The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Jermyn’s resignation of the office in 1666 ties in with his deep embroilment in the Anglo-Dutch peace-process, which required him to stay almost full-time in Paris. The man who replaced him as Grand Master, Earl Rivers, was in fact a distant cousin of his.

  None of this is conclusive evidence that Anderson’s list was correct, but let us look at the problem from the other way around. If Anderson had made his list up, and Jermyn was not Grand Master, then he was pretty lucky to have picked someone whose life, when placed under the microscope of historical research, just happens to fit the story so well.

  Also, if Anderson was making his list up, then Jermyn was a pretty bad choice. By the eighteenth century, Jermyn and his successors, Rivers, Arlington and even Buckingham were all associated with the sort of pro-French policies that were anathema to the Hanoverian regime, which was then facing very real dangers from pro-French, pro-Stuart conspiracies and rebellions. Anderson’s list gives Freemasonry some unpalatably ‘Jacobite’ roots – exactly the sort of public image that the Craft was seeking to avoid. Hyde would have been a much better choice than Jermyn, if the list was made up.

  Anderson’s work relied on a number of sources that were later destroyed, and it is hardly his fault that they are not available to us today, to verify his work. Indeed, his narrative almost certainly preserves material that would otherwise have been irrevocably lost.

  Anderson also relied on living memory and, when he was writing, very old Masons would still have remembered Jermyn’s era. Significantly, Deputy Grand Master Martin Folkes, one of those who officially oversaw Anderson’s work, was the son of Jermyn’s lawyer. Folkes may have had access to many of Jermyn’s papers, that are now lost. The fact that Folkes approved Anderson’s list is again pretty good circumstantial evidence that it is true.

  On the whole, there seems to be no very good reason to dismiss Anderson’s assertion that Jermyn had been Grand Master of the Freemasons. Yet it is quite possible to see how Bacon, Jones and D’Avenant had both inspired Jermyn with the idea that the Golden Age of classical antiquity could be recreated in Stuart England. That is why Jermyn supported the poets D’Avenant and Cowley. It is why he agreed to guide Freemasonry through the first years of the Restoration. And it is why he promoted classical building work at Greenwich, Somerset House and, as we shall see, at St James’s, Westminster.

  Shortly after the Restoration, Jermyn and Charles were talking in a chamber at Whitehall when a servant came in to announce a visitor, who had come to ask for a very lucrative sinecure which was vacant. Charles could not be bothered dealing with the man, so he passed Jermyn his hat and told him to pretend to be the King.

  The man came in and bowed low to Jermyn, who listed very regally to his petition. When the man finished, Jermyn told him that he clearly deserved the sinecure. But, he continued, as soon as he had heard it was vacant, he had granted it to his faithful friend, the Earl of St Albans. After the man had left, Charles roared with laughter and told Jermyn he could indeed have the sinecure for himself.

  The story does not state what the sinecure job was. But it was only one of several which combined to bring Jermyn an enormous income. These included being a Commissioner for Prizes; a Commissioner for the Coronation; a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey; Engrosser of the Great Rolls and Governor of Jersey, none requiring any work except for instructing his lawyer Martin Folkes to collect the fees due to him.

  As Registrar in Chancery, Jermyn received £900 a year in fees from the portly judges who in turn reaped an income from people disputing wills and pursuing unpaid debts. Translating old money into meaningful modern values is very difficult, but a rough equivalent is about £69,000. A further £1,000 a year (about £76,500 now) was his stipend for his main job – for which he did work very hard – of Lord Chamberlain to Henrietta Maria. As her Lord Chamberlain, Jermyn presided over her enlarged post-Restoration household and overseeing the work of her Treasurer and Steward.

  While Jermyn was ambassador in Paris he also received £400 (roughly £31,000 in modern money) a month to offset the vast entertainment expenses the job entailed.

  Besides jobs, Jermyn collected an enormous income from land. This included a handful of East Anglian manors he had inherited. By a royal grant of 1649, Jermyn had become a co-proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia, where Chickahoan Indians menaced the bold settlers who hewed clearings in the deciduous forests by the shores of Chesapeake Bay. Another royal grant made Jermyn seigneur of the windswept fiefs of Saint-Germain, L’Islet and Saint-Helier in Jersey, all of which paid their feudal dues to him and gave him the right to appoint clergymen to all the island’s churches (and charge for the privilege).

  The poor tenants of the fertile fields and soggy meadows of an enormous tract of County Antrim in Ireland paid Jermyn an income as well. Jermyn had used his influence with the King to help the Earl of Antrim regain the estates that Cromwell had confiscated. In return, Antrim had granted Jermyn a share of the estates’ revenue for life. Jermyn’s prosperity had been restored in abundance. But there was yet more to come.

  Just before he joined Charles at Breda in April 1660, Jermyn had calculated how much money he had raised for the war effort since 1643. The total was 647,416 livres Tournois, about £45,000, or about £3.5 million in modern terms.

  To put it in context, Charles II’s government had an income of only £773,700 in the first year after the Restoration.

  Because the King could not repay the debt in cash, he granted Jermyn leases out of the Queen’s estates instead. In Surrey, the crumbling edifice of Oatlands Palace and its overgrown deer-park became Jermyn’s by a royal grant in 1661, together with the lush water meadows of Byfleet and Weybridge, including valuable, fur-producing rabbit warrens, producing a total of £466 a year.

  Of more value to Jermyn was Byfleet Lodge, one of Inigo Jones’s earliest classical houses. Significantly, it and the Silk House at Oatlands, another of Jones’s designs, were the only parts of his Surrey estate he did not sub-let. The Duchy House, one of the most impressive buildings on the Strand besides Somerset House, became Jermyn’s, its rents adding to Jermyn’s brimming coffers. Finally, there was the Bailiwick of St James’s stretching, in modern terms, from Green Park in the west to St Anne’s, Soho in the east.

  It was back in 1640 that Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had organised a survey of the almost entirely undeveloped fields of the Bailiwick of St James’s. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria surely had grandiose plans for the area before Civil War intervened. By the time Jermyn returned to England in 1662, a series of royal leases, set to run until the mid-eighteenth century, had made the entire Bailiwick his.

  On its scrubby fields, especially the area in front of St James’s Palace where courtiers practised archery, Jermyn planned a new magnificent addition to London, all built on classical principles, which would bring the capital, and himself, both wealth and prestige. ‘The beauty of this great town and the convenience of the court’, he wrote to the King, ‘are defective in point of houses fit for the dwellings of noblemen and other persons of quality’, and proposed the construction of ‘great and good houses’ in St James’s Fields’.

  Standing in the shade of St James’s Palace later that summer, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria could watch the builders and surveyors hard at work, marking out the new streets and the grand central square with ropes. The labourers had even started digging the foundations of the first houses in what was to become Jermyn Street.

  Jermyn had laid magnificent foundations for London’s West End. The area was inevitably going to be built up as London expanded. Yet it was Jermyn who determined its nature: not the ramshackle medley of residential streets that was spreading out north and east, or the later suburban sprawl that would engulf the lovely fields south of the river, but a truly grand, uplifting area of elegant squares and broad streets, worthy of, if not eventually exceeding, the magnificence of Rome itself.

  And a new Rome, rather than yet more old ‘New Troy’, was surely what
Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had in mind. It was visions of this that surged through their minds as they stood gazing out over what was to be a bright Restoration future for London, echoing the prophetic words of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, whose text was then well-known to every educated European:

  Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy:

  Born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries

  Begins. Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age

  Returns…

  London was set to become a city worthy of Virgil, thus achieving one of Jermyn’s major goals. Yet his other great ambition, the attaining of high political power would, as in Virgil’s Rome, prove far harder to achieve.

  XVII

  SOMERSET HOUSE 1662 – 1663

  So they loved as love in twain,

  Had the essence but in one,

  Two distincts, Division none…

  Francis Bacon, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (Love’s Martyr, 1601)

  After suppers eaten to the accompaniment of musicians and singers, the golden candelabras of Somerset House would be kept burning into the early hours while Jermyn, Henrietta Maria and their guests chatted over the card tables.

  Whatever the game, the excitement of gambling was the same. Hyde characterised Jermyn’s love of gambling as ‘the sponge that sucked in, and the gulf that swallowed up all he could get’.

  But Jermyn was only marginally worse than most of his contemporaries. Even Henrietta Maria sometimes had to borrow a few pounds from Jermyn in order to be able to carry on playing after having lost everything in her own purse.

  The fashionable card games they enjoyed included Crimpo, Whisk (later called Whist) and Ombre, a Spanish game in which the trump cards were the three Matadores – Spadille (ace of spades), Manille (seven of trumps) and Basto (ace of clubs). Both within the game, which they played insatiably, and in their political intrigues, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria sought to hold such trumping ‘Matadores’ as frequently as possible.

  The Queen’s salon at Somerset House soon became a popular meeting place for all those disaffected with Hyde’s government.

  Recently ennobled as Lord Clarendon, Hyde was determined to restore the Church of England to the position of dominance it had enjoyed under Charles I, through a series of pro-Anglican laws nicknamed the ‘Clarendon Code’.

  In March 1662, his Act of Uniformity made it illegal for anyone to be a teacher or minister without first swearing to use the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

  The law effectively outlawed teaching or preaching any doctrine except Anglicanism, and it was detested by all those who did not conform to the Church of England. Jermyn and Henrietta Maria’s supper guests included Privy Counsellors and Members of Parliament of all denominations who opposed it. Catholics such as Jermyn’s old adversary George Digby, now Earl of Bristol, rubbed elbows around the Ombre table with the Presbyterian Lord Holles and even Jermyn’s Anglican cousin, the excitable young Charlie Berkeley.

  Another visitor was the pro-Catholic Henry Bennet, soon to become Lord Arlington. Thirteen years Jermyn’s junior, Arlington’s most distinguishing feature was a little black patch that he wore over the bridge of his nose covering, he claimed ostentatiously, a Civil War wound. Arlington owed his first official appointment – to the household of James, Duke of York’s household – to Jermyn. Sympathetic to Catholics and later to become one himself, Arlington was another opponent of the religiously intolerant Hyde.

  Also at the Ombre tables were the young Duke of Buckingham and his salacious twenty-one year old cousin Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine. Barbara had become Charles’s mistress shortly before the Restoration. Hyde was deeply disapproving of Charles having a mistress, and as a result Barbara detested him.

  Charles’s recent marriage to Catherine of Braganza had done nothing to diminish Barbara’s ability to influence the King. Shrewd politicians like Jermyn had been quick to recognise her as a formidable tool to use against Hyde.

  Out of this cabal of courtiers and politicians, of which Jermyn was a – if not the – leading member, was launched a fresh assault on Hyde’s party. Charles was still too dependent on the Lord Chancellor to dismiss him, but it was possible to weaken Hyde by removing his allies.

  In bed with Barbara, Charles innocently agreed to replacing the elderly Secretary of State, Edward Nicholas, with Arlington. Arlington’s vacant post of Keeper of the Privy Purse went to Charlie Berkeley, bringing another member of the Somerset House party into the government.

  Arlington became Secretary of State in October. That December, he persuaded Charles to issue a Declaration of Indulgence, temporarily suspending the penalties imposed by Hyde’s Act of Uniformity.

  ‘The design aims higher’ the cashiered Nicholas warned his Anglican colleagues. And he was right, for Somerset House planned to replace Hyde’s friend, Lord Treasurer Southampton, with Jermyn himself.

  Whilst all these machinations were unfolding, Jermyn’s nephew Harry indulging in some court intrigue of his own by starting an affair with Barbara. Their romance was described in salacious detail both in the memoirs of the Comte de Gramont and the New Atlantis by Mrs Delarivierre Manley (1663-1724), in which she calls Harry ‘Germanicus’. Mrs Manley related how Barbara already had a lover apart from the King. Wanting to seduce her himself, Harry arranged for her to come to a room where she thought she was going to meet this lover, but instead, she saw something quite different:

  The weather was violently hot… the curtains of the bed drawn back to the canopy, made of yellow velvet, embroidered with white bugles… Upon the bed were strewed, with a lavish profuseness, plenty of orange and lemon flowers.

  And to complete the scene, the young Germanicus in a dress and posture not very decent to describe. It was he that was newly risen from the bath, and in a loose gown of carnation taffety, stained with Indian figures. He had beautiful long flowing hair, for then ‘twas the custom to wear their own tied back with a ribbon of the same colour. He had thrown himself upon the bed, pretending to sleep, with nothing on but his shirt and nightgown, which he had so indecently disposed, that slumbering as he appeared, his whole person stood confessed to the eyes of the amorous Duchess…

  Inevitably, Barbara succumbed to this temptation. Their affair was discovered, and Harry was banished from court, ‘for courting Lady Castlemaine’, in December 1662. Charles II allowed him to return the following year, however, and their affair continued on and off until 1670.

  During her affair with the King, Barbara had a number of children, of whom Charles acknowledged five as his: Anne (1661); Charles Duke of Southampton and Cleveland (1662); Henry Duke of Grafton (1663); Charlotte Countess of Lichfield (1664) and George, Duke of Northumberland (1665). Anne’s paternity was originally claimed by Lord Chesterfield, and only later by Charles. Another, according to Mrs Manley was Harry’s: so indulgent of Barbara was the King, wrote Mrs Manley, that ‘he suffered a great belly of the Duchess (due to that happy amorous rencounter of the bugle-bed) to pass in the esteem of the world (as the rest of hers had done) for his’.

  Mrs Manley was writing a novel, based on thinly disguised facts, but her father was second-in-command to Harry Jermyn’s brother, Governor of Jersey from 1684, and in the same decade she was Barbara’s lesbian lover. On the subject of Barbara and the Jermyn family, Mrs Manley knew more than most.

  Her story, however, clearly condenses events that took place over a period of years into a much smaller time-period, for she suggests that the child who was really Harry’s was conceived when he and Barbara first slept together, before December 1662. However, it was not until July 1667 that Pepys recorded ‘the King hath declared that he did not get the child of which she is conceived at this time, he having not as he says lain with her this half year; but she told him – God damn me! but you shall own it. It seems he is jealous of Jermyn [Harry] and she loves him’.

  Barbara had no surviving children born in that year. But was Mrs Manley correct in saying that one of Barbara’s was
also Harry’s?

  Over the years, various suggestions have been made: one was Dame Cecilia FitzRoy, a daughter of Barbara’s of unknown parentage, who became a nun in Dunkirk. But Cecilia, by their own estimation, was not born until about 1670. Another more intriguing possibility is Henry, Duke of Grafton, who was born on 20 September 1663, nine months after Harry’s pre-emptory banishment from court. The King hesitated a long time before acknowledging the boy as his. Evelyn wrote suspiciously that, unlike the King’s other children, Grafton had been ‘rudely bred’, and observed that he was ‘exceedingly handsome, far surpassing any of the King’s other natural issue’. Harry was very handsome, and was also an excellent soldier; so was Grafton.

  In 1672, the boy was created Duke of Grafton, Earl of Euston, Viscount Ipswich and Baron Sudbury. In 1688, William of Orange invaded and Grafton, then one of James II’s principal generals, did the Jacobites dreadful damage by defecting to join the usurper. During his Irish campaign the following year, James II broke the cardinal law of honours – not using the same territorial designation twice – when he granted Harry Jermyn a number of titles, including Baron Ipswich. This was clearly a well-deserved snub to Grafton, and a barbed indication of what James, at least, may have thought of the Duke’s true paternity.

  That all lay, of course, in the future. Back in December 1662, Harry’s banishment from court for courting Barbara had a serious impact on his uncle’s plans. Barbara’s influence with the King suffered a substantial, albeit not long-lasting setback. For now, she could no longer intermingle Somerset House’s political plans with the sweet nothings she whispered into the King’s ear at night. Hyde’s portly frame remained for now parked between the King and Jermyn, and Jermyn’s promotion to become Lord Treasurer was never mentioned again.