8
LUCY CARLISLE’S HUSBAND died in style in March 1636. He had suffered a stroke, but had several new sets of clothes made in his last days, ‘to outface naked and despicable death’.1 Lucy was saddened by this loss, but her grief was neither deep nor long-lived. Indeed, she was soon ‘very jolly’ and busy honing her political abilities.2 Based in the Strand, she had, as a widow, gained that holy grail for the seventeenth-century woman – independence. ‘Who shall control me?’ asks a character in James Shirley’s contemporary play The Lady of Pleasure. ‘I live in the Strand, whither few ladies come / To live and purchase more than fame.’ And what Lucy had was indeed more valuable than fame: she had influence.
‘The gay, the wise, the gallant and the grave’ flocked to Lucy’s house.3 Poets claimed her beauty outshone jewels, and her limbs left ‘tracks of light’. Holland composed several such verses which were judged, even against this stiff competition, to be ‘the worst that were ever seen’.4 He did better with a gift of a diamond bracelet valued at the vast sum of £1,500.5 And Lucy was worth it. As the powerful Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, observed, she was ‘extremely well skilled how to speak with advantage and spirit for those friends she professes’, promoting careers and speaking the truth to power.6
Lucy’s success did little to improve the darker side of her character. Her sister Dorothy, Countess of Leicester, complained that she still took pleasure in abusing ‘most of her friends when they are absent’. Indeed she had grown ‘greater in her own conceit than ever she was’.7 Her gallants were her slaves and Lucy did not like playing second fiddle, even to the queen. Henrietta Maria scarcely dared ask her to perform in her masques for fear of being turned down.8 Like it or not, however, Lucy owed much of her influence to her position in the queen’s bedchamber, and Henrietta Maria too had grown in confidence, as had her husband, the king.
The outgoing Venetian ambassador described the thirty-six-year-old Charles in October 1637 as ‘in the flower of his age’. Slender and muscular, he handled his ‘arms like a knight and his horse like a riding master’. His hair was now short on the right side, and grown longer on the left in a fashionable lovelock. The Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne warned that lovelocks were used by the Devil to drag wearers down to hell for their ‘shameful and uncomely vanity’.9 But Charles’s clothes showed just as little regard for pious restraint. Jacobean ruffs had given way to falling collars of intricate lace, and he wore silk suits with clashing coloured stockings: he bought enough to put on a brand-new pair four times a week. Sartorially, the most striking addition to his wardrobe was the new escutcheon of the Garter, which he had embroidered on his cloaks. A Cross of St George surrounded by glittering silver rays, it sparkled when he moved. Garter knights were expected to wear it in public ‘at all times … and in all places’, along with their ‘George’: the badge of St George killing the dragon.10
There were no great favourites at court. The Venetian ambassador noted approvingly that in political affairs Charles selected ‘his ministers not from affection, but from his opinion of their capacity’. In intellectual matters he showed ‘literary erudition without ostentation, possessing what befits a king’. He was careful to set an example in sacred observance and his ‘exercises in religion were most exemplary’, while he showed ‘no lusts or vices’.11 The deeply charged physical and emotional relationship he had with his wife lay at the heart of the court, and continued to raise fears of her influence on him. ‘The only dispute which now exists between us is that of our conquering each other by affection,’ Charles admitted to Marie de’ Medici.12
Turning twenty-eight in November 1637, Henrietta Maria was ‘the happiest of women’. She loved ‘beautiful clothes, physical elegance and witty conversation’, as well as taking pleasure in her growing brood of children.13 Prince Charles, aged seven, was full of energy and curiosity. The king would make him a Knight of the Garter the following year, to ‘encourage you to pursue the glory of heroic actions’, he told his son.14 Lucy’s god-daughter Mary, aged six, had her father’s melancholic eyes and a wilful temperament. James, Duke of York, aged four, was as blonde as his brother was dark, and ‘cared not to plod upon his games’ but ‘was delighted with quick and nimble recreations’.15 As soon as he was five and allowed to wear breeches, he would be made honorary Lord Admiral. Sandy-haired Elizabeth was now almost two, while a baby, Anne – named after Charles’s mother – was just eight months old.
In Stuart tradition the children were placed with governors, but the Stuarts were a close family by royal standards. The children of the Winter Queen later complained that she had preferred the company of her dogs to her offspring. By contrast, her brother Charles enjoyed measuring the growth of his children on a silver staff and accompanied his wife to play with them in St James’s Park. They, in turn, adored their father, greeting him after he had been away ‘with the prettiest innocent mirth that can be imagined’.16 He placed their portraits where he could see them every day. He had commissioned several likenesses from Rubens’ former assistant – another Catholic artist from Antwerp – the thirty-eight-year-old Anthony Van Dyck. Charles involved himself in many of the details, once asking why the youngest ones weren’t painted in the aprons they usually wore to protect their expensive clothing.17 Mary wouldn’t stand still for her sittings, but Charles was delighted with the results. He kept one of the group portraits over his breakfast table. Another, of himself with Henrietta Maria and the two eldest children, was hung at the entrance to his personal quarters at Whitehall. They advertised his success in maintaining the continuity of the dynasty.
Van Dyck was also painting many of the king’s leading subjects. Installed in a house in the Blackfriars on a royal pension of £200 a year, and with the help of his studio, he churned out a picture a week. Not all Van Dyck’s patrons were happy with his work. One countess demanded he make her figure ‘leaner for truly it was too fat’. Even after his alterations she claimed ‘the face is so big’ it looked like a representation of ‘the winds puffing’.18 Most, however, felt differently. Native Protestant artists, uncomfortable painting nudity, lost commissions, for the ladies of the court loved his ‘sweet disorder of the dress’, with sky-blue silk falling off their bosoms and bare arms.19 Men, meanwhile, were being painted for the first time with friends or brothers, their poses effortlessly aristocratic, lace tumbling down loosened shirts and foaming over tall leather boots: images that have come to define the Caroline court.
But Van Dyck was not the only artist to benefit from Charles’s patronage. Diplomatic agents from Rome were wooing the king by helping to expand an art collection destined to become the greatest in English royal history.fn1 Charles was like a boy at Christmas when these new paintings arrived. A papal agent once described him dashing to open the latest packages, taking Inigo Jones and Holland with him. ‘The very moment Jones saw the paintings he greatly approved of them,’ the papal agent reported, ‘and in order to be able to study them better threw off his cloak, put on his eyeglasses and, together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much.’20
Inigo Jones had started his professional life as a London joiner, before spending much of his twenties learning about art and architecture in Italy. He had arrived at court as a set and costume designer for masques. Ben Jonson complained he remained a control freak even at sixty-five years of age, insisting on being ‘the main Dominus do all in the work’. Charles, however, was grateful ‘that he educated workers constantly day and night in our service’.21
Charles had commissioned nine ceiling canvases from Rubens for Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House. The neoclassical building begun in 1619 had been inspired by the town palaces of Palladio and Scamozzi that Jones had seen in Italy, and the exterior was coloured in contrasting bands of pale gold Oxfordshire stone and the redder burnt gold of Northamptonshire.22 The ceiling, still a work in progress, would depict King James being transported to heaven as God’s former representative on earth, and celebrate the rich benefits of peace now being realised under Charles. Beneath it would hang tapestries celebrating the history of the Order of the Garter.23
The king had transformed his finances since he had dissolved his last parliament in 1629. With the British kingdoms at peace and Europe at war, merchants were shipping their goods through English ports despite the high customs duties Charles charged. There was also unprecedented growth in trade with southern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East. Out of Charles’s estimated total income of £900,000, almost £400,000 now came from customs duties.24 The most productive tax Charles raised was, however, the reinvention of a prerogative tax dating back to the Middle Ages known as Ship Money, so called because it paid for the navy.
Eleven new ships of the line had been built with the Ship Money tax, including the Sovereign of the Seas, which, with 102 bronze cannon, was the most heavily armed battleship in the world. As Charles foresaw, the Royal Navy was key to Britain’s future wealth and power. Nevertheless, the tax was traditionally raised only on coastal areas in time of war. Charles was raising it in peacetime and had extended it to inland areas without any parliamentary scrutiny. Indeed, this money was helping Charles rule without Parliament being called at all. As such the tax was seen as a threat to property rights as well as to ‘the liberty of the subject’. And some opponents refused to pay.
Charles had sought to make an example of one repeat offender in non-payment: a member of Warwick’s American colonising circle called John Hampden.25 The former so-called ‘patriot’ party had high hopes when the case came to court that Ship Money would be declared illegal. But in November 1637 the judges declared for the king. It was now said that Charles was ‘more absolute than either the King of France or the great Duke of Tuscany’.26
Yet John Hampden was widely treated as a hero, and Charles’s future was looking far from secure. The departing Venetian ambassador thought Charles would ‘be very fortunate if he does not fall into some great upheaval’.27 He cited not only the ‘diminution of the liberty of the people’, but also Charles’s religious reforms, spearheaded in England by the man he had made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633: William Laud.28
Described by his social superiors as a ‘little, low, red-faced man’, ‘of mean birth, bred up in a college’, William Laud was a prelate with a mission and not much tact. The son of a clothier from Reading, Laud was, in private, a gentle intellectual who loved his cats and kept a dream diary in which he wrote of erotic encounters with the late Duke of Buckingham. In public, however, he was ‘arrogant’ with ‘an uncourtly quickness, if not sharpness’, a man who could ‘not debate anything without some commotion’.29 He was uncomfortable with women and his efforts to cultivate Lucy Carlisle had fallen on stony ground. He did, however, have Charles’s ear.
Charles had given Laud a secular role as a privy councillor. This gave the archbishop more political power than any churchman had in England since the days of Henry VIII. Laud had no interest in living in the grand manner of a Cardinal Wolsey. He dressed modestly and teased clerics with a taste for the good life as ‘the church triumphant’ – that is, those who had already achieved heaven. He did, however, hope to return to the Church of England something of the standing of the pre-Reformation English church. To do this he sought to restore the wealth of the church as an institution. That meant regaining some of the lost church lands. Land meant power, and Laud believed the Church of England could be a power for good – and not just in terms of the political support the church could give the king.
Laud wanted to root out corruption in society. This had to begin with rooting out clerical corruption, and Laud was willing to use the ecclesiastic Court of High Commission against bishops as well as more junior clergy. More controversially Laud also took on rich and powerful gentry. The protection of the weak is a Christian duty and Laud used the Star Chamber in this spirit, prosecuting the mighty for such malefactions as hoarding grain for profit while the hungry starved, or enclosing the common land the poor used to feed their animals. In the parishes too, the clergy were encouraged to stand up to large landowners in the public interest. At the same time, however, the traditional roles of the gentry in their local communities were protected. ‘Lawful recreations’ such as archery and dancing, usually carried out on Sundays under the patronage of the local landowner, helped foster the community ties that Charles wished to cultivate, and so were permitted to continue – in the face of Puritan disapproval.
Puritans also wanted to reform the morals of their fellow countrymen in order to help transform England into a new Jerusalem. For Puritans that meant encouraging a strict observance of the Sabbath, as well as opposing the new ceremonial style of worship that was central to Charles’s policy of building a more deferential society. Laud was ruthless in crushing such dissent, censoring the press and using the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber to bring Puritans to heel. The punishments Laud meted out to troublemakers could not be compared to those suffered by opponents of Henry VIII’s Reformation. There were no executions without trial, no one was starved to death in their cells, or burned alive. There were, however, fines, prison and, most horribly, mutilation, such as cropping men’s ears.
Puritans continued to flee abroad to join the colonies in New England where they hoped their communities would become beacons of godliness, acting as ‘a city upon a hill’, inspiring their homeland by their example.30 At home, meanwhile, large crowds came out to witness the suffering of the Puritan martyrs. Some came principally because they sympathised with Puritan religious beliefs. Others were more anxious about Charles’s rule without Parliament, which was backed from the pulpit by the Laudian clergy, and many were alarmed by what they had heard of the growing influence of their Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria.
In 1625 Charles had forbidden his subjects from attending Henrietta Maria’s chapels. Yet Henrietta Maria now had a splendid new chapel at Denmark House designed by Inigo Jones, and when the chapel had opened in December 1635, there had been three days of festivities that had attracted numerous non-Catholics. Charles had even donated a Rubens painting of the Crucifixion. There had since been many conversions amongst ordinary members of the public who had attended the Catholic Mass out of curiosity. Meanwhile, the rough-clad Capuchin priests in Henrietta Maria’s household had achieved a number of further conversions, especially amongst her ladies-in-waiting.
It seemed to Puritans that Charles’s queen was behind his religious changes, and that they were part of a popish plot to turn England over to Roman tyranny. ‘Ordinary women can, in the night time, persuade their husbands to give them new gowns’ so could not Henrietta Maria, ‘by her night discourses, incline the king to popery?’31 In fact, Charles was appalled by the Catholic conversions and used both stick and carrot to encourage conversions the other way – from the Catholic Church to the Church of England. He vigorously collected the fines that fell on Catholics for their refusal to attend Church of England services, and pushed on with his reforms, convinced that when Protestant worship was as impressive as Catholic ritual, he would be able to ‘deal with … the Pope as wrestlers do with one another, take him up to fling him down’.32
There was no attempt by Charles to modify the Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles, which remain the defining statements of the doctrines of the Church of England. But anxiety was such that the more Charles and Laud beautified English liturgy ‘the more the Puritans cling to the bareness of their worship’, the Venetian ambassador noted, ‘and what is worse, many other Protestants, scandalised by the new institutions, become Puritans from fear of falling into Catholicism’.33
Time, however, was on his side. Charles was young and had sons to succeed him. Rather than be intimidated by opposition to his reforms he was extending them, determined to succeed where his father had failed – in achieving religious uniformity across the three kingdoms. In July 1637 he had introduced a new prayer book into Scotland to bring the kirk and the Church of England into closer alignment. Instead it would unleash the very forces he most feared.
It is often said – and not inaccurately – that the first blow struck against Charles in the civil wars was a woman throwing a stool. On 23 July 1637, as the Dean of St Giles, Edinburgh, read from the new Scottish prayer book, a row of women sitting at the front of the congregation on fold-up stools began to clap and shout. They called him Satan’s spawn and the stout Bishop of Edinburgh, sitting near the dean, was abused as ‘a beastly glutton’. It was when the dean continued to read that the stool was thrown. He ducked, but the man who tried to stop a second such projectile was set upon, ‘his gown rent, his prayer book taken from him and his body pitifully beaten and bruised’. The plump bishop then fled down the street, with women in pursuit screaming abuse, throwing clods of mud and threatening to cut his throat.
The stool-throwing was a pre-planned protest organised by the most firmly Presbyterian ministers of the kirk, along with leading aristocrats who resented the growing secular power of the bishops, and feared the restoration of church land at their expense. The passion of the matrons of Edinburgh expressed in the riot was real nevertheless, and not manufactured. Charles had underestimated the extent to which the stripped-down Calvinism of the kirk was bound up with the national, and even personal, identity of the Scots. His sole visit to Edinburgh as king was in 1633, for his coronation, which had been carried out in a manner many Scots had found offensive, with candles and crucifixes, a railed-in Communion table and bishops in surplices.
When Charles had subsequently purged awkward nobles from high office, replacing them with pliable lawyers and grateful bishops, ordinary Scots had begun to wonder what this outsider from England might introduce next.
Then came the Scottish prayer book.
It had been drafted by a committee of Scottish bishops and vetted by the Scottish Privy Council. But it was introduced on the royal prerogative alone, without consultation with the Scottish Parliament or any recent General Assembly of the kirk. It was now widely judged to be even more ‘popish’ than the English prayer book, which the Scots had always despised. Most notably it left out several words that denied any belief in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist – the core difference between Lutheran and Calvinist belief.
Further riots followed, along with a petitioning campaign against the prayer book and the bishops. But this was as much an aristocratic and nationalist rebellion as a religious one. By early 1638 Scottish dissidents had set up what amounted to a provisional government. Its aim was to limit the exercise of the royal prerogative, and to replace low-born bishops and lawyers as well as other ‘evil’ councillors with members of the traditional ruling elite.34
This sedition had to be confronted. In February 1638, Charles announced that opponents of the new Scottish prayer book would be treated as traitors. This sent shock waves south of the border. The Tudors had dealt with opponents of their religious reforms with the utmost savagery. Warwick and other colonising aristocrats wondered if the time had come for them to join the emigration to Puritan New England.
While they dithered, the Scottish dissidents responded aggressively by issuing a public contract known as the ‘National Covenant’. Inspired by the Old Testament covenants made between God and his people, its signatories swore to protect their Calvinist kirk against popish influences. Loyalty was sworn only to a covenanted king – in effect a Presbyterian – who ruled according to the laws of the realm. It swept the central and southern Lowlands, raising political consciousness there in a way that had never been achieved in Scotland before. Its subscribers, irrespective of rank, were now political actors in God’s design for their nation in the overthrow of popery. Charles believed, however, that this was the work of only a few dangerous malcontents who were in league with Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu.
Seditious alliances of fiery ministers and lairds dated back to the earliest days of the Scottish Reformation. James had described the consequences in his ‘how to rule’ handbook, the Basilikon Doron, and the last example had resulted in the execution of the Ruthven brothers on the day that Charles was born. The involvement of the French in Scottish affairs was even longer-standing. For centuries France had used Scotland as a ‘bridle’ on England, fomenting anti-English feeling in Scotland to ensure kings of England had to divert resources to their northern border, while confronting France to the south. It appeared to Charles that Louis was playing this old game.
France and Spain had been at war since 1635. The result was that Louis, the ‘first son of the [Catholic] Church’, and his cardinal chief minister were doing far more for European Protestants in their battles against the Habsburgs than the Stuart kingdoms ever had.35 But renewed hopes in Paris of an Anglo-French alliance against Spain had risen and fallen over the course of 1637.36 Louis feared that Charles might even make an alliance with Spain instead. An angry Charles now encouraged those concerns by welcoming to court a long-standing enemy of Richelieu. This was no less than Holland’s reputed former mistress, the glamorous intriguer with the serpentine ringlets, Mme de Chevreuse.
On 7 September 1637 Mme de Chevreuse had left the Loire and ridden for the frontier with Spain. Successive quarrels with Richelieu had forced her to flee France, and she was disguised as a boy. Accompanied only by two grooms she successfully reached the Pyrenees and safety, changing back into her fine clothes at a remote monastic hospice. From there she had made her way to Madrid. As a favourite of Anne of Austria, she received a friendly welcome at the court of Anne’s brother, Philip IV, and had spent December and January being banqueted and feted. Then, in February 1638, she had left Madrid for refuge in England.
Charles could not easily have forgotten the woman who had prepared Henrietta Maria for his wedding night. On her departure from England in August 1625 she had left behind her portrait dressed as an erotic shepherdess with one breast exposed.37 She had later entangled not only English courtiers, but also Henrietta Maria in her plots against Richelieu. It was only in recent years that Richelieu had begun to build a better relationship with Henrietta Maria. Louis feared Chevreuse would again now ‘perform unfriendly offices’ against his government in England.38 And, indeed, when she disembarked at Portsmouth in April 1638, Mme de Chevreuse had every intention of doing exactly that.
Chevreuse believed that France would benefit from making peace with Spain, just as Charles’s kingdoms had benefited. Richelieu was an impediment to these hopes, but if Britain went into alliance with Spain this would force Richelieu’s downfall. Her allies could then bring France to the negotiating table.
Charles sent her former lover, Henry Holland, at the head of a welcoming party of twenty-five coaches to bring her to Whitehall. Holland remained high in royal favour at court and had succeeded Lucy’s late husband as Charles’s Groom of the Stool. He also had a key position in helping raise money for the king by enforcing the medieval Forest Laws. At the palace Mme de Chevreuse was granted the privilege of being permitted to sit in the royal presence while the wife of the French ambassador was publicly denied a similar honour – an ominous snub to Louis XIII, whose representative her husband was. Charles also loaned Chevreuse a house in Whitehall’s gardens. In it he hung a portrait by the high-baroque Italian artist Guido Reni depicting the biblical figure of Judith holding the decapitated head of her enemy, just as Chevreuse would have liked to do with Richelieu: Charles’s joke.
Mme de Chevreuse was soon enjoying herself immensely. Charles paid her expenses while Henrietta Maria supplied her with fashionable clothes. ‘She has renewed her old acquaintances and is making new ones,’ a diplomat noted, ‘all the lords pay her court and she passes the time merrily.’39 Although she was personally pious, Henrietta Maria’s friends were often rakish: there were drinkers, gamblers and fornicators amongst them. Chevreuse too liked to shock, and one day went swimming in the Thames, inspiring poets who compared her body to a galaxy of stars, shooting through the water like the Milky Way.40 But she also spent more respectable hours attending the queen’s masques. Often they depicted representations of the love Henrietta Maria shared with Charles, which in turn reflected the peace and order Charles had brought his kingdoms.
Yet worthy as these masques sound, to hot Protestants they demonstrated a moral threat every bit as much as Mme de Chevreuse swimming in public view. Henrietta Maria had revolutionised the English stage by introducing women who both spoke and sang. The Puritan William Prynne railed against this, arguing that women, standing on stage, ‘perchance in man’s apparel and [with] cut hair’, subverted woman’s divinely ordained submission to man. They were ‘notorious whores’, he wrote, both ‘sinful and abominable’. His ears had been struck off for his words, and the masques with their transient kingdoms of gilded board continued. ‘O shows! Shows! Mighty shows! / The eloquence of masques!’ the underemployed Ben Jonson scoffed. ‘What need of prose / or verse … / You are the spectacles of state!’41
The court conversions also continued. In May 1638 one onlooker complained that it seemed ‘Our great women fall away [from the Protestant faith] every day.’42 Mme de Chevreuse made great play with the queen of trying to also convert Holland. Chevreuse knew very well that Holland would never become a Catholic. His support for Puritans was linked both to family solidarity and a genuine horror of popery, even if he was not a Puritan himself. But at court the distinction between those Calvinists, like Holland, who were Church of England conservatives, and as such disapproved of Charles’s innovations, and those who were full-blooded Puritans and active dissidents, was being blurred. Lucy’s brother, the Earl of Northumberland, complained that ‘To think well of the Reformed religion is enough to make the archbishop one’s enemy.’43 Chevreuse’s ‘failed’ efforts to convert Holland were designed to tar him with the Puritan-dissident brush, while reminding the queen that Chevreuse was a fellow Catholic and a much older friend. Holland remained viscerally anti-Spanish, and that was not an influence Chevreuse wanted anywhere near the queen.
While cutting Holland out from Henrietta Maria’s circle, Chevreuse also busied herself making friendships with court Catholics to whom the queen was close, and began the promotion of the alliance when she ‘artfully threw out some project of a marriage between the Princess Mary … and the prince of Spain’.44 Added pressure could be brought on the queen through her mother.
Marie de’ Medici had been living in the Spanish Netherlands since a failed coup against Richelieu in 1630. Henrietta Maria was concerned about her, and Mme de Chevreuse persuaded the queen to press Charles to invite her mother to England. Laud was aghast at this development. Marie de’ Medici was well known for her Counter-Reformation commitment, and Laud was already at his wits’ end over the court conversions. Chevreuse, he observed, was ‘a cunning and practising woman’, and Marie de’ Medici’s imminent arrival with her ‘seditious, practising train’ would be a most ‘miserable accident’.45 Charles, meanwhile, also dreaded the expense. He would have to pay to support Marie and her household at a time when financing his sister and her son, the Prince Palatine Charles Louis, was stretching his resources. The plan, however, had the advantage of further annoying the French. As the situation in Scotland continued to deteriorate, he agreed at last to his wife’s request, and offered to welcome Marie de’ Medici to England.