THIRTY-SIX
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
BEN JONSON, ‘ON MY FIRST SON’
As evening fell on 7 December, a creaking of floorboards and doors disturbed the calm of Henry’s watching family. A spectre appeared: the prince, just ‘as he went in life’. He was a waxwork over a wooden frame.
They clothed him with reverence, dressing him in his creation robes. What a day that had been! They placed his cap and gold coronet on his head, fastening his collar and the George and dragon badge of the Garter Knight about his neck. Closing his wax hand around a staff gilded with gold leaf, they laid him on top of his coffin, binding him to it and supporting his head on black cushions. Abraham van der Doort, one of Henry’s servants, had made the head separate from the body. It was not a good fit. The sight of them all trying to fix it firmly as it lolled this way and that was almost funny.
The next morning, over two thousand mourners took four hours to assemble behind Henry’s bier. A wooden canopy mounted on eight wooden columns rose above the coffin and effigy, ‘trimmed and set thick within and without with diverse escutcheons, small flags, and pencils of his Highness’s several Arms of the Union chained, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Chester, Rothesay, Carrick, & c’. The arms were ‘mingled here and there with his Highness’s motto “Glory is the torch of the upright mind”,’ and his motto as patron of the Northwest Passage Company: ‘He Delights to go upon the Deep’. His past, present and future layered up – body below, effigy in the middle, and the honours of the future king above – for his final state occasion.
The bier highlighted Henry’s status as a great military hero, though he died before facing a single enemy.
Crushed by despair, neither of his parents attended. They left the young – Charles and Frederick – to be chief mourners. Only one person joined Henry on the bier. Sir David Murray, who had been with the prince since Stirling, sat by his feet, looking ghastly. Never married, Henry was his life. Friends were lobbying the king to have Murray reappointed to the new crown prince’s household. The rest of Henry’s court lined up behind them.
As the cortege moved out into the street to make its way to Westminster Abbey, a horrible howling came out of the thousands of every age and class lining the roads. ‘Some holding down their heads, not being able to endure so sorrowful a sight, all mourning … Some weeping, crying … wringing of their hands, other half dead, swooning, sighing inwardly, others holding up their hands, passionately bewailing so great a loss, with rivers, nay oceans of tears.’ Nearly everyone believed the social order was divinely ordered. Henry’s death was their own loss. The resemblance of the effigy to the living Henry made the loss more shocking. He was here and not here.
At the abbey, his friends pulled him inside. Archbishop Abbot preached from Psalm 82:6–7: ‘I have said ye are Gods, and ye are children of the most High; But ye shall die as a Man, and ye Princes shall fall like others.’ Die like a man maybe, but he went into the grave as a prince, almost a king.
Abbot set Henry in company with all of us, offering the solace Ralegh denied them. Henry was only ‘one brave ship lying amongst a number of others, all tending towards one haven, whither at length they must needs all come, or ship-broken perish by the way’. Do not pity Henry, he said. Setting out like them ‘fresh and strong, with a fair gale of wind. [He] arrived quickly without any danger at the haven of safety’ in heaven.
When Abbot climbed down, the great officers of Henry’s court – Chaloner, Cornwallis, Holles, and the prince’s three gentlemen ushers – stepped up and broke their white staves of office over the coffin, leaving them on top. With this gesture, Henry’s court disbanded itself.
They returned to St James’s Palace, confident ‘each would be readmitted to his old post’ any day now. The king, well known for esteeming images of peace and continuity in his new united kingdoms, was expected to help the Crown recover from this loss. Put Charles in Henry’s place. The country needed it to be business as usual for this young dynasty as soon as possible.
What a shock then, on the last day of December 1612, when James dismantled Henry’s court family. The king simply turned most of them out ‘to seek their fortune elsewhere’. He dismissed men such as Murray on a charge of Puritan populism. Rochester was given Murray’s place, close to the new crown prince, although Charles ‘interceded earnestly’ for Murray. The king ‘refused, alleging he was a Puritan seducing his late master to their schism’.
Charles was to have no independent court for years. The fact that the king had stripped St James’s of many of its trappings so quickly in November might have alerted Henry’s people that something along this line was afoot.
A few of Henry’s more radical Puritan preachers joined Elizabeth and Frederick when they departed for Heidelberg, as if the Palatine couple were Henry’s true heirs. Elizabeth even perfected her signature over the coming years, until it was almost indistinguishable from her great Protestant namesake, Elizabeth I of England. A little surprisingly, the king readmitted the Puritan court divine, Henry Burton, to Charles’s service. Charles could not keep his loyalty. Burton would turn into one of his old patron’s most virulent opponents. He and his companion Prynne went on to become two of the most celebrated Puritan ‘martyrs’, when King Charles and Archbishop Laud excised Calvinism out of the court clergy in the 1630s. Charles had them arrested, tortured by having their ears cropped, crushed them with huge fines, and exiled them to remote prison houses. Puritan and non-Puritan alike would be outraged by Charles’s brutality and tyranny.
Breaking his white rod of office over Henry’s coffin marked the end of Sir Thomas Chaloner’s time at court. The coterie of Fleetwoods, Chaloners and Foulises had served the Crown loyally for several generations. King James cast them off. They melted away from the national stage to reappear themselves, or in the next generation, as opponents of the court in the civil wars. Chaloner’s sons, Thomas and James, had lived part of the year with Henry and Charles, dancing, playing, practising the military arts. But in 1649 James Chaloner sat in the Painted Chamber as a judge. His brother, Thomas, signed the death warrant of King Charles.
Of their Fleetwood cousins, by the 1620s, Sir William Fleetwood headed the country opposition in Parliament. His son Colonel George would also sign Charles I’s death warrant. George’s cousin, Charles Fleetwood, became a lieutenant-general in the New Model Army under Fairfax and married Cromwell’s daughter, Bridget. Courtiers to absolute princes, these families ended the relationship by destroying the monarchy.
Astonishing how the world of their youth around Henry, powered by an apparently noble, unstoppable vision of a modernising monarchy, fell apart so spectacularly. Sir David Foulis was reappointed in 1613 by King James and served as cofferer to Prince Charles, as he had to Henry. But King Charles would refuse to protect his old friend, Foulis, when one of Charles’s favourite statesmen, Sir Thomas Wentworth, hounded and imprisoned him. Foulis was a member of the king’s Council of the North. Charles created Wentworth its despotic president. The old Essexian in Foulis accused Wentworth of abusing his president’s office and Wentworth sought vengeance. Foulis’s eldest son, unsurprisingly named Henry, became a lieutenant-general of the horse in the New Model Army.
Of the others, the Phelipses went home to Montacute House in Somerset. Their protégé, Thomas Coryate, died an anonymous death in India, despised by James to the end. Sir John Danvers, gentleman of Henry’s privy chamber, turned regicide. Sir Humphrey Tufton returned to Kent. He came back to public life to sit in the Puritan republic’s Long Parliament. As for those other Parliament-minded royal servants, the Cottons, they continued their stewardship of Robert Cotton’s magnificent library of manuscripts. Robert’s immersion in it had been the purpose of his life. The library, and Cotton’s public service, was dedicated, he said, to proving ‘the sacred obligation of the King to put his trust in parliaments’. In 1630, King Charles had Cotton’s library confiscated. Cotton’s son had to petition to get it back after his father’s death.
Sir John Holles stayed around court in 1613, asking for favour. Considering the Puritan radicalism of his politics and religion he should not have been surprised to be rejected by the king – though he was. He retired, consumed by bitterness. His son, Denzil, returned to Parliament to fight the Holles corner with a vengeance. He too signed Charles I’s death warrant.
John Harington survived his master and companion by only fifteen months. Weighed down by grief, struggling with the £30,000 of debts his parents incurred as guardian of their beloved Princess Elizabeth, he succumbed, aged twenty-two, to a smallpox outbreak at Kew, and died there in February 1614. For his funeral sermon, Richard Stock, the godly minister of All Hallows, Bread Street, implicitly linked Harington and Prince Henry, describing Harington’s model Puritan life that nevertheless blended seamlessly with aristocratic and court duties. John Donne lamented ‘thou dids’t intrude on death, usurps’t a grave’ before time.
Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, and Essex’s first cousin, Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, stayed at court, but turned and led the nobles who revolted against Charles, drawing their swords against their childhood friend in the civil wars, accusing him of tyranny. Essex’s devotion to Elizabeth of Bohemia and the parliamentarian side in the civil war can be traced to the political legacy of his father and the old Elizabethan Protestant internationalists, and his upbringing with Henry.
Historians have traced a trajectory from the Essex era of Elizabeth I’s last years to Charles on the scaffold in January 1649. I think that trajectory passed through Henry and his world.
Whatever political ideology made the 2nd Earl of Essex move against Elizabeth in 1601, perhaps King James saw its spirit still moved and lived in Henry’s circle in 1612, and feared it. Henry’s court bred well-born future parliamentarians. Here the survivors of the first generation of Essexians nurtured the second generation, instilling into them their political philosophy, never imagining it would lead to a republic.
It was not just the Puritan ideology in Henry’s court that James disliked. It was how the Puritanism of St James’s mingled with the old Essex group’s neo-Stoic, Tacitus-influenced politics. The implications of these views was what lay behind the unfounded rumours that Henry had been about to seize power. Just because Henry thought his father did not always act for the benefit of the ‘common weal’ in areas such as finances, favourites and the marriage negotiations, it did not mean Henry would rise against him. Henry’s followers were blamed and ousted for whatever spirit James sought to kill off by destroying Henry’s court.
Perhaps he was right to do so, for between Henry’s death on 6 November 1612 and January 1649 a significant number of the families who had moved from the 2nd Earl of Essex to Prince Henry, then moved to oppose and destroy the Crown they had served with such faith and hope when Henry lived. Feeling increasingly alienated from the court as it drifted towards High Church Anglicanism – and its association, for them, with the corruption and tyranny of the eleven years of King Charles’s personal rule – they opposed the Crown. The monarchy betrayed what Henry’s political heirs believed both they and their prince stood for: international Protestantism, active citizenship (a form of ‘public spiritedness’); and government by the troika of king, Privy Council and Parliament, caring for the liberties of the commonwealth. This way of ruling, they believed, would temper the steel of ‘free’, absolute monarchy.
Just look, said one commentator, speaking from the other side of decades of terrible bloodshed in Britain and Europe. ‘The stage stands, the actors alter. Prince Henry’s funerals are followed with the Prince Palatine’s nuptials, solemnised with great state, in hopes of happiness to both persons, though sad in the event thereof, occasioning great revolutions in Christendom.’
As Westminster Abbey emptied, all these other players left the prince on that December night in 1612. What remained of Henry lay centre stage in our national theatre of death.
In the days that followed, crowds came and paid their respects. On 19 December, church officers carried the prince’s coffin and effigy down to the crypt. They laid him ‘among the representations of the kings and queens, his famous ancestors’.
Soon, tourists began to peck holes in his effigy, tearing off bits of leather and clothing as relics – the undoing of all his display, back to anonymous, bare wood. Henry was taking part in his last great entertainment, ‘the play of the dead folks’, they said. What a dark, Jacobean, irony it would have been to him: the only active service Britain’s lost king ever saw was centuries on duty in the group of royal effigies fondly disparaged as the ‘ragged regiment’.