angrily, ‘whereas if [the tin patent] had remained in the Queen’s hands she would have made a great one’. The battle-lines between the brilliant lawyer and the consummate courtier had been drawn.

  When Charles said good-bye to Jermyn at Oxford he had, as Jermyn wrote, ‘withal commanded [me] to make overture for some succour for England’. Besides becoming a base for his money-making activities, Jermyn’s ornately furnished office at the Louvre also doubled as a make-shift English foreign ministry, from which he coordinated negotiations for help from the foreign powers, including France; Holland; Rome; Lorraine; Denmark; Sweden and even the Baltic duchy of Courland.

  The first plan that Jermyn and Secretary of State Digby contrived together – for, despite their differences, they knew they must co-operate – was for a Triple Alliance between the Royalists, France and Holland, whereby Mazarin would allow the Irish and Scots regiments serving in the French army to be transported to England in ships loaned by the Prince of Orange.

  In August 1644, Jermyn returned to Cardinal Mazarin’s opulent chambers to ask for his participation in this international coalition against Parliament. Jermyn urged him to remember that, ‘unless France did not presently think on some preparations, it would not be possible for the King’s cause to get the desired fruit thereof at the end of this summer campaign’.

  It was not that the French did not want to help Charles. Many French noblemen, including Henrietta Maria’s brother the Duke of Orléans, made assurances to Jermyn and the Queen of their genuine eagerness to help them subdue the impertinent Parliamentarians. And nor did Anne and Mazarin wish any permanent harm to the Stuart dynasty. It appalled and frightened them that an anointed monarch, so closely connected to the French royal family, should be treated so insolently by his subjects.

  Yet it seems that whenever Mazarin felt an urge to agree to Jermyn’s requests, the spectre of Richelieu would hover before him, admonishing him, as he had done so often whilst still alive, to make France strong by keeping its neighbours weak. So Mazarin replied to Jermyn’s requests for help by saying, ‘we might think on it’, adding

  it might happen that before this campaign [of France against the Spanish] ended, some occasion might offer itself to take this business again into consideration, and that the conjunctures might perhaps yield better expedients to bring it to a good conclusion than yet did appear.

  Such language did not fool Jermyn for a minute, but what could he say? Everything depended on inducing Mazarin to take positive action.

  ‘He dares not offend the Cardinal’s dog’, mocked an exiled Royalist who shared Hyde’s hostility to Jermyn. But to Jermyn, no effort to please Mazarin was too great if it would gain French military assistance for the King. ‘You must call him my cousin’, Jermyn told Charles, ‘and at the bottom [of letters], your affectionate cousin’. Yet, despite many such efforts of this sort, French assistance remained frustratingly unforthcoming.

  Of all the rulers whom Jermyn contacted, Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, was by far the most enthusiastic supporter of the royalist cause.

  The Prince’s chief motivation was his desire to elevate the House of Orange from mere stadtholders – military commanders – to monarchs in their own right. He regarded the marriage of his son William to Charles and Henrietta Maria’s daughter Mary as a valuable step in this direction – but only if the English king retained his power. Now, to encourage him further, Jermyn secretly suggested that Orange’s daughter might become the wife of young Prince Charles. He omitted to mention in doing so, however, that he had also offered Prince Charles’s hand to the Duke of Orléans’ daughter, with the similar aim of strengthening Orléans’ resolve to help the King. All Jermyn could do was hope neither found out until the greater end of ending the war had been achieved.

  The Prince of Orange promised to help Jermyn by providing ships to transport the Scottish and Irish regiments to England. But it soon became clear that Mazarin would never release them from their servitude in the French army. So Jermyn was forced to seek an army elsewhere. He found one in the mercenary troops maintained by the Duke of Lorraine.

  The Duke had been expelled from his French duchy in 1634 and had spent the intervening years marching about Europe, hiring out his army of professional soldiers to whoever needed them. When Jermyn asked Mazarin for the money to hire Lorraine’s army, he pointed out sagely that sending the Duke to England was a good way of stopping him marching back into France to reclaim his lost patrimony. For once, Mazarin agreed.

  By January 1645, thanks to Jermyn’s deft negotiations, Lorraine had agreed in principle to embark for England with 10,000 well-drilled troops. But despite this success, Mazarin dispensed the promised funds sparingly, grudgingly and late. And to Jermyn’s equal frustration, the Dutch Parliament, the States General, raised constant obstructions to prevent the Prince of Orange from lending Jermyn the ships. To rectify this, Jermyn’s agent in The Hague, the Puritan clergyman Stephen Goffe, embarked on an ambitious program of bribing the leading members of the States General.

  As these frustrating negotiations dragged on, and no armies actually sailed for England, Jermyn kept in constant touch with the King. The news he heard from the Royalist camp was very seldom encouraging. But in June 1645, a disaster took place that would have made a lesser man than Jermyn give up altogether.

  XI

  THE ‘GREAT HELL-CAT’ 1645-6

  ‘The torment of misfortunes which have overborne us of late and brought us from so high into so desperate a condition is now so insupportable to me in any thing as when I think of the Queen, unto whom… the sadness of my heart will not permit me to write’.

  Cardiff, 5 August 1645, George Digby to Jermyn.

  To Jermyn and Henrietta Maria, Saturday 14 June 1645 was just another day in exile.

  They were at home, as usual, in the Louvre Palace, Paris. That spring, the 34 year-old Queen had suffered at least three fits of ague, a term used for sharp attacks of feverish chills. Although recovered from these, Henrietta Maria was still frail.

  Far more than her health, however, her worries focussed on her family, not least little Henrietta Anne, whose first birthday was due to fall in two days’ time. After the Queen had been forced to abandon her in Exeter, the little Princess had remained in England: neither Henrietta Maria nor Jermyn had seen her since.

  Jermyn was now 40 and in very good health. Like his royal mistress, however, he was exhausted by
his on-going efforts to help the Royalist cause, juggling bills and loans, seeking help from foreign powers and monitoring the situation in England and abroad through the by now formidable network he had built up of correspondents, agents and spies.

  Yet on that same day, 14 June, momentous events were unfolding. Some 300 miles to the northwest, the morning mists cleared over Naseby Ridge in Leicestershire to reveal what was, even by the standards of the Civil War, an anything but ordinary scene.

  Drawn up in battle order were two great armies. On one side, the King’s Royalists, including Charles’s nephew Prince Rupert, were massed in their gorgeous finery, the gold-embroidered Royal Standard flashing in the first rays of the summer sun. Confronting the King’s men was not the customary raggle-taggle turnout of assorted Roundheads. What faced Charles I that day at Naseby was the might of Parliament’s New Model Army, commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax.

  Up to now, the armies of both sides had consisted mainly of landed proprietors leading men conscripted from towns and villages, part-time soldiers, many armed with no more than farm implements. The New Model Army, however, was entirely different. Raised and paid for by Parliament at a cost of some £45,000 a month – about £4 million pounds in modern money – its ranks had been drilled rigorously as professional soldiers.

  The army included some ex-Royalists who had been pressed into its ranks, but most of the soldiers belonged to the Independent denomination, an English form of Presbyterianism that believed in a church without a hierarchy. For these psalm-singing puritans, the Civil War was not just about reshuffling which aristocrats got to be closest to the King. It was a struggle on behalf of God and the English people against the forces of the Pope and the Devil.