SEVENTEEN
‘THE MOTHS AND MICE OF COURT’
Far from playing ‘the wise King’s part’, James’s infatuation with the Scotsman, Robert Carr* – a man whom his eldest son, wife and closest advisers regarded as a scheming parasite – threatened to damage the Crown’s reputation.
James knighted Carr in December 1607 and showered more money and gifts on him than the Crown could spare. The favourite was raised to Gentleman of the Bedchamber, making him one of the few to take turns to sleep on a pallet at the end of the king’s bed each night. Carr helped dress his master every day and attended to his intimate needs. Soon, no door closed to Carr that opened to the king. Carr reached him when others could not – not even Prince Henry, the queen, or the king’s chief minister.
In public, James pinched Carr’s cheek and patted his clothes. Unconsciously, James gazed on Carr as he addressed others, even when he spoke to the queen and Henry. Many found it intolerable. Henry and his mother were used to James’s male favourites, but this one was different. The king seemed oblivious or indifferent to anyone around him. No one could be sure if they were lovers, but Carr was James’s type: handsome in an androgynous way, with ‘a fair complexion, equally sharing the beauty of both sexes’.
The English ambassador in Madrid, Sir Charles Cornwallis, warned Prince Henry against such court gallants and favourites: ‘the moths and mice of court’. The mice overran the stores, gnawing and fouling them. The moths laid their eggs in the cloth of state. Their grubs hatched and ate their way out through it. They were ‘the maligners of true virtue and only friends to their own ambitions and desires’.
Among the great, ‘how many are there, that knowing themselves to be palpably flattered, do yet love him that flatterest fastest, and hate him that speaks but the truth?’ administrator, writer and veteran soldier, Barnaby Riche, asked Henry. The prince could spot a flatterer, he said, ‘by their salutations. With the kiss on the hand, the body shall be bowed down to the ground; then the arms shall be cast out, like one that were dancing the old Antic, not a word but – at your service, at your command, at your pleasure.’ Riche regretted that the ‘old protestation, “yours, in the way of honestie”, is little cared for’. Both Cornwallis and Riche flattered Henry’s youthful high-mindedness and his Stoic rectitude. Were they aware that dedicating these tracts to Henry was its own act of flattery?
In Basilikon Doron, James had famously advised his son: ‘Be at war with your own inward flatterer … be careful to prefer none … but only for their worthiness: But specially choose honest, diligent, mean, but responsible men.’ Be ‘specially free’ the king told him ‘of that filthy vice of Flattery, the pest of all Princes, and wrack of’ Republics.
‘Eschew to be effeminate in your clothes, in perfuming, preening, or such like,’ he told Henry, ‘and make not a fool of yourself in disguising or wearing long hair or nails.’ Such accoutrements were ‘excrements of nature’, said James. Yet, here was Carr, long hair curled and scented, lipping compliments. Even in public, Carr never tired of James pawing him. Carr knew ‘his taste and what pleased’, harrumphed Anthony Weldon, a less successful competitor for favour.
The sort of nuisance Carr might be to Henry became clearer when, in the New Year 1609, the king agreed to assign Sir Walter Ralegh’s sequestered Dorset estates to the favourite. James compensated Ralegh’s distraught wife and children for the loss of their home with borrowed money – a lump sum of £8,000, and an annual pension of £400. From the Tower, Ralegh wrote to invite Carr to act with honour, seek another estate, and not ruin his family. But Carr refused his invitation.
‘Sure, no King but my father,’ Henry snorted, ‘would keep such a bird’ as Ralegh ‘in a cage.’ Henry took up the cudgels for his caged informal mentor and tried to get Sherborne back. Ralegh meanwhile wrote tracts and pamphlets with Henry in mind. He could not be of his circle while in prison, but he could court his patronage.
Noticing, at last, that his wife was no better pleased with his conduct than his son, the king summoned Henry. Anne was avoiding her husband. James asked Henry to talk to her. An invidious request, but Henry agreed to act as go-between.
‘According to your commandment, I made your excuse unto the Queen for not sending her a token by me,’ Henry reported back, apologising to his mother for the king’s ill manners. I explained ‘your Majesty had a quarrel unto her for not writing an answer to your second letter’, he said, ‘written from Royston when your foot was sore’. Also, that you resented her still not ‘making mention of it in her next letter, written some ten days after. Whereas, in your Majesty’s former tourney to Royston, when you took first the pain in your foot, she sent [some]one on purpose to visit you.’
‘Her answer was,’ said Henry, ‘that either she had written, or dreamed it!’ Queen Anne checked with two men attending her. They confirmed that yes, she had written the first time. Perhaps someone in the king’s bedchamber had let her note go astray?
No one mentioned Carr by name, although by 1609 the favourite was directly assisting the king, reading much of his master’s post and writing some of his letters. The queen hated to think of her private correspondence being fingered by this churl, or feel his hand in any reply.
According to Henry’s account, there was further provocative content in the king’s message to the queen. ‘I dared not reply that your Majesty was afraid lest she should return to her old bias,’ Henry wrote to his father, ‘for fear that such a word might have set her on the way, and made me a peace breaker’ not a peace maker.
‘Her old bias’, and talk of bringing disorder to the royal courts, recalled the years of the queen’s factional politicking in Scotland. Henry’s account of his parents’ bickering, unleavened by wit or affection, shows how depressingly distasteful he found the whole business. Loving both, he was fair to both. The royal couple’s spats spilled over into public life, showing an ‘effeminacy’ which Henry’s neo-Stoic household despised for diminishing the authority of the monarchy.
The prince and his household carried their animus against ‘supple-mouthed parasites’ to Whitehall. During the Christmas season 1608, the prince had desired to have an apartment in Whitehall, to keep a closer eye on Carr and the bedchamber. Noting the lodgings of two powerful earls, Southampton and Pembroke, Henry had requested they make way for him. When they refused to move, the prince, unfazed, ‘had them removed by his people, to the indignation of these gentlemen’, and the amusement of the court, who saw it as ‘proof of spirit on the part of the Prince, who … gives the highest promise in all he does’. Henry’s faction now asserted their presence in the main forum of power, in the same building as the king and the bedchamber coterie.
But, whether Carr was part of Henry’s decision or not, in the spring of 1609, Henry decided formally to assert his courtly college’s independence from his father’s court and bedchamber coterie. At St James’s, Henry was determined to let no one charm their way to preferment. They would earn it by doing some service first.
Henry reached ‘adulthood’ – fifteen – on 19 February 1609. Immediately he sought to increase his political and financial independence. He asked that control of his territories and sources of income be handed over to him and petitioned the king and government to acknowledge his change from child to adult, by mounting a state ceremony to create him Prince of Wales. Anticipating his inherited income would be insufficient for his many plans, he additionally requested ‘various emoluments’ – positions offering patronage potential – ‘at present enjoyed by some of these great Lords’.
The Privy Council ‘pointed out to the King that it would be greatly to his service that the Prince should leave him the revenues [of the Prince of Wales’s estates] for another two years in order to facilitate the payment of Crown debts’. Henry recognised this as a ruse: Crown debts were never paid down, and everyone knew that the king preferred to use his money to indulge men like Carr. Salisbury, the holder of many lucrative ‘emoluments’, visited Henry with the gift of ‘a jewel worth six thousand crowns’, to try to persuade him to desist. But the flattering trinket merely showed Henry the value of his request.
Henry’s collegiate court supplied him with a copy of a report originally compiled in 1603, as the government adjusted to the requirements of a male heir. The heir’s estates had been mixed in with the Crown estates for half a century under Mary and Elizabeth. No one knew the details of the territories, properties, extractive industries and rights belonging to the prince, or their condition. Judge John Dodderidge MP, an eminent antiquarian, was author of the original report. Henry now asked Dodderidge to ascertain the heir’s assets and rights, and appointed him as his sergeant-at-law. Dodderidge was to be assisted by fellow MP, Cornish businessman Richard Connock. Connock had served both Ralegh and Cecil under Queen Elizabeth and was a mine of information about the Duchy of Cornwall. Dodderidge combined Connock’s knowledge with records in the Tower of London and ‘diverse ancient authorities’, those great sources of legitimacy for Englishmen, to compile his report.
Back in 1603, they found that the prince’s estates had declined through poor management. Dodderidge and Connock recommended a survey and the development of strategies to restore the estates to their earlier efficient management and yields. Henry claimed his men could show that neglect and abuses persisted, despite a few haphazard reforms over the last six years. He announced that he was going to undertake the wholesale reform of his inheritance.
Turning to the issue of ‘emoluments’, Henry pressed to be given one in particular: the ‘guardianship of wards’, which he described as, ‘at present held by Lord Salisbury to his incredible benefit and influence’. Rich orphans and their assets – ‘wards of the Crown’ – were worth a fortune to the guardian. The Guardian of the Wards was not ‘bound … to render account of income, but, after supplying the necessary and suitable aliment [to the wards], all the rest of the income is at his disposal; he also has the right to give both males and females in marriage to whomsoever he pleases’. The guardian could sell any of the wards’ assets, if he deemed it necessary, to meet the wards’ maintenance costs. The guardian retained as much of the proceeds as he could square with his conscience, for his trouble. It was an office with Dickensian-scale potential for corrupt exploitation. Parliament tried continually to have the office abolished. Henry’s intention was to reform its use.
His request made sense. Henry’s courtly college was created to breed up the next generation of generals and councillors. The wards, if they lived with Henry and his circle, would be nurtured under this same ethos. Henry intended to be a just and efficient guardian, but saw a chance here to increase his income, and at the same time, to grow his circle. The newcomers would be imbued with his values from youth and grow up to serve and obey him when he became king. Henry would bind the wards to him in childhood, if he managed their assets with honour. In return for protecting the wards from court predators, they would feel gratitude and affection for Henry. He would arrange marriages from within his circle. The ties would strengthen his royal ‘affinity’ between future king and future counsellors and courtiers. ‘For these reasons, the Prince urges that an office of such weight should not lie outside the Royal House.’
The negative fiscal impact of all this mattered to the king. And a nebulous, elusive issue nagged at him as well. The changes Henry sought could provoke a shift of power and influence between the royal households. Knowing Henry, might king and Privy Council be financing a rival power base in Whitehall? On the other hand, James was enthusiastic for anything that underlined the legitimacy of his and Henry’s title to the thrones. For this reason, the king warmed to one particular scheme: the idea of a great state occasion to invest Henry as Prince of Wales in Parliament. He ordered Salisbury to examine the case for it.
* Anglicised from the Scottish spelling, Ker.