THIRTY
‘THE GOD OF MONEY HAS STOLEN LOVE’S ENSIGNS’
In the cold light of day Henry sat in council to review the offer of marriage from Savoy. The Savoyards had asked the king if the Privy Council would consider making a double match: Isabella for Henry, the Prince of Piedmont for Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, the Tuscans pressed on, certain they were closing their deal for Henry. A cannonade retorted from St James’s. We only entertain the Savoy match for our prince for one reason, said Holles, Henry’s comptroller and proxy: ‘the clearing of the King’s debts … But, why should the heir of England be sold?’ In any case, Savoy offered a price not ‘above the reach of three subsidies of 2s in the pound’, the detail underlining the grubbiness in all this. Our princes used to marry for ‘greatness or affection’, said Holles. If his highness had to speak of his marriage in the language of profit and loss, then what gain should he seek? Princes’ profit was ‘to be understood in augmentation of empire, either present or future; in reason of state, by intelligences; commerce for commodities; conjunction of arms, or diversion for the recovering of withheld rights’, not a one-off lump sum that failed to address the underlying causes of the financial woes at the Treasury. The king and his advisers were throwing away a powerful tool of foreign policy.
Henry could fulfil none of these expectations if he married into Savoy (or Tuscany). He would gain no increase of dominion as Charles Emmanuel had many sons. There was no reason of state: Savoy might spill some intelligence about France, but never about Spain, to whom Savoy was economically beholden and related by blood and faith. Commerce? Not a chance, said Holles, as Savoy’s ‘strait countries afford none’. Help in arms? Perhaps. Again, although Savoy was wary of Habsburg ambition, the Savoyard default alliance was with Spain.
Charles Emmanuel answered the critical commentary in England by doubling the huge dowry offered by Tuscany. But the view at St James’s was that Savoy could not afford to put up this amount: Spain and Rome would have to cover Savoy’s bet to ‘make the stake good’. When that happened, to whom did the Duke of Savoy owe loyalty? His own creditor cousins, neighbours and co-religionists, or a heretic, foreign son-in-law? By a Catholic match, Holles continued, ‘Rome shall reap thereby great honour, great profit, namely she shall recover her ancient supremacy and jurisdiction … Spain will have us abandon our sympathisers, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and … cast off our well willers for religion’s cause, or other common interest.’ As for her faith, even if a prospective Catholic queen only practised her faith in private, ‘one mass in the court … begets 1,000 in the country’. That summed up the hotter Protestants’ assessment of Anne and the other court Catholics.
James disapproved of this maturing tone from Henry’s circle. But Henry’s people could rely on their master to protect them. His close-knit court knew him to be ferociously loyal.
Having secured Elizabeth for Frederick V of the Palatinate, the Duke of Bouillon came from France in May 1612 to offer Christine, the second daughter of the late Henri IV, for Henry. Only nine years old, the princess’s marriage to a Calvinist of Henry’s calibre would strengthen the battered Huguenot faction in France. Bouillon half hoped Spain might find the prospect so distasteful they would step back from committing both senior Spanish political pawns to France as a result.
Henry once more spoke through the scribal publications he commissioned, endorsed or sponsored, from which he could distance himself, just enough, if challenged. James disliked his son broadcasting through the back door, via the voices of ‘common men’, but he needed Henry’s cooperation on a matter of such national importance as his marriage. On the surface, Henry drew on his neo-Stoic pride, adopting a pose of aloof demurral. He ‘does not show many signs of stirring himself, and seems to defer to the judgement of his father’. He would choose how and when to compete openly for powers. For now, he resorted to the guile he learned from Dallington, Northampton, Cornwallis, and from Tacitus.
However, had James been left in any doubt of his son’s views, the entertainment he arranged for the Feast of Epiphany told him, again.
Love Restored could not have differed more from the usual princely spectacle. The subject was topical enough in a year when marital chess enthralled the leaders of Christendom. Yet ‘Robin Goodfellow’ just shambled on. He moaned and groaned about offering them an apologetic, impoverished little show – no good music, singing, enchanting sets, costumes, poetry. They had little money to honour the company tonight.
The court, arrayed to magnify the splendour of the evening, stiffened. Henry always played his part. Had he taken a false step?
Interrupting Robin’s whinging, Cupid entered. They knew it was Cupid – bow and arrows in his hand, blindfolded, talking of Love. Yet, it did not sound like Love. Who then?
‘’Tis that imposter, Plutus,’ said Robin, enlightening them, ‘the god of money, who has stolen Love’s ensigns.’
Masquerading as Love, Plutus/Money ‘reigns in the world, making friendships, contracts, marriages and, almost, religion; begetting, breeding and holding the nearest respects of mankind and usurping all those offices in this age of gold, which Love himself performed in the Golden Age’.
Henry’s masque denounced his era as a grasping, gold-coin obsessed age, not the real Golden Age. Plutus sets himself up ‘to tie Kingdoms’. Every sacred thing is reduced to a commodity to be traded. There was real anger and resentment here.
Taken with the other commentaries from Henry’s circle, it formed a coherent narrative. If England did not act to address economic problems, and to stand up for what it understood love to comprehend – ‘friendships, contracts, marriages and, almost, religion’ – then it ended up selling the heir to the throne. Love Restored showed the ignominy of being treated as the star lot, touted about to attract the highest bidders to the auction. Was Henry’s marriage not to be a sacrament, a sharing of your dearest values – pleasing to God, as well as the state? A song lamented the change in Cupid:
O how came Love, that is himself a fire,
To be so cold!
Yes, tyran money quenches all desire,
Or, makes it old …
Jonson and Henry had Love/Cupid enter at this point, and go onto the attack. ‘Away with this cold cloud that dims/My light!’ He turned on the god of money:
Imposter Mammon, come, resign
This bow and quiver, they are mine.
Thou hast too long usurped my rites.
The masquers – Henry, very unusually, not dancing tonight – stepped up to reset the world’s moral compass:
Till all become one harmony
Of honour and courtesy,
True valour and urbanity,
Of confidence, alacrity,
Of promptness and industry,
Hability, reality.
Henry was under pressure. He had to think seriously and fast about the matter of who he should marry, or it would be done for him. He knew he could marry a Catholic. His mother was a papist. Certain men of his set, such as Arundel, were known to be papists. It did not make them Counter Reformation zealots. It might indeed make Henry into the sort of holding figure in Europe that his father hoped the new British kings could be – between the Scylla and Charybdis of aggressive, expansionist Catholicism and militant international Protestantism.
‘I would advise the Prince to keep his own ground for a while,’ counselled Ralegh, ‘and no way to engage or entangle himself’ in a marriage he might later regret. Ralegh’s (prophetic) reading of the times was that ‘the world is yet aslumber’. Henry should wait for the inevitable, he told him, when ‘this long calm will shortly break out in some terrible tempest’.
Delaying tactics might work for a Prince of Wales who wielded great influence but did not, yet, make policy for his kingdoms. It would leave him free to claim both traditionalist and progressive laurels. It was a shrewd position to take up, almost resolving the conflicting desires and beliefs of the various circles in which he moved, from Whitehall to St James’s.
At least his sister Elizabeth was beyond barter. Bouillon, together with the Elector Palatine’s servant, Count Schomberg, had come to discuss Henry’s possible bride, but primarily to finalise articles for Elizabeth’s marriage to Frederick. The couple had not yet met but had been communicating directly. The count carried letters for Elizabeth and Henry from Frederick – and muddled them, nervously presenting a love letter to Henry and a clarion call to his future brother-in-arms to Elizabeth.
Henry was more than happy to take Ralegh’s advice and stall. He was attracted to Henri IV’s second daughter, Christine, as a prestigious and politically interesting prospect, and dragged his heels on an Italian match. Some describe the prince as being reticent to the point of taciturnity, but Henry knew very well how a person of his significance had to guard his thoughts, to manage how and where he broadcast them to greatest effect. ‘While he is yet free, all have hope,’ said Ralegh, ‘but a great deal of malice will follow us afterwards, from those that have been refused.’
Quietly, Henry gathered intelligence from France, using a spy called Lorkin. Mr Lorkin had tutored Henry’s school friend, Thomas Puckering, during his grand tour. He reported that the French queen regent was attacking the Huguenots’ governing body, and the Huguenot strongholds of Languedoc and Provence had sent deputies to Paris to protest. The queen replied that if they did not submit, she would ‘hold them as traitors and rebels, and accordingly … proceed against them’. Lorkin also described a dispute at the Sorbonne raging between the Huguenots and Jesuits. The Jesuits wanted to beatify their founder, Ignatius of Loyola – the first step to sainthood. The Huguenots thought it a ‘damnable and detestable’ idea to make a saint of a man whose followers had slaughtered their king not two years ago. The Jesuits countered that ‘their order has done greater miracles by the power of Ignatius … than did the Prophets and Apostles by the power of God himself’.
Such intelligence helped Henry assess the impact a French bride might have on the balance of power in Christendom. If France was drifting towards a militant Jesuitical Catholicism, it did not bode well for the chances of a mixed political and religious settlement in Europe. Part of him was ‘resolved that two religions should never lie in his bed’. Another hoped he might be able to convert Christine. She was only nine, and her father had been Protestant for most of his life.
Still, Ambassador Lotti remained buoyant, convinced that he had achieved the match for Tuscany. He told his replacement Signor Cioli as much before returning to Florence. Cioli imagined this was going to be a prestigious, easy mission. So he could not understand why, throughout the spring of 1612, St James’s laid one stumbling block after another in his path. Sir Edward Cecil presented him with a long list of objections to the Tuscan marriage and told Cioli he needed to address them before Henry could give his decision.
All talk from within Henry’s circle consistently favoured a Protestant match. Although possessing strong Catholic sympathies himself, the Earl of Arundel told Henry, over the supper table, that he believed this route best secured the independence and strength of the British Crown. Cornwallis echoed his view, as did Edward Sackville, nephew of the late Earl of Dorset. Lord Roos, grandson of the Earl of Exeter and someone James used for diplomatic missions, told David Murray that the Tuscans knew Murray was ‘so great a Puritan, that you are not only an endeavourer against this match’ of Henry and Caterina, ‘but also against all other matches which are popish’. No one knew Henry’s heart better than David Murray.
Thwarted and confused, Signor Cioli had had enough. He denounced King James as a ‘weathercock’ who swung towards several different Catholic matches. He said the queen was stuffed with ‘extravagant fancies’ and was unbearably vain and haughty. Henry, he admitted, was a ‘generous and heroic spirit’, yet he too had an unattractive sense of superiority and arrogance.
Cioli’s opinion soon became irrelevant when the pope forbade any Medici princess from marrying a heretic British prince unless England changed its laws. The Tuscans demanded James’s government rewrite the Oath of Allegiance to ensure it did not offend his holiness, the pope. In addition, the English must make greater concessions to Catholic worship.
Negotiations collapsed. The pope’s stance confirmed everything Henry and most Britons believed about papal and Jesuit interference in sovereign states. Under the guise of facilitating a dynastic alliance between European powers, they had the temerity to demand changes in the laws of independent nations. One Savoyard negotiator, thrilled to see the Tuscan bid founder, said Savoy would not be so anxious to appease the papacy.
Cioli was suffering considerable distress. ‘I am in a state of such mental confusion,’ he said, and now just wanted to go home.