14
‘… a Prince’s court
Is like a common Fountaine, whence should flow
Pure silver-droppes in general; but if’t chance
Some curst example poyson’t neere the head
Death and diseases through the whole land spread.’
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene i
Some two years or so after James I ascended the throne of England, a royal commission reporting on the sorry state of the royal finances informed him, with all due delicacy, of the profligacy and greed that were sapping his resources and poisoning his court. ‘The empty places of that glorious garland of your crown,’ the king was told, ‘… cannot be repaired when the garden of your Majesties Treasure shall be made a common pasture for all that are in need or have unreasonable desires.’ What the commissioners may have thought of the £15,593 lavished upon Queen Anne’s childbed for the birth of Princess Mary on 8 April 1605, we can only guess. But it was the steady flow of gifts and pensions to a seemingly endless list of servants, associates, hangers-on and outright blackguards that emptied the royal coffers most remorselessly. A certain Jon Gibb, one of the king’s lesser Scottish servants, had, for example, been gifted all of £3,000 that same year, while one of Queen Anne’s favourites, listed in the accounts as ‘Mrs Jane Drummond’, had benefited to the tune of £2,000. And these, of course, were but droplets in a growing torrent of waste and excess. In 1603 ‘divers causes and rewards’ accounted for £11,741, the next year £18,510, and the year following £35,239, while over the same period Exchequer spending on ‘fees and annuities’ rose giddily from £27,270 to £47,783.
In the meantime, like many incorrigible spendthrifts of his kind, James continued to salve his conscience by occasional half-hearted gestures of reform. On 17 July 1604, for example, he had signed a book of Ordinances for the Governing and Ordering of the Kings Household, which laid down, among other things, that only twenty-four dishes of meat should henceforth be served at the royal table instead of the customary thirty. The sergeant of the cellar, on the other hand, was to limit his issue of sack to twelve gallons a day and to offer it only to those noblemen and ladies who desired it ‘for their better health’. Yet any notion that the financial crisis inherited from the previous reign and fuelled by James’s broader improvidence could be remedied by savings from the royal larder were blatantly misconceived, particularly when soaring inflation was already drastically eroding income from the Crown’s estates and undermining the rapidly dwindling yield from direct taxation. By the end of her reign, Elizabeth had accumulated a debt of some £430,000, though the disparity in value between the Scottish currency and its English equivalent may actually have served in part to lessen James’s appreciation of the scale of his predicament. Scotland’s pound, after all, was only one twelfth the worth of England’s and when James reflected from the alternative perspective that the income of the Scottish Crown in 1599 had been merely £58,000 (Scots) as opposed to the £110,000 (English) available at the time of his accession, this too may well have exaggerated his impression of the new funds available to him.
James could, of course, comfort himself with the sounder assumption that some of the financial outlays dogging his predecessor’s government no longer applied to his own. There was, for example, the cost of maintaining the expensive Border garrison at Berwick which had largely evaporated upon his accession, while the huge sums that Elizabeth found herself obliged to expend upon the Irish rebellion had also been curtailed by Lord Mountjoy’s successful campaign at the very time that James was securing his new throne. During the financial year ending at Michaelmas 1602, the war in Ireland cost £342,074, only to fall after four years of the new reign to little more than a tenth of that figure. And when it is remembered that peace with Spain had been achieved in 1604, there were added grounds for cautious optimism about the Crown’s potential solvency, so long as suitable economies could be sustained in other areas.
But moderation was, it seems, no less inimical to James’s nature than humility and by 1607 he was already complaining bitterly of ‘the eating canker of want, which,’ he maintained, ‘being removed, I could think myself as happy in all other respects as any other king or monarch that ever was since the birth of Christ.’ Moreover, neither the expense of supporting a comparatively large royal family, nor the necessity of sustaining regal splendour by lavish gifts and patronage can remotely excuse the full measure of the king’s wastefulness. ‘My first three years were to me as a Christmas, I could not then be miserable,’ James told Parliament at this time. But the ramifications of such generosity cannot be underestimated. On the one hand, as the wages of the king’s servants, high and low, fell into arrears, graft and peculation infected every corner of his court. While royal bakers cooked lightweight loaves and misappropriated what they saved, and members of the king’s boiling house interpreted their perquisite of the ‘strippings’ so freely as to leave little meat on the fowl served to ‘the kings poor officers’, Lord Treasurer Dorset – who would himself ‘have spared a life to gain a bribe’ – looked on largely impassively, borrowing heavily at interest rates of up to 10 per cent. And as Sir Julius Caesar, Chancellor of the Exchequer, entreated Sir Thomas Chaloner, governor of the Prince of Wales’ household, to pay the wages of the boy’s embroiderer, who ‘is redy to perish for want of money’, so the moral tone at court continued to decline in parallel.
Only a year before the meteoric rise to prominence of Robert Carr, it seemed that the king might have at last outgrown the need to lavish inordinate affection upon some handsome young man or other. James Hay had, of course, arrived from Scotland with the reputation of a favourite, and in the early months of his reign, England’s new ruler had also fawned over Philp Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. But Hay’s relationship with his master, though resented, was always seemly, while Montgomery always smelt far too strongly of the stables to appeal at any deeper level to the king’s fancy. For James required manners and refinement as well as good looks from his ideal companion, and if gratitude, docility and a dash of vulnerability could be added to the mix, the king’s devotion was assured. When Montgomery’s wenching and drinking finally cooled the king’s ardour for him, therefore, it was only to make space for Carr – an altogether more eligible competitor whom Sir John Harington described as ‘straight-limbed, well-favoured, strong-shouldered and smooth faced’, with fair hair and a pointed beard, and who, in the words of Sir Anthony Weldon, had ‘had his breeding in France and was newly returned from foreign travel’.
The youngest son of Sir Thomas Ker of Ferniherst, who had served as Warden of the Middle March and been a faithful friend of Esmé Stuart, Robert Carr, as the surname became spelt in England, had been born around the time of his father’s death in 1586, making him around 21 at the time that he was first dangled under the king’s nose by none other than James Hay in an attempt both to undermine the Cecil–Howard stranglehold on power and advance once more the Scottish interest at court. Having served as a page who ran beside the royal coach in Scotland – a post from which he had been dismissed for clumsiness, according to Queen Anne – Carr seemed the perfect instrument for Hay’s purpose. Athletic, personable and apparently guileless, he could be shaped to need, or so it seemed, and guaranteed to enliven the king’s paternal instincts, which might grow with suitable prompting into something more compelling still. To all intents and purposes, the only requirement was a suitable setting to lay the bait, and such an opportunity was duly forthcoming on ‘King’s Day’, 24 March 1607, when the annual jousting event to celebrate James’s accession was held in the Whitehall tiltyard.
It was Hay, in fact, who made the first flamboyant entrance that day, attended by a number of gentlemen and pages adorned ‘in their richest ornaments’, one of whom, on a high-bred horse, had been appointed to carry the courtier’s shield, and present it to the king. But the handsome young stranger’s mount was ‘full of fire and heat’, we are told, and, after encouraging it to prance and curvet, he was thrown to the ground with such violence that his leg was broken. With the stricken rider lying prone before the royal stand, there could be, in fact, only one outcome. For the king, ‘whose nature and disposition was very flowing in affection toward persons so adorned’, was overcome with compassion, and ‘mustering up his thoughts, fixed them upon this object of pity, giving special order to have him lodged in the court, and to have his own physicians and chirurgeons to use their best endeavours for his recovery’. Thereafter, it seems, James visited Hay’s young gentleman not once but several times, captivated by his modesty and ingenuousness when questioned about the progress of his recovery. ‘And though’, Arthur Wilson tells us, the king ‘found no great depth of literature or experience’ in the patient, ‘yet such a calm outside him made him think there might be good anchorage and a fit harbour for his most retired thoughts’.
So it was, then, that Robert Carr became firmly lodged in his sovereign’s affections. Possessing, no doubt, a native shrewdness that enabled him quickly to gage the character of the man from whom he might hope all things, the young Scot seems, nevertheless, to have exhibited genuine charm and grace of manners, since even those who eventually came to hate his influence acknowledged his ‘gentle mind and affable disposition’. Before long, James was personally teaching Carr ‘the Latin tongue’ and laying a foundation ‘by his daily discourses with him, to improve him into a capability of his most endeared affections’. With no less care and trouble, the king also attended to his new favourite’s appearance and bearing, equipping him with the finery in which he liked to see his courtiers ‘make a brave show’. ‘The young man,’ wrote Sir John Harington in Nugae Antiquae, ‘doth much study art and device: he hath changed his tailors and tiremen many times and all to please the Prince. The King teacheth him Latin every morning and I think some one should teach him English too, for he is a Scotch lad, and hath much need of better language’.
Harington makes clear, moreover, that James not only cared for Carr but smothered him with the kind of cloying attentiveness that was soon exceeding the bounds of strict propriety and plain common sense. ‘The Prince,’ the author informs us, ‘leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheeks, smoothes his ruffled garments, and when he looketh at Carr, directeth discourse to divers others.’ But this was not the limit of James’s indiscretion, for in indulging his infatuation ever more ardently, the king’s control of the young man became increasingly unwholesome. Robert Carr was to be, as James liked to phrase it, his ‘creature’. ‘Remember,’ James wrote later, ‘that all your being except your breathing and soul is from me.’ Nor, from some perspectives, was this an exaggeration as the king’s new favourite enjoyed the broader generosity of his master’s patronage. In a letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton, dated 30 December 1607, we read that Robert Carr, ‘a young Scot and new favourite’, was appointed Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Then, on 6 December a royal warrant was made out ‘To Robert Carr, Groom of the Bedchamber, for a yearly rent-charge of £600, to be paid to him for fifteen years by John Warner and three others, in consideration of a grant to them of certain arrears of rent due to the Crown’. And on 22 March 1608, there is a further warrant to pay £300 to Henryck von Hulfen ‘for a tablet of gold set with diamonds and the King’s picture, given by the King to Robert Carr, Gentleman of the Bedchamber’.
It was not until January 1609, however, that Carr was finally afforded a gift that placed his position far above that of any private gentleman. Since any advancement to higher honours necessitated a substantial endowment, the king opted in the worst possible way to employ Sir Walter Raleigh’s estate at Sherborne for Carr’s benefit. The only property saved for his family’s benefit from the wreck of his fortunes, Sherborne was now lost to Raleigh as a result of a criminally careless flaw in the deed conveying the land to trustees. When so much Crown land was being sold to meet his most pressing debts, the king had therefore acted without compunction and in the teeth of widespread public hostility, which was shared by both Queen Anne and Prince Henry. ‘I mun hae it for Carr,’ James insisted, and, in accordance with his growing habit of flagrantly disregarding opposition to his immediate wishes and brazenly ignoring unpalatable facts, Sherborne was indeed acquired. Early in 1610, moreover, Carr was duly created Viscount Rochester, a Knight of the Garter and a Privy Councillor, before becoming Keeper of the Signet and, in effect, the king’s private secretary in May 1611. Two years later he was to complete his ascent by becoming Earl of Somerset and Lord Chamberlain.
How far this remarkable advancement was linked to the emotional needs arising from the disintegration of the king’s family life will naturally remain a matter for speculation. James had never, of course, been able to share any worthwhile intellectual activity with the queen, and her propensity for intrigue, gnawing intolerance to opposition, and widely broadcast flirtations with Rome had made it necessary, ultimately, to exclude her altogether from politics. Nor had she had ever been able to reciprocate the pent-up romanticism and desire for love and sympathy that her husband required of her. In spite of any residual friendship and tolerance they still shared, therefore, the death of the Princess Sophia within twenty-four hours of her birth in June 1606, followed the year after by that of the other baby daughter, Mary, seems to have damaged the couple’s relationship irreparably. Still only 33, Anne remained pretty, if only blandly so, and, apart from the twinges of gout that she shared with her husband, continued to enjoy good health. But having borne James several children and endured a number of miscarriages along the way, the queen seems to have decided once and for all to escape the roundabout of pregnancy and bereavement she had ridden for too long and give herself over to more gratifying pursuits, such as the masques in which she caused such indignation by acting herself.
Nor, more importantly still, was the king able to fulfil his emotional needs by the kind of intensely devoted relationship that he might have been expected to enjoy with his eldest son. Indeed, as Prince Henry began to exhibit a cool, clear mind of his own around the age of 12, the gulf in personality and tastes between the two became increasingly evident. ‘He was a prince,’ wrote Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ‘rather addicted to martial studies and exercises than to golf, tennis, or other boys’ play; a true lover of the English nation, and a sound Protestant, abhorring not only the idolatry, superstitions and bloody persecutions of the Romish synagogue, but being free also from the Lutheran leaven.’ Much more typically English than his father, then, Henry also preferred the company of ‘learned and godly men’ to that of ‘buffoons and parasites, vain swearers and atheists’. But he was both insular and immovable in his prejudices, and while James had wished him to be all that he was not – athletic, self-confident and attractive – he was nevertheless hurt when the boy proved incapable of sharing his bookishness and open-hearted demonstrativeness. For Henry preferred action to dialectic and the tales of Elizabethan heroism to any talk of peace. By the age of 14, indeed, the prince found greater inspiration in the company of Phineas Pett, the Master Shipwright at Woolwich, than that of his father, acquiring far more knowledge about naval administration and dockyard construction, we are told, than king and council combined. That Prince Henry’s greatest hero, however, should have been none other than Sir Walter Raleigh must surely have been his father’s most galling disappointment of all.
Lonely and starved of affection as he was, therefore, it was not perhaps altogether surprising that James should have found in Robert Carr an emotional prop of sorts and a delectable object for his sweeter nature. But the naivety which led him to believe that he could turn his favourite into a statesman, and his blindness to the political consequences of his infatuation, were again indicative of that self-same lack of majesty that would always negate the king’s more admirable qualities. Emotionally vulnerable – sometimes truly pathetic so – and stricken by insecurities that he was never ready to confront sufficiently earnestly, this was nevertheless a ruler who was incapable of doubting his own wisdom or the status of his divinely ordained office and believed that this was enough in itself to make him a leader of men. Such, then, was the potent combination of conflicting characteristics that had long infected James’s kingship and would now threaten to poison the fibre of his entire court.
For the time being, however, it remained the king’s financial position that troubled his ministers most pressingly. When Lord Treasurer Dorset dropped dead at a meeting of the Privy Council in April, 1608, his last ‘accompt’ showed debts totalling more than £700,000 and revealed, according to his successor, the Earl of Salisbury, that James’s expenditure exceeded his ordinary revenue by some £80,000 a year. Wishing to consolidate all areas of policy under his sole control for an attempt at root and branch reform, and partly because there was nobody other than himself obviously qualified to assume the post, the Secretary of State therefore added the killing burden of the treasurership to his already overwhelming workload. For unless the Crown could secure adequate revenue to govern in times of peace without parliamentary grants, the king’s independence from the tax-voting House of Commons, as Salisbury well knew, must surely be compromised. All hinged initially, however, upon clearing the mountain of government debt and the crippling burden of annual interest payments resulting from it.
In this last respect, at least, the new treasurer seems to have been surprisingly successful. Selling Crown property to the value of £400,000 and retrieving old debts amounting to a total of £200,000, Salisbury also revived various lapsed dues and fees and uncollected fines, and raised in the process a further £100,000. Yet the annual deficit continued to snap at the treasurer’s heels and even his more drastic efforts to drive home the need for stringent economies proved unavailing with the king. James had made clear in Basilikon Doron that it was the duty of any prince to ‘use true Liberality in rewarding the good, and bestowing frankly for your honour and weal’. The use of patronage was, after all, a tried and trusted method of guaranteeing loyalty, and even Salisbury observed to Parliament in 1610 that ‘for a king not to be bountiful were a fault’. But James remained a long-term addict to excess: impulsive and compulsive at one and the same time, and driven by a heady need to satisfy his sentimental urges by giving. And just as Thomas Fowler had reported in 1588, the king’s largesse still exceeded all sensible bounds of generosity as ‘vain youths’ and ‘proud fools’ continued to be lavished with royal gifts and favours. Nor had confession of his faults saved him from their consequences. ‘I have offended the whole country, I grant, for prodigal giving from me,’ he told Maitland in 1591.
So when Salisbury resorted to pleadings and shock tactics the outcome was hardly surprising. In 1610 a Declaration of his Majesty’s Royal Pleasure in the Matter of Bounty committed James to ‘expressly forbid all persons whatsoever, to presume to press us, for anything that may … turn to the diminution of our revenues and settled receipts …’ Five years later, however, commentators were still bemoaning the throng of self-seekers besieging the throne. ‘The King hath borrowed £30,000 of the aldermen of this city,’ wrote John Chamberlain. ‘But what,’ he added, ‘is that among so many who gape and starve after it?’ Even more childlike lessons, for that matter, appear to have had no lasting effect. According to an anecdote related by Francis Osborne, Salisbury resorted on one occasion to piling up in front of James the £20,000 he had ordered the Exchequer to pay out as a gift, whereupon, we are told, ‘the king fell into a passion, protesting he was abused, never intending any such gift: and casting himself upon the heap, scrabbled out the quantity of two or three hundred pounds’, swearing that the intended recipient ‘should have no more’.
Tall tale or not, the implication was nevertheless entirely borne out by the hard facts, which left the exasperated treasurer to resort to an altogether more painful course for the king’s hard-pressed subjects. For if fire sales and savings were not the solution, then the yawning gap between expenditure and income could only next be bridged by raising import duties – an opportunity for which had conveniently presented itself as a result of the collapse, early in the reign, of the Levant Company. To compensate itself for the handsome yearly sum that the company had been paying for its monopoly of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the treasury subsequently imposed an extra duty on imported currants, and when a merchant named Thomas Bate refused to pay, the outcome was a lawsuit in the Exchequer Court which raised the whole issue of the Crown’s right to ‘impose’ extra duties of this kind. Backed by sound Elizabethan precedents and the firm support of the judges, however, Salisbury prevailed and, after careful discussion with leading City merchants as to what the trade could reasonably stand, imposed in 1608 a new Book of Rates calculated to yield a further £70,000. In consequence, as the total value of the kingdom’s trade continued to increase, the Crown’s revenue rose from £264,000 in 1603 to £366,000 in the very same year that the new rates were implemented.
Sadly, however, and all too predictably, expenditure continued to rise even more rapidly over the same period – from £290,700 in 1603 to £509,524 in 1610, the year in which Salisbury finally called upon Parliament in the hope of agreeing a ‘Great Contract’ that might render the Crown solvent by surrendering the more provocative methods of raising revenue in return for a guaranteed grant of £200,000 lasting for the duration of the king’s life. Yet the most promising financial reform of the reign was never to materialise. By July the bargain had actually been struck, though Parliament hesitated, it seems, ‘to engage themselves in any offers or promises of contribution to the King, afore they were sure of some certain and sound retribution from him’, and the final details were left until Parliament was reconvened in November. In the intervening period, moreover, MPs came to like the arrangement less and less until some bristled with resentment, while the king, possibly in consequence of statistics submitted to him by Sir Julius Caesar, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had decided that the agreed annual grant from Parliament was incommensurate with the monetary concessions he had granted. Poisoned too, it seems, by the influence of Robert Carr who was justifiably alarmed by the palpable hostility to Scots in general and himself in particular, James duly decided to abort his treasurer’s plans by irritably dissolving Parliament in January 1611.
The prior behaviour of the Commons had demonstrated, however, just how far their confidence in the king’s ability to manage his affairs was already compromised. Under the leadership of men like Edwin Sandys certain members had plainly adopted the principle that redress of grievances should be linked to financial co-operation, and proposed accordingly that the king’s predicament should be used as a lever to wring wider concessions from him. They urged, therefore, that laws against recusants should be properly enforced and that all grants to courtiers should be cancelled: the first clear sign that Carr’s rise to prominence was now a matter of open disapproval. ‘Where your Majesty’s expense groweth by the Commonwealth we are bound to maintain it: otherwise not’, warned Sir Henry Neville, before demanding to know ‘to what purpose is it for us to draw a silver stream out of the country into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run dry from private cocks’. But it was the member for Oxford City’s last comment that carried with it the most wounding barb of all when he added how he would never ‘consent to take money from a poor frieze jerkin to trap a courtier’s horse withal’.
And as debate expanded to encompass ‘impositions’ and, in particular, the fear that James might soon see fit to raise far more than the sum laid down by the current Book of Rates, his only response was to visit the House on 21 March and deliver the most outspoken defence of his royal prerogative to date. ‘The state of Monarchy,’ he declared in what has rightly become one of his best known speeches:
is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods … In the Scriptures kings are called gods, and so their power after a certain relation compared to the Divine Power. Kings are also compared to the fathers of families, for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people … Now a father may dispose of his inheritance to his children at his pleasure, yea, even disinherit the eldest upon just occasions and prefer the youngest, according to his liking; make them beggars or rich at his pleasure; restrain or banish them out of his presence, as he finds them give cause of offence, or restore them in favour again with the penitent sinner. So may the King deal with his subjects.
There followed, it is true, a reassurance from James that God would punish all kings who nevertheless failed to govern according to the laws. But this did not deter a minority of MPs from producing a solemn Petition of Right in defence of free speech or prevent calls for the reinstatement of 300 ejected clergy and criticism of the activities of the ecclesiastical courts. Nor was Salisbury spared the sting of the king’s tongue when James finally called a halt to proceedings after discussion had turned to the scandals of Scottish favourites and the iniquities of court extravagance. ‘Your greatest error,’ James told him in the aftermath of his decision to prorogue Parliament, ‘hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall, being a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this Parliament, whereof all men were despaired, as I have oft told you, but yourself alone.’ And just how little the king had learned throughout the last sorry year of ill-tempered debate was amply demonstrated by his prompt elevation of Carr to the House of Lords as Viscount Rochester and the scattering of another £34,000 in indiscriminate gifts, mostly to Scotsmen.
Thereafter, relations between the king and Salisbury appeared, superficially at least, to resume their former course. James returned to his rural delights, while his principal minister received the usual flow of instructions and admonitions, delivered more and more often now in the hand of Viscount Rochester to whom most royal correspondence was dictated. Many of James’s letters dealt, in fact, with trivialities. He was irritated, for example, by the felling of trees in the Forest of Dean which disturbed the hawks, and concerned about the treatment of an albino hind. He wrote, too, about foreign affairs and the queen’s illness of 1611, as well as the Oath of Allegiance and fines from those who refused it. On another occasion, he told Salisbury how he had heard from his pastoral retreat that deprived clergy still preached in the vicinity of Peterborough, and required the hard-pressed minister to admonish the bishop. But this did not stop him either from objecting to Salisbury’s draft of a commission which, he believed, might be exploited to limit the royal prerogative.
Nor does the banality of much of James’s correspondence conceal the fact that he continued to blame his minister for the failure of his first Parliament, and was intent upon quietly dropping him as his chief adviser. There were no more ‘Little Beagle’ letters, the old jocularity disappeared, and royal messages were uncharacteristically formal and business-like. Increasingly, too, Salisbury found himself relegated to routine matters, while the king took counsel with Northampton, who hated him, and Rochester who conspired against him at every turn. ‘I have seen this parliament at an end,’ the waning minister reflected, ‘whereof the many vexations have so overtaken one another as I know not what to resemble them so well as to the plagues of Job.’ To add to his woes, a scheme was hatched to seal an alliance with Spain by marrying Prince Henry to a Spanish princess and granting toleration to English Catholics – a project which only the uncompromising hostility of the prince himself ultimately thwarted.
Not altogether surprisingly, therefore, by February 1612 Salisbury was seriously ill. The king, meanwhile, as a friend informed the stricken minister, was ‘careful exceedingly of your lordship’s health’, the more so, it seems, because he had continued in spite of his pain to attend to instructions about a royal paddock. There was a visit from the king, too, which appears to have consoled the patient further. ‘This royal voice of visitation (like visitatio beatifica),’ wrote Salisbury, ‘has given new life to those spirits which are ready to expire for your benefit.’ Yet within a few days James delivered a complaining letter. He did not like the manner in which Salisbury had dealt with a problem in London where many Englishmen were attending Mass in the chapels of ambassadors from Roman Catholic states. If he himself had not been absent, James reflected, the matter would have been better managed.
That April, as a last desperate remedy for the dropsy which was gaining on him, Salisbury resorted vainly to the healing waters at Bath before finally dying in the parsonage at Marlborough on 24 May during his return to Hatfield. Northampton, unable to conceal his malicious satisfaction, spoke heartlessly of ‘the death of the little man for which so many rejoice and so few do so much as seem sorry’. And John Chamberlain, too, left little doubt that similar sentiments were circulating widely. ‘I never knew so great a man so soon and so generally censured,’ he wrote, ‘for men’s tongues walk very liberally and very freely, but how truly I cannot judge.’ Yet it was Sir Francis Bacon, no friend, it must be said, to the late secretary and treasurer, who probably encapsulated most effectively his achievements and limitations. ‘Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great servant,’ he told the king on 31 May. ‘I should say,’ he added, ‘that he was a fit man to keep things from growing worse but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better.’
For James, meanwhile, the news of his minister’s demise appears to have represented nothing less than a blessed relief from a long-standing and irksome tutelage. Upon hearing of it at Whitehall, he delayed his intended departure for the country, according to Bishop Goodman’s memorial of the reign, only until after dinner. Plainly, the obligation of gratitude and deference had become tedious to the king, and the restraints upon his conduct galling. No new Secretary of State was therefore chosen or any Lord Treasurer appointed to restrain and criticise the lavishness of his impulses. Instead, the king would receive his financial counsel henceforth from a commission, of which Northampton was the most influential member, and which soon ascertained that the debt so assiduously reduced by Salisbury to £300,000 in 1610 had risen once again by two thirds. In November 1612, moreover, Prince Henry also sickened and died, calling for his friend, David Murray, and his beloved sister, Elizabeth, and subsequently leaving his father freer than ever to administer his kingdom entirely as he pleased. All correspondence now was to be conducted through Carr, as Keeper of the Signet, or ‘bedchamber men’ who were, in any case, Carr’s nominees. And with this, the transfer of effective power to the new favourite whom Salisbury had unobtrusively, but on the whole effectively resisted, became complete.
Though not promoted to any higher office, Viscount Rochester nevertheless became the mainspring on which the king’s entire style of government now largely depended. Too dull of wit to offer effective counsel on matters of state, he was nevertheless faithful, obedient and ever watchful, and this, above all, made him a formidable guardian of his master’s interests. ‘I must confess,’ wrote James, ‘you have deserved more trust and confidence of me than ever man did, in secrecy above all flesh, in feeling and impartial respect … And all this without respect either to kin or ally or your nearest and dearest friend whatsoever, nay, unmovable in one hair that might concern me against the whole world.’ Nor was James’s estimation of his favourite’s better qualities by any means entirely unfounded. Bishop Goodman, for instance, would describe Robert Carr as ‘a wise, discreet gentleman’, and even Sir Anthony Weldon, crabbed and tainted witness that he was, acknowledged how the young Scotsman ‘was observed to spend his time in serious studies, and did accompany himself with none but men of such eminences as by whom he might be bettered’. There was no denying, of course, that Carr took bribes, as did almost everyone else at court, but he was always ready to secure the king’s approval in doing so. And though he was ready to benefit from others’ misfortune, he did not in general deprive men of their posts and influence gratuitously.
Yet if Rochester was indeed discreet for the moment, shunning his Scottish compatriots and own kindred, he was inevitably under pressure to join one of the two factions into which the court was cleanly divided, and ultimately, like all favourites who have been pampered too long, he would become overweening, forgetful of his dependence upon the king and thereby invite disaster. Deprived of the Salisbury alliance on which their power had rested, the Howard grouping in particular, headed by the earls of Northampton and Suffolk, was bound to lose its primacy without the favourite’s good offices. But while the Howards offered fawning blandishments, Rochester was also courted by his old friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, who sought to draw him to the anti-Spanish camp and the ranks of the ‘parliamentary mutineers’. Holding aloof with good sense, the pig in the middle for some time made no move ‘save where the king had his interest’. But love for the king was ultimately overwhelmed by ardour for another – the Earl of Suffolk’s very own daughter. Thus, wrote Arthur Wilson, were Rochester’s good and affable qualities finally swallowed up in a ‘gulf of beauty’.
Already married to the young Earl of Essex, son of the former queen’s own firebrand favourite, Lady Frances Howard was a bad lot – proud, headstrong and violent, and raised in an atmosphere of self-interest, self-indulgence and sexual and political intrigue that had left her capable of both flagrant immodesty and implacable hatred. Her marriage had occurred in January 1606, when she was still only 13 and her groom only a year older, and had resulted from a typically well-intentioned and misconceived attempt by the king to heal a long-standing feud dating back to the time that the Howards had helped deliver the young earl’s father to the scaffold. James saw himself, after all, as rex pacificus, the bringer of peace and harmony to each and any situation, who had not only rescued his realm from war with Spain but had already engineered a marriage between Salisbury’s son and a daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and would now sow further concord by similar means. That the principals on this occasion were mere children was neither an obstacle nor a concern.
In the event, for two years after her nuptials the bride returned to her father’s house while her husband left for the Continent to mature over two years of travel. But by 1609 the earl, a solid if humourless young man, was back in England and set in vain upon consummating his marriage in his country home at Chartley. Witness after witness, in fact, would later confirm that the two had repeatedly bedded together and the countess herself would testify how she had made every effort ‘that she might be made a lawful mother’. Yet Essex, according to his own subsequent testimony, ‘felt no motion or provocation, and therefore attempted nothing’: a situation that persisted well beyond the compulsory period of ‘triennial probation’, after which a marriage could normally be nullified and the couple given their longed-for release. Whether, of course, the groom’s impotence was natural or the consequence of drugs which, years later, it transpired his wife had secretly procured from quacks and ministered to him, will remain uncertain. But the countess’s mounting aversion to her spouse was an open secret at court and by 1613 she had become the object of outright scandal, for it was widely rumoured that she was both angling for divorce and already Robert Carr’s mistress. More salaciously still, it was also suggested that she had relieved Prince Henry of his virginity and that jealousy over her affection had been the real cause of his hostility towards the king’s favourite.
The Howards, however, saw only opportunity in the countess’s prospective marriage to Carr until, that is, they found themselves confronted by a formidable obstacle. For favourites have favourites of their own and Sir Thomas Overbury, poet, bosom friend and personal mentor to Robert Carr, would prove an implacable enemy to their designs. Clever, able and intolerably arrogant, Overbury had already made many enemies, but his ascendancy over the king’s favourite made him a formidable entity at court. Enjoying the privilege of unsealing and reading reports from English ambassadors abroad before passing them on to Carr, complete with margin comments, it was said that Overbury knew more secrets of state than the Privy Council. And while a casual dalliance between his protégé, who would be created Earl of Somerset on 3 November 1613, and a Howard daughter might be borne, the prospect of their marriage was utterly unacceptable to him. ‘Will you never leave that base woman?’ Overbury is said to have asked his friend during a heated altercation at 1 a.m. upon Carr’s return from a tryst with his loved one. After which, according to Henry Peyton who witnessed the exchange, ‘they were never perfectly reconciled again’.
The king, meanwhile, who was always inquisitive in matters of sex and therefore particularly attracted by the more novel and tawdry aspects of this case, had immersed himself thoroughly in every detail of the wretched affair. In all likelihood, of course, he regretted his own part in encouraging the marriage initially, for at one point in the subsequent trial he inveighed against the risks of marrying too early. But he was surrounded, nevertheless, by men who favoured the countess’s divorce and he was in no doubt either about the potential alliance between Carr and the Howards. The immediate result was the appointment in May 1613 of a commission to investigate the validity of the marriage, headed by the muddle-headed but scrupulously honest George Abbot who had succeeded Bancroft as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1611. Within a year, however, this same divorce case had assumed dimensions that the king could scarcely have imagined, as he waded thigh-deep into a stagnant pool of sexual scandal, intrigue, corruption, sorcery and, ultimately, poison.
‘What a strange and fearful thing it was’, wrote Abbot, ‘… that the judges should be dealt with beforehand, and, in a sort, directed what they should determine’, and that the king should profess how he himself ‘had set the matter in that course of judgement’. For James was utterly credulous from the outset to Frances Howard’s lies and resolved that she should have her way. When, for instance, a jury of twelve matrons examined the countess and asserted her virginity, the king ignored that she had been allowed to wear a veil throughout the examination, and discarded claims that her cousin – a true virgin – or some other woman had impersonated her. As the case dragged on throughout the summer, moreover, James had tried to influence the commissioners’ decision by inviting them to Windsor and browbeating them on theological issues relating to the case for more than three hours. Throughout, there had been much talk of witchcraft, though Abbot could find no mention in the Church Fathers of a link between ‘maleficium’ and impotence in marriage.
Such, indeed, was Abbot’s perplexity at the king’s accusations of prejudice against the countess, ‘which prejudice is the most dangerous thing that can fall in a judge for misleading of his mind’, that the archbishop dropped at one point to his knees and tearfully implored the king to relieve him from his role as chairman. Completely oblivious to the irony of his own advice, however, James merely urged the dumbfounded cleric ‘to have a kind of faith implicit in my judgement, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity, as also that I hope no honest man doubts of the uprightness of my conscience’. Whereupon, after discovering that the vote of the commissioners would be tied he duly added two more members, Bishops Bilson and Buckeridge, with the result that on 25 September the divorce was finally granted by a vote of seven to five. That Bilson’s son was thereafter created a knight, and Lancelot Andrewes, another in favour of a nullity verdict, soon became Bishop of London did not, of course, escape the notice of the cynics.
Even now, however, the sorry episode had still not run its course, for, after her eventual re-marriage on 26 December 1613, Carr’s new wife showed no trace of forgiveness towards Overbury for opposing her divorce in the first place. Worse still, she not only hated him but feared he knew too much about her murky dealings with the quack doctor, Simon Forman, ‘that fiend in human shape’ as he was described by Richard Nichol, a contemporary poet. By now, in fact, Overbury had already fallen foul of a trap laid by Northampton in April, which had left him a close prisoner in the Tower. Using his daughter’s hold on Carr and Carr’s hold upon the king, the Howards’ leader had arranged for his enemy to be offered a mission abroad while encouraging him to believe that he could count upon Carr’s protection, should he refuse. Thereafter, when Overbury did indeed reject the offer for fear of losing influence at court, his insolence was punished accordingly, leaving him mortally exposed to the further intrigues of the woman who was soon to become Countess of Somerset.
Before that title was even hers, however, Robert Carr’s bride had indeed seen off Overbury once and for all. Sending poison through a certain Richard Weston whom she had arranged to serve as Overbury’s keeper, her first attempt at murder was foiled when Weston’s design was discovered and prevented by Sir Gervase Helwys, Lieutenant of the Tower. But though Helwys suspected the main culprit he dared not accuse her and chose instead to keep the matter quiet, leaving her free to send further poisons, including arsenic and mercury introduced into tarts and jellies and a brace of partridges, some of which were sent by Carr himself, though there is evidence, mainly in the letters of Northampton who was certainly aware of his daughter’s skulduggery, that the king’s favourite had no direct knowledge of the plot. Ultimately, in any case, the lethal dose appears to have been delivered by an apothecary’s boy whose handiwork resulted in Overbury’s death the next day. And though a posthumous poem by Overbury entitled ‘The Wife’, which had been written, it seems, to discourage the marriage, would sell out five editions in less than a year, the nature of his death would remain, for the time being at least, a secret, as feasting and revelry marked the wedding and the new Countess of Somerset became the recipient of jewels worth £10,000 gifted to her by the king himself.
For the next year, indeed, Robert Carr enjoyed the high watermark of his fortunes, as James’s confidence in him continued unbounded. He was, wrote Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the king’s secretary in Ireland, ‘more absolute than ever any that I have either heard or did see myself’, while John Chamberlain observed how all matters were conducted between the king and his favourite ‘within the shrine of the breast’. ‘The Viscount Rochester at the Council table,’ reported Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, ‘showeth much temper and modesty, without seeming to press and sway anything. But afterwards the King resolveth all business with him alone, both those that pass in the Council and many others wherewith he never maketh them acquainted’. With Northampton’s death in June 1614, moreover, the duties of Lord Privy Seal and Warden of the Cinque Ports were, for the time being, entrusted to Carr who was also installed as Lord Chamberlain. He was even lucky enough, in the process, to be spared the poison chalice of the treasurership, which was passed instead to the Earl of Suffolk at a time when debt stood at £680,000 and £67,000 of the anticipated revenue for 1614 was already spent.
But Somerset lacked, it seems, the intuitive skill to handle his now increasingly complicated relationship with the king. During that summer James continued to indulge his peculiar delight in the domestic intimacies of his favourites and fussed over the countess almost as much as he did over her husband. When she fell ill after a wedding banquet in May, Chamberlain wrote that there had been ‘much care and tender respect had of her, both by her Lord and the King’. Yet James’s love was essentially possessive, and for all his gushing sentiments and lavish presents, the independence of his royal will and ego was what he had fought most passionately to establish and maintain throughout his life. Though he might happily become a slave to his own infatuation, therefore, he would never subject himself to the mercy of another’s whim, and when Somerset now became rude and exacting, taking for granted what he had so far earned by chance, his many enemies made ready to strike in the most effective – and ironic – way possible. For it was in August 1614, on a hunting visit to Sir Anthony Mildmay’s estate at Apethorpe that the king first encountered another young newcomer to the court, and by September Sir Geoffrey Fenton was observing how this same bright light, a youth named Villiers, ‘begins to be in favour with his Majesty’.