THIRTY-THREE
‘LET BRITISH STRENGTH BE ADDED TO THE GERMAN’
When he thought about his sister Elizabeth’s marriage, he was able to put Rochester out of his mind. Henry called in his servant, poet and physician, Thomas Campion. Elizabeth and Frederick’s wedding was due to take place at the end of the year and Henry had to create the entertainments for their guests.
The prince had Campion hail Elizabeth as: ‘The mother of kings, of emperors. Let the British strength be added to the German: can anything equal it? One mind, one faith, will join two peoples, and one religion and simple love. Both will have the same enemy, the same ally, the same prayer for those in danger, and the same strength. Peace will favour them, and the fortune of war will favour them; always God the helper will be at their side.’
George Chapman created a second show, the Memorable Masque. It celebrated the conversion of the indigenous Virginians to Protestantism, as Britain expanded her empire. The native Virginians sat inside a mountain of gold and worshipped the sun – looking more like Aztecs than native North Americans. The tableau showed the immense wealth Henry and his fellow colonisers assumed Virginia concealed. This show made Honour choose to raise her temple in England. And because she did so, Fortune followed her, and resided here for ever too. It was classic Henry – a Renaissance image of Honour and Fortune together. Act with Honour, said Henry, to commit us to our destiny, and Fortune will come to us.
The final entertainment Henry planned that year was too fierce a polemical dish for some foreign powers to stomach. Informally called the Masque of Truth, it told how Atlas decided to relinquish the burden of holding up the world and handed it over to Alethea – Truth. In Henry’s ‘barriers’, James had been Atlas. Henry’s duty as God’s knight, Moeliades, was to help Atlas carry his burden. By now, he was ready to lift the burden clean off Atlas’s shoulders, and bear it on behalf of Truth. But whose truth?
Truth was shown to be a monolithic reclining statue, located in Britain. The head radiated light. Truth held the globe and read a Bible in English, the source of all truth for godly men and women. The arms of England and the Palatinate stood on each side of the set, bracketing the action.
The Muses called the nations of the world to end religious conflict. The globe in Truth’s hand split open to show paradise, implying this was the reward for ending religious conflict. Stars and angels flew around Truth. Heavenly music played. Truth spoke. She invited princes and potentates to come to her here, enlightened, repent their error, and seek the truth of the love of Christ, in paradise, in England – where truth now is, the truth of the Word of God as interpreted by the reformed faith in the vernacular Bible.
You Empires and Republics,
Lead all your heretics
To the feet of this TRUTH.
Then receiving this knowledge,
They will be touched with Repentance,
And find again Purity.
It was an explicit Calvinist Christian parable. Puritans had ‘Purity’. It was quite clear who were assigned the role of the ‘heretics’. It showed the perfection of the reformation that Henry, Elizabeth and her betrothed, Frederick, sought.
Here, Henry stated that the marriage was not just one half of the religious, geopolitical balancing act; more than this, the union of the Palatinate and Britain created an unstoppable force for Protestant good. In effect, Henry’s Church of England would be transformed by this union into an evangelising, international Protestant Church.
Seeing where this was leading, when the Spanish ambassador received his wedding invitation, he refused it.
Late spring turned into summer – long, hot, glorious, almost ‘excessive in continuance and degree of heat, more than any now alive in England had ever seen’. Satisfied with the wedding entertainments, Henry went to Richmond to check on the progress of the renovations.
While there, fond of his food, ‘having often filled himself with fish, and with oysters both raw and dressed with fire, at every meal, three or four days in the week’, he went to the river to bathe and ease his stomach. He remained ‘in the water for some hours together’. Fusspots tried to dissuade him. Fit as a fiddle, Henry laughed them off. He enjoyed all his physical appetites to the full. When he was not swimming in it, or dreaming of sailing on it, he found peace walking by the water in the balmy moonlit evenings. He listened to the echo of trumpets coming across it to him, and talked quietly with his most trusted friends.
Reassured that the works at Richmond were proceeding well, he dashed to meet his parents and siblings who had set out already on their summer progress among the people. Henry had agreed to join his father to hunt at Belvoir Castle in Rutland. He posted sixty miles in nine hours, stayed over at Hinchingbrooke near Huntingdon, then covered the remaining thirty-six miles to meet his father on schedule the following day. He had ridden almost a hundred miles in forty-eight hours in the middle of a heatwave.
Towards the end of the progress, Henry rode ahead of his family to the old Elizabethan hunting lodge of Woodstock, now his. He was to feast them and the court there, and wanted to oversee the creation of a great summer pavilion of fresh-cut boughs that he was building in the park for them. It was as if Oberon entered the day world, ready to welcome the ‘sun’ king and queen to the greenwood bower of the Fairy King.
Courtiers arrived several days before the royal family. Henry kept them company, arranging hunting by day, music and dancing by night. The prince came down each day to his temporary banqueting house, to sit under the cool shade of branches cut in their prime, amongst the sweet-smelling sap. He checked all was in order. A good host, ‘it was his great care to give contentment’.
A fanfare announced the royal family. He led them to his leafy hall. ‘The King and Queen being set at a Table by themselves at the upper end of the room, his Highness with his sister accompanied with the Lords and Ladies sitting at another table of thirty yards long and more … there was to be seen one of the greatest and best ordered feasts as ever was seen.’ They had so much to celebrate this year. Henry was ‘like to a Princely Bridegroom cheering and welcoming his guests, there appeared an universal contentment in all’. They applauded ‘his Highness[’s] cheerful carriage, the Time, Order, State, Magnificence, and Greatness thereof’, supervising the feasting and dancing, keeping ‘good measure’ in his life. A belief in the healing, synchronising power of a conjunction between man, spirit and nature ran deep in them. Henry possessed its mystique right now. No one should see anything ‘ominous therein’. The king congratulated Henry with real pleasure. Everything was so well ordered, with decorum maintained in the middle of such splendour and luxury. James complimented his fine son that ‘he had never seen the like before all his lifetime, and that he could never do so much in his own house’.
Henry left Woodstock very happy with life. He galloped back to Richmond to make sure all his arrangements were in place, and his houses prepared to receive Frederick. The Count Palatine was expected any day in early October. Henry planned to spend as much time as possible with Frederick, ‘to grace him with all possible honour’.
As he waited for Frederick, he noticed he felt tired. He was never tired, though he had pushed himself very hard this year. His head ached. The weather was still hot; he must have a touch of sunstroke. Henry summoned his physician, Dr Hammond, who listened as his patient dredged up heavy sighs, bored by ill health. Hammond asked what made him sigh.
Henry shrugged. ‘He knew not.’ The sighs ‘came unawares’. But he said he thought ‘they were not without cause’. He was just not himself, no vitality; none of the stubborn, Henry-like teenage certainty in his voice. Despite ‘his continual headache, laziness and indisposition increasing’, he ignored his malaise. He was not going to fall ill now, of all times.
Most mornings he rose before five, ‘to walk the fields’ with a close friend – John Harington, or Essex – talking freely. Now though, he found himself unable to shrug off whatever illness had got into him and had to ‘lie a-bed … until nine of the clock, complaining of his laziness, and that he knew not the cause’. His grooms of the bedchamber came to get him up and dress him. ‘How do I look this morning?’ he asked every day. ‘To make his Highness laugh’, they teased him ‘with one jest or other’, that he looked like a lazybones.
He soon recovered enough to move his court downriver, from Richmond to St James’s, to wait for Frederick.
The king and Rochester sought him out, badgering him to express his wishes with regard to a bride. They were eager to settle with one of the offers – Christine of France or Isabella of Savoy. In mid-October, Rochester passed Henry a letter recently received from the English ambassador to France. They want to know, Henry told his friends, about ‘my marriage with the second daughter of France’. The king had scribbled a line on the bottom of the letter, asking him ‘to give my opinion thereon’.
Henry took his time, as always, then replied. There was ‘no reason to yield’ to the French straightaway, he told his father. It made England look too keen. It was in the hands of France to make the marriage ‘go forward or otherwise’. Henry recommended some provisos. They should accept France only if the princess came at once, to grow up in a Protestant milieu; then there ‘will be a greater likelihood of converting her to our religion’. Also, ‘your majesty’s credit will be the better preserved’ if ‘the delivery of both the daughters shall be made at the same time’ – one French princess to England and one to Spain. ‘As for the exercise of her religion, your Majesty may be pleased to make your ambassador give a peremptory answer that your Majesty will never agree to give her a greater liberty in the exercise of it than that which is agreed upon with the Savoyard, which is … in her most private and secret chamber.’
Henry admitted he demanded ‘somewhat strict’ conditions. Yet, if the French proceeded from ‘a sincere and hearty affection, I make no doubt but they will make no rub of them’.
He compared France and Savoy: ‘If your Majesty looks to the greatness of the dowry, then it is likely you will make choice of Savoy … But if you lay aside the little piece of disgrace in being served after another,’ Spain having got the choicest fruit, and we consider ‘which will give the greatest contentment and satisfaction to the general body of the Protestants abroad, then I am of the opinion that you will sooner incline to France than Savoy,’ because of the Huguenot element in Christine’s provenance. This, for Henry, was decisive. His marriage must strengthen the European Protestant union. Henry rounded off by saying – hoping – ‘your Majesty may think that my part to play, which is to be in love with any of them, is not yet at hand’. This was his real view – no hurry, the world was ‘yet aslumber’ – almost repeating Ralegh’s recommendation.
‘My master’ sought to heal his drifting nation, said Sir John Holles, ‘by upholding religion, bettering the policy, moderating the oligarchal greatness of court, of Council, opening the passage to virtue, with reward of merit’, not favouritism. Henry could ‘make us once again the nation among all nations, a terror to God’s enemies, the triumph of the Church at home, and a sure haven to the distressed Church abroad’.
Henry sent his reply to Whitehall, wearily – aware Rochester would open it, peruse its contents and present it to the king with his own gloss on it.
The Palatine wedding party was almost with him, but he still did not feel completely well. ‘He began to be displeased almost with everything, exceeding curious in all things, yet not regarding, but looking as it were with the eyes of a stranger upon them.’ As ‘for sundry things showed him’, mechanical curiosities and fine collectibles, ‘which before he wonted to talk of, ask questions and view curiously, he now scarce vouchsafed to look upon, turning them away with the back of his hand’, and walked off, as if to say, ‘“I take pleasure in nothing.”’