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‘Only I must tell thee, that the queen will break my heart if she any more undertake to obtain my consent for Presbyterian government (to which end I know all possible art and industry will be used); for if she once should openly condemn me of wilfulness, but in one point, I should not be able to support my daily miseries.’
Charles I to Queen Henrietta Maria, 31 August 1646
As storm clouds continued to descend upon the king’s prospects from all points of the political compass in the late autumn of 1646, so the shadows lengthened too upon his marriage. Twenty-one years earlier, ‘sitting upon the very Skirts of Womanhood’, the young Princess Henrietta Maria had bid a tearful farewell to Paris amid a ‘countless throng of people’ and a colossal baggage train of ladies, priests, nurses, maids and sundry other servants – some 200 in all – on her way to Boulogne and a Channel crossing towards her husband-to-be. Among those present all the while was Henry Rich, Viscount Kensington, the 34-year-old English ambassador who had brokered long and hard over fifteen solid months to bring the couple together, and his Gentleman in Attendance, young Henry Jermyn – tall, broad-shouldered, elegant and refined – who, like his master, epitomised the courtly grace and panache so beloved of the French court. Possessing, at only 20 years of age, what the poet Abraham Cowley would describe as ‘a soul composed of the eagle and the dove’, Jermyn had arrived at the Louvre in February 1624 as a callow subordinate to his handsome, refined superior, only to emerge by June of the following year as a bold, self-confident, worldly wise and watchful man of the moment. When young Henrietta, whom he had already befriended, finally came up the steep hill to the forbidding edifice of Dover Castle, where King Charles awaited her, he was close at hand. He was there too when, after a short and awkward embrace with her intended, she burst into tears of anguish. As the darkness gathered later that evening outside the dank Great Hall of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, ‘Harry’ Jermyn stood solemnly with the rest of the congregation in the nave to witness the wedding itself. As the soft June rain pattered on the richly decorated royal barge bringing the newly-wed couple back from Gravesend to London, Jermyn too was coming home with them as Gentleman Usher of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Privy Chamber.
From the outset, the new queen’s experience of married life in a strange and foreign country left much to be desired. Though Charles emerged from his wedding night ‘jocund’ and unusually talkative, Henrietta Maria, by contrast, is said to have appeared ‘very melancholy’. The extreme formality of the English court, which, as Alvise Contarini, the Venetian ambassador, reported, was ‘so different to French custom and familiarity’, was soon causing her to lead ‘a very discontented life’. Subjected to a crash course in English, she was only allowed to speak and write in the presence of her English ladies, which led to several ‘angry discussions’ between the royal couple, and when Contarini met them both at Nonsuch, he found Henrietta Maria still inclined to shed tears when in conversation with anyone sympathetic to her homeland. ‘The queen continues in affliction as usual,’ the ambassador wrote later, ‘more especially as she is watched by the argus eyes of those in whom she has little confidence’: a scarcely veiled reference to the Duke of Buckingham, who both feared and resented Henrietta’s potential rivalry, and guaranteed, amongst other things, that she slept in the presence of his niece, Mary Hamilton, whenever the king was absent on one of his continual hunting trips.
Knowing full well that maintaining his monopoly of influence over King Charles might prove altogether more problematic than it had been under the distinctly bisexual James I, Buckingham made every effort, indeed, to weave a particularly spiteful and devious web with which to ensnare the interloper. Pointing out how damaging it was for the country that Henrietta Maria would not attend either the State Opening of Parliament or the Coronation, on the grounds that the ceremonies were Protestant, Buckingham also suggested that the presence of the queen’s priests was stoking fears that Charles himself would become a Catholic. As well as her Grand Almoner, the Bishop of Mende, a close relative of Cardinal Richelieu, her chaplains included twenty-four Oratorians who enjoyed apparently unrestricted access to Henrietta’s apartments. There were other, albeit pettier but no less pernicious, snipings for her to contend with. The members of the queen’s French household, for instance, were said to be treating English courtiers with contempt, and there was even disapproval for the more exotic clothes that she preferred to plainer English fashions.
Yet the king’s wife was disinclined, it seems, to accept her ill-usage passively. Certainly, she required no interpreters to make clear her feelings when one Englishman, who had joined the throng at Whitehall to catch sight of the diminutive 16-year-old at dinner, noted that ‘howsoever little of stature’, she was nevertheless of ‘spirit and vigour’ and appeared to be ‘of a more than ordinary resolution’. ‘With one frown’, it seems, being ‘somewhat overheated with the fire and the company, she drove us all out of the chamber’. She was more than capable of similar iciness towards the king himself when occasion dictated. For when he first attempted to reform the laxity of his wife’s household, where French attendants approached her ‘without ceremony’ and shared her conversation with ‘openness and freedom’, Charles found himself squarely balked. He had intended that Henrietta should follow the same rules that had applied in ‘the Queen my mother’s house’, only to be told that such regulations ‘wounded her maids whom she loved’. She could not, recorded the Comte de Tillières, willingly ‘surrender her liberty’, and desired that her husband ‘would give her leave to order her house as she list’. That she had refused Charles’ request was provocative enough, but that she had done so in full public view of his courtiers made the slight all the more intolerable. Later, when he drew her aside to explain her mistake in both ‘the business itself’ and in making a ‘public denial’, Henrietta merely compounded the insult. Far from ‘acknowledging her fault’, the queen launched at once into ‘so ill an answer’ that Charles refused to record it.
Nor was it long before the queen’s wish to assert herself was manifesting itself in the royal bedchamber. ‘One night when I was in bed,’ the king wrote, ‘[she] put a paper into my hand, telling me it was a list of those that she desired to be of her revenue.’ When told, furthermore, that this was a matter for her husband and to ‘remember to whom she spoke’, she fell nevertheless into a ‘passionate discourse’ and declared ‘how miserable she was’. Yet even this was not the end of the unhappy exchange. For when Henrietta Maria objected that Charles’ mother, Anne of Denmark, had chosen all her own officials, Charles replied that ‘his mother was a different sort of woman from her’. During the inevitable exchange of insults that ensued, in which the queen claimed pre-eminence as a ‘daughter of France’ over a mere Danish princess, Charles dismissed her status as ‘nothing very great’. ‘Besides’, he added, ‘she was the third and last’ of Henri IV’s daughters, ‘and therefore of less account’. At one point, after Henrietta had complained that ‘business succeeded the worse for her recommendation’, Charles had attempted to answer, only to find that ‘she would not so much as hear me’. And to demonstrate his indignation at the whole unhappy episode, the king subsequently avoided his wife’s company for three whole days, after which he did indeed revisit her bed, though not, as he made clear ‘for love of her’, but only ‘for the love of his people’, for whom he must beget an heir.
Not long afterwards, it seems, Henrietta Maria’s former governess, Mamie St Georges, was consulted about her young charge’s sexual unresponsiveness. Since their very first meeting, when Charles had excluded St Georges from a seat in the royal carriage, he had been convinced that the doughty French matron was mainly responsible for stirring the queen into ‘such an humour of distaste against me, as that from that very hour to this, no man can say that she ever used me two days together with so much respect as I deserved’. But now his predicament was such that the Duke of Buckingham was encouraged to sound her out. Though the former governess primly declined to meddle in such matters, rumours persisted that all was not well and that ‘bawdy’ priests in particular were exacerbating the problem by interrogating the queen – ‘by way of confession’ – ‘how often in a night the king had kissed her’. Almost every day seemed to bring a different religious ‘feast’ day when Henrietta was told ‘you must not let the king approach’. By these means, Charles complained, ‘the happy conversation that ought to pass between him and his dear wife, which is the principal comfort of marriage, hath not only been interrupted but wholly squenched and perverted’.
Equally predictably, perhaps, the influence of the queen’s priestly entourage had become a source of widespread dissatisfaction in the country at large. Not long after the royal wedding, Buckingham’s sister, the Countess of Denbigh, had arranged for the local parson to come and preach at Titchfield for the Protestant members of the queen’s household without requesting her permission, whereupon she reacted by walking to and fro through the hall where the service was being conducted, in the company of her French ladies and their pet dogs, talking and laughing, making mock hunting cries, and generally creating so much disturbance that the preacher was unable to continue. Worse still, the same parson would later complain that some of the queen’s servants had taken pot-shots at him while sitting on a bench in his own garden. Though de Tillières explained the incident by attributing it to bird-hunting on behalf of two of the queen’s lackeys, the residual holes in the garden bench raised lingering doubts, which were not dispelled by a subsequent scuffle between rival Protestant and Catholic chaplains, who had tried to shout each other down in saying grace and thereby forced the king to rise ‘instantly’ from the table ‘in a great passion … taking the queen by the hand’.
That Easter, during Holy Week, Henrietta and her ladies had gone into retreat at Somerset House, where a long gallery had been divided and equipped with cells and an oratory, and there, we are told, ‘they sang the hours of the Virgin and lived together like nuns’. But the climax came when she travelled on foot, ‘a distance of a mile’, through the streets of London to the Palace of St James, where her private chapel was approaching completion. For the queen this was merely normal Catholic devotion, but public outrage was unremitting. Henrietta’s priests, it seemed, had humiliated the king’s wife, making her ‘dabble in the dirt, in a foul morning, from Somerset House to St James’s, her Luciferian confessor riding along by her in his coach’. If, the same account continued, they ‘dare thus insult over the daughter, sister and wife of so great kings, what slavery would they not make us, the people, to undergo?’
A similar excursion, two months later, caused even greater consternation when the queen made what amounted to a pilgrimage to the site of the gallows at Tyburn, in response to ‘the most holy Jubilee’ that the Pope had declared at that time. In the midst of some thirty of her courtiers, she had set to ‘walk afoot (some say barefoot)’ across Hyde Park before stopping to pray on the public highway – ‘so openly that the people noticed and were scandalised’ – for the souls of those Catholic saints and martyrs who had suffered at that ‘holy place’. Beseeching that God would ‘give her grace with the like constancy to die for her religion’, she was even rumoured to have prayed specifically for the soul of the Jesuit priest, Henry Garnet, ‘who had suffered cruel torture and death on that spot’ for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot twenty years earlier. Nothing, of course, could have represented a greater abomination for English Protestants or a more direct affront to Charles himself, who knew Garnett as a ruthless traitor, instrumental in the assassination plot against his own father. In the aftermath of Henrietta’s action, he could therefore ‘no longer bear it’, it seems, and it was this that prompted him at last to ‘deliver his dear wife’ from her French attendants.
At this point, it is true, the king himself continued to attribute the various ‘unkindnesses and distastes’ souring his marriage to the queen’s comparative youth and ‘the ill crafty counsels of her servants for advancing their own ends’. But the fact remained that Henrietta Maria’s coldness and disrespect towards Charles was nevertheless, as he freely admitted, ‘too long to set down all’. The nadir duly arrived at about 3 p.m. on Monday, 31 June 1626, when the queen’s French attendants were abruptly ushered out of her chamber and she was informed by her husband that her retinue was to be sent home. First outraged and then terrified, she fell to her knees, weeping and imploring the king to reconsider in a manner ‘which would have moved stones to pity’. When Charles remained unmoved by her protests, she screamed loud enough, according to one account, ‘to split rocks’ before rushing to a window, smashing the glass with her fists and clinging to the iron grating in a frantic attempt to hold the attention of the crowd that had gathered in the courtyard below. Appalled by such a shamelessly public loss of control, it was the king himself, it seems, who finally dragged her away, her hair dishevelled, her dress torn, her hands cut and bleeding.
Nor were there any immediate signs thereafter that the queen was becoming reconciled to the loss of her associates. On the contrary, the Comtesse de Tillières, who had heard the entire episode from the other side of the door, feared at the time that she would cry herself to death. ‘Never could a similar affliction be seen,’ she recorded, adding that Henrietta ‘almost died, crying out, despairing, demanding us back with such prayers and tears that if it had been another [man than Charles] assuredly we would have been called back’. In a letter smuggled out to the comtesse a little later, Henrietta confided that the king was even following her to the close stool. To her beloved mother, meanwhile, she described herself as ‘the most afflicted person in the world’. Left ‘a complete prisoner’ and surrounded by Buckingham’s relations – ‘persons who had shown themselves her enemies since the moment she landed in England’ – her ‘tears and displeasure’ were ‘continuous’, so that ‘she hardly sleeps any more and eats very little’. ‘If you do not take pity on me,’ she wrote, ‘I am beyond despair.’
In the meantime, while Charles attributed his marital ills to a simple surfeit of Gallic meddling, so Henrietta herself had continued to see the malign influence of the Duke of Buckingham at every turn. Notwithstanding the fact that the duke had attempted to persuade his master that the queen’s behaviour might be remedied by ‘kind usages’, there was indeed no curing her hostility. She had not only refused on the one hand to be crowned in a Protestant ceremony or to watch her husband’s own coronation from ‘a place made fit for her’ – a private curtained gallery – but had also flatly refused even to enter Westminster Abbey at any stage during the five hours of solemn ceremonial. Instead, she and her entourage chose to watch Charles’ procession to and from Westminster from a nearby house, while, according to one hostile rumour, ‘her ladies [were] frisking and dancing in the room behind her’. Even so, the king appeared to bear Henrietta’s absence with surprising good grace, even making light of the episode when he met her afterwards by ‘putting his two hands to his crown and lifting it a little’, like a gentleman doffing his hat.
But when, at the Duke of Buckingham’s suggestion, Henrietta was invited to watch her husband’s passage to the State Opening of Parliament from the Whitehall apartments of the duke’s mother, there followed the bitterest royal quarrel to date. Her absence from the event itself – ‘from the same religious scruples’ – had once again been countenanced, albeit awkwardly, but her decision to decline the duke’s invitation at the last moment on the grounds that it was raining and the journey involved a muddy trip on foot across the Privy Garden – an open space some 100 yards wide – proved a step too far in more ways than she herself had anticipated. She was fearful, it seems, that her hair would be spoilt and her clothes dirtied, and Charles, at least, was initially inclined to acquiesce with her request that she be allowed to watch the procession from her own windows. From Buckingham’s perspective, however, the insult to his mother was intolerable, and according to the account of de Tillières, it was the duke who now pushed matters to an issue by asking the king how he could expect Parliament to obey him when his own wife displayed such defiance.
The result was another belated fit of anger from the king, which resulted in public humiliation for his wife and another night-time spat that further confirmed the depth of their difficulties. Ironically, under the advice of the French ambassador, the queen had indeed agreed to attend the Countess of Buckingham’s apartments, only to find after her arrival that the king was now insisting that she return. When his message was initially delivered by none other than Buckingham himself, moreover, the queen compounded the king’s fury by sending the duke back with a request that she be allowed to stay. Faced with what seemed yet another example of casual disregard for his authority, Charles then dispatched Buckingham once more with an absolute command that she return at once. Though at last she acquiesced, she fumed that night in the royal bedchamber for being thus embarrassed before the entire court. She would rather die, she claimed, than offend her husband, but was unable to come to terms with ‘the Duke acting as messenger on this occasion’ and could never believe that words such as hers might be considered faults.
In response, Charles told Henrietta that he would no longer torment her with his visits and left the room. Next day, Buckingham himself informed the queen that the French ambassador, Blainville, must no longer enter her presence, and for hours ‘pressed her for a promise of acquiescence’. Once again, moreover, it was only under the duke’s ‘constant pressure and the king’s demands’ that Henrietta Maria finally acceded. For two nights, the king and queen slept separately before Buckingham finally informed her that unless she begged her husband’s pardon with all due humility, he would not visit her again. Indeed, if she had not done so within two days and agreed in the process to the expulsion of her French household, Charles would not treat her as a person fit to be his wife. In consequence, even her most spirited protests, which followed thick and fast, were suddenly rendered hollow. For even a queen like Henrietta was unable to trump an ace of this particular potency. Though, as she continued to maintain, she was guilty neither in word nor in deed, nor even in intention, she would nevertheless formally comply as commanded. One day later, therefore, she duly visited her husband, expressed her regret at the misunderstanding and begged him to think of it no longer. Under the circumstances, it was the closest thing to an outright apology that he could hope for, and that night, as court observers recorded, ‘the complete and sincere affection which subsists between the King and Queen was restored’.
The eventual expulsion of the queen’s French retinue would, of course, quickly shatter this particular show of domestic harmony, and the formal reconciliation with Buckingham, engineered by the ambassador Bassompierre ‘with a thousand pains’, lasted a mere twenty-four hours. After two years of marriage, moreover, and in spite of trips to the small county town of Wellingborough and its famous mineral waters, which were said to ‘facilitate generation’, the queen was still not pregnant. By and large, the royal couple confined their exchanges to arid letters containing little beyond ‘dry, ceremonial compliment’, and as relations with France deteriorated into the bargain, Henrietta had sought solace increasingly in a mixture of play and self-improvement within the largely separate enclave that she fashioned for herself. On the one hand, she bought a lute and started lessons with ‘a certain Monsieur Gouttier, a Frenchman and a famous performer’. There was ongoing support, too, from her two remaining Oratorian priests, Fathers Philip and Viette, who were to become her lifelong companions, though above all, she lavished affection on ‘Little Jeffrey’, or ‘the Queen’s dwarf’ as he came to be called: a little boy named Jeffrey Hudson, whom Buckingham’s mother had first presented to her under the crust of a cold pie, from which he emerged to stun all onlookers. Standing only 18in high at the age of 8, he was described by one observer as ‘a marvellous sight … the most perfect imperfection of nature that ever was born’. And when the queen chose to indulge herself with the broader pleasures of court life, there were also lavish masques for her to lose herself in: at one of which, we are told, everyone danced until four in the morning. ‘Doubtless’, wrote one outraged Londoner, ‘it cost abundance’ – so much so, it seemed, that ‘one Mr Chalmers sold 1,000 yards of taffeta and satin towards it’.
As time passed, furthermore, there were even signs of a thaw in Henrietta’s relationships with both her husband and the Duke of Buckingham himself. In May 1627, she had finally accepted Charles’ formal regulations for her court, and was described thereafter as ‘very happy and cheerful’ with her new English companions. In particular, she eventually developed a keen regard for Buckingham’s mother and wife. The first, after all, was a passionate Catholic convert, whose Whitehall lodgings were a notorious safe haven for ‘the most active priests in England’, while the other, Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, was a lifelong Catholic at heart, who publicly practised Anglicanism only to bolster her husband’s position. Described as a woman of ‘very great spirit’, Katherine was also generous, presenting the queen with ‘a costly coach and six horses valued generally at 20,000 crowns’. While the duke’s closest relatives did their level best to win her affection, so he too played his part in melting her hostility in a whirl of generosity – the most exceptional example of which was ‘the most superb feast’ that the French ambassador had ever seen, where each course was accompanied by a separate ballet, with its own scenery and music, and Henrietta was treated to a grand masque depicting the French royal family dispensing peace for all Europe among the Gods.
Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that the queen would assume an increasingly brave public face and write to the duke ‘most heartily and cheerfully’ with ‘her best wishes’ when he finally set off to make war on her homeland. Even a young woman of Henrietta’s indomitable temperament could not, after all, resist the inevitable indefinitely. Yet ultimately, only the disgrace and death of the man with whom her husband always corresponded as ‘your faithful, loving, constant friend’ would relieve her of his influence and thereby at last cement her place in the king’s affections. As Buckingham’s ill-conceived and ill-fated military expedition to the Île de Rhé foundered, Charles had written to him ‘hoping and longing for your safe return’ and assuring him that ‘no distance of place, nor length of time can make me slacken, much less diminish my love to you’. Yet optimism swiftly faded, and by the time that the duke returned to Plymouth at the head of the broken remnant of his force, English news-sheets were awash with reports of a ‘great slaughter’ and ‘a rout without an enemy’.
The king, it is true, remained thoroughly enamoured with his friend, insisting that ‘all the shame must light upon us here at home’ for failing to send reinforcements in time. But his subjects were altogether less indulgent – as Buckingham would discover to his mortal cost on Saturday, 23 August 1628, when he was ‘slaine at one blow with a dagger knife’ by a morose ex-officer lieutenant named John Felton, who had been passed over for promotion and found himself owed £80 in back pay before finally acquiring a tenpenny weapon from a cutler’s shop on Tower Hill with which to demonstrate his disapproval. As he left the parlour where he had been breakfasting, Buckingham was dispatched by a single merciless thrust, delivered ‘with great strength and violence’, which had passed through his lungs and into ‘the very heart itself’, leaving him spouting blood from the mouth ‘with much effusion’. Though he had pulled the dagger from the wound and made to pursue his attacker, the chase lasted only a few steps before he slumped to the floor. ‘I am the Man, heere I am,’ called Felton, making no attempt to escape from the crowd in which he had mingled beforehand.
When questioned, the assassin had explained that his motive was nothing less than to ‘doe his Country great good service’, and there was no denying, as the Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini observed, that it had been ‘very difficult in many parts of the country to prevent bonfires and other rejoicings’. Yet the real beneficiary in many respects was none other than the king’s own wife. Upon hearing the news of the duke’s death, the queen had visited the duke’s bereaved wife – ‘an act on her part’, noted Amerigo Salvetti, which ‘greatly gratified the king’. Yet Charles had been thrilled by Henrietta Maria’s support beforehand too, at the very time of Buckingham’s military expedition itself, for although she had expressed her regret at the conflict with her homeland, she had also wished the duke ‘all success, being more interested for him than for anyone else’. The king had responded effusively. ‘My wife and I,’ he informed Buckingham, ‘were never better together; she, upon this action of yours, showing herself so loving to me, by her discretion upon all occasions, that it makes us all wonder and esteem her.’
The budding reconciliation had begun to manifest itself more visibly too, as Charles, notwithstanding his own shortage of funds, lavished generosity upon his formerly recalcitrant wife. On the one hand, he ordered that Henrietta’s debts be paid off to the tune of £30,000, and also gave her lands worth £6,000 per year, so that her income should match that of the late Queen Anne. Even more extravagantly, however, the king saw fit to gift her Greenwich Palace, a favourite resort of his mother, where she had begun building a luxurious, Italianate ‘Queen’s House’ to designs by Inigo Jones. If Henrietta’s domestic needs were now catered for with a new diligence, so too, it seems, were her religious tastes, as Charles turned a blind eye to the many English Catholics who now eagerly attended Mass at her private chapel in Somerset House. When Parliament protested at such ‘connivance at Popery’, the king responded angrily; and when Henrietta asked him to reject a new anti-Catholic Bill that MPs had just passed, he acceded gladly.
All observers acknowledged, however, that Buckingham’s death proved the final catalyst in swaying the king to an almost unconditional dependence on his wife that would thereafter span some two decades. Within a fortnight of the duke’s assassination, the Venetian ambassador had written to his opposite number in Paris how it was believed ‘the queen would henceforward have great influence’, and not long afterwards he would confirm that ‘every day she concentrates in herself the favour and love that was previously divided between her and the duke’. Amerigo Salvetti, indeed, thought that ‘were she not so youthful … it would be an easy matter for her to make the King do whatever she pleased, so much is he attached to her’. The Earl of Carlisle, on a diplomatic mission abroad, heard how he would find his ‘master and mistress at such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again, and her gladder to receive his caresses than he to make them’.
To all appearances, then, the transformation was a truly remarkable one, as Charles suddenly and unconditionally shifted his emotional dependence upon Buckingham to the nearest available substitute, and Henrietta – newly outgoing and affectionate, and at last finding herself loved and respected – reciprocated warmly. Her nineteenth birthday was celebrated by a tournament, the king on horseback and determined to ‘grow gallant every day more and more’. When Charles left London, Henrietta’s only consolation was his portrait, ‘his shadow at her bedside’. That same December, Thomas Carey informed the Earl of Carlisle that ‘the King has now so wholly made over all his affections to his wife, that I dare say we are out of the danger of any other favourites’. Indeed, though she seems to have informed Alvise Contarini around this time that ‘she did not pretend to interfere in state affairs’, the ambassador was in little doubt that her support was a valuable tool in assisting his efforts to promote the cause of peace between England and France. ‘I know,’ he informed Giorgio Zorzi, ‘that her entreaties have made an impression in addition to my own.’ Nor was this all. For boatloads of captured French fishermen were released after ‘she exerted herself with much warmth’ on their behalf, and the king ‘not only reprieved, but pardoned’ a condemned Jesuit priest as a result of her intervention.
In the meantime, fresh rumours that the queen was ‘breeding child’ only served to consolidate her new-found position at the epicentre of her husband’s world. Though her first child, a boy born ten weeks prematurely, lived only long enough to be hastily baptised by one of the king’s chaplains, Henrietta duly became ‘the happy mother of a Prince of Wales’ only one year later. This time, moreover, there was no question about the health of the infant. The queen’s first child had been turned ‘overthwart’ in her belly, and she had endured several hours of great pain and considerable danger, as Peter Chamberlen, a leading obstetrician who had pioneered the use of forceps, struggled unsuccessfully to save the situation. Now, however, she could boast a baby boy whose longevity seemed guaranteed. Giovanni Soronzo, who saw the future Charles II in his cradle before he was a week old, observed that ‘so far as one can judge from present indications he will be very strong and vigorous’. Though the queen herself regretted aspects of his appearance, she was more than satisfied with the end product of her labour. ‘He is so ugly,’ she informed her former governess, ‘that I am ashamed of him, but his size and fatness supply the want of beauty.’
Henrietta had good reason, moreover, to delight at her new child’s arrival, since he was the first heir apparent to be born on English soil since Edward VI. His birth had been accompanied by all the bell-ringing, bonfires and bad verse customary on such occasions, but more significantly still, it had ushered in a new dawn of unprecedented happiness and influence for the queen – one which would consolidate her hold over her husband’s heart and confirm her place at the centre of state affairs. ‘I wish that we could always be together,’ Charles told his wife shortly after the birth of his new heir, ‘and that you could accompany me to the Council.’ While Charles knew that this could never be – for ‘what would these people say if a woman were to busy herself with matters of government?’ – there were other, more subtle ways in which the same effect might be achieved. When, more than a decade later, Henrietta had left to raise funds in the Netherlands under the shadow of civil war in England, her husband had galloped along the cliff tops to keep her ship in sight until the last sail had vanished below the horizon. Throughout the trials and disappointment that followed, that same lovelorn dependence had been maintained. By then, the fortunes of war and even the loss of his liberty to the Scots had only served, if anything, to magnify the king’s desire for her company and dependence on her counsel. She was indeed, to all appearances, his alpha and his omega – his rock in adversity, his guiding light in the darkness of the times.
But if Charles’ ardour was seemingly unconditional, the queen’s remained tinged with frustration at her husband’s weakness, stricken as he was by a curious – and ultimately fatal – cocktail of stubbornness and vacillation. ‘I am most confident that within a very small time I shall be recalled with much honour, and all my friends will see that I have neither a foolish nor peevish conscience,’ he told his wife on 30 November 1646 from his quarters at Anderson House, where his Scottish captors were by then lodging him. In love no less than politics, he continued to ignore the warning signs. There was only one fault, she had once told the Duke of Buckingham, that could make her unworthy to be the king’s wife, and she was certainly too well bred to be guilty of it. Yet sordid rumours of Henrietta Maria’s unfaithfulness had already continued to dog the king for some time. Even upon the occasion of their reunion at Edgehill, indeed, there was mischievous talk of her unseemly familiarity with Lord Charles Cavendish, for whom she was said to have delayed her journey. The Earl of Holland, of course, had also unsettled the king by his more recent appearances in her rooms at Merton.
Now, however, as autumn mists turned to winter fog in Newcastle, even more scandalous whispers were reaching Charles’ ears concerning his own friend Henry Jermyn, for whom the queen had immediately requested a peerage upon her reunion with her husband at Oxford in 1643. Born in 1605, he was the second surviving son of Sir Thomas Jermyn – a long-serving court official who eventually became Governor of Jersey – and had followed his father into royal service, attending Lord Bristol’s embassy to Madrid in 1622–23, as well as Lord Kensington’s mission to Paris to negotiate the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria one year later. He had served too as an MP – for Bodmin, Liverpool and Corfe Castle – though his real talents were always as a courtier, and it was the courtier’s gift of gentility, finesse and eagle-eyed opportunism that had first secured his place within the queen’s household in 1627. Handsome, discreet, a fluent French-speaker and no lover of the Duke of Buckingham, who had stripped his kinsman Francis Bacon of the Great Seal, Jermyn was ideally equipped to win the queen’s affection and maintain her confidence, all of which had been amply demonstrated in 1633 when he displeased the king by refusing to marry the pregnant Eleanor Villiers. Though his prospective spouse was a maid of honour and niece of the deceased Buckingham, Jermyn held firm on the grounds that Eleanor had already slept with two men besides himself. Notwithstanding the fact that Charles banished him to France, Jermyn was back at court once more in February 1636 – as a direct result of the queen’s intervention.
It was from this point, furthermore, that his close relationship and increasing influence with Henrietta Maria had become a particular source of gossip. In 1636, William Davenant may have intended an ironic allusion to the pair in his play The Platonic Lovers, and Davenant almost certainly depicted Jermyn as the philandering Arigo in his poem ‘Madagascar’ two years later. But the courtier’s activities also gained a notoriety that extended well beyond literary circles and into the murkier corners of court life – the realm of creeping whispers and furtive knowing looks. The private apartments of the monarch and his wife were, after all, a strictly self-contained and forbidden microcosm, where only a carefully chosen elite of gentlemen, ladies and necessary servants might expect to gain entry. Rules that served to insulate the king and queen so securely from the outside world were only likely to foster an extraordinary degree of intimacy between themselves and the immediate circle that surrounded them. Where such intimacy obtained, therefore, so too, inevitably, did rumour – however ill-founded or otherwise.
In particular, it was the closeted world of the queen’s Privy Chamber – where Henry Jermyn appeared to hold such sway – that became the focus for a steady trickle of curious tales and half-lit hearsay. One story, recorded sometime after the event, originated with Jermyn’s own cousin, Tom Killigrew, whose task was to light the king’s way along the corridors that joined his own apartments with those of his wife. Whether at Whitehall or St James’s, this process was always conducted during autumn and winter nights at those times when Charles chose to sleep in his wife’s bed. On this occasion, however, Killigrew purported to have opened the door to the queen’s chamber, only to find her sitting on the bed, almost completely hidden by the broad-shouldered form of his cousin. Acting as quickly and resourcefully as he could, Killigrew is said to have dropped the taper and fallen to his knees, scrabbling about to clear the wax and apologising all the while, in order to buy time for the embarrassed couple. By the time the bemused king eventually entered from the corridor, the queen, it seems, had composed herself and Jermyn had vanished.
Killigrew, ultimately, would become a successful playwright who established a reputation as a witty and somewhat dissolute figure at the court of Charles II. But by the time he came forward with his claim, he was a heartfelt devotee of the Stuart cause and Roman Catholic, who had no reputation for slander or any appreciable grounds for defaming the queen herself. He was a man with a critical eye for the evidence, having witnessed the exorcism of the ‘possessed’ nuns of Loudun and dismissed the proceedings in a sceptical account of 1635. Though Pepys dismissed him as the king’s fool and jester, Charles II nevertheless trusted him sufficiently to install him as Groom of the Bedchamber and Chamberlain to his own wife, and given that Charles himself was rumoured in some circles to be none other than Jermyn’s own son, it seems unlikely that Killigrew would have lightly concocted a tale of this kind. The incident, in any case, did not so much incriminate the queen as add one more coal to a slow-burning fire that had long been smouldering in a variety of quarters. In one instance, the Duke of Hamilton is said to have found Jermyn and Henrietta Maria cuddling in a room at Somerset House, while another account suggests that an unnamed earl, playing upon the king’s own suspicions, offered to lead him to the queen’s chamber at a time when she would be alone with her favourite. Upon bursting in upon his wife, Charles, it seems, found that the pair were indeed together, but merely conversing innocently, leaving him red-faced and stricken with guilt that he should have suspected her in the first place.
By contrast, of course, there were those for whom the queen was nothing less than a model of unalloyed virtue. ‘As to faith, or sin of the flesh, she is never tempted,’ wrote one particular commentator. ‘No one,’ he continued, ‘is admitted to her bedrooms except ladies with whom she sometimes retires and employs herself on light, but innocent matters.’ Written by a papal agent, reporting what he had allegedly been told by Henrietta Maria’s confessor, this report, too, must be viewed with due caution. Yet the truly significant feature of the rumours about the queen’s fidelity is not so much their accuracy as their very existence – and the high places in which they circulated. In 1643, for instance, Jermyn had been accused by Parliament not merely of political crimes but of what was openly described as ‘too great an intimacy with the queen’. In consequence, parliamentary agents had been dispatched to rummage through his apartments at Whitehall – ‘in an unprecedented manner’ and ‘without any respect for the place’ – in hopes of seizing incriminating papers and giving ‘further offence to Her Majesty’. Though he had been forced to flee to France, his influence remained undiminished upon his return. For not only was he raised to the peerage as Baron Jermyn of St Edmundsbury at the queen’s request – on the grounds, ostensibly, that he would thereafter be beheaded rather than hanged, drawn and quartered if he fell into Parliamentarian hands – it was he who accompanied her to France in 1644, and he, thereafter, who mastered her affairs as private secretary. In consequence, wrote Madame de Motteville, he was ‘more than ever in the favour of [the Queen] and indeed to a strange degree’. There were further ugly rumours that Henrietta’s ninth child, ‘a lovely princess’ who had been born in the West Country on 16 June after her departure from Oxford, was none other than Jermyn’s.
So when the queen’s letters began to arrive once more to the king at Newcastle in 1646, she remained a cause for concern for her increasingly hard-pressed husband – not simply because of her ongoing headaches and eye-strain, but also, perhaps, because these ailments now induced her to entrust her correspondence to none other than Henry Jermyn, who rendered them into code on her behalf and likewise deciphered those letters delivered from Charles. Yet the king, master as always of the rose-tinted gloss, continued to take consolation of sorts from the letters of love that his wife still dispatched amid the instructions, exhortations and imprecations that characterised so much of her correspondence. His nagging frustrations were leavened too by the undoubted delicacy of Henrietta’s health. The Royalist Francis Bassett, who had seen her passing through Launceston on the way to France from Exeter, had told his wife that ‘here is the woefullest spectacle my eyes ever yet beheld on: the most worn and pitiful creature in the world, the poor queen, shifting for one hour’s life longer’. Even Theodore Mayerne, who was apt to dismiss many of the queen’s symptoms as hysterical in origin, had predicted at that time that she would live for no more than another three weeks, and prior to her departure she had confided to Charles that she was giving him ‘the strongest proof of love that I can give’. ‘I am hazarding my life, that I may not incommode your affairs,’ she continued. ‘Adieu, my dear heart. If I die, believe that you will lose a person who has never been other than entirely yours.’ And Charles, for the time being at least, did indeed believe as bidden.
In his present circumstances, moreover, the king could perhaps be forgiven for refusing to dwell upon the most unthinkable of all possibilities. For by the beginning of 1647, after eight months in Scottish hands, he was already a changed man. Under strict new orders, ‘eight officers never let him out of their sight’, his early optimism was now being steadily replaced, under the ‘violent importunities’ of his enemies, by creeping fears that drained his energy and rendered him increasingly desperate. The pastimes of his early weeks in Newcastle – occasional games of golf in the surrounding countryside, rides along the river to Tynemouth or games of chess indoors – were no more. Instead, for days on end, Charles was occupied only at his desk, managing a constant round of letters: to Henrietta Maria and Jermyn in Paris, to Parliament in London, and to both his enemies and old friends in Scotland. In mid-November, with news from London that an agreement might yet be possible, he had turned to drafting peace proposals, only to be rebuffed by his wife. Thereafter, driven by the queen’s accusations that he was destroying by his wilfulness ‘all that is dear to me’, he had even contemplated abdication. ‘I hate it,’ she replied by return of post. ‘If any such thing be made public, you are undone – your enemies will make malicious use of it. Be sure you never own it again in any discourse.’
As Henrietta and her advisers, including Jermyn, continued to press for his acceptance of Presbyterian settlement, so Charles continued, it seems, to hover near breaking point. ‘Good God, what things are these to try my patience!’ he wrote. ‘I could say much more upon this subject, but I will conjure you, as you are Christians, no more thus to torture me, assuring you that the more ye this way press me, you the more contribute … to my ruin.’ The time for concessions had in any case passed. For some months the Scots and the English Parliament had been forging ahead on a peace settlement entirely independent of Charles, and now they were ready to act. Money would be paid to the Scots for their services in the war, and then they would withdraw. At the same time, the king would be handed over to Parliament in return for a down payment of £100,000, after which, as he informed Henrietta when rumours of the arrangement reached him, ‘I shall be an absolute prisoner’.
Under the circumstances, escape appeared the only option, and Charles – once again sacrificing the initiative to the queen – urged her to ‘consider well’ the idea. As early as June, less than a month after he had joined the Scots, he had pondered the prospect of flight, and by July he was not only convinced that ‘I am lost if I go not unto France by the end of August’, but imploring Henrietta Maria to make the necessary arrangements. With none forthcoming, he had been left in September to seek help from his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. Were his negotiations with Parliament to fail, he hoped a Dutch ship might then arrive in Newcastle, under the pretence of carrying messages, and deliver him safely to Holland. That plan too had failed at first to be implemented, however, and now all hinged yet again upon the good offices of the queen. Once out of the country, he reasoned, the Scots would clash with Parliament, ‘and so give me an opportunity, either to join with the weaker party, or frame one of my own’. The Dutch too, it seems, were now willing ‘to do what the King commands’, and there was also, for good measure, a further rumour for the king to cling to that some 5,000 former soldiers from the Royalist army were gathering, ‘high and bold’, in and around Newcastle itself.
The queen, however, shared no such delusions, and at the beginning of December she delivered a firm injunction to her husband that he must ‘not think of making any escape from England’. ‘Everyone here’, she wrote from Paris, was startled at the very notion, since a ‘general peace’ to the Thirty Years’ War was imminent on the Continent, after which French aid was sure to be forthcoming. Indeed, their ambassador was already under orders to negotiate a treaty with the Scots to fight jointly against Parliament, in an all-out effort to restore the king. In fleeing now, the letter continued, ‘you would destroy all our hopes’, and there was also, of course, ‘the danger of the attempt to be considered’. Within the month, after all, Charles himself would openly admit to his wife that while ‘heretofore my escape was easy enough … now it is most difficult if not impossible’. In such circumstances, Henrietta urged, her husband should only consider such an action as a drastic last resort if the Scots were to declare openly ‘that they will not protect you’.
Whether, as some commentators suggested both then and later, the queen really was acting from ulterior motives remains an open question. For by now, Henry Jermyn was not only firmly installed in Paris as her closest confidant and counsellor, he had become in effect a substitute father for her eldest son. It was Jermyn, for instance, who administered Prince Charles’ finances and allowed him pocket money out of his French pension. It was Jermyn, too, who delicately tempered the queen’s instinct to pamper and cosset her son, and countered the adolescent boy’s instinct to rebel against her. Appointing the prince’s tutors and deciding what they taught him was only one of many other paternal duties that Jermyn assumed, as he both befriended the boy and did his best to guide him through the troubles of the times. In the meantime, the queen and her secretary became the de facto heart of a Royalist government in exile. Ireland, France, Holland, Rome, Denmark, Sweden, Lorraine and even the Baltic duchy of Courland were all courted in turn by Jermyn from his gilded office in the Louvre, where he sat each day, surrounded by correspondence, ciphers and maps, sifting through reports from his spy network, desperately trying to find a way to save the day while enjoying the constant company and adulation of the queen.
Nor, it must be said, was Charles himself ungrateful to his ‘humble servant’, who, in concert with the queen, increasingly directed policy. ‘Harry,’ the king had written in May 1645, ‘this is chiefly to chide you that I had no letters from you this last week … not to hear every day from you … is a cruel thing failing thereby of my expectation.’ The same level of trust and gratitude, with the one notable exception already discussed, was apparent throughout his correspondence from Newcastle during 1646. ‘Tell Jermyn from me,’ Charles had informed Henrietta in July, ‘that I will make him know the eminent service he hath done me concerning Prince Charles his coming to thee, as soon as it shall please God to enable me to reward honest men.’ While other Royalist exiles fleeing to Paris resented Jermyn’s control of the royal finances – bristling at the fact that he ‘kept an excellent table for those who courted him, and had a coach of his own, and all other accommodations incident to the most full fortunes’ – the king offered only unconditional trust in all matters, it seems, but religion and the running sore of Presbyterianism.
Yet, notwithstanding a compliant response to the insistent request that he stay put at Newcastle, Charles now chose to exercise his own judgement – albeit in the form of an escape attempt that proved as half-cocked as it was half-hearted. Writing to Henrietta on 5 December, he appeared resigned to his current situation:
I will, according to thy conjuration, not think of an escape until the Scots shall declare that they will not protect me, and now I see the opinion (I say not thine), that it is less ill for my affairs that I should be a prisoner in my own dominions than at liberty anywhere else … and therefore will not say more.
On Christmas Eve, however, came news that the Scottish Parliament had passed ‘very harsh resolutions’, leaving no other recourse than flight. Faced, indeed, with an ultimatum that he must approve ‘all the proposals of peace that have been presented to him by the two kingdoms’ until which time his ‘royal authority will remain suspended’, Charles suddenly moved beyond the need to consult the queen. Seeing not a single place in Britain ‘where he could remain in safety’, he therefore planned to join her in Paris, and though the new French ambassador, Pierre Bellièvre, suggested that it might be ‘very difficult for him to return again’, and tried desperately to persuade him to ‘retire to the Scottish Highlands’ instead, Charles remained adamant. A Dutch ship sent by his daughter, which had finally arrived in Newcastle harbour ‘under the pretence of being careened’, was ‘victualled … and new trimmed’, and the king, it seems, would brook no delay.
That same day, therefore, the vessel’s captain was summoned to Anderson House to meet ‘in private’ with William Murray, one of the grooms of Charles’ bedchamber. Murray had served the king in this capacity since the second year of the reign, in fact, before being arrested as a spy in 1646. Educated as a boy alongside the king, with whom he enjoyed great influence, he had also been employed as an emissary to France. It was this intimate link with his sovereign that had led to his release from the Tower in September as a result of the intervention of the Scottish commissioners, who gained from him an assurance that he would do all in his power to induce his master to yield to Parliament’s terms. Like other committed Royalists of his kind, however, Murray plainly considered such assurances unbinding, for he subsequently delivered £100 to the Dutch captain at the quayside Peacock Inn, and on Christmas morning word came back that, if the wind was fair, the ship – a man-of-war ‘of 84 gunnes’ – would sail on the night tide, ‘notwithstanding any opposition from Tynemouth Castle’. Disguised in either ‘the habit of a sailor’ or as William Murray’s servant, the king would thereby achieve his liberty at last.
From the various accounts available, it would appear that late in the night of 25 or 26 December, Murray ventured forth to check whether one of the town gates – either Pandon Gate or Sandgate – had been opened as arranged by Royalists or sympathetic guards with whom Charles had been trying to ingratiate himself, only to find that the gate designated for the king’s escape remained secure, since ‘a key was set fast and broken’ within the lock. Apparently wearing ‘gray cloathes’, which were intended to render him less noticeable in the wintry murk, Murray then returned to the king’s lodging, where he was ‘looked upon with suspicion’ for ‘coming downe the staires at so unusuall a time’ and held in the guard house for three hours, during which time Charles concluded that a mishap of some kind had occurred. Whether he had prudently gone to bed in anticipation of a possible surprise visit from either the town governor or the Earl of Leven himself, in order to affect the appearance of innocence, or whether, as Tobias Peaker, another groom of the privy chamber, suggested, the whole enterprise had been abandoned simply because of a change in the wind, remains unknown.
But thereafter ‘the suspicion was so great, and the stir so great upon it’ that security was considerably increased, notwithstanding the fact that Murray was released after questioning by the town governor. Leven, for example, at once placed his cavalry on the Tynemouth road, and next day ordered the king’s guards to ‘be strictlier posed than they have been hitherto’, with a squadron of the Scottish lifeguards, along with four handpicked officers from each of the other Scottish regiments, ‘to watch every night’. For the first time, too, guards were now placed inside the king’s apartments, and three government ships – The Leopard, The Constant Warwick and The Greyhound – were stationed to watch the suspect Dutch vessel. Lacking hard evidence to implicate him in an escape plot, Charles was still given leave to play golf on the so-called ‘Shieldfield’, where he had been accosted some time earlier by a ‘distracted’ woman who refused to ‘hould her peace’ and told him that it was better for him ‘to be with his Parliament than to be there’. But from this point forth he could do so only with Leven in direct attendance, and even the more eccentric of his supporters became the object of close scrutiny. For when ‘a young woman at Morpeth’ proclaimed herself to be the king’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, even she, we are told, was subject to interrogation before being ‘whipt and sent going’.
Yet the disappointment of Charles’ first abortive attempt to escape by no means exhausted either his own or Murray’s determination to break loose while any crumb of hope remained. On 28 December, for example, the latter appears to have attended a meeting at The Angel Inn, after which Tobias Parker was dispatched to Hartlepool to ‘see what ships were there’ now that the Dutch man-of-war, still at anchor in Newcastle, was under suspicion. But the desperation of the hour did not, it seems, produce the man for the moment, since Peaker had proceeded no further than half a mile beyond Gateshead when, in his own words, he began to ponder ‘the consequents of that business’ and, ‘not being willing to be accessory to an action which might prove so prejudicial to the kingdome’, turned and rode back to the place he had just passed, leaving his horse at a blacksmith’s shop, before proceeding direct to the mayor to tell him the whole business. Leven duly confronted Murray with the incriminating letter, carried by Peaker, enquiring about the availability of ships for a voyage that he was planning. Though, predictably, there was no direct hint in the letter of the king’s involvement, his guard was nevertheless doubled – ‘both within his residence and without’ – that same day.
According to the account of the escape attempt contained in the Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, Charles himself had lost his nerve even before the enterprise had been exposed. Wearing a disguise, he had allegedly gone down the backstairs of Anderson House, before turning back in fear of the guards and ‘judging it hugely indecent to be catched in such a condition’. If so, it would not be the last time that the king’s supreme confidence at the planning stage suddenly melted at the critical point of execution. But when he wrote to his wife on Saturday, 2 January, with the possibility of his death plainly in mind, there was no similar hint of indecision. Indeed, with none of his previous pleadings and self-justification, he laid down what appeared to be his last great requirement from his wife: namely, that she and Prince Charles should ‘declare publicly’ that his offers to his enemies had been reasonable and ‘that neither of you will persuade me to go further, but rather dissuade me, if I had a mind to grant more’. In this way, Charles reasoned, his enemies would not be tempted to replace him with his heir, ‘for if there be the least imagination that Prince Charles will grant more, then I shall not live long after’. As such, a public declaration of the sort specified was ‘absolutely necessary for my preservation’. With this stark truth, the king concluded. There was no need for further discussion, he reassured his wife, ‘for I know thy love will omit nothing that is possible for my freedom’. Nor should she ever ‘despair of a good cause’, or abandon her labours for their son, ‘even as thou loves me, who am eternally thine’.
Just over two weeks earlier, on 16 December, thirty-six carts containing £200,000 had set out from London under a ‘large convoy’ of Parliamentarian troops, and the day following Charles’ plea to Henrietta Maria, they duly reached York. The journey had been long and arduous – ‘the waies being very bad’ and ‘the monies overturned, the boxes dirty’ – but the soldiers, though weary ‘after many a lang dayes march’, were still ‘blithe and merry’ enough to upset their officers by ‘leaping in the churchyard after all their marching so far in the durt’. By that stage, it seems, they had passed beyond fatigue and were in no mood either to dwell upon the purpose for which their cargo of ‘good gold and silver coins’ was now to be put. Yet they had been responsible, in fact, for the safe transport of nothing less than a king’s ransom – though not one to guarantee his liberty, but rather to ensure his transfer from Scottish to English captivity. For in return for a payment in recompense for all the ‘pains, hazards and charges’ they had incurred during their involvement in the Civil War, the Scots had agreed at last to deliver the king into Parliament’s hands and withdraw from England for good.
For twelve days the money remained in York while English and Scottish treasury clerks counted the coins: several hundred thousand of them at least, and perhaps over a million if, as seems likely, much of the money was in silver. Carefully packed into bags, each containing £100 and secured with the seals of both England and Scotland, the money was then placed, ten bags at a time, into wooden chests, which were once more sealed by both parties. Clearly, neither Scotsmen nor Englishmen were entirely trustful of the other, and it was equally plain that this was no surprise. The wartime alliance between the two old foes had, after all, been a marriage of convenience from the outset, sure to be sundered as soon their separate ends were achieved. So when the job was finished on 15 January, and the carts trundled northwards with their booty to the waiting Scottish troops at Newcastle – ‘each one reaching for his share’ – the parting was a welcome relief on all sides. Any Scottish qualms about the sacrifice of their anointed monarch had been smoothly allayed by a much-needed injection of Sassenach cash, while for MPs at Westminster, the disappearance of their northern neighbours offered respite, freedom of action and the opportunity to focus without distraction upon their ultimate goal: the bringing to heel of the ‘Man of Blood’ who, by his stubborn refusal to submit to his subjects’ just claims, had racked his kingdom with four long years of civil war.