4
HENRIETTA MARIA SPENT her first night in England at Dover Castle. Buckingham had had it dressed with goods from various royal palaces, but many of these furnishings were old. Her servants expressed their disappointment. Charles was also unable to afford, either politically or financially, to fund such lavish greetings as had been seen on Henrietta Maria’s route from Paris to Boulogne. From the castle, if she now looked out across the sea and it was clear, she could see France and mourn what was past. ‘Goodbye, sweet banks of the Seine where I have enjoyed a thousand pleasurable entertainments … Fountains, goodbye, I will no longer look into the mirror of your crystal waves.’1 If she turned inland, there was, however, also the kingdom of her future, with its beautiful ‘up and down’ countryside, ‘many good woods and pretty houses with rows of trees’.2
The young queen was due to meet Charles the following day at Canterbury, seventeen miles away. Instead, he arrived without ceremony at ten the following morning. Henrietta Maria was having breakfast. ‘Nimble and quick’, she dashed down the stairs to greet him, falling to her knees as she saw her husband for the first time. Charles had grown a moustache and a short ‘royale’ beard, and although he was dressed casually in his riding clothes and tall boots there was ‘a majesty in his appearance’. Henrietta Maria was nervous: she did not yet speak English and, after giving a rehearsed speech in French about her love and duty, she burst into tears. Charles raised her from her knees, took her in his arms and kissed her.
Charles had been warned that his wife was small and was surprised to discover she reached his shoulder.3 He glanced down to check if she was wearing high shoes. She noticed immediately and, raising the hem of her dress, assured him, ‘Sire, I stand upon mine own feet. I have no help by art. This high am I, and neither higher nor lower.’4 Charles’s father had advised that with a wife you must ‘rule her as your pupil’.5 If so, it was evident Henrietta Maria was not going to be a slow-witted or unobservant pupil.
That night, Charles’s first with his wife, was spent at Canterbury in the archbishop’s palace. There, Mme de Chevreuse handed Henrietta Maria her night attire in a formal ceremony and prepared her for her bridal coucher. When Charles arrived in her bedchamber, he asked their servants to leave. He then bolted all seven doors to her rooms. This was to be a private night, without courtiers joking around the bedside, as they had at court weddings under James. Henrietta Maria had been told something of what to expect in her first sexual experience. Her tutor in this matter, Mme de Chevreuse, had done her job well and would return to France that summer having earned Henrietta Maria’s affection and Charles’s gratitude.6
The next day Charles emerged from the queen’s rooms ‘very jocund’. Henrietta Maria appeared more subdued. She was concerned for her friends. The crumbling Anglo-French military alliance was already having an impact. Nationalist tensions had emerged on the way to Canterbury, when a row had broken out over which women could travel in her carriage.7 The English had taken the side of their ladies, with their French rivals described dismissively as ‘poor, pitiful sort of women’. Only Mme de Chevreuse was judged worth looking at and it was said ‘though she be fair’, she ‘paints foully’.8
Henrietta Maria retreated amongst her familiar friends, but that evening, in her rooms, she invited Charles to watch from behind a screen as she danced a slow sarabande by candlelight.9 Dance was ‘a kind of mute rhetoric’, a teacher of the art had once said, the movements suggesting the dancer was worthy to be ‘acclaimed, admired and loved’.10 Charles looked on discreetly, as he had when he saw her perform in the masque in Paris in 1623, but as she danced her French adaption of this old and erotic Spanish dance, he had the opportunity see how beautiful his wife was growing. Buckingham boasted in a letter written to Louis that night, it would not be long before Charles sired a child with the queen.11 Charles’s happiness was still evident on 16 June when, with Henrietta Maria at his side, they approached London by barge.
The king and queen were dressed in matching green costumes, the colour chosen as a symbol of their love and youthful fertility. The London skyline, with its myriad church spires and tall chimneys, was veiled in rain. This had not, however, put off the crowds. James had told Charles that his people’s love would be his ‘chiefest’ security, yet had also warned that such love was best earned by ruling a well-ordered society: that meant subduing the rabble, not exciting it by playing to the gallery.12 Taking his father’s advice, Charles had instructed his subjects ‘to dispense with public shows of their zeal, cheerfulness and alacrity’.13 Yet still they cheered along the riverbanks and a courtier reported he had ‘never beheld the king to look so merrily’.14 One ship by the shore was leaning dangerously in the water, with over a hundred people piled on the side with the best view of the royal couple. As they bunched closer the ship tipped, then capsized, spilling the occupants into the river. Numerous small boats dashed to fish them out.15
That night, as Londoners toasted the royal couple and lit bonfires, Henrietta Maria was introduced to Whitehall. Charles’s principal residence in London was described by one Frenchman as ‘the largest and ugliest palace in Europe’; ‘a heap of houses, erected at divers times’, observed another.16 Charles was keen to replace its 2,000 musty Tudor rooms with a palace in the clean, modern lines of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, which had been built next door by his father. Unfortunately, such a project would soak up the money he needed for the war with Spain. Instead, Charles was doing what he could do to transform life in the palace: the life of the court.
Not only power but also virtue was supposed to flow from a king, through his court, to the people. At James’s coronation, the Archbishop of Canterbury had prayed that ‘the glorious dignity of his royal court’ would ‘brightly shine as a most clear lightning’.17 The reality had proved rather different. James’s court had become notorious for its drunkenness and immorality. Charles had announced early his determination to ‘establish government and order in our court from which thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom’.18 The informality and hard drinking habits of James’s court were brought to an end and the strict ‘rules and maxims of the late Queen Elizabeth’ were reintroduced. Charles asked that the nobles not ‘enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore’.19 Each rank was to have its appointed place, as they had at James’s funeral. This emphasised the importance of hierarchy outlined in James’s Basilikon Doron. For Charles, however, rank did not exist to encourage a sense of entitlement, but rather service, and not only to those above you but also those below you to whom you had a duty of care and to foster talent. More elaborate ceremonies were planned as Charles began to craft a kingly figure as impressive as any of his contemporaries in Europe. Foreign observers were impressed and judged him ‘well, active, resolute’.
Now Charles was ready also to assert the honour of the Stuarts against Habsburg power. He needed £1 million a year for his war. To get it he had reconvened Parliament: the first of his reign.
For weeks Westminster had been a hive of activity as the palace was prepared for the coming influx of 600 MPs and 150 peers. Workers had mended windows, delivered furniture from the king’s other palaces, hung curtains and sewed seats of wool and canvas in preparation for what was the largest representative assembly in Europe.
The daily business of ruling England was centred on the monarch. At his right hand were his councillors, all of whom were courtiers since they had to be where the king was. Parliament was only called periodically – sometimes not for years – but it was England’s highest legislature and an effective tax-raising body which had grown enormously in importance since the Reformation. Parliamentary legislation had rubber-stamped the legitimacy of monarchs, and, time and again, had been used by monarchs to alter religion. The Elizabethan theory that the king’s authority resided not in the physical person of the monarch alone, but was ‘mixed’ with that of Parliament, had further empowered it – although not, necessarily, to the disadvantage of the monarch. fn1
‘The truth is,’ a future Royalist observed, ‘the Kings of England are never in their glory, in their splendour, in their Majestic Sovereignty, but in Parliaments. Where is the power of imposing Taxes? … Where is the legislative Authority? … The King out of Parliament hath a limited, a circumscribed Jurisdiction. But waited on by his Parliament, no Monarch of the East is so absolute.’20
Charles appreciated the potential value of king and subjects working together through Parliament. It would take national will, as well as money, to face the military challenges ahead.
The most powerful figures in Parliament were the peers who sat in the Chamber of the House of Lords. They included the Lords spiritual – the Church of England’s bishops – and the Lords temporal, the hereditary nobles. Their great houses were centres of local political authority and they influenced who were chosen as the House of Commons MPs. These MPs were also mostly from landed families (if not landed themselves). Some had trained as lawyers, which was a common profession for a younger son in the gentry. They often acted as agents for the peers, but they still had to engage the backing of their electorate.
Every freeman with property valued at over £2 had the right to vote – as much as 40 per cent of the adult male population.21 For many Parliament had come almost to define what it was to be English, Protestant and free. But there was no certainty where exactly the balance of power should lie between a king and his MPs in a ‘mixed’ monarchy. And here the language of both monarch and Parliament had become increasingly defensive during James’s reign. MPs had felt threatened not only by James’s words – his insistence that a monarch’s authority was drawn from God and ‘free’ of legal restraint – but also by what he did.
James’s extension of customs duties, raised under the royal prerogative, had freed him from the financial necessity of calling regular parliaments. This threatened the ‘liberty of the subject’, expressed in Parliament’s debates, and in its protection of property rights. The Commons lawyers had fought back in defence of ‘liberty’, by asserting that Parliament, and not the king, had the right to take control of customs duties. These attacks had, in turn, prompted fears that if the Crown was too weakened, the monarch could end up in the financial pocket of a dominant faction of MPs. A strong king was seen as a protector against populist tyranny, ruling above faction and political interest.
Now, this new parliament, with a young and inexperienced king in grave need of money, meant fresh opportunities for champions of the ‘liberty of the subject’. Charles had seen the difficulties his father had faced in the 1621 Parliament, but he was confident that MPs would now support him in a dangerous war that threatened the very safety of the kingdom. After all, he observed, they had voted in 1624 to engage in the war, ‘and so were bound to sustain it’.22
On 18 June, Charles sat enthroned in the Lords Chamber, dressed in velvet and ermine, and prepared to give his opening speech. The benches beneath him were roped off with crimson tape, ‘the Lords in their Robes, and the Commons present below the Bar’.23 Buckingham was watching him, along with Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who would join the Privy Council the following month. Holland’s elder brother, Warwick, was also here.
Smiling out of a portrait by Daniel Mytens, Warwick sports a goatee, along with brilliant red breeches and a doublet sewn with a field of flowers. Even his enemies judged him a ‘man of a pleasant and companiable wit, of a universal jollity’.24 Yet behind the relaxed manner was a godly Calvinist who cultivated an inner life of reflection and prayer, and was a ruthless political strategist.25
Warwick was seen as a virtual king in Essex where he owned 20,000 acres, and had in his gift twenty-two livings – that is, placements for clerics – which he used to influence and organise prominent Puritan clergy.26 In London his colonising activities in the New World had also linked him to a new merchant class, sprung from the ranks of shopkeepers and mariners. These men did not have the wealth to be granted access to the great merchant companies like the Levant and East India that traded across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near and Far East.27 They had instead been obliged to develop commerce in the New World where Warwick had helped Puritans found godly communities.28
In Parliament Warwick was known as one of the ‘popular lords’ who ‘aimed at the public liberty’ and the limiting of royal power. Another was his cousin, the thirty-four-year-old ‘Robin’ Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth I’s last favourite. Pockmarked by smallpox and embittered after a disastrous marriage had ended in divorce, Essex had found purpose in spending his summers fighting for the Protestant cause in Europe.29 In the winters he came home to recruit men, or attend Parliament. He was now returning from the siege of Breda, which had just fallen to the Spanish. Of the English force of 7,000 Charles had sent to save the garrison two months earlier, a mere 600 had survived.30
‘I am unfit for much speaking,’ Charles admitted from the throne, and he kept to the point.31 The necessary supply of money for the war had to be voted quickly. Plague had broken out in north and east London – and was spreading rapidly towards Westminster.
Plague was a regular occurrence in summer. But this epidemic had fallen on a weakened population. Cheap imports of wool cloth had led to high unemployment and rain had ruined the summer harvest. The London poor were starving and easy prey to disease. One peer in Parliament knew the dangers better than most: he had had his shoemaker pull on his boots that morning, only to see the man drop dead in front of him.32
Charles reminded his listeners that the rapid granting of sufficient subsidies for the war was also vital for national and royal honour. ‘This being my first action,’ he said, ‘all the eyes of Christendom will be on me.’33
Unfortunately, this matter of national and royal honour proved to be of less concern to his MPs than Charles had hoped. The news of the fiasco of Breda and distrust of Buckingham had killed confidence. ‘We have given three subsidies and three fifteenths to the [Winter] Queen of Bohemia, for which she is nothing the better,’ as one MP observed.34 The funds that Parliament now voted were woefully inadequate for the needs of the war effort.35 To make matters worse, the French alliance was threatened as the debates turned to the suspension of the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Puritan MP John Pym saw it as a Jesuitical plot to destroy not only ‘us and our religion … but also the possession of themselves of the whole power of the state’. If Catholics ‘get but a connivance, they will press for a toleration, then strive for an equality, and lastly aspire to such a superiority as may work the extermination of both us and our religion’.36
Henrietta Maria became frightened that her promised religious freedom might even be taken from her. On her first morning in London there had been sour comments on the Mass being ‘mumbled over to Her Majesty’ at Whitehall, and her wearing ‘a veil upon her head’.37 To ease Protestant anxiety Charles forbad his subjects from attending his wife’s Catholic chapels, but the grumbling continued. It did not help that, after a brief experiment in his Protestant chapels when the congregation were invited to pray for their ‘Queen Henry’, Henrietta Maria’s name was anglicised instead to ‘Queen Mary’, with its unfortunate associations with the last Queen Mary of England: the Protestant-burning Mary Tudor.38
Ever watched by hostile Protestant eyes, Henrietta Maria felt suffocated in her chambers that summer. There were always hordes of visitors at court. People came on matters of business, to see its entertainments or simply to escape ‘the barbarous and insipid dullness of the countryside’.39 To gain admission you needed only to dress the part and you could eat in hall at the king’s expense – a part of his ancient duty of ‘good lordship’ – or watch the queen dine. One MP was entranced by her, ‘a most absolute delicate lady … all the features of her face much enlivened by her radiant and sparkling black eyes’ and her behaviour ‘sweet and humble’.40 Another visitor, however, witnessed a different side of the queen. In the roaring fires and the press of people, the fifteen-year-old’s composure snapped, and ‘with one frown … she drove us all out’. It seemed that ‘howsoever little of stature’, she had ‘spirit and vigour’ as well as ‘a more than ordinary resolution’; ‘I suppose none but a queen could have cast such a scowl.’41
In Parliament Buckingham attempted to reopen the subsidy debate, but merely irritated MPs, who judged he was taking advantage of a thinly attended Chamber. Most of their colleagues had fled London. The weekly toll of plague victims had risen into the thousands. One arrival in the City ‘found nothing but death and horror, the very air putrefied with the contagion of the dead’.42 But England was still at war, and Charles still needed the money to fight it. He adjourned Parliament to have it reopen on 1 August in Oxford, far from the plague. A courtier travelling on Henrietta Maria’s barge en route for Oxford spotted the people of a Berkshire town stoning a man who was having a fit at the side of the road.43 They feared the plague was following the court. And, indeed, by 27 July the first deaths from plague were already being reported in Oxford: a knight who had arrived from London had succumbed along with a doctor, staying in the same house.
In the febrile atmosphere of a town of sudden death, Charles now addressed his MPs’ concerns about the prosecution of the war. He explained that money was needed to support his Danish uncle, the Lutheran Christian IV, who planned to attack Catholic forces in north Germany.44 The remnants of Mansfield’s army still needed paying. Meanwhile England’s major contribution to the latest war effort was to be a joint military and naval attack on Cadiz. The financial estimates and plans were laid out in detail. The aim was to drive Spain to the negotiating table by destroying her ships and undermining her sea trade. Essex, who had at last arrived from Breda, was asked to take the role of vice admiral serving under the experienced soldier Sir Edward Cecil.
Buckingham’s probity and competence as Lord High Admiral were, however, questioned. He was also attacked for his monopoly of power, for mismanaging the marriage negotiations, and for popish influences. Henrietta Maria was well aware of the pressure Charles was under to reimpose the anti-Catholic penal laws, and that Buckingham was encouraging him to do so in order to blunt the attacks on himself. As relations between France and England deteriorated so did they in royal marriage, and she treated Charles to ‘disrespects’ and ‘little neglects’.fn2 Bewildered, Charles confided his distress in Buckingham, blaming her behaviour on ‘the ill crafty counsels of her servants’. Henrietta Maria was equally convinced it was Buckingham who was stoking their quarrels.45 According to one contemporary Buckingham had even reminded her ‘that there had been queens in England who had lost their heads’.46
When Charles did reinstate the penal laws it failed to stem the attacks on Buckingham. It seemed to Charles that having betrayed their duty to support their king in a challenging war, some MPs were now attempting to appropriate his right to appoint his own ministers. In despair of getting his money, on 12 August Charles dissolved Parliament. The war against Spain would have to be fought with what cash he had – and without the French, who were busy crushing the Huguenot rebellion. In October the Cadiz expedition set sail with 5,000 sailors and 10,000 soldiers funded at a cost of £250,000.47 This was more than double the money Charles had gained from the French for his wife’s dowry, but the navy was still undersupplied and many of the ships in poor condition.
Rubens, toiling on his painting of Buckingham, was disgusted by the duke’s role in the coming conflict. ‘When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham I pity that young king who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom, into such an extremity.’48
When the navy reached Cadiz the joint forces managed to capture a small fort, but this was followed only by the further capture of a large cache of wine. This was promptly drunk, turning the soldiers into a mob. Men who passed out on drink were left to have their throats cut by the Spanish as their ships then sailed away. ‘Throw but a butt of sackfn3 in the way of the English’, the Spanish sneered, and ‘it will do more harm in an English army than a thousand Spaniards can do in arms.’49 Buckingham’s choice of commander, Edward Cecil, had proved incompetent, and his pressed men undisciplined and poorly led.
On 24 November, a few days after his twenty-fifth birthday, Charles opened his first Chapter of the Garter at Windsor. The king walked down the quire under a golden canopy, leading his knights two by two.50 Hierarchy, kinship, patronage and friendship mattered in England as much as impersonal institutions. So did the chivalric qualities of honour, duty and loyalty, of faith and courage.51 The Garter represented all these things and defined Charles’s ideals of kingship: Honi soit qui mal y pense (May he be ashamed who thinks badly of it) ran the motto. As spectators to the Garter procession gossiped nosily, Charles knew, however, that ‘under the eyes of Christendom’ a tragic scene was unfolding with the return of the Cadiz expedition.
Far from the music and ritual of the Garter chapel, contrary winds were destroying his navy. They crashed against the English coast, some ships wrecking as far as Scotland. There would surely be further loss of life in the fighting yet to come: ‘For anyone can start a war when he wishes,’ Rubens observed; ‘he cannot so easily end it.’52