THIRTY-FIVE
AFTER 6 NOVEMBER 1612
… Care not for issue;
The crown will find an heir.
THE WINTER’S TALE, V, SC. I
The next morning Mayerne opened Henry’s body in front of privy councillors and the prince’s closest court officials. He examined, emptied, stitched, embalmed, and encased Henry in lead, then sent his report to the king.
Assassination theories abounded. In Brussels, the diplomat William Trumbull heard that Mayerne’s autopsy repudiated the most popular rumour: no sign ‘of poison appeared, all his principal parts sound, only his liver a little discoloured towards whiteness, and his brain somewhat charged with matter. His death is imputed to an universal inflammation of the blood, occasioned through his over-violent exercise at tennis and over-eating of grapes.’ In 1882, another doctor analysed the report and diagnosed typhoid fever. Another writer thought Henry displayed symptoms ‘quite consistent with variegate porphyria’. That, and the cures.
In the hours after Henry died, the king fled in panic to Theobalds. Hunter and hunted, James could not outmanoeuvre his loss. ‘He stayed three days only, in which time for the most part, he kept his bed.’ On Monday, he rode to ‘Sir Walter Cope’s house at Kennington’. Finding no peace, ‘he returned to Whitehall, nor will he stay there any longer but till Monday next, but again in Theobalds’.
As the weeks passed, James recovered enough to attend to some matters of government, until inevitably someone said the wrong thing, and James cried: ‘But Henry is dead! Henry is dead!’
Condolences poured in. ‘The news of the death of the Prince of Wales has stunned us all. It is a very great loss to us Germans also,’ read the letter from Württemberg. ‘God preserve us from many such accidents and save for us, the King, Queen and the rest of the royal house, which we consider as a bridle to the Spaniard.’ In Cologne, half Catholic and half Protestant, ‘the well-affected here are lamenting the death of the Prince of Wales; the others rejoice at such news’.
Though many Catholic leaders expressed sorrow, in Madrid Sir John Digby observed, ‘there could scarce anything have happened whereat these people would have grieved less’. As for the Habsburg archdukes of the Spanish Netherlands, ‘both by their discourses and countenance … the whole pack of that Spanish faction, upon this death of our most excellent Prince … do already begin to cry out vie la gaigne’ – ‘life wins it’ – victory to the survivor.
On the night of the prince’s death, the queen disappeared into her privy chamber at Somerset House. Her ladies heard her weep alone. Months later, still no one was permitted to mention Henry’s name unexpectedly, for fear the shock would throw her back into her private hell. ‘Nor does she ever recall it without tears and sighs.’ If she had to hear it, she needed to steel herself to take the blow. Charles stuck close to his mother, equally devastated.
Elizabeth ate nothing, drank little, day after day. She wept continually. Frederick and Henry of Nassau, dismayed to find themselves here, now, made plans to go home. But James encouraged the elector to stay, giving him ‘as free access as before to the Lady Elizabeth and to eat with her’, to see if he could encourage her to talk to him.
Soon, he was indispensable to her. Frederick and Elizabeth would marry the following spring, before leaving England together.
At St James’s, towards midnight on the day after Henry died, Sir John Holles ‘attended my dear master’s bowels to the grave’. Holles wrote letter after letter to his friends.
What was left of Henry lay a few rooms away. It was so Jacobean – Henry anatomised to a bucket of tripes and a mummified, lead-clad shell – his heart and brain to be encased in their own lead casket. To ‘see the fruit and not to taste it’, wrote Holles, was agony.
Silence fell on the prince’s vibrant, busy household. The Privy Council came to St James’s to ensure the ‘whole house, Chapel, great Chamber, Presence, Lobby, Privy Chamber and Bedchamber were all hung in black’. The palace of light and colour transformed into a sepulchre.
In Henry’s presence chamber, his servants hoisted a black velvet canopy over him – the canopy of the realm of death. Carpenters built a trestle beneath the canopy. They draped that too in black velvet and put his coffin on it.
Morning and evening, Henry’s household clerics entered the presence chamber to offer prayers for his soul and the future of the country. During the day they delivered sermons to ‘the family of Prince Henry’. By this they meant his court. They had long thought of themselves as a family, with their own family culture. For four weeks, over forty members of his household attended on him, day and night.
Nothing changed, though nothing was the same. They brought him a basin and cloth to wash his hands, and kept offering ‘the same service and order of meals as when he was alive’. They offered body service to the corpse of the future Henry IX, because the monarchy could never die. The monarch suffered not death, but demise, and the next monarch raised the crown back up. This was the ritual governing the lying in state of a king or queen. Henry was not a king, though. This was the first time in history a crown prince had earned this honour.
Those closest to Henry – Murray and Newton, Chaloner and Holles, Cornwallis, Harington, Essex and Cranborne – now suffered like his blood relations. Adam Newton did not touch a pen for ten weeks, having written daily in Henry’s voice for over fifteen years. When he could pick up a piece of paper, he admitted, ‘I am loathe even at this present to touch upon that string and to recall that grief.’ He too dreaded being ambushed by the sudden aftershock of a memory.
Henry’s death ‘came so sudden and unexpected’, Newton could not take it in. ‘When we were preparing for nuptials and jollity … the blow astonished the more … what weakness and uncertainty is in the likeliest of human beings.’ Losing his secretaryship, he became Prince Charles’s Receiver General.
Others rushed into print. Scores of laments in prose and poems, sermons, songs and funeral music appeared. Sylvester, Henry’s poet, set his elegy within a printed frame of interwoven skeletons. Thomas Campion, George Chapman, John Donne, William Drummond, Sir Arthur Gorges, George Herbert, Henry Peacham, Joseph Hall, Daniel Price, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, all grieved publicly. It was a horrible echo of their poems for Coryate’s ‘Banquet of the Wits’ that had made Henry, and all of them, laugh so long the previous year.
Where did it leave them? Henry’s death sent a shudder of panic through the body politic. The heir was now a slightly disabled, twelve-year-old weakling. A nice boy, but not strong.
At St James’s, Henry had created a dazzling and fully functioning court for the Prince of Wales. Charles had lived there half his time. He had shared many of Henry’s concerns. He knew Henry’s circle intimately. The new heir only had to step into Henry’s shoes and fill a loss Charles’s future people experienced as their own. James had arranged it so Henry’s court developed a close-knit, collegiate character. It could cope with catastrophe.
But, the king did not move Charles in here. Rather, within weeks the king gave away all of Henry’s beautiful horses and hounds, though he knew how much Charles loved them. Men like Rochester discouraged the king from setting Charles up in the way he had Henry. The boy must be kept passive and dependent for as long as possible. Apart from emptying the stables and kennels, Henry’s great collections and possessions were seized. James unravelled his son’s life.
If the king heard Daniel Price’s sermon to ‘that Princely family’ at St James’s, it would have confirmed his decision not to install Charles in Henry’s place. Price told Henry’s people that ‘certainly the soldier however he paces the same measure of misery with the scholar, yet in all ages hath been ever in high esteem, till these days’, under James VI and I. The ‘soldier is the heart, and arm of the State … and the most laudable improver of his country. For always the olive garlands of Peace be not so glorious as the Laurel wreaths of victory, seeing Peace only keeps, and often rusts, good spirits.’
Worse, some of the court cormorants crept about and whispered that Henry had harboured ambitions to challenge James for supreme power. Those accusing Henry of designs ‘not compatible with the safety of the King and State’ were ‘worse than swine’, Sir John Holles raged. As if Henry might ‘snatch the sceptre out of the father’s fist’! It was a contemptible fiction. ‘With this opium they rock the parent to sleep to drowse out the sorrow for his lost child,’ said Holles.
There were mad happenings as well as ominous ones. ‘A young fellow came stark naked to St James’s.’ He hammered and shouted at the gates. Amazingly they opened, and in he ran. He ‘marched very magnifically along until he came to the Privy Chamber, and there made a speech to all the company, saying he was the Prince’s soul and was come from heaven whither he would return after two days, having in the meantime spoken with the King’. It was as if some ghastly parody of Henry’s masques was among them, with a crazed, naked ‘Poor Tom’, instead of a heroic prince.
Should Henry’s old servants not grasp the scale of their loss, the unseen household genius Henry had so frequently consulted, Sir Walter Ralegh, spelled it out. A death sentence had hung over Ralegh since 1603. He lived in a place of torture and murder. He saw it and heard other people facing it daily. He was well placed to throw a light on Henry’s death. Over the last ten years Ralegh had mapped his long road to liberation, with King Henry IX as the door out of his darkness. Now that door was gone and Ralegh was walled up. It must have occurred to him that he might die in this hole. The destruction of Henry’s vision began as his body lay at St James’s.
Ralegh had been busy writing a History of the World for the prince. He kept at it now. His paean to Death hurled down his challenge to the free. ‘“I have considered,” saith Solomon, “all the works that are under the sun, and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit;” but who believes it,’ Ralegh asked, ‘till Death tells it us?’ No one. Therefore, confrontation with ‘Death alone … can suddenly make man to know himself.’
Death ‘tells the proud and insolent, that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant, makes them cry, complain, and lament … He takes the account of the rich, and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but the gravel which fills his mouth.’ It was as if he saw the dance of death projected onto his cell walls, and just described it.
Ralegh conjured man as Lear’s ‘poor, bare, forked animal’, cast into the night, cut off, a busy insect scurrying across an empty plain between birth and death. All men, including everyone at St James’s. Men of ambition, who put their hopes in Henry, saw their tomorrows roll into the grave by the flame of the brief, guttered candle of light and hope Henry had been for them. Ralegh lived what Shakespeare imagined, and found himself qualified to make the beautiful brutality of his statement. He had travelled so far in his imagination in the last ten years, proposing foreign marriages, distant empires, mountains of treasure, brilliant battles on sea and land, and voyages of discovery in wonderful ships, all for Henry. At the last, Henry let Ralegh imagine death.
Death ‘holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge it’. Human hopes and dreams looked like vanity. But oh the deadly greyness of the world, as Henry’s people saw their dreams collapse to ashes.
‘“Naked came I into the world, and naked shall I go out of it”,’ Ralegh acknowledged with a conviction few could match. ‘O eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and [those] whom all the world hath flattered,’ like Henry, and himself once, ‘thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!’ Here it lies! – the corpse, the meaning of it. This is all. No sight of salvation here. His vision was comfortless.