TWENTY-FIVE
Henry’s household records show the prince was as extravagant as any of Jonson’s ‘great ones of the state’. But much of the expenditure could not be avoided. His creation as Prince of Wales meant that from now on his adult court had to act with magnificence and virtue, at home and abroad; otherwise he would not command the esteem of fellow princes and their diplomatic representatives. Neither would he and his mother – working closely with Salisbury – be able to possess enough political weight to counter the king’s bedchamber coterie.
Henry supervised the composition of his court from the bottom up. His account books detail ‘the Allowance of diet, wages, board wages, rewards and liveries that were belonging unto his chamber, household and stables’. He signed off decisions about how many gallons of beer should be served at breakfast (‘three gallons’) and the number of loaves for each meal; whether to serve lapwings for dinner or supper; how many larks, capons, conies, mutton, beef, veal, chickens, tongues, sweet chewits, custards and dulcets, and so on could be produced.
Henry and his court officers decided who was entitled to eat and drink what, and when; what they were allowed in faggots of wood to heat their rooms, candles to light them (the quality – wax or tallow – and the number), the torches to be burned, and for which seasons all this was all allowable. Then Henry named ‘the Prince his Highness, servants’, setting the wages and board wages (maintenance allowance) for all the departments of his household. It ran to hundreds of people and positions.
In consultation with his close advisers, his father and Salisbury, as Henry’s household changed from college to full court, he promoted old friends. Sir Adam Newton went from tutor to Henry’s private secretary. Sir David Murray stayed as Keeper of the Privy Purse and Groom of the Stool: he remained the man most intimate with Henry domestically, the abiding, discreet, father figure, sleeping in Henry’s chamber, as he always had. Sir Thomas Chaloner moved from governorship of Henry’s household to being Lord Chamberlain of his court, charged with managing Henry’s accounts and expenditure. Puritan preacher Henry Burton remained as Henry’s sole Clerk of the Closet, keeper of the prince’s conscience.
Among the new appointees, Salisbury’s client, Sir Charles Cornwallis, became Treasurer. Having pursued court office for some time, the Puritan MP and ex-soldier Sir John Holles was thrilled to get the post of Comptroller of the Household. A follower of the late Earl of Essex, who had fought in the Netherlands and Ireland, Holles was very much in tune with the ethos at St James’s.
The Venetian ambassador observed that Henry ‘is delighted to rule, and as he desires the world should think him prudent and spirited, he pays attention to the regulations of his household’. He ‘is studying an order to the cut and quality of the dresses of the gentlemen of his household … he attends to the disposition of his houses, having already ordered many gardens and fountains and some new buildings’. ‘Some new buildings’, included starting on the largest royal renovation project of James I’s reign – the redesigning of the house and grounds of one of Henry’s principal homes, Richmond Palace.
Many men serving Henry were eminent in their fields and had successful careers in the world beyond the confines of court. John Florio, friend of Shakespeare and translator of Montaigne, was Henry and Elizabeth’s Italian tutor. As the prince’s ‘sewer-in-ordinary’, George Chapman – poet and masque-maker – tended to the household’s dining arrangements. Joseph Hall, Stoic cleric and satirist, remained as another of Henry’s chaplains. Thomas Coryate, the era’s most entertaining travel writer, attended as the prince’s unofficial gentleman jester. Scores of others kept up their spirit of enquiry, excellence and wit at Henry’s new court – Thomas Harriot, mathematician and scientist; Thomas Lydiat, cosmographer and clockmaker; Edward Wright, navigator, mathematician, and cartographer, author of a groundbreaking book on navigation, ‘and a very poor man’, curated Henry’s collection of science books; Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel served as playwrights; Inigo Jones, architect and designer; Robert Johnson, musician and composer; Salomon de Caus, polymath, Huguenot engineer; Constantine de Servi, an Italian architect and engineer.
All thronged around Henry. Many served in quarter yearly phases, then moved back out into the city, or to their own country homes. It was partly why Henry needed so many experts in each sphere of activity. In addition, it was not enough that a man be a specialist in one field. They had to be able to combine artistry, craft, engineering skill, court and political awareness, and experience of the wider world, to be able to serve the prince. At St James’s, a court animal was an impressive beast.
The military salon continued to thrive in the new order, as did the sermons and religious atmosphere created by Henry’s twenty-four chaplains, two to be in continuous service per month, to preach daily in the prince’s chapel, where attendance was compulsory; and to help Henry and his friends in examinations of conscience. Henry told a favourite chaplain, Richard Milburne, that he respected preachers who challenged him from the pulpit, ‘with a look that said: “Sir, you must hear me diligently: You must have a care to observe what I say”.’
In addition to the servants and court office-holders, Henry’s informal aristocratic circle was consistently high calibre – Northampton, Salisbury, Southampton, Arundel, Pembroke. None of them received a pension from Henry. Some were wealthier than the prince himself. But, they were clever, worldly men who continued to develop his understanding of monarchy and government. Under their influence, he spent freely on art, sculpture, coins, architectural projects, masques, and plans to modernise the navy and military – raising his household to one of the leading courts in Europe.
Henry received explorers such Thomas Roe and bought exotica from him for Richmond and St James’s, paying for eight ‘tons of Indian coloured wood transported from beyond the seas’. It cost between £30 and £45 a ton, a stupendous amount.* Roe had recently returned from a voyage up the Amazon. Having a piece of a New World in your home was intensely desirable. To furnish his homes, English agents abroad had an open commission to find him rare works of art, antiques, artefacts.
But, as Jonson made Catiline complain of the imperial court, which must include Henry, ‘They ha’ their change of houses, manors, lordships,/We scarce a fire, or household lar.’ The few could buy anything they wanted. The many struggled to keep a roof truss, a ‘lar’, over their heads, and one chair to sit on, while ‘they buy rare Attic statues, Tyrian hangings’:
Ephesian pictures and Corinthian plate,
Attalic garments, and now new-found gems
Since Pompey went for Asia, which they purchase
At price of provinces.
Jonson’s satire showed how the elite held power, by one close enough to see its naked and refined greed. At court, he celebrated, probably sincerely, the culture and glory of majesty. This was all in Henry – engaged, but at risk of becoming out of touch. The esteemed men of his circle, apart from the aristocracy, must keep him alert to the general sentiment of the political nation.
Henry soon raced through his income, forcing his officers to think of new ways to increase it. Sir Arthur Gorges proposed a bill to improve the prince’s finances through the harsh imposition of the fines on recusants. It would, Gorges reckoned, ‘bring unto your coffers … twenty thousand pounds a year at least, and to be effected with ease, without wrong to the public’. At least, the Puritan element of ‘the public’ might not feel wronged.
Gorges set out to present the bill in Parliament. Salisbury told Henry to withdraw it and soften it. If it ‘be not tempered, it will be of ill sound in the subjects’ minds in this island’, said Salisbury. ‘I fear me that this will be very inconvenient to his Majesty, and be found directly repugnant.’ The Countess of Shrewsbury, the Earl of Northampton and his niece, Lady Suffolk, confidante of the queen, as well as Queen Anne herself, and the Earl of Arundel, were all court Catholics.
Sir Arthur encouraged Henry to answer anyone who went ‘about to disgrace your bill in Parliament’ by saying the bill ‘favours more of a well-policed Christian state, and of the government of a wise and godly Prince, rather, with mild and provident remedies to prevent growing mischiefs, than afterwards to seek to weed them out with rigorous and bloody means when they are already planted’. The tone at Henry’s court, in the shadow of Jülich-Cleves and the assassination of Henri IV, sounded aggressively anti-Catholic. Gorges’s bill failed even to get a reading.
Alternative solutions to his indebtedness led Henry to ask Salisbury to help him raise his first substantial capital debt. The prince wanted to take on a debt the Crown held over Sir Henry Carey. Carey had ‘bargained with the King my father for his land’, said Henry, and had borrowed to finance it. Carey could not make his mortgage repayments on his country house in Hertfordshire. ‘I mean to give him a composition for Berkhampstead [Place],’ Henry told Salisbury. (He meant to lease back it to Carey for less than the amount of the debt. He would take on responsibility for paying the balance to the Crown, in order to gain control of the property.) He was sure he could overhaul the asset, improve it, and make a big enough return to show a profit for himself. ‘I would be content absolutely to take upon me his debt, and pay it to the King my father, if you durst adventure to trust me,’ Henry said. ‘For though I am like enough to prove an unthrift, yet I will be loathe to lose my credit in my first undertaking, if you will give me reasonable’ terms.
He knew – from that slightly forlorn admittance: ‘I am like to prove an unthrift’ – that he spent without hesitation to realise his interests and ambitions. Yet, he wanted to craft a reputation as a good businessman, ‘a projector’, a man you could rely on to honour his debts.
* Add two noughts to this number to get an idea of the cost.