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‘All good sentiments are clearly dead in the king. He is too blinded in disordered self-love and in his wish for quiet and pleasure, too agitated by constant mistrust of everyone, tyrannised over by perpetual fear of his life, tenacious of his authority as against the Parliament and jealous of his son’s obedience, all accidents and causes of his almost desperate infirmity of mind.’
From a report made by Alvise Vallaresso, Venetian ambassador to England, 1622–24
The last official portrait of Scotland’s King of England dates to 1621. Painted by Daniel Mytens the Elder, it depicts him bare-headed and seated in a posture of limp repose, with a plumed hat on the table beside him, but no other symbol of regality beyond the Garter robes he wears and a Tudor rose woven into the tapestry behind his chair. His hands droop wearily over the arm of his chair. His tired eyes lie far back in their sockets beneath heavy lids. His lips are pursed in indifference and resignation. It is the face, in fact, of a deeply disillusioned man who has lost his vigour and abandoned all real desire to prevail against adversity. Beati pacifici – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ – is there above the king’s head, but hardly noticeable and only then, it seems, as a dutiful afterthought from an artist whose main intent was to capture an eloquent image of worn-out authority. Fit only to be cossetted by the ladies of the Villiers family and in particular Buckingham’s mother, who according to Archbishop Mathew now ‘fulfilled a double function as a middle-aged gossip and as a nurse’, James, it seems, was already slipping into careworn lethargy, born of ill-health, the relentless passage of time and a world that had consistently refused to conform to his more noble aspirations.
There were, it is true, bright spots ahead for him, not the least of which was the much anticipated return of his beloved son. Towards the end of September, the prince and Buckingham embarked for England, sailing from the north-west coast of Spain and landing at Portsmouth on 5 October to a rapturous reception as bonfires blazed all along the Portsmouth road and hundreds of hogsheads of wine were emptied to fuel the ardour. At Cambridge, church bells rang out for two solid days, while at Blackheath the people were said to have been ‘so mad with excess of joy that if they met with any cart laden with wood they would take out the horses and set cart and all on fire’. Not far from Tyburn, meanwhile, Prince Charles took time to reprieve a group of felons, and upon the heroes’ arrival at Royston, the king clambered downstairs, in spite of crippling gout, to fall upon their necks in heartfelt thanks and affection. For some days, moreover, the high spirits continued. ‘The prince and my lord of Buckingham,’ wrote Sir Edward Conway, ‘spend most of their hours with his Majesty, with the same freedom, liberty and kindness as they were wont.’
But the bonfires and bells in the country at large were at least partially deceptive, since they were not so much expressions of joy at the prince’s safe return as of relief that he had returned both as a Protestant and without a Catholic bride in tow. And even as the Villiers ladies, whom the king had hastily summoned, were being regaled with rousing tales of romance and derring-do, an anthem from the 114th Psalm was being solemnly sung at St Paul’s, which could not have reflected more eloquently the feelings of most Englishmen now that the ‘house of Jacob’, just like Israel before it, had been delivered from ‘a people of strange language’. Even more perplexingly, perhaps, both the prince and his companion had now returned from Spain thoroughly disenchanted with the marriage and alliance they had hitherto striven so strenuously to forge. In particular, Buckingham’s vanity seems to have played a crucial part in this curious transformation, for he had been created a duke by his adoring master to place him on an equal footing with the Spanish grandees confronting him, only to find that his hosts would neither defer to his affectations nor tolerate his sensitivity. In bridling at Spanish ‘trickery and deceit’, he was told directly by Olivares that negotiations would have been better left to a professional like the Earl of Bristol. And when Buckingham incurred displeasure by remaining hatted in Prince Charles’s presence, and Charles’s Protestant attendants were ejected from Madrid after Sir Edmund Verney had struck a priest, any grains of enthusiasm for a lasting treaty were swiftly dissipated.
Henceforth, indeed, nothing would satisfy Buckingham’s wounded ego other than war itself. And war, of course, offered the added attraction of maintaining the gust of popularity he had so surprisingly experienced upon his return. To that end, therefore, the king would have to be either deceived or coerced: Parliament must be called at once and all doves on the council duly silenced or ruined. With the aid of the prince and the reliable offices of the Villiers ladies, moreover, James was to be effectively debarred from contact with any Spanish representative, and as Charles assumed more and more influence with the declining energy of his father, the last condition for the plan’s success became a formality. For, while James had by no means entirely lost his native shrewdness and remained as averse to war as ever, he was unable to thwart the ongoing pressure for a postponement of the planned proxy marriage until an understanding had been reached with Spain concerning restitution of the Palatinate. Buckingham was now no longer the ‘humble slave and dog’ of former times, and travel had plainly broadened not only the princes’s mind but his shoulders, too. ‘The Prince,’ wrote one courtier indeed, ‘is now entering into command of affairs by reason of the King’s absence and sickness, and all men address themselves unto him’. Accordingly, in January 1624 he felt sufficiently confident to inform his father categorically that he would not hear of either friendship or alliance with Spain.
And while the momentum of the newly resurgent war party gathered pace, a beleaguered and befuddled king duly wrecked his long-held dreams of peace by wearily insisting upon Spanish action in the Palatinate that could never be forthcoming, and by summoning a Parliament that was bent on conflict on all fronts. Telling his son that ‘he would live to have his bellyful of Parliaments’, James was now a largely broken reed, though when Buckingham eventually determined to organise the impeachment of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, for supporting the king’s peace policy, the failing ruler was still capable of exercising a testy prescience. ‘By God, Steenie,’ came his retort, ‘you are a fool and will shortly repent this folly and will find that in this fit of popularity you are making a rod with which you will be scourged yourself.’ But, as so often, the king’s resolve did not match his wisdom, and Cranfield would nevertheless fall to charges of financial corruption and find himself imprisoned in the Tower by the very Parliament which duly assembled on 19 February 1624.
Stricken, it seems, by a brooding conviction that those closest to him had, in effect, deserted him, James approached the session with minimal energy, mainly occupying himself beforehand with inconsequential matters like the importation of some Spanish asses from the Netherlands, ‘making great estimation of those asses, since he finds himself so well served with the mules to his litter’. And as he engaged in any available displacement activity to avoid the looming realities surrounding him, he descended further into self-pity and listlessness. When he should have acted, he chose instead to delay or demur, and where he might have led he merely lamented. ‘The king,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘seems practically lost … He now protests, now weeps but finally gives in.’ And Tillières’ observations were even more striking, as he described how James was descending ‘deeper and deeper into folly every day, sometimes swearing and calling upon God, heaven and the angels, at other times weeping, then laughing, and finally pretending illness in order to play upon the pity of those who urge him to generous actions and to show them that sickness renders him incapable of deciding anything, demanding only repose and, indeed, the tomb’.
Under such circumstances, therefore, James’s opening speech to the last Parliament of his reign proved uncharacteristically faint-hearted and defensive. Casting himself upon the compassion of his audience, he pleaded that he had worked consistently to preserve his people’s love and was now to seek their advice on the very matter that he had hitherto barred from all discussion so tenaciously: the issue, namely, of war or peace. ‘Never soldiers marching the deserts and dry sands of Arabia,’ he claimed, ‘… could thirst more in hot weather for drink than I do now for a happy ending of this our meeting.’ And so, it seems, the doors were suddenly to be opened wide to previously forbidden territory. ‘The proper use of a parliament,’ James continued, ‘is … to confer with the king, as governor of the kingdom, and to give their advice in matters of greatest importance concerning the state and defence of the king, with the church and kingdom …’ ‘Consider of these,’ came the king’s remarkable concluding appeal, ‘and upon all give me your advice … you that are the representative of this my kingdom’ and ‘my glasses to show me the hearts of my people.’
Still wishing in the first instance to stage a final rearguard defence of his peace policy by using Parliament’s bellicosity to lever Spain into action over the Palatinate, the king’s tired rhetoric was nevertheless outshone by Buckingham’s, who now personified the nation’s war fever and experienced little difficulty in swinging the House of Commons to his cause. When, moreover, Parliament did indeed call for an end to the marriage treaties with Spain and promised assistance in the event of war, the king reacted petulantly, retreating to Theobalds and refusing to see either Buckingham or Charles who, he claimed, had misrepresented his intentions. Thereafter, he sent secret instructions to his councillors in the Commons, intercepted a dispatch on its way to Spain to announce the ending of the marriage treaty and bemoaned the impeachment of Cranfield, which he proved powerless to prevent. And it was no small irony either that while three subsidies amounting to more than £400,000 were willingly delivered – ‘the greatest aid which was ever granted in Parliament to be levied in so short a time’ – the money was only proffered for a cause that ran directly counter to the king’s wishes. The marriage treaties were dissolved and peace teetered in the balance. Nor, indeed, was any money to be disbursed on any authority other than that of a council of war nominated by the House of Commons.
In the meantime, Buckingham and Charles consolidated their niche as popular heroes, with all that had gone wrong in Madrid duly laid upon the Earl of Bristol’s buckling shoulders. Throughout the spring and summer of 1624 they beavered at the task of forging a grand alliance against Spain and made extravagant commitments without the funds to enact them. £360,000 was promised to the King of Denmark and a further £240,000 to pay for the conscription of an English army of 12,000 men to fight under the notorious German mercenary Ernst von Mansfeld. Above all, however, Charles and Buckingham pursued agreement with France and in particular marriage to the French princess Henrietta Maria – a policy which caused additional embarrassment for James, since in spite of his promises to Parliament that no future marriage treaty would entail concessions to English Catholics, the French now proceeded to demand precisely that. For three days during September, in fact, the king resisted the pressure of his favourite who had made a confidant of the French ambassador, the Marquis d’Effiat. But his capitulation followed, and while the resulting treaty was presented innocuously enough to his subjects, James privately accepted the French formula and, in a letter, promised to fulfil it. The royal signature which was appended to the treaty with a stamp, since the king’s arthritic fingers could no longer move a pen, effectively purchased nothing, for while France had entered the Thirty Years’ War in resistance to Habsburg power, their interest did not extend to the restitution of the Palatinate to its rightful ruler. In consequence, England found itself at last at war, but for a cause that the king had never espoused and without prospect of achieving the only specific foreign policy objective that had encouraged him to engage in war talk initially.
As the reign drew to its end, however, at least no military action was underway, since the remnants of the English volunteer force in the Palatinate had by now ceased to exist and its leader, Sir Gerald Herbert, had been killed. Yet the absence of fighting was of little consolation to James as he fell ill once more during December 1624. Wholly preoccupied with his dwindling pleasures, his ailments and his tantrums, he was further disheartened by the death in February of the old Marquis of Hamilton. Only the year before, James had lost his cousin Lennox – a fine figure of a man who had ‘shared his pleasure with many ladies’ before becoming the constant ‘servant’ of that imperious beauty, the Countess of Hereford. When her husband, a curious old eccentric, had died in 1621, Lennox had stepped into the breach and lost no time in marrying her. But after retiring to bed in perfect health one night, he had been found dead in the morning – the consequence, according to one court wag, of an overdose of aphrodisiac. Seeing his friends and contemporaries thus disappearing into the grave, James now told his courtiers how he would be next.
Nevertheless, he had recovered enough by July to gorge himself with melons and even to set out on a modified royal progress not long afterwards. But he failed to emerge from his chamber at Christmas, ‘not coming once to the chapel, nor to any of the plays’, and experienced a more serious decline in the New Year, as a result of his own stubbornness and indiscipline. The malaria, or so-called ‘tertian ague’ that attacked him in March 1625 was by general agreement ‘without any manner of danger if he would suffer himself to be governed and ordered by physical rules’. He refused the advice of his doctors, however, and not only drank vast quantities of cold beer but opted resolutely for the remedies of the old Countess of Buckingham who fussed continually at his bedside.
Stricken by a series of painful convulsions and fainting fits, the king then succumbed, it seems, to a minor stroke which left him unable to control the muscles of his face and choking upon vast quantities of his own phlegm. Even at the time there was largely groundless talk of skulduggery, and rumours that poison may have been involved were soon fuelled by one of James’s Scottish physicians, George Eglisham. In a pamphlet published in Latin at Frankfurt in 1626, Eglisham suggested that the Duke of Buckingham had administered a white powder to the king which made him very ill, after which his mother had applied a plaster, also unbeknown to the royal doctors. In a Jacobean court already tainted by the Overbury scandal, it could hardly have been otherwise, of course, and such scandalous gossip found ready propagators in the small handful of Robert Carr’s former servants who still tended the king.
Certainly, on 14 March James is said to have drunk a posset prepared by a country doctor named Remington, who had been warmly recommended by Buckingham and his mother, whereupon the king’s physicians reacted angrily, refusing to proceed until Remington’s medicine and the countess’s plasters were discontinued. According to Eglisham’s account, indeed, there was an unsavoury scene at the king’s bedside when some of his doctors declared outright that poison was involved and a furious Buckingham drove them at once from the bedchamber. When, moreover, the countess begged James to clear both her son’s and her own name from such slanders, the king, it seems, fainted from shock at the very mention of the word ‘poison’. Yet even disregarding the fact that James’s condition had improved sufficiently within the week for him to request further remedies from the good countess, the evidence for foul play remains slender, to say the least. The potential profit for Buckingham from foul play was in any case minimal, for the king had effectively ceased to rule long before he ceased to live. And it was actually a violent attack of dysentery that delivered the killing blow, bringing the king’s misery and degradation to a merciful close.
By that time James’s malarial fits were lasting for up to ten hours, and shortly before the end finally arrived, he had called for Lancelot Andrewes, though his favourite bishop was now himself a sick man, and John Williams, Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Lincoln, was therefore summoned to deliver the last rites instead. Whenever conscious, the king’s talk was of repentance, remission of sins and eternal life – a faint and fading echo of his lifelong interest in all things theological. But when Prince Charles arrived, his father was already beyond speech and unable to deliver the last message he had intended. Upon hearing of his imminent death, James had shown no sign of disquiet. In life, of course, he had been prey to every conceivable apprehension, but the king, whose fear of shadows had played such a part in shaping both the man and his rule, was stalwart, it seems, when the shadow of death itself finally descended. It did so shortly before noon on Sunday 27 March at Theobalds – far from his Scottish homeland. He was 58 years old, and for only one of those years, as a cradled infant, he had not borne the heavy burden of a royal crown.