14

‘The most hated man then living’

THERE HAD BEEN little time for the earl to mourn his surviving son. Just three weeks later, he was among the dignitaries who attended the king’s procession to Paul’s Cross, an open air pulpit in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral, on 26 March 1620. Then the controversy of his daughter’s marriage to Buckingham was quickly followed by another royal visit to his estate. On 3 August 1620, the king once more made Belvoir Castle part of his summer progress. The Earl of Rutland presided over the entertainments, which included the obligatory banquets, knighting and hunting. With the trial so fresh in everyone’s minds, the atmosphere cannot have been as jovial as on previous royal visits, and the fate of the Flower women must surely have formed a topic of conversation between the earl and his sovereign during the week or so that they spent together. No doubt James fully approved of the outcome. The fire might have gone out of his witch hunting fervour, but given that the victim in this case was one of his most important courtiers, he could not flinch from showing his support.

A portrait of the earl was painted at around this time, and still hangs at Belvoir today. It shows him to have been a handsome man, with the clipped pointed beard and elegant ruff fashionable in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. He stares into the distance, and his eyes have a haunted, sorrowful look, as if tormented by a painful memory. He would never recover from the heartbreak of losing both his young sons – and with them his hopes for his estate.

More sorrowful news soon arrived at Belvoir. The Reverend Samuel Fleming, who had served the earls of Rutland as chaplain for more than 30 years, died a few months after the young lord. A godly man to the end, it was said that he had died in the middle of preaching a sermon to his congregation in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire. He was buried not in Bottesford with his brother Abraham and the earls whom he had served, but in the grounds of Cottenham church, in a grave site that is now unknown. One of his bequests hints at a degree of remorse for the death of Joan Flower and her daughters. He left property for the foundation of an almshouse for old women in Bottesford. This can still be seen today, bearing the inscription ‘Dr Fleming’s Hospital, 1620’.¹

In contrast to the tragedy in his personal life, the Earl of Rutland’s public career was thriving. His daughter Katherine’s marriage to George Villiers enhanced his already high standing at court and tied his family more closely to the king – a long-standing and anxiously cherished ambition. Shortly after the wedding, he was the first-named in a list presented to the House of Lords of ‘reported recusants and Non-communicants who are in places of trust’. Both he and his wife were described as being ‘suspected Popish recusants’, but thanks to their new position of influence at court, they escaped reprisals.² The following year, the king honoured his favourite’s new wife with a visit to her husband’s estate at Burley in Rutland. In the same dispatch that he reported the visit, John Chamberlain added that Katherine was ‘saide to be with child’.³

Despite her earlier reticence on account of their religious differences (or, more specifically, her parents’ objections), Katherine seemed quickly to have fallen passionately in love with her husband. ‘Never woman was so happy as I am,’ she wrote to him three years after their wedding, ‘for never was there so kind a husband as you are, and God made me thankful to Him for you . . . I am sure God will bless us both for your sake, and I cannot express the infinite affection I bear you; but for God’s sake believe me that there was never woman loved man as I do you.’ In another letter she assured him: ‘I think ther was never such a man borne as you ar and how much am I bound to god that I must be that hapye womane to injoy you from all outher wemen and the unworthiest of all to have so great a blessing.’⁴

But it was always going to be a turbulent marriage, given the strong will and contradictory opinions of each family. Buckingham himself described it as ‘something stormy’.⁵ Katherine, like her husband, was possessed of a formidable temper and did not always succeed in playing the passive and dutiful wife that convention dictated. It soon became apparent that Buckingham was not going to return her loyalty and affection, and his womanising continued virtually uninterrupted by the fact that he was now married. The naive Katherine was easily duped for a time. During a prolonged period of absence on diplomatic business, he received a letter from his wife assuring him: ‘Everybody tels me how hapy I am in a husband, and how chast you ar; that you will not looke at a woman, and yett how thay woo you.’⁶

But even Katherine could not be fooled forever, particularly as her husband took little trouble to conceal his infidelities. She became intensely jealous of his many mistresses, in particular Lucy Percy, whose affair with the marquess had been unaffected by his marriage. Yet so passionate was her love for him that she always forgave his ‘one sin [of] loving women so well’, as she herself ruefully admitted. Conscious of her lack of physical charms, she assured him: ‘Might you have a finer and handsomer, but never a lovinger wife than your poor Kate is.’ She therefore expressed the rather optimistic conviction: ‘I am sure you will not commit the like again.’⁷ In fact, Buckingham did not have so high an opinion of women as his wife supposed. As one contemporary shrewdly observed: ‘He looks upon the whole race of Women as inferior things, and uses them as if the Sex were one, best pleased with all.’⁸

Katherine’s relations with her mother-in-law were also volatile. In January 1622, she reaffirmed her conversion to the Protestant faith when, along with her husband and the dowager countess, she dined with the Bishop of London and was confirmed in his chapel.⁹ But just a few months later, Buckingham’s mother was sent from court because of having ‘relapsed into Poperie’, though Chamberlain believed the real reason for her dismissal to be ‘some pique or harsh usage toward her daughter-in-law’.¹⁰

None of this was conducive to a smooth pregnancy for Katherine. King James, who, far from being jealous of his favourite’s new wife, referred to her affectionately as his daughter, was solicitous of her welfare. He told Buckingham to look after Katherine and ‘the sweete litle thing that is in her bellie’, and urged that he should ‘let her never goe in a coache upon the streete, nor never goe fast in it, lette youre mother keepe all hastie newis from comming to her eares, lette her not eate too much fruite, & hasten her owte of London’.¹¹ To the king’s great angst, Katherine suffered a traumatic labour, which resulted not in the male heir that her husband longed for, but a ‘sickly daughter’. Worse still, Katherine fell dangerously ill with smallpox shortly afterwards.

James, who stood as godfather at the hastily arranged christening, was beside himself with worry. It was reported from court that he ‘prayed heartily for her [Katherine], and was at Wallingford House, early and late, to inquire after her’.¹² He also made a lavish gift of a ‘faire chaine of diamonds’ to the Duchess of Lennox ‘for her great care and paines in making broaths and caudells and such like for the Lady Marquise in her sicknes’.¹³ Much to his relief, and that of her husband, Katherine recovered, and her infant daughter, Mary (known affectionately as ‘Little Mall’), became a firm favourite with the king, who constantly cuddled and played with her.¹⁴ Katherine even consulted him on the appropriate moment to wean the little girl, and went into very personal details, confiding: ‘I thinke there was never child card [cared] les for the breast then she does.’¹⁵ In the years that followed, she continued to keep her royal master informed of every stage of Mary’s development, such as when the girl took her first steps (‘I think she will run before she can go’) and her love of music (‘She will clap her hands together and on her breast, and she can tell the tunes as well as any of us can; and, as they change the tunes, she will change her dancing’). Above all, Katherine assured James, ‘she grows every day more like you’.¹⁶

Despite Buckingham’s proclivity for womanising, he seemed to genuinely love his wife, and she returned that love with ever growing passion. ‘You could never a had one that could love you better then your poore true loving katte [Kate] doth,’ she wrote during one of his missions abroad on royal service, ‘poore now in your absencs but els the hapyest and richest woman in the world.’¹⁷ She was rich in more than just her husband’s love. Thanks in no small part to her dowry, the Buckinghams enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, maintaining several homes and an army of servants, and staging lavish entertainments for the king and his courtiers. By 1624, the duchess’s housekeeping expenses alone were reckoned at £3,000 per year. Still basking in James’s favour, theirs seemed set to be a long and glittering partnership.

Although there were rumours that the king’s regard towards Buckingham waned after the latter’s marriage, there was little perceivable decline in the marquess’s power at court. He became an invaluable ally to his father-in-law, with whom he was now apparently entirely reconciled. Katherine even went so far as to assure her husband: ‘I will swear, [he] loves you better, I think, than he does me.’¹⁸ In the spring of 1623, Buckingham brought his influence to bear in having Rutland appointed admiral of the fleet to bring home Prince Charles from Spain, after the collapse of the negotiations for his marriage to the infanta. A court commentator described Rutland’s departure in late May, noting that he and his fellow envoys were ‘in their best array, and their followers well appointed in fair and rich liveries.’¹⁹ The following month, Villiers himself received another honour at his royal master’s hands when he was awarded the dukedom of Buckingham. In June that year, it was rumoured that he would soon be made Lord High Constable of England, and his father-in-law given the post of Lord Admiral.²⁰

The Earl of Rutland seemed to be growing ever more indiscreet in his religious beliefs, and his position at court would have become correspondingly more precarious if it had not been for his son-in-law. In March 1624, when Parliament was debating the treaty with Spain, the earl was alone in objecting to a clause relating to religion, and according to one court gossip, it was only Buckingham’s timely intervention that saved him from ‘censure’.²¹ Nevertheless, Rutland was still being talked of as one of the most influential men at court. Ben Jonson alluded to him in his Masque of the Metamorphosed Gipsies, which was performed for the king at Belvoir on 5 August 1621:

There’s a gentry cove here

Is the top of the shire,

Of the Bever-Ken,

A man among men;

You need not to fear,

I’ve an eye and an ear

That turns here and there,

To look to our gear;

Some say that there be

One or two, if not three,

That are greater than he.²²

There are numerous other references to Rutland’s appearance at court during the years that followed, which suggested that he remained at the heart of royal and political affairs. He was still sufficiently in the king’s favour to receive two visits from him at Belvoir during the summer progress of 1624. The first took place towards the beginning of the progress in mid July, and the second as the king was making his way back down south in early August. The usual knighthoods were conferred during the latter visit, which lasted a few days, and James left for Newark on 8 August. He would never see Belvoir again.

By now, Buckingham was at the height of his powers. As well as continuing to enjoy favour with the king, he had also shrewdly courted the good graces of James’s son and heir, the future Charles I. ‘Never was one man so beloved of King, Prince, and people’, observed Sir Edward Conway in March 1624.²³ By contrast, in his account of James’s court, Sir Anthony Weldon described Buckingham as ‘the most hated man then living’.²⁴ Inevitably, the duke’s growing influence had become the source of great resentment and suspicion among the other members of the court. The King of Spain’s agent there wrote to his master in some alarm that ‘Buckingham desires to be placed above King or Prince, and whilst many dare speak against him, none dare do it against the Duke.’ The duke was clearly becoming more arrogant by the day, and ‘oftentimes bragged openly in Parliament that he had made the King yield to this and that’. The envoy concluded that Britain was ‘not now governed by a monarchy, but by a triumviri, whereof Buckingham was the first and chiefest, the Prince the second, and the King the last’.²⁵

Buckingham remained high in favour for the remainder of James’s reign. When he fell dangerously ill in May 1624, his royal master was so horror-struck that he immediately hastened to his bedside and spent three hours there, in anxious vigil. On a subsequent visit, he was observed praying on his knees beside the duke’s bed, beseeching God to cure his beloved Steenie or else transfer the sickness to him. He proceeded to send regular gifts to his favourite as he convalesced, including ‘the eyes, the tongue and the dowsets [testicles] of the deer he killed in Eltham Park’.²⁶ Perhaps this unsavoury gift had not been appreciated, for when Buckingham suffered a relapse, James resorted to the more tasteful offering of ‘excellent melons, pears, sugared beans’, strawberries and raspberries. The pair also exchanged a series of impassioned letters, the duke expressing heartfelt gratitude to James as ‘my purveyor, my goodfellow, my physician, my make, my friend, my father, my all’.²⁷

Similar sentiments were expressed by James in December the same year, when he too was laid low by sickness. In an extraordinarily passionate ‘billet’ more suited to a spouse than a political associate, he begged Buckingham to hasten to his side, assuring him: ‘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.’²⁸ In another missive to ‘my sweete tome [Tom Badger]’, he urged his favourite to ‘keepe thyselfe verrie warme, especiallie thy heade and thy showlders, putte thy parke of Bewlie [Burley] to an ende, and love me still and still’.²⁹

Unlike his beloved favourite, James would not recover. His health had been steadily declining for several years, and in March 1625, whilst on his customary stay at Theobalds House in Hertfordshire, he was stricken with a strange fever. Buckingham was at his side at once, and he and his mother personally ministered to the dying king, rejecting the services of the royal physicians. It was reported that the dowager countess had ‘contracted much suspicion to herself and her son, for applying a plaister to the King’s wrists without the consent of his Physicians . . . after the applying thereof, the King grew worse’.³⁰ The duke and his mother had certainly taken an extraordinary risk, and when James’s symptoms worsened, there were whispers that he had been poisoned. On 25 March, the king suffered a stroke, which saddened his face muscles and left his jaw hanging loose. This, together with the rising phlegm which constantly threatened to choke him, made it virtually impossible for him to speak. Two days later, the 58-year-old king was dead.

There is a story that almost at James’s last breath, Buckingham and his mother had tried to forestall his death by taking part in an extraordinary ritual. As the king lay on his deathbed, racked by pain, his attendants had apparently decided to lessen his suffering by transferring it into the body of an animal. A young pig had duly been brought in for this purpose and dressed in the clothes of a human baby. The Duchess of Buckingham had played the part of midwife to the baby pig, while her husband had been among its godfathers. The animal had been baptised before being chased out of the room. This tale was told in a nineteenth-century account and is not corroborated by any of the contemporary sources. If it was true, then it would be deeply ironic that a monarch who had devoted so much of his life to stamping out all traces of sorcery should have taken part in a blasphemous ritual of witchcraft to prolong his days on earth.

The duke made an impressive show of grief – real or exaggerated – at his late master’s demise. Immediately falling ill again himself with ‘an impostume that brake in his head’, he had to be carried to the funeral in a chair. He subsequently made an impassioned speech in Parliament, defending the treatments that he had given to the king during his final days. ‘He spake with tears in his eyes,’ remarked one observer, ‘expressing much sorrow that he who had been so inifinitely beholden to the King for himself, for his kindred, for all his favours, that he should now be questioned for murdering him.’³¹ As well as an attempt to clear his name, this speech may have been for the benefit of the new king, James’s son Charles, whose favour Buckingham had been careful to cultivate for some time. If so, then the ploy worked. ‘I have lost a good father and you a good master,’ Charles wrote, ‘but comfort yourself, you have found another that will no less cherish you.’³² The new king was as good as his word, confirming the duke in all of his former offices and even giving him a golden key to symbolise his right to enter any royal residence at any time he chose.

The Earl of Rutland, who had played a prominent part in the late king’s funeral, also appeared to be in the new king’s good graces. But this favour was fragile, for the earl’s enemies tried their utmost to discredit him. Countess Cecilia wrote with some alarm that her husband had been charged by certain members of Parliament with ‘being the cose of the ould Kinge deth and going to coning pepel [cunning people]’.³³ The reference to ‘cunning people’ is intriguing and – if taken literally – suggests that Francis had encouraged the late king to consult with ‘white’ witches and sorcerers. As well as revealing the earl’s strong belief in witchcraft, this also suggests that even at the end of his life, James had far from abandoned such beliefs himself, despite publicly distancing himself from them after coming to England. The rest of the countess’s letter makes it clear just how closely bound were the Catholic religion and belief in witchcraft, for she adds: ‘here is gret fere by Catholikes of persecuson’.³⁴

Although he enjoyed Charles’s favour, the Duke of Buckingham’s position at court was increasingly perilous. He had amassed a dangerous body of enemies during his rise to greatness, and they resented his influence and arrogance. Buckingham’s sympathy for the French Huguenots prompted him to lead an expedition to France on their behalf in 1627, which failed miserably and only served to bolster his enemies. He set sail for home at the end of the year, and hastened to see his son, George, who was born a few days before his arrival. There was great rejoicing at the long-awaited arrival of a son and heir for Buckingham. His father-in-law was among the first to offer congratulations. Indeed, so keen was Rutland to see his new grandson that he failed to keep an appointment with the king and was obliged to apologise that ‘he forgot the day, being occupied with his daughter’.³⁵

Meanwhile, allegations that Buckingham had secured royal favour by witchcraft grew ever more insistent. That his former protégé, John Lambe, had helped him to bewitch the late king was an old rumour. More recently, Buckingham and his mother had enlisted the services of Richard Napier, the astrologer physician who had treated the Earl of Rutland’s younger son. They hoped that Napier might cure Buckingham’s lunatic and adulterous younger brother, Viscount Purbeck. The latter and his unhappy wife had hurled accusations of witchcraft at each other in their sordid and well-publicised marital battles. Buckingham’s notorious cunning man, Lambe, was said to have facilitated Lady Purbeck’s adulterous affair with Sir Robert Howard. With ‘powders and potions’ supplied by Lambe it was alleged that ‘she did intoxicate her husbands braines’.³⁶ The cunning man was duly hauled before the High Commission in 1625. By then, he had fallen from favour with Buckingham: indeed, the latter accused him of having used the same ‘potions’ on him.

Napier proved unwilling to take on the commission, but eventually agreed. His reluctance was justified. Failing to improve Purbeck’s condition, the physician blamed it upon Buckingham’s mother, whom he hated, and also wrote bitterly of Buckingham that he was ‘full of bribery’ and not to be trusted.³⁷ His aversion was at least partially motivated by their religious differences. Napier was a supporter of moderate Protestantism, with its emphasis upon salvation through faith, and wrote a number of refutations of the Catholic faith. When he discovered that Buckingham and his mother were sheltering a Jesuit priest in the 1620s, he was deeply shocked and tried to wean them from this dangerous course, without success. The experience was enough to make Napier suspicious of the nobility and unwilling to accept assignments from them.

Increasingly desperate to hold on to power, Buckingham now retained the services of another cunning man, Pierce Butler, who possessed ‘strange faculties’. The tales had reached the ears of the Venetian ambassador, who reported that Butler ‘is generally believed to be a magician, and as the duke gives him a handsome salary . . . he can have given him nothing except some secret service’.³⁸ Buckingham’s patronage of witches was seen as analogous with his Catholic faith: both inverted the proper social and religious order. This was enough to condemn him in the eyes of contemporaries – and give sanction to anyone who sought his destruction.

In June 1628, Buckingham’s old retainer John Lambe was murdered. By then, Lambe was an object of such popular hatred that he could not venture out of his house for fear of being attacked. But on the afternoon of 13 June, he risked a trip to the theatre. By then in his early eighties, he took the precaution of hiring a group of sailors to protect him. However, they were powerless against the angry mob which hounded him down and savagely beat and stoned him to death. King Charles heard of the riot and was said to have ridden from Whitehall to quell it, but arrived too late to save Lambe.

Just two months later, Buckingham himself was dead. He had already fallen foul of the House of Commons and most of the public, who blamed him for the shortcomings of Charles’s foreign policy. The rumours that he had poisoned the late king also resurfaced, and a parliamentary inquiry was held in April 1628, at which evidence was heard from the royal physicians, including the esteemed William Harvey. Although the duke was criticised for ousting the physicians from James’s bedside, he was cleared of responsibility for his death. But the tale proved remarkably resilient, and when King Charles himself was facing the prospect of death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell’s regime 20 years later, among the indictments against him was included the ‘old and almost forgotten charges, that his Majesty hastened the death of his father by poison, or that Buckingham attempted it with his consent’.³⁹

It was while planning an expedition in Portsmouth on 23 August that Buckingham was assassinated – stabbed to death by the army officer John Felton. It was not long before people linked his death to that of his former protégé, Lambe. Without Lambe’s magical powers to protect him, it was said, the royal favourite’s binding spell over the king and the nation was broken: his demise was inevitable. As one contemporary poem neatly put it: ‘For want of Lambe the Wolfe is dead.’⁴⁰

The intensity of his widow’s grief was matched only by that of the king, who upon hearing the news ‘threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with such passion and with abundance of tears the loss he had of an excellent servant’.⁴¹ Thanks to the lasting esteem in which Charles held her late husband, Katherine continued to enjoy favour at court. She used this to good effect, and was instrumental in promoting her father’s interests, as a letter she wrote to him in April 1631 suggests. She avowed that she had made his excuses to the king and queen at Greenwich, and that they had forgiven his absence. It may be that Francis had been unable to attend the court due to failing health. Katherine signs the letter ‘Your Lordship’s most obedient and unfortunat daughter’. It is not clear why she referred to herself as unfortunate – perhaps she still mourned her late husband. It is only in the postscript that she remembers to present her ‘humble servis’ to her stepmother.⁴²

Francis Manners died on 17 December 1632 at an inn in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire. His wife and his brother, Sir George Manners (who was set to succeed him), had been at his side as he gave a curious last speech two days earlier, the notes of which are preserved at Belvoir. He made no mention of the witchcraft controversy that had so blighted his life, but instead set out his last bequests. These were extraordinarily detailed, which suggests that the earl may have known for some time that he was dying and had therefore given the matter careful consideration. The fact that he bequeathed his doctor the extremely generous sum of £50 for attending him ‘in this his sicknesse’ also suggests a prolonged final illness.

Among the earl’s other bequests was ‘his best huntinge horsse for the hare or his best buck hunter’ for the king, which he desired one of his executors, Lord Savage, to present along with an assurance that ‘never Kinge had a more faithfull servant or a more loyall subject then myself nor never subjecte had a more gracious Soveraigne, acknowledginge himselfe infinightly bound to his Majesty for his ever gracious favoures unto him’.⁴³ Francis also ordered the disbursement of a £2,000 debt to Sir John Ayres, half of which money could be found in ‘his iron chest at London’ and £500 in his servant Robert Cook’s keeping, and begged his executors to supply the remaining £500. This suggests that his finances, like those of so many of his predecessors, were precarious by the time of his death.⁴⁴

Francis begged that ‘there might bee no difference’ between his wife and his brother George over the execution of his will, but he evidently suspected that there might be because he gave instructions for the resolving of these. He also desired there to be minimal expense upon his funeral. ‘For my funerall I wowld have it such as my auncestors have had, which will bee no greate charge, for that my toombe is allreddy made, and I wowld have my bodie, so soone as it is embalmed, to bee removed forth of the Inn.’ The reference to his tomb makes it clear that the earl had already approved the extraordinary inscription, with its reference to his sons’ deaths ‘by wicked practise & sorcerye’.⁴⁵ He had gone to his grave believing that the boys had been bewitched.

So far, there was nothing out of the ordinary in this last speech of a dying earl. What is worthy of note, however, is what Sir Francis said to his wife at the beginning of it: ‘Sweete hart give mee your hand, now I pray God blisse you and your children. It greeves me I shall see none of them before I die, but I leave them my blessinge.’⁴⁶ There is no record of the earl and his wife having any other children after the death of their two young sons. The clarity and detail of the rest of the speech make it unlikely that Francis’s thoughts had become clouded and confused. Is it possible that he had instead begun to lose his reason as his impending death called to mind the tragedy that had been played out at Belvoir some 14 years before?

Francis was right to suspect trouble after his death. The following May, his daughter Katherine complained that ‘my uncle has no desire of a good conclusion between us’ and that he was trying to force her to give up the lands that her father had left to her. She therefore resolved to take her case to the Court of Wards.⁴⁷ A commission was subsequently established to decide upon the matter. Meanwhile, the Belvoir accounts show that Cecilia was still haggling with the new earl over the family jewels a year after her husband’s death.⁴⁸

The widowed countess might well have cherished a hope to live in quiet retirement at Belvoir, away from the glittering court that her husband had so frequented. But the tragedy that had plagued Francis right up to his last breath also continued to fascinate society as a whole. In 1635, 16 years after the Flower women’s deaths, The Wonderful Discoverie was reprinted. It proved one of the most enduringly popular tales of witchcraft ever written.

Neither had the tale been forgotten by Cecilia, who outlived her husband by more than 20 years and died in September 1653. She chose to be buried not with her husband in the family vault at Bottesford church, but with her younger son in St Nicholas’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey.⁴⁹ The controversy surrounding his death had apparently haunted her until she too drew her last breath.