The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  Like the conquest of Madagascar, however, the completion of Winchester Palace and all it stood for, would prove an ephemeral dream. But that night in September 1683, its rising walls were a tangible manifestation of what Jermyn had achieved.

  Jermyn stayed drinking at Arlington’s as late as he could. Eventually he allowed his servants to take him home to the opulent splendour of his empty house.

  When Lady Borlais died in France, Louis, citing the Medieval law of droit d’aubains, had claimed that her estate belonged to him. Her heir, Lord Preston knew that, in 1667, Jermyn had successfully overcome a similar claim made by Louis on the French estates of the Dukes of Richmond. So, in November 1683, Preston sought Jermyn’s help and advice over how he should handle his personal conflict with the King of France.

  One way or the other, Jermyn remained useful right up to the end.

  And now the end had come.

  A drawing from a contemporary depiction of the Frost Fair, that was being held on the frozen Thames at the time Jermyn died.

  The start of 1684 saw Britain in the grip of a mini-Ice Age. The timeless Thames, that had lapped London’s banks when the mythical Brutus had first traced out the perimeters of his ‘New Troy’, and had watered the countless generations of real-life Britons, and Romans, and Saxons, and Normans who lived and died in the city’s cramped streets – that mighty river upon which Jermyn had travelled so often in high-sailed ships and gilded barges – was frozen solid. The Londoners were enjoying an ‘Ice Fair’, held on its crisp surface. Charles II went himself, to watch the extraordinary spectacle of a whole ox being roasted over a fire blazing on solid ice.

  Detached from the excitement, up in his house in St James’ Square on Wednesday, 2 January 1684, and two months short of his 79th birthday, Henry Jermyn died.

  It is unfortunate for us that no record survives of Charles’s reaction on hearing of the death of the man who had been so widely rumoured to have been his real father. Henry Jermyn had been a strong, surviving link with his mother, and had done so much, in so many ways, to make Charles the man he was. It was Henry Jermyn, more than anyone else, who had set him safe upon his throne in 1660, and had left him, financially and thus politically secure on the same seat, a quarter of a century later.

  James, Duke of York, wrote, in his usual, somewhat detached, soldierly fashion, of an event he had clearly anticipated for some time:

  As for news, what is from foreign parts you will see in the Gazette; and for here there is none but that Lord St. Albans is dead, and that the river has been so frozen over these two days that people go over it on foot.

  Rather than be buried in Westminster Abbey, Jermyn wanted a ‘decent Christian burial amongst my ancestors in the church of Rushbrook’ – evidence, if ever it were needed, that he had never become a Catholic.

  Accompanied by his sorrowful nephews, his body was borne speedily along the ice-bound roads to Rushbrook, where he was buried eight days later. An elegant classical tomb, which Jermyn had probably commissioned himself, was erected in the south chancel wall, showing a couple of cherubs, his coat of arms, and a simple Latin inscription, which reads:

  Here lies the noble Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, Baron of Bury St Edmunds, second son of Sir Thomas Jermyn, Master of the Horse and Lord Chamberlain to Henrietta Maria, mother of Charles II and, after her death, Lord Chamberlain and Privy Councillor to His Majesty the Queen’s son, created a Knight of the most noble Order of the Garter at Windsor the day before the Kalends of July [i.e., 30 June]1672.

  Not ‘to the King’, but to His Majesty the Queen’s son. All that ever really mattered to Jermyn was her.

  This monument, however, was very far from being all that remained to remind the world of Jermyn’s astonishing achievements.

  XXIV

  ‘THE FUNERAL OF GLORY’?

  1685 – present

  Next, painter, draw the rabble of the plot:

  [Harry] Jermyn, Fitzgerald, Loftus, Porter, Scot;

  These are fit heads indeed to turn a State,

  And change the order of a nation’s fate;

  Ten thousand such as these shall ne’er control

  The smallest atom of an English soul.

  Old England on its strong foundation stands,

  Defying all their heads and all their hands;

  Its steady basis never could be shook,

  When wiser men her ruin undertook;

  And can the guardian angel let her stoop

  At last to madmen, fools, and to the Pope?

  No, Painter, no! close up the piece and see

  This crowd of traytors hang’d in effigie

  Edmund Waller, Advice to a Painter (1666)

  Jermyn died leaving Charles II secure on the throne. The treasury was full; James’s succession was assured, the monarchy was Absolute and Britain was well on the way towards full religious toleration.

  Yet within five years of Jermyn’s death Britain became a religiously-repressive state – ruled by a Dutchman!

  How did Jermyn’s plans go so dramatically wrong?

  It started on Monday 2 February 1685 when Charles, who was waiting for his morning shave, suddenly bellowed with pain and collapsed.

  Unaware that the King’s kidneys were failing, his doctors spent the next few days bleeding him and feeding him a terrible cocktail of drugs, an estimated 58 in all, ranging from hellebore root and white vitriol (sulphuric acid) dissolved in peony water, to forty drops of ‘extract’ from a human skull and also some powder made of ground ‘bezoar’ stone taken from the stomach, it was recorded, ‘of an eastern goat’.

  Some of these ‘medicines’ were deadly poisonous; all were useless. When these drugs failed to make him any better, his doctors burned his feet and head with red-hot irons.

  On Thursday, Louise de Keroualle told Barillon to fetch a Catholic priest, who baptised Charles into the Catholic Church. At noon on Friday the 6th, the Thames ran, unfrozen, at high tide and the man who had so often been taken for Jermyn’s son was dead.

  After Charles II’s death, his brother James, Duke of York, succeeded to the throne as James II.

  Fulfilling the Anglicans’ worst fears, James soon brought a ‘rabble’ of Catholics into the government, including Jermyn’s nephew Harry, whom he made Earl of Dover; a Privy Counsellor; Lord Lieutenant of Cambridge; a Lord of the Treasury and acting Lord Chamberlain.

  When James’s queen Mary of Modena gave birth to a Catholic heir, James Francis Edward, in June 1688, the patience of the Protestant establishment ran out.

  A cabal of Protestant courtiers offered William of Orange the throne. William landed at Torbay in November. After a brief attempt to fight back, James II fled to France. It is extremely likely that Harry Jermyn had contracted a death-bed marriage to William’s mother Mary back in 1660 and thus had been, technically, his father-in-law. Yet despite this, Harry’s loyalties lay firmly with James, whom he followed quickly across to France.

  In 1689, James and Harry landed in Ireland, backed by Louis’s money and officers. Harry’s view was that both were far too inadequate to be of any real use and that Louis, like Mazarin and Richelieu before him, was more intent on creating trouble in England than in providing genuine help for James. He appears to have been right.

  James and Harry rode out of Dublin Castle on Sunday, 16 June 1689 at the head of an army of 26,000 men, nicknamed ‘Jacobites’ after the Latin version of James’s name. Passing through Dundalk, they looked out across the waters of the River Boyne to see William’s 36,000-strong army assembling for battle.

  They fought their battle on Monday, 1 July 1689. Only 2,000 men were killed, three quarters of them on James’s side, but the Jacobite army was thoroughly trounced. James and Harry galloped south to Waterford, where they parted. James sailed for France, dying in exile at Saint-Germain in 1703. After long months of waiting, Harry finally gained the permission of William of Orange to return to England. He lived quietly at Cheveley, troubled in his later years, like his uncl
e, by acute gout.

  Harry’s last word on the subject of Anglo-French relations was made to John Evelyn, who visited him at Cheveley in 1691. Louis had over-stretched himself fighting the Hapsburgs, he said. If William still wanted to attack him, now would be the right time. Not even Harry, it seems, retained Jermyn’s firm conviction that England’s future lay in a peaceful friendship with France.

  Ultimately, the winners were the people against whom Jermyn had struggled the hardest. The spiritual heirs of the Parliamentarians and Roundheads, who rejected the idea of absolute monarchy, now govern Britain. And the statue of Oliver Cromwell, though never a great friend of Parliamentary democracy stands, nevertheless, in pride of place outside the Palace of Westminster.

  But had Jermyn been so wrong? His advocacy of absolute monarchy may not sit well with modern Liberalism, yet it was a widely-accepted form of government at the time. And let it be remembered that it was Jermyn, and not Cromwell or the post-Restoration Parliament, who favoured religious toleration.

  In terms of foreign policy, it may be argued that friendship with France could have saved a great deal of trouble. In 1704, Queen Anne’s favourite general John Churchill (later Duke of Marlborough), defeated Louis at the Battle of Blenheim. For the rest of the eighteenth century, Britain and its allies remained periodically at war with France. Impoverished by the demands of constant war, the French population eventually erupted into revolution.

  And while Britain and Napoleonic France battled on into the nineteenth century, the power of Prussia grew, eventually becoming the German Empire and replacing France as the dominant power on the Continent. By the time Britain finally reverted to Jermyn’s policy of co-operation with France, Germany had become so powerful that it was too late to prevent the two devastating world wars of the twentieth century.

  That’s not to say that, had Jermyn’s policies been followed, there would have been no more war in Europe. Of course there would – but history would not have unfolded as it did, and maybe it would not have been quite as terrible.

  For the eighteenth century, at any rate, and like his ephemeral hope of possessing Madagascar, Jermyn’s desire that England and France could live in friendship and peace proved to be nothing more than a dream.

  So what were Jermyn’s real legacies to the world?

  Jermyn’s love of French wine was one of the defining passions of his life. Not only did he have it imported, but he paid extra to have bottles made bearing his family’s coat of arms: the bottle-blower was given a copy of the family’s seal, which was stamped into the glass whilst it was still soft.

  One of the bottles, which had once seen Jermyn and his friends through a hearty meal, has long been on display in the museum at Mont Orgueil, Jersey.

  The museum’s curators looked on it as nothing more than a curiosity, until they were contacted in 2007 by Professor Martin Biddle of Oxford University, who was making a study of old wine bottles. ‘If it belongs to Henry Jermyn’s first governorship [of Jersey]…’ he told them, ‘it would be the earliest datable wine bottle’. There are of course many much older bottles: what makes Jermyn’s unique in the world is that his is the oldest one, anywhere, that can be identified to a specific owner.

  How entirely appropriate that Jermyn, having spent so much of his lifetime enjoying his wines, should have written himself into the history of wine itself.

  That was one achievement he had not expected. The list of what he did achieve is impressive, even when only measured in terms of official positions. Jermyn was, at varying times of his life, a Knight of the Garter; Earl of St Alban; 1st Baron Jermyn of St Edmundsbury; Lord Chamberlain to Charles II; Lord Chamberlain, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, Treasurer, Receiver General and Master of the Horse to Queen Henrietta Maria; Governor and Captain of Jersey; Governor of Elizabeth and Mont Orgueil castles; Ambassador, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of France; Colonel of the Queen’s Regiment of Foot; High Steward of Greenwich and Kingston upon Thames; Registrar of the Court of Chancery; Co-coroner and Attorney of the Court of King’s Bench; Joint Surveyor of the Petty Customs and Subsidies; Member of Parliament for Bodmin and Liverpool; Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey; co-proprietor of the ‘Northern Neck’ of Virginia; an original member of the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa; Lord of the Bailiwick of St James’s; Sieur de Saint-Germain in Jersey and Lord of the Manors of Rushbrook, Weybridge, Oatlands, Byfleet, Eldoe and Tofts, founder of the West End and reputed Grand Master of the Freemasons.

  Jermyn was also variously rumoured to be, or tipped to become, various things that were either never to be or, at any rate, did not transpire. These include, particularly, Treasurer of the Household (1640); a viscount (1640); First Minister of State (various dates); Earl of Yarmouth (1645); Ambassador Extraordinary to the Netherlands (1645); a Duke of France (1646); Lord of Aubigny (1646); a Secretary of State (1641; 1649/50); Lieutenant General of the Channel Islands (1648); Lord High Admiral (1648); husband of the Queen of England (c. 1650); Governor of the Principality of Orange (1659) and Lord Treasurer (1662) – and that is to name but a few.

  During the Civil War, Jermyn had accrued a debt of some £45,000 for the Crown. Charles had repaid this debt with leases, especially for the St James’s estate, and the income they generated reached easily £8,000 a year by the time the land was all developed. Yet for all that, this income had barely covered the ever-increasing interest on the original debts.

  Whilst Jermyn had a vast overall income, he also had enormous expenses due to gambling and entertaining. When the final calculations were made, Jermyn’s nephews were stunned to find that he had died £60,000 in debt.

  Jermyn’s earldom became extinct when he died. By a special condition written into the grant, the title of Baron Jermyn went to his nephew Thomas Jermyn.

  Of Thomas’s numerous sons, only one boy survived beyond the cot. In 1692, the survivor, fifteen years old and as high-spirited as his great uncle was at his age, was messing about on a barge in the Thames when he was struck by a falling mast and killed. The baronial title passed, by a special arrangement made when it was created, to Jermyn’s nephew Harry. When Harry died without children in 1708, it became extinct.

  Once the various leases to Jermyn’s estates ran out in the course of the next century, very little was left of his transient empire. The main properties, Rushbrook and the house in St James’s Square, were inherited by the Hervey family.

  The intermarriages of the Jermyns and Herveys produced some interesting connections. Jermyn’s great aunt Susan Jermyn married Sir William Hervey of Ickworth. Their son John Hervey (d. 1679) was a trustee for some of Jermyn’s London leases, whilst their grandson John became 1st Earl of Bristol. Felton Hervey, a younger son of the 1st Earl was, incidentally, an ancestor of the Randolph family, who were ancestors of the actor Hugh Grant, who is thus a not-too-distant cousin of Henry Jermyn’s.

  The 1st Earl of Bristol’s eldest son, meanwhile, was John, Lord Hervey (1696-1743), whose career echoed Jermyn’s. He became vice chamberlain to Queen Charlotte and thus a prominent, if generally unpopular, power behind the throne of her husband George II. Lord Hervey died before his father, and his sons became 2nd, 3rd and 4th Earls of Bristol in turn: the latter married Elizabeth Davers, who was herself a great granddaughter of Jermyn’s brother Thomas. The son of the 4th Earl and Elizabeth Davers was Frederick William Hervey, who was made 1st Marquess of Bristol and was also granted the title of Earl Jermyn, to commemorate his family’s inheritance from the Jermyn family in general, and from Henry Jermyn in particular. The 1st Marquess’ heir senior heir today is Frederick, 8th Marquess of Bristol & Earl Jermyn. The 8th Marquess’ sisters are the famously stylish Ladies Victoria and Isabella Hervey.

  Two additional family connections of the Jermyns are worth mentioning too. From the 4th Earl’s daughter Mary, Lady Erne, we can bring down a line (via the families of Wharncliffe, Chetwynd-Talbot and Ford) to the explorer and television presenter Edward
Michael ‘Bear’ Grylls. The youngest British person ever to climb Everest, he is another well-known character who can certainly be considered a notable relative of Henry Jermyn.

  Going further back into the Jermyns’ past, Henry Jermyn’s own great grandfather Sir Ambrose Jermyn had a daughter Susan, who was the ancestress (via the families of Tollemache and Allington) of the great naval commander, Earl Howe (d. 1799). Sir Ambrose’s brother John Jermyn (d. 1606) went one better, for he was the ancestor – via the family of the poet Sir John Suckling, who appears in Jermyn’s story – of none other than Horatio, Admiral Lord Nelson, the victor of Trafalgar.

  Jermyn’s mother’s sister, Lady Elizabeth Berkeley, gave Jermyn a further interesting connection, for her great great great great grandson was the poet Lord Byron.

  As to Henrietta Maria’s blood, after the demise of the Stuarts in 1714, the crown passed sideways across the royal family tree, to George I of Hanover, whose grandmother Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia was the sister of Charles I. However, the blood of Henrietta Maria continued down several lines of dukes, sprung from the illegitimate progeny of Charles II and his brother James II. A line of descent from Charles II’s natural son the Duke of Richmond leads us to Lady Cynthia Hamilton, whilst a line coming down from James II’s natural daughter Henrietta, Lady Waldegrave, brings us to Lady Cynthia’s husband, John 7th Earl Spencer. Through their granddaughter Diana, Princess of Wales, Henrietta Maria’s blood flowed back into the British royal family – and with it the tantalising suspicion of a dose of Jermyn blood as well.