3

A Marriage Alliance

IT WAS DUSK when the procession accompanying James’s coffin arrived in London. Black smoke from thousands of coal fires curled up from tall chimneys into the gloom. A quarter of a million subjects and immigrant workers lived in Charles’s capital. Usually the streets were jammed with people and carts as well as the newly licensed hackney carriages.¹ But that night, 4 April 1625, the roads on the processional route were cleared. Crowds gathered behind rails to watch the mayor and aldermen greet their new king, who rode before his father’s bier, accompanied by a guard of foot soldiers and horsemen. Behind, a long line of coaches carried ‘many great lords’.² Haloed in torchlight the procession continued to Denmark House, the classical palace on the Strand James had built for his wife, and where James’s coffin was to lie in state.

Just over a week later Charles lifted James’s orders refusing General Mansfield permission to fight. With the army now heading for the besieged Dutch garrison at Breda, Charles pushed ahead with the marriage to Henrietta Maria to seal the French alliance. Unfortunately his bride was already proving an unpopular choice. Women had been key to the survival of Catholicism in England. Catholic men could be – and were – stripped of their property if they refused to attend Protestant services. Wives owned no property and were more defiant. They harboured priests and raised their children as Catholic. Henrietta Maria was, furthermore, no ordinary Catholic. Her brother boasted he was the ‘first Catholic among all kings’.³

Rumours had also surfaced that the French marriage treaty had stipulated an end to the persecution of Charles’s Catholic subjects: rumours that were based on fact. Secret promises had been made that Catholics would not be punished for worshipping in their own homes. It was a necessary concession and reluctantly made. Charles now acted to allay Protestant fears. He refused leading Catholics the funeral blacks required to attend his father’s funeral, due to take place on 7 May. This snub signalled that Catholics would remain second class. Anxieties about the French marriage remained, nevertheless, as a proxy wedding took place in Paris on 1 May while Charles remained in England for the funeral preparations.

Henrietta Maria was now fifteen, but small for her age and only ‘on the very skirts of womanhood’.⁴ In other words she was a barely pubescent child. For much of her life it had been expected that she would marry into a cadet branch of the French royal family and her education had been limited to religious and courtly matters. With this she had acquired a ‘spirituality’ and ‘delicacy’, but to one French courtier, ‘above all there was something about her person that was noble and grand. Amongst all the princesses she had the great likeness to her father’, Henri IV; ‘Like him she had a noble heart, a magnanimous intrepid heart full of tenderness and pity.’⁵

An elevated walkway hung with violet satin had been built at the archbishop’s palace, giving the crowds a perfect view of the bride as she was accompanied the short distance to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. ‘The princes, marshals, dukes and peers of France’ stepped out first, each dressed ‘in robes of inestimable value’: a brilliant moving tableau. Henrietta Maria followed in a shimmering bridal gown of silver tissue and gold fleur-de-lys, and a diamond-studded crown. Her figure was ‘finely proportioned’, she had ‘a perfect complexion’, her ‘large, black eyes’ were ‘soft, vivacious and shining’, her hair dark, her ‘teeth pretty’ and ‘big mouth … nicely made’.⁶ King Louis walked on his sister’s right in his velvet and ermine robes. The princesses of France bore her velvet mantle, embroidered with another large fleur-de-lys, and behind them was her mother, Marie de’ Medici: the former Regent of France a living reminder that, beyond their roles as wives and mothers, queen consorts could wield significant political power.

At the west entrance to the cathedral, Louis handed Henrietta Maria to Charles’s proxy. The role had been given to a kinsman, the French Duc de Chevreuse. He was a member of the Guise family of Charles’s great-grandmother, Mary of Guise, the French wife of James V of Scots. As Charles was in mourning for his father, the duke had dressed in black, but his cloak was so thickly embroidered with gold and diamonds that ‘he seemed to burn and bear a living flame about him’.⁷ The wedding vows were taken on the platform at the doorway under a golden canopy. Since Charles would not attend a Catholic service the duke – although himself Catholic – would not enter the cathedral for the nuptial Mass. Charles’s young bride walked alone through such a profusion of candles the church resembled ‘the Palace of the Sun, described by Ovid in his Second Book of the transmutations of shapes’. Against a backdrop of cloth of silver, gold and rich tapestries she then took Communion alone beneath the soaring Gothic arches.⁸ That night, however, the Duc de Chevreuse played Charles one last time, lying in bed alongside Henrietta Maria, one leg touching, in a symbolic consummation of the marriage.⁹

Charles longed to see his wife for himself and spent much of his spare time gazing at her picture bemoaning the fact ‘he could not have the happiness to behold her person’.¹⁰ She, in turn, was surely curious about her groom. Before they could meet, however, James’s funeral had to take place.

James’s embalmed body was still lying in state at Denmark House, his coffin covered with a velvet cloth and mounted with a lifelike effigy dressed in royal robes. It was a statement of the undying nature of monarchical authority. This was something the funeral would express even more dramatically. Charles had borrowed the unprecedented sum of £50,000 for a funeral judged ‘the greatest ever known in England’.¹¹ A cavalcade of several thousand plain-black-clad mourners escorted James’s body a little over a mile to the medieval splendour of Westminster Abbey. Each mourner was precisely ranked according to his status, while heraldic banners – symbols of chivalric virtue and dynastic greatness – shone in brilliant colour against this river of black. Buckingham rode one place behind the coffin, in his role as Master of the Horse. But ‘the greatest glory’, it was said, ‘was Charles’s own presence’. Dressed in a long black robe and hood he walked immediately behind the chariot bearing James’s body – it was only the third time an English king had ever done so and it was judged a striking mark of his love for his father.

In the abbey the congregation heard a two-hour sermon recalling James’s survival of dangers, his success in achieving the union of the crowns and his strong support of episcopacy. James had argued that bishops, like kings, drew their authority from God and to deny their divinely sanctioned status was also to deny divine-right kingship: ‘no bishop, no king’, as he had once said. The sermon concluded with the statement that James’s kingly body now lived on in his son. At this, Charles stepped forward to accept his father’s hatchment, receiving James’s heraldic arms in a ritual enactment of the succession and an advertisement of the stable transfer of power.

With the funeral over, Charles now dispatched Buckingham to Paris to collect his bride and firm up the French alliance. A revolt had just broken out in La Rochelle, a key port in south-west France and a Huguenot stronghold. Charles feared that Louis was poised to make peace with Philip of Spain in order to free him to focus on crushing this Calvinist rebellion at home. Charles relied on Buckingham to keep Louis on track for war.

Buckingham was more than ready to impress the Bourbon court. He had ordered three coaches lined with velvet and gold lace to convey him around Paris. For travel by river, he took twenty-two boatmen with him, each of whom would be dressed in sky-coloured taffeta embroidered with gold. Even they, however, could not compete with his own appearance. Buckingham had packed twenty-seven rich suits in which to represent Charles. One alone, in white velvet spangled with diamonds, was said to be worth ‘fourscore thousand pounds’ – more than a rich knight would earn in over a decade.¹²

When Buckingham then appeared in Paris, he was judged ‘the best-looking and best-built man in the world’. Dressed in his ‘splendour he filled the populace with admiration, the ladies with delight – and something more; the gallants with jealousy, and the husbands, with something worse’.¹³

He discovered that Marie de’ Medici had hurried Rubens to finish a cycle of twenty-one full-length portraits celebrating her achievements in time for the wedding celebrations. The paintings had just been installed at the newly completed Luxembourg Palace and she took Buckingham to see them. It was impossible not to be impressed, both by the great palace, with its windows of rock crystal framed in silver, and also by Rubens’ masterpieces, which today are kept in the Louvre. He was a profoundly original and powerful Counter-Reformation artist, and one whose dynamic and plump nudes would give the term ‘Rubenesque’ to the English language. Marie’s blank face and sexualised body overwhelm any images of her husband and her son. They include one of her giving birth to Louis, a scene reimagined in a vast outside space with Marie seated on a throne-like birthing chair. Marie gazes with her hazel eyes at the infant Louis, in the arms of a nurse, but he no more outshines her than does the pug that sits at her feet.¹⁴

Buckingham immediately commissioned Rubens to begin a ceiling painting for his own house in London. It was to depict him being carried up out of the reach of the forces of Envy towards a temple of Virtue and Abundance: a theme close to his heart. The forces of envy against Buckingham were stronger than ever, with it disappointing many ‘that he should be found favourite to both father and son’.¹⁵

Meanwhile Paris glittered with welcome for Buckingham. Suppers, musical evenings and masked balls were thrown for the duke and his train of English and Scottish courtiers. Louis XIII’s new chief minister, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu, gave one such party in the gardens of his small country palace of Ruel.¹⁶ Richelieu’s wiry frame, dressed in the flashes of scarlet that denoted his cardinal’s rank, exuded nervous energy. It was said you either liked Richelieu or hated him. He was not a man who inspired neutral opinions. He had served Marie de’ Medici as her Secretary of State during the Regency. After her fall, when she had plotted with Louis’ enemies, he had effected the reconciliation between son and mother. Louis had made him his chief minister the previous year and Richelieu was now set on making France the greatest power in Europe. Cardinal or not, his loyalties in all secular matters lay with the king, not the papacy; if he thought it was in France’s interest to ally with Protestant heretics against Catholic Spain, he would.

Richelieu’s gardens were his place of relaxation.¹⁷ There were evergreen trees and avenues with elaborate fountains. One, in the form of a serpent, shot out plumes of water sixty feet into the air that would sharply twist to catch the unwary passer-by. Buckingham had still more disconcerting experiences, however, at Richelieu’s hands. In their private meetings the cardinal refused to align France more openly against the Habsburgs, arguing that a formal military alliance would only antagonise neutral countries. When Buckingham requested that Charles at least be given a written promise that Louis not make a separate peace with Spain, Richelieu dismissed it as unnecessary. It seemed that his focus would indeed be on crushing the Huguenot rebellion. And even Rubens took the liberty of lecturing Buckingham on the virtues of peace with Spain, as the duke sat for his portrait.

Buckingham was not the only Englishman in Paris to be troubled by Richelieu’s slipperiness concerning the alliance. So was the diplomat Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who had led the marriage negotiations. The thirty-four-year-old Holland was a ‘very handsome man, of a lovely and winning presence’. By nature easy-going, and generous with his money, he also relished intrigue and Richelieu was now in his sights.

The French alliance had a personal dimension for Holland, one that was linked to his family’s legacy of hatred for Spain and support for the Calvinist cause in Europe. His mother, Penelope Devereux, was the 2nd Earl of Essex’s favourite sister. When Holland was ten he had seen her go to prison, reportedly for urging his uncle on in his revolt against Elizabeth I in 1601. Holland’s elder brother, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, had continued in the family tradition. He was the greatest anti-Spanish privateer of the day, and deeply involved in colonial and trading enterprises in the Spanish-dominated Americas.¹⁸ Warwick had acted, for example, as a signatory of the famous Pierce Patent, which confirmed the rights of the Puritans who had sailed on the Mayflower to plant and govern land in the Plymouth area of New England.¹⁹

Holland had had to be more circumspect than Warwick in defying James’s peace with Spain. As a younger son he did not have his brother’s vast landed inheritance. He needed a successful court career to pay for the magnificence he enjoyed, and his achievements had recently earned him his earldom. Nevertheless, Holland shared the family’s anti-Spanish values, as well as having a taste for women in his mother’s image: clever, alluring and dangerous. His current lover was reputed to be no less a figure than the wife of Charles’s proxy, the twenty-four-year-old Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse – or Mme de Chevreuse as she was known. She was due to travel with Henrietta Maria to England as dame de la chaise percée, the queen’s closest body servant.²⁰ Meanwhile, she was happy to join Holland in his intrigues.

A fair-skinned, petite woman, Mme de Chevreuse looked innocent enough. She had a round, almost baby face, framed with long tawny curls called ‘serpents’ and an expression that was both ‘majestic and sweet’. This belied a ruthless political animal, recalled in Richelieu’s memoirs with grudging respect: ‘She had a fine mind, a potent beauty, which she knew how to use to her advantage, was never disheartened by any misfortune and always retained her evenness of temper.’²¹ Mme de Chevreuse, in return, viewed the cardinal only with contempt for his social origins in merely minor nobility.^fn1 The higher nobility believed they had a right to dominate the king’s councils and she saw the power given to Richelieu as an insult. As for Louis, she thought him ‘an idiot’.²² With Richelieu out of the way, she believed the French king would be easy to manipulate – and she advised Holland and Buckingham that the most effective tool to weaken the cardinal’s power was Louis’ queen, the green-eyed Anne of Austria.

Mme de Chevreuse and Queen Anne were close friends, their intimacy sealed by a tragic event three years earlier. A boisterous game the young women had been playing in the corridors of the Louvre had ended in the queen miscarrying her first child. Louis had sent Chevreuse into exile, which she had bitterly resented, while his angry treatment of his wife had damaged his marriage. Mme de Chevreuse was now back at court and closer than ever to Anne. No one was better placed to help Buckingham ingratiate himself with Louis’ wife and the French would never forget his efforts. Buckingham’s extravagant glamour, his flirtatious behaviour with the Queen of France and his enmity with Richelieu later inspired Alexandre Dumas’ nineteenth-century novel The Three Musketeers.²³

Henrietta Maria spent the eve of her departure from Paris in a Carmelite convent. It was a peaceful and spiritual retreat, offering the new Queen of England a simple diet and time to reflect.²⁴ In the far future, when Henrietta Maria had all the more reason to appreciate its serenity, she would ask for her heart to be buried here.

On 23 May she was carried out of Paris in a litter lined with red velvet, amidst ‘shouts of applause’ and ‘a countless throng of people’.²⁵ In her train were an estimated 4,000 courtiers, ‘all the flowers of France’, servants, diplomats and members of her family, as well as Buckingham and his British train. Scarlet coaches rolled along the bumpy roads on gilded wheels, the footmen dressed in the red of the Stuart livery, the horses trapped to match, with white plumes of feathers nodding from their heads. Behind, carts carried the trousseau. There were beds of estate, furniture for her chapels and a vast wardrobe of clothes: embroidered shoes, red velvet boots lined with marten fur, perfumed gloves, cutwork handkerchiefs, a royal mantle of crimson violet, a petticoat in the fawn colour ‘Isabella’, embellished in gold, a silver dress embroidered with brilliant coloured flowers, and much, much more.²⁶

To one Englishman in the train the young Henrietta Maria was ‘a sweet, lovely creature’, and a ‘brave lady’ who was ‘full of wit’.²⁷ Holland had also found her intelligent, observing that her conversation showed ‘extraordinary discretion and quickness’. Although Buckingham’s focus remained on Anne of Austria, and Venetian diplomats reported growing gossip about the pair, this was largely forgotten in the great spectacle of Henrietta Maria’s formal entry to Amiens.²⁸ The gates of the city had been hung with the arms of England, and seven triumphal arches, built at enormous expense, led her in procession to the cathedral. The last was fifteen metres high and depicted five virtuous former queens of England.²⁹ The strain on Buckingham of a potential collapse of the French alliance against Spain was beginning to tell – and it prompted a row with Charles’s young wife.

The anger felt by Protestants in England at the impending lifting of the anti-Catholic penal laws was mirrored in France by the hope that, indeed, English Catholics would now be allowed some religious freedom. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV had founded a new department – Propaganda Fide – for the evangelising of the faith. It would prove a powerful force across the globe. There were now twenty-eight priests in Henrietta Maria’s train, each of them ready to serve as a Counter-Reformation missionary. The sight of such men, dressed in Catholic religious clothes, was bound to cause deep unease in England, and Buckingham knew that as the man judged responsible for the treaty that permitted this, he would be blamed. His concerns were brought into even sharper focus with the arrival at Amiens of a papal legate.

Henrietta Maria had written to Pope Urban VIII promising to remain faithful to the church after her marriage and to work for ‘the liberty of the Catholics’ in England – that is, for their freedom from persecution.³⁰ Without this the Pope might not have granted the dispensation necessary to permit her marriage to a heretic king. The Pope’s representative now expressed the Pope’s delight in her promises, bestowing on Henrietta Maria the honour of the Golden Rose, an ancient Catholic symbol of joy following sorrow. In an accompanying text the Pope further urged her to become like a rose, ‘a flower of the root of Jesse among the spines of Hebrew iniquity’, who would spread the true Catholic faith amongst the heathen in England.³¹

When the ceremony was over, Buckingham berated Henrietta Maria for the warm welcome she had given the legate. It must have been intimidating for a young girl to be lectured by a strapping man like Buckingham, who was also the representative of an as yet unmet husband. Nevertheless, Henrietta Maria defended herself, reminding him ‘that it behoved her to treat with respect the representative of the head of her religion’.³² It was an unfortunate start to their relationship, and on this unhappy note, the stay in Amiens concluded.

Marie de’ Medici had been unwell for days and remained too ill to travel, so she said farewell to Henrietta Maria outside the town. Marie had enjoyed a strong influence over her fatherless daughter and she now gave Henrietta Maria a final letter of instruction, written in her own hand ‘so that it will be dearer to you’. It reminded the queen to be grateful for the privileges God had given her and to remember that she had been placed on earth for His glory. A longer version, which also still survives, encouraged her to love her husband and to be kind to all his subjects, but also to remember she had a duty to her persecuted co-religionists: ‘God has sent you into this country for them … who have suffered for so many years’.³³ It was a role the young queen accepted with the utmost seriousness. It was traditional for a queen consort to intercede on behalf of the condemned. Who would she wish to intercede for more than those punished for sharing her religious faith? Two days later Henrietta Maria was on the coast at Boulogne, ‘in good health and very merry’.

The last of the French queens of England, Margaret of Anjou, had also left her homeland aged fifteen. It was 1445 and England, under the Lancastrian Henry VI, was losing the Hundred Years War with France. Margaret of Anjou was seen as the child of the enemy. When that war was lost and civil war came to England, she had fought bravely for her husband’s cause, but this negative view of her never changed. Shakespeare condemned her as the ‘she wolf of France’ and a ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. Now, 180 years later, English Protestants judged Henrietta Maria a child of the powerful Catholic enemy. But hers was ‘a nature inclined to gaiety’ and she was excited to be taking the boat from France.³⁴ Henrietta Maria was watched that evening dashing to the water’s edge, letting the waves lap over her shoes: a haunting image of carefree childhood before the wind caught the sails of an English ship and brought her to a new shore.³⁵