TWENTY-ONE
‘TO FIGHT THEIR SAVIOUR’S BATTLES’
Whitehall Palace, 6 January 1610. The Feast of the Epiphany. Against the king’s wishes, Prince Henry appropriated the court’s Twelfth Night show. He invited the court for ‘barriers’ – a competitive display of martial arts – to discover ‘where true Virtue triumphed most’. Two opposing groups of knights, one led by Henry, would test their virtue by fighting with swords and push of pike across a wooden partition (the ‘barrier’). One of the most important days in the church and court calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany celebrated the revelation of the Christ child’s divinity to his human parents.
Around nine o’clock that night, over 500 people – courtiers, servants, armed guards, clergy and foreign dignitaries – poured into the banqueting hall. The audience skirted the wooden barrier bisecting the room and elbowed their way up the scaffolds towards the best vantage points. Court ladies – draped in gold chains, up to fifteen feet long, and embellished with cabochon gems and gold enamelled flowers and animals – settled in their seats. Heavy brooches swayed in the ladies’ wigs. Men fingered their rings, ropes of pearls, earrings and hat jewels. Magnificence made statements that could be swiftly lost to cutpurses, operating even here.
Inigo Jones had created backcloths, painted with wild hills and rocks, and mock fortifications, to reach to the beams at each end of the chamber. A little apart from the raised platform, with its canopies of state hanging over the empty chairs awaiting the royal party, Jones had constructed a ‘sumptuous pavilion’. Here the ‘Prince and his associates’, all ‘strangely attired’, sat talking – among them, the English earls of Southampton and Arundel, and Sir Thomas Somerset; the Scottish Duke of Lennox, Lord Hay, and Sir Richard Preston. Eyes flicked back and forth, wondering if Henry’s dais vied for prestige with the royal stage.
Drums and flageolets announced the king, queen, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles. They headed to the raised platform at the end of the room, an entourage of intimates buzzing behind each royal person. Courtiers observed Carr lean in close to James as he settled on his chair, then they looked to the other two leading royals for their reaction. The queen and Henry snubbed Carr when they could. So many dramas to enjoy, all good copy for the playwrights and gossips.
A nimbus of ostrich feathers billowed out a yard from the carved eagle on Henry’s headdress. Jones had fitted him out with leather doublet, short, tight-fitting hose and ‘a livery of crimson velvet and broad gold lace’ in a costume that referenced a ‘fantastical’ mix of Roman centurion, godly knight, Italian Renaissance and Jacobean prince. Tonight, Henry was ‘Moeliades’. The prince had commissioned Ben Jonson to write the introductory speeches for the ‘barriers’ and the dramatist had found the name in an old Arthurian chronicle. Moeliades was an anagram of Miles a Deo – God’s soldier and Christian crusader. Henry liked it. He would adopt the character again.
It was Henry’s desire to showcase the martial face of monarchy that had led the king to try and refuse his eldest son’s request to fight this evening. With Europe divided by religious tensions and James positioned as Europe’s peacekeeper, Henry’s spectacle broadcast the wrong message. But James always struggled to refuse anything to those he loved.
The Lady of the Lake walked out to start the entertainment and greeted all the glories, riches, beauties, ‘ornaments of council, as of court’, back after years of neglect in the twilight of the Elizabethan era. Her gaze fell on a beautiful young woman, playing Chivalry, sprawled dead on the floor. The ‘house of Chivalry’ is ‘decayed,/Or rather ruined seems’, said the Lady.
On the walls, the martial ornaments of kingship, ‘shields and swords’, hung ‘cobwebbed and rusty’. Unbelievable in England, ‘not a helm affords/A spark of lustre’ which used ‘to give/Light to the world, and made the nation live’ in the hearts and minds of all Christendom, in Elizabeth I’s heyday. Who would restore England’s virtue, she wondered?
From a seat in the heavens, King Arthur interrupted. The first ruler to create England from separate warring little kingdoms, Arthur assured the Lady that England’s virtue was secured by the one ‘that doth fill that throne’: King James. As an exemplar, Arthur recommended ‘men should him take,/As it is nobler to restore than make’. James fulfilled Merlin’s prophecy that England’s greatness returned with Union. In the king’s imagination he had restored the four kingdoms, to create the legendary Britain. Therefore, King James’s virtue outshone Arthur’s, or Henry’s.
That said, Arthur thought any future ‘great work’, in this tense political and religious climate, called for a ‘knight’, not a peacemaker. Let a soldier ‘tempt fate’, said Arthur, ‘and when a world is won,/Submit it duly to this state and throne,/Till time and utmost stay make that his own.’
Ben Jonson had to avoid assigning all of James’s gifts to the past, while assigning all of Henry’s gifts to the present and the future. That would be a fatal lapse of masque etiquette. Yet when Merlin, wizard prophet of Old England, came on, he too identified Henry as the virtuous hero of Protestant Europe. The very Earth reacted to Henry. For such men ‘she shakes’, said Merlin. ‘Mankind lives in a few.’
Signalling the king’s priorities, Merlin advised Henry that his ‘arts must be to govern and give laws/To peace, no less than arms’. Follow the example of Edward III, father of the Black Prince, said Merlin. From the wool trade, he earned ‘millions’ for just wars, and to relieve ‘so many poor’. As long as ‘industry at home do not decline’ they will ‘need no foreign mine’. So much for Henry’s ambition, to go aggressively into colonisation and Atlantic trade.
Henry could argue that the wool industry, as everyone knew, had stagnated. Therefore, England did need a ‘foreign mine’. Besides, they came today for a display of ‘the martial’ arts, not a lecture on the economy.
Merlin admitted that if Henry had ‘to fight their Saviour’s battles’ for the soul of Protestant Europe, then an exemplary line of heroic royal commanders preceded him. Richard the Lionheart let ‘rivers of blood’. Edward I made ‘the field a flood’ of blood, then marched ‘through it with St George’s cross’, badge of chivalry, and Garter Knights before him. Jonson compared Henry to Henry V, the prince’s namesake. The two Henrys were also physically alike, said Jonson. ‘War knew not how to give him enough to do.’ Our Henry ‘shall succeed him both in deeds and name’.
Citing precedent, using metaphor and allusion, Jonson’s artistry clothed Henry’s contemporary ambition in historic and mythic arguments. There was nothing antique and quaint about this. Talking about the present in the language of a mythic past was a tool of the sort of hard-nosed rhetoric of persuasion that Henry was educated to deploy. Jonson’s vision foresaw a monstrously heroic Prince Henry, wading a whole field of blood behind the flag of St George – soon perhaps, if the crisis in Jülich-Cleves in Germany turned into full-blown war.
Merlin called now on God’s knight ‘Moeliades!’ to prove his mettle.
Henry and his companions descended. Attendants clattered out with burnished weapons, shields and banners into the centre of the hall. The combatants set to, and continued the whole long night. Henry never once left the floor of the chamber, fighting with sword and a pike sixteen feet long. His skill, vigour and aggression insisted, blow on blow, shove on shove: he had come of age.
Next evening, washed and rested, Henry rode to his father, accompanied by his fighting companions. With flaring torches and music, they escorted the king through the dark streets of Westminster to Henry’s palace at St James’s. The Prince’s Men performed a play. Then servants bustled about to lay up a table for over a hundred guests. Henry awarded prizes to the most skilled fighters and feasted until gone three in the morning.
All this activity followed on from Henry’s ‘Oratio Serenissimi Principis ad Regem’ – the prince’s address to the king. It was Henry’s valediction to formal education. A student’s oration was his rite of passage from theory to practice, from schoolroom to the adult world. Henry composed his along lines laid out by the epitome of public speaking, Cicero. Described by others continually, a few months ago he had described himself to the court in his own words.
Henry started by praising his father as his role model, in the hundreds of private conversations between them ‘concerning the pre-eminence of letters’. You, ‘supplied [me] with the central planks of reasoning, on which [I] constructed the building’ of his vision of himself, said Henry. ‘The golden books’ of Basilikon Doron and The True Lawe of Free Monarchies showed Henry that, ‘the fame of Kings’ in learning, is essential for ‘the health of the common weal’.
This ‘fame’ earned a prince his ‘absolute rule over free and willing subjects’. Erasmus had said ‘absolute rule’ was only possible and did not become tyranny if it was exercised over ‘free and willing subjects’. You must rule superbly to rule supremely. Henry and James differed on how to win their kingly ‘fame’. Henry said that monarchs should not be ‘bound fast by the chains of laws and decrees’. That part of him sat uneasily with those among his circle who imagined a more constitutional monarchy for the future Henry IX secured, but bound, by laws.
To rule well, Henry said he must master four subjects: philosophy, eloquence, politics and history. As his father’s son, he had clearly absorbed the philosophy of a divine right monarchy. As a product of his more immediate educational context, he had taken on Tacitus and neo-Stoicism. This broad philosophical training gave self-mastery over the passions when wielding power, a quality ‘required more in a prince since he exercises … [power] for the greater good of the public’. Rule for the benefit of the commonwealth gave a context for a monarch’s exercise of absolute power. Henry’s view was stronger than his father’s in recommending constancy, rectitude, and the wearing of an unreadable mask.
As for eloquence, he said rhetorical skill helped rulers to direct judges, preside over councils and intervene effectively in Parliament – to ‘restrain all sedition, factions and those passionate impulses … for internal dispute’ in peacetime. As Henry IX, he believed he would dominate his legislature, bending it to his will through his virtue and powers of persuasion, not by issuing edicts from on high. In times of war, eloquence let the king rouse the people, to ‘impress courage and military strength on the nation’. Henry was stepping out with self-assurance from under the king’s shadow.
‘Does the Prince wish to preserve the laws?’ Henry asked next, addressing the subject of politics, ‘to assign rights and to rule the people with supreme power [imperium]. Politics will give this.’ James talked of kingcraft more than the political process as such, especially as conducted in parliaments.
Henry’s courtly college wanted to hear the heir declare that he valued politics. Senior statesmen such as Salisbury encouraged Henry’s active political involvement. He invited Henry to sit in on the adjudication of a dispute between the Merchant Taylors’ Company, of which Henry remained a member, and the Mint. Salisbury said it would be full of ‘so many things of Civil Policy’ vital to ‘that Excellent Mind, moulded (in his own due time) for the Government of Kingdoms’.
Salisbury believed a princely education must include consistent participation in the political process, so Henry could feel it in his heart and guts, not just his head. The earl anticipated seeing Henry IX in the Privy Council daily, unlike his father. This might lead to the next king accepting the need for contractualism in the relationship of ruler and ruled, to nuance his absolute monarchy.
James, clever as he was, never ‘got’ England and the English style of governing, in the way he mastered Scottish kingcraft. When the English Parliament frustrated him, he withdrew, and left with his coterie of intimates, to hunt, feast and hawk in country houses and royal hunting lodges across the south of England. They were gone for months on end. Living half the year away from the capital, governing by despatch, delegating to chief ministers, meant certain chronic problems that required the monarch’s continual presence and immediate response were not addressed. Salisbury wanted to correct that in the next generation. James thought the business of kingcraft centred on study, reading wide and deep; he was essentially Platonic, believing rulers should be philosophers. Henry of course inclined to a more robust, empirical method.
Sir Charles Cornwallis, now seeking a position in the prince’s household after returning from Madrid, also contributed to the debate. He proposed to Henry that, to protect their interests, ‘princes may’ even ‘touch upon the verge of vice’ in their political dealings. Henry thanked Cornwallis for his ‘observations’ and asked him to keep him abreast of any more ‘in that kind, as occasions shall be offered’.
Robert Dallington, friend of Cornwallis and one of Henry’s unofficial tutors, added his view, explaining the kind of ‘vice’ necessary to the virtuous exercise of power. Cicero’s maxim, that the only profitable path was the honest one, was ‘too strait-laced’, he told Henry. In the book he dedicated to the prince, Dallington urged ‘a middle way between … [honesty and utility] which a right statesman must take’. Drawing on an infamous passage from Tacitus, Dallington observed that ‘actors must of necessity wear vizards, and change them in every scene’. By extension, it was the same for rulers, also obliged to live on national and international stages. The ‘good and safety of a state’ being the goal of everything they do, it was a goal ‘to which men cannot always arrive by plain paths and beaten ways’.
Dallington called this prudential politics, by which he meant, use a moderate, principled deceit that does not injure your virtue. Serving Henry for no reward to date, this book earned Dallington a pension for life from the prince. Henry and his political circle envisaged a government model which made use of judicious dissimulation, and small calculated amounts of artifice: core skills for a prudent monarch. You just had to know when you should tell lies.
In his childhood, Henry’s ‘outward shows’ had reflected his father’s ideas. Since then he had been introduced to quite different models and ideas. These steps towards independence need not mean Henry would pose a challenge to his father. He could ‘dissimulate’, or ‘wear a vizard’, if he needed to.
Yet, they were all secretive, these Stuarts. James was known for it in his youth, and so were his sons. Henry learned how and when to best use concealment and bluff from statesmen such as Dallington and Cornwallis, his study of Tacitus and Stoicism, as well as from the king. Living on a public stage, he surely developed an instinct to guard his privacy. Charles, who was with Henry as much as six months of the year, also took in these lessons and discussions. Dallington eventually moved to serve Charles. Thirty years from now, Charles I perverted their ideas of mixed prudence, secrecy, principled deceit and aloof neo-Stoic constancy, to appalling ends.
Henry ended his ‘Oratio’ with a discussion of history. ‘Any member of the public will take great delight in’ history, said Henry. But a prince sees himself in it, ‘his affairs born by another person’. The prince ‘reads about the beginnings of wars between the most powerful rulers and bellicose nations, he observes arts and strategies of excellent leadership’, and sees how he might act in that role. Everything in the education of a prince was a grounding for the art of ruling. The aim was not to turn him into the embodiment of chivalric virtue, almost his own statuesque work of art, but a dynamic modern king, learning from the recent and distant past about how to act in the present.
Having made some headway on the estates due to him, Henry returned to the question of his investiture as Prince of Wales. He summoned Richard Connock and ordered him to revise Dodderidge’s survey on the Prince of Wales’s assets. Connock produced a knockout report. It demonstrated how all previous princes of Wales had received their lands by the age of fourteen. It listed his possessions, along with, as Connock stated, ‘reasons which moved the kings in former times … to create their sons Princes of Wales … which collections may serve as an inducement for the more speedy creating of Prince Henry’.
Connock added a personal comment on Henry’s assets: the Crown had permitted a degradation of Henry’s inheritance which ‘must need within a few years fall into such an irrecoverable corruption, as … yields no hope of help’. Broadening his view, Connock stated that when ‘a state is brought to’ ‘irrecoverable corruption’, so that ‘in resting or adventuring the peril is the same, much better it must needs be to enter into action’ to reform it. He wrote with passion, in a bit of a sweat. He dreaded the anger of the king as he argued him out of lands, income and influence; criticised corruption in Henry’s estates as well as in the ‘state’; and recommended radical reforms in the prince’s territories, while inferring a need for greater reforms to address the corruption of the body politic. In his preface, Connock sensibly begged Henry to protect him.
Henry thanked and rewarded his man. He assured Connock he would ‘imitate and follow the steps, worthy virtues and renowned acts of his predecessors, Princes of this kingdom’. He sent the report to his father, and to Salisbury. Henry said he ‘will rather trust your Lordship with the care of his creation than any other’. Salisbury decided to make a virtue of necessity. The status quo needed a shake-up. The present structure of Crown finances was collapsing under the weight of expenditure and mismanagement from both sides: Crown and legislature. A change at the top could trigger a major renovation of royal financial affairs.
Although Henry was the driving force in the debate about his creation as Prince of Wales, his father soon agreed with him. The scholar in James appreciated and used Connock’s researches to help draw up another list of a Prince of Wales’s assets. Henry came to Whitehall more often. Lobbying on behalf of his own favourites, exerting what influence he could in naval and military matters, canvassing support for his investiture, ‘he makes himself already very much respected and even by our greatest men in authority’.
‘The Prince now begins to take a great authority upon him,’ one experienced diplomat told his secretary, ‘many men out of the pregnancy of his spirit do make many descants of many things that may hereafter ensue.’
King and prince needed Parliament’s consent to the parliamentary setting of Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales. The king assumed he only had to state his wishes. For this reason, he reconvened Parliament in February 1610, arriving with Henry, Salisbury and other senior councillors. The king told MPs he required them to vote for Henry’s parliamentary investiture, but also to vote a subsidy (to cover his current financial embarrassment). Salisbury, meanwhile, planned to use the goodwill Parliament felt towards Henry to smooth the passage of some unpopular fiscal reforms.
Salisbury needed Parliament to acknowledge financial reality. The monarchy could no longer live ‘of its own’: income derived from its dwindling assets and one-off taxes that tax payers tried to avoid. Parliament must guarantee the Crown annual support. However, Salisbury knew that if the king expected regular funding, then Salisbury needed James to admit he owed his parliamentary paymasters a degree of accountability for his spending. It would involve a real change of relationship between Crown and legislature. It would inevitably draw monarchy and Parliament closer together through the need to call frequent, regular parliaments to assess Crown needs, discuss how to fund them, and find out what Parliament expected in exchange for its support. The framing of the words for a bill to reform royal finances ‘infinitely troubled’ Salisbury. He ‘toiled’ to exhaustion to think how ‘to induce the Parliament to yield some large contributions for the maintaining of future charges’.
Henry listened as his father addressed both houses. ‘The time of creation of my Son doth now draw near, which I choose for the greater honour to be done in this time of Parliament,’ he said. He knew how popular Henry was throughout the country. Radical MPs waited for the right moment to object that the king could not ‘choose’ the conclusion of what Parliament must first debate. James waved a hand at Henry. ‘The sight of himself here speaks for him.’ The king waited for them to agree to make Henry’s creation a parliamentary state occasion.
The house did not mean to answer until they aired their grievances about royal finances. If Salisbury hoped Henry’s popularity would ease the passing of his bill on annual grants for the Crown, he was alarmed, but unsurprised, when Sir Thomas Wentworth MP demanded to ‘what purpose is it for us to draw a silver stream out of the country into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks?’ The house roared approval and disapproval of a subversive, very Jacobean, jibe at the king’s bedchamber coterie.
The king must tighten the lacing on his purse, not leave it gaping at his belt, for favourites to dig in and grope about for gold. Before they came here today, Salisbury had alerted the king to the discontent caused by ‘the harsh effects and ill order of your Majesty’s gifts’.
As if to prove the MPs’ point, James had just taken back Sherborne from Carr and gifted it to Henry, as the prince wanted. James then compensated Carr for his loss with a hefty £20,000 – 250 per cent more than he had already given Lady Ralegh to compensate her for its loss. Technically, almost none of that money was his to give. The Crown had borrowed it, and the king’s creditors expected him to be prudent and use it for the commonwealth, not the wealth of ‘private cocks’.
‘Our gift I wish liberal,’ said Sir John Holles, and ‘the King’s expense moderate, for unless the drain or outlet be stopped, be the inlet never so large, we may pour in but never fill … The court is the cause of all.’ Holles supported Henry and sat as a Puritan MP. A growing number of this kind of court parliamentarian looked to Henry, hoping he could reform court corruption. Like and approve Henry as many did, members queried the necessity for their involvement in Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales. It would cost (another) small fortune. But James found their cavils impertinent.
The Commons presented the terms James must agree to before they could strike a deal. Most turned on the Crown giving up revenue streams raised by royal command, the king’s prerogative, not via parliamentary process. James withdrew in anger. As a man, he loved jokes and debates as well as the next person. But to him the rude banter he had been subjected to trespassed on the sacred mystery of the absolute monarch.
In the bedchamber, Carr’s whispering campaign stoked James’s wrath. He said the Commons wanted to make voting supply dependent on the king sending home his Scottish intimates. Carr hinted Salisbury knew and condoned the MPs’ terms. The king exploded with rage. So did Salisbury – as he noted a new, overt political intrusion from the bedchamber.
Henry and his mother loathed some of the pretty and amoral young men around the king, bleeding the state of money and exposing the monarchy to this mockery. With an adult prince to shield them from a Whitehall backlash, some of Henry’s servants went into print with their dim assessments of the king’s ‘private cocks’.
Ralegh’s cousin, Sir Arthur Gorges, urged Henry that when he ruled he must cut the number of parasitical gallants at court ‘on whom the king your father hath bestowed great and bountiful gifts’. Since princes ‘have more means, and opportunities to express their worthiness and virtue’, said Gorges, Henry was morally bound to intervene and halt this ‘decay’ in the body politic. If Henry attacked the court favourites head on now, he would move his household into active opposition to the king’s court, and likely alienate himself from Whitehall power. The time was not right. Besides, it was not in his nature.
Salisbury shelved the question of the royal budget for the moment. Parliament assented to a parliamentary setting for Henry’s investiture, eventually, which would take place on Monday, 4 June 1610, the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Salisbury secured a loan of £100,000 from the City of London for Henry’s big day. From the moment of its agreement, European rulers and their representatives started communicating their plans to mark it.