TWENTY-EIGHT
‘TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NEVER LIE IN HIS BED’
Henry’s parents had come to power in that brief, already passing, European moment when a multi-faith marriage might create a broad political path their multi-denominational people could walk together, between fundamentalist, intolerant poles. That situation had changed. Attitudes were hardening across Christendom. Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth preferred to marry fellow Protestants – ideally political opponents of the papacy and the (Spanish and Austrian) Habsburgs. Henry wanted to continue Henri IV’s work of suppressing any resurgence of international popery under the Habsburg banner.
However early in February 1611, Queen Anne received Ottaviano Lotti, the Tuscan representative in London, at Greenwich. He brought with him presents, including portraits of the grand duke himself, Cosimo II de’ Medici, and his grand duchess, Magdalena.
Lotti and Anne strolled in the palace’s gallery. The queen wanted to see where the paintings might be hung in the best light. They stopped to admire a portrait of the eldest Spanish princess, Ana Maria, still a child: ‘I see that little Princess [will be] Queen of England,’ said Lotti, ‘if her youth does not impede it.’
The queen thought so too. She herself was a lot younger than James. The infanta was their first choice for Henry.
Lotti asked about the French representative, Marshal de Laverdin, who was expected any day with an offer of the Princess Elisabeth for Henry.
‘By God, that will never be. I would rather see my son damned,’ said the queen.
‘Why, Madam?’
‘Because it does not please me,’ she replied. ‘I do not wish to have children by one who has four wives’ – the late Henri IV having been a womaniser of European renown.
Prince Henry, on the other hand, might contemplate a French match, to keep Catholic France connected to Protestant Christendom, although it was known that Henri IV’s widow, Marie de’ Medici, was already passing anti-Huguenot legislation and had begun to negotiate with Spain to marry the young Louis XIII or his sister Elisabeth into the Spanish royal family. England proposed that if Elisabeth of France married the Spanish infante, Prince Henry should marry his sister, the Infanta Ana Maria – ‘the Spanish olive’, as Salisbury called her.
When penning his ‘golden books’ of instruction for the infant Henry, James VI of Scotland had warned his son against marrying outside the faith: ‘Disagreement in religion brings with it ever disagreement in manners; and the dissension between your Preachers and hers, will breed and foster a dissension among your subjects, taking their example from your family.’ James had obviously changed his mind. Though Spain offered their daughters to all comers, the king noted acerbically, he and the queen very much wanted the infanta for Henry. If he could add a high-status Catholic to his ruling dynasty, the king might then be pleased to negotiate a Protestant match for Princess Elizabeth.
Lotti had not come to praise a Spanish or French or Protestant match, but to offer his own princess, eighteen-year-old Caterina de’ Medici. He also brought gifts for Henry – beautiful Renaissance bronzes displaying the cultural excellence of the Medici and all that it implied. But soon he was irritated to learn of a competing Italian offer for the prince, from Savoy.
The king and Salisbury had allowed both Italian states to play their hand. Tuscany, run by arriviste bankers – the Medici – could offer an enormous dowry, but they lacked honourable dynastic roots. Isabella of Savoy’s bloodline was ancient and eminent, and the dowry was close enough to the Tuscan bid. Half the blood the Princess of Savoy offered was her mother’s Spanish Habsburg line.
From Henry’s Europhile perspective, although this was yet another Catholic, Savoy offered some geopolitical benefit. It bordered France on the west. To the east lay the Spanish military citadel in Milan, which Coryate had reconnoitred for him, strategically important to securing the north–south movement of Spanish troops up through Italy, and over the Alps, to flood into Germany and the Low Countries. Savoy owned Mediterranean ports, including Nice and Villefranche.
However, Isabella’s father, the Duke of Savoy, was regarded as a megalomaniac and mentally unstable. Nicknamed the ‘Hot-Headed’, at one time or another Charles Emmanuel claimed to be King of England, Provence, Cyprus, Morea, Albania, Sicily, Sardinia, and Poland; and to be the Holy Roman Emperor. A Catholic and devotee of the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he also welcomed refugee Huguenots and Waldensians (a southern French Calvinist sect, who came and settled in Piedmont). A man of huge appetites, the duke had already fathered ten children by his wife, and eleven more by a string of mistresses.
Soon after the Italian bids, the leading French Huguenot prince, the Duke of Bouillon, arrived in London. Bouillon asked if an approach from his nephew, the hard-line Calvinist Frederick V (the new ruler of the Palatinate) for Princess Elizabeth’s hand would be well received. James said he required a formal proposal before he could reply.
By the middle of 1611, a raft of potential matches for Henry and Elizabeth lay before the Privy Council, each with its supporters. Henry could speak for himself in council. In public, he had to be more circumspect and use mouthpieces and proxies. As ever, he did not want to throw his court into opposition to the Crown. Whitehall could cut St James’s off from the heart of power quick enough, if it wished.
Henry asked one of his favourite scribal proxies, Ralegh, for his opinion of ‘the Prince Palatine of the Rhine’, Frederick V’s suit, compared with that of Savoy. ‘Certainly, he is as well born as the Duke of Savoy, and as free a Prince as he is,’ Sir Walter replied. ‘The Nation is faithful, he is of our Religion, and by him we shall greatly fasten unto us the Netherlands, and for the little judgement that God has given me, I do prize the alliance of the Palatines and of the House of Nassau, more than I do the alliance of ten Dukes of Savoy.’ Just what Henry wanted to hear. If the Palatine bid won, Henry acquired Frederick as brother-in-law, and his uncle Maurice of Nassau, with him.
Another ‘faithful’ prince, Otto of Hesse, arrived in England in June 1611 with a train of thirty noblemen to secure Princess Elizabeth for himself. Astutely, his party included a prestigious supporter, Maurice of Nassau’s brother, Henry.
Prince Henry welcomed Otto ‘with fare, and sports, tennis, the ring, manège, and hunting, very royally at Richmond’ for three days, and then ‘presented him at his waygate with dogs, horses, bows and guns. Many liked him better for our Infanta [Princess Elizabeth] than the Savoyard in regard of religion, and of the Palsgrave [Frederick V] because his father drunk himself dead, and we fear his patrisation.’ Yet, Henry’s comptroller Sir John Holles concluded, ‘have I good grounds to believe that the Palsgrave will get the golden fleece’.
Anne and James did not find any of these princelings magnificent enough – except, at a stretch, the Palatine electors, blood descendants of Charlemagne himself, founder of the Holy Roman Empire. William Fennor, James’s gentleman fool, composed a ditty about the marriage shenanigans, and sang it before the king, queen, Henry and Elizabeth.
Five heirs, true youths, five kinsmen and five Princes,
Of one religion, though in five provinces,
Each of these are their countries’ joyful hope,
Friends to the gospel, foes to th’devil and Pope.
The five were Henry and the princes of the Palatinate, Brandenburg, Brunswick and Hesse. ‘We’ll forebear to speak of France or Spain,’ said Fennor, speaking of them by saying he would not. James disliked mockery of his foreign policy and rebuked his fool.
Meanwhile, Henry listened to the Privy Council go over the offers and seem to work towards a Spanish or Italian Catholic match for him. But in September a piece of news left the negotiations dead in the water: the French government announced the queen regent’s pleasure in concluding a double marriage contract with Spain. Elisabeth of France would marry the infante, the Spanish heir, and her brother, King Louis XIII, would marry the infanta.
James was furious. Two major European powers had played him for a fool, leaving France, Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor to draw ever closer together. King James clearly did not command enough fear or respect. France and Spain murmured about the availability of younger princesses for Henry. Their deceit strengthened Henry’s argument: no papist state could be trusted.
The king answered France and Spain by accepting the Palatine offer for Elizabeth. To show what that meant for Christendom, the king then formally joined the Evangelical Union, founded by Frederick V’s father. In James’s mind he had joined a defensive alliance. To other members, his participation moved Britain and its heir back into the top echelon of politically and militarily active European Protestant states and princes. Logically, the Evangelical Union would now be spearheaded by Henry and young Frederick. They would defend the faith.
Before his early death to drink the previous summer, Frederick IV of the Palatine had despatched his own clarion call to England – for king or prince to take the place of Henri IV. ‘Our brethren’ are daily being ‘robbed, taken, ransomed, burnt, fought withal, besieged, exposed … overrun, spoiled and forcibly handled’, he pleaded. He called for a religious war of liberation. Their apocalypse was nearly on them. How could the Stuarts not answer the cry from their beleaguered brothers and sisters in Christ, he asked?
The French Herald, an anonymous pamphlet circulating in England, begged Henry to take up the banner of his ‘valorous god-father … Henry the Great’, the late Henri IV. Lead the crusade ‘under the happy auspices of your glorious father, or rather he himself by you’, it told him. Everyone knew James would never go.
‘You need not stir out of your royal Whitehall,’ the Herald assured the king. ‘We will send you the news of the ruin of your enemies. Your arms are long enough to chastise them … most especially your right arm, the son of your thigh,’ Prince Henry. ‘Let us but have him, let him but have himself, and he will come to us,’ they pleaded. ‘Let him go for the public good of all Christendom … We have none else to be the head of our croisado.’
The Herald’s tone grew shriller. ‘To horse, to horse!’ it urged Henry. ‘The quarter is broken, the bloody Trumpet hath sounded; true and mortal war is open.’ Enough practising ‘among your tiltings and feigned combats’, it urged, ‘though otherwise in peace, honourable, delightful, needful,’ they are not enough any more. ‘Do not … mould any longer among your books.’
The pamphlet sold out, and had to be reprinted. Other voices came in behind it. ‘Here is the Alexander of Great Britain. Here he is – weapons in his hand, his side and blade turned towards the enemy of God,’ Huguenot, George Marcelline, wrote, offering himself, ‘as one of yours’, to Henry. ‘You shall find me readier to lay hand on my sword for you, than on my pen, and would rather spend my blood than mine ink, for your honour and service, in all, and by all, My Young Caesar, and great Alexander.’
So many marriage contracts and new alliances agreed this year, yet Prince Henry, the key player, was left unmatched. Finalising the contract for Princess Elizabeth, the king and Salisbury turned to see who still held what cards: Spain dismissed, France still in play; Tuscany and Savoy now came back to the table to win Henry for one of their princesses.
While seeing a certain logic in his parents’ desire for a European, mixed-faith match, for Henry and his entourage it killed the dream. He was not yet king though; he and his followers must tread softly on this matter, although they realised Henry would have to wed soon. Henry tried to fend off the issue by saying he ‘intended to marry a subject and a beauty, to avoid keeping a mistress’ – a sly dig, perhaps, at his parents’ marriage and ‘Mistress’ Carr.
And he did not react when Sir Edward Cecil, prompted by his uncle, Salisbury, held up the portrait of Caterina de’ Medici for him to admire. Of course he supported any tactic aimed at challenging Spain’s presence in the Italian peninsula. If his father hardened his views on a Catholic match, he might have to marry an Italian. ‘Behold our Prince turns to Tuscany for a bride,’ the crypto-Catholic earls of Northampton and Suffolk cheered in the Privy Council.
In the autumn, Caterina sent her confessor to Rome to seek the pope’s approval for her to marry a heretic. Ambassador Lotti assured the king and queen that a papal curia of six cardinals was working on how tacit approval could be given, without being seen to facilitate the inherent ‘evil’ of such a match.
If he was to be sold to Tuscany, Henry wanted to see evidence of future benefits. He asked Sir Thomas Chaloner to commission his former pupil, the exiled Sir Robert Dudley, to visit the Medici. The price of Henry’s consent would be a large proportion of the dowry, paid direct to him, not the Treasury.
Henry undermined the Tuscan negotiations as best he could. He asked Sir Charles Cornwallis to publish a damning review of the match. Cornwallis’s ‘A Discourse Concerning the Marriage Propounded to Prince Henry with a Daughter of Florence’ said Tuscany was remote, and therefore useless geopolitically. And, it was too closely tied to the pope. The dowry would not provide investment capital for the good of the country, would only pay down a bit of royal debt – and most likely leak out into favourites’ pockets. Last, the Medici were nouveau riche and no honourable match for a prince of such ancient lineage and esteem.
The alternative was a Protestant princess. Cornwallis concluded happily: ‘Your conjunction with your own religion will demonstrate your clear, and undoubted resolution not to decline in the cause of God’ – unlike his father and council, apparently. ‘This will fasten unto you, throughout all Christendom, the professors of the reformation, and make you dear to the subjects of this kingdom; out of whose loves you may expect a permanent and continual treasure.’ If Henry was thinking ahead to his own reign, he would not marry Caterina.
A Catholic queen meant ‘a marriage in so high a degree distasteful to them’, his subjects, Cornwallis continued, that it ‘is likely to breed, and increase, those obstructions which have lately been showed upon the demands of supply in parliament, by the King your father’. Henry and Sir Charles assumed Parliament’s input in policy-making.
Salisbury approved much of Henry’s maturing narrative. Especially, any hints that Henry might sense something James did not – that government by Privy Council and king in Parliament, not despite it, was the way forward.
To stall for time and keep the king, queen, Salisbury and the Privy Council at bay required some subterfuge and strength of character in a seventeen-year-old. The playwright John Webster said it felt as if ‘we stood as in some spacious theatre’, to those around Henry now, ‘musing what would become of him’. Henry’s vision was no longer just the political culture he had inherited from the descendants of the godly, Elizabethan war party, whose heirs had always gravitated to his court. Plays, masques, poems and wild-talking pamphlets showed he now chimed with the contemporary imperial and religious aspirations of a broad spectrum of the British people.
As winter came in, Henry’s court asked themselves if a large section of these Britons really wanted the prince to throw himself away on a papist in order to solve, temporarily, his parents’ chaotic finances and satisfy their outmoded vision for Europe, and to accommodate his father’s exalted view of divinely sanctioned rulers. For King James, monarchy was a transcendent state, which certainly included the capacity to transcend mere confessional barriers.