TWENTY-SIX
HENRY AND THE KING’S COTERIE
At Whitehall, his father’s court, the masques Oberon and Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly seemed to hit a raw nerve. ‘The King now means to play the good husband,’ to queen and country, ‘to reject all importunate and impertinent suitors, to reform excess of apparel both in Court and elsewhere, by his own example and by proclamation,’ John Sanford informed the diplomat William Trumbull, the English resident in Brussels who needed informers. ‘And of the £40,000 given to six of the Court cormorants, I do not hear that they have yet received anything … All the world wishes they may not’ get a penny, said Sanford, a Latin poet, absentee chaplain of Magdalene College, and one of Trumbull’s team.
The candidates for the title of ‘cormorant’ had to start with Carr; then James’s old school friend, Sir Thomas Erskine, now Viscount Fenton, and John Murray: another old friend from Scotland, and brother of Henry’s mentor, David Murray. James’s travelling secretary, Sir Thomas Lake could be included; and James Hay, Earl of Carlisle; and George Hume, Earl of Dunbar; and an English courtier and favourite, Sir Roger Aston; among others of James’s close coterie.
Carr knew better. He encouraged the king not to engage in dialogue with Parliament over regular financial support for the Crown. The Privy Council divided. Northampton and Suffolk came up with schemes for raising money, but bypassing the need for parliamentary consent. Salisbury, seconded by nobles such as Southampton and Pembroke, advocated the Privy Council, Lords, Commons and king in Parliament, governing together.
To Salisbury’s dismay, on 9 February 1611, the king dissolved Parliament, resenting their impertinent demands that he must discipline himself and account for monies spent. A few weeks later, James showed what absolute power meant. He handed over substantial money gifts which he had promised not to give six ‘Court cormorants’. On 25 March, Accession Day, he followed it up by creating Carr ‘Viscount Rochester’ in the English peerage. It was the first time a Scotsman had been allowed to sit in the House of Lords. Eight weeks later, James made Carr ‘Keeper of the Palace of Westminster’.
Henry received an anonymous tract, ‘An Instruction to Princes, to know how to Govern state well’: another missive warning him off favourites and flatterers. They caused ‘the prince to be deemed a weak and unwise man’, it said. It argued a Machiavellian line on why rulers failed – weakness, more than vice; both were tyrannies. The pamphlet verged on treason. Favourites ‘disorder the whole government’, it declared. A courtier hoping for patronage would never send something like this to the king. But Henry welcomed it, and kept it, perhaps to remind him to maintain his virtue and to avoid misguiding his affections.
The king and Rochester announced their own schemes to increase royal revenues. Under the pretext of raising money for the garrisoning of Ireland, James increasingly began to sell titles – cash for honours. The going rate for a baronetcy was set at £1,095. It attracted ambitious commoners. Scores bought the title in the next few years, establishing their families on the outer thread of the web of the titled, and entitled, with the royal family at its centre.
Two months later, James made Rochester a Knight of the Garter, alongside the Earl of Arundel. Henry carried the banner and helmet of the late Garter Knight, Henri IV, to the altar and laid them down – his face stiff with pain, disgust and self-control.
By mid-summer 1611, all could see that Rochester was ‘further in the King’s graces than any other subject’ – including his wife, heir, and chief minister. ‘All this is displeasure to the English,’ the Venetian ambassador noted. ‘All the same, everybody is endeavouring to secure his favour and good will.’ The favourite ‘had more suitors following him than my Lord Treasurer’, said Viscount Fenton. If true, this was a serious, unpropitious turn of fortune for Lord Treasurer Salisbury and Henry. Salisbury found his responsibilities exhausting him beyond his capacity to carry them out. He was depressed by the failure of his scheme to modernise and stabilise royal finances. He was wearied by Rochester’s crude attempts to outmanoeuvre him. He now felt unwell all the time.
Henry reacted to Rochester’s swift advancement by stepping up his own political activities. He wooed courtiers and looked ‘graciously on everyone’, except the new Viscount Rochester and his followers. ‘So, everyone is his most devoted servant, and he can manage the King’s most intimate, and make them speak to the King just as he thinks best.’ An overstatement of the facts but not of Henry’s ambition: to weaken the disordering force of the bedchamber, as advised in the tracts Henry received, in Jonson’s masques and plays, and as discussed at his court.
The developments at Whitehall frustrated that brilliant group of ministers who had done so much to ensure the success of King James I’s accession. Rochester embodied the problem. The Earl of Suffolk, as the tavern wits had noted, was ‘still defatigated’ by his attempts to impose some restraint on the royal purse. The bedchamber – weakened as a political entity for decades in Elizabeth’s reign, since women could not hold office, as Rochester could – now felt like a secret, unofficial governing body that carried out whispering campaigns against any group trying to stand between it and the king. It undermined Salisbury and his colleagues on the Privy Council. Rochester was soon asking James to appoint him to that body as well. Henry was determined to get his place on it before him.
Rochester’s slighting of the queen increased Henry’s determination. Rochester and his confidant, Overbury, told themselves Anne was of little account – by no means the first or last of James’s intimates to make that error. The French ambassador thought Rochester treated the queen with ‘insupportable contempt’, while Overbury ‘always carried himself insolently’ towards her. It was astounding behaviour towards an anointed queen. In the bear pit of court, if their star ever fell, jaws stood open and ready to tear them to bits.
They overstepped the mark as they walked in the garden of the queen’s palace at Greenwich. Anne stood at an upper window, chatting with her ladies and watching the courtiers walking and talking. As they passed her, they turned and made an obeisance. Rochester and Overbury did not give her a second glance, but shared a joke and laughed.
No one missed it. Certainly not Anne. She flew to her husband, expecting James, with his sense of monarchy, to punish such a serious insult to the queen’s majesty. Rochester said he did not see her, and James ignored his wife. The queen returned to him and burst into tears. She ‘cast herself on her knees and besought him not to suffer her to be so scorned and despised of his grooms, though’, she lashed out at the flaunting of his love for his cormorants, ‘she were content to suffer it [scorn] from him’. In private, Rochester sneered that she was jealous of him.
James sat unmoved. Inwardly, he shook. In the face of the king’s impassivity, the queen lost her head. If this was how it was, she would return to Scotland or Denmark. He made her position here untenable.
Henry agreed to tackle the king on his mother’s behalf. James was terrified of losing his queen, or Rochester. The prince watched as, ‘much afflicted’, his father, ‘walked up and down his chamber. “Ah, woe is me, my queen will go from me, my Carr, my Carr”.’ James’s passions seemed to incapacitate him. No wonder Henry made a mental note to rein in his own carnal appetites. To appease his wife and son, the king resigned himself to summon Rochester and Overbury before the Privy Council to account for their behaviour.
Henry and his mother knew the king would not give up Rochester, but Overbury was within their reach. Salisbury approved their plan to humble him. When the Lord Treasurer received a letter from the queen saying she expected ‘that fellow’ – not deigning to name him – to be punished in council, Salisbury willingly obliged. Overbury was widely believed to be the brains behind Rochester’s increased political activities, as well as the love letters to Lady Essex. ‘I recommend to your care how public the matter is now,’ said Anne.
The council banished Overbury from court and the king swore Henry onto the Privy Council. From now on, the prince would play an official role in government. It was rumoured, wrongly, he ‘is President of the Council’. ‘He will, no doubt attend regularly, for he takes great pleasure in the conduct of important affairs,’ concluded the Venetian ambassador-elect Foscarini. Henry could counterbalance Rochester, if and when he attended council, as few others could, perhaps including Salisbury.
Rochester was seen ‘grappling often with the Prince in his own sphere, in diverse’ arguments. For Henry, ‘being a high-born spirit, and meeting a young competitor in his father’s affections that was a mushroom of yesterday, thought the venom would grow too near him, and therefore he gave no countenance but opposition to’ the poisonous growth. These days, Henry was ‘almost always with the Earl of Salisbury’, although the Lord Treasurer opposed Henry becoming President of the Council, reasoning that it was ‘dangerous to divide the government, and to invest the son with the authority of the father’.
Henry once again found himself caught between two warring parents, as the court witnessed the nasty ‘contestation between their Majesties about Sir Thomas Overbury’s offense, and though her Majesty’s displeasure be not yet much mitigated, Sir Thomas begins to approach the court again, his great friend Carr much labouring in his behalf’. Rochester threatened to abandon James if he did not restore Overbury. James, unable to think of life without ‘my Carr’, gave in, but needed the queen’s assent. In the end, Anne gave it. Back Overbury slid, but only on the condition he never, ever entered the queen’s line of sight.
When the dust settled, Rochester changed tack. Knowing he would be vulnerable when James died, he set himself to court the future king and his mother. Rochester worked to have the queen’s patronage requests granted, rather than thwart them. He involved himself in the negotiations surrounding Henry and Elizabeth’s marriages. The Viscount Rochester ‘carries it handsomely and begins to have a great deal of more temper’, a cousin to the Earl of Mar observed. Nevertheless, he could not ‘find the right way to please either the Queen or the Prince’, no matter what he did. ‘They are both, in the conceit of this court, not well satisfied with him.’
The Mars knew what it was like to be the focus of the queen’s hatred. Anne had learnt from years of experience in Scotland to work such factionalism to her advantage. She now headed ‘a great faction against’ Rochester, ‘having the same spirit and animosity against [him] … that her son’ and Salisbury had. Common cause bound the three of them.