THIRTY-FOUR
‘I WOULD SAY SOMEWHAT, BUT I CANNOT UTTER IT!’
On 16 October 1612, Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine, landed at Gravesend. Henry failed to greet him. Instead, the Duke of Lennox and a tail of courtiers took Frederick and his party to their lodgings. They rested for a couple of days and then went onto the river to be rowed upstream to Whitehall. Over a hundred boats crowded on the water, pennants blowing. The guns on the Tower roared a salute. Trumpets blared and thousands of people lined the banks to cheer their arrival.
Charles came to Whitehall Stairs to meet them, attended by the earls of Shrewsbury, Sussex, Southampton and others numerous enough to compliment Frederick. They greeted each other in a mixture of Latin, French, German and English. Charles led them to the palace’s banqueting hall. The king and queen sat beneath a canopy of gold damask, with Elizabeth and Henry sitting on each side, in front of the arms of Britain.
Frederick struggled through a speech in French, in a low voice, slightly awed. The queen surveyed him coldly. ‘Say no more about it,’ said James, putting him at his ease. He patted him kindly. ‘Suffice it that I am anxious to testify to you, by deeds, that you are welcome.’
Elizabeth held herself apart, while the king and Henry greeted the guests – though Henry remained seated. He apologised to Frederick, explaining he had a ‘cold, lazy drowsiness’ in the head, no more. Frederick, ‘straight and well-shaped for his growing years’, with a friendly and intelligent face, made a good impression on everyone, except the queen.
Frederick came forward to kiss Anne’s hand. Again she stared at him ‘with a fixed countenance’. Recently, whenever the queen had talked with Elizabeth on the subject of her marriage, she signalled her contempt for what she saw as a low-status match by calling her daughter ‘Goody Palsgrave’. Elizabeth shrugged her mother off. Calvinist Henry was the real influence in her life, not the Catholic queen. And Henry supported Frederick.
Now Frederick turned to Elizabeth who ‘did not turn so much as a corner of an eye towards him’. He bowed low twice and made to kiss the hem of his mistress’s robe. Elizabeth stopped him. She made a deep curtsey, rose, then leaned forward and offered her cheek. He kissed it. She blushed. Everyone relaxed and applauded.
Frederick lodged at Essex House but came every day to court Elizabeth. ‘He seems to take delight in nothing but her company and conversation.’ The alliance might even grow into a love match.
Meanwhile, Frederick’s uncle, Henry of Nassau, and the other nobles sought out Prince Henry and his circle. The future young leaders of Calvinist internationalism were now gathered in one place: Henry of Nassau, representing his brother Maurice and the free Dutch; Frederick of the Palatine, representing the Evangelical Union; and Henry of England, representing the kingdoms of Britain. Henry rallied. They rode and hunted, played cards and practised military arts, and talked and talked.
On Saturday 24 October, the prince challenged Henry of Nassau to a game of tennis in the court at Whitehall. The prince seemed to have thrown off his lurgy. ‘As though his body had been of brass,’ he played in his shirt, both sweating hard as they fought to win.
The next day being the Sabbath, Henry went to his chapel to hear Robert Wilkinson preach. Wilkinson took Job 14:5 as his text: ‘Man that is born of woman is of short continuance and full of trouble.’ Although lauded for ‘your matchless wisdom, your incomparable valour, your equity, piety and princely Majesty’ now, Wilkinson warned Henry that once he was dead, well then, ‘every Hare … dare dance upon [your] … carcase, and dogs dare bark, and Poets then dare rail and rhyme with pen and tongue’. Henry thanked Wilkinson for his plain-dealing. Perhaps he liked the astringency which cut through praise endlessly sugaring over his faults. The prince, by training and temperament, was the answer to his godly preachers’ prayers. He attended regularly and listened with humility.
Then he rode, as he always did when he was at St James’s, to Whitehall, to hear the Sunday sermon with his father. After it, the two men went into dinner together. At around 3 p.m., Henry suffered a spasm of ‘sudden sickness and faintness of the heart’. The nausea did not pass. He shivered hot and cold. His head pounded. Henry apologised to his father and called his entourage to take him ‘home unto his bed; where being laid, he found himself very ill, remaining all this evening in an agony’. A huge unquenchable thirst parched his throat and mouth. His eyes burned so badly ‘they were not able to endure the light of a candle’. Whatever the malady, it was back.
On Monday morning the Privy Council sat to decide whether Henry should marry a daughter of France or Savoy. Henry found he could not go, to speak for himself.
Yet, the Europeans among whom he wished to be counted were here now. He could not lay around in bed. He had work to do. He forced himself to dress and play cards with his brother and Henry of Nassau. Henry of Nassau said he should ask the Privy Council to delay choosing a wife until he could come and speak for himself. Messages came from the king and from Frederick, calling for him. Dr Hammond returned cheerful answers, saying he was preparing delicious ‘cordials and antidotes’, ‘broths and jellies’ and ‘juleps’ to assuage the ailing prince’s dreadful thirst.
The next few days a pattern set in. Henry rose, declared himself better, only to retire to bed a few hours later. His father sent his physicians, Dr Naismith and the Huguenot, Dr Theodore Mayerne, the most famous medical man of his day, to confer with Hammond. The king also summoned seventy-six-year-old Master Butler from Cambridge, ‘one of the greatest Physicians and most capable humourists of his time’, to read Henry’s humours.
One night, a spectacular display of the aurora borealis filled the sky above St James’s for two hours. The court looked out of the windows and trembled at the sight of gory reds, oranges and poisonous greens leaking all over the sky, as if the heavens ran with blood and putrefaction. At the end, a ‘lunar rainbow … [hung] over Saint James’s House’, observed one of Henry’s servants. After such a sign they were not surprised when ‘this night was unquiet, and he rested ill’.
On Sunday afternoon, Henry’s whole family visited: James, Anne, Charles, Elizabeth, and the Elector Palatine. Some of his closest friends also called, reassured by the prince’s good spirits. Charles brought his brother his favourite bronze from the Medici collection, a beautiful little pacing horse. They both loved it. Charles put it in Henry’s hands and told him to recover and come back to them, so they could ride together again.
The physicians purged Henry ‘to wash his bowels’. Even so, by Monday evening his mind showed ‘greater alienations of the brain, ravings, and idle speeches out of purpose, calling for his clothes and his rapier, and saying, he must be gone, he would not stay, and I know not what else, to the great grief of all that heard him’. He began to sob that this was all ‘chastisement … a deserved punishment upon him, for having ever opened his ears to admit treaty of a Popish match’. That did not sound like ‘idle speeches out of purpose’, but feverishly churning religious and political thoughts.
His vigorous, youthful body fought, but as ‘his boundings being turned into convulsions, his raving and benumbing becoming greater, the fever more violent’, the physicians could see he approached crisis. They felt confident he would survive until the fever broke. All except Mayerne, who demanded action, showing nerves. They must do something. Mayerne wanted to bleed again. The others did not like it. Mayerne berated them.
No one said: keep Henry quiet, hydrate him, cool him, let him rest. Rather, ‘for easing of the extreme pain of his head’, Henry’s ‘hair was shaven away, and pigeons and cupping glasses applied to lessen and draw away the humour and that superfluous blood from the head, which he endured with wonderful and admirable patience’. Yet it was ‘all without any good’. He sang in his delirium, raving and tearing at his bedding.
Desperate, Princess Elizabeth slipped Charles’s coachman some money to escort her to St James’s in secret. Dressed in disguise, travelling by night, she hoped anyone who knew her would be in bed and she might make her way in. But of course the court officials recognised her, barred the door, and she was sent home in distress.
Next day, the eleventh since Henry fell seriously ill, the physicians sliced open a live cockerel up its backbone, and applied it to the soles of Henry’s feet. But in vain. The doctors ordered everyone to stay away now. They even stopped James at the door, on his way in to see his isolated, beautiful boy. The king left in tears.
Yet, they admitted the Archbishop of Canterbury fast enough. Have any prayers been said over him, Archbishop Abbot asked the minute he saw him? The servants shook their heads. Abbot criticised their carelessness of his immortal soul.
Henry murmured that ‘for all that, I have not failed to pray quietly by myself’ – ‘which … answer pleased them well’.
Abbot leaned over Henry and whispered. Would he like to hear prayers? Henry nodded. He wanted Dr Milburne, Dean of Rochester, a favourite of his.
Milburne came, sat in the corner and prayed for a miracle. The archbishop talked in a low voice, not to pain the prince’s ‘distempered ears’. Speak up, said Henry, ‘repeating the Confession of his Faith word by word after’ the archbishop.
Thursday, 5 November, was the day of national thanksgiving for salvation from the Powder Plot. The churches filled with prayers for the prince to be saved again, by God’s mercy.
King James, ‘looking more like a dead than a living man’, told Mayerne ‘to do what he would of himself, without advice of the rest’. Mayerne convened the doctors. He wanted to bleed Henry once more. They refused, but agreed to insert a clyster, an enema, into his bowel and force more cordials down him.
Abbot returned. Taking one look at Henry, he had nothing to say to him of this world. Very gently, ‘like a wise and skilful physician’, he put the young man in ‘mind of the excellency and immortality of the soul, with the unspeakable joys prepared for God’s children, and the baseness and misery of the earth, with all the vain, inconstant, momentary and frail pleasure’ of the earth. Henry believed it, though it had never been his experience of life in the flesh.
Abbot then told Henry he might die, the first person to say it to his face. Henry raised a feeble protest. The archbishop back-pedalled. Of course he might recover, as the whole nation ‘hoped he should’. Yet he might also die, he reminded him – as if the prince needed to be told the news twice.
Then the archbishop rationalised the blow, to make it easier for a young man in the prime of his life to grasp the proximity of his annihilation. ‘It was an inevitable and irrevocable necessity that all must die once, late or soon, death being the reward of sin.’ That was what it all meant then: the healthy person must have sinned to earn the ‘reward’ of ‘death’. Abbot asked Henry, ‘if it should so fall out’, that he was dying, ‘whether or no[t] he was well pleased to submit himself to the Will of God’ – meaning Death.
‘Yea, with all my heart,’ the young man said. Encouraged, the archbishop did not leave until he was sure the prince’s soul was safe. Abbot hauled up one satisfactory answer after another about the one true reformed church, the salvation and resurrection of his soul by Jesus Christ, the everlasting joy awaiting him. Then, the archbishop left to attend to other business.
Henry drifted between delirium and lucidity. ‘David! David! David!’ he shouted, calling for David Murray.
Murray came to his bedside and sat by him, asking what his lad needed. Henry looked up at him ‘in an extremity of pain and stupefaction of senses confounding’ his speech. ‘I would say somewhat’ Henry said. He stared at Murray, ‘but I cannot utter it!’ Where had his thoughts gone? Murray went to bed in tears, leaving instructions that he was to be woken at any time.
As midnight turned, the prince made a monumental effort and grabbed Dr Naismith’s collar. He seemed to be ‘speaking to him somewhat, but so confusedly, by reason of the rattling of the throat, that he could not be understood; which his Highness perceiving, giving a most grievous sigh, as it were in anger, turned him from him’. A servant ran to fetch Murray.
Murray came and sat on Henry’s bed. He asked what was eating his mind. Henry ‘was not able to say anything’ coherent, but gave signs. Murray understood he meant the ‘burning of a number of letters in a certain cabinet in his closet’. Henry’s servants said these contained his secret plans and ‘showed him to have many strange and vast conceits and projects’ – his determination that their contents should remain private perhaps an attempt to protect his followers.
In the early hours of Friday morning, rumours of his death swept London. ‘There arose a wonderful great shouting, weeping, and crying in the Chamber, Court and adjoining streets.’
Yet he lived. The queen sent a note to Ralegh in the Tower. He must hurry and concoct something in his laboratory, a miracle cure using new wonder drugs from the New World. A tiny vial and a note came back. It was his famed ‘balsam of Guiana’.
Ralegh’s accompanying note worried them: it claimed universal efficacy ‘except in case of poison’. The physicians tested the cordial on themselves, found it did not harm them, and gave it to Henry, who picked up.
The Archbishop of Canterbury returned and shouted at him: ‘Sir, hear you me? Hear you me, hear you me? If you hear me, in certain sign of your faith and hope of the blessed resurrection, give us for our comfort a sign.’ Henry lifted ‘up both his hands together’ in the prayer position. Abbot still did not let him be. He nagged at Henry ‘to give him another sign, by lifting up his eyes; which, having done, they let him alone’. Fear for the unshriven soul meant they gave him no peace.
Henry stared round the chamber. ‘Where is my dear sister?’ he whispered.
All that day, Death delayed, and toyed with him. ‘Many times did he [Death] from that morning until night offer to shoot and thrust in his dart a little, yet pulling it presently back again’ – the onslaught recorded in quasi-sexual terms. Death teasing, penetrating, withdrawing; at times steady, at others impatient.
Evening came in. Out ‘of mere pity’, Death suddenly ‘thrust the dart quite through; after which his Highness quietly, gently, patiently … yielded up his spirit to his immortal maker, Saviour and Restorer’.
The wreck of Henry, his body insulted by the scars left by the well-meaning, who had laboured to hold him in life, became utterly still. Death hovered in the room, over the shrunken, wounded, most naked thing you can imagine – a young man without clothing, without sense, without a breath. The corrupted, sweating flesh cooled and hardened like wax. Patience personified. Britain’s lost king, Prince Henry, died a little before 8 p.m. on Friday, 6 November 1612.