15
‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.’
Comment made by the King of England to
his Privy Council in 1617
On 5 April 1614, the king opened his second Parliament, expressing the hope that it might become a ‘Parliament of Love’. By 7 June, however, the same assembly had been dissolved in general acrimony, to be dubbed by posterity the ‘Addled Parliament’. And though James had displayed a studied moderation and respect for legality that belies his later reputation, the lack of trust and respect that dogged him was apparent throughout. ‘Kings,’ he had declared, ‘that are not tyrants or perjured, will be glad to bind themselves within the limits of law … For it is a great difference between a King’s government in a settled state and what Kings in their original powers might do …’ Yet the Addled Parliament proved, it was said, ‘more like a cockpit than a grave Council’ as MPs refused to take Holy Communion in Westminster ‘for fear of copes and wafer cakes’ and a hot-headed Puritan minority railed against morris dances and games upon the Sabbath. ‘The House of Commons,’ James complained to the Spanish ambassador, ‘is a body without a head’ where ‘nothing is heard but cries, shouts and confusion’. ‘I am surprised,’ he added, ‘that that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence.’ And such, indeed, was the disorder leading to its dissolution without the desired grant of taxation that one of the House’s members, Sir Thomas Roe, thought he had witnessed the end ‘not of this, but of all parliaments’.
Henceforward, impositions would continue to be raised without parliamentary consent, and when James called for a ‘benevolence’ or free gift from his subjects in 1614 against the advice of his Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, ripples of resistance were predictable. Though Archbishop Abbot had donated a selection of plate to the treasury and Coke himself had come forward with £200, humbler folk like Oliver St John of Marlborough, who was prosecuted in Star Chamber for his protests, were not so willing to comply. In the case of Edmund Peacham, meanwhile, the king became personally involved and ordered that the elderly Somerset rector be consigned to the Tower for daring to warn of the possibility of rebellion and his sovereign’s death within eight days like Ananias and Nabal. When, moreover, James suggested to Sir Francis Bacon, his Attorney General, that the realm’s leading judges might be consulted singly on the issue of whether Peacham had committed high treason, Chief Justice Coke again intervened to warn that ‘such particular and auricular taking of opinion’ was in breach of English common law. Even so – and in spite of Coke’s overall conclusion that Peacham’s outbursts, though scandalous, were not treasonable, since he had not impugned the king’s title – a treason verdict was indeed delivered in Taunton by King’s Serjeant Montagu and Chief Baron Tanfield of the Exchequer Court. In the event, only the foul air of the local jail, which quickly killed him, prevented the execution of Peacham’s sentence.
Rober Carr, meanwhile, had become increasingly prone to what the king himself described in a letter as ‘streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride, and a settled kind of induced obstinacy’. The same letter, addressed to the favourite personally in 1615, also details how he had raised complaints with his royal master at unseasonable hours, as if on purpose to vex him, and how the court had become increasingly conscious of their angry exchanges and the king’s sadness thereafter. Why, James complained, was Carr now refusing to sleep in the royal bedchamber and continuing to trouble him with so many idle and unfounded concerns? ‘Do not all courtesies and places come through your office as Chamberlain, and rewards through your father-in-law as Treasurer? Do not you two as it were hedge in all the court with a manner of necessity to depend upon you?’ the letter continued. And the same tone of slighted affection and sincere sorrow was to climax in a profession that the king was writing ‘from the infinite grief of a deeply wounded heart’ that he can bear no longer.
Amid such utterances, however, there also lurked more ominous sentences of the deepest significance for Carr’s future prospects. ‘For the easing of my inward and consuming grief,’ James appealed, ‘all I crave is, that in all the words and actions of your life you make it appear that you never think to hold me but out of love, and not one hair by force.’ As the letter unfolds, furthermore, there are threats as well as entreaties. ‘I told you twice or thrice you might lead me by the heart and not by the nose’, the favourite is reminded, and ‘if ever I find you think to retain me by one sparkle of fear, all the violence of my love will in that moment be changed into as violent a hatred’. ‘God is my judge,’ the message concludes, ‘my love hath been infinite towards you, and only the strength of my affection towards you hath made me to bear these things and bridle my passion … Let me never apprehend that you disdain my person and undervalue my qualities; and let it never appear that your former affection is cold towards me. Hold me thus by the heart, and you may build upon my favour as upon a rock.’
Arguably, no words of James capture more aptly so many essential features of his personality: the potency of his passions, the underlying insecurity that made them such a political liability, and his residing need for both unreserved affection and utter control, which inclined him so often to treat criticism as disloyalty, and equate opposition with enmity. Such traits could both endear and enrage, and, as Robert Carr and George Villiers would now find, both sweep to prominence and wash away in the same flood tide. For the latter’s emergence was ‘so quick’, as Clarendon later observed, ‘that it seemed rather a flight than a growth’. By April 1615, George Abbot and other enemies of Carr, knowing the king’s curious rule of seeking the queen’s approval for his favourites, were soliciting her for Villiers’ appointment as gentleman of the bedchamber. And though she temporised, noting with commendable foresight that the young cupbearer would soon prove a plague to ‘you that labour for him’, she nevertheless proved willing on St George’s Day 1615 to visit the king’s bedchamber with the most fateful of consequences. Telling James that she had a new candidate for the honour of knighthood worthy of St George himself, she then asked Prince Charles to hand her his father’s sword unsheathed, and proceeded to compensate for the king’s well attested fear of naked steel by guiding his hand as the blade was duly applied to Villiers’ shoulders.
For some time already, the new gentleman of the bedchamber had been in constant attendance upon James as royal cup-bearer and had shown, on one occasion at least, a feistiness that equalled his grace and good lucks. For when one of Somerset’s followers had previously spilt a bowl of soup onto his magnificent white suit, he had been stung to anger and struck the man in the king’s presence: an offence which could have led in theory to the loss of his right hand. But James refused to take the matter further and was soon idolising his new favourite in the all too familiar fashion. In the same year of his knighthood, indeed, the young man who had started life as the younger son of a Leicestershire squire also became Viscount Villiers, and in 1617, Earl of Buckingham, while 1618 witnessed his promotion to marquis and appointment as Lord High Admiral. Five years later the king bestowed his highest accolade of all by creating him the only duke of non-royal blood in the kingdom.
‘The Duke,’ wrote Clarendon many years later, ‘was indeed a very extraordinary person; and never any man, in any age, nor, I believe in any country or nation rose, in so short a time, to so much greatness of honour, fame and fortune, upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and gracefulness of his person.’ The Puritan memoirist, Lucy Hutchinson, however, expressed an altogether earthier verdict on the same theme when she reflected how ‘a knight’s fourth son’ had been raised ‘to that pitch of glory … upon no merit but that of his beauty and his prostitution’. What Hutchinson meant by this may well be imagined, and the nature of the king’s sexuality has, of course, been a residing source of speculation across the centuries. Writing in 1617, the politician John Oglander observed how he ‘never yet saw any fond husband make so much or so great dalliance over his beautiful spouse as I have seen King James over his favourites, especially the Duke of Buckingham’. The MP Edward Peyton, moreover, was another who noted how ‘the king sold his affections to Sir George Villiers, whom he would tumble and kiss as a mistress’. Nicknaming Villiers ‘Steenie’ after St Stephen who was said to possess the ‘face of an angel’, James would also end a now famous letter of 1623 by affirming their relationship in the most striking manner. ‘God bless you, my sweet child and wife,’ the king declared, ‘and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear father and husband.’
As the king’s ‘great dalliance’ proceeded, moreover, Villiers reciprocated in kind. In reply to James, he confessed how ‘I naturally so love your person, and adore all your other parts, which are more than ever one man had’. ‘I desire only to live in the world for your sake,’ he continued, and ‘I will live and die a lover of you’. Writing many years later, Villiers also pondered if the king loved him now ‘better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. Whether the incident at Farnham was, of course, an isolated incident or merely part of a short-lived phase in the relationship, as some commentators have suggested, can never be known for sure. James was, after all, in vigorous middle life at the age of 48 when the young Villiers was first presented to him, though his health would deteriorate steadily beyond the age of 50. In similar fashion, it has sometimes been argued that the ardent friendship between Villiers and Prince Charles might have been rendered impossible by any sexual relationship between the favourite and the prince’s father. But Charles would always show a rare capacity for blinding himself to a situation he did not wish to face, and the discovery during restoration work at Apethorpe Hall in 2004–08 of a secret passage linking Villiers’ bedchamber with the king’s state apartment appears particularly compelling.
Nevertheless, during the earliest days of Villiers’ ascent James still seemed anxious to reassure his other favourite. Indeed, he was at pains to guarantee that Robert Carr’s position was in no way threatened by the new arrival, even hoping to engineer the rise of the newcomer under the earl’s own mantle and protection, so that they could all three be happy and harmonious together. Sir Humphrey May, renowned for his tact, was therefore dispatched to Carr to convey that Villiers would be calling to offer his services, and according to Sir Anthony Weldon, Villiers presented himself precisely as required. ‘My Lord,’ Carr was told, ‘I desire to be your servant, and your creature, and shall desire to take my Court preferment under your favour, and your Lordship shall find me as faithful a servant unto you as ever did serve you.’ But the olive branch was brusquely rejected, it seems, as Carr gave vent to the wrath that was already undermining his status in the king’s affection. ‘I will have none of your service, and you shall have none of my favour,’ he is reported to have raged. ‘I will, if I can, break your neck, and of that be confident.’
These, however, were the rantings of a thoroughly beleaguered man. In November 1614, he had initially thwarted Villiers’ appointment as a gentleman of the bedchamber by installing a bastard kinsman of his own. Yet by the end of that month, it was known that the king was once again ignoring the parlous state of his treasury by donating £1,500 towards the expenses of a Christmas masque, ‘the principal motive whereof is thought to be gracing of young Villiers and to bring him on the stage’. As his enemies circled, moreover, Carr saw fit in July 1615 to inquire from Sir Robert Cotton whether a pardon might be issued under the Great Seal of England exonerating him from any and all offences he had committed in the past. In the meantime, while Sir Henry Yelverton, the Solicitor-General, and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere refused to sign the necessary documents, the pardon was actually supported during a heated debate in the Privy Council by none other than the king himself. ‘And so, my Lord Chancellor,’ James commanded, ‘seal the pardon immediately, for that is my will.’
But in spite of a royal tantrum accompanied by a stormy exit from the council chamber and a subsequent flight to the country in search of peace of mind, the pardon was never sealed, as Ellesmere continued to demur. And as the king, in Gondomar’s view, listened to further tales against him and courtiers openly cut him, Carr grew increasingly ripe for the final blow, which was duly delivered in September 1615 when further revelations about the death of Sir Thomas Overbury finally issued from a dying Englishman in Brussels, named William Reeve. Smitten by conscience, Reeve confessed to servants of William Trumbull, James’s ambassador, that as a former apprentice to the London apothecary William de Lowbell, he had been charged to administer to Overbury an enema contaminated by a mercury sublimate, and that he had been paid a sum of £20 for the murder by Carr’s own wife, the Countess of Somerset.
When Sir Ralph Winwood, no friend of the pro-Spanish Howards, was subsequently informed and the countess was further implicated by the suspicions of Sir Gervase Helwys, the ensuing scandal threatened to expose in one fell swoop the full scale of the moral depravity and corruption for which the royal court had long become a byword. Under such circumstances, the king made before his council, we are told, ‘a great protestation before God of his desire to see justice done, and that neither his favourite, nor his son himself, nor anything else in the world should hinder him’. Appointing commissioners to determine ‘whether my Lord of Somerset and my Lady were procurers of Overbury’s death, or that this imputation hath been by some practised to cast an aspersion upon them’, James issued instructions ‘to use all lawful courses that the foulness of this fault be sounded to the depth, that for the discharge of our duty both to God and man, the innocent may be cleared, and the nocent may severely be punished’. But in doing so he plainly appreciated that any attempt at concealment carried far more danger still than thorough inquiry, as he would indeed tell Somerset later. If, he informed his desperate favourite, ‘I should have stopped the course of justice against you in this case of Overbury, who was committed to the Tower and kept there a close prisoner by my commandment, and could not have been so murdered if he had not been kept close, I might have been thought to be the author of that murder and so be made odious to all posterity’.
Even so, James’s conduct as the trial proceeded, notwithstanding his intense interest and constant interference, was generally creditable. The countess confessed her crime beforehand and some time after October 1615 she and her husband were arrested. And though Carr’s direct responsibility for the murder remains uncertain, his destruction of Northampton’s many letters to him and attempts to falsify the dates of Overbury’s correspondence did little for his credibility. Seizing other letters in the possession of a certain Mrs Turner, the depraved woman from whom the countess had obtained charms and poisons, he even seems to have made a vain resort ultimately to blackmail the king himself. ‘It is clear,’ James wrote, ‘that he would threaten me with laying an aspersion upon me of being in some sort accessory to his crime.’ To his credit, however, James stood firm against Carr’s ‘scribbling and railing’, informing him how he would never ‘suffer a murder (if it be so) to be suppressed and plastered over’ nor spare, ‘I vow to God, one grain of vigour against the conspirators’.
At 9 a.m. on 24 May 1616, therefore, the Countess of Somerset was duly conveyed to Westminster Hall to face trial for murder, the headsman’s axe – its blade turned away – preceding her as she entered. Though she had recently given birth to a daughter Anne and now stood – ‘in black Tammel, a Cypress Chaperon, a cobweb lawn ruff and cuffs’ – with downcast, gently weeping eyes, Sir Edward Coke would soon be defaming her as a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a felon, a devil and a murderer: the very incarnation, no less, than the seven deadly sins. Spectators, moreover, had paid dearly to behold the Lord Chief Justice at his trade. ‘I know a lawyer’, wrote John Chamberlain, ‘who had agreed to give £10 for himself and his wife for two days’, while another buyer ‘gave £50 for a corner that could hardly contain a dozen’. For Coke’s reputation preceded him: so powerfully indeed that when the elderly judge requested Somerset’s presence in London, the accused vowed he would not go and, in doing so, called upon the king’s support. But while James, in spite of all that had passed between them, still gushed sentiment for his fallen favourite and feared that he might ‘never see his face more’, the response was nevertheless unfaltering: ‘Nay, man, if Coke sends for me, I must go.’
Meanwhile, in spite of the Lord Chief Justice’s imprecations and a plea of guilty by Somerset’s wife, which the countess acknowledged could not ‘extenuate my fault’, there was never any doubt that Lord Ellesmere’s subsequent sentence of death against her would be overturned by the king’s prerogative of mercy. One Italian observer, Eduardo Pallavicino, had been wholly overcome by the countess’s nobility, grace and modesty, leaving him in no doubt that she had been led into crime by her husband. In Chamberlain’s view, however, the accused had won pity both by her shows of tears and otherwise sober demeanour, ‘which in my opinion was more curious and confident than was fit for a lady in such distress’. For her sins, moreover, she was spared the anguish of lengthy trial, since the entire process was over within no more than two hours. She had come, seen, sobbed and conquered, it seems – the beneficiary of the best possible legal solution from the king’s own point of view: both clear-cut and bloodless, since confession and contrition were considered powerful mitigators of guilt, and proferring, under these most awkward circumstances, the best available hope of minimising public outrage.
Carr, for his part, had also been urged by the king to ‘honour God and me’ by confessing his guilt, after which the royal prerogative might likewise be employed to guarantee a pardon. In contrast to his wife, however, the embattled earl would face a trial at Westminster Hall on 25 May lasting from nine in the morning until ten at night, and one that did not run nearly so smoothly from his royal master’s perspective. Wearing ‘a plain black satin suit laid with satin laces in a seam’ and ‘a gown of uncut velvet’, Carr obstinately refused, in fact, to confess his guilt. ‘I am confident in mine own cause,’ he declared, ‘and am come hither to defend it.’ On the other hand, his prosecutor, the Attorney General, Sir Francis Bacon, was unable and even a little unwilling, it seemed, to press home any truly convincing case that the accused had been a knowing accomplice to his wife. ‘For the poisonment’, he declared, ‘I am sorry it should be heard of in our kingdom’, since such a crime was not nostri generis but ‘an Italian comfit for the Court of Rome’.
Defending himself, as Bacon observed, both ‘modestly and wittily’, Carr gave James, in fact, one of the most miserable days of his life as he watched the landing stage at Whitehall eagerly for any boat that might bring him news of the outcome. No courtier, it was said, had ever seen him ‘so extreme sad and discontented’ and his efforts to distract himself by discussing with Gondomar possible terms for a marriage treaty had proved wholly ineffective. That night, indeed, he would neither dine nor sup until he had learnt the result he most desired: a unanimous vote of guilty by the Lords that vindicated the king’s justice and left him conveniently unentangled in the whole sorry episode. Hereafter, he could not only intervene once more to spare the fallen favourite’s life but duly ensure that that life, as well as the life of the convicted countess, would be wholly worth living. For, even as the Somersets were promptly conveyed to the Tower under sentence of death, their long-term comfort and well-being was already assured.
In all, the couple would remain in the Tower for some six years, during which time, it seems, a ‘great falling out’ occurred between them, which continued for the rest of their days, leaving them, we are told, ‘though in one house as strangers one to another’. The revulsion that Carr now felt towards the convicted murderess who had robbed him of his friend eventually became overwhelming, it seems, as the countess exploited her comparative liberty within the Tower’s walls to conduct an affair with the so-called ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland. But she would live a further sixteen years before finally meeting what appears to have been, if Arthur Wilson is to be believed, a particularly unwholesome end. ‘Her death,’ wrote Wilson, ‘was infamous … for that part of her body which had been the receptacle of her sin, grown rotten (though she never had but one child), the ligaments failing, it fell down and was cut away in flakes, with a most nauseous and putrid savour, which to augment, she would role herself in her own ordure in her bed [and] took delight in it.’
Before that time, however, both she and her husband had nevertheless been allowed to retire to Lord Knollys’s house at Rotherfield Grays in Oxfordshire, a secluded country residence, on condition that they would confine their movements to within 3 miles of it. Still unable to cast off his sentimental attachment to his former favourite, the king had also ignored Carr’s conviction and allowed him to remain a member of the Order of the Garter. The fallen favourite had saved his life in the first place with nothing more than a letter to his royal master requesting that he be hanged rather than beheaded and that his daughter might be maintained out of the income from his forfeited lands. And the king’s goodwill did not end here, for on 7 October 1624, a little over five months before his death, a formal pardon was produced under the Great Seal, which allowed Carr to retain an income of £4,000 per annum until his own death in 1645.
In return, James would incur untold damage, both to his own reputation and that of his court, notwithstanding Archbishop Abbot’s dutiful refrain that the king’s life was ‘so immaculate and unspotted from the world … that even malice itself could never find true blemish in it’. James’s own relief that the emotional turmoil of Carr’s downfall had been negotiated without major political disaster was palpable. But rumours of undisclosed facts persisted and moralists continued to complain that the king had appeared to condone such wickedness among those close to him. Indeed, the impression which Carr’s rise had created among the country gentry and the nobility who did not frequent the court was as nothing compared with that created by the manner of his fall. Nor, it seems, were such misgivings confined to the more sober elements of Jacobean society, for John Chamberlain relates how Queen Anne and the Countess of Derby were mistaken, while driving in a coach, for the Countess of Somerset and her mother, and subjected to fierce abuse by a mob of Londoners.
As contempt and disillusionment bore in upon James, moreover, the effects upon his health and personality became increasingly marked. Arthritis, combined with gout, became chronic during the winter months from 1616 onwards and he found himself plagued, too, by abdominal colic, sleeplessness, frequent diarrhoea and, after a serious attack of jaundice in 1619, acute kidney pain resulting from nephritis – all of which depressed his spirits and rendered him either fractious or morose. ‘He is of exquisite sensitiveness,’ wrote Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, his physician, ‘and most impatient of pain; and while it tortures him with violent movements, his mind is tossed as well, thus augmenting the evil.’ Passing urine ‘red like Alicante wine’ and refusing access to individuals like Sir Ralph Winwood, in order to avoid government business, the king turned increasingly to every available expedient to ease his anguish and relieve his symptoms. ‘He demands relief from pain,’ wrote de Mayerne, ‘without considering the causes of his illness.’
In such circumstances, therefore, it was hardly surprising that James’s dependence upon George Villiers, Earl, Marquis and later Duke of Buckingham, should now have increased to unprecedented levels. ‘The king,’ it was said, ‘is not well without him, his company is his solace.’ And Buckingham would indeed provide a powerful antidote for the misery and humiliation of Robert Carr’s long-drawn-out ruin: a private haven of beauty, grace, sympathy and gaiety, in which the king could forget both his own ailments and the censure of the outside world. Tall, comely and handsome, with a fine forehead, clear blue eyes, dark chestnut hair and a pointed beard of golden brown, as well as long, slender legs which made him renowned for his elegance as a dancer, Buckingham exhibited an ideal combination of masculine strength and female delicacy to make him irresistible to the king. ‘I saw everything in him full of delicacy and handsome features,’ wrote Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the contemporary antiquarian, ‘yea, his hands and face seemed to me especially effeminate and curious,’ while another observer noted how ‘from the nails of his fingers, nay from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him’. Yet he was manly in his tastes, excelling in sports and nurturing a roving eye for the opposite sex, for, as Arthur Wilson put it, ‘if his eye cull’d a wanton beauty, he had his setter that could appoint a meeting’.
Nor, it seems, was Buckingham prone to the naivety or presumption that had finally put paid to his predecessor. On the contrary, the new favourite was altogether more formidable, because more able, than the old. ‘No one dances better,’ wrote Arthur Wilson, ‘no man runs or jumps higher.’ ‘Indeed,’ continued Wilson, ‘he jumped higher than ever Englishman did in so short a time, from a private gentleman to a dukedom.’ And the secret of this giddy ascent was his expert reading of the king’s own needs and expectations. Pawed, petted, pampered and puppied, Buckingham pleased his royal master by diligent attendance at divine service and when James decided to produce a meditation on the Gospel of St Matthew, the favourite was quick to ask that he might act as amanuensis. ‘How can I but write merrily when he is so I love best and beyond the world,’ he told James in response to a request for merry letters, and after a gift from the king, his response was even more effusive. ‘I am now,’ he wrote, ‘going to give my Redeemer thanks for my maker.’ No hyperbole, indeed, was too much for Buckingham’s pride or beyond his master’s satisfaction: so much so that he was also capable of cultivating a witty, playful impudence that both enhanced and emphasised his hold upon the king. ‘And so I kiss your dirty hands,’ he wrote later.
But Buckingham was also prepared to be instructed. When, for example, James proffered a New Year’s gift in 1619, dedicating The Meditations upon the Lord’s Prayer to him, it was accompanied by a message declaring how ‘I dayly take care to better your understanding to enable you the more for my service’. And it had not been long either before Queen Anne, always so hostile to Carr, was duly charmed by the handsome courtier’s winning ways. Referring to him in several letters as ‘my kind dog’, she thanked him on one occasion for ‘lugging the sow’s ear’ and urged him to remain ‘always true’ to her husband, in response to which Buckingham confirmed that in obedience to her desire, he had pulled the king’s ear ‘until it was as long as any sow’s’.
And with the good offices of the royal family assured, Buckingham duly sought to employ his own relatives to bolster his position, fully aware, it seems, that Robert Carr’s failure to do so had left him cruelly isolated when the moment of crisis arrived. Buckingham’s brother John, for example, notwithstanding temporary bouts of insanity, was duly joined in marriage to the daughter of Sir Edward Coke and created Viscount Purbeck, while ‘Kit’, his other brother, who was widely regarded as little more than an amiable fool, would find himself created Earl of Anglesey in 1623. The favourite’s sister Susan, meanwhile, was married to Sir William Fielding, who subsequently became Earl of Denbigh and the father of a daughter who was in her turn betrothed at the age of seven to the Marquis of Hamilton. Finally, as if to seal the happy nexus, Anne Brett, a cousin of the Villiers family, was married to Lionel Cranfield, the future Lord Treasurer and Earl of Middlesex.
But if Buckingham’s grasping tribe of kinfolk caused ill-concealed murmurs in the country at large, it was the influence of his mother – an overweening and predatory old termagant - that evoked the most unremitting outrage. Descended from an impoverished branch of a great medieval family, she had been born Mary Beaumont and served as a waiting-gentlewoman to her cousin, Lady Beaumont of Coleorton, before attracting an offer of marriage from Sir George Villiers, a widowed Leicestershire knight of no exceptional means. Even after her husband’s death, moreover, subsequent marriages, first to Sir Thomas Rayner and then Sir William Compton, an alcoholic nonentity, brought her little advantage. Yet if her choice in husbands belied her true ambition, the rise of her son was squeezed for every opportunity. Parading her ‘numerous and beautiful kindred’ before a string of wealthy husbands, she exploited what amounted to a vicious system of blackmail, in which the king frequently connived. It was she, it seems, who had set her mind upon Frances Coke as a bride for John Villiers in the spring of 1616, and it was her pressure for a generous marriage portion that ultimately sealed the Lord Chief Justice’s dismissal for initially resisting the match. Such, indeed, was her reputation that even Buckingham himself discouraged her presence at court upon her elevation to the rank of countess in 1618.
Buckingham’s own marriage in 1620, meanwhile, was arguably the final step in securing his status in English society. A Florentine observer living in England at the time considered it ‘very dangerous for such a powerful courtier to marry at all’, but the choice of Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the Earl of Rutland, was an impeccable one, irrespective of the Catholicism of her family, and the union proved fruitful on all counts. Reputedly the richest heiress in England, her great wealth would provide Buckingham with precisely the independence he required, while her simplicity and devotion guaranteed that she would never become the kind of political liability that had finally undone Robert Carr. Indeed, her gentleness and womanly tenderness, devotion and purity of life, became conspicuous amid the almost universal corruption and immorality of the Court. ‘There was never woman loved man as I do you,’ she wrote her husband during one of his absences, and she doted equally tenderly upon the son and daughter that the marriage eventually produced.
But it was not only his choice of bride that distinguished the Duke of Buckingham so markedly from his predecessor. Above all, unlike Robert Carr, he wanted to enjoy the exercise of real political power and to employ it, wherever possible, in his royal master’s interests. The former he certainly achieved on an extraordinary scale until he became, in the words of the Earl of Clarendon, ‘the man by whom all things do and must pass’ and ‘… entirely disposed of the wealth of the three kingdoms’. However, Clarendon’s further claim that, in dispensing of patronage, Buckingham was guided ‘more by the rules of appetite than of judgement …’ remains harsh. For, while no promotion was ever granted without financial sweeteners, the king’s favourite was neither oblivious to the broader interest nor devoid of judgement in his choice of men. ‘I never saw a young courtier,’ James told Parliament in 1624, ‘that was so careful for my profit without any respect as Buckingham was.’
Nowhere was this plainer, moreover, than in the appointment in 1614 of Lionel Cranfield as head of a commission to examine government expenditure in an effort to free the king from his perpetual bondage to debt. A thrusting man of business who had begun as a mere city apprentice before winning rapid success as a cloth merchant and member of the Mercers’ Company, Cranfield had become a farmer of various royal revenues and eventually Surveyor General of the Customs in 1613. ‘The first acquaintance I had with him,’ James later recalled, ‘was by the Lord of Northampton, who often brought him unto me as a private man before he was so much as my servant.’ But it was Buckingham who ‘fell in liking with him and brought him into my service’ and Buckingham who ‘backed him against great personages’ and ‘laid the ground and bare the envy’. One result was stringent savings: in the royal household, in the exchequer, in the wardrobe, in the navy, and in Ireland. The other was a mortal struggle between Buckingham and his vengeful Howard enemies who could neither forget his upstart origins nor forget how his rise had coincided with Robert Carr’s disastrous ruin.
The corrupt practices of the treasury under the Earl of Suffolk’s administration were, of course, a byword, and all, with the possible exception of the king himself, acknowledged that in order to gain payment for a bill or settle overdue expenses, a hard bargain must first be driven with Sir John Bingham, the sub-treasurer, and indeed Lady Suffolk. Only when these two expressed their satisfaction would the earl himself approve, and only when the whole unholy trio had been duly ripped from influence, therefore, was the king’s financial predicament likely to amend. Possessing no administrative expertise, Suffolk’s personal extravagance had led him to spend some £200,000 on his Audley End estate, and he had displayed the same insouciant disregard for economy in government. So now, as Buckingham’s attitude switched from careless tolerance to hostility and stories of Lady Suffolk’s transactions reached the ears of the king in June, the whole rotten tree of Howard influence, with all its branches, became ripe for cutting.
Within the month, in fact, Lady Katherine had been ordered from the capital, and by the end of July her husband’s resignation was also demanded by the king. And though it would require a further eighteen months to complete the Star Chamber inquiry which culminated in imprisonment for both and a crippling fine of £30,000, the rout was comprehensive. Not without good reason, Sir Francis Bacon compared the countess to a woman who kept shop while her creature Sir John Bingley cried ‘What d’ye lack?’ And accordingly the Attorney General left no worm a hiding place. The Suffolks’ two sons lost their court appointments and Lord Wallingford, as a son-in-law, his office as Master of the Wards. Sir Thomas Lake, meanwhile, who as Secretary of State had so far been able to fend off the more dangerous attacks upon his Howard cronies, now found himself tainted and doomed to resignation by a vicious and indefensible accusation of incest launched against the Countess of Exeter by his wife. The king himself, indeed, had exposed the perjury of a maid involved in the case by taking her to the room at Wimbledon and demonstrating that the arras, behind which she falsely claimed to have heard a compromising conversation, fell far short of the floor.
So it was, then, that by November 1619 a popular jest came to be in general circulation throughout the capital. For now, it was said, the entire Howard faction were at liberty to set up a Privy Council of their own within the Tower, with Suffolk as treasurer, Carr as chamberlain, Lake as secretary, Lord Wallingford as Master of the Wards, and the hapless Lord Howard Walden, who had also been sucked into the vortex, as Captain of Pensioners. Ultimately, indeed, only the senile Earl of Nottingham was left his freedom, though he too had been forced into resignation by the threat of an inquiry into Admiralty and Dockyard accounts. Perhaps because of his reputation as commander of the ships that defeated the Spanish Armada, he had been allowed to retire unmolested, though only to be replaced in February 1619 by Buckingham himself.
Now, however, there would be no new faction at the heart of government, since Buckingham, unsurprisingly, desired no near rivals. For replacements, he sought only talented and industrious servants who would neither seek to fashion policy nor aspire to control patronage. As secretaries, Sir Robert Naunton and George Calvert were ideal prototypes, since the king himself preferred ‘conformable men with but ordinary parts’, while Cranfield would be left to go about his business unimpeded, shaving Admiralty costs from £57,700 to £30,000, and reducing costs for the king’s velvets, silks, saddle costs and other items from £28,000 to £20,000. For the time being, then, the wings of the great nobility, notwithstanding the wealth and territorial independence that had given them a certain independence from the Crown, were safely clipped – leaving only Buckingham and the ailing king himself to steer the ship of state.