TWENTY-TWO
‘EVERY MAN REJOICING AND PRAISING GOD’
In March 1610, Henry welcomed his cousin, Frederick Ulrich, Prince of Brunswick. There had already been ‘familiar discourse between one another, with an equal affection’ by letter. Now they expanded on it at their leisure, face to face. Court gossip was that Brunswick wanted ‘marriage with the Lady Elizabeth’. Queen Anne liked her nephew well enough, but dismissed his pretension to marry a princess of England.
Another of the prince’s friends, Frederick, heir of the Elector Palatine, wrote from Heidelberg to announce that his cousin Duke Louis Frederick of Württemberg was coming back to England, ostensibly to celebrate Henry’s investiture. Young Frederick sent Henry his salutations in his own hand, but little else. It was too risky to expose his innermost thoughts on the religious and territorial tensions building up in Europe, and what action Henry and Frederick thought the countries they stood to inherit should take. Frederick trusted Württemberg to speak for him, as Henry trusted John Harington.
Henry was determined not to be prevented from meeting the duke this time. With the Jülich-Cleves crisis ongoing, Frederick’s father the Elector Palatine and Duke John Frederick, ruler of Württemberg, leading lights in the Evangelical Union, wanted to press England for some written commitment to the alliance. The foreign visitors also came to ask for Princess Elizabeth’s hand for the young Palatine heir.
As news of the Brunswick and Palatine marital diplomacy spread, more offers came in for Elizabeth, including from the heir to Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, the wealthy Catholic Prince of Piedmont. Savoy was moving into closer alliance with anti-Habsburg Catholic France, to counter the Spanish presence in the Italian peninsula. Fearing the ambition of the Habsburgs (with Habsburg-dominated Milan on her eastern border), Savoy sought marital alliances to strengthen its ability to resist Spain and the papacy.
Württemberg’s party arrived in April and took rooms at the Black Eagle inn on the Strand. It suited James to grant them their audience. As the Palatine delegation entered the Palace of Whitehall, they were greeted by the full spectacle of Stuart majesty – the king ‘seated under a canopy of cloth of gold, together with the Queen, the Prince [Henry], the Duke of York, the Princess [Elizabeth], Madame Arbella [Stuart], and the Prince of Brunswick’. Around them stood ‘a great number of earls and lords of England – all Knights of the Garter’. Nobles and ladies speaking, servants coming and going and the sound of music filled the rest of the room.
The French ambassador, de la Boderie, hurried over to Württemberg to discuss the German crisis; the Prince of Brunswick followed him, and the ambassadors of the States of the United Provinces (Messrs Berck, Verius, Oldenbarneveldt, Joachimi and Carron) presented themselves after him. A few days later, Queen Anne sent two coaches to bring Württemberg for an evening audience, and to pick up gossip on her European extended family. At the end of the week they were joined by Württemberg’s cousin, the young Landgrave of Hesse.
In the run-up to Henry’s investiture, the young men rode and ran at the ring. They hunted and joined the king at Royston to course for hares, a sport ‘in which his Majesty takes extreme pleasure’. ‘Though the beast be but little, yet are the members worth enjoyment; as the flesh, which is good for all manner of fluxes; the brains good to make children breed their teeth with ease,’ and myriad other health benefits.
Henry suggested a visit to Eltham Palace to see the laboratory of Cornelius Drebbel, the scientist and inventor Chaloner had persuaded to come and work for Henry. Around the workshops stood prototype machines, each having the potential to become the invention to secure Drebbel’s immortal fame. Drebbel displayed his beautiful ‘perpetuum mobile’ clock to the youths, showing how it revealed secrets of astronomy. But he evaded direct questions on its mechanism, enjoying the aura of hidden knowledge that the apparently inexplicable spectacle lent him. Across Europe, engineers and experimenters, ‘mechanicians’ as they were called, tested the theory that an ordered universe implied someone imposing order on it (the argument for the existence of God from intelligent design). If Drebbel could prove it, his reputation was made, and he would be the gatekeeper who let men see the workings of the deity’s mind.
In more prosaic activities, he was already a master of the engineering of lens-grinding to make spyglasses and techniques to pump water under pressure. A natural showman, Drebbel cultivated anything that added to his mystique as a type of scientist-magus. It was that combination of science and mysticism that men like John Dee combined in the previous reign. Drebbel asked Henry for permission to hold a lottery to raise money to fund his work. Already supporting Drebbel, Henry gave him another £20 for his expenses.
Hosting his princely European cousins, Henry was ‘exceedingly magnifique and stately in all his doings, and principally in feasting of great persons’, observed his Groom of the Bedchamber, ‘giving them all manner of contentment, that they could have desired of him’.
At the end of the St George’s Day Garter feast, the king stood, head uncovered, and ‘drank to his Excellency’ the Duke of Württemberg, ‘and the health of the Princes of the Union’ gathered here. The princes took every chance to talk freely, thinking how to make progress in the negotiations to bring England into the Evangelical Union and how the union and its allies should react to Jülich-Cleves.
On mainland Europe, events sped ahead of James’s intentionally glacial diplomatic pace. By April 1610, Maurice of Nassau and Henri IV of France had mustered thousands of troops to march on Jülich-Cleves. With or without the Stuarts, they must force Archduke Leopold out of Jülich and deter the Spanish Habsburgs from interfering.
English soldiers and diplomats in Holland queried James’s reluctance to let them join the Franco-Dutch force. The consensus in Holland was that delays gave Leopold ‘a great deal too much time’ to secure himself in Jülich. Lack of instruction from London ‘may protract the Cleves business while our King is amused by’ his favourites, the lively young German princes, and marriage proposals for his two older children. ‘It is now time for action not deliberation,’ they snapped.
Dutch deputies ‘bound for France passed Brussels in great lustre, but those sent for England make little show’. Henry badly wanted command of a British force. He ‘was athirst for glory if ever any Prince was. He lent fire to the king in the affairs of Germany, and aspired to be head of the confederate Princes’, of the union, ‘who include fourteen of the Hanseatic towns’. Since Henri IV signed his military pact with the Evangelical Union the previous winter, Henry had been even more impatient to go. His ‘barriers’ at the beginning of the year, were, in part, Henry communicating his readiness, both at home and abroad.
At last, at the end of April, James agreed to commit English troops to the campaign. Henry waited for his call to arms from his father. The king gave the command to … Sir Edward Cecil. Henry was not to re-enact the bloody heroics of the Black Prince and Henry V, cited in his ‘barriers’, after all. Not yet.
Sir Edward now mustered 4,000 English and Scots troops to join Maurice and Henri IV, and promised to write to Henry continually.
Salisbury sent a man ‘to take order to furnish [William] the Lord Cranborne with all necessaries to follow the French King in this journey’. He hoped it would endear his son to Henry. In England, ‘more of our court gallants talk of taking the same course if the voyage hold’, said Salisbury. It must have galled Henry no end. Salisbury wished them God speed. Better, he muttered that ‘they had some place abroad to vent their superfluous valour, than to brabble so much as they do at home; for in one week we had three or four great quarrels’. Salisbury did not explain what the problem was, but Southampton, a Henry man, and Montgomery, an old favourite of James’s, came to blows on the tennis court, ‘where the rackets flew about their ears’.
By the beginning of May, Protestant Europe and France were ready to march, ‘[which] I fear will draw all Christendom into the quarrel’, the English ambassador in Paris concluded grimly. Sir Ralph Winwood wondered, in all honesty, ‘what should move the French King to engage himself so far in a business that no more concerns him, and’, at his age, ‘as [if] it were de gaieté du coeur, to thrust himself into so difficult a war’. Henri, a womaniser famed for a pronounced gaieté de coeur, had established peace in France. Was this the French king indulging his pipe dream of displacing the Habsburgs and dominating Europe himself? Perhaps, Winwood joked to a friend, he was only sabre-rattling, and when ‘he hath made a great noise in the world, he will be content to put water in his wine’ and calm down.
Henri IV followed up by suggesting his own match for Prince Henry: his eldest daughter Christine. If James and Anne wanted a prestigious Catholic princess, surely better to have one whose father was committed to protecting Protestantism, than a Spanish infanta, who would always see their son as a damned heretic and bring her Jesuit spies with her? Two days later, 14 May, catastrophe struck. Prince Henry was inconsolable.
Henri IV of France had survived twenty-three assassination attempts. The twenty-fourth got him. In a frenzied knife attack, Jesuit cleric François Ravaillac killed the founder of the Bourbon dynasty. It had incensed Ravaillac to watch Henri ally Catholic France with heretics, forcing Frenchmen to march on their religious brothers in Jülich-Cleves.
King James blanched ‘whiter than his shirt’ when he was told, said Württemberg.
Henry spun round, walked into his bedchamber alone, muttering ‘my second father is dead’, over and over to himself. He kept everyone away. A scheme ‘which he never communicated to anyone, was now destroyed; for he had resolved’ to defy his father and go to ‘fight under his Most Christian Majesty whenever he marched on Cleves’.
In the Dutch cautionary town of Flushing, the English garrison, fearing Spain might now launch an attack, halted the departure of their troops to meet with Maurice.* ‘I think it was never more needful to make a League of those of the Religion’ than now, said the town’s governor. James would have to take Henri IV’s place in the Evangelical Union. There was no one else of sufficient stature. Salisbury passed the continental communications to Henry, asking them to be returned to him after copying.
Protestant momentum stalled. ‘All former resolutions, projects and counsels are either utterly reversed, or to be changed and transformed,’ said Winwood. Archduke Leopold ‘will now grow more confident,’ in his ability to keep hold of Jülich-Cleves, ‘and unless His Majesty and these Provinces will undertake the cause of the Protestant Princes and supply the defects of France, I fear this year he will not be routed from [Jülich]’. If they did not act, the crisis would drag on.
Maurice’s combined forces should have reached Düsseldorf by the end of May. Instead, ‘we are all at a stand, until we understand what his Majesty will counsel’, the English reported from Holland. The Spanish were delirious with joy at developments in France. Henri IV’s widow, Marie de’ Medici, was a devout Catholic. She took power as queen regent for the eight-year-old Louis XIII and at once entertained a double marriage proposal for the son and daughter of France with the infanta and infante of Spain. Marie looked as favourably on Spain as her late husband had viewed it with loathing.
Henry now lived ‘every day five or six hours in armour’, though he had no war to fight. His ‘whole talk was of arms and war. His authority was great, and he was obeyed and lauded by the military party.’ He received and corresponded continually with his German cousins and allies, with Maurice, and the English officers in his service. But he could not act.
Though forced to watch others recalibrate the European power balance, at home, at least, Henry gained financial independence, as James agreed to sign over all the lands and revenues due to him. Reacting positively, Henry concentrated on the thing sure to raise his profile internationally: his parliamentary installation as Prince of Wales. By 17 May money came onto the ordinances to pay for fireworks and spectacles. Chaloner planned firecrackers and rockets to dazzle Christendom as far as Rome and Madrid.
Henry requested permission to enter London on horseback for his big day. James and Salisbury refused. After the French king’s assassination, no royal dared move freely. Soldiers closely guarded James’s carriage and prevented anyone approaching. Henry’s investiture was to be the biggest state occasion of James’s reign. It might well attract an assassin’s attack.
The Privy Council ordered that Henry should make his entry along the river instead, setting off by barge from Richmond Palace. The mayor and aldermen of the City, bankrolling the day, would greet him midway. The mayor instructed the livery companies to prepare themselves. Sir William Browne, in charge of security, liked the idea of a water progress. ‘All riding by land or entries by land are taken away. The world is so full of villainy.’
Salisbury took the opportunity to remind MPs that ‘the new doctrine of the Jesuits’ advocated the assassination of heretic rulers. Now ‘no Christian king can be secure’. Had not all of them nearly been blown sky-high in 1605? They were all in this together. James ordered all Catholic recusants to be removed from the city, exiled beyond a ten-mile radius of the capital and court.
Sir Henry Montagu, Recorder of London, mused that ‘amongst all the cares of a kingdom, the sovereign care is the chiefest’, and so onerous it might be the death of him. The ‘disaster that fell in France in this late time … hath made us enter into the consideration of this’. Just what Salisbury wanted to hear. Bearing this weight, the Crown must then have the means to fund soldiers and warships to protect them all. Salisbury hoped the cloud of assassination might have a silver lining, and make MPs reach a generous decision on financing the royal family.
Taking advantage of the MPs’ momentary sympathy for the perils of monarchy, Salisbury moved Henry’s investiture from the House of Lords, the usual venue for parliamentary state occasions. In the Lords, the Commons had to stand for hours, crushed behind a wooden bar, while senior clergy and peers sat at ease along the benches. Salisbury looked for a larger venue and settled on the Court of Requests, in the Palace of Westminster, where he could seat them all.
Salisbury now set about designing a ceremony for Henry that combined the continuity of the growing liturgy of monarchy, while nudging Crown and Parliament towards a new era.
The day before the investiture, Sunday 3 June, James was to create new Knights of the Bath in his son’s honour. Henry was allowed to choose from a list of fifty candidates drawn up by the king. Henry took a pen to it, scored through most of the names, added others he wished to promote, and reduced the total number by nearly half.
Monday dawned and guests from all corners of the political nation approached the Palace of Westminster. The king’s chair of state had been placed at the far end of the hall, on a dais. All made obeisance to this sacred symbol of the king’s presence as they entered. To the right was a seat for the Lord Chancellor, Ellesmere. Lord Treasurer Salisbury’s chair stood empty to the throne’s left.
First to enter was the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the Marquis of Winchester, followed by the earls, seventeen bishops, and barons. The greatest nobles shuffled along benches on each side of the throne, gathering round them their ‘red velvet garments with ornaments of white precious furs upon their shoulders. Their hats also were of red velvet, made after the manner of coronets, with shining gold bands, and they did wear athwart their shoulders, as it were girdles, beset with precious pearls, as soldiers use to wear their belts.’
Sons followed their noble sires, like a flock of excited, highly coloured birds. In ‘doublets and hose of changeable silks’, their heads bobbed as they chattered and joked, shaking the multicoloured feathers on their silk hats. These youths would comprise Henry’s House of Lords in due course. Fathers and sons, their blood had oiled the machinery of government for centuries; whereas James and Henry had set foot in England a mere seven years ago. Then again, the presence of Irish peers and favoured Scots at a very English ceremony to celebrate a Scottish-born Prince of Wales, created a spectacle of closer union James had failed to enact in law.
The lord mayor and thirty aldermen crowded in, gold chains of office heavy on their scarlet robes. They lined out on the observers’ benches.
A wooden bar crossed the Court of Requests from side to side, notionally separating the two houses. However, the bench seating ran continuously under it, the length of the room. Below the bar sat the Commons, ‘very easy and handsome’. The Speaker of the Commons walked to a raised chair in the centre of the hall, with the clerk at a table by him. He was ‘face to face right over against the King’s majesty’, noted the Earl of Huntingdon. The arms of England hung above the Speaker’s chair, a signal honour and sign of the Commons’ growing stature. Many members had splashed out on ‘apparel worth an hundred pounds’ for the day. ‘For some of them the very panes of their breeches were nothing else but laces embroidered with gold,’ harrumphed John Noies, Puritan MP for Calne, Wiltshire. Most Cheapside jewellers had lent, rented or sold out their entire stock-in-trades.
Noies – making his show in top-to-toe black wool – plonked himself right in the middle of his fellow MPs. ‘More boldly, than wisely, I confess,’ he later said to his wife. He looked around and saw how he and a few other Puritans stuck out. ‘I thought myself to be like a crow in the midst of a great many golden-feathered doves.’ He found the ‘whole house being thus furnished with sumptuous and shining apparel’ most unpleasant.
Spotting the court ladies in their viewing boxes, he immediately felt worse. ‘If I should take in hand to write of the apparel and fashions of the ladies and maids of honour I should be as foolish as they were vain.’ So much flesh on display, heavy make-up, jewellery stitched in from hair to toes. ‘I say no more than this, that they were unspeakably brave and intolerable curious,’ he wrote.
Noies and his brother dissenters from such luxuries were also Prince Henry’s most ardent supporters. They sat here, solid, like a seam of good English mud in a wall of glistening diamonds and pearls. Henry was marching to glory. He would have to pass among the lotus-eaters and escape the clutches of court Circes, before he could emerge to strike down the enemy for God.
In a box specially constructed for them, Elizabeth and Charles, Arbella Stuart, and about twenty of their closest companions waited for their brother and father. Arbella was on the verge of taking a step that would prove fatal: marrying William Seymour without obtaining royal consent. Given the strength of her claim to the thrones – and that Seymour also had a claim and so was one of the men James would never, ever permit her to marry – she immediately condemned herself.
The ambassadors of Spain and Venice and the Archduke Albert of Austria, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, took their places beside Henry’s friends and Protestant European relations from Brunswick, Württemberg, Hesse, and diplomats from the Dutch United Free Provinces. Suddenly, voices, trumpets and drums deafened all talk, as the royal barge arrived at the watergate to the Palace of Westminster.
All stood. The king entered, flanked by heralds. Two Cecils – the lords Cranborne and Burghley – carried James’s train, his whole outfit ‘gloriously garnished with precious stones and pearls’.
Last, Henry appeared. Stepping into place to hold Henry’s train, the Earl of Huntingdon took the chance to check it over. The prince’s robes had cost over £1,300.* Dressed in royal purple satin and velvet, his train was ‘lined clean through very thick with powdered ermine’ Huntingdon was pleased to note. The Earl of Sussex walked at Henry’s side. The earls of Suffolk and Worcester, two of Salisbury’s allies, fell in behind. An exquisitely ornamented patent detailing Henry’s creation followed, carried by the Garter King of Arms. Drafted by Henry Hobart and Francis Bacon, as Attorney and Solicitor General, Salisbury had obsessively corrected and amended the Latin original, and the English translation, until it captured the right tone.
A sword, a ring, a golden vierge – wand; a gold ‘crown richly set with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds’, each borne on its own cushion by four earls, came next. Flanked by his new Knights of the Bath, Henry moved slowly through a waterfall of voices and instruments cascading down from the galleries. The mettle of Henry’s majesty even struck Noies to sparks of delight. ‘All the trumpeters and drum players did sound out their instruments, with others, which played upon cornets and flutes with such an acclamation and exultation as if the heavens and the earth would have come together,’ he told his wife, sounding like a prose Caliban.
Henry turned to stand before the throne, clothed head to toe in purple, for all the world like a richly dressed bishop reverencing the high altar at a papist mass. He bowed three times to the king and then stepped up and knelt before him. Henry remained on his knees for over a quarter of an hour, while Salisbury read out the patent creating him Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Earl of Chester, Duke of Rothesay, and Baron Renfrew – first in Latin and then in English.
Another layer of purple velvet descended round the young man’s shoulders. James fastened it under his son’s chin. The king then crowned the Prince of Wales, put the sacred ring marrying him to his country on his finger, and the long, fine, gold wand of judgment into his hands.
Henry remained solemn, his father relaxed, jovial even. For Henry, this day marked a decisive break with the past. He acted out his arrival as adult ruler of the secondary court of the new Britain. James would see the ceremony as increasing the prestige of his own majesty, not crowning Henry as ruler of a separate court, in any meaningful way. The king ‘displayed great affection … saying that the Prince must not mind humbling himself to his father, now playfully patting his cheek and giving him other tokens of love’. James understood his son’s ambition, even if at times it vexed him.
As King of Scotland, James VI had jumped to grasp the reins of government from over-mighty magnates at a young age. The ancient Stuart dynasty had come far. Crowning his son Prince of Wales, James took Henry up, kissed him and placed him on the seat to his left – Henry’s ‘Parliament seat’.
The ritual enacted, a fanfare blared and the choir burst into Tallis’s towering anthem, his motet for forty voices, Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui – ‘Hope in any other, I have never had’. For this day, they substituted an English text for Tallis’s Latin, inserting Henry’s name as the one in whom they placed their hope. The glorious music carried his name high into Westminster’s rafters, over everyone’s heads:
Sing and glorify Heaven’s high Majesty …
Sound divine praises …
This is the day, holy day, happy day …
Live Henry, princely and mighty,
Harry, live in thy creation happy.
For nine out of ten here, it was the greatest parliamentary occasion they had seen, or would ever see. Their heads might temper the patriotic sentiment evoked by this ceremony, but they came, the elements of power in the land, because of what Henry represented. Rituals such as this encouraged a focus on the Crown as the divine symbol of the nation. They were establishing the identity and mantra many Britons went on to venerate in themselves, the essence of a magical spell: for God, King and Country.
Realistically, it was hard for King James to embody this role. He was a Scottish monarch and middle-aged import. Henry was different. He had first appeared as the blond boy in ivory and scarlet satin, aged ten: the obvious candidate for the divine child, as the kingdoms united, and a prince of Protestant Europe. People had talked, written and manoeuvred him into this role all his life. He wanted to live up to their expectations.
Granting Salisbury’s input, this was very much Henry’s day. It had happened at his insistence and it won what he sought – a substantial amount of real financial and political independence for what now became the court, no longer the courtly college, of the king-in-waiting. This extraordinary, quasi-sacramental event somehow performed an informal coronation as well as an investiture.
As prince and king walked out together the whole hall broke into ‘a very joyful and solemn applause, every man rejoicing and praising God, and the king and the young Prince, whose lives God long continue in all happiness and honour! Amen! Amen.’ Overcome, the Puritan John Noies cried and clapped.
Coming back to earth, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere adjourned the next sitting of Parliament, commanding the members to convene the following Thursday – when the overriding concern would be to agree a political settlement to secure Crown finances.
That night, the court feasted. The great aristocrats of England – Pembroke, Southampton, Montgomery – served their friend, the Prince of Wales, at table. With the prince sat Salisbury, Worcester, Northampton, Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Derby, Cumberland, Huntingdon and Sussex, the grandees of the British state, as they would remain when Henry became king. ‘During the whole dinner time the hall resounded with all kinds of most exquisite music,’ sounds and sweet airs.
The next night belonged to entertainments arranged by the queen. Anne of Denmark took centre stage as Tethys, goddess of the sea. She addressed a prince who sought global expansion by mastery of the oceans. She celebrated Henry’s maternal inheritance, as the daughter of a great seagoing power and progenitrix of a new Eurocentric dynasty. Inigo Jones once again designed and created the sets. Anne chose the dancers and attended closely to the content.
His mother’s masque told Henry that the glorious Empire of Britain ‘will be enough’ for him. He should not ‘think to pass the circle of that field’. Within the ‘large extent of these my waves’ around Britain, will ‘more treasure and more certain riches [be] got/Than all the Indies to Iberus brought’. Pro-Spanish, like James, neither parent wanted the Protestant warrior ‘Moeliades’ to pursue an aggressive policy towards Iberia’s overseas empire. Her son would have riches enough anyway, by way of scientific discoveries: ‘Nereus will by industry unfold/A chemic secret, and change fish to gold’! Henry and his court doubted it would be enough.
On the final night of celebrations, the court made its way to the banks of the Thames to join tens of thousands of Londoners. They watched as two gunships besieged a vast, floating wooden castle in the middle of the river. The boats fired at the castle and from within its flaming walls fireworks were launched, exploding into the sky. ‘Some of them were so cunning that they could … mount and … flee up into the air twice so high as St Paul’s Tower, and when it was at its highest it would stream down again as long as bell ropes, and the fires did seem to fight and to skirmish one with another in the skies, which was very pleasant to behold in the dark evening, and at length they would descend again as it were buckling and striving together until they were extinguished in the water.’ Even the fireworks symbolised something about Henry and monarchy: the ‘power to destroy and to illuminate’, to defy gravity.
* Cautionary towns were those ceded to England in return for Elizabeth I’s military and financial support of the rebel Dutch in their war of independence from Spain. Hostile locals, insanitary conditions, the chaotic traffic of men and materials going to and from the war zones, made them wild places in which to live.
* About £165,000 in today’s values.