FOURTEEN
‘O BRAVE NEW WORLD’
Henry’s courtly college at St James’s was costing a fortune. The reconfigured household had ‘become so great a court’, said Chaloner, ‘that it was ready to be overwhelmed with the burden and charge of itself’. Still, hundreds flocked to offer service to the crown prince.
The speed and scale of the court’s expansion forced Chaloner to request more funds from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar. Henry himself wrote to Lord Treasurer Dorset, bluntly indicating the shortfall in his budget. Dorset disappointed him. The royal coffers were as bare as ever, he explained. ‘Money is the nervus belli’, the nerves and sinews of war, James had advised Henry. Mountains of colonial plunder had powered Spanish domination of Europe in the sixteenth century. But where would the prince find his nervus belli? Salisbury described the Stuarts’ finances as raging like an ignis edax, a consuming fire. If he was to stay solvent, Henry, as king-in-waiting, must acquire a better understanding of finances than either his profligate father or mother possessed. Where better to go to learn about money than the City of London?
It was arranged for Henry to be inducted into the Merchant Taylors’ Company, one of the Great Twelve livery companies of London. On arriving at the guild’s hall on Threadneedle Street, he was presented ‘with a purse of gold, and the Clerk of the Company delivered his Highness’ another. Music floated down from twelve lutenists positioned in high window arches. ‘Hanging aloft in a ship’, sat three musicians dressed as sailors. Trade and navy sailed together. Weighing the purses in his hand, Henry ‘graciously accepted’ them. He ‘commanded one of his gentlemen … to go to all the Lords there present, and require … them that loved him’, who were not committed elsewhere, ‘to be free of his company’. These men, from the worlds of trade and commerce, were invited to come to his courtly college to see what it might offer them in terms of books, experts, soldiers and sailors, laboratories, scientists and inventors. In return, the City men would tell him how to fill his empty royal coffers.
The opening of the Earl of Salisbury’s New Exchange in the spring of 1609 showed Henry just what trade and enterprise could offer. Located on the Strand, the ground floor was an arcade. Under the arches, merchants and estate agents conducted their business. Inside, on the ground and first floors were retail outlets for luxury goods that had been imported into London. Salisbury had created the first high-end shopping mall, which James christened ‘Britain’s Burse’.*
As Henry and the royal family walked into two great galleries they were plunged into a sea of jewel-coloured light. Windows glazed with armorial stained glass splashed vivid hues across interiors aglow from gilding and red, green, blue, yellow paintwork. The Cecil coat of arms dominated. The royal party passed ‘Haberdashers of hats, Haberdashers of small wares, stocking sellers, linen drapers, Seamsters, Goldsmiths or Jewellers … such as sell china wares, Milliners’. They stopped to admire ‘Perfumers, Silk mercers, Tyremakers or Hoodmakers, Stationers, Booksellers, Confectioners, such as sell pictures, maps or prints, Girdlers, etc.’.
Salisbury had commissioned a Ben Jonson masque to celebrate the Exchange’s opening and ‘fitted up one of the shops very beautifully’ for its setting, over which ‘ran the words: “All other places give for money, here all is given for love”.’ Three characters walked out to meet the court: a Merchant, the Merchant’s Boy, and the Porter of the Burse. They welcomed the royal family and spread before them a stunning selection of opulent wares imported from China: fine silks, bracelets, scarves, fans, knives, umbrellas, sundials, silk flowers and, above all, the prettiest porcelain. These goods were meant to educate as well as amuse.
Truly, ‘there is not that trifle in this whole shop that is not mysterious’, boasted the Merchant, reaching for automata displaying what appeared to be moving stars and planets. He was planning bird-collecting trips to America and China, he told them. He pretended to haggle with Queen Anne over a jewel-embossed silver plaque of the Annunciation, before handing it to her. The Merchant picked out an expensive inlaid cabinet for the king. He then rummaged about and staggered forward under the weight of silver-inlaid horse tack – worthy only of Alexander the Great’s steed, Bucephalus, he announced, before giving it to Henry. The prince accepted the tribute, fit for great conquerors.
Luxury and scientific progress welded together in many of the products on sale. The royal party examined an innovative ‘perspective’ glass – a spyglass to let you pick out the detail of a man’s clothes and even the breed of his horse from miles away. The Merchant hinted he might be able to get one for young Henry, if he wanted one?
Henry definitely wanted one. Aside from the irresistible spying opportunities, owning a large telescope would put Henry’s court at the cutting edge of science. One of the prince’s tutors, scientist Thomas Harriot, had already made groundbreaking discoveries in optics, engineering, astronomy, mathematics, and cartography. He applied his discoveries in the field of spherical geometry to navigation, and developed advanced navigational instruments. Given the courtly college’s military bent, Henry had encouraged Harriot to apply his mathematical genius to ballistics: he calculated the rise and fall of an object along a trajectory – like a cannon ball – to enable gunners to take aim accurately. Together with Henry’s cosmographer, Thomas Lydiat, Harriot could use the telescope to discover how God ordered the workings of the universe – allowing the prince to peer deeper into the heavens than almost anyone before him, as if seeing into the mind of God Himself. A spyglass showed Henry how science and beauty served imperial ends. Mapping the heavens, the globe could be navigated more confidently.
Almost every day in the courtly college, men such as Chaloner, Murray and Newton asked Henry to receive ‘projectors’ and ‘mechanicians’ in order to pitch a commercial idea or scientific invention to the prince. The times were obsessed with ‘projects’, everyone on the lookout for new schemes to make their fortunes. One man wanted Henry to invest in making farthing coins out of copper. Another, Sir William Slingsby, asked the prince and his circle to come in on a proposal to make a new kind of fuel-efficient furnace. Monsieur Gouget, meanwhile, gave a presentation on new techniques to improve lead, silver and tin mining in the Duchy of Cornwall.
Closer to hand lay more conventional ways for a prince to amass a fortune. When the royal family attended the opening of Salisbury House, Robert Cecil’s palatial new residence on the Strand the previous April, Henry had seen for himself just how vast a wealth might be derived from exploiting the British political system’s offerings of patronage, positions, and perks.
The Earl of Dorset’s death in April 1608 allowed Salisbury to add the Lord Treasurer’s position to his portfolio of assets and responsibilities. According to Ambassador de la Boderie, Salisbury now had ‘the whole administration of affairs in his hands’. A fraction of the income that ‘administration of affairs’ offered would allow Henry to ‘attempt everything great and excellent’.
In Salisbury’s library, Henry perused the Cecils’ beautiful collection of books arrayed along the walls on twelve tables, each inlaid with the name of a different country. A book on fortifications lay open on one. Another displayed hand-painted maps of the known world, together with works on genealogies, heroic men, voyages of discovery, trade and conquest. High above him, the heads of Moors, Indians and Mercury looked down, carved deeply into the library’s plasterwork ceiling, all to magnify Salisbury’s ‘virtue’. A huge map of America dominated one wall.
The idea of America transfixed Henry. He wanted to discover the Northwest Passage sea route, to open up the wealth of the East to English trading companies, and make Sir Walter Ralegh’s ambition of colonising America for England a reality.
Henry heard Ralegh’s ideas through his maths tutor, Thomas Harriot. Harriot and his friend John White had voyaged to Virginia under Ralegh in the late 1580s. There Harriot observed the Algonquin people, learned the Algonquin language and made a phonetic alphabet to represent it. His friend White drew sketches of the native population. Between them they documented the life of the Algonquin, their society and religious practices, their knowledge of local plants and animals, and their produce. Despite describing them as ‘military inferior’, theirs was a sympathetic portrait compared to later colonial depictions of the Algonquin as ‘savages’.
In 1608 Sir Walter was still locked up in the Tower under sentence of death, but Harriot visited him regularly. The king loathed Ralegh and showed no sign of releasing him, leaving Sir Walter’s best hope of regaining his liberty with the two other courts. Queen Anne liked Ralegh. He was also expert in many of the Prince of Wales’s interests, such as the navy, the New World, scientific experiments and an aversion to Spain. Men such as Harriot were able to slip Ralegh’s world views into conversations with the prince, while, say, setting mathematical puzzles for his student to solve. When Ralegh started communicating directly with Henry, he already knew what he wanted to hear about. The prince began to receive letters containing ideas on all sorts of things – from ship-building and navigation, to how to conduct diplomatic relations with foreign neighbours, to marriage.
In April 1606, James had agreed to the formation of the Virginia Company to trade with the New World. Key investors included men from Henry’s inner circle, including Sir Thomas Chaloner, John Dodderidge (MP, lawyer, and Henry’s sergeant-at-law), the Earl of Southampton, who frequented St James’s, George More (MP and Henry’s Receiver General) and Sir Oliver Cromwell (uncle of the future Lord Protector).
The king commanded the colonists to set up a ruling council in Virginia, allowing the company council in London to retain overall control. (How this would work when decisions had to be made months before London even knew what the problem was, did not seem to cross James’s mind.) Some of the colonists packing to go assumed that when they arrived in America they would have the liberty to govern their lives, without continual reference back to London.
That December, 1606, the newly chartered company had sent three ships, 105 settlers and over fifty crew on an exploratory expedition to establish a trading bridgehead in Virginia. Henry sent along his gunner, Robert Tindall, to be his eyes and ears, with a brief to record anything of interest.
Months later, the prince had received Tindall’s first reports from the newly established township of ‘James town’. ‘We are safely arrived and planted in this country by the providence and mercy of God, which we find to be in itself most fruitful,’ he wrote, ‘of the which we have taken a real and public possession in the name and to the use of your royal father.’
The crossing had been unusually long and hard, lasting 144 days. The colonists made first landfall on 26 April 1607, on a broad sandy beach at what looked like the mouth of a major river. They assembled a small boat and went exploring. George Percy, younger son of the Duke of Northumberland, recorded that ‘on the nine and twentieth day we returned to the mouth of the Chesiopic, set up a cross and called the place Cape Henry’, in recognition of Prince Henry’s commitment to the enterprise. The waters were named the River James in honour of the king. Thirteen years before the Mayflower landing, settlers from the Susan, Constant, and Godspeed arrived, claimed the New World for the Stuarts, and planted the British race permanently in American soil. They called it Nova Britannia.
On Henry’s instructions, over the following months, Tindall created the first map of the Chesapeake Bay. He marked the James River and Jamestown on it, added a handful of Indian towns, and kept a journal of his impressions. Though nothing like the sumptuous maps in Salisbury’s grand library, Tindall’s ink and vellum map, its colours still jewel bright, tantalised the prince, giving him the first glimpse of the Chesapeake Bay area and the newly christened ‘Cape Henry’ and ‘Prince Henrie, his river’.* The map is big for something so seemingly empty, with its mere handful of landmarks and features. Laid on thick parchment, it is thirty-three inches long and just over eighteen inches deep. It feels like a highly personal sketch – a secret map to hidden treasure. But, here the treasure is the region itself. It is waiting for Henry to come and fill it in, as the colonial ruler.
Soon after, Henry procured some money and made himself a shareholder in the company. His backing of the enterprise led men to refer to him as ‘the Patron of the Virginia Plantation’. ‘Actions profitable or honourable for the kingdom were fomented by him,’ wrote one of his officers, ‘witness the North West passage, Virginia, Guiana, the newfoundland, etc., to all which he gave his money as well as his good word.’ Henry’s greatest dream was to visit his American territories himself, to sail there at the head of an English fleet, modernised and powerful enough to dominate global trade on the high seas.
Such behaviour infuriated the Spanish, who claimed ownership of the whole New World.
In May 1608, Henry returned to dine at Salisbury House. After supper, he was invited to take a turn through the earl’s long art gallery.
The prince stopped to admire a painting, one of the earliest works to arrive from Venice, described by the English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, who sent it, as ‘the figure (I take it) of Prometheus, devoured by the eagle, done by Giacoba Palma’. Wotton said he hoped the image of Prometheus’s suffering would prove worthy of a space in his lordship’s new galleries.
Everything Henry saw at Salisbury’s home showed him what power looked like from the top of the heap – tasteful, beautiful, innovative, competitive and cosmopolitan. It was a place available to Henry, as heir, if he seized it. He saw how Salisbury sat at the centre of a web of cultural, artistic, economic and intellectual patronage. ‘Short, crookbacked, but with a noble countenance and features,’ the earl had a rather beautiful face, like an owl. An intelligent, watchful humour flitted over it in response to the antics of men he saw pass before his large, calm eyes. His whole image mesmerised. Henry understood from men like Salisbury how magnificence could enhance the virtue of a Renaissance Jacobean prince, and took the lesson back to the collegiate court. The royal palaces looked decidedly old-fashioned he thought. His father had preserved Hampton Court largely unchanged since the age of Henry VIII for precisely the old-world virtues of continuity – and by extension legitimacy – this inferred. Hampton Court gave out the message the king repeated endlessly: Scottish James’s natural right to the English throne. Henry never had this anxiety.
Not long after the Salisbury House dinner, the earl sent Prometheus, devoured by the eagle to St James’s, as a gift for the prince.
Prometheus was a Titan (half god, half human) who challenged the Olympians. A trickster, he deceived the gods and destroyed the golden age of mankind by stealing fire for human beings. Fire enabled man to break through the limits that held them in a primitive condition, and opened the door to scientific and cultural advances which transformed society. As punishment for his vaulting ambition and deceit, Zeus shackled Prometheus to a rock and cursed him to have his liver devoured by an eagle every day, only for it to regenerate every night to be devoured again the next day. Was Salisbury’s gift a hint to Henry – a warning, perhaps – about the risks of making transformative changes to his kingdom?
* It differed from Thomas Gresham’s sixteenth-century Royal Exchange, on the corner by Threadneedle Street, in its emphasis on luxury items for the leisured classes.
* Today called the York River.