The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart

James was obliged to establish a royal household for the prince and princess in a hurry. He was advised to choose Oatlands palace in Surrey, some ten miles upriver from Hampton Court, though in an alien kingdom he cannot have had any real idea where it was.

With the king unable to settle and establish his own court, Henry immediately took on some of his father’s public duties. At Oatlands he met with the Venetian Secretary, to receive the Republic’s congratulations on James I’s succession. ‘He is ceremonious beyond his years,’ Scaramelli wrote of the prince.

When the Secretary asked him how he filled his days in England, Henry opened up. ‘Through an interpreter he gave me a long discourse on his exercises, dancing, tennis, the chase’ – in lengthy, excited detail. ‘He then conducted me … to visit the Princess. I found her surrounded by her Court under a canopy. They both said they meant to learn Italian.’

Italian delegate and British royals charmed each other. King James’s tutor, Buchanan, had extolled the Venetian constitution, recommending it as a model to his followers. Buchanan’s student, Melville, would have passed the approval to his student, Adam Newton, who passed it to Prince Henry. Yet, Venice was a republic, and Henry the son and heir of a man proclaiming vocally and in print, the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy.

The plague outbreak was the worst for a generation. Travellers carried it from London out into the countryside. The Lord Chamberlain and the Lord High Steward moved the royal couple on, and on – with the Privy Council and the law courts still following behind.

Soon Oatlands fell victim to anxiety over the plague, forcing Henry and his train to follow his father’s court. Elizabeth was moved to new guardians, the Haringtons, parents of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, at Coombe Abbey in Northamptonshire. ‘I most kindly salute you,’ Elizabeth wrote to Henry when she was settled, ‘desiring to hear of your health, from whom, though I am now removed far away, none shall ever be nearer in affection than, your most loving sister, Elizabeth.’ Henry replied with a gift, a verbal message, but also ‘these few lines … I beseech you to accept, as witnesses of my tender dutiful affection … and that by our absence shall [not] be diminished but rather with our years shall be increased … I rest, your loving brother, Henrie’. The formal register of all royal communication masked, but could not prevent, a sense of the deep mutual affection coming through the rhetoric.

Elizabeth thanked him by return. I shall keep these ‘delightful memorials of your brotherly love in which assuredly (whatsoever else may fail) I will endeavour to equal you, esteeming that time happiest when I enjoyed your company … As nature has made us nearest in our love together, so accident might not separate us from living together.’ She always hoped they would live together again.

By December 1603 the number of plague cases each week was falling. On the 23rd, Robert Cecil wrote from Hampton Court, ‘where now the King, with the Queen and the Prince are safely arrived, thank God’.

James had confirmed Cecil in his position as Secretary of State, and raised him to the peerage as Baron Essendon. The king sought to balance Cecil’s power by bringing in two Howards, the earls of Northampton and Suffolk respectively. James was soon calling the three men his ‘trinity of knaves’. The two Howards benefited by the serendipity of being that object beloved by James, ‘an ancient pearl’ of the nobility, as well as having been consistently pro-Stuart before 1603. Northampton was renowned as a man of ‘subtle and fine wit, of good proportion, excellent in outward courtship, famous for secret insinuation and fortuning flatteries, and by reason of these qualities, became a fit man for the condition of these times’. He shared James’s eye for good-looking young men, and was a pedant and flatterer. A Catholic, his support for the Stuarts originated with James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the throne. Northampton reverenced the monarchy as divinely appointed, though how he managed to assume high office without swearing the Oath of Allegiance to James and abjuring the pope, was another matter. He must have fudged it somehow. The man wore many masks, and probably played with conviction the role of each one he donned. After years of disappointment, his moment now came with the accession of the Stuarts. Both courtier and councillor, Northampton pursued his own fortune, and government reform. Men like Northampton typified the kind of expert opinion a new ruler could use.

The court settled to enjoy their first British Christmas. Henry threw himself into it. At one moment during the dancing of ‘galliards and corantos … the young prince was tossed from hand to hand like a tennis ball’. The first dynastic marriage of the new era was celebrated – between Philip Herbert, brother of the Earl of Pembroke, and Lady Susan Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. Henry and his Danish uncle, the Duke of Holstein, ‘led the bride to church … The marriage dinner was kept in the Great Chamber, where the Prince, the Duke of Holstein and the great Lords and Ladies accompanied the bride.’ Henry sat next to her at the wedding feast, chatting amiably.

In addition, ‘we are to feast seven Ambassadors: Spain, France, Poland, Florence, and Savoy, besides masques, and much more’, Cecil told a friend, already exhausted by the stamina required to socialise and network at night, and work by day. The names were geopolitical. Some had been in England for months, waiting for the king to return and settle. Cecil longed for Christmas to end so he could get on with the business of government: ‘I protest I am not thoroughly reconciled, nor will not be till we meet at Parliament.’ Whoever was absent on that day, Cecil said, ‘I will protest they do it purposely because they would say, “No” to the Union.’

The plague had delayed the real work of beginning to understand the new sovereign. Having united the crowns, the king now sought the full union of England and Scotland.

The court had its first chance to see who King James really was when he summoned the moderate Calvinists of the English Church, the Puritan Calvinists, and the Roman Catholics to a conference at Hampton Court on 14 January 1604. There they would thrash out the shape of the Jacobean Church.

The Catholics arrived feeling sure the king would lift the penalties against the public profession and practice of their faith. As far as they understood it, James, through the late Earl of Essex, had agreed to remove anti-Catholic legislation, in exchange for Catholic support for James’s candidacy for the throne.

The Puritans arrived feeling even more confident. They anticipated the Calvinist king of a properly reformed Presbyterian Scotland would purify the Elizabethan Church of its papist residues. For them, salvation came only through predestination: God’s will. It could not be earned by attending church ceremonies and rituals of piety, or doing good deeds, as the idolatrous papists and moderates sitting opposite them believed. You got to heaven through faith alone, and constantly proving your faith in God’s goodness by your pious way of life. They knew the Church of England had stalled part way along the path to the international Protestantism of Calvin. God’s appointment of James of Scotland to the English throne was a sign that He knew it as well. James came to perfect the Reformation.

Henry entered the royal presence chamber and sat by his father, the lords of the Privy Council looking on. The king told the conference he did not come ‘to make innovations’ in religion ‘but to conform’. There was ‘one religion’ as ‘by the law maintained’, said James. This law required conformity to the Book of Common Prayer. Elizabeth’s was a national church, generally Calvinist in doctrine but closer to Catholicism in church structure and the rules governing ceremony and forms of worship. The moderates were pleased. Henry knew his father was being consistent with the advice of Basilikon Doron, that the monarch should rule an inclusive church from the middle ground.

The godly Puritans heard, with horror, the king inform them that the English Church only needed upgrading, not further reformation. Investment in education and proper salaries for preachers would produce an intelligent, high-quality clergy. James insisted on retaining ceremonial conformity in the church. He wanted to hear no more extempore preaching odysseys from Puritan clergymen, less open-ended examinations of the Bible with speculative exegesis on its meanings – and no interfering in politics from the pulpit. No theorising would be tolerated about a contract theory of monarchy, or the rightful resistance to a failing monarch; or the explorations of the idea of separate realms and jurisdictions of church and state that had bedevilled his relations with the Scottish kirk.

Worse for the Puritans, James told them that the Roman Catholic Church was still ‘our Mother Church’. Everyone had to grow up and leave ‘mother’ at some point; James believed Catholics were immature. Prone rather to delusion than sedition, they had believed too many of the fairy tales the Mother Church told them in order to keep them obedient.

James foresaw the established church and English Catholics on shared ground ‘in the midst’ of a ‘general Christian union’ to match the new union of crowns. A lot of this was hard for even the predominantly moderate Puritan clergy to swallow. It was the king’s vision of the harmony all Christendom might aspire to, if they just followed his lead. Catholics need only renounce the error of maintaining the pope’s supremacy to the king. Given this, James saw no need to lift the penalties against them. The Catholic representatives left bitterly disappointed, feeling used and deceived.

As for the Puritans, the king denied they were a church; they were merely ‘novelists … a private sect lurking within the bowels of the nation’. Recalling the radical Scottish clergy, they were too arrogant ‘to suffer any superiority’ to their own authority, he said. Therefore, they could not ‘be suffered in any well-governed Commonwealth’. The hard-line Calvinists departed in furious frustration.

Puritans and Catholics should have read Basilikon Doron. It was now widely available after all. James believed the church needed containing not empowering.

If a Calvinist king could not meet Puritan needs, and their queen was a crypto-Catholic, the Puritans would have to look elsewhere. Given the godly character of Henry’s senior servants, men such as his tutor Adam Newton and the soldier-poet David Murray, some radical clergy began to orientate towards a prince still young enough to be moulded in their own image of him.

EIGHT

The Stuarts Enter London

‘WE ARE ALL PLAYERS’

Eleven months after Elizabeth I’s death, the Stuarts had not even made their official entry into London. As the plague petered out, the day was fixed for the Ides of March, to be followed by the state opening of the first Parliament.

Fields and wooded parks divided the two Londons – the cities of London and Westminster. The City of London resounded with the clatters and bangs of hundreds of ‘mechanicians … carpenters, joyners, carvers and other Artificers sweating at their chisels’, energy levels kept up by a ‘suck [on] the honey dew of Peace’. On 15 March the royal family emerged from the Tower, their palace in the City. Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker created the pageant, and Dekker’s company of actors was now Henry’s: the Prince’s Men. To celebrate, Dekker was collaborating with Middleton on a play for their ten-year-old master – The Honest Whore. Jonson, burly, with a square bruiser’s head, dismissed Dekker as ‘a dresser of plays about town’, but they put aside professional rivalries to produce a politicised vision of the new united kingdoms of Britain as an earthly paradise.

The royal procession left the Tower around midday. Henry rode in front of his father, men on foot and mounted nobles in between them, accompanied by the prince’s friends and leading household officers. The prince gazed about, ‘smiling, as overjoyed, to the people’s eternal comfort’. This was just how the late queen Elizabeth had comported herself among her people in the capital. Henry now turned and ‘saluted them with many a bend’. They shouted and cheered ‘fair Prince’ Henry to the skies, riding ‘in glory … as in the abridgement of some famous story’. To them, he was his father and forebears in miniature. In Henry, the poet Michael Drayton identified ‘every rare virtue of each king/Since Norman William’s happy conquering’.

A five-hour parade lay ahead of them. The king sat on his favourite white filly under a canopy of silk and cloth of gold, ‘glittering, as late washed in a golden rain’. Horses and men seemed made of gold. Courtiers great and small, household officers of all ranks, filed into place.

Shakespeare and his fellow actors, now the King’s Men, had received four yards of scarlet cloth to make up their livery for this day. They began to march. As the King’s Men they were also grooms of the chamber in ordinary. At court functions, they came in as ushers. The court resembled a huge three-decker ship, rocking, unsinkable. Courtiers clambered up, fell overboard, conspired against others, flattered and bantered and vied for favour. Hide-bound by ritual to honour each other to their faces, they hid, spied, informed, gave and broke their word just out of sight. It was rich, brutal and elegant. Shakespeare and his friends waited and watched. What a trove of royal material – a cacophony of information to feed into plays about kings, the nature of monarchy and empires.

From the Tower to Temple Bar (gate), labourers had gravelled the muddy, filth-strewn streets, and railed them to separate the crowds from the nobility. Along the road, the City’s Worshipful Companies waited in their liveries with their ‘streamers, ensigns and bannerets’ blowing. The conduits of Cornhill, Cheap and Fleet Street ran with claret. ‘Diverse music’ flowed from every arch, heightening the party atmosphere and making the wine ‘run faster and more merrily down into some bodies’ bellies’.

The Stuarts processed along Cheapside, lined with the gold-workers’ shops and jewellery merchants they would soon patronise. Near Fleet Street they passed the Mitre and Mermaid taverns. Close to the Inns of Court, these taverns attracted many of the artists, thinkers, radical lawyers, MPs and clerics who would soon be drawn to Henry’s circle, to eat and talk about their employers, their work, and plans for their country’s future, when their hopeful young master was called to the thrones.

Between the Tower and Westminster, the pageant passed under seven arches in all, some over seventy feet high. From the top of the second arch, Genius addressed Queen Anne, praising her birth and virtues, and ‘that fair shoot … your eldest joy, and top of all your store’, Henry. After solitary Gloriana, the English revelled in the myth of a royal family. After the Virgin Queen, pure and alone, came marriage, earth, offspring, fecundity and growth, security of succession. Richard Martin MP welcomed the king on behalf of Members of Parliament and lawyers. He praised the ‘fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient kings … your princely offspring’, deliberately tracing the Stuart descent from the Tudors.

When Henry reached the sixth arch by the conduit on Fleet Street, it looked like ‘some enchanted castle guarded by ten thousand harmless spirits’. It was a ‘tower of pleasure’. In the middle a huge globe rotated slowly, ‘filled with all the degrees and states that are in the land’. Astraea – one of the traditional symbols of Elizabeth I – sat on top, her garment thickly strewed with stars, a crown of stars on her head, a silver veil covering her eyes.

Near Astraea stood Envy, eating the heads off adders. Her ‘rank teeth the glittering poisons chew’ and swallowed, as blessings descended on Henry and his family. The City celebrated ‘the attractive wonder of man’s majesty’ after a loved but barren woman’s majesty: ‘Our globe is drawn in a right line again/And now appear new faces and new men.’

Yet, the presence of Envy and her sisters showed that the Stuarts had enemies. They had inherited Elizabeth’s wars, religious divisions and potential assassins, along with her thrones. The previous year, while the Stuarts rode from here to there, outrunning the plague, two Catholic conspiracies – the Main and Bye plots – had been unearthed, resulting in the first religiously and dynastically motivated executions and imprisonments of the new era. Sir Walter Ralegh had become entangled in one. He was sentenced to death, but sent to the Tower until James made up his mind whether to kill or free him.

In a private letter, Father Tesimond, a disenchanted Catholic priest, gloomily concluded it was Prince Henry, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles, the king’s ‘numerous progeny’, that really guaranteed this Protestant succession. Tesimond’s colleague, Father Garnet, a prominent English Jesuit, concurred. The king secured the present, ‘but the son that follows him’ was more important in the long run. Over the hill at thirty-eight – an average male life expectancy in 1600 – James might die any moment. However, James’s heir was in place and being educated for the job. The peaceful transition to the new dynasty made clear to the discontented: the cause of other claimants was a dead issue.

The final arch at Temple Bar marked the meeting point of the City and Westminster. Here the City of London handed the royals over to the court and politicians. Beneath the arch the god ‘Janus’ hung the arms of the new kingdom: a life-sized lion and unicorn rampant, made of brass, gold and silver gilding.* The dedication read: to ‘Janus Quadrifrons’, word-play perhaps for James needing four faces (and eight eyes), each one to watch over one of the countries he ruled. This extraordinary union had come about peacefully, after centuries of conflict between the English and Scots. At Whitehall, James’s government had started to work on ending the war with Ireland, and the king and Cecil were negotiating to bring the Armada war to a close.

Towards the end of the day, the court retired to Whitehall to feast and celebrate the new British monarchy. Up the road in the City, the people fell to looting the allegorical world. They hauled down the arches as if it were a revolution, and carried off the chipped, gaudy paintwork, to raise fires and mend houses.

The Stuarts had at last taken possession of Elizabeth’s palaces and hunting lodges, furniture, books, gems, tapestries and jewels. James also inherited her policies and her factions in court, church and state – all competing for power and favour. He reappointed many of Elizabeth’s ministers and lower-ranking officers. He inherited expectations as well as wealth and status. But Henry was new. He had to be settled in a manner suitable for a role hardly anyone remembered – that of crown prince. The last had been Edward VI, born in 1537.* Cecil now set to work, consulting old household books from Henry VIII’s time, to find the protocols for creating the crown prince’s household.

* The arms hang today in the Guildhall.

* Nottingham was born in 1536, his cousin Northampton in 1540; Edward VI inherited in 1547, so even men like these remembered nothing useful of Edward’s time as Prince of Wales.

NINE

Henry’s Anglo-Scottish Family

NONSUCH

James set up his son’s first permanent English home at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. Built by Henry VIII for his son, the future Edward VI, Henry VIII demanded it rival the greatest French Renaissance palaces: there would be none such anywhere in the world. Six hundred and ninety-five carved stucco-duro panels decorated the facades and inner court of the palace. They extended over 850 feet long, rising from sixteen to nearly sixty feet high in places. Gods and goddesses lolled and chased each other across the walls. Soldiers in classical uniforms battled for their lives, frozen for ever in their moment of triumph or death.

The panels overlooking the gardens featured depictions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Stucco-duro polished easily to a high marble-like sheen: Nonsuch dazzled in sunlight. Other scenes illustrated to the heir the duties of a Christian prince. One panel showed Henry VIII and Edward seated among gods and mythical heroes. Divinities watched over them, blessing the Tudor dynasty. All in all, it was the ‘single greatest work of artistic propaganda ever created in England’. James instinctively knew it was the right setting in which to nurture the first ever Prince of Wales of the united kingdoms. The king had given Nonsuch to the queen, as one of her royal palaces.

Topping the massed bulk of the octagonal towers at each corner of the southern facade, enormous white stone lions bore Prince Henry’s standard in their paws. Mouths frozen in a snarl, their fierce eyes followed Henry and his friends as they hunted, practised feats of arms on foot and horseback, readying themselves to defend, attack, defeat, rule. The boys chased each other through gardens laid out by the keeper of Nonsuch, Lord Lumley, around fountains where water squirted out of the goddess Diana’s nipples, and past tall marble obelisks with black onyx falcons perched on top. Amongst all the treasures, Lumley’s most prized possessions were his books. He had built up the greatest private library in England and now offered an unparalleled collection of teaching materials to Henry’s circle.

The king confirmed Adam Newton in his post as Henry’s principal tutor, and Walter Quin to assist. Newton prevailed on the prince to ask the king to give the vacant, lucrative post of the deanery of Durham to him. (Newton was establishing himself at court by marrying into the Puckerings, an important Elizabethan political family.) Henry did so, writing to his father, the prince said, not because I think ‘your Majesty is unmindful of the promise he made at Hampton Court’ that the Dean’s position would go to Newton in due time, but because I want to ‘show the desire I have to do good to my master’. Henry’s bookish father wanted his son to esteem his tutor. Henry’s letter jogged his father’s memory. Newton got the post of Dean of Durham.

In his domestic sphere, David Foulis retained his place as cofferer in charge of Henry’s wardrobe. David Murray became the prince’s Gentleman of the Purse, and remained in the bedchamber as Groom of the Stool. The affectionate, constant presence of men such as Newton, Foulis and Murray helped give Henry’s new life in England stability. His parents came and went, but these men abided continuously, and seemed to love and honour each other.

They bickered like a family too. Newton and Murray ‘did give [the prince] liberty of jesting pleasantly with’ them, initiating banter. Playing shuffleboard, Newton saw Henry swapping his coins to see if a different one gave him an edge. He told Henry he ‘did ill to change them so oft’. Taking a coin in hand, he told Henry to watch. Newton would ‘play well enough without changing’. He shoved his penny – and lost.

‘Well thrown master,’ Henry crowed.

Newton pushed himself back from the table. He ‘would not strive with a Prince at shuffleboard’, he said.

‘You Gown men,’ Henry countered, ‘should be best at such exercises, being not meet for those that are more stirring’ – such as archery, or artillery practice, or preparing to lead men into war.

‘Yes,’ Newton said, ‘I am. Fit for whipping of boys.’

‘You need not vaunt of that which a ploughman … can do better than you,’ Henry laughed.

‘Yet can I do more,’ Newton eyed him. ‘I can govern foolish children.’

Henry looked up ‘smiling’, and acknowledged that a man ‘had need be a wise man that would do that’.

The king and Privy Council extended Henry’s ‘Scottish family’ to reflect the prince’s enlarged British identity. James appointed an Englishman, Sir Thomas Chaloner, to replace the Earl of Mar and run Henry’s household. Determined to maintain her connection with Henry, the queen gave Nonsuch and all her private estates over to Chaloner’s management. As governor, after the king and council, Chaloner had the last word on who came and went and lived at Nonsuch. Before 1603, Cecil had trusted him to carry Elizabeth’s pension to James in Scotland, and Cecil’s own secret correspondence about the succession. Awarding Chaloner this high office, the king expressed his confidence in him, rewarding Sir Thomas for those long, perilous journeys.