When he acted for Lord William, Bankes probably already inclined towards Arminianism. We might imagine him early in his practice as the briefless lawyer in one of John Harington’s epigrams:
I met a lawyer at the Court this Lent
And asking what great cause him thither sent
He said, that mou’d with Doctor Androes fame
To hear him preach, he only thither came.54
Later Bankes copied out notes of Andrewes’s sermons.55 Further evidence of Bankes’s religious position derives from his connection with Laud, who considered him an ally in the reform of the church and also of Oxford, to whose statutes he invited Bankes to add “beneficiall clauses as you shall thinke fitt.” Since the archbishop entertained Bankes at Lambeth Palace, it appears that their connection was social as well as political. A complaint by a Puritan accused of possessing libelous books confirms the conjecture that, soon after joining the government, if not before, Bankes had abandoned whatever Calvinist commitments he might have taken on in Keswick. “Mr Attorney, who hath ever been esteemed a religious and godly gentleman…is now very violent against maintayners of the truth.”56
The vicar of St Bartholomew the Less, William Hall, gives further insight into Bankes’s religious–political standing in a dedication to him of a thoroughly Laudian sermon on the power of rulers and magistrates and the duty of the people.57 A snippet of conversation between Bankes and Richard Sibbes, the popular moderate Puritan preacher of Gray’s Inn, allows a similar inference. Sibbes complained often about Laud’s insistence on ceremony and hierarchy.58 Bankes advised him to stick more closely to his texts. “A good Textuary is a good lawyer as well as a good Divine.”59 Explain the writ, squeeze it dry in the manner of Andrewes and the men of Gray’s Inn, and accept the outward forms of worship.
In the Royal Bed
James saw himself as a conciliator of religious differences not only among Protestants but also between them and Catholics. To prove his sincerity and fish for an ample dowry, he sought a dynastic connection with a Catholic state. Since he had pledged his daughter Elizabeth, born in 1596, to a rising Protestant leader, Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, Henry, Prince of Wales, would have to wed a papist. In 1610, Henry then being 16, Wotton proposed the delightful, attractive, demure, and circumspect daughter of Carlo Emanuele II, Duke of Savoy, for the position; though small, Savoy had the important value of controlling strategic Alpine passes. Other Catholic powers with spare daughters then entered the bidding. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II, wooed Henry with wine and salami, bronzes and paintings, and the promise of one of his sisters. Marie de’ Medici, as regent of France, offered her daughter Christine, who, however, was only 4, and came with a dowry proportional to her size.60 The Spanish hinted at a double marriage should Elizabeth jilt Frederick: Philip III for her, one of his sisters for Henry. Queen Anna plumped for Spain or Tuscany, and, to even the playing field, English Catholics promised a dowry for the Princess of Savoy.61
When Prince Henry’s sudden death in the fall of 1612 removed the threat of the great heretical prince, the Spanish lost interest in matching with England.62 The Italian states pursued the new Prince of Wales. Wotton went in great state to Savoy to negotiate a bride for “Baby Charles,” then 12, and a dowry James could accept. Carlo Emanuele could not afford it. Cosimo could. Hoping that Henry’s death might cause James to reconsider Elizabeth’s betrothal, he offered her his brother Francesco, Charles their younger sister Maria, and James a million gold scudi. The grand duke required of the king only that he grant Maria freedom of worship, stop molesting English Catholics, and give Elizabeth Ireland as a dowry.63 Despite these advantages and against Queen Anna’s wishes, James married Elizabeth to Frederick.
Spanish Try
It remained to find a Catholic mate for Charles. Against the odds, James raised his game to Spain. This time he had his queen’s support.64 Not so his brother-in-law’s. News of a union of England and Spain brought Uncle Christian angrily back to London.65 He did not succeed in changing James’s mind. Still the kings managed a little royal sport, to the tune of £50,000. “The two monarchs were guilty of great intemperance, the Dane being addicted to drunkenness, to which James had not the least objection.”66 It was not, however, the sort of behavior a well-bred Spanish princess would approve. As a better guide to capturing an infanta, James had the wheedling advice of the clever ambassador of Spain, the Count of Gondomar.
Gondomar deftly exploited James’s self-image as a peacemaker to keep him from mobilizing European Protestantism, entangled him in cobwebs over terms of the proposed marriage, and sympathized with his need for the money that a large Spanish dowry for Prince Charles would assuage. It is said that “Machiavellian” became a common term in English because of its frequent application to the Conde de Gondomar. The king and the count became close. When Gondomar left London for a brief visit home, James gave him as going-away presents the release of 100 imprisoned Catholic priests and the head of Sir Walter Raleigh.67
A Spanish match became all the more desirable in James’s eyes after Habsburg armies dispossessed his daughter Elizabeth, then (in 1620) the Queen of Bohemia. She had risen to royalty when Frederick foolishly accepted the Bohemian crown from Protestant burgers who had no right to offer it. James judged Frederick’s acceptance a violation of the Holy Roman Emperor’s divine rights in Bohemia; Uncle Christian, less entangled with theory, regarded it as sheer stupidity.68 The travail of Frederick and Elizabeth marked the onset of the Thirty Years War. They fled to The Hague. Although pressed to intervene to reestablish his kin by force of arms, and although a formal ally of Denmark against aggression by Catholic powers, James pursued peace and a Spanish union. He now hoped not only for a dowry, but also for effective pressure by the new young King of Spain, Philip IV, on his relatives the Austrian Habsburgs to withdraw their armies and their interests from Bohemia.
It was not easy for a Protestant king to bag a Spanish princess. Not only did James face tough opposition at home from people who remembered that the immediate forebears of the intended bride, the Infanta Maria Anna, had launched an Armada against them; he could not hope to gain Philip’s assent to the marriage without obtaining prior approval from the pope. He chose as his emissary to Rome George Gage, a Roman Catholic who had been present and supportive when his friend Tobie Matthew received Holy Orders from Bellarmine. Gage was an acute connoisseur, a first-class broker, and a man of sophisticated charm. He charmed Pope Gregory, who approved the proposed match on Gage’s insinuation that it would turn Charles Catholic.69
By then smitten by pictures and reports of Maria Anna, the Crown Prince of Wales and the royal favorite, the Earl of Buckingham, slipped into Spain incognito to woo the lady in person (Figures 12 and 13). They galloped the 800 miles from Paris to Madrid in thirteen days.70 Philip IV welcomed their unexpected sweaty arrival, but not their subsequent lengthy sojourn. His councilors opposed the marriage, as did the intended bride, and Philip dared not act against his kinsman the emperor. To extricate himself, Philip tightened the draft marriage contract to require toleration for all Catholics, withdrawal of the laws against recusants, liberal guarantees of free exercise of religion for Maria Anna’s household, and prior agreement by parliament to all provisions.71
Figure 12 Daniel Mytens, Prince Charles (c.1623), age 23.
Figure 13 Diego Velasquez, Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, once Charles’s inamorata, but at the time depicted, 1630, age 24, the Queen of Hungary.
In July 1623, James and his Privy Council swore to accept the terms of any marriage contract Charles, Buckingham, and Tobie Matthew, whom James sent to help with negotiations, managed to consummate in Madrid, and, on the 20th, Andrewes presided over a ratification of the marriage treaty in the Chapel Royal. In secret articles James made the unredeemable promise that Parliament would revoke the recusancy laws within three years. Nonetheless, the affair in Madrid did not prosper. Buckingham insisted that Philip agree to intercede in the Palatinate. Impossible! M
atthew made a last appeal: if Philip did not accept the marriage under the conditions offered, the blood of English Catholics would be on his hands.72 Philip did not mind running the risk. Charles returned to England without his infanta. Instead, and in fact much better, he brought back four canvases by Titian.73
It had been a fool’s errand, literally. The royal jester Archie had greater access to the infanta and her ladies than the Prince of Wales. So far had the Spanish held the suitor from his inamorata that (so Buckingham quipped in a letter to his wife) he needed a telescope to see her. To which his devoted gullible lady replied by sending the best perspective glasses she could find in London and her regrets that “the Prince is kept at such a distance that he needs them.”74 Archie’s jokes also were productive, as they gained him a pension without the awkward qualification Philip placed on other such grants.75 This was to agree to die, preferably soon, reconciled to Rome. Charles’s secretary Francis Cottington took advantage of the offer. Thinking himself on his deathbed, he entrusted his soul to the Roman Catholic Church; recovering, he reconverted; from which much later, again facing death, he again reconverted.76 This last flip-flop occurred after Cottington had served Charles as a chief minister for many years.
The experience in Madrid jolted Charles’s religious sensibilities, which had developed under the supervision of tutors and chaplains who had educated Henry. The chaplains included anti-Arminians such as Joseph Hall of Foolania and the Clerk of the Closet Henry Burton, an extreme Puritan fated to return to these pages, and two sober divines trained to sniff and snuff out every whiff of Catholicism. The godly had therefore delighted in Charles: “Wee have yet the Sunne and the Moone [James and Anna], and starres of the Royal firmament: and though we have lost our morning Starre [Henry], yet we have Charls-waine [the pole star] in our Horizon.”77 Andrewes alerted James to the undue influence on the prince of the godly types around him. James quickly replaced Charles’s Calvinist secretary with Cottington. That occurred in time for Cottington to join the mad gallop to Madrid. His Catholic sympathies and fourteen years of experience at the English embassy in Spain made him a useful man.
Several English Catholics and Catholic sympathizers who joined the nuptial battle helped to complete Charles’s liberation from Henry’s militant Protestantism. Among them was Matthew, who found the infanta satisfactory as to person, rather good looking, gentle, charitable, but very stubborn and (what made a bad combination) very pious.78 There was also Kenelm Digby, the nephew of the English ambassador to Spain, who arrived direct from Tuscany with a recipe for a powder of sympathy that cured wounds when sprinkled on the weapon that inflicted the injury. It worked for James Howell, a traveler in the glass business, who washed up in Spain after buying materials in Venice, which mayhap included telescope lenses useful for spying on princesses; we will encounter him again as a travel writer. Howell’s cure won Digby’s powder a reputation of infallibility, but it neither cured Charles’s puppy love nor made Maria Anna sympathetic.79 This census of informed Catholicizing Englishmen around Prince Charles in Madrid would be inexcusably incomplete without mentioning Endymion Porter, like Cottington an old Spanish hand, whose many moneymaking schemes would bring him frequently to the attention of Attorney General Bankes. Despite their failure to bring home the bride and the waste of £48,000 in the effort, Digby and Matthew received knighthood, and Buckingham promotion to duke.80
Fallout
Letters from Micanzio to his friend Cavendish, which Hobbes translated into English for a wider audience, offer a Venetian view of these proceedings. Micanzio tried to understand why the wisest of kings was behaving as the greatest of fools. He could only suppose that wily James had a secret purpose that stayed his “mightie arme.” He must be very deep. “For neither desire of quietnes nor hate of mutations shall never make me to beleive that the wisest King of this Age, and the most learned of many Ages will neglect the heighth of his glorie especially falling in so joyntly with the service of God, & defense of truth and Justice.”81 And yet, he stands aside as Catholic armies drive his family from Bohemia.82
Rumor now has it (in the summer of 1622) that James will conclude the match with Spain and free English Catholics; the pope has set up a committee of cardinals to consider the match and the recovery of England. Yet the infanta resists! The business will boomerang: “the endeavour of the Spanish Ministers to captivate the Prince [of Wales] to their opinions will make an Antiperistasis [a sort of backlash in Aristotelian natural philosophy] which strengthens all motion.”83 Could that be James’s deep purpose? No! Micanzio reluctantly accepted the truth that Sarpi had seen much earlier: James was negligent, weak, indecisive, and mediocre, “the learnedest ass in Christendom,” made impotent by writing, busy not with issues befitting a king, but with “Vorstius and other paper-battles.”84
Meanwhile the tragedy of De Dominis was playing out. While rumor was rife that James would convert, De Dominis enjoyed a hero’s welcome. He returned to Rome carried in a litter followed by a coach-and-six containing four pages in livery. The display, underwritten by Gondomar, implied that the apostate brought some great news. Pope Gregory absolved him of everything and gave him precedence over all other archbishops. In return, Micanzio continued, De Dominis boasts of his conquests, urges the Spanish match, and writes voluminously against the Protestants.85 He is sincere in his zeal for the unification of Christianity: he just does not understand that popes have no interest in religion. Gondomar is no better. He pretends to share De Dominis’s cause of unification while conniving to send him for justice to Rome.86
Micanzio’s analysis ends with the change of popes. Gregory has died, no loss, as the Spanish and the Jesuits controlled him.87 The new man, Urban VIII, is promising. “He is a man of a fine literature, of a lively witt, obstinat in his owne opinions, a statesman and little above 50 yeares of age.” His nature is now (27 October 1623) evident: “violent, confident, apt to thinke him selfe allmighty, [a]bove all he hath most vast dessignes for the extirpation of those that hold contrary opinions to the Church of Rome.” One of the first to experience Urban’s sting was De Dominis.88 Galileo would be another. Already, Micanzio reported, foreign books not in conformity with the Vatican’s views about the physical world system were unprocurable. Perhaps an antiperistasis will push Copernicus’s work. “[S]ince it hath bene prohibited by Rome that hath found Articles of faith also in Mathematicall inventions, it is to be believed that an appetite will grow for reviving it.” But there was no hope for Sarpi’s Trent, “so much as never perhapps hath any booke so much displeased them.”89 It was a great book, so the cardinal nephew Ludovico Ludovisi conceded to the Venetian ambassador to Rome, and all the more dangerous for De Dominis for being so.90
The playwright Thomas Middleton had escaped censure for insinuating, more gently than Micanzio, that the situation in Bohemia demanded action, not scholarship, from James.91 The Spanish debacle gave Middleton another opportunity for trouble. A game of chesse celebrated the unmasking of Gondomar and the demise of De Dominis in a hit that ran, unusually, for nine nights in a row before Spanish agents could persuade James to shut it down. Its smallest audience numbered in the thousands.92 As the Black King, Middleton intended Philip IV; as Black Bishop, the General of the Jesuits; and, among the Whites, James as king, Charles as knight, and Abbot as bishop. The main episodes are the seduction of White pawns by the Black Bishop’s (the Jesuit General’s) pawn, the White Knight’s trip to the Black House, and the plot of the Black Knight (Gondomar) against a fat bishop (De Dominis). We meet the bishop in the play worrying about his polemics. “Are my Bookes printed, Pawne? My last Inventions agaynst the Blackhouse?” The Black Knight: “Yond greasie tournecoate Gourmandizing Prelate do’s worke our house more mischief by his…fat and fulsome Volumes than the whole bodie of adverse partie.” The Black Knight helped dupe the Fat Bishop into returning to Rome and the White Knight came back unscathed from the Black House. Among real pawns seduced by the Black side was the mother of the White Duke, Buckingham
.93
The prince and the duke returned from Madrid spoiling for a fight. James still hoped, however, to recover the Palatinate through Spanish diplomacy. Unable to do so without money and against the opposition of the prince and the duke, he summoned a parliament.94 He opened it in February 1624 with an uncharacteristic request for advice and assurances that everyone might speak frankly. The Commons waxed enthusiastic over war with Spain, if confined to piracy; rejected a land war for the Palatinate; and insisted on enforcement of the recusancy laws.95 That was to require what James could not promise. He had just hurriedly arranged to wed Charles to France in the person of Henrietta Maria, the 15-year-old daughter of Henry IV and Marie de’ Medici, and the marriage contract provided for protection of Catholics in England. No matter that the provision violated James’s previous promise to parliament to make no such concession; among Stuart prerogatives was the right to lie.96 Was this deception not justified by their expectation that their new in-laws would assist them in the Palatinate? Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, refused the help. That brought James to the end of his contrivances. He was also near the end of his life. He called Andrewes to his bedside, but the bishop was too ill to attend him.97 The king committed himself to God with what other help he could muster and left his three conflicted kingdoms to his inadequately prepared son and incompetent favorite.
A Venetian ambassador drew the character of Charles a year or so before he became king: chaste, economical, prudent, prudish, and close, especially in matters of religion. “He moves like a planet in its sphere, so naturally and quietly that one does not remark it.” His judgment is good. But as his father and the favorite often overcome it, he dissimulates. He excels at manly sports, especially on horseback. He frequents a “school of arms” that Henry had set up and works there on “out of the way mathematics and methods of encamping, being very interested in inventions.” He is not a student like his father but sometimes reads history or poetry. He speaks French and Latin fluently and knows some Italian. Catholics think that his wife, then expected to be the infanta, will win him over to their religion. Although his defense of Catholics against attacks on them by Puritans may support their optimism, they are wrong.98
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