The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  At Fontainebleau, on Midsummer’s Eve, Sunday, 23 June 1661, Jermyn and Louis signed a renewal of the ancient treaty between England and France, and began discussing a new treaty whereby each monarch would send armed help should the other be attacked either by foreign enemies or domestic rebels.

  Because the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza was so politically important to France, Mazarin had agreed to pay the dowry. The negotiations over the sum involved, and which colonies Portugal would give Charles in return, were conducted in Paris.

  According to some sources, the Portuguese marriage had been Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s idea. Regardless of who first thought it up, it was now an integral part of their greater scheme for Anglo-French friendship, and Jermyn did all he could to make the negotiations run smoothly.

  The discussions were made rather complicated by Hyde. Unable to prevent the marriage going ahead – he would have preferred a Protestant or, at a pinch, a Hapsburg princess – Hyde had decided, in the manner of pompous men, to pretend the Portuguese marriage had been his idea all along, and thus take the credit away from Jermyn.

  Therefore, while Jermyn negotiated openly at the French court, Hyde was in secret correspondence about the same thing with Louis’s finance minister, Nicholas Fouquet. It was therefore a combination of both negotiations that produced the finished contract, although ultimately Jermyn does deserve the credit – not least because in August, Hyde’s efforts were curtailed.

  On 17 August, Fouquet gave a sumptuous ball at his newly-completed Chateau of La Fontaine. The whole French court were invited, and also Henrietta Maria and Jermyn. During the proceedings, someone, probably the Queen’s old friend the Duchess of Chevreuse, mentioned to Louis, seemingly casually but really quite deliberately, that the only way Fouquet could possibly have afforded such magnificence was by embezzling the King’s money. Four days later, Fouquet was flung into the Bastille. Was Jermyn behind this? We do not know.

  The following May, 1662, when swallows flitted over the glittering waves on their way back to England, Jermyn’s nephew Harry escorted Catherine of Braganza up the Channel to Portsmouth. Jermyn arrived back from France to be present at the royal wedding, which was celebrated in Portsmouth Cathedral on Wednesday, 21 May.

  The marriage dowry that Jermyn had negotiated brought England Tangiers, which proved worthless, and the province of Bombay, Britain’s first possession in India. Almost three thousand miles of the Arabian Sea separated Bombay from Madagascar, yet in Jermyn’s mind this may have seemed some fulfilment of that old, 1630s dream, that one day the English would rule the Eastern oceans. His plans to transform London into a new Rome were already in hand, the acquisition of Bombay was a major element of that yet more audacious dream – to gain for Britain an empire to rival that of Rome’s.

  As things turned out, Jermyn’s wildest dreams were fulfilled – and vastly exceeded. At the height of its empire, Rome may have controlled as much as three million square miles. When Britain’s empire was at its height at the start of the twentieth century, it was larger by four and a half times.

  Jermyn had achieved all his aims, except the signing of the new defensive treaty between England and France. But the brilliant lawyer’s mind of Hyde, whom Charles had now made Earl of Clarendon, was already working on a counterattack, and of course it was he, and not Jermyn, who had access to the King’s ear in London.

  Hyde took every opportunity he could to create diplomatic incidents between England and France, such as by ordering the navy to interfere with French fishing boats and demanding that French ships should salute English ones. Although Jermyn made a special journey to London in December 1661 to see Charles, he still could not prevent Hyde from continuing to damage England’s relations with France.

  From Louis’s point of view, and however much Jermyn tried to persuade him to the contrary, what Jermyn said about Charles’s affection for France was simply not reflected by the actions of Charles’s government. Although Louis thanked Jermyn for his efforts as ambassador and gave him a large diamond, he refused to sign the new defensive treaty with England.

  Instead, the Sun King accepted a very similar one offered him by the Dutch States General. Despite all Jermyn’s efforts, France became allied to Holland under its republican States General, and specifically not to Britain. The consequences for Britain and, ironically, for Hyde in particular, were to be appalling.

  XVI

  ‘GRAND MASTER OF THE FREEMASONS’ 1662

  We are graciously pleased at the humble suite and petition of our right trusty and well beloved Cousin Henry E[arl] of St Albans to ratify and confirm… the said several grants for or concerning the said field or close called Pall Mall Field…

  Charles II’s confirmation the grant of what would become St James’s Square, 1662.

  On Monday, 28 July 1662, a flotilla of magnificently gilded barges glided up the River Thames, carrying Jermyn, Henrietta Maria and their household.

  It was the end of a traumatic journey back from France. As their ship was crossing the Channel, a violent storm had whipped up the waves, driving them up past the White Cliffs and into the North Sea.

  Greenwich, showing the old palace and the Queen’s House, drawn by Wenceslaus Hollar in 1637

  They had narrowly escaped being shipwrecked on the treacherous sandbanks off the east coast of Kent, and had finally come ashore at Deal. They must have been extremely relieved when the barges rounded the last bend in the river and they saw their destination – Greenwich.

  Since the Restoration, Jermyn, in his joint capacities as the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain and – by Henrietta Maria’s new appointment – High Steward of Greenwich, had organised the repair and improvement of her palace.

  When they stepped ashore, painters and gilders were putting the last touches to the restored Queen’s House, the white, classically-styled mansion in the palace grounds, that had been designed by the great Inigo Jones.

  Greenwich Park, which had degenerated into a wilderness during Cromwell’s rule, was being landscaped to designs they had commissioned from André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens of both Fontainebleau and Henrietta Anne’s new home in the Parisian suburbs, Saint-Cloud.

  Meanwhile, masons were toiling in the July sun to demolish the old Tudor palace and replace it with a new classical one. Inigo Jones had died in 1652, and nobody knows which of two architects Jermyn had hired for this purpose – it was either Inigo Jones’s protégé John Webb, or Sir John Denham, who had been one of Jermyn’s secret agents during the Commonwealth.

  From the front door of the Queen’s House, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria could look north over the piles of rubble and imagine what the view would be like in the future.

  In the distance the lush green grass of the water meadows of the Isle of Dogs was already turning into golden hay. In the middle-ground was the Thames, its rippling surface glinting and flashing in the summer sunlight.

  In the foreground, when all was finished, would be ornamental gardens rounded off with neat stone balustrades. And on either side of their vista would be two massive square buildings of fine stone, pillared and corniced like English versions of the Louvre. It would be like a grandiose stage-setting, and indeed Greenwich seems to have been planned thus, as a magnificent real-life stage, on which the King could receive foreign ambassadors.

  As ambassadors landed, they would see the same view, but in reverse, the great classical blocks of the palace framing the emerald background of the landscaped park, and, in the foreground, the shining whiteness of the Queen’s House.

  Late in the summer of 1662, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria travelled further up-river in their splendid barges from Greenwich to Somerset House. Here, too, Jermyn had been busy renovating and innovating.

  He and the Queen had altered some old designs made by Inigo Jones for extending the palace. A large block of rooms was being built in brick along the Strand, enclosing the Great Court inside. A gallery supported by white marble pillars was being const
ructed on the south side, overlooking the Thames. The land between the palace and the river was being laid out as an Italianate garden, complete with a set of marble stairs leading down to the water.

  They made Somerset House so beautiful that Jermyn’s poet Abraham Cowley wrote a poem in which the palace itself sings of its gratitude to the Queen.

  Cowley, who had lived in London since 1654 in order to spy on Cromwell for Jermyn, now rejoined the Queen’s household as Henrietta Maria’s secretary. He served until 1667, when Jermyn wrote sadly of the death of ‘poor Cowley’. Shortly before he died, Cowley asked his friend the Bishop of Rochester to publish his collected works and dedicate them to Jermyn. ‘I doubt not’, the Bishop wrote in the preface

  but according to his usual humanity, he [Jermyn] will accept this imperfect legacy, of the man whom he long honoured with his domestic conversation. And I am confident his Lordship will believe it no injury to his Fame, that in these Papers my Lord St Albans and Mr Cowley’s name shall be read together by posterity.

  The masons whom Henrietta Maria and her Chamberlain watched toiling in the July sunshine were only some of the hundreds whom he was employing all over London, and with whom he had a very special relationship for, according to a later source, Jermyn was Grand Master of the Freemasons.

  The frontispiece of Anderson’s ‘Constitutions’, published in 1738, gives a hint of the world of Freemasonry, with its emphasis on classical architecture and the inspirational connection between heaven and earth symbolized by the flying chariot, that Jermyn may himself have experienced some 70 years earlier.

  During Jermyn’s lifetime, Freemasonry went through a major change. Until the seventeenth century, Freemasonry consisted of meetings, or ‘lodges’, of working masons, builders and architects. Their purpose was chiefly to maintain and pass on standards and techniques, including the detailed knowledge of geometry necessary to construct such wonders as the medieval cathedrals.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the church-dominated universities still viewed new ideas with deep suspicion, Freemasonic lodges started to attract non-masons who were interested in geometry. Particularly, it attracted people inspired by Francis Bacon’s new ideas of exploring the world through scientific investigation.

  There was a spiritual element as well, for science and religion had not yet been become divorced. Because the world was believed to have been created by God, science – the exploration of the world – was regarded as an investigation into the mind of the creator, the great architect of the Universe.

  By the eighteenth century, Freemasonry would become an organization for esoteric, spiritual studies, coupled with complicated grades of rituals, and a substantial social element as well.

  Thus, in Jermyn’s day, Freemasonry was somewhere in between old and new – it was gaining a strongly spiritual element, but it was still rooted in practical, working masonry.

  Jermyn’s Freemasonry is attested by a single source, the 1738 edition of Dr James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons. Published by the authority of Grand Lodge, this book includes a history of Freemasonry in England, alleging some measure of continuity from Roman times onwards, and listing Grand Masters from the Middle Ages up to and beyond the foundation of Grand Lodge in London in 1717.

  It is a controversial list because its earlier sections seem rather fantastic and because it was not included in the first edition of the book, which came out in 1723. Further, it was dropped in 1841, since which time the Craft has denied that any form of organised Freemasonry existed in England before 1717, and thus that there were any earlier Grand Masters at all.

  When the matter has been debated, arguments have tended to focus on Sir Christopher Wren. Wren is said to have become one of Jermyn’s two Grand Wardens during Jermyn’s term of office, rising to become Deputy Grand Master by 1678, and presiding over Freemasonry as Grand Master for many years.

  Detractors of Anderson point out that Wren was alive in 1723, so Anderson did not dare publish his ‘false’ history of the Craft, but he did so in 1738, once Wren was safely dead and unable to deny this ‘false’ story.

  Another interpretation of these events, however, is that seventeenth century Freemasonry was hedged in with so many oaths of secrecy that Wren, who had been involved since the 1660s, may not have countenanced seeing its true history published. Once he was dead, however, this obstacle was removed, and the correct story of seventeenth century Freemasonry could appear in print.

  It is significant that, when Wren’s son published his monumental biography of his father in 1750, he did not refute Anderson’s allegations. Indeed, his text and Hawksmoor’s illustrations for the book are full of Freemasonic references. But it was not only Wren’s son who kept silent: when the 1738 edition came out, we hear of no protests from the heirs of any of the other earlier, alleged Grand Masters. Nobody spoke out in protest, perhaps because everybody knew that they were reading the truth.

  Wren’s involvement has been much debated, and on the outcome of that argument Freemasonic historians have been content to rest the fate of history up until that point. Never have the alleged seventeenth century Grand Masters, such as Jermyn, been studied in their own right, to see if what Anderson said about them might hold any water.

  Several aspects of Jermyn’s life suggest that he might have been a Freemason, and I still remember my astonished delight when I first leafed through a copy of Anderson’s book and found his name listed, not just as a Freemason, but as a Grand Master. The circumstances that had drawn me to the idea also help bear out the veracity of Anderson’s history, for the seventeenth century, at least.

  First, Anderson relates that, having served as deputy Grand Master under several aristocrats, Inigo Jones eventually became Grand Master shortly before the Civil War broke out, and remained so until his death in 1652. We know that Jones’s work on the Queen’s buildings, especially Greenwich and Somerset House, brought him into contact with Jermyn, and there is no doubt that Jones’s work was a clear inspiration for Jermyn’s own grand-scale development of St James’s. We have seen how Jones’s work on court masques brought him into collaboration with Jermyn’s poet, Sir William D’Avenant.

  There are tantalising hints of Freemasonry in the writings of both D’Avenant and Cowley, especially when they wrote about spiritual flights in which their souls soared above the earth. These can be linked to a Medieval form of Cabalism called Merkavah mysticism, which purported to enable its initiates to do just that, and which was one of the acknowledged, spiritual roots of esoteric eighteenth century Freemasonry. In ‘Madagascar’, too, D’Avenant wrote that Jermyn was inspired by ‘mighty Numbers’, in other words, by geometry.

  No Grand Master was appointed during the Interregnum. During this period, Jermyn had fascinatingly ‘cloak-and-dagger’ dealings with Sir Robert Moray, whose membership of Scottish Freemasonry is an established fact. Whilst the theory cannot be proved, it seems highly likely that Jermyn used his contacts with English Freemasonic lodges as part of his spy-network, gathering information, planning uprisings and spreading Royalist propaganda.

  In 1659, as we saw, Jermyn chose the title ‘St Alban’, which he always spelled without an ‘s’, perhaps harking back to the name of the legendary founder of English Freemasonry, St Alban. Another reason may have been Jermyn’s family connection to the long-dead Viscount St Albans, Francis Bacon, but Bacon himself was widely rumoured to have been a Freemason in any case.

  Was his adoption of this title a signal to English Freemasons that Jermyn wanted to become their Grand Master? He took office, says Anderson, on the Restoration in 1660. As a man set to develop the West End and with control of the restoration of the Queen’s dower palaces, and with the strong possibility (at that stage) that he would become First Minister, Jermyn was indeed an ideal candidate to become the Freemasons’ leader.

  Anderson tells us that, half way through Jermyn’s six year Grand Mastership, he held a
national assembly of Freemasons in December 1663. The location was designated by Anderson by thirteen dashes, which could denote Somerset House, where the masons working on the renovations would certainly have formed a Lodge. There, Jermyn issued a set of pragmatic rules to reorganise Freemasonry after the disruption of the Cromwellian era.

  Such an action is not at all out of character for Jermyn. The rules are not at all dissimilar in character to those he drew up, once he had become the King’s Lord Chamberlain, to regulate the ceremony of the Touching for the King’s Evil (a ceremony of Medieval origin based on the belief that the King’s touch could cure his subjects from scrofula), which are in the State Papers for 1 May 1674.

  Anderson’s list does not suggest any ties between Jermyn and the other officials who appear at the same time, yet such connections exist. Jermyn’s alleged Deputy Grand Warden, Sir John Denham, turns out to have been a spy for Jermyn during the Interregnum. Jermyn’s Grand Wardens were John Webb, Jones’s son-in-law and Wren.

  Jermyn first met Wren in 1665, when the then thirty-five-year old had travelled to Paris to study Louis’s great classical building works. The diarist John Evelyn had given Wren a letter of introduction to Jermyn, who in turn introduced him to many of the most renowned architects of his day, including the great Gianlorenzo Bernini, who was then redesigning the Louvre. This was the year before Jermyn’s Grand Mastership ended, giving Jermyn plenty of time to install Wren as a Grand Warden and thus ensure his future as a prominent member of the Craft.