The Cradle King (58 page)

These negotiations made real headway when Buckingham returned to court in mid-June. The French had caveats. They did not want to alienate Spain. They worried about the treatment of Roman Catholics in England. James had assured the Commons that no marriage treaty would include concessions to English Catholics. When France demanded a marriage settlement on a par with that negotiated with Spain, James lost interest, saying it was impossible. Buckingham disagreed, and set out to isolate James by winning over first Charles and then a new French ambassador, the Marquis d’Effiat, who arrived in late June. He certainly made a favourable impact on d’Effiat, who wrote back to Louis claiming that the Duke ‘was the unchallenged ruler of England. The King … loved him so deeply that he let him do what he liked and saw everything through his eyes. The Prince looked on him as the sole source of his happiness and contentment. And as for the ministers, they were all Buckingham’s creatures and held their places only during his good pleasure.’
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Buckingham had regained his confidence, and celebrated by throwing a great feast at Burley-on-the-Hill; James made a public endorsement of the Duke by accepting an invitation as guest of honour. In a last ditch attempt to undo Buckingham, Arthur Brett was persuaded that now was the moment to return to court. In July he suddenly appeared before the King while he was hunting in Waltham Forest, grabbing hold of the King’s bridle (or stirrup, in some accounts), begging to plead his case. James was reportedly ‘much offended’ at the intrusion, and galloped away, ordering the Earl of Warwick to forbid Brett from coming into his presence again (he was later arrested), and sending word that Middlesex should move away from the court, as his sentence required.
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During August, Buckingham and d’Effiat put pressure on James to submit to the terms of the marriage, and James agreed to order the suspension of all prosecutions of recusants. But then a new chief minister was appointed in France: Cardinal Richlieu. Richlieu insisted that James should sign a formal written undertaking, a demand that deeply offended the King. James despatched a harshly worded response to France, and Buckingham (who had again been ill and away from court) was forced to intercept the letter and smooth things over with d’Effiat. Observers watched the King carefully for signs of his relative goodwill to France and Spain, but many, including even the highly experienced John Chamberlain, remained mystified.
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By the end of September 1624 James agreed to promise in writing that English Catholics would be freed from persecution. On Sunday 21 November, the French match was concluded, and Thomas Carey, ‘a privado of the Prince’s Bedchamber’ was sent into France ‘with a love letter and some rich and rare jewel’ for the Princess; in London, the organ in St Paul’s was played for two hours ‘on their loudest pipes’, followed by bells, bonfires, and ‘a great peal of ordnance at the Tower’.
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This had been very much the doing of James, Charles, Buckingham and to some extent Secretary of State Sir Edward Conway. It was reported that some other Privy Councillors had to be told what was being celebrated by the bonfires they saw in late November; the Archbishop of Canterbury quipped that there were now two Privy Councils in England, and that of the two, ‘that of Newmarket was the higher’.
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The French ambassadors followed James to Theobalds, Royston and then to Cambridge where James received them on 10 December. James was ‘so ill troubled with a universal pain in shoulders, elbows, knees and feet’ that he was forced to leave the entertaining of his guests to the Prince. The articles were agreed and signed with only the King, Prince, the two ambassadors, Buckingham and Secretary Conway in attendance, deliberately excluding the lords of the Privy Council who were also in the King’s retinue; this was to reduce the number of men who knew that James and Charles had also signed a separate
ecrit particulier,
in which they gave their undertaking to free Roman Catholics from prosecution.
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James was increasingly frail. When he came to sign the treaty, his hand was too afflicted with arthritis, and he had to use a stamp. A planned comedy was cancelled as he felt himself too ill to attend. James took to his bed, once again leaving the entertainment of his visitors to his son, the Lord Keeper, and the Earl of Warwick, and was still there on the 18th, ‘pained with the gout in his hands and arms’.
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It may have been after this encounter that James wrote a strange letter to Buckingham, begging him to come to him quickly with his family:

Notwithstanding of your desiring me to write yesterday yet had I written in the evening, if at my coming in out of the park such a drowsiness had not corned [sic] upon me, as I was forced to sit and sleep in my chair half an hour. And yet I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christenmass a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow-life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

My only sweet and dear child,

James R.
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James went to Whitehall for the holiday festivities but ‘kept his chamber all this Christmas, not coming once to the chapel or to any of the plays’.
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On Christmas Day, he heard Lancelot Andrewes preach on Psalm 2. 7, the seventeenth and last Christmas sermon by Andrewes he was to attend. Occasionally, ‘in fair weather’ he went out in his letter ‘to see some flights at the brook’.
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The Twelfth Night masque, Ben Jonson’s
The Fortunate Isles and their Union,
was put off until 9 January, when James attended it seated with the French and Venetian ambassadors and agents from the King of Spain and the Archduchess.
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Early in the New Year, he made his usual journey to his favourite haunts of Theobalds, Royston and Newmarket, this time with Charles in attendance while Buckingham remained in control in London. In late January, the Duke fell ill again. Charles forwarded a message from the King: ‘he commands me to tell you [that] he is extremely sorry for your late sickness & likkwise for your delay of coming hither, but he assures himself that ye will not lose an hour of time of coming away out of that filthy town as soon as your pressing occasions will permit you, & that ye may see how mischiefs come by planets & never one single, he has commanded me to tell you, that he is as ill tormented at this time in his right elbow and knee, as he was at Cambridge, but he hopes that your coming merrily hither with the counts [i.e. the Villiers women] in your company to be his nurses will make him a whole man again.’
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The ‘pressing occasions’ keeping Buckingham in London concerned the English army commanded by Mansfeld. Buckingham had wanted to land the army in France, but King Louis refused. According to Charles, James was convinced that ‘this juggling proceeds from the importunity of the Jesuits and Spanish faction with that King’,
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and he was easily persuaded to follow Buckingham’s suggestion to allow Mansfeld to go directly to Holland instead, and the ships set sail on 31 January. But their fate was miserable. Some men were put ashore at Walcheren, but the others were forced to sail to Gertruidenburg; there, frost made it impossible for them to land, and they were left to the mercy of a virulent infection that killed hundreds, their bloated corpses pushed overboard to pollute the beaches. When the survivors eventually landed, they starved to death. In England, the terrible news was met with public outrage – and the finger of blame was pointed not at Mansfeld, but at Buckingham.
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In February, news reached Paris that the papal dispensation for the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria had been issued, but it demanded changes to the articles signed by Louis and James. But then Buckingham heard from his friend Lord Nithsdale in the Vatican that the dispensation was ‘free and unclogged’ – suggesting that the French were lying to force further concessions from England. James was unsurprised. ‘Where is your glorious match with France?’, he demanded of Buckingham, ‘and your royal frank
Monsieurs?
’ Buckingham was himself disgusted at the French ‘shitten mouths’. He urged James to ‘roundly let the ambassador know you so much prize your honour that neither in a circumstance nor form will you make any alteration’. James needed no encourgement to follow that advice and when he met with d’Effiat (without Buckingham in attendance), despite giving in on a few details, it was France who had to climb down.
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In mid-March Buckingham sent his coaches to Dover in preparation for his journey to Paris to bring back Charles’s new bride. But his plans were to be altered.

On 28 February, at Royston, James knighted Sir Richard Bettenson of Essex – a routine occurrence, but this was to be his last knight.
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It was at Theobalds in the early days of March 1625 that he fell ill with the ‘tertian’, a malaria-like fever characterised by paroxysms every two or three days. At first no one was too worried: the Countess of Bedford wrote to a friend that ‘there was no more doubt of his safety than of every man’s that hath an ordinary tertian ague’,
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and John Chamberlain reported that the King was in no ‘manner of danger if he would suffer himself to be ordered and governed by physical rules’, that is, by the rules of physicians.
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But characteristically, James delighted in ignoring medical advice, trying instead to allay his fever by holding his hands in cold water, and drinking prodigious amounts of small beer.
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When his fever abated temporarily, he tormented his doctors by demanding of them where they thought his ague had gone. Buckingham rushed to be by the King’s bedside, but by the time of his ‘seventh fit’ on 16 March, they had become ‘less intemperate’ and Secretary Conway reported that it had ‘left more clearness and cheerfulness in his looks than the former’.
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Recovery seemed to be indicated on the 23rd as convulsions were reported to grow ‘less and less’,
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but suddenly James started to deteriorate, and the convulsions became more violent. News came that another of his favourites, Hamilton, had died, and James was plunged into a depression. ‘I shall never see London again’, he realised.
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Buckingham was at his King’s bedside throughout. A week into the illness, the Duke and his mother remembered that, during a recent illness, Buckingham had been relieved by the remedies of one Dr John Remington, a country practitioner from Dunmow in Essex. He sent for Remington’s medicines, and mother and son administered plasters (poultices) without the knowledge of the royal physicians. One plaster ‘eat down into his belly without the least hurt of disturbance of nature’, but, shortly afterwards, James took a turn for the worse, and the physicians protested that their work had been undermined. They refused to give James any more physic until the plasters had been taken off, which was done; and the next three fits were said to be ‘easier’. But then on Monday 21st, the plasters were applied once again, and James ‘grew worse and worse’, and his surgeon Mr Hayes had to be wakened to take them off. Then one of Buckingham’s servants named Baker made a julip, which the Duke brought to James himself; James took two draughts, but refused a third. After his death, it was claimed, the physicians were presented with a bill to sign, affirming that the plasters and the julip were safe, but most refused to do so, pointing out that they had no idea what the ingredients of either were.

Buckingham was now in control, and had one of the physicians, the Scot John Craig, dismissed.
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But another, George Eglisham, took his revenge a year later when he published at Frankfurt a Latin tract with a sensational story. Buckingham, he claimed, had given the King a white powder that made him extremely ill. The physicians declared that the King had been poisoned, but Buckingham expelled them violently from the sickroom, threatening to draw his sword. Buckingham’s mother then knelt before the King and craved justice against these accusations that she and her son had poisoned him. ‘Poisoned me?’ said the King, ‘and with that, turning himself, swooned.’
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One source claims that, while he was still lucid, James had three hours’ private talk with Charles, sending all his attendants two or three rooms away, ‘to be out of hearing’.
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If true, he had grasped his last chance for a proper conversation. ‘Late at night’ on the 24th, Conway wrote to the Earl of Carlisle: