7
HENRIETTA MARIA WAS six months pregnant and already she was in labour. When the town midwife at Greenwich examined her, she found the baby was breech and promptly fainted. With the midwife carried from the room, and Henrietta Maria in great pain, the king’s surgeon was left to manage alone. The doctor asked Charles whether he should save mother or child. Charles said the mother. Their son died two hours later. Afterwards, Charles stayed at Henrietta Maria’s bedside, and wrote to her mother to give her the sad news.1 It was just over two months since the dissolution of Charles’s last parliament. He could no longer afford to be at war with Louis and this was his first contact with Marie de’ Medici since he had signed a peace with France almost three weeks earlier. The baby was buried at Westminster Abbey that night, 12 May 1629. Six pall-bearers, each the son of an earl, bore the black velvet cloth over the tiny coffin.
Henrietta Maria had been only fifteen when she married and small for her age. Four years had passed before she bore this short-lived son. It may be that she had lacked the physical maturity to conceive earlier. In the first of a further series of lost royal letters Henrietta Maria refers sadly to the ‘affliction’ of her baby’s death in correspondence with Richelieu.2 Her friend Lucy Carlisle knew the pain of losing an infant, as did her sister Christine, the Princess of Piedmont, who also commiserated. Christine’s letter, however, announced the successful delivery of her latest child. Charles answered it for his wife and found it in himself to be generous. He reassured Christine that her good news lessened their sadness, and announced himself optimistic that ‘the unhappy accident that has befallen my wife’ was the forerunner of better news.3
The following year Henrietta Maria was pregnant again, and this time she insisted she had her mother’s midwife, Mme Peronne, present for the delivery of her baby. Peronne had travelled all over Europe for the birth of Marie de’ Medici’s grandchildren, but when she sailed to England accompanied by Henrietta Maria’s dwarf, Hudson (who had been sent to the Continent to collect her), the ship was seized by Dutch privateers. For a time this had ‘caused more upset at court than if they had lost a fleet’.4 Peronne and Hudson were, however, soon released and the midwife proved her worth. At midday on 29 May 1630 Henrietta Maria delivered a healthy boy at St James’s Palace. She had thus succeeded in the principal function of a royal consort – the production of a male heir. Charles was delighted and, while his wife rested on a bed of green satin embroidered with silver and gold, he sat with her, and wrote once again to Marie de’ Medici.
‘Madame, My joy, together with the speed of sending you the promptest news of the happy confinement of my wife, only allow me to tell you that, thank God, Mother and Son are doing very well.’ He signed himself, ‘Your most loving son and servant, Charles R’. Henrietta Maria interjected a comment that prompted him to add a postscript. ‘My wife wanted me to write this in her name to show you that she is doing well, so her hand bears witness of this truth to you.’ What follows is the very shaky handwriting of the exhausted new mother, signing herself in French, ‘Your most humble and most obedient daughter and servant, Henriette-Marie’.5
Ordinary Londoners celebrated the birth of their prince with enthusiasm, enjoying an opportunity to ‘so ply themselves with penny shots … that at length they have not an eye to see withal or a good leg to stand on’.6 The infant was named Charles after his father, though he in no way physically resembled him. Henrietta Maria wrote to a friend in France four months later describing her son as ‘so fat and so tall he is taken for a year old’. But he had his mother’s black eyes. Indeed, she wrote, the prince was ‘so dark I am ashamed of him’.7 It would earn him the later sobriquet ‘the black boy’.
The birth of the future Charles II would ease the new negotiations for a peace with Spain. The recovery of the Palatinate was less urgent now that Charles’s sister Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, and her sons were no longer his heirs – and Charles badly needed peace. Continuing the war would require him to call another parliament to raise the subsidies to pay for it. This in turn would provide the forum for a renewed attack on Arminian influence within the English church. The court was, however, bitterly divided between those who wanted to see the British kingdoms disengage entirely from Europe’s wars and those who hoped the French peace was the prelude to a recall of Parliament and an Anglo-French campaign to check Habsburg power in the Old and New World.8
Henrietta Maria was for the French alliance. Philip IV’s empire in Europe was like an aging elephant. The population of Spain was in decline, and internal poverty had become the price of external success. France, with its huge and growing population, was preparing to take down a lumbering and wounded beast – and remained a powerful potential ally for the Stuart kingdoms.
Surprisingly, however, the Carlisles, who had always been anti-Spanish (and, correspondingly, pro-French), held the contrary view, and wanted peace with Philip IV. Politics had been the basis of Lucy’s friendship with the queen since 1626. It would now lead to the first serious breach in their relationship.
Rumours had surfaced as early as December 1628 that ‘camel face’ Carlisle had turned ‘hugely Spanish’. Lucy had asked her husband for assurances that this wasn’t so and had worked hard to protect him from the queen’s anger. However unfaithful she was to her husband in the bedroom, Lucy was loyal to him in politics. After all, Carlisle’s success or failure at court affected her own position.9
The rumours were true.
Although he remained deeply committed to the Palatine cause, Carlisle was indeed ‘hugely Spanish’. France and Spain were falling out over their rival interests in Italy, and Carlisle judged that if they went to war, Spain would be desperate not to fight the British kingdoms as well as France. The return of the Palatinate could be the price of British neutrality. His differences with the ‘pro-French party’ thus concerned means rather than ends. But the division was nevertheless a bitter one, and viciously contested.
Tensions were high at court in June 1629 when the artist, and occasional diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens appeared in London in the role of Philip IV’s envoy. Fifty-two years old, with a curled beard and moustache, Rubens’ success as an artist had made him a rich man who ‘appeared everywhere not like a painter, but a great cavalier, with a very stately train of servants, horses, coaches, liveries and so forth’.10 Philip IV, who took ‘an extreme delight in painting’, had become his most devoted patron after Marie de’ Medici, and for eight months, between August 1628 and April 1629, Philip had visited his rooms almost every day.
The Spanish king had matured into a hard-working and conscientious monarch, but also restless, depressive and indecisive. He took comfort in sex and his mistresses, while allowing himself to be overshadowed by his powerful minister, the Count-Duke of Olivarez, whose policies had yet to restore the Spanish monarchy to the glory Philip envisaged for it. ‘The king alone has my sympathy,’ Rubens observed. ‘He is endowed by nature with all the gifts of body and spirit, for in my daily intercourse with him I have come to know him thoroughly. And he would surely be capable of governing under any conditions, were it not that he distrusts himself and defers too much to others.’11 Rubens now had the opportunity to get to know Charles as well.
The King of England’s eye as a collector had long impressed Rubens: even so, he was stunned to see Charles’s ‘incredible quantity of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions’.12 Above all, however, Rubens fell in love with England, ‘the beauty of the countryside’, and ‘the charm … of a people rich and happy in the lap of peace’. Rubens’ task was to arrange an exchange of ambassadors between Charles and Philip to begin peace negotiations. But that same month Richelieu had dispatched the French ambassador, Charles de l’Aubespine, Marquis de Châteauneuf, with instructions to persuade Charles into an alliance against Philip, and war.
An arch intriguer, Châteauneuf took up residence in the Holborn house of Lord Brooke, a London neighbour and friend of the Earl of Warwick, whose house was the hub of anti-Spanish lobbying. Warwick’s brother, Holland, was Châteauneuf’s principal co-plotter at court, where Holland served in key roles as the queen’s High Steward, as well as Charles’s Master of the Horse.13 Châteauneuf assumed the pretty young Henrietta Maria had little interest in worldly affairs. Yet he also thought her potentially dangerous. It was clear that Charles loved her, and both Châteauneuf and Rubens feared she had a sexual hold over him. Women were believed to have higher sex drives than men and their ability to seduce men and make trouble was also well known.14 They had brought evil into the world when Eve persuaded Adam to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.
It was vital to Châteauneuf that Henrietta Maria be surrounded by pro-French and anti-Spanish influences. That meant Holland’s promotion in the queen’s household and the demotion of Carlisle’s ‘bright and sharp-witted’ wife, Lucy. To this end Henrietta Maria was told that Lucy had ‘abused her favour … going so far as to make sport of her actions’. This the queen could well believe. In ‘wild’ moments, or ‘very jolly’ moods, Lucy would often show off her friends’ letters and laugh at them behind their backs.15 Lucy asked to see Henrietta Maria to defend herself. But the queen was persuaded that having such a conversation with a servant would be undignified. In January 1630 Charles advised Lucy to leave the court ‘until the queen was appeased’.16 She duly left for a month. On her return, she found that Henrietta Maria had a new best friend: Holland, who was seen out in the mornings riding ‘with the king and queen in their chariot in St James’s Park’, and on such good terms with them that he kept his hat on.17
Rubens had been struck by Holland’s extravagance – only ‘camel face’ Carlisle matched him in his appreciation of fine things and beautiful clothes. The earl was, in consequence, chronically in debt, but the war with Catholic Spain was not only a religious and patriotic duty to him, it was also good business. He had that year become governor of one of his brother’s many privateering endeavours.fn1 The Providence Island Company had been founded to plant a Puritan colony off what is now the Nicaraguan coast. Many of Warwick’s colonising friends were involved: John Pym, Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke amongst them. The plan was for it to be a base from which to launch piratical attacks on Spanish shipping. The Dutch had captured much of the Spanish plate fleet in 1628, and gained 4 million ducats in gold. The Dutch fleet and its captive prize had put in at Portsmouth and Falmouth in December 1628, providing a revalidation in England of the claim that a naval war with Spain in the Caribbean could pay for itself.18 It was also the kind of money that could buy Henry Holland a lot of suits.
Once Rubens had succeeded in arranging the exchange of ambassadors between Philip and Charles he prepared to leave England. But the future of his peace efforts remained uncertain. At his formal leave-taking of the court, on 22 February 1630, Henrietta Maria had offered a snub, deeming him ‘not of that quality to require … [a] solemn reception with the attendance of her great ladies about her’.19 Rubens fretted she might yet undo all his good work, and persuade Charles into the French alliance. But Rubens need not have been so downhearted. Like Châteauneuf he had overestimated her political influence over the king. Charles wanted peace, which would free him from any immediate need to recall Parliament, and in producing an heir in May 1630, Henrietta Maria had given him a renewed incentive to pursue a treaty.
The peace with Spain was eventually signed in November 1630. Rubens’ efforts in bringing about the peace were rewarded with a knighthood, £500 worth of diamonds and, in a personal gesture from Charles, the right to incorporate part of the royal arms of England as an augmentation of his own armorial bearings.20 Carlisle, who like Rubens had worked for the peace with Spain, was made Groom of the Stool, which made him the first Gentleman of the Bedchamber and the man who controlled access to the king.21 Since Henrietta Maria accepted Charles’s decision, Lucy’s former happy relationship with the queen began to be restored.
‘What news?’ asked a diary entry. ‘Every man asks what news?’22 War stories poured in daily from Bohemia, Austria, the Palatinate, the Netherlands and elsewhere. People sought to discover from the news-sheets the fate of the Calvinist churches abroad, ‘seeing them as counterscarps and outworks of the Church of England’. As soon as any of them were threatened so the English and the Scots felt threatened, ‘Apprehensions raising passions, passions leading to extremes both in action and judgement.’23
English, Scottish and Irish volunteers went to fight in large numbers alongside their co-religionists in Europe, despite the peace Charles had made. Atrocity stories brought many recruits and also ensured that the pressure for Charles to rejoin the conflict was often intense. Here no event was more significant than the fall of the German city of Magdeburg to Habsburg forces on 20 May 1631. At least 20,000 people were killed by soldiers ‘in all sorts of merciless and wretched ways’, or suffocated in cellars when the city burned. The mayor bemoaned that ‘words alone cannot adequately describe these acts’.24 Words were, however, printed in plenty. At least 205 pamphlets appeared in one year in England describing the scenes.
But then at last Protestant revenge came. Four months later, the Lutheran King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, inflicted the first major defeat on Catholic forces at Breitenfeld near Leipzig. He was promptly hailed as ‘the Midnight Lion’, the Protestant hero who, it had been foretold, would come from the north to defeat the Habsburgs.25 Charles’s courtiers began sporting moustaches and beards in the same style as the Swedish king. Charles dutifully sent an expeditionary force to Europe to act as auxiliaries, but would do no more – and his caution proved justified: Gustavus Adolphus was killed at the Battle of Lutzen the following year. In the same month, November 1632, Charles’s brother-in-law, Frederick the ‘Winter King’, died of a ‘pestilential fever’ in Swedish-occupied Mainz.
Over nineteen years had passed since Elizabeth had married Frederick, and Charles had last seen his sister. The future Winter Queen had smiled so broadly on her wedding day that ‘it was almost elated to laughter’.26 Now, she told Charles, she was ‘the most wretched creature that ever lived in this world’.27 Frederick had called Elizabeth his ‘heart’s soul’ and she had loved him in return.28 Charles asked his ‘dearest and only sister’ to return to London and with ‘as much haste as you conveniently can to come to me’. The apartments at Whitehall ‘where she lay when she was a maid’ were already prepared for her. Elizabeth, however, declined the offer. Frederick’s letters to her, some with the sand used to blot the ink still clinging to them, are full of descriptions of the fashions he saw in Germany as he encouraged Elizabeth in their dream of returning to the Palatinate. It was a dream that she could not allow to die with her husband.
Elizabeth’s eldest son, Charles Louis, was not yet of age. Until he was, she would seek covert ways to raise money for his cause in Europe, as well as initiating diplomacy and military action on his behalf. ‘I … have become a stateswoman,’ she admitted.29 Charles, in turn, continued to send his sister what money he could to support her and her children, but he would not send an army. As one of his ministers observed, ‘putting aside the bonds of consanguinity … the Palatinate itself is as remote from his interests as it is from his dominions’.30
In Whitehall Charles hung a powerful anti-war painting, which Rubens had left him as a gift. Mars, the God of War, is held back, while Peace, in the form of a sensual nude, brings bounty. In the foreground children play: this bounty would be their future if peace prevailed.
Charles’s own brood of children was growing. A daughter, Mary Henrietta, had been born in 1631. Lucy Carlisle was chosen as the princess’s godmother. Lucy’s differences with her cousin Holland were also resolved. They were even said to be having an affair. Come the new year of 1633, Henrietta Maria was pregnant again. The baby was to be a second son, named James.
Charles placed the Rubens picture in the gallery overlooking the old tilt yard. The money that used to be lavished on jousting and tilting was now spent instead on masques at the Banqueting House.31 These were an exquisitely beautiful form of theatre, with words by Ben Jonson and gilded sets built by Inigo Jones shimmering in candlelight. Charles would often appear in these theatrical events cast as the sovereign of a chivalric elite, whose wise rule created order and harmony. They were, in effect, beautifully crafted political manifestos, and designed to provoke some of the wonder found in high art. Charles still wished to be seen as an heroic monarch, but in the absence of Parliament’s subsidies to fight actual wars, these aspirations were transferred to the imaginary world of St George: an Arcadian fantasy of erotic delight, where the knight defeats the dragon and wins his lady.
Back in Antwerp Rubens completed a new painting celebrating the ultimate success of his visit to England. It was a vast canvas of St George and the dragon, set in an English landscape, and in which the faces of St George and his princess were those of Charles and Henrietta Maria. The dragon, lying dead, represented the conquering of strife and disorder, with the couple ushering in an era of peace and tranquillity. He knew his client well. Charles soon acquired the painting for his art collection.
The poet Thomas Carew described these years of peace as marking England’s ‘halcyon days’. While the Germans beat their drums, bellowing ‘for freedom and revenge’, it was for Charles’s kingdoms to prosper. They could be ‘rich and happy in the lap of peace’, even as Protestant agony in Europe continued.