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ON 7 NOVEMBER 1619, a pregnant Elizabeth Stuart was processed to the high altar at St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. She was attended for her coronation by blue- and violet-clothed Bohemian clergy and was bestowed with the crown of St Elizabeth, a circlet of double arches surmounted by a cross. Anna of Denmark had been disappointed when her daughter had been married to a mere Elector of the Palatinate. Now, eight months after Anna’s death, Elizabeth’s husband Frederick was King of Bohemia and she was his crowned consort. For how long his reign would continue remained to be seen. Frederick had accepted the throne at the hands of Calvinist rebels against the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, despite his father-in-law King James’s strong advice. Frederick’s enemies had warned that his reign would vanish with the snows of winter. The following September, 1620, Habsburg armies made ready to fulfil that promise and advanced on Prague.
Elizabeth sent her ‘only dear brother’ Charles a desperate plea to ‘move his majesty [King James] that now he would assist us’.1 Charles responded as his martial brother Prince Henry would surely have done. He promised her £10,000 of his own revenue, and offered to lead a military expedition in person. James forbad it. In November 1620 Habsburg forces defeated Frederick at the Battle of White Mountain and Elizabeth fled Prague with Cossack horsemen at her heels. Legend has it her new baby, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was almost left behind, tossed into her carriage at the last minute, the swaddling unravelling at her feet. The lower Palatine territories of the Rhineland were also soon lost, overrun by Spanish Habsburg forces in alliance with their Austrian cousins. Elizabeth and Frederick were forced into exile in The Hague, the capital of the rebel Calvinist Dutch Republic. The Habsburg prophecy had come to pass. Frederick’s short reign had earned Charles’s sister no more than the bitter sobriquet ‘the Winter Queen’.
Thousands were now being killed in Bohemia. Protestant worship was banned, while the Palatinate had been given to the Catholic Maximilian of Bavaria for services to the Habsburg cause. With the Protestant states of Germany and the Netherlands still at war with both the Habsburgs and the ‘Catholic League’, under Maximilian, it seemed only a matter of time before the Lutheran kingdoms of Scandinavia and Calvinist Britain were drawn into the conflict. James persisted, however, in seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
James believed he could persuade the Habsburgs to withdraw from the Palatinate as part of a marriage alliance between Charles and the infanta Maria of Spain. An additional benefit would be a huge dowry that would help free James from financial dependence on Parliament. In return, James would offer the Habsburgs an alliance against their Continental rivals the French. But first James had to convince the Habsburgs that, if they refused his offer, he would fight a war against them. To this end he called a parliament in 1621 and asked for the subsidies he would need.
James’s MPs instead demanded that Charles marry a Protestant. James was outraged that the Commons saw fit to encroach on a decision that fell under the royal prerogative. Indeed, when they also attacked his raising of customs duties outside parliamentary control, it seemed to him they had left no aspect of royal sovereignty ‘unattempted but the striking of coin’.2 He dissolved Parliament, but Puritans in particular continued to attack the Spanish match as an alliance with forces of Satan.
Elizabeth I was portrayed as having been a paragon of warlike intent against Spain and the myth was used as a means of criticising the peace-loving James. The martial Prince Henry, meanwhile, was remembered as her true heir. There were posthumous advantages to Henry’s reputation in having lived long enough to embody great hopes, and not so long as to have had the opportunity to disappoint them. With Charles seen as James’s dutiful son, the old war party even sought a legal basis for an alternative dynasty to the Stuarts from amongst junior descendants of the Tudors.3
In the face of this Puritan opposition to peace, James began to actively favour anti-Puritan clergy within the Church of England.fn1 To his dismay, however, the Spanish were slow to respond to his overtures. As the marriage negotiations dragged on, and anxious to help his sister, Charles decided the answer was to cross Europe incognito and break the deadlock by winning the infanta in person. There was a proverb Charles quoted, ‘Few great talkers are good doers’.4 His father was a good talker, but Charles wanted to take action. Buckingham encouraged Charles in his project, although others feared the prince could be kidnapped in Spain, or even killed.
Charles was of an age when he wished to develop an identity separate from his father. The danger for Buckingham in this was that when Charles became king he might signal his independence by swiftly retiring his father’s favourite. There would certainly be pressure on Charles to do so.
The 1621 parliament had seen the revival of the medieval practice of ‘impeachment’, whereby royal officials accused of criminal behaviour were tried and punished by Parliament. It had been used successfully against James’s Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, and Buckingham feared he could be next. He was deeply resented for his monopoly of power, ‘managing his glory to the eclipse of other great men’.fn2 There was also anxiety about the nature of his relationship with the king. It was said that in Europe ‘men talked familiarly’ of James’s unnatural love for Buckingham, that ‘the sin of sodomy’ was now frequent in London, where ‘boys grown to the height of wickedness’ painted their faces like women, and that the whole realm was at risk of divine punishment.5 Buckingham needed royal protection in the next reign, and so made himself integral to Charles’s first solo political venture, backing it to the hilt with the king. Buckingham told James that Charles’s plan would put the Spanish on the spot, and that James had ‘once for all to know what satisfaction they were like to have in the business of the Palatinate’.6
It was with James’s extremely reluctant agreement that the venturous knights left for Paris, where they had their adventures at the Louvre and Charles saw Henrietta Maria for the first time, before riding on to Spain. Avoiding wolves and (with more difficulty) duels, they arrived in Madrid on 7 March 1623.
Charles and Buckingham passed suburban palaces with beautiful gardens and rode on down streets of great houses with plain brick facades embellished only with granite doorways and iron balconies. A travel book of the period observed that while Parisians walked ‘so quickly and actively that they look as though the law were after them’, here in Madrid the ‘calm and repose’ of the Spanish was such that ‘any who saw them, will think that they have just recovered from a serious illness’.7 There was rather less repose in Madrid, however, when the astonishing news broke of Charles’s arrival.
Their Habsburg king, the seventeen-year-old Philip IV, was treated as a living icon. Tall and fair-haired, with the undershot jaw that was a feature of the family’s inbreeding, he was rarely seen in public.8 Most of the time he was kept screened from the world by a barrier of protocol, jealously guarded by an elect group of nobles and officials. Diplomats who were invited to see him in the gloomy Moorish fortress of the Alcazar were escorted through a succession of dark but richly furnished rooms to an audience chamber where they would find the young king standing alone by a small console table. He would raise his hat in greeting, then remain still and silent while the diplomat spoke.9 A few polite words from the king would then conclude the audience. Any visiting princes had to be greeted with even greater formality to protect the divine image of monarchy. They weren’t expected to bound into town, hoping to throw themselves at the feet of Philip’s carefully chaperoned sister.
The teenage Philip was shocked, but also excited, to discover he was to entertain a Prince of Wales. When Philip had become king two years earlier, he confessed he had found himself quite unprepared for his duties, adrift in a ‘sea of confusions and ocean of difficulties’.10 He knew Charles was highly educated, an accomplished horseman, and a young man of taste. He wanted to both learn from him and impress him.
Philip had recently introduced an entirely black court dress, worn unadorned save for a small white standing collar. He decided to relax this code. He would not go so far as to wear colour but, in honour of Charles’s visit, his suits were sewn with gold thread and rich jewels. The personal encounters Charles had wanted with the infanta Maria were not permitted, but he was given a suite of rooms in the Alcazar. A household was also appointed for him and he was waited on in a manner unknown at the English court since the days of the Tudors.
James had introduced to England the relaxed style of the Scottish court where he would chat to those around him while he ate. In Madrid noblemen served Charles on their knees, and watched him take his food almost as if they were witnessing Holy Communion. Charles saw in image and ritual what his father had written on the theory and nature of divine kingship. He was impressed, and, as the summer heat fell on Madrid like a weighty blanket, days turned to weeks and weeks to months.
Philip’s court, despite its formalities, was also one of glitter and liveliness. There were fireworks, bullfights, torchlit processions and chivalric games, in which Philip appeared splendidly arrayed, commanding squadrons of horses. There were balls too, ballets and plays, which incorporated elaborate theatrical machines that allowed quick and dramatic changes of scenery. Above all, however, there was art. This was Spain’s golden age and Charles wanted to grab all it had to offer. He purchased Renaissance works by Titian, Raphael and many others. He had an exceptional eye as a collector, investing in the cutting edge of modern art as well as old masters. Only eighteen months later Peter Paul Rubens would call Charles ‘the greatest student of art among the princes of the world’.11 Buckingham – whom James made a duke in May – shared Charles’s tastes and was the perfect companion in this regard.
The Spanish were shocked, nevertheless, to see how Buckingham would sit while the prince stood, and even leave his hat on, the two men calling each other ‘ridiculous names’. It was as if they were ordinary brothers rather than prince and servant. James had, perhaps unintentionally, encouraged this – they were his ‘babies’, although of them Buckingham was ‘my bastard brat’.12 Philip’s leading minister, the Count of Olivarez, expressed concern that if the infanta married Charles and did not immediately put a stop to this ‘unsuitable licence’ then ‘she would herself experience its mischievous consequences’.13 It was not to come to that, however, as it became evident that the religious differences between Charles and Maria were too great for any marriage to take place. The Habsburg infanta, as pink-cheeked and full-lipped as a German doll, believed that marrying a Protestant would imperil her soul, while Charles angrily rejected the efforts Philip made to convert him to Catholicism.
In October 1623 Charles and Buckingham returned to England. The nation was relieved that Charles was safe and remained Protestant. Church bells rang and cheering crowds lined the roads from Portsmouth to London to greet the prince’s return. But he had been left angered by the failure of the trip to Madrid. It appeared to Charles that Buckingham had been correct in suggesting that the Spanish had all the while been stringing his father – and himself – along, and taken them for fools.
Buckingham, meanwhile, wrote to James to tell him how he was looking forward to their reunion, and promised never to part from him again. He was ‘only bent’, he said, on having James’s ‘leg soon in my arms’.14 The collapse of the Spanish match would, nevertheless, now open up a rift with the peace-seeking king. Buckingham’s months with Charles, and the stress of the marriage negotiations, had forged a deep loyalty in the prince for his friend, and Buckingham continued to groom his affections. Charles had given up on his father’s dream of a Spanish match, but he had not given up his intention to help his sister. If the Palatinate were not to be regained by peace, then, Charles believed, it must be regained by war.
The Winter Queen and her children were Charles’s heirs. If her eldest son ever inherited the Stuart kingdoms, then the Palatinate would belong to the English and Scottish crowns. For Charles, its restoration to Elizabeth’s husband was a dynastic imperative and a national duty. While Charles pressed his father to plan for military conflict with the Habsburgs, Buckingham, once again, backed his policy and piled further pressure on the king.
Charles’s anti-Habsburg policy stood to win over some of Buckingham’s fiercest critics, many of whom came from the old war party, now often called the ‘patriots’. But were their hopes of the possible gains of a war with the Habsburgs in any way realistic? The Stuart Crown was ‘in a miserable state’, one Frenchman observed, ‘without money, without friends and without reputation’.15 The royal income of Castile alone was six times that of England.16 The Habsburgs had secured Bohemia by armed force. James had no armed force. After James had made peace in 1604 the English army had virtually ceased to exist, and the logistic supply systems for food, clothing and weapons had all gone.17
With no standing army and little money, Charles needed an alliance that would bring him both. The obvious place to look was France. The Bourbons had a history of backing Protestants when it suited their dynastic interests. A marriage to Louis XIII’s sister, the pretty young Henrietta Maria, would provide the Stuart Crown with the support of Louis’ great army, and money from a dowry with which to raise an army of their own. Charles also sought tax support from his father’s subjects, asking the king to call a parliament where he would seek to ask for the necessary subsidies. In 1624, he duly sat in the House of Lords as Prince of Wales and proved to be an effective leader of the ‘patriot’ party.18 There were concerns that a French marriage would oblige James to ‘take off or slacken the execution’ of the penal laws against English Catholics. These laws forced Catholics to attend Protestant services or face ruinous fines and denied them the freedom to attend Catholic worship. Although there was only a small Catholic minority in England, the threats in Europe meant that rooting out all popery was seen as vital for Protestant survival in Britain. After James had signed a House of Commons petition promising to continue to enforce these laws, MPs voted tax subsidies of £200,000. The money paid for an army of mercenaries and pressed men under the German general Ernst von Mansfeld, with the intention they be sent to fight the Habsburgs in the Netherlands on the side of the Dutch rebels.
Some of the English poor drafted into the army rubbed salt into their eyes to escape being sent across the Channel. James was scarcely more enthusiastic and in mid February 1625, he called a halt to the war. Countermanding Buckingham’s orders to relieve the besieged Dutch garrison at Breda, James forbad Mansfield from engaging with Spanish forces. Mansfield’s army was already succumbing to disease in the cold and wet weather as they awaited orders, and their supplies were dwindling. If the army did not have their orders to march soon, Parliament’s money would be wasted – and the war policy Buckingham had advocated with Charles would fail. To add to Buckingham’s worries the former Spanish ambassador, the Conde de Gondomar, was proposing to return to England and help James gather support for a revived Anglo-Spanish peace.
In England too, meanwhile, the weather was bad. There were floods in London, where Westminster Hall was under two feet of water. This was particularly dangerous to the old, and at the beginning of March 1625 James developed a ‘tertian ague’ while at the Elizabethan palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire. The fifty-eight-year-old king was overweight and heavy drinking had further weakened his health. Nevertheless, he had survived such fevers many times before. Indeed he was reported as recovering well when, on 21 March, he became ‘extremely sick’. The cause appeared to be a poultice and a cordial brought by Buckingham.19 With the king suffering violent fits of diarrhoea, his Scottish attendants began to quarrel. Some feared Buckingham had unintentionally poisoned the king. James refused to have the cordial again.20 On 25 March a Habsburg agent in the palace reported his suspicion that Buckingham had tried to murder King James. Out of Mansfield’s force of 12,000 only 5,000 were now fit for service. James was still awaiting Gondomar, but the agent reported that Buckingham had used the king’s stamp to sign a warrant to stop the Spaniard from coming.21
Two days later Charles was sitting at the side of his dying father. James tried to speak to his son, but found he had ‘no strength to express his intentions’.22 James VI of Scots and I of England died at noon on 27 March 1625, with Buckingham holding his hand.
James was perhaps the greatest ever King of Scots, but he was an outsider in England and it showed. He had left a difficult legacy for his son. His incontinence with money, his quarrels with his English parliaments, and the anger provoked by negotiations for the defunct Spanish match had generated mistrust, while royal finances remained in a parlous state with the Crown dependent on the diminished revenue of a medieval monarch. There were problems stored up for the future also in his other kingdoms. James had failed to unite their divergent religions. The Irish remained predominately Catholic, while the Scots kept their distinctive kirk. Subjects who differed from their king in matters of religion were judged unlikely to be fully obedient or loyal. Charles had bridges to mend everywhere, and needed to do so urgently if he was to have his people behind him for the conflict ahead.
In the following days England continued to be wracked by storms. As the words of the proclamation declaring Charles king were read in Cambridge, the townsfolk were unsettled by a blast of thunder like a cannon’s roar.23 After over twenty years of Jacobean peace it heralded the new king’s war.