12
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Prince William’s carriage made its way down the Strand in a cavalcade of coaches heading for Whitehall Palace. He was a good-looking boy with long brown hair, dressed in red and gold. Not to be outdone, his companion Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, wore silver and gold. Holland had taken what should have been Warwick’s place in the carriage. Warwick had claimed he was too busy with ‘affairs of state’ to attend the wedding.1 It was a troubling absence and an extraordinary snub for Charles, who had made Warwick a privy councillor only days earlier.
Did Warwick know what was happening at the White Horse Tavern near St Paul’s, where Sir John Suckling was now assembling a planned force of a hundred armed men?2 Suckling was the poet who had once written verses on the fantasy of stripping Lucy Carlisle naked while she walked in Holland Park. Slim, of middle height, with a small head and long fair curls, the thirty-two-year-old cavalier had ‘a brisk and graceful look’.3 He was a cousin of the queen’s current favourite, Henry Jermyn. Yet he was no blind supporter of Charles’s policies. Suckling had argued that Charles needed to pay court to the people, in the traditional manner of an English monarch and as Elizabeth I had done so successfully.4 But he also believed that men like Warwick and Pym were self-seeking and dangerous – and had to be stopped.
While public attention was focused on the marriage ceremonies, Suckling planned that his hundred men would march to the Tower, where the lieutenant had verbal instructions to grant them entry. Once in, they hoped to overpower the wardens and release Strafford.
Prince William, meanwhile, had reached Whitehall where he was escorted into the royal chapel. There he awaited his bride on a railed platform near the Communion table. The nine-year-old Princess Royal entered the chapel dressed in silver and escorted by two of her brothers: the ten-year-old Prince of Wales, and seven-year-old James, Duke of York. William had not been permitted to kiss Mary when they had first met, but thought her ‘beautiful’. She was wearing a necklace of huge pearls lent by his mother. ‘I love her very much and I believe she loves me too,’ he had told his parents. Behind Mary and her brothers followed sixteen small bridesmaids of her own age, ushered by Mary’s governess, the old Countess of Roxburghe.5 The king entered next, with a number of senior peers. Then came Henrietta Maria and the stately Marie de’ Medici, attending the ceremony as spectators rather than co-worshippers.
Since Charles had been left financially dependent on Parliament, Marie de’ Medici’s allowance had been stopped, obliging the ‘mother of three kings’ to dismiss her household, with its dwarves and noblemen, and to live ‘the frugal life of a private lady’.6 She was also now showing signs of poor health. Her life in England was under constant threat and the strain was taking a toll. Holland had asked his fellow peers to provide money for a guard, reminding them that if anything were to happen to their royal guest, ‘it would be a great dishonour to the Nation’.7 The money was denied and so she still faced the danger of being killed by a rogue fanatic just as her husband, Henri IV, had been.
The children’s wedding was presided over by the Bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren, who was personally closer to Charles even than Laud, and promoted a devotional style far closer to baroque Catholicism than that of the archbishop. Light filtered through 241 feet of modern stained glass, while music was played on a magnificent organ. Charles gave the bride to the groom and William put a ring on her finger.8
This was not a marriage of the stature Charles had wanted for his daughter. The Prince of Orange was the stadholder, or ‘place holder’, of the province of Holland, and as such merely the hereditary head of state of a Dutch republic. Charles would have preferred a King of France or Spain for Mary and would never have agreed to the marriage had he not desperately needed Dutch money. But Henrietta Maria told her sister Christine that ‘although [William] will not be a king I have no doubt she can be just as happy. I know well that it is not kingdoms that bring happiness.’9
As the wedding ceremony ended, Suckling counted only around sixty men at the White Horse Tavern: two-thirds of the number he had expected. He decided to delay the enterprise until the following night. But word of this threatening group of soldiers was spreading through London, even as Charles enjoyed the wedding breakfast with his family in the withdrawing chamber.10 Here there was a notable absence. Charles’s eldest nephew, the twenty-three-year-old Prince Palatine, Charles Louis, had arrived in England in February hoping to prevent the Dutch alliance in order to marry Mary himself.11 Charles had tried for years to find rich brides for his nephews.12 He had always been generous to the family of his sister Elizabeth. Now that Charles was himself in financial straits, it was ungrateful of Charles Louis to have tried to claim Mary as his bride, and his coming to England was unhelpful on another front. For years there had been Puritans who believed the thoroughly Calvinist Charles Louis would be a more worthy King of England than Charles, or Charles’s sons by the Catholic Henrietta Maria.
At around 10 p.m. the ambassadors returned to Whitehall to witness the ritual consummation that would ensure the marriage was irrevocable. They were escorted from the withdrawing chamber to the bedchamber where William now lay with Mary, as Charles and Henrietta Maria looked on. Since Mary was only nine it was considered sufficient that what was witnessed was the children ‘associating’, as the Venetian ambassador put it.13 The ceremony was given drama by the queen’s dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, who produced an enormous pair of shears to cut the stitching on the nightgown into which the princess had been sewn. William then could touch her leg – flesh against flesh made the ritual complete. Afterwards William was taken back to his own quarters. He would return home at the end of the month. It was not expected that Mary would leave her parents for The Hague before her twelfth birthday. They did not want the sexual act to take place before she was physically mature. Charles wanted her to be fourteen, at least.
At eleven o’clock that night, with the wedding over, Charles learned that the plan to spring Strafford had failed. Notices had gone up that an attempt to free Strafford was planned and a crowd of around 1,000 people was now gathered in the darkness outside the Tower. By morning the crowd had shifted to Westminster and their numbers had grown. MPs were informed of the Tower plot and of a further conspiracy to bring the English army in the north to London to institute a coup. Warwick had indeed been busy. MPs promptly drew up a protestation in defence of the Protestant religion. Over the following days several of those wanted for interrogation about the Tower plot fled aboard. The queen’s favourite Henry Jermyn was amongst them, as was Suckling. The Countess of Leicester – sister of Lucy Carlisle – saw Suckling in Paris soon after and pronounced him still ‘good company, but much abated in his mirth’.14 A year later he vanished and was rumoured to have taken poison rather than live in poverty.
Lucy Carlisle was interrogated in front of a Commons committee about what she knew of the Tower plot.15 She learned more from them than they did from her – and the lesson she took away was that it was time to distance herself from her former affiliation to Strafford. Pym and her cousins Warwick and Essex were the new force in the land. Charles’s power, meanwhile, continued to diminish with a law passed that Parliament could not be dissolved without its own consent.16 Henrietta Maria would henceforth refer to it shrewdly as the ‘perpetual parliament’, for why would MPs ever vote themselves out? The law opened the door to the absolute power of whoever controlled Parliament. Currently that meant the Junto – and their mobs.
MPs who had abstained from the attainder bill against Strafford were publicly named and shamed, with news-sheets and pamphlets driving the verbal assaults on them as ‘enemies of their country’.17 They were also abused by the crowds that filled New Palace Yard, and peers, who had yet to take their final vote, had to push their way through men chanting at them ‘Justice! Justice!’, and ‘with great rudeness and insolence pressing upon those lords whom they suspected not to favour the bill’.18 Attendance in the Lords dropped from seventy peers to around forty-five. Catholic peers in particular kept away, unwilling to sign the protestation and fearful of ‘having their brains beaten out’ if they voted against the attainder.19
On Saturday 8 May the attainder passed its third reading, leaving Charles confronted with the decision of whether or not to give his assent to Strafford’s death. He could hear the baying of a crowd of around 12,000 men and women pressing at Whitehall Palace’s gate, threatening his life and that of ‘all the royal house’.20 It was too late to send his family away. The French ambassador had warned Henrietta Maria that the roads were now too dangerous.
The Bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, assured Charles that in signing Strafford’s attainder his ‘public conscience as a king might … oblige him to do that which was against his private conscience as a man’, in order to ‘preserve his kingdom … his wife … his children’.21 In Christian religious teaching governments have the right to do what individuals do not, such as executing a guilty criminal, when the public good demands it. But the key word here is ‘guilty’. Charles did not believe Strafford was guilty. Strafford himself, however, wrote urging Charles to sign his death warrant as the price of the public good, and the preservation of the kingdom.
The next day, Sunday – a week after Mary’s wedding – Charles Louis saw his uncle the king break down in tears at the council table as he struggled with his decision. Come the evening, outside the Tower, another violent crowd had to be subdued by rifle fire, leaving three dead. Charles’s fears for his people and his family sapped at his resolution to hold firm; at nine that night it broke, and he signed the attainder. Charles said if it was only his life at risk he would ‘gladly venture it’ to save Strafford, but ‘seeing his wife, children and all his kingdom was concerned in it, he was forced to give way’.22 ‘In this he showed himself a good Master, a good Christian and at last a good king,’ Charles Louis wrote to his mother Elizabeth, with smug satisfaction.23
The only hope left to Charles was that the Lords could yet be persuaded to show Strafford mercy. On 11 May, the day before the execution was due to take place, Charles sent his eldest son to plead that Strafford’s beheading be commuted to life imprisonment. The prince entered the Lords Chamber and duly delivered the message on which a man’s life depended. These were his father’s ‘natural counsellors’ and Charles informed them he had sent his son as the person ‘that of all your House is most dear to me’ to ask them to accept his plea for mercy. To one Royalist, looking back, this ‘strange submission of himself to the power and courtesy of his people’ amounted merely to a diminishment of majesty.24 Charles had humbled himself – and to no avail. The reply, delivered to Charles later that day, denied mercy on the grounds that sparing Strafford’s life could not be achieved ‘without evident danger to [the king] himself, his dearest consort the queen, and all the young princes, their children’.25 Strafford’s fate was sealed.
‘I was persuaded by those that I think wished me well, to choose rather what was safe than what was just,’ Charles later recalled.26 Strafford’s blood was now on his hands. He would never forgive himself.
Strafford sent a message to his fourteen-year-old son, William. They were ‘the last lines you are ever to receive from a father that tenderly loves you’, he wrote. He sent blessings for his daughters and asked his son to care for them, along with the boy’s stepmother.
On Tower Hill, where the scaffold was built, the crowds began gathering before dawn. When the sun came up on 12 May it was estimated 100,000 or more had flocked to witness Strafford’s death. The Lieutenant of the Tower feared his prisoner would be lynched on the walk from the Tower gates to the Hill and so Strafford was given a military escort. Spectators were perched on the tiered benches of the grandstands like birds on the branches of a great tree. From up on high they watched Strafford, a figure in black, moving on the scaffold, speaking, praying. When he lay prostrate on the block he vanished from the view of those on the lower stands. Then the axe was swung, his fallen head was raised up for all to see, and in the shadow of the Tower the spring morning rang with the ugly song of their cheers.