The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (26 page)

Others sought advancement through Ker’s influence with the King. Chief among them was Francis Bacon, who, thanks also to the death in 1612 of his cousin Salisbury, at last achieved office as Attorney-General. Northampton too was quick to make friends with the young man, and soon sought a means of making that friendship firmer. His brother, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, had a beautiful daughter called Frances. She had been married while still a very young girl to the equally young Earl of Essex. They did not suit. Frances developed a distaste for his person; he disliked and perhaps feared her, for she was strong-willed and dominating, and made no secret of her contempt for him. Now, returning to court, her fancy turned to Somerset. He was flattered but found himself unable to write the sort of love letters she might expect, and enlisted the help of his closest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. Overbury was a clever young man and something of a poet. He had been the bosom friend, and perhaps the lover, of Ker before he rose to greatness. At first he was happy to do as his friend asked. It may have amused him; perhaps he didn’t take the thing seriously. Then he became intensely jealous and advised Ker to break off his courtship of Frances. Politics played a part in his changed attitude. Overbury was opposed to a Spanish alliance, which the Howards favoured. He became a nuisance. It was thought wise to get him out of the way. James was persuaded, easily enough, to offer him an ambassadorship. Overbury refused it. The King was offended; the disobedient poet was dispatched to the Tower as a prisoner.

Meanwhile Frances, advised by her uncle, opened legal proceedings to obtain an annulment of her marriage to Essex, on the grounds that it had never been consummated on account of the Earl’s incapacity. This was insulting, and Essex, though disliking his wife extremely, could not be expected to collude in a process that would leave him an object of pity or, worse, mockery. The nullity suit made no progress. There were rumours that Frances was employing witchcraft against Essex. Perhaps Overbury started them, or at least fanned them. Perhaps he threatened to divulge secrets that would prevent the marriage Frances had set her heart on. Then Overbury died. Poison was soon suspected.

Frances obtained her annulment
¹⁰
and she and Somerset were married. The ceremony was held at court. There were masques – one paid for by Bacon; it cost him £2,000 which he could ill afford, since he was always deep in debt. Poets, among them John Donne, wrote verses in honour of the occasion and in praise of the happy couple. Some historians have seen James’s approval, indeed encouragement, of the match as evidence that his relationship with Robert Ker had never been sexual. Yet this is to misunderstand both him and the age, which approved passionate friendships between men without supposing that this precluded marriage. Besides which, James’s first passion for Ker was fading. He had settled into a loving tenderness, and in any case there was always a paternal element to his feeling for the young men he loved.

But now the rumours surrounding Overbury’s death became firm allegations. There was indeed evidence of poisoning. A woman called Mrs Turner, reputed to deal in potions and spells, was incriminated, tried and hanged; and Mrs Turner had been a close associate of the new Countess of Somerset.

The governor of the Tower, Sir Gervase Elwes, passed on all he suspected to the King. James was alarmed. The scandal was coming dangerously near the throne. Somerset begged him to have the investigation stopped, but James told him he could not allow such a crime as was alleged ‘to be suppressed and plastered over’. He had the good sense to see that a cover-up might be more damaging than anything that might emerge from an examination of the evidence. ‘If the delation [accusation] prove false,’ he told Robert, ‘no man among you shall so much rejoice as I.’
¹¹
Somerset came to the King at Royston where he was hunting to plead once more. In vain. According to one witness, ‘When he came to take his leave of the King, he [James] embraced and kissed him often, wished him to make haste back, showed an extreme passion to be without him; and his back was no sooner turned, but he said with a smile, “I shall never see his face more.”’
¹²
One may question the ‘smile’.

Somerset hurried back to London to destroy letters from Northampton, who had died a few months previously, which he feared might compromise him.

The minor figures in the case having been condemned and disposed of, Robert and Frances were both arrested and committed to trial. The case was prosecuted, quite gently, by Bacon. Frances confessed her guilt, while affirming that her husband was innocent. He refused to plead guilty. Both were condemned to death, but James commuted the sentences to imprisonment, and the pair remained in the Tower for several years. The reprieve was unpopular: one law for the rich, another for the poor wretches who had been their accomplices. James was convinced of Frances’s guilt, even before her confession. He had sent a message to Robert by way of the lieutenant of the Tower, saying: ‘If it shall plainly appear that she is very fowle, as is generally conceaved and reported that she is, as being the author and procurer of that murder, then I thinck justice may not be stayed, and he shold have just cause to be glad that he is freed from so wicked a woman.’
¹³
But when the time came, he could not bring himself to have Frances executed. It would have been difficult to do so without sending Somerset to the block also, despite his protestation of innocence, and James had sufficient lingering affection for him not to do that.

Even before Somerset’s downfall, James had a new favourite, a new love. The young man was called George Villiers, and he was both beautiful and charming. James was captivated, more completely in love than he had ever been; he called Villiers ‘Steenie’, from a fancied resemblance to a portrait of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. More intelligent than Ker, Villiers took care to ingratiate himself with the Queen, who was soon writing to him in affectionate terms: ‘My kind dog, I have received your letter which is very welcome to me. You do very well in lugging the sow’s ear, and I thank you for it, and would have you do so still on condition that you continue always a watchful dog and be always true to him, so wishing you all happiness. Anna R.’ The young man’s rise would be meteoric: Knight of the Garter, Viscount Villiers, Earl, then Duke of Buckingham. The day would come when James would tell his Council that he was ‘neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man, and confess to loving those dear to me than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf, and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John, and I have my George.’ This was the besotted language of infatuation. Buckingham for his part played his game cleverly, making a parade of his devotion while also charming the King with boyish impertinence: ‘I kiss your dirty hands,’ he wrote. James responded in similar vein. ‘Steenie’ was his dog, as well as the Queen’s, and he celebrated a visit to Buckingham’s house in Rutland with one of his occasional verses:

The heavens that wept perpetually before,

Since we came hither show theyr smiling cleere.

This goodly house it smiles, and all this store

Of huge provision smiles upon us here.

The Buckes and Stagges in fatt they seeme to smile:

God send a smiling boy within a while.
¹⁴

Before Buckingham’s rise was assured, and while Somerset was caught up in his troubles, the declining favourite had shown himself to be jealous of the rising one. He wearied James with his tantrums and complaints. His Howard relations by his new marriage were also alarmed. They brought a pretty boy, a son of Sir William Monson, under-governor of the Tower, to court, and treated his face with cosmetics (posset; that is, milk curdled with wine) to make him still more delectable. But they had miscalculated. James’s taste did not run to effeminate boys, but to handsome and athletic youths like Ker and Villiers. Besides, the King found this blatant appeal embarrassing. The young man was dismissed from the court, and retired, disappointed or perhaps relieved. Henceforth Buckingham had no rival. The King could deny him nothing, and in time came to be dominated by him.

The marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to one of the leading Protestant princes of Germany had been popular. The King’s ambition to secure a Spanish bride for his heir, Prince Charles, provoked opposition. For many Englishmen Spain was the natural enemy, the greatest Catholic power, feared and hated. The King’s friendship with the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, was remarked and disapproved of. As far as James was concerned, the Spanish match was a necessary part of his grand design to stand forth as the Rex Pacificus, the monarch who by the application of intelligence and goodwill would maintain the peace of Europe. It was a noble but impractical ambition.

Then, in 1616, in the wake of the Somerset scandal and perhaps to divert attention from it, James yielded to the demands of the anti-Spanish party and released Sir Walter Raleigh from the Tower. Raleigh himself had a scheme, one which, if successful, promised to make James rich. In Elizabeth’s reign he had sailed the coasts of South America, and now proposed to journey there again and mine for gold in the valley of the River Orinoco. He would, he promised the King, abstain from anything that could be construed as piracy. James assented on condition that Raleigh respected the integrity of the Spanish empire and made no war on their forts or settlements. Raleigh accepted the condition, though it was incompatible with his declared intentions. The expedition was a failure. One of his captains attacked a Spanish outpost. No gold was found. Some of the crews threatened mutiny. Raleigh’s eldest son was killed. The old adventurer returned in dismay and disgrace. Gondomar, on behalf of his government, demanded that Raleigh be executed. James set up a board of inquiry, among its members Sir Edward Coke and Francis Bacon. Their report was damning: Raleigh had misled the King, conspired with France and had always intended to plunder the Spanish colonies. He had been under sentence of death since 1605; it was now carried out. He died in 1618 with characteristic panache, remarking that the axe was a sharp physician but a cure for all ills. He had never been popular, but he was a relic of the great days of Elizabeth, and there was deep resentment that he had been beheaded to please the Spaniards. Nevertheless, his death encouraged James – and Gondomar – to believe that an obstacle to the marriage of Charles to an infanta of Spain had been removed.

There had been an uneasy peace in Europe for most of James’s reign in England. In Germany the peace had held since the Diet of Augsburg of 1555 had settled the religious question on the basis of the formula ‘
cuius regio, eius religio
’: a state should take the form of its religion from its prince. The religious wars in France had ended in 1598; in 1609 the Dutch rebels had made a twelve-year truce with Spain that effectively secured the independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. But now there were rumblings of war, and James’s son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, was a central figure in the drama about to unfold.

The Holy Roman Empire was an agglomeration of quasi-independent states, ‘neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire’, as Voltaire would declare a century later. The title of emperor was all but hereditary in the House of Habsburg, but the family’s power derived from the collection of states – kingdoms, princedoms and duchies, which they ruled directly – and from their alliance with their cousins of Spain. The Habsburg territories were a hotchpotch, and their title to rule varied according to local custom. There was no uniformity, not even of religion. Bohemia (more or less the modern Czech Republic) inclined to Protestantism. Moreover, by tradition the crown of Bohemia was elective. Now the heir to the aged Emperor Matthias was his great-nephew, Ferdinand of Styria. He had been educated by the Jesuits and saw himself as the sword of the Counter-Reformation. The Bohemians were alarmed. When the Emperor sent two of his leading officials to Prague to secure Ferdinand’s election to the Bohemian crown, his opponents broke into the imperial palace and threw the unfortunate imperial emissaries out of the window. ‘Let your Virgin Mary save you now,’ cried one, adding in surprise, ‘By God, she has,’ as the unfortunate man was seen to crawl away. This incident, known as the Defenestration of Prague, sparked off a revolution. The Bohemians refused to elect Ferdinand and instead offered the throne to James’s German son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, in 1617.

The King was in a quandary. On the one hand it was certainly pleasing and flattering that his dear daughter Elizabeth should become a queen. On the other hand, if Frederick accepted the throne, it could not be expected that Ferdinand would acquiesce in the loss of one of his kingdoms. A general European war might break out. It did, and the Thirty Years War reduced Germany to a pitiful condition. (Such was the loss of life in these three decades that when peace at last returned, men in some cities and states were temporarily permitted to take more than one wife, so that the land might be repopulated.) The war would draw in all the major Continental powers: Spain, Denmark, Sweden, France and the Netherlands, as well as every German state. In time, the religious divisions that characterised the early years of the war would become blurred, when Catholic France first financed the campaigns of the Protestant Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, and then entered the war herself on the Protestant side against the German and Spanish Habsburgs. What had been in its origins an ideological conflict became a struggle between the Great Powers.