FIFTEEN
‘TRAVELLER FOR THE ENGLISH WITS’
The affairs of continental Europe demanded Henry attend to the protean political situation there, as much as domestic projects and plans to found a British empire in America. The era of the grand tour began now, not in the eighteenth century. A more peaceful Europe let men fulfil their desire to see the cradle of the Renaissance and experience the most cultured royal courts in Christendom. For an ambitious prince, touring friends offered the perfect opportunity, or cover, to gather information.
The Continent buzzed with ‘intelligencers’ of all kinds. Although Henry’s first attempt at spying had been a dismal failure, another opportunity arose as his close band of courtly followers disappeared one by one on their European tours. The Earl of Essex, away since 1607, had not yet returned. Thomas Coryate, Henry’s favoured wit, busied himself for his tour – on foot. Salisbury’s son, Viscount Cranborne, was just about to go. And now, Henry’s closest friend, sixteen-year-old Sir John Harington, was preparing to leave.
The two rode through St James’s Park to Whitehall to obtain Harington’s passport from the king. He would be gone for up to three years. As Henry spoke to his father, he felt tears welling up. ‘What hast thou done, John,’ said the king, turning to Harington, ‘that thou art so master of the Prince’s favour – tell me what art thou hast used? Not flattery – that belongeth not to thy age.’ Harington said that he had won his highness’s love, not with flattery ‘which I know not how to use’, ‘but by truth, of which, as your Majesty’s true son, his Highness is the lover’. For devout Calvinists like Henry and Harington, truth meant the truth of God’s word, in the Bible.
Harington and the prince experienced this truth immediately, in their hearts and minds, when they reviewed their words and deeds in its light. Each evening Harington recorded his deeds in ‘a day book’, in which he asked himself ‘how he had offended, or what good he had done … surveying his failings’. He recorded his sins and virtues ‘in a private character’. No one except Harington, and God, understood the code. A mass of thick hair swept up from Harington’s long, slim head. He managed as yet only a downy fuzz of beard round his chin and a pencil line over his mouth. His eyes were steady, though the bags under them told of hours reading, staring at a candle, Bible on his knee, in prayerful examination of his conscience; or lying awake reviewing his behaviour after a powerful sermon he and Henry had heard and discussed. He never slept above five or six hours a night.
Passport obtained, the youths planned Harington’s itinerary through the most geopolitically significant areas of Europe. In May, Harington, accompanied by his tutor John Tovey and an entourage of ten other gentlemen and masses of servants, left for Europe. Bearing endorsements from his prince, Harington looked every inch Henry’s ambassador from the collegiate court of St James’s.
Heading first for the Netherlands, then up the Rhine, Harington described to Henry how he had passed through ‘a great part of the Low Countries, and seen three courts of Princes, and as many universities, together with several large cities, fortified towns, castles, forts’. He recorded as much as he could about ‘politics, men eminent for authority, prudence or learning, war, the present state of affairs, the situation of cities, and the manners of people’. Everything he thought of interest to Henry and the future of Christendom went into private journals for future discussion at home. Then headed down into Italy.
He arrived in Florence, the heart of the Renaissance, on the wedding day of Cosimo de’ Medici and Maria Magdalena von Habsburg of Austria, and sent home an account of the event, including illustrations of the great court spectacles. But it never reached Henry. Harington believed it had been intercepted by ‘some of the English Papists at Florence’. Most travellers were paranoid about the security of their lines of communication – tacitly admitting they had something to hide and were spying on their hosts. He had written from three German cities, he said, but had not a word yet from his parents in Kew or from Henry. He asked the prince if he had received any of his letters? Had he written back?
Harington had matters ‘of great importance’ to the state and what Jacobeans called the whole ‘nation of Europe’, which included Britain, to relate. But given the loss of his letters he felt serious matters ‘could not be written without danger, paper being too weak a security for carrying, such a length of way, secrets, which might prove hazardous to the writer’. These he would share face to face on his return. He told Henry he would certainly travel home via France, and there seek an audience with Henri IV, not only to convey the prince’s warmest regards but to sound him out on more sensitive shared interests. Harington knew this was the only way Henry could obtain an honest picture of the situation abroad. When foreign delegates came to see the prince they always put a spin on things, and told him what they wanted him to hear.
Letters of Harington’s that did reach Henry arrived by a circuitous route, having been circulated between St James’s and Whitehall. Salisbury sent copies to his son, William Cranborne, also on the Continent, as examples of how a future leading man should address the future king, with the right mix of intelligent observation, affection and respect. Still Cranborne did not get it. Writing to Henry from Bordeaux, he announced that the prince’s reputation did ‘most gloriously shine’ in France. Hardly news, it was the sort of flowery guff princes heard daily. Good friend of Henry as he was, the words just did not spring off the page for the Cecil heir. Homesick and depressed, Cranborne seemed to realise it. ‘Although I know your Highness expects not much from me,’ he wrote gloomily, ‘yet having placed the eye and hope of my youth upon your person and fortune, I would be loathe by silence to fall out of your memory.’
‘During this your absence, there is no cause to fear that my affection should be wanting unto you,’ Henry reassured him. His father, Salisbury, was so vital to Henry and the state, that he ‘draws love from me unto him and all his’. From you, said Henry, ‘I do expect, if not as much sufficiency in serving princes’ as his father and grandfather, ‘yet as great abundance of love and loyalty as the example of so worthy patterns’. It was slightly comic, Henry telling Cranborne: just do your best.
Essex’s reports from France also lacked political bite. I hope, said Essex, to ‘attain to trusty knowledge and to better my experience … that I shall return an acceptable servant to your Highness’. Essex was always going to be a better soldier than diplomat.
Patently, Harington was Henry’s best and most trustworthy foreign intelligencer. He arrived in Venice just before Christmas 1608, and was welcomed by Sir Henry Wotton, delighted to be handed the diplomatic coup of receiving the intimate friend of the Prince of Wales. ‘An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,’ Wotton had said of his job, which led to James almost sacking him. During his Venice posting, he had established himself as a sophisticated connoisseur of – in addition to classical paintings – house design, sculpture, gardens, decor and antiquities. Artists’ studios, recently occupied by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Sansovino still hummed with their followers’ activity. Architects such as Palladio had transformed the face of the old Byzantine Venice. Rich foreigners went away with shipments of glass, paintings, sculptures, drawings and mental pictures about transforming their medieval piles into Palladian palazzi fit for late Renaissance nobles. Wotton loved to share the treasures of this artistic explosion with visiting countrymen. He had already begun to advise Henry on collecting ‘civilised’ possessions to display the prince’s virtue and sophistication.
If young Harington was a first-class contact for Wotton, the ambassador found the other travelling denizen from Henry’s household – Thomas Coryate – a liability.
Often moving alone, his goods in a pack, and funded only by a very light purse, thirty-year-old Thomas Coryate had to walk through much of Europe. His journey had not started well. Forced to spend the crossing to Calais head hanging overboard, ‘I varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excremental ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as [if] desiring to satiate the gourmandizing paunches of the hungry haddocks’, he wrote in the record of the journey he later dedicated to Henry. Coryate was not a natural sailor, then, unlike his prince.
When the young men of Henry’s courtly college were not engaged in serious debate, their tone seemed to draw more on this new verbal acrobatics of the burgeoning English language than the classics and the Puritans. They digested their Latin, Greek and French and gushed it out in highfalutin’ neologisms, almost Rabelaisian, to describe the most basic and earthy processes. They revelled in the comic grotesque – the same mad word-play used by Shakespeare’s clowns and jesters. Henry’s courtly college enjoyed such banter.
Coryate had first entered Henry’s life under the protection of Coryate’s old Somerset friends, Sir Edward Phelips of Montacute House, and his son, Sir Robert. Both Phelipses became MPs. Knighted by James in 1603, Sir Edward was Speaker of the House of Commons and later chancellor of Henry’s court. His son, Robert, served Henry as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber Extraordinary. Their friend Coryate – bumptious, loquacious, a man in love with the thread of his own crazy ideas – irritated the life out of the king and Salisbury. Yet he was always to be found at Henry’s supper tables. ‘He carried folly (which some call merriment) in his very face.’
Staggering off the boat in Calais, Coryate was aghast to see women totally veiled in black from head to foot. Moving on to Henri IV’s court at Fontainebleau he blagged his way in. He admired the king’s horses, but thought Henry’s were better. He visited the menagerie and was amazed by birds with long pink necks, rudely devoid of feathers – sharp, black eyes regarding him at his own height as their heads swivelled round over big feathered bellies. Coryate had never seen a nun or an ostrich.
Wherever he went, he recorded historical facts, architectural descriptions of avant-garde buildings, notes on local customs largely unknown in England, such as a pronged stick for eating (a fork); or a shade on a thin pole, strapped to the thigh to protect your head when riding (an umbrella – a word Coryate introduced into the English language). He gave an idea of prices and warned against being defrauded in currency exchanges.
Moving down into Italy, Coryate reached the Spanish-dominated dukedom of Milan. Here the Italian city and the Spanish military citadel of Castello Sforzesco existed side by side. The citadel – equipped, Coryate reckoned, to withstand a three-year siege – supported a fully functioning community, cut off from the Milanese outside their walls. Coryate strode up and down measuring the castle walls and counting weapons, asking about their range and power, until an infuriated Spanish officer yelled down that he would throw him into a dungeon if he did not clear off. Coryate observed that the Italians and their Spanish protector-occupiers coexisted with ‘an extreme hatred’ of each other.
Eventually, Coryate closed to his main destination: ‘La Serenissima’ – Venice – where he was to meet Wotton. He floated down the Brenta on the current, watching horses tow returning boats back to Padua, entranced by the pleasure palaces of great Venetian merchants that lined each bank. A local proverb had it that no vessel containing a monk, student or courtesan making the crossing would ever sink (they were the most frequent passengers). The best things in life here were meant to be: Vin Vincentin, pan Paduan, tripe Trevizan, putana Venezian – Vincenzan wine, Paduan bread, Treviso tripes and Venetian whores.
Coryate stood in his boat to gaze across at Venice and was bowled over by ‘the most glorious and heavenly show upon water that ever any mortal eye beheld’.
Wotton was scrupulously polite to Coryate, as one coming from Henry’s circle, but calibrated his status exactly: a maverick, perhaps Henry’s unofficial gentleman jester, a low-life intelligencer, not someone the ambassador need take seriously.
To ‘research’ why the name of Venetian whores was ‘famous all over Christendom’, Coryate visited one of the best known at her palazzo. The lack of children puzzled him, though he mused ‘the best carpenters make the fewest ships’. After a tantalising delay, the courtesan appeared, ‘decked like the Queen and Goddess of love’ with many chains of ‘gold and orient pearl … gold rings beautified with diamonds and other costly stones’ and ‘jewels in both her ears’. A gown of ‘damask with a deep gold fringe’ opened to reveal ‘stockings of carnation silk’, he noted, gazing at her lovely red legs. ‘Her breath and her whole body, the more to enamour thee, [is] most fragrantly perfumed.’ Coryate sounded like Enobarbus describing Cleopatra. She will ‘enchant thee’ with her singing and lute play. Better still, ‘thou wilt find her … a most elegant discourser, so that if she cannot move thee with’ song, ‘she will assay thy constancy with her Rhetorical tongue’.
When he got home and recounted all this at St James’s, his listeners roared, well able to picture the state of Coryate’s ‘constancy’ under the onslaught of her ‘rhetorical tongue’.
‘And to the end she may minister unto thee the stronger temptations, to come to her lure, she may show thee her chambers of recreation, where thou shalt see all manner of pleasing objects,’ Coryate continued, his words beckoning those who listened to look closer into the bedroom, even as he warned them off. Having completed his observations, Coryate left, his virtue apparently intact. You can only salute the power of his constancy.
Coryate’s journey home took a line through Switzerland and down the Rhine, the imperial highway, then southwest through Speyer. He captured the culture, learning and glory of these great imperial towns and cities at their zenith. Many would be totally devastated in the Thirty Years’ War from 1618. That summer, the land yielded grain, cabbages, flax, turnips, radishes, fruit trees, and vines. The cities hummed with activity. In Frankfurt he met the Earl of Essex at the biggest book fair in Europe. So many rulers were committed to learning, religion, and all the arts, wrote Coryate, in a state of bliss.
He went back along the Rhine to enter the Dutch-Spanish conflict zone. Maurice of Nassau’s United Provinces resembled a huge, reinforced fortress of independence, cocking a snook at the mighty Habsburgs. At Nijmegen, Coryate passed under the walls of Schenkenschanz, one of the most formidable strongholds in Europe, designed and built by Martin Schenk. A brutal and efficient mercenary, Schenk and his men – the hyenas and wolves of Europe, Coryate called them – fought for the highest bidder, swapping sides. Schenkenschanz was a marvel of modern military engineering. Henry would expect his traveller-intelligencer to make a rough plan of it.
As he sailed down the Waal River towards the coast, still in the guise of a tourist, Coryate passed along the front line between two huge armies, noting their defences. Dutch vessels patrolled all the time, weapons turned towards him. Coryate’s journal was clearly a travel guide for a specific kind of traveller – perhaps a prince at the head of an army.
Coryate travelled mostly on foot and alone, but by the time Harington’s entourage reached Venice it was so large that a palazzo had to be hired to accommodate them all.
Wotton had been asked by the Doge to introduce Harington to the Senate. The ambassador went in first, leaving Harington in an ante room. Whetting their appetites, he announced that the young man outside was ‘the right eye of the Prince of Wales’. ‘This world holds that he [Harington] will one day govern the kingdom.’ Wotton stood in for King James; Harington stood in for the future Henry IX. Not permitted to embark on his own grand tour, the prince’s closest friend spoke for him on the political stages of Christendom.
Mid-speech Harington pulled from his breast pocket a precious miniature of Henry which he carried next to his heart. Faces lit up around him. The members passed it from one to the other, examining it, matching up Harington’s words with the picture of this clear-eyed young man staring at them from a little gold frame embossed with cabochon gems.
Harington told Henry he would stay in Venice ‘to study the form of this government’, republicanism. The prince was encouraging of ‘Mon petit Chevalier’, but added that he missed him sorely.