PART II—
THE KING

10—
Charles's First Parliament

It was not only marriage that claimed Charles's attention. He knew well enough that his life had now to be lived on several levels. Even while he was greeting his wife at Dover and they were coming up river to the cheers of the London crowd, plague deaths continued to rise and economic distress associated with rising prices and unemployment was spreading. The Privy Council dealt with the plague in such ways as it could, closing the theatres, stopping the fairs, halting bull and bear baiting, limiting travel in and out of affected areas, collecting money for the relief of victims. He himself renewed a Commission, headed by Viscount Mandeville, to enquire into the causes of the decay of trade. He had to consider the new coinage necessary to a new reign, the designs for which old Abraham van der Doort was preparing. Questions concerning his coronation and the style by which he would be known needed to be settled: like his father, he wished to be King of Great Britain, but the Judges ruled against him and he had to be King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He made over Denmark House and its contents to Henrietta-Maria for life, and transferred his pictures, tapestries, statues, and the precious contents of his little cabinet room at St James's to grander premises at Whitehall.

He confirmed twenty-eight of James's thirty Privy Councillors in their offices, excluding only Bristol, still in disgrace, and Lord Baltimore (the former Sir George Calvert) who, now a professed Roman Catholic, felt he could not take the oath of allegiance. Charles merely remarked that it was better for a man to state his opinions than to retain office by equivocation. He remembered his personal friends. His cousin, James Stuart, Duke of Lennox, a man twelve years his junior, became Gentleman of his Bedchamber. Sir Henry Vane remained his cofferer and was still 'well rooted in the King's heart'. Robert Carey, who had taken him in as a weak and backward child,

and who already was Baron Hunsdon and Lord Leppington, now became the Earl of Monmouth, with £500 of land made over to him and his heirs in perpetuity. Carey, who had been Chamberlain to Charles since the death of Henry, felt a pang when James's Chamberlain, Pembroke, was continued in office by the new king. But Charles could not demote Pembroke, who was in any case a younger man, and Carey, after a wry aside made largely for form's sake, conceded that 'the King dealt very graciously' with him. He lived to publish his Memoirs later that year and died in 1639. Cottington was temporarily out of favour, partly because of his initial reaction to the Spanish journey, but mainly because his Catholic leaning led him to oppose a Spanish war. Cottington did not join the Privy Council until November 1628.

If Charles had any doubts as to what it meant to rule a kingdom they were resolved as the papers flowed in for his perusal. Three hundred and forty-six times before the year was out, seven hundred and thirty-three times before the end of 1626 he would sign a wide range of documents of varying importance which came to him from his Secretary of State alone. He was sufficiently conscientious to read them all, and many times amended them in his own fine, spidery hand; and sufficiently punctilious to dispense with a sign manual and actually to write his name on each of those he approved.^[1]

One of the first to receive his signature was a warrant to Lord Treasurer Ley to continue collecting customs duties as in his father's time; he instituted commissions of marque, or reprisal, against subjects of the King of Spain in the Low Countries; he continued the drainage of Sedgemoor in Somerset which his father had begun; he instructed compensation to be paid to a woman whose husband had been killed in the King's ship Speedwell ; he granted dwellings in the almshouses at Ewelme to deserving persons; he pardoned a convicted murderer whose father had interceded for him, paid considerable sums of money to his jeweller, earmarked £150 to help establish the new draperies, and ordered the payment of £120 to Daniel Mytens for a copy of Titian's great Venus (the Venere del Pardo).^[2]

He instituted a stricter regime at Court which rid him of a few expensive parasites and suited the greater decorum he intended to introduce. His own day was planned so that no time was wasted. He rose very early and thereafter every activity — prayers, exercises, Council business, eating and sleeping — had its appointed time. One day a week was set aside for public audiences and neither then nor at

any other time would he see anyone unless sent for. But he gave general satisfaction by mixing with his courtiers in the Privy Chamber each morning, giving a word here, a salutation there. In private he might be observed reading in a little book whose contents were divulged to no one but were thought to consist of maxims in manuscript. His spirit was high. The Spanish Ambassador was told to say to his master that the Queen of Bohemia had now a King for a brother! He could even be firm with the Buckingham family, refusing to attach Kit Villiers to his bedchamber because he would have no drunkenness there. The Venetian Ambassador was delighted with him. 'The King's reputation increases day by day', he wrote to the Doge and Senate. 'He professes constancy in religion, sincerity in action and that he will not have recourse to subterfuges in his dealings'. Amerigo Salvetti was similarly impressed. 'Wise government by the new King may be anticipated', he reported. 'He was well, active, and resolute', wrote Toby Mathew to Sir Dudley Carleton. In Council, it was said, he would listen attentively and weigh the arguments carefully before coming to a decision.^[3]

The question that concerned him above all others was the future of his sister. The restitution of the Palatinate was no nearer than when he had ridden to Spain two and a half years earlier with his hopes high, and Elizabeth was still living at The Hague with an annual pension of £20,000 from England and was so poor that Charles had not only paid a debt of £10,000 on her behalf but sent her money for mourning after the death of James. She displayed, nevertheless, much of her old spirit, unlike her husband who, for all his charm, was indecisive and inclined to melancholy. 'I think', said Charles, who by this time had taken the measure of his brother-in-law, 'the grey mare is the best horse.'

The most important decisions he had to take concerned the war that, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, would lead the Palatine back to his inheritance. Charles appointed a committee of his Privy Council to advise him on foreign affairs and went to Gravesend to inspect the merchant ships that still, as in Tudor times, were the backbone of his naval force. The Parliament of 1624 had earmarked part of its supply for refurbishing that force, Buckingham had lent £30,000, and other navy commissioners had raised a loan of £50,000. On May 1, disregarding the difficulties of earlier impressments, Charles ordered the raising of a further 10,000 men to accompany the fleet as soldiers, and the enterprise against Spain began to take shape as

twelve ships of the royal navy, twenty armed merchantmen and fifty colliers were commanded to rendezvous at Plymouth in June 1625. There was also the question of La Rochelle hanging in the balance. This Huguenot enclave in Catholic France had revolted at the end of 1624 and early the following year Richelieu had asked James for ships — not to be used against the Huguenots but, by their presence, to prevent further rebellion. James was rarely deaf to an appeal to support authority, and he could hardly afford to offend France at this time. The loan of a few ships barely worried him. It took Charles longer to accept Richelieu's assurance that only a show of force would be necessary against the Huguenots, but Pennington sailed for France on 9 June 1625 with eight English ships.

Mansfeld and his hotch-potch army had meanwhile left Dover on 11 January 1625. Contrary to agreement the French refused them landing at Calais or Boulogne and they proceeded along the coast looking for the promised French cavalry. But these were not ready to embark and the little fleet, already in poor condition, cast anchor off Flushing on February 1. Mansfeld had expected to march to the relief of the Palatinate, but without French help he was powerless against the Imperial forces that barred his way. The Dutch begged for his help in holding Breda against besieging Spanish forces. James refused to enlarge the area of the war. The condition of the little force worsened as it waited at Flushing. They were short of food and water, inadequately clothed, so close-packed in their ships that movement was difficult, they stifled below deck and froze above. When at last they disembarked the Dutch provided a modicum of food and of straw to cover them at night, but they were dying at the rate of forty or fifty a day. 'We look for victuals and bury our dead', was a laconic report. By the end of February 1625 barely 3,000 of the original 12,000 were capable of bearing arms. These few Charles ordered on his accession to help the besieged at Breda, arguing that the continued locking up of Spanish forces round the town was an indirect help to the Palatinate. Many of them deserted to the Spanish, the rest remained before Breda for two months, unable to avert the inevitable outcome. When the city surrendered on May 26 the Dutch, with indecent haste, hurried Mansfeld and the desperate and marauding remnant of his army over the border on what they hoped was the way to the Palatinate. It was a sorry beginning to Charles's intervention in Europe. But the broader strategy remained in the form of the fleet which was being prepared

for action against Spain, and the subsidies he had agreed to pay to the Protestant armies in Europe.

It remained to be seen whether he could meet these obligations: £240,000 a year for Mansfeld and his men; £100,000 annually to help maintain troops in the Low Countries; £360,000 for the armies of his uncle the King of Denmark; £300,000 or more to equip and pay for the fleet and army being prepared against Spain; £25,000 to protect Ireland. He had to find something like £1,200,000 in the next twelve months apart from the normal expenses of running his Court and Household. And these had been swollen by new or exceptional obligations: £40 or £50,000 for the old King's personal debts, £30,000 for his funeral, the accompanying receptions and gifts to servants; £40,000 for Charles's marriage and for the presents and entertainment involved; £37,000 a year to his Queen, as well as an immediate payment of £5000 and unspecified further sums to her French attendants — a total of at least £162,000. He could economize on personal expenditure and reduce such standing items as pensions, but the degree to which he was willing to do so made little difference. He raised some income by disparking most of his more remote parks and chases, either selling or leasing the land thus disafforested or turning it to profitable agriculture. He anticipated some of his customs revenue. He borrowed £60,000 from the City of London upon the security of Crown lands. Yet nothing could make an appreciable difference to the financial situation: he needed something like the £400,000 which had been his father's income in 1624 together with £162,000 to cover exceptional expenses, and the £1,200,000 required by his war expenditure.^[4]

He could see no way of raising it except through a Parliament. He would have preferred to meet his first Parliament under more favourable conditions; for he knew that besides asking for large sums of money he would have to deal with the suspicions surrounding his marriage treaty, the commitments he had made in Europe, the uncertainties of the war, the failure of Mansfeld's expedition, and the growing unpopularity of Buckingham. He had seen enough of Parliaments to appreciate their potential power, but his experience of the Parliament of 1624 gave him confidence. He even considered reconvening the postponed session of that assembly, but the constitution demanded a new Parliament for a new reign and the writs went out on April 17. No more than the usual patronage appeared to be exercised and there is no evidence of hotly contested elections to the Parliament

of 1625, though there were rumours that those opposed to the Court were 'exciting tumults' in order to win seats for their candidates. In the event the House of Commons was little different from that of the previous year, with Coke and Sir Robert Phelips prominent among the leaders. Sir Thomas Wentworth, who had been returned for Yorkshire, was the only Member with a disputed election on his hands and was absent for most of the session. Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Dudley Digges, Edward Alford were there and, among the younger men, John Pym, Sir John Eliot, and John Hampden. Once more Benjamin Rudyerd, the friend of Pembroke (with whom he composed verses) was expected to be the spokesman of the Court party. They were all concerned with the authority of Parliament and their own right to freedom of speech. They all intended to safeguard their own interests and those of their constituents. This would be no rubber-stamp assembly. Charles, indeed, made some effort to influence the House through the presence of Privy Councillors. When Sir John Suckling, Privy Councillor and Comptroller of the Household, failed to gain a seat for Middlesex, patronage found him one at Yarmouth, Isle of Wight; and Sir Albertus Morton was helped in Kent by Buckingham, as well as by Westmoreland and Dorset. They need not have troubled for Morton was also returned for Cambridge University. In other respects James had been negligent, raising Conway to the peerage in the spring of 1624, so depriving the Commons of a useful Court spokesman. In the Upper House generally there was little change, and Charles still refused to allow Bristol to take his seat.

Charles was reluctant to face the Parliament of 1625 until his marriage was consummated, and its opening was twice postponed — from May 17 to the 31st and again until June 18, two days after Henriette-Maria reached London. It was unfortunate that by then the fall of Breda and the condition of the English troops in Holland were common knowledge and that the impressment which Charles had ordered for the fleet was causing grave unrest. Meanwhile, with plague ravaging the capital, the meeting of Parliament elsewhere had been considered; but in the end the convenience of London prevailed. The show normally attendant upon a state opening was curtailed, but nothing could stem the enormous enthusiasm which greeted the new King as he came quietly by water to his first Parliament. When he appeared before the House of Lords Charles was not only robed but crowned, in spite of the fact that as yet there had been no coronation, but as prayers were said he knelt by the chair of state and put off the

crown. The traditional sermon was given by William Laud, Bishop of St David's. Speaking with the words of James he expressed the sentiments of Charles: the law and the Parliament were agents of the King, they received their power from the King and their function was to support his authority. It was not a helpful speech and did nothing to encourage the unity which Laud extolled. Charles was wiser. Whether from necessity or from a just appreciation of what his audience wanted, he hit the right note with simplicity and brevity, which made a welcome change from his father's long and erudite speeches. In his favour, also, were his youth, the good impression he had made on earlier parliaments, and the earnestness with which he was reforming the disordered Court.

'I thank God', he began, 'that the Business that is to be treated of at this Time, is of such a Nature that it needs no Eloquence for to set it forth; for I am neither able to do it, nor doth it stand with My Nature to spend much Time in Words'. He emphasized, nevertheless, that Parliament had urged the breaking of the treaties with Spain, that this presupposed war, and that war required money. He asked for 'assistance for those in Germany' and spoke of 'the fleet that is ready for action'.

My Lords and Gentlemen, I pray you to remember . . . what a great Dishonour it were, both to you and Me, if this Action, so begun, should fail for that Assistance you are able to give Me . . . I hope you . . . will expedite what you have now in Hand to do.

Yet, even as he spoke, there hung over Parliament the broken promises of the previous year, the unrevealed disasters of the Continental war, the ugly rumours of help being given to France against the Huguenots. Charles did not tell them that he stood there perjured, either to them or to his Queen, in respect of the treatment of Roman Catholics; nor did he explain that the promise to reconvene the 1624 Parliament in the autumn of that year had been broken for fear of jeopardizing the French marriage negotiations. He had no reason to advance for not keeping his father's undertaking to account for the money already granted by Parliament. Still less did he speak of the commitments in Europe which he and Buckingham had undertaken in spite of the strongly expressed opposition of the previous Parliament.

Charles's Lord Keeper was hardly more explicit. His statement that the breaking of the treaties with Spain, 'the succeeding treaties and alliances, the armies sent into the Low Countries, the repairing of

the forts, and the fortifying of Ireland, do all meet in one centre, the Palatinate', must have left his hearers decidedly puzzled since it was accompanied by no specific information nor by any statement of the sums of money involved. True, there was no constitutional necessity for an explanation from the King. But the degree to which the monarch had taken Parliament into his confidence had been growing, and James had certainly invited his last Parliament to advise him on foreign affairs. When two days later the Speaker, Sir Thomas Crew, was presented to Charles his speech was understandably cool. He 'trusted' the King would be able to recover the Palatinate and he then plunged into another matter, asking Charles 'really to execute the laws against the wicked generation of Jesuits, seminary priests, and incendiaries, every lying in wait to blow the coals of contention'. A few days later the House settled down to a full debate on the question of religion. Although nothing specific was known of the contents of the French marriage treaty rumour was hard at work and members were clearly not convinced of Charles's integrity. On the 23rd a committee of the whole House was voted to consider the working of the recusancy laws and on the 30th a petition drawn up by the experienced Sandys and the young Pym begging the King to execute the penal laws in all their strictness and to take measures to prevent the spread of papist doctrines, was sent up to the Lords. On the same day Sir Francis Seymour rose unexpectedly in a thin House. He had been vociferous in the previous Parliament in insisting that England should not entangle herself on the Continent but should fight a lucrative war on the Spanish Main. He now proposed a grant of one subsidy and one fifteenth, a mere £100,000, and clearly not enough to provide for any aspect of the war. Rudyerd was taken by surprise. He stumbled to his feet to remind the House of the great expenses of funeral, marriage, coronation, and the entertainment of foreign ambassadors. With the more vital commitments in Europe and the need to supply the navy, he dealt only in general terms. The Commons were not impressed. Phelips, whether by previous agreement or not, quickly rose to support Seymour. The supply given by the previous Parliament had been generous yet was still unaccounted for. 'What account is to be given', he asked, 'of 20,000 men, of many thousand pounds of treasure, which have been expended without any success of honour or profit?' The money had been voted for war, he cried, flinging Charles's unsubstantiated demands back in his face, but 'we know yet of no war, nor of any enemy'. The comparison he drew was intentionally hurtful

and damaging and drew together the religious and financial issues: 'It was not wonte to be soe when God and wee held together; witness that glorious Queen, who with less supplyes defended herself, consumed Spayne, assisted the Low Countreys, relieved France, preserved Ireland.' He nevertheless proposed the granting of two subsidies, some £140,000, which the House supported, partly on the grounds that fifteenths were burdensome to poorer people, though the fact that fifteenths were an assessment upon property may have made them less acceptable on other grounds.

With the petition of religion and the proposed supply, inadequate though it was, going forward on the same day, the issue was squarely before Charles: he had either to break his promise to Parliament concerning religion, in which case there would be no supply, or break his secret agreement with France — which meant, in effect, with his wife. The latter was easier. The French alliance was proving worthless, Buckingham was out of favour in France after his flirtation with the French Queen, Henrietta-Maria's French attendants were tiresome in themselves, a drain upon his resources, and a cause of friction between himself and the Queen. But before taking action he made one effort to secure a larger supply in return for the concession on religion he was about to make. The pestilence was raging in London and Charles himself left for Hampton Court, leaving Buckingham to attempt to hammer out some compromise with the opposition. On July 8, when many Members had left for home because of the plague, Sir John Coke made a fuller statement of the King's requirements than had yet been offered: £240,000 for Mansfeld; the same for the King of Denmark; another £133,000 for the fleet above the two subsidies granted. But it was too late to throw such figures at the House. They needed to be more fully informed. Perhaps they were stunned at the large sums named. Certainly they needed time for full and open debate. But with plague in their midst that time was not now, and there was no response to Coke's statement.

Meanwhile there had been further humiliation to swallow. On July 5 tonnage and poundage was offered to the King for one year only instead of for life, as had been usual since the reign of Henry VI. It is unlikely that this was a deliberate withholding of permanent supply; to have cut Charles off from the monarch's customary revenue at this stage presages a far wider and clearer breach between King and Parliament than had yet occurred. The reason was more likely to be found in the review of the customs which was proceeding and a reluctance,

meanwhile, to pledge any revenue indefinitely. But the effect was the same on the harrassed King. With plague deaths amounting to more than 500 a week in London alone Parliament ground to a halt. On July 11 Charles renewed his promise to enforce the recusancy laws, Lord Conway accepted on his behalf the paltry grant of two subsidies, and the Houses adjourned.

The pestilence broke out in the King's guardroom, in his bakery, and among the Queen's priests. The Court thankfully moved to Wood-stock and the Fellows and students of the University of Oxford moved out to make room for the Parliament men who assembled on August 1 in Christ Church Hall for the second session of the 1625 Parliament. Again religion and supply were coupled and Charles was immediately asked to account for the money granted by the 1624 Parliament and to explain why he had pardoned a Jesuit on July 12, the day after he had promised to execute the penal laws. At the same time the Commons returned to a religious issue which had troubled them in the previous session.

This was a matter not so much of Papists and the Papacy as of dissension within the reformed, Protestant religion itself. It had come to a head with two books written by Richard Montague, rector of Stanford Rivers in Essex. Montague was a scholar and author of some distinction who had publicly disputed with the learned John Selden himself on the subject of tythes. In an argument with Catholic priests in his parish he had taken up the position that they had no need of Rome since much of their doctrine was integral to the true reformed Church of England, a notion which appealed to neither Puritans nor Catholics. The Catholics responded in 1622 with The Gag for the new Gospel . Montague's reply of 1624, A New Gag for an Old Goose , was a vigorous pamphlet which, while rejecting Roman Catholic doctrines, upset Calvinists by its clear assertion of the dogmas of free will and salvation by works. In other respects Montague pleased neither side. He denied that the clergy could compel their parishioners to confession, but claimed that in some cases advice and consolation, even an intimation of divine pardon, might be given by a priest to a repentant sinner. He rejected transubstantiation of the bread and wine but believed in the immanence of Christ at communion. He opposed image worship yet believed that pictures and statues could help to bring God and the nature of Christian worship into the hearts of a congregation.

Montague's book had come to the notice of James's last Parliament. James was delighted with it, exclaiming that if it offered Popish doctrine then he was Popish too! By the time Charles's first Parliament met, Montague had produced another book, written at James's request, in order to clarify his position. Since James had died before its publication, the dedication of the Appello Caesarem was to Charles and the book concluded with the unnecessarily provocative exclamation: 'defend thou me with the sword and I will defend thee with the pen!' Incensed at what appeared to be an anti-Puritan alliance by the Church and the Crown the Commons summoned Montague to the bar of the House at Westminster and bound him over in recognisances of £2000.

Montague was typical of a number of intellectuals who professed to find their inspiration in the Early Fathers and disowned both the mediaeval Papacy and all forms of Puritanism. The English Church settlement of Elizabeth, they believed, brought the Church as nearly as possible into accord with the teaching of the Fathers. They believed that worship could be enhanced by individual acts of piety and good works and that it was in the power of the individual to live a godly life. A Christian was therefore not predestined to either salvation or damnation but could achieve grace through acts of piety. A leading exponent of free-will, Jacobus Arminius, gave his name — Arminianism — to the doctrine.

On the second day of the Oxford session Parliament returned to the Arminian issue and the subject of Montague. But Charles had put him beyond the reach of Parliament by making him his chaplain. The action was typical. Coldly disapproving of the Commons' conduct, he showed his support of Montague warmly by bringing him within his own household and under his protection. The lawyer Edward Alford at once perceived the wider issue: could the King's ministers and other public officers similarly be protected by the King or were they responsible to Parliament who could call them to account if it thought fit? The Commons thus stumbled upon the vital question of ministerial responsibility and inevitably the name of Buckingham was in every mind.

The question of responsibility became, indeed, more urgent as the situation deteriorated both at home and abroad. The delivery of the ships to the French and the rioting following the latest impressment for the fleet were by this time common knowledge, clashes between English and French merchantmen were affecting commerce, the menace of pirates was daily growing more acute and reports were

pouring into the Oxford Parliament of pirate raids on English shores. Hysteria and reality combined to crystallize the feeling against the Duke. One observer coupled 'the neglect of guarding the seas' with 'misspending of the public treasure' as the chief grievances of the Commons and laid the responsibility upon the man who was both the Lord Admiral and the King's chief adviser. All the Commons knew about Buckingham, his accumulation of office, the advancement of his family, his hold upon preferment, his monopolies, his wealth, was suspect. So was his religion. He was the patron of Laud, he had supported Montague; his wife, though apparently converted, was of a Catholic family; his mother had adopted the Catholic faith; he himself was known to have flirted with it; his conduct in Spain was condemned.

Charles did nothing to appease his Parliament. On the 4th he came in from Woodstock to Christ Church Hall and reminded them that the two subsidies they had voted were 'far too short and yet ungathered', he put up Secretary Conway to say that £30–40,000 was needed for the fleet and Sir John Coke to name £600,000 a year as the cost of European commitments. Next day when his Chancellor of the Exchequer moved for a further two subsidies and two fifteenths (about £170,000) the House plunged into a disorderd discussion which reflected its bewilderment at the varying sums named by the King's advisers. Two supply votes were impossible in one Parliament, they said, it was too late for the fleet to sail, was there perhaps no intention that it should sail? Who was the enemy against whom preparations were being made? One voice, indeed, was raised for Charles when it was suggested that some other form of tax might be found which would raise money immediately; but the Members had too great a care of their pockets to support such a proposition. Sir Nathaniel Rich thought that the King's revenue should be examined with a view to its increase, a suggestion that would hardly help immediately, but the sting in his speech was a request that 'when His Majesty doth make a war, it may be debated and advised by his grave council', a hit, surely, at Buckingham. Sir Robert Cotton aimed in the same direction when he begged the King 'not to be led with young and single counsel' but to be guided by his great officers of state.

Buckingham was well aware of the way the debates were tending. Though he had been endeavouring to reach a compromise outside the House he had not heard within it any terms he could accept. So on August 8, never one to shirk responsibility, he himself came before Parliament in Christ Church Hall. He spoke with confidence of his

popularity when he returned from Spain, and of his efforts since then to build up an anti-Spanish party. He asserted that he had always taken advice, that nothing he had done had been without the approval of Council, and denied that it was too late in the year to send out a fleet. 'Make the Fleet ready to go out, and the King bids you name the Enemy', he cried. 'Put the Sword into His Majesty's hands, and he will improve it to your honour.'

But the House was in little mood for rhetoric. The statement of the King's finances which the Lord Treasurer now put before them fell flat: it was, after all, the fourth time the King had offered figures and they could not reconcile the varying sums involved. On the 10th Phelips went to the heart of the matter by asking Sir Robert Mansell, a member of the Council of War, if he accepted joint responsibility for the war strategy? Mansell, after some hesitation, said 'No'. Later the same day Buckingham was named in the House by Seymour: 'Let us lay the fault where it is', he cried, 'the Duke of Buckingham is trusted, and it must needs be either in him or his agents'. Phelips rubbed in the salt. 'It is not fit', he exclaimed, 'to repose the safety of the Kingdom upon those that have not parts answerable to their places.' Well might a broad Scots voice be heard again: 'Ye'll live to have your bellyfull of Parliamentary impeachments!'.^[5]

Charles saw at once the implications and summoned his Council that afternoon. He wanted an immediate dissolution. Buckingham and Williams begged him to be patient, both for the sake of supply and, as Williams strongly urged, to avoid an ignominious end to his first Parliament. But, even with Buckingham on his knees before him, Charles would not be persuaded. On August 12 he dismissed his first Parliament in order to protect his friend. As the Venetian Ambassador pointed out, he put the safety of Buckingham above the needs of the state. He might have added that Charles put the safety of Buckingham above the needs of his sister, for Parliament had granted nothing but a paltry and as yet ungathered supply while the tonnage and poundage bill lay uncommitted. Parliament had demanded that the King's actions on religious affairs be brought into line with its own beliefs, it had refused to endorse his foreign policy, it had condemned the influence and what it considered the ineptitude of the King's favourite. But Charles gave Buckingham a circlet of diamonds and a beautifully moulded little bronze horse. When others found fault with his friend it was always Charles's instinct to reward. The hurt must be wiped away and the world must see how truly the Duke was loved.

11—
'Reason of the Spaniards'

While Parliament men dispersed to their homes Charles held a Privy Council at Woodstock on August 14. The fault had not been entirely his. Constitutionally he was not obliged to consult the Commons on foreign policy, nor had he any reason to believe that the Members were as well equipped as he himself to take decisions. He had accepted at face value their anti-Spanish sentiments and he might well have felt that his immediate policy was in accord with their wishes.

Even so, he had told them very little. What they did learn had been dragged from him piecemeal and added up to no coherent whole. This fumbling approach to his first Parliament could be accounted for partly by supposing that Charles feared the Members' reaction if they knew the extent of his European commitments, partly in terms of his own natural reluctance to explain. Yet his attitude throughout was in such marked contrast to his approach to the 1624 Parliament that there would seem to be some deeper cause for the change. Then he had been debonair, industrious, willing to charm — and his success should have induced him to act in the same way in 1625. Instead he was taciturn, glum, imperious, as though, in place of the rosy promise of 1624, he was already obsessed by a sense of failure, or perhaps was oppressed by a sense of guilt stemming from his broken vows on religion.

He probably knew better than Buckingham the difficulties of the strategy upon which they had embarked and this in itself could have induced his lack of communication; it is possible that he had yielded to Buckingham's impetuosity against his own better judgment and was defending a tactic in which he had less than complete faith. Perhaps, deep in his unconscious mind, there might already have been gnawing an enervating doubt about his ability to help his sister. The restoration of the Palatinate, indeed, no longer seemed as simple as it had at first,

and the European power politics in which he was becoming involved were outside his inclination or his ability. Nor had the change from Prince to monarch increased his confidence. On the contrary, given Charles's notions of kingship and the exaggerated unction with which he had been treated since boyhood, it was in itself intimidating. James, for all his peculiarities, was a buffer between ideal and real, and the removal of that earthy character, with his good common sense and homely touch, left Charles exposed to a world, dominated by Buckingham, in which ideals and fantasy played a large part. When he was faced by the reality of hard-headed, close-fisted Members of Parliament representing constituents equally unwilling to open their purses for him, the confident King, who had been observed shortly after his accession sending arrogant messages to Spain, became the aloof monarch, puzzled and disappointed. Parliament's attitude in no way corresponded with the precepts of political obligation he took for granted nor with the welcome they themselves had accorded him the previous year.

It was, indeed, a Parliament guided by a self-interest which was becoming increasingly coherent. The Members and their constituents were for the most part closely bound together by ties of economic interest that stretched from the land and its produce east and west across the oceans to the far shores of China and America, and the general depression of the 'twenties affected them all. They knew that bad harvests, interrupted trade and, above all, the decline of the cloth industry which, from the sheep to the shipper, remained England's most important source of profit, were matters of more immediate concern to their constitutents than equipping a fighting fleet or raising an army. The topics they raised in debate while Charles was waiting for supply showed where their interests lay: they were troubled by the interruption of trade caused by French hostility and pirate impunity; they were concerned with the fishing of the English settlers on the coast of New England and with their rights to wood and timber; they were anxious to limit the import of tobacco to that grown in the colonies; they discussed the Eastland merchants and their timber and shipbuilding supplies; voices were raised against the Merchant Adventurers, against the attempted monopoly of Newcastle coals; objections were raised to the Court of Wards, there were difficulties over the Apothecaries being registered as a separate Company, the Goldwire Drawers' patent was to be withdrawn, voices were raised against a tax for the lighthouse at Winterton Ness; clothworkers, the aulnage,

rates of tax upon perpetuanas and serges were briefly discussed; objection was taken to the 'multitude of Popish and seditious books' which were printed. Religion, indeed, appeared to be a chief concern. Yet, in spite of eloquent speeches and petitions which expressed anxiety for the Protestant cause, Charles's first Parliament was not a high-principled body and in the end had done virtually nothing for the cause it professed to have at heart, not even offering a word of cheer to its fellow religionists in Europe nor to the Princess who so recently had been the Queen of Hearts.

How had such a body generated the will and achieved the power to thwart the King? Basically, perhaps, because he was asking, they were giving: only a strong common purpose could bring those two opposites together. Even in the time of Elizabeth I, when Parliament and monarch had been united in opposition to Spain, the alliance was wearing thin and Elizabeth's last Parliament had its own terms to juxtapose to the financial demands of the Queen. Elizabeth got part of what she wanted but a bargain had been struck. The development of Parliamentary power had been assisted by the growing feeling of representation — that Parliament men sat in Westminster with the support of their constituencies, their 'countries' — and the more frequently Parliament met the stronger was the continuity and the bond between elector and elected. In Charles's first Parliament, following closely upon James's last, were many of the same Members, already familiar with the situation, emboldened by familiarity and the contact with friends and colleagues. Sir Edwin Sandys, Edward Alford, Sir Dudley Digges, Sir Robert Phelips, Sir John Eliot, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Sir Walter Erle, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Seymour, John Pym, John Hampden, were only a few of the colleagues of more than one previous Parliament; Denzil Holles and William Strode and many more were fresh from the experience of the Parliament of the previous year. That Charles so badly wanted their support after the Spanish Marriage episode and that James had invited them to discuss foreign policy and his son's marriage could only augment their sense of power.

Procedural forms evolved by Parliament also helped it to stand against the monarch. It worked increasingly through committees, which could be managed so that royal nominees were outnumbered; or through a committee of the whole House where Members were freed from the control of the Speaker, who was a Crown appointment. Charles was well aware of this development:

We are not ignorant how much the House hath of late years endeavoured to extend their Privileges, by setting up general Committees for Religion, for Courts of Justice, for Trade, and the like; a course never heard of until late: So as, where in former times the Knights and Burgesses were wont to communicate to the House, such business, as they brought from their Countries; now there are so many chairs erected, to make enquiry upon all sorts of men, where complaints of all sorts are entertained . . .

Disputed elections were not uncommon and the right which Parliament won in 1604 to determine the issue through a committee appointed by itself added to its power; similarly the creation of new Parliamentary boroughs in 1621 both increased the membership of the House and brought in men whose industrial and commercial interests made them highly independent and strongly opposed to taxation; as Thomas Hobbes remarked 'tradesmen, in the cities and boroughs . . . choose, as near as they can, such as are the most repugnant to the giving of subsidies'. Crown policy should obviously have been to secure the election of Privy Councillors to the House of Commons, but both James and Charles were careless of this contrivance: Charles inherited a Council of thirty members from his father, but only six of them sat in his first Parliament.

The more it felt itself 'representative' — a term it increasingly used — the bolder Parliament became. In the new-style government that began to emerge it worked more closely with the constituencies, making use of the rapid development of printing to keep them informed of events at Westminster and of the attitudes of individual Parliament men. Even in Elizabeth's time Sir Robert Cecil had complained 'that Parliament and its daily goings-on were matter for gossip on the streets and in alehouses' and his perturbation was attributed to the fact that he saw in publicity a threat to statecraft. Now Parliament made use of, and fostered, a conscious opposition of constituency or 'country' objectives to those of the Court. The country gentleman who lived outside the circle of Court office and Court perquisites and possibly suffered a feeling of exclusion assumed a growing importance. A multiplicity of local matters were of more immediate relevance to him than the European war which, in any case, was not so easy to relate to his own affairs as his father's war on the Spanish Main in the days of Drake and Hawkins. To these men cheers for the Princess Elizabeth were one thing; money and men to fight in Europe were quite another. The realization that they were the instruments

through whom taxes in the localities would be collected increased their confidence in opposition, as well as the confidence of the men who represented them in Parliament.^[1]

As Charles and his Council examined the financial position afresh on August 14 they saw two areas of abysmal want but one of reasonable sufficiency. On the one hand the shortage of money for day-to-day expenses was acute; the King's servants were unpaid, ambassadors were held up and embassies delayed for want of funds, there was barely enough money for the customary royal victuals. Far less was it possible to meet the big continental requirements. On the other hand the re-equipment of the fleet was virtually complete and the August and September instalments of the Queen's dowry, the tonnage and poundage which Charles would continue to collect in spite of Parliament's failure to proceed to an Act, would provide current cash for soldiers' and sailors' pay. Charles supplemented this by borrowing a further £10,000 in August; and in September, with the approval of the Council, privy seals were issued against loans of from £10 to £30 to be required of persons named by the Lords Lieutenants of the counties as being able to lend. The money would be required in twelve days and would be repaid in eighteen months. Such a sum, Charles said, few would deny to a friend.

Meanwhile, with Buckingham, he was putting the finishing touches to the strategy which would govern the sailing of the fleet. He made a further treaty with the Dutch at Southampton on September 8. They had already promised twenty ships for the enterprise against Spain and now they agreed to blockade the Flemish coast while the main English fleet was absent in Spanish waters. Sir Edward Cecil, the nominee of Buckingham, was appointed to the command. Cecil was an experienced soldier with much campaigning in the Netherlands to his credit, he had accompanied the Princess Elizabeth to Germany in 1613 as her treasurer, he had advised Charles on the purchase of his engines of war. But he had little knowledge of naval warfare and his appointment was resented by the more experienced seamen he would command. The Earl of Essex, in particular, who would serve as Cecil's Vice-Admiral, would, both on his own merit and as the son of Elizabeth's famous sea-captain, have lent 'much lustre to the action' had he been appointed to the command.

Though one object was the capture of Spanish treasure ships, the overall aim of the expedition was the 'protection and restitution' of the

Elector Palatine and his wife; and, since the King of Spain had entered the field against them, he was to be weakened and disabled in his sea-forces and trade 'by taking and destroying his ships, galleys, frigates and vessels of all sorts; by spoiling his provisions in his magazines and port towns; by depriving him of seamen, mariners and gunners . . . by intercepting his fleets either going out or returning; and by taking in and possessing some such place, or places, in the many of his dominions, as may support and countenance our successful fleets.' The Palatine was urging desperately that the 10,000 soldiers destined for Spain would be better employed on the Continent, but Charles and Buckingham may perhaps be given credit for their wider strategy. But it would have to be successful. Full of hope, Charles took up residence in Portsmouth in September, going on board many of the ships and reviewing the troops on Roxborough Down. 'By the grace of God,' said Charles, 'I will carry on war if I risk my crown. I will have reason of the Spaniards, and will set matters straight again. My brother-in-law shall be restored, and I only wish that all other potentates would do as I am doing.'^[2]

He had assembled nearly a hundred sail, including thirty merchantmen and a number of Newcastle colliers; 5000 seamen, 10,000 land soldiers, ten pieces of large ordnance, many smaller field pieces, fifty horses to draw the guns, fifty more for the use of the land commanders, besides ammunition, and provisions for men and beasts. There was much excitement when the twenty sail from Holland hove in sight on 4 October 1625, of which fifteen would accompany the fleet and five remain to help guard the coasts. The following day they set off. Storms drove them to return two days later, they put to sea again on the 6th and, though bad weather dogged them, one ship floundering with its total crew of 175 and the Admiral's flagship barely surviving, they rounded Cape St Vincent on the 20th. By this time it had been discovered that supplies were so short that the usual allowance for four men had to be apportioned between five, that many of the muskets issued were useless, and that in many cases the bullets did not fit the muskets. The pressed men were seasick, homesick, frightened and resentful, the High Command took too long in deciding where the blow should fall.

Finally it was agreed that Cadiz Bay was the spot where they would attack and wait for the homecoming treasure ships. They did not know, as they entered the harbour on the flood tide, that they had missed the West India fleet by four days and that the Brazilian fleet,

getting wind of their arrival, had been diverted to Malaga. A little knot of Spanish ships and galleys at anchor in the Bay escaped into the security of the inner harbour: if Cecil had gone in on the ebb not one of them could have got away in this manner. As it was, he gave the order to attack Fort Puntal, which guarded this inner harbour, as a preliminary to taking Cadiz itself. Five of the Dutch ships bore the brunt of the fighting. The colliers who had been ordered to assist cowered behind them, the only one of their shots to hit any kind of target going through the stern of the Vice-Admiral's ship. Though Fort Puntal was finally taken, the clumsy and lengthy fighting left no chance of surprising Cadiz. Moreover, the city was found to be well fortified, having been fully informed of the preparations that had been going on in English ports, and reinforcements of infantry and horse were being hurried to the area.

In these circumstances Cecil landed under cover of Fort Puntal, but he found no army to engage, for the Spaniards predictably withdrew into the cover of a well-known countryside. As the English pressed after them through a scorching sun, it was discovered that no provisions had been brought from the ships and that the men had not eaten or drunk for forty-eight hours. Cecil ordered a cask of wine to be brought from a village house. It was then realized that the whole area was a wine-store for the West India fleets and that nothing could stop the men from broaching cask after cask. The whole English army was drunk. There was nothing to be done but get as many men as possible back to the ships before their helplessness should be apparent to the Spaniards.

It seemed now that no purpose could be served in Cadiz Bay and the fleet reformed and put to sea still with the intention of intercepting some richly laden fleet. But again they were forestalled. Well-advised by rumour, the Mexican ships had chosen to come by way of the African coast and crept into Cadiz harbour from the south behind the backs of the English who were watching the westward horizons.

On November 16 Cecil gave up and the fleet sailed for home. It was a long and terrible journey. Four vessels went down on the way. In spite of months of preparation many of the ships were in part rotten, the sails of one had been in use against the Armada, the food was putrid, the drink bad, the wounded were dying through want of care, sickness spread from ship to ship. Winter storms battered them all the way and even their own shores proved so inhospitable that gales prevented them rounding the Lizard and Cecil, with most of what

remained of his fleet, made his way to Ireland. Here he remained for some time licking his wounds and reluctant, possibly, to make his accounting in England. But before he crept back sufficient stragglers had arrived to tell their stories and rumour provided the rest.^[3]

Charles's first large-scale effort to help his sister had failed. He could not blame Parliament entirely although he might have felt that a less niggardly outlook would have resulted in a better-equipped fleet. The terrible truth was that a criminal irresponsibility had failed to ensure the seaworthiness of the fleet or the condition of the armaments, to check the quality of the provisions, to provide adequate medical care, or to stop the dishonesty and peculation that was rife in the shipyards. For the strategy in Spanish waters, indeed, the Commanders had to bear the blame. Sir William St Leger, writing to Buckingham from the Bay of Cadiz on October 29, had professed himself to be 'so much ashamed that he wishes he might never live to see his Sovereign, which he thinks he shall not do, for his heart is broken'. Yet ill luck also played its part. But for the storms which delayed their departure they would not have missed the Spanish West India fleet; on the other hand, a little more expedition would have got them off before the storm broke. But overall, though blame might rest upon a dozen unscrupulous or inefficient contractors, responsibility could be shouldered by no one but the Lord Admiral.

Perhaps for this reason Charles attempted no more than a perfunctory enquiry into what went wrong, and all the little peculators, all the big profiteers, went unpunished in order to protect the Duke from the charge of criminal incompetence. Perhaps he wished also to protect himself from the knowledge that his models, his war games, his books, had resulted in no more skilful deployment of his resources than this. The French were scandalized and blamed the English commanders. The French Ambassador in Madrid brushed aside an enterprise into which so much effort had been put as the 'youthful and unconsidered escapade of the King of England'. The Venetian Ambassador to London found the reason for this humiliation in bad management, division between the leaders, shortness of provisions and a fear that if the winter gales were allowed to take their final toll none of them would return.

Charles remained strangely unperturbed. Taking adversity without apparent emotion was, indeed, becoming characteristic. It was also a kind of defiance. Circumstances had treated him badly and no enquiry, no attempt to apportion blame, could alter the situation. In

Charles's mind, so far as the rest of the world should know, the episode was closed. He never again attempted a direct naval or military confrontation with Spain. He spent the autumn and winter endeavouring to bring Denmark and the North German Princes into a closer alliance with himself and the States General, and he sought new ways of raising money, one of which entailed offering the Crown jewels as security for a loan from Dutch financiers, but nowhere did he find much support. Even from France, in spite of his marriage treaty, he received little comfort.

12—
Charles Saves the Duke

Relations with France were indeed deteriorating and incidents were accumulating daily concerning the merchant ships of each nation; on one occasion the whole English-Scottish wine fleet sailing from Bordeaux with a year's supply was seized by the French, and merchants' complaints to the Privy Council could not be ignored. Charles was mortified that the French had failed to keep their treaty obligations and had done little to help the Palatinate. His personal relations with the French in general were bad in spite, even because of, his French wife, and he demanded the recall of the Sieur de Blainville, the French Ambassador, whom he accused of causing trouble between Henrietta-Maria and himself. The French aversion to Buckingham continued and they refused to allow him even to pass through their country for any kind of negotiation. The Duke was now as strongly anti-French as he had been anti-Spanish and he made no more effort than Charles to save the alliance. All these factors combined and received expression in Charles's strong reaction to the plight of the Huguenots in La Rochelle. No doubt he felt some pang of conscience over the English ships he had lent to France, but the practical issue took shape after 5 September 1625 when the French defeated a Huguenot fleet under the Duke of Soubise, one of Charles's godparents, and laid siege to the town. There then began to rise in Charles the conviction, which over the next few years became almost an obsession, that he was in honour bound to help the Huguenots. As the battered wrecks from Cadiz crept back to English harbours during the winter of 1625 he was glad to discover a new focus for his warlike intentions, wiping out the ignominy of Cadiz by the thought of the relief of La Rochelle. That it entailed fighting the French seemed scarcely to occur to him; nor the fact that to be on unfriendly terms with both France and Spain at the same time was upsetting the basic

tenets of centuries of English foreign policy. His main concern was to find the money to re-equip the fleet and reluctantly his mind turned once more to a Parliament.

He made more effort this time to manage elections by exercising his right of appointment to the shrievalty: since a sheriff was not eligible for election to Parliament the device should rid him of the more troublesome Members of 1625. When his second Parliament met on 6 February 1626 Sir Robert Phelips was not there, nor Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Seymour, Edward Alford nor Sir Thomas Wentworth. Further intervention in the elections was not very effective. Sir Edwin Sandys, after an initial defeat, was returned for Penryn; he was joined by Sir Dudley Digges and, of the younger men, by Sir John Eliot, John Pym and Clement Coke, son of the eminent lawyer.

In the Upper House manipulation was at once more direct and more difficult; it is surprising that Charles had not used the obvious device of creating peers who would support him. He tried instead to disarm those who stood in his way. He had already relieved the moderate Bishop Williams of the Great Seal, he now imprisoned the pro-Spanish Arundel on a flimsy pretext, he placated the choleric Pembroke, he attempted to keep Bristol from taking his seat. Bristol succeeded in appearing on May 1, Arundel was not back in his place in the House of Lords until June 8. Both were petty and ineptly-handled affairs which did nothing to improve the political atmosphere.

The opening ceremony was kept at a minimum. Once more Laud preached the sermon, his theme the unity of the state in the person of the King: the session, unfortunately, raised doubts. The King's speech was even more brief than to the previous Parliament though it was, as usual, dignified. He came to them, he said, 'in the midst of necessity to learn how he was to frame his course and councils' and he warned them that 'unseasonable slowness may produce as ill effect as denial'. Again the Houses were given no concrete statement, no specific request. Still less was there any reference to what had happened at Cadiz. But they knew enough to be both angry and uneasy. Sir John Eliot was well aware, as a Cornishman, of the effect of pirate raids upon the West country; as Vice-Admiral for Devon he had watched the return of the ships and the pitiful remnants of their crews from Cadiz. Four days after the opening of Parliament he was on his feet demanding an enquiry into that expedition and some indication of future plans before considering supply. 'Our honour is ruined, our

ships are sunk, our men perished; not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance', he cried, 'but . . . by those we trust'. Tension was running through the House. Since constitutionally the King could do no wrong the blame must be taken by the man with most power under the King — the Duke of Buckingham — who was, besides, the Lord Admiral. Moved apparently by sudden anger, perhaps feeling that in his father's absence some responsibility devolved upon him, Clement Coke, a man not usually vocal, exclaimed on March 11 that it were better to die by an enemy than to suffer at home! This loosened the tongue of Dr Turner, another Member not generally to the forefront, and he made an impassioned attack upon Buckingham. Had the Duke guarded the seas against pirates? Had he not, by the appointment of unworthy officers, caused the failure of the expedition to Cadiz? Had he not engrossed a large part of the Crown lands to himself, his friends and his relations? Had he not sold places of judicature and titles of honour? Was he not dangerous to the state, his mother and his father-in-law being recusants? Was it fit that he should, in his own person, enjoy so many great offices? The cause of all their troubles, he cried, was 'that great man, the Duke of Buckingham!'. Perhaps the House was not quite ready for such an outburst. At any rate it hastened to assure the King that no monarch was ever dearer to his people and that it wished to make him 'safe at home and feared abroad'. Charles's answer was to demand justice upon Clement Coke and Turner and to summon the Houses to Whitehall.

There, four days later, he spoke incisively. He might claim his stammer on occasion, but he could speak well and to the point when he wished. He now told them to spend less time discussing grievances and more time in preventing and redressing them. Then he went on:

But some there are . . . that do make inquiry into the proceedings, not of any ordinary servant, but of one that is most near unto me. It hath been said, 'What shall be done to the man whom the King delighteth to honour?' But now it is the labour of some to seek what may be done against the man whom the King thinks fit to be honoured.

He reminded the Members that when Buckingham was to the fore in breaking the treaties with Spain he was considered worthy of all the honour James conferred upon him. Since then, Charles maintained, he had done nothing but what arose out of that policy and had engaged himself and his estate in furtherance of it and in the service of the King.

Indeed, said Charles, some of the actions of which the House accused him were done at his express command. 'I would not have the House', he concluded, 'to question my servants, much less one that is so near me.' Though the language was more restrained, it might have been James who was standing there before them. Once more he had disclaimed, emphatically, any question of the responsibility of ministers to Parliament.

March 27 was the day fixed to consider supply and once again Rudyerd spoke for the Crown, asking for three subsidies and three fifteenths. Eliot's reply indicated that Charles's speech had fallen upon deaf ears. How could they give, he cried, when enterprise after enterprise, at home and abroad, met with disaster? And he did not hesitate to name the cause. They were all undertaken, if not planned and made, by that great lord, the Duke of Buckingham. He had exhausted and consumed the treasures, not only of the subjects but of the King. Without some reformation in these things, Eliot averred, he did not know what wills or what abilities men could have to give a new supply. He proposed, and the House agreed, that the supply asked for should be approved but not converted into a Bill until their grievances had been redressed. The inference was clear. As the Commons set to work to build up the case against Buckingham Charles addressed them once more in a fighting speech. He had begun the war upon their advice and now

that I am so far engaged that you think there is no retreat, now you begin to set the dice, and make your own game; but I pray you to be not deceived; it is not a Parliamentary way, nor it is not a way to deal with a king. Mr. Coke told you it was better to be eaten up by a foreign enemy than to be destroyed at home. Indeed, I think it more honour for a king to be invaded and almost destroyed by a foreign enemy, than to be despised by his own subjects. Remember that Parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue or not to be.

They were his last words to them before the Easter recess. They had so little effect that when the Commons reassembled on April 13 they immediately appointed a committee to formulate charges against the Duke.^[1]

In this situation Bristol was doubly to be feared. From his seat in the Lords he could both attack and sit in judgment upon Buckingham. To prevent that, Charles on May 1 brought Bristol to the bar of the House

of Lords on a charge of high treason: he had got Charles to Spain under false pretences, attempted to change his religion there, and had been willing to accept marriage terms less advantageous to the country than they could have been.

When Bristol rose to reply it was apparent at once that Charles had given him the very opportunity he needed, for he launched into a series of counter-charges against Buckingham: 'My Lords, I am a freeman and a peer of the realm, unattainted', he began. 'Somewhat I have to say of high consequence for his majesty's service; and therefore I beseech your lordships give me leave to speak.' This being granted, 'my lords', he said, 'I accuse that man', pointing to the Duke of Buckingham, 'of high treason; and I will prove it.' So Buckingham was in the unprecedented position of facing simultaneously an impeachment charge by the House of Commons and a charge of High Treason in the House of Lords. Part of Bristol's case covered familiar ground, the Duke's conduct in Spain, his intimations of the Prince's conversion to Rome — here Bristol made the point that Charles could at any time have scotched those rumours by a straightforward statement to the contrary — and, above all, he offered what appeared to be proof that the Duke, unknown to James, had planned the visit with Gondomar a full year before it took place. Time and time again as Bristol made his case Charles attempted to intervene. First he sent to the House of Lords to say that Bristol's charges against Buckingham were merely recriminatory, and that he himself could witness against them; then he contested Bristol's right to be counsel in his own cause. In neither case was his point taken.^[2]

On May 8, with Bristol's trial in full swing, the Commons had completed their Declaration and Impeachment against the Duke of Buckingham and at a conference between the two Houses the charge was laid. It covered his plurality of office, his purchase of place, procuring honours for his kin, compelling the purchase of honours, failure to guard the seas, giving English ships to the French, 'exhausting, intercepting, and mis-employing the King's revenue' and his 'transcendent Presumption in giving Physick' to King James on his death bed. The impeachment did not include any reference to the charges which Bristol was making concerning Buckingham's part in the Spanish escapade. So far as the Commons were concerned, Bristol might have been flogging a dead horse.

Their charge against the Duke took two days to complete. Dudley Digges opened the case. He laid the ills of the country at the Duke's

door: 'the laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things. And whatsoever ill events succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them', and he ran briefly over the heads of the charges made against the Duke, concluding with a somewhat obscure reference to his presence by James's death bed. Buckingham himself appeared to take the proceedings lightly. Contrary to precedent he was in the House of Lords when his accusers came to the bar and when at one point in his charge Dudley Digges, speaking of Buckingham as 'a comet, exhaled out of base and putrid matter', looked up it was full into the smiling face of the Duke — 'sitting there, outfacing his accusers, outbraving his accusations'. Yet earlier in the session Buckingham had been worried and, as so often when he was under stress, he fell ill: 'it may be animo as well as corpore ' remarked Mead to Stuteville.

Edward Herbert, a future Attorney General, followed Digges and spoke of Buckingham's monopoly of office, of his purchase of the Admiralty from the Earl of Nottingham, of the Cinque Ports from Lord Zouch. John Selden spoke of Buckingham's failure to guard the narrow seas, of the disasters to English ships and naval enterprise; John Glanville, who had been secretary to the Cadiz expedition, spoke both of that disaster and of the ships that had been sent to La Rochelle. Sherland told how the Duke had compelled the purchase of honours and office for money; John Pym how he had accumulated honours and rewards both to himself and to his family and friends. Christopher Wandesford, a friend of Wentworth, spoke guardedly of the charges of administering medicine to James on his sick bed. Sir John Eliot then rose for the summing up of the Commons' case against the favourite and chief minister of two kings, a man who was unique in that his influence with the son was even greater than it had been with the father. With burning oratory he went over the points again, spoke of the 'immensity' of Buckingham's waste of the revenues of the Crown: what they had granted in subsidies Buckingham had spent on himself. 'No wonder, then, our King is now in want, this man abounding so!' Having said the worst he could, Eliot could think of nothing more but a comparison: in his pride, his high ambition, his solecisms, his neglect of counsels, his veneries, his venefices, above all in his pride, Buckingham was like Sejanus who was styled laborum imperatoris socius . 'My Lords', concluded Eliot, 'I have done. You see the man. What have been his actions, whom he is like, you know. I leave him to your judgments.'^[3]

Eliot had made an oratorically and emotionally strong case against the Duke, but he had put the House of Commons in a paradoxical position. While accepting the doctrine that constitutionally the King could do no wrong, they were seeking to condemn the actions of a minister which the King had already accepted as his own. They were driven back, consequently, on a series of specious arguments. If a king contemplated a rash act it was the responsibility of the minister to advise him against it, to appeal to his Council and finally to appeal to Parliament. Unless he did this he, and not the king, must bear the blame. Once more the responsibility of ministers to Parliament had been raised and the Commons were reaching out to a principle that would be basic both to the political thought of Englishmen and to the practice of constitutional government. At the same time, though even more dimly perceived, they were thinking in terms of Parliamentary sovereignty.

It was insulting and appeared to be a prejudging of the issue that the House of Commons asked for Buckingham's restraint while the impeachment was proceeding. The House of Lords refused the request. Charles spoke bitterly to his friends. 'If the Duke is Sejanus', he said, 'I must be Tiberius.' On May 11, the day after Eliot's summing up, he went from Whitehall by barge to Westminster accompanied by the Duke and other peers, and before the House of Lords made a full refutation of every charge made against Buckingham, taking all the Duke was charged with upon himself. But while speaking soft words to the Lords, in the Commons Charles had acted, seizing Eliot and Digges at the door of the House and taking them by water to the Tower. When the news of their imprisonment broke, the indignation, confusion, and uproar in the House should have warned Charles of the dangerous path he was treading. 'Rise! Rise! Rise!' shouted the Members, and the House broke up in confusion. But before it met again the following day the words 'liberty of Parliament' were on every lip, and the Speaker was not allowed to proceed with ordinary business. 'Sit down!, sit down!' the Members cried as he made to rise in his seat to open proceedings for the day. They were hardly mollified by Sir Dudley Carleton, speaking undoubtedly on behalf of the King, who begged them not to trench upon the King's prerogative lest they brought him out of love with Parliaments.

At this moment, with the charge of High Treason against Bristol and the impeachment of Buckingham in full swing, Charles perpetrated an extraordinary act of defiance. The Earl of Suffolk,

Chancellor of Cambridge University, died on May 28 and Charles nominated Buckingham for the office. It was a triple defiance in adding one more office to the accumulation which formed part of the indictment against the Duke; in demonstrating once more the King's confidence in his friend; and in showing his own opposition to Puritan beliefs. For Suffolk had been a staunch Puritan and his followers were advancing his son, the Earl of Berkshire, as their nominee. Buckingham secured the election by 108 votes to 103, although what degree of pressure was brought to bear is difficult to assess.

But the election could not affect the broader issue and on June 8 Buckingham began his defence. He was probably helped by Nicholas Hyde, later to be knighted and to become Chief Justice of the King's Bench, by Laud, and by the Attorney General, Sir Robert Heath. He was in the position of knowing far more of the circumstances and events at issue than the Commons who had accused him. Some charges he was able to rebut, some actions he claimed were on the King's orders, others, like the purchase of office from a retiring officer, were according to custom. He answered the charges of accumulating riches at the state's expense by claiming how largely he had spent them for the King and the country. 'I never had any end of my own', he said, and he cited the eight ships he had kept on the coasts at his own charge.

When you know the truth and when all shall appear, I hope I shall stand right in your opinions. It is no time to pick quarrels one with another . . . though I confess there may be some errors I will not justify, yet they are not gross defects as the world would make them appear. They are no errors of wilfulness, nor of corruption, nor oppressing of the people, nor injustice.^[4]

But the Commons were disregarding the most elementary principle of justice in paying no attention to Buckingham's defence. While he was answering their charges in the Lords they were working on a new Remonstrance which announced that they had presented only part of their case against him. They now declared in so many words that he was an enemy both to Church and to State, and they begged the King to remove him. For, they said, 'until this great person be removed from intermeddling with the great affairs of State, we are out of hope of any good success'. In particular they feared that any supply they might grant would, through his mismanagement, be turned to the prejudice of the kingdom. It was clear that they would withhold

supply until Buckingham was gone, and it was clear that they intended to remove Buckingham.

Perhaps they realized the legal weakness of their case and intended to bluster through; possibly they felt driven to extremities by the Cambridge Chancellorship; it is possible that Charles, by throwing the Chancellorship into the ring at this time, was deliberately provoking the Commons. He certainly professed to be outraged by the Remonstrance. He was possibly glad to use it as an excuse for an immediate dissolution, ready to be quit of a Parliament that had yet granted him no supply, because he feared the outcome of the impeachment. Sir Robert Heath had assured him that its result could only exonerate Buckingham. But there could have been other issues, less openly spoken of, which alarmed Charles.

One of the reasons for Digges's imprisonment had been the way he dealt with the last of the charges in the Commons' indictment of Buckingham, that of administering medicine to the late King. There was considerable disagreement as to what he said. One report spoke of him as saying that he forebore to speak further on the poisoning charge in regard of the King's honour; another that he said he was commanded by the Commons, in making the charge, 'to take Care of the Honour of the King our Sovereign that lives'. Charles referred to 'insolent speeches against myself'. Digges maintained that he had not wished to reflect upon the person either of the dead or of the present King. Since much turned upon Digges's actual words a committee met on May 8 to determine them. Nothing conclusive emerged but a majority of peers expressed their belief that Digges had said nothing that reflected upon the King's honour. This was the ruling Charles wanted, and he released Digges from prison on May 16.

Wandesford, who had spoken to the actual charge against Buckingham of administering medicine to James, had merely spoken, like the indictment, of an act 'of transcendent presumption'. He had not been imprisoned. Eliot, on the other hand, in his summing up, had been even more damning than Digges against Buckingham, although he made no reference to Charles. 'Not satisfied', he said, with the wrongs of honour, with the prejudice of religion, with the abuse of State, with the misappropriation of revenues, his attempts go higher, even to the person of his sovereign. 'You have before you his making practice on that, in such manner and with such effect as I fear to speak it, nay, I doubt and hesitate to think it.' Eliot's imprisonment lasted longer than Digges's and he was not released until the 19th. On May

20 the Commons formally cleared both Eliot and Digges of any charges against them.

Whatever his intentions, however brave a show he put on in public, in private Charles was much distressed. 'What can I do more?' he was heard saying to the Duke in his bedchamber. 'I have engaged mine honour to mine Uncle of Denmark, and other princes. I have, in a manner, lost the love of my subjects. What wouldst thou have me do?' One thing was certain. All reports agreed that there was no abatement, but rather an increase, in his affection for the Duke. Whether for Buckingham, or whether to protect himself from further charges, Charles went to the House of Lords once more on June 15 to dissolve another Parliament. He was doing so, he said, because it was 'abused by the violent and ill advised passions of a few Members . . . for private and personal ends', that it neglected public business, was intent upon the prosecution of a peer of the realm, and that it had forgotten its engagements to the King and to the country. The Lords begged for two days more to complete their business. 'Not a minute!' was Charles's reply and his second Parliament was then and there ended without a penny of subsidy being granted or any customs duties legalized.

A Proclamation ordered the destruction of all copies of the Remonstrance and on July 7 Charles published his own account of the 1626 Parliament. Since he was no longer protected by privilege of Parliament Bristol was sent to the Tower. Charles wished him to be condemned and Buckingham to be triumphantly vindicated by a trial in the Star Chamber. Buckingham's trial there broke down because the Parliament men who had charged the Duke insisted that they had done so in the name of the House of Commons and that body being no longer in existence they could not proceed. After a merely formal hearing, therefore, the Star Chamber gave judgment in Buckingham's favour. Bristol fell ill. The charges against him were quietly dropped and he was allowed to return to his home.

Charles's second Parliament was no more high-principled and, in spite of the central theme of Buckingham's impeachment, no more coherent than his first. Eliot had assumed the leadership and given it such direction as it had. But the Commons as a whole were too obsessed with the charges they were levelling against the Duke, and with their determination to withhold supply, to consider general questions of policy. They showed little interest in Europe, little sympathy for their co-religionists who were fighting for their faith, no

understanding of the magnitude of the problems that Charles was trying to handle. Yet the dissolution of two Parliaments in so short a time by so new a king had inevitably caused misgivings. Some people forecast there would never be another. 'Is it not time to pray?' asked Mead of Stuteville when dissolution was imminent. The meteor that appeared over the Thames, the storm that swept Westminster on June 12, were taken to augur disaster. But Charles made no concessions. He had shown his faith in the Duke. Five days after the dissolution he showed his support of William Laud by appointing him Bishop of Bath and Wells. It was not the see that Laud would have wished, but he had to wait for dead men's shoes and, as he wrote, he 'had to fasten upon any indifferent thing' to get out of Wales. Three months later, when Lancelot Andrewes died, Charles kept his see of Winchester vacant for a year in order to give it to Laud, meanwhile conveniently appropriating its revenues to the Crown. The Deanery of the Chapel Royal, which Andrewes also held, Charles gave to Laud immediately. He had expressed, in no uncertain terms, his support of the Laudian Church as well as his devotion to Buckingham.

13—
Charles Saves His Marriage

Throughout her husband's preoccupation with Parliament and his favourite, Henrietta-Maria remained thoroughly French in sentiment and religion. Unlike the Infanta of Spain she had taken no English lessons and, although French was spoken by many at her husband's Court and others, like Bishop Williams, took pains to learn it, language was still a barrier. In some ways, indeed, she was older than her years and her upbringing close to the French Court had taught her that a king had duties that stretched beyond his wife. Yet she might have expected a little longer grace before her husband plunged into affairs of state. Parliament opened two days after her arrival in London. Because of the plague she was moved from London to Hampton Court to Richmond to Oatlands to Windsor to Nonesuch to Woodstock. If she imagined that her place was by the King she was frustrated because the Duke of Buckingham was always there. She felt excluded, as Charles himself had done as a young man when his father and Buckingham were always together. The Duke himself made no attempt to woo her. On the contrary, he joined with Charles in attempting to foist upon her, as ladies of her bedchamber, attendants of their own choosing, in particular the Duke's mother, his sister, and his niece. Henrietta-Maria refused to accept them. It was contrary to the conditions of her marriage, she told Charles; she would not have spies in her bedchamber. The French Ambassador threatened to throw any message from Buckingham out of the window, and there the matter rested for the moment. Nevertheless, by the end of July a compromise had been reached whereby Buckingham's mother, as a Catholic, was admitted to the Queen's bedchamber while the other two ladies were admitted 'by permission' only. As in so many of the wrangles between the King and Queen there was reason on both sides. The Queen's only security and sense of continuity lay in her French

attendants, yet not only were their numbers excessive, they appeared to dominate the Queen, they showed contempt for all things English, and they were wildly extravagant in the demands they made upon the English Exchequer. Even the lying-in of the Duchesse de Chevreuse was paid for by Charles. Apart from Chevreuse — 'who painted her face foully' — Madame de Saint-Georges was particularly hated and was still not allowed in the royal coach.

But her religious advisers had more control over her than her attendants. In their presence she could never forget her mother's letter and her promise to the Pope. It was rumoured that at confession they asked her how many times she had allowed the King to kiss her in the night. They reminded her of every Saint Day and her appropriate conduct, even emphasizing the nights upon which she must not let her husband approach her. She worshipped in what was described as 'a small monastery in her house', where she performed 'spiritual exercises with her ladies', sometimes withdrawing there altogether and 'behaving like a nun'. Much of this was reaction. She had come to England under the assurance of freedom for her own worship and of a wide tolerance for Catholics, yet the English Parliament at Oxford spoke of her religion as 'this dangerous disease' and her husband had promised to expel her fellow believers as a 'wicked generation of Jesuits, seminary priests, and incendiaries'.

After the dissolution of his first Parliament on 12 August 1625 Charles's mind was only half on his marriage and probably less on his wife. He went, not to Henrietta, but with Buckingham to Beaulieu to hunt in the New Forest. Buckingham's wife was for the first time pregnant and was at Beaulieu, but Henrietta went from Woodstock to Tichfield on Southampton Water. Here, as was customary for houses in royal occupation, a room was established as a chapel for English services, in spite of the Queen's protest that, since she was in residence and not the King, it was unnecessary to provide for anything but her own worship. In sheer defiance she made her protest like a small child, playing practical jokes on the chaplain, passing through the English chapel at sermon time, laughing and chattering with her French attendants and her dogs. Charles visited her from time to time but there were always quarrels. Buckingham also went to see her at Tichfield and told her that, unless she changed her ways, she would not be treated like the Queen of England but like the silly little girl she was.

But she continued to be happy with her French friends, too often

sulky with the English. A smile could change all too quickly to a frown when matters were not quite as she wished them — when there were, for example, too many people watching as she and the King dined in public, or when people pressed too closely to her. At grace at meal times her chaplain refused to give way to English customs. There was one occasion when he actually competed with the King's own chaplain who was saying grace and there was such confusion that Charles, in a great passion rose from the table, took the Queen by the hand, and retired into his bedchamber.

At the beginning of 1626 the plague was abating — some said in the week following the proclamation against Papists, some said after the seventh general fast — but it left a trail of distress in its wake. The rich had fled from the cities, trading was virtually at a standstill, unemployed men and women were begging in the streets. Appeals were made by magistrates and ministers for the relief of the poor and homeless, voluntary collections were made throughout the country, the poor rate was doubled. There was nevertheless a public thanksgiving in January for deliverance from the pestilence and the playhouses, which had been shut for eight months, re-opened. The return to London and the prospect of entertainment was a great stimulus to the Queen. Her first birthday in England (her sixteenth) had been celebrated at Hampton Court in December with some success and Charles was persuaded that, as he put it to Buckingham, his wife was 'mending her manners'. A new theatrical company was formed in her honour — Queen Henrietta's Men — which immediately started playing with two plays by James Shirley which were performed in the Cockpit at Whitehall. The Queen appeared happy enough and Charles had no misgivings as he made plans for his coronation.

To a man of Charles's temperament the coronation was a more than usually solemn service of dedication. Instead of the customary purple he chose to wear white as a symbol of the purity with which he came to his people, and he had no qualms concerning the presence of his wife on such an occasion. But to Henrietta-Maria and to her brother, King Louis, a daughter of France could not be crowned in a Protestant church in a ceremony performed by Protestant bishops. Louis wrote that, although he desired his sister to have this crown it must be without prejudice to her conscience and that if she had to choose, a heavenly crown was better. Even the small curtained box in which it was suggested she might sit, unseen, even if she would play no part, was refused. So, on 2 February 1626, Charles was crowned alone. The

absence of his Queen gave a greater prominence to Buckingham and an incident occurred during the ceremony which appeared to cement their relationship. Charles stumbled in mounting the steps to the throne and Buckingham made to assist him but Charles removed the Duke's helping hand and instead put his own under Buckingham's arm, saying with a smile, 'I have as much need to help you as you to assist me.'

Williams, as Dean of Westminster, should have conducted the ceremony, but Charles chose instead William Laud, who was one of the prebendaries of the Abbey, and it was Laud who delivered into Charles's hand the staff of Edward the Confessor. The Earl of Pembroke bore the crown, his brother, the Earl of Montgomery, bore the spurs. When the King was crowned the Earl of Arundel, as senior Earl, presented him to the people. For a moment, probably because of some misunderstanding, there was silence. But when Arundel told them what to do, 'God save King Charles!' sounded on every side, amid great crying and shouting. The King was crowned. But the absence of his Queen revealed, perhaps, a flaw in his domestic life as well as a rift in his religious settlement. To what extent Charles perceived the implications, to what degree he cared, whether his stumbling on the steps of the throne or the people's brief silence after his proclamation or the absence of his Queen appeared to him as omens, he gave no sign but turned his attention to his second Parliament which was due to meet within the next few days.

Charles wished his wife to watch the opening procession to this Parliament. As usual, they were soon bickering. At first she was to watch from a window of the Banqueting House in Whitehall. But when she was already there with the French Ambassador and other French friends, Charles sent word that it would be better if she watched from the balcony of the house of Buckingham's mother in King Street. Henrietta-Maria excused herself on the grounds that it was raining and she did not wish to cross the street and get wet. Charles retorted that it was not raining. When Buckingham went to her on the King's behalf, the French Ambassador joined him in advising compliance, and the Queen allowed Buckingham to take her hand and lead her to his mother's house. It was an open manifestation of the Buckingham family's position in the royal household. But Charles was incensed against his wife, complaining that she took more notice of the French Ambassador than she did of him. For three days he would not speak to her. When she asked him in what she had

offended he replied that he expected her to acknowledge her error. 'In what?', she asked. 'You said it rained when I told you it did not.' 'If you think that an offence', she replied, 'I will think so too.' And so the matter ended. Charles considered he had asserted his authority, kissed his wife, and turned back to Buckingham and to Parliament.^[1]

After the Court's return to Whitehall at the beginning of 1626 there was the usual round of parties and diversions such as the visit of the Persian Ambassador, who proceeded in state to the Banqueting House from Bishopsgate on March 10 in a procession of thirty coaches. But, apart from her priests, Inigo Jones was the Queen's greatest solace, and she spent many hours with him planning her Shrove Day masque for 1626, which would be both her first and the first of the new reign. They chose to perform Racan's Artenice , of whose production at the French Court seven years earlier Henrietta had vivid memories. When the play was presented on February 21 at Somerset House on a specially constructed stage it was seen that Jones had introduced the proscenium arch and perspective scenery and that there was a succession of changing scenes after the French fashion. He had even simulated varying weather conditions, the play opening in moonlight, changing to storm, and returning to a peaceful moonlit night. The scenes themselves changed from deep forest glades to pastoral villages, to lakes and Italianate villas.

Early in the New Year the Queen began to rehearse her ladies, who were to act the entire production, and to train the dancers for the masque which would follow the play. Charles's mother had appeared in Court masques with little criticism (except when she blackened her face) but this would be the first time that a Queen of England had spoken a role or that her ladies had taken male parts. The performance was therefore kept strictly private, and Charles allowed no printing of the text. Those who were privileged to view the performance were delighted, and Charles was particularly pleased with his wife's acting. The King and Queen, indeed, were showing rather more affection to one another, yet the quarrels continued. Buckingham may have been sincere in trying to help; he certainly believed he knew all there was to know about love. But when he tried to talk to Henrietta-Maria on the subject she recoiled and repulsed him. He then went to Madame de Saint-Georges and begged her to try to improve the relations between the King and the Queen. She replied that she thought they were satisfactory. Buckingham said that they might be so during the day

but that the Queen did not respond as she should at night. Madame de Saint-Georges was embarrassed and said she did not meddle in such affairs though, according to Buckingham, she promised to speak to the Queen. Charles believed his wife did become more affectionate towards him, but was deeply humiliated when he was told that he was indebted to Madame de Saint-Georges. The general worry was, in fact, making him more impatient than ever with Henrietta's French attendants. He had unburdened himself many times to Buckingham about the 'Monsieurs', threatening to send them all back to France. The deteriorating relations between France and England did not help, and the departure of Blainville, the French Ambassador, on April 19 increased Henrietta's sense of isolation.

Shortly afterwards there was a quarrel over her marriage jointure, the Queen demanding that it should be managed by at least some people of her own choosing. She spoke to the King one night in bed, sulkily asserting that she would accept no jointure at all if she could have no hand in managing it. As usual, they were soon in the middle of a regular quarrel in which Henrietta alleged her general unhappiness, refused to listen to her husband, and cried out that she was not of such base quality as to be used so ill. 'Then', wrote Charles later, 'I made her both hear me, and end that discourse.'

It was, however, religion that brought matters to a head. There was trouble about English Catholics frequenting the chapels established for the Queen and her attendants, trouble over the numerous saint and fast days she observed at the behest of her religious advisers, trouble over the number of her priests. One day, 6 July 1626, it happened that after a period of private worship she had come across St James's Park to Tyburn, where Catholic martyrs had suffered and died, and she was moved to kneel by the gibbet in devotion. When Charles heard this his unaccustomed anger flared. 'They would separate me from my wife!' he exclaimed, and after informing his Privy Council of his intentions he sent for the Queen on the 10th. She declined to come, as she so often did, this time alleging toothache. So Charles, with members of his Council, went to her apartment at St James's and shut himself in with her alone while in an outer room Secretary Conway told her French staff they must go. Their resistance was so strong and vocal that the yeomen of the guard had to be called to clear them out. As they gathered in the courtyard below, still shouting and protesting, the Queen, realizing what was happening, rushed to the window and beat at the glass, breaking the panes and

cutting her hands so that they bled. Charles dragged her back into the room and kept her there forcibly while her attendants were taken to Somerset House. 'I command you', Charles wrote to Buckingham, 'send them all away tomorrow — by fair means if possible, but stick not long in disputing, use force if necessary and drive them away like so many wild beasts until ye have shipped them, and so the Devil go with them.' It needed the guard once more to get them to Dover where they were sent to France by the earliest possible boat. A knot of people jeered them on their way and someone threw a stone at Madame de Saint-Georges which knocked her hat off. But they had little reason to complain. They were given jewels and money amounting to about £23,000 and Charles ironically told them that if they were not satisfied they could take more from that part of the Queen's dowry which had not been paid. Of her original attendants Henrietta was allowed to keep her two English priests, her old French nurse, her dresser, and some dozen cooks, bakers and others employed on less personal tasks.

Although she had no alternative but to submit, she still reached out to assert herself in some way. One night in August she returned to the matter of her household, telling her husband that she desired no more for its regulation than his mother, Queen Anne, had enjoyed. The King replied that his mother was in a different category. To this the Queen retorted that there certainly was a great difference between a daughter of Denmark and a daughter of France and Bourbon. Charles then remarked that a daughter of France was nothing very great, as she brought no prerogative with her beyond her simple dowry, and, besides, she was the third and last and therefore of less account.

It was a blessing all round when Marshal Bassompierre arrived from France in September with the mission of settling disputes and of healing, so far as could be done on the personal side, the breach between France and England. He proved to be a man of soothing presence and great tact. He alone seemed to perceive that the rift between the King and Queen owed as much to one partner as to the other. He advised Charles, he spoke sharply to Henrietta-Maria. The Queen's household was made as agreeable as possible to her and, although it still included Buckingham's mother, wife and sister, she soon found herself on more friendly terms with them and even with the Duke himself. In short, she found that it was not only with her French ladies that she could enjoy herself. Buckingham, in defiance of the money shortage and all that was being said about his extravagance, mounted a wildly exuberant but most effective masque at York House

in honour of the French Ambassador, with the theme of renewed amity between the two nations. So, while relations between Charles and Buckingham remained the same, those between Charles and Henrietta, and even between Henrietta and the Duke, improved, and there were the beginnings of a triad similar to that of his father's time—he, like James, drawing together the two people closest to him. Still, however, there was no sign of an heir. As the Venetian Ambassador said to Carleton, the 'King of Great Britain had married to have a successor, as was only reasonable, but children come from love and not from anger.' The anger was dying but there was still an impediment.^[2]

14—
La Rochelle

On the war front, while Charles and Buckingham were pinning their hopes upon a fleet to relieve La Rochelle, nearer the heart of the struggle the news was bad. Mansfeld was defeated by Wallenstein at the Bridge of Dessau in the summer of 1626, Christian of Denmark was defeated by Tilly at Lutter on August 27, a defeat on a scale which virtually meant abandoning the whole of North Germany. Christian was bitter, accusing Charles of bad faith in leaving him to struggle alone. Charles, hearing the news on September 12, showed a rare agitation. He rushed to London, called a Council meeting which lasted four hours, sent for the Danish Ambassador and, with tears in his eyes, protested that he would stake his crown and his life for his uncle, but reminded him of the dire financial straits he was in.

The situation was, indeed, desperate. Charles had hoped to show he was master in his own house by throwing out the Monsieurs and throwing out two Parliaments, but he was a master without resources and unless he could raise money he was helpless. He offered the Crown jewels once more — this time to the City of London — and although the citizens declined to lend upon so doubtful a security, a few people made gifts instead. There were three sales of royal plate in August and September 1626. A proposal, supported by Buckingham, to debase the coinage was turned down on arguments brought forward by Sir Robert Cotton. The raising of money by privy seals had not proved sufficiently successful to merit its repetition. The substitution of free gifts for the subsidies promised, but not passed into law, by the previous Parliament appeared a likely way. But the success of this enterprise depended upon the Justices of the Peace who would be expected to collect the gifts. Since it was apparent that such Justices as Eliot, Phelips, Seymour, Alford, Mansell, Digges and Wentworth would not co-operate, Charles removed them from the Commission

of the Peace and attempted to make a reasoned claim for the money through specially appointed commissioners in each county who would assess the inhabitants in accordance with previous Parliamentary assessments. To make payment easier he abandoned the idea of a free gift and promised that the money would be repaid 'as soon as we shall be any ways enabled thereunto', at the same time pledging his royal word that not a penny would be spent upon anything but public service.

In Middlesex, Essex and the home counties the response was at first encouraging, but just as plans were being made to extend the collection the Judges stepped in with a veto, claiming that they could not be certain of its legality. Charles dismissed the Chief Justice, Sir Randal Crew, and replaced him by Sir Nicholas Hyde. But the news of the resistance of the Judges encouraged people to refuse to lend and some who had already consented revoked their promises. There was a suggestion that troops recruited for the new naval enterprise should be quartered upon the counties most reluctant to lend, but reflection indicated that since both the soldiers and the populace were equally disaffected the action would create rather than suppress disturbance. Instead, rich men were imprisoned by warrant from the Privy Council while poorer men were forced under martial law to serve as soldiers. The names of those who resisted what was now generally termed a forced loan sound like a preliminary roll-call for the struggle to come, including Essex, Holles, St John, Warwick, Saye and Sele, Hampden, Eliot, Wentworth, Darnell. Five of them appealed in November for cause of their imprisonment to be shown. But a majority of King's Bench ruled that the command of the King was in itself sufficient cause and the five knights were returned to prison. With tonnage and poundage Charles felt he was on firmer ground, for not only were customs duties an established form of royal revenue, but his Parliament had expressed its willingness to confirm them and had merely delayed because of an irregularity. So, in the face of growing opposition from merchants, he issued a commission to collect taxes at the ports. Naval foraging, that other source of revenue, met with little success until in March 1627 Pennington took three French prizes, the proceeds of which boosted the preparations in English ports.

Meanwhile, they had all been trying to keep up appearances. Buckingham joined with the Venetian envoy in baiting a lion at the Tower; in the Queen's masque in January Charles led the dancing with his wife and Buckingham, and the revels continued until four in the

morning. But the kind of gossip that circulated did the Duke no good: he had been carried in a litter to tennis while the King walked at his side; when he arrived late at the Christmas play it was begun again for his benefit. More serious were the riots at the ports where sailors were crying for wages. Groups of them came up to London demanding satisfaction of the Lord Admiral, they forcibly stopped his coach and created disturbances outside his house so that he was compelled to barricade his gates. When they were threatened with hanging they said that there were plenty more of them to come, and they were, indeed, joined by soldiers similarly demanding wages. In the crescendo of antagonism against Buckingham all the ills of the state seemed to combine. He was held responsible for the Queen's sterility, and even the death of his baby son, aged sixteen months, in March 1627 brought him little sympathy. Only Charles continued his support in spite of the fact that there were rumours that he himself was being included in the general dissaffection by, for example, sinister groups of Scotsmen who went about demanding that they would know how James met his death!

Nevertheless, the Rochelle project went forward and when on June 11 the King was once again at Plymouth dining aboard his flagship there was an air of joviality about his visit. Mirth and music were contributed by Archie the Fool and by the Duke's musicians. Charles himself talked of nothing but his ships, he continually sent healths across the water to neighbouring vessels, and he ordered a five-gun salute to the Duke of Soubise, the Huguenot leader they were sailing to help. Buckingham himself was in command of the fleet of eighty-four ships, which, with some 10,000 men, left Stokes Bay on June 27. They carried battering rams, landing trains, lodging materials, scaling ladders, guns, cannons, and other materials of war. Besides victuals their cargo included cows, sheep and poultry for the benefit of the besieged, an assortment of musical instruments, bedding, much 'brave apparel' for the Duke (doubtless to wear when he appeared among the Rochellese as their liberator), his own rich coach and his litter, many jewels, horses for tilting, and what the Venetian Ambassador caustically described as 'other hindrances to warfare'. The fleet, he asserted, was 'so furnished as to arouse no fear.' But its intentions were grandiose, as the instructions Charles gave to Buckingham on June 19 made clear. The French were encroaching upon English rights on the seas and, in spite of the terms of the marriage treaty, were endeavouring 'to root out that religion whereof by just

title we are the defender'. Buckingham, therefore, was to capture or destroy any French or Spanish ships that seemed likely to interfere with English shipping; he was to proceed to La Rochelle and, if his assistance was still needed, was to hand over his soldiers to Soubise, who would accompany the expedition. Buckingham would then free the English vessels still detained by the French at Bordeaux, establish mastery of the seas round the coast of France, and break up Spanish shipping, securing such French and Spanish prizes as he could.

Spanish and French shipping had retreated into the shelter of their ports, and apart from a futile chase after four Dunkirkers, the English fleet had an uneventful journey to Rochelle. The weather was particularly foul, and it was not until July 10 that they anchored off the Isle of Rhé which controlled the approach to the town. The capture of the island, besides breaking the blockade of the town on the seaward side, would be of great value to Britain. Its harbour would shelter her commerce, it would be a good base for striking at French and Spanish shipping, its command of the salt marshes round the French coast would contribute considerably to private income and the royal revenue. In the face of stiff opposition from the French and casualties on both sides a landing was made and the English settled down to besiege the fortress of St Martin, the chief town of the island, mounting a strong blockade and barricading the seaward approaches to the town. The enterprise seemed straightforward enough. But the fort was well held, the rocky ground upon which it stood was unsuited to siege warfare, and the French had the advantage of reinforcements on the mainland and ships in nearby French ports. The English, on the other hand, were at the end of a long and slow line of communication whose reliability depended upon the weather. The reinforcements which Buckingham sent for were held up first by lack of money but then by a great storm which so battered the ships in their English harbour that repairs were necessary, supplies were consumed, and they had to be revictualled before they could sail.

As summer gave way to autumn on the Isle of Rhé the situation of the besiegers was difficult. They held on through expectation of help from home and in the knowledge that the Fort was reaching starvation point. It seemed, indeed, on the point of surrender when, on September 28, a night of favourable winds, supply ships battered their way through the English vessels and past the barricades to drop supplies before the fort. A decision to abandon the siege was made, then reversed when news came that the English reinforcements were

on their way. But by October there was still no sign of them. By this time French troops were landing on the island from the mainland, the weather was wet and cold, the condition of the besiegers deplorable. Buckingham decided on a desperate attempt to take the fortress, but the garrison was forewarned, the scaling ladders proved too short, the siege cannon, instead of being ready for use, had mistakenly been reshipped. The assault was a complete failure. Buckingham halted his retreat in order to collect his wounded and then began to move across a narrow causeway to his ships. As he did so the French inflicted merciless casualties in the confined passage: they had the killing, taking, and drowning of our men at their pleasure, as an eye witness said.

Buckingham's personal bravery was never in doubt, nor his devotion to his men, his care of the sick and wounded, his willingness to share hardship with them, even to risk his life for them. He had also shown an aptness in learning the art of war that deserved more co-operative commanders. The failure of the assault, the disastrous retreat, resulted from immature judgment, a shocking breakdown of support from home, a lack of co-ordination among the high command and a reluctance to fight among the rank and file. Yet Buckingham could have been successful. If the wind had not been in the right direction supplies would not have got through to Fort St Martin; if the wind had not been in the wrong direction reinforcements would have reached him from England in time to affect the issue; even in the tragic farce of siege ladders being too short the issue might have been turned if someone had not blundered.^[1]

Charles had followed events from home as closely as the distance allowed and throughout July was urging the officers of his Treasury to raise money for Buckingham's relief. The 'forced loan' had produced something like £240,000, for most of those assessed, moved by exhortation or threat, had contributed. But this money had already been swallowed up. An extra £14,000 was urgently needed if Buckingham was to be supplied. Yet, even at this time of stress, Charles had other projects on his mind. The rumoured sale of the Mantuan collection of pictures, brought to his attention by the Countess of Arundel a few years earlier, had never been far from his thoughts. Nicolas Lanier, one of his musicians, whom he had sent to Italy shortly after his accession to seek out art treasures, had been staying in Venice with Daniel Nye, a shadowy figure purporting to deal in rare perfumes, furs, and other luxuries, under cover of which he had become a

familiar figure in the half-light of international art dealing. He had acted as agent for Sir Henry Wotton, Dudley Carleton, and Buckingham himself, and he now threw himself with zest into the most exciting deal he had yet undertaken.

The Gonzaga, Dukes of Mantua, were not art lovers, and their stupendous collection had been formed for the aggrandisement of their Court and State rather than to gratify their artistic sense. The interests of the present Duke certainly lay elsewhere: it was said he would pay more for a dwarf than an Old Master and he was rumoured to have his eye on a particularly delectable female dwarf while the sale of his art treasures was being negotiated. A decline in the silk industry upon which much of Mantua's prosperity depended was a further factor inclining him to exchange his art collection for ready cash. By August 1627 the work of Nye and Lanier was bearing fruit and Charles was asked to provide £15,000 for the bulk of the Mantuan collection, including Titian's Twelve Caesars, Raphael's Holy Family, and canvases of Caravaggio, Andrea del Sarto and Correggio. This was a month after Buckingham had arrived before Rhé and when it had become evident that further supplies would be needed for his aid.^[2]

Charles's anxiety was apparent in the letters he was despatching to his Treasury officials in July. There was desperation in his note to Marlborough and Weston from Woodstock on August 1:

. . . if Buckingham should not now be supplied not in show, but substantially, having so bravely, and I thank God, successfully, begun his expedition, it were an irrevocable shame to me, and all this nation; and those that either hinder, or, according to their several places, further not this action, as much as they may, deserve to make their end at Tyburn.

Yet, whatever inward struggles Charles may have had, he clinched the art deal on August 10 and ten days after writing this letter instructed Burlamachi to pay £15,000 to Nye for the Duke of Mantua. Burlamachi appeared more conscious of the threat to Buckingham than Charles himself and wrote frantically to Charles's secretary: 'I pray you, let me know where money shall be found to pay this great sum. If it were for two or three thousand pounds, it could be borne, but for £15,000 besides the other engagements for His Majesty's service, it will utterly put me out of any possibility to do anything in those provisions which are necessary for my lord duke's relief.'

Charles did not change his mind though he suffered severe pangs of conscience. 'I have understood your necessities for fault of timely

supplies', he wrote to Buckingham on October 13, and 'I still stand in fear that these may come too late.' By November 6 his fears were even greater and he dreaded that Buckingham might have abandoned the enterprise. If so, he took full responsibility upon himself because of the failure to send supplies in time. He sent a letter to await Buckingham's return: 'in case you should come from Rhé without perfecting your work, happily begun, but I must confess with grief, ill seconded.' 'I assure you', he said, 'that, with whatsoever success ye shall come to me, ye shall ever be welcome, one of my greatest griefs being that I have not been with you in this time of suffering, for I know we would have much eased each other's griefs.' Buckingham's mother saw clearly what was happening, and while the Mantuan deal was going through wrote curtly to her son before Rhé: 'at home . . . all is merry and well pleased, though the ships be not victualled as yet, nor mariners to go with them.'^[3]

It is not certain that supplies would have arrived in time even if Charles had not put the Mantuan deal first, or that they would have made any difference to the little force before Rhé. What is certain is that the failure of the expedition destroyed both Buckingham's and Charles's credibility as commanders. 'The disorder and confusion', wrote Denzil Holles to his brother-in-law Wentworth, describing the retreat, 'was so great, the truth is no man can tell what was done. This only every man knows, that since England was England it received not so dishonourable a blow.' It was thought that 4000 of the 6000 men who sailed had been slain, four colonels lost, and at least thirty-two colours lost or in the enemy's hands. The expedition had failed 'with no little dishonour to our nation, excessive charge to our treasury, and great slaughter to our men'. The irony of the French King in restoring freely to his sister all English prisoners was probably lost upon Charles. Louis' remark that if he had known that his brother of England had longed so much for the Isle of Rhé he would have sold it him for half the money he had spent, probably hurt more.

The most charitable interpretation of Charles's action in buying the Mantuan collection at such a time is that he was not deliberately abandoning the Duke in favour of Mantua but that he was hoping, by prevarication, to get both relief for Buckingham and the art treasures he coveted. The pictures began to be shipped almost immediately but Nye protested that he had not been paid and that Burlamachi would not accept his bills because the money had not been provided by the King. Charles seemed to be solving his problems by paying over

the money in driblets. Nye received nothing until 23 November 1629 when he got £11,500; on 15 December 1630 he received £3,000, on 25 July 1631 a further £2454.14.3d. In all, bills were paid to Nye which raised something over £18,000, which included the cost of shipping the collection. On a less charitable interpretation Charles was prepared to abandon Buckingham and La Rochelle, which he had repeatedly insisted was bound up with his sister's fortunes, in favour of the mouth-watering morsels which Nye dangled before him. He had chosen not Buckingham, not the Huguenots, not his sister, but a fabulous art collection. But upon the Duke's return his action was fully in character. He sent his own coach to Portsmouth to fetch Buckingham and rushed to meet him 'as if he were returned from some conquest'.^[4] Within a year Charles was engaged in further negotiations with Mantua. The Mantuan Duke had reserved nine of his choicest canvases, including Mantegna's Triumph of Julius Ceasar, as well as many fine statues from the first sale, Nye wrote. Now his son had succeeded him and would sell them to raise money for war. Cardinal Richelieu and the Queen Mother of France were in the market for the treasures but if Nye acted promptly he could secure them for Charles for a further £10,000. Charles clinched the deal and in April 1628 bought the second part of the Mantuan collection.

15—
The Assassination of the Duke

So far as the war was concerned Charles still did not know what it was to give up. 'Louis XIII is determined to destroy La Rochelle', he told the Venetian Ambassador after the return of Buckingham, 'and I am no less resolved to support it.' The Duke, apparently bearing Charles no rancour, was no less adamant; 'It is useless', he said, 'to think or speak of peace.'^[1] So another fleet was prepared, more money sought. An excise upon bread and beer was considered but came to nothing. Charles pledged more of his jewels. He thought of asking for a general contribution to the fleet but opposition was fierce and the ship-money letters had to be withdrawn. Buckingham, arrogant and undaunted as ever, favoured another Parliament. At first the King was firm. He had no wish for a Parliament in itself, he said, and 'the occasion will not let me tarry so long'. But when the Council joined with Buckingham, and guaranteed there would be no revival of Buckingham's impeachment, Charles gave way. The writs went out early in 1628, less than six months after Buckingham's return. Sheriffs had just been chosen, so there could be no exclusion in this way. Charles considered banning lawyers, but this was hardly practicable. In the event there was little interference with elections and there was, indeed, some show of compromise: seventy-six of the men who had refused to make the forced loan had already been released, no objection was raised to Bristol taking his seat in the Lords, and there was even talk of reconciliation between him and the Duke.

Nevertheless, when Parliament opened on March 17 it was again Laud who preached. Charles, looking down at the Commons below the bar, seeing the familiar opposition faces, including some of the men he had imprisoned, offered no concessions in his opening speech. James would have scolded and lectured the House with warmth. Charles was cold, so unconciliatory that he seemed intent on marking

the gulf between them. But he was brisk. 'These Times are for Action', he said, 'wherefore, for Example Sake, I mean not to spend much Time in Words; expecting accordingly, that your . . . good Resolutions will be speedy, not spending Time unnecessarily or (that I may better say) dangerously; for tedious Consultations at this Conjecture of Time is as hurtful as ill Resolutions.' 'I think there is none here', he continued, 'but knows what common Danger is the Cause of this Parliament, and that Supply at this Time is the chief End of it.' If the situation was not clear, he said, 'no Eloquence of Men or Angels will prevail'. If they did not do their duty in this he would use other means. And, he said in conclusion, 'Take not this as Threatening for I scorn to threaten any but my equals.'

It was not an auspicious beginning and it was soon clear that the pattern of this Parliament would be not unlike that of previous Parliaments. Rudyerd asked for supply without specifying the amount. He emphasized that dangers to the kingdom were great, and that there were dangers to themselves if they offended the King. It was, he said, 'the crisis of Parliaments'. If Members took the point they interpreted it in another way. As they rose to make their comments it was clear that forced loans and the five knights' case were uppermost in their minds. Eliot and Wentworth, in their different ways, stressed the danger to property if money was raised without Parliament's consent. If the ancient laws and constitutions were laid aside, said Eliot, all rights of property would also go and the old chaos and confusion, the will of the strongest, would prevail. Wentworth more realistically asserted that the prerogative of the King had been extended 'beyond its just symmetry' and had been 'tearing up the roots of all property'.

Speaker after speaker emphasized that there could be no taxation without parliamentary authority, and Sir Edward Coke reminded the House that no imprisonment was legal unless cause was shown. Phelips widened the issue to one of political obligation: 'It is well known the people of this state are under no other subjection than what they did voluntarily assent unto by their original contract between King and people', he said. The collective will of the House coalesced into a stand upon the old principle of redress of grievances before the grant of supply. Sir Nathaniel Rich urged a petition rather than a bill to embody their demands for, he said, an immediate answer was required to a petition, whereas a bill could be rejected by the King after the end of the session when subsidies had already been granted. Accordingly, when Selden emerged from committee on May 8 he

held in his hand the document whose name alone became a household word — the Petition of Right.

The Petition of Right was a straightforward document, containing four simple demands that went to the heart of the Commons' grievances. There should be no taxation without consent of Parliament and no imprisonment without cause shown; no billeting of soldiers or sailors upon householders against their will, and no martial law to punish ordinary offences by sailors or soldiers. These 'rights' and 'liberties', as they called them, were claimed by the Commons under the laws and statutes of the realm already in existence and they cited Magna Carta and laws of Edward I, Edward III and Richard III. The third and fourth demands, indeed, seemed more immediate, less fundamental than the others, reflecting the disastrous impact of Charles's foreign policy upon everyday life. Yet they, too, were grievances basic to a society which levied troops without barracks or other accommodation to house them. No less a document than Magna Carta had expressly forbidden the billeting of soldiers and sailors except at inns or with the householder's approval.

Charles and Buckingham realized fully that here was no Remonstrance, damaging as that could be, but an attempt at a statutory limitation of royal authority such as no monarch had suffered for a century and a half. Charles's first reaction was to dissolve Parliament, but he thought better of it. He created five new peers who would support him in the House of Lords and questioned the Petition closely point by point. He tried in particular to reserve to himself the sovereign power that would give him discretionary action in emergency, and Arundel proposed and the House of Lords accepted a clause to this effect. But the Commons would hear nothing of 'sovereign power'. 'Let us give that to the King that the law gives him, and no more', said Alford. Pym professed not to know what sovereign power was. 'All our petition', he said, 'is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another distinct power from the law. I know how to add sovereign to his person, but not to his power.' Coke clinched the matter with his great authority. 'I know that prerogative is part of the law', he said, 'but sovereign power is no parliamentary word. In my opinion it weakens Magna Carta and all our statutes, for they are absolute, without any saving of "sovereign power" . . . Take heed what we yield unto: Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no "sovereign"'. Perhaps thinking that Coke was offering a straw to clutch at, Buckingham and other friends of the

King then pressed that the Petition should expressly preserve the prerogative and advised the Lords that they could accept it with this proviso. But the Commons forced the Lords to give way and on May 26 the Petition went forward as it stood.

Charles had one more card to play. On June 2 he gave an answer to the Petition which was regarded as no answer at all.

The King willeth that Right be done, according to the Laws and Customs of the Realm. And that the Statutes be put in due Execution, that His Subjects may have no Cause to complain of . . . Wrongs and Oppressions contrary to their just Rights and Liberties; to the Preservation whereof he holds Himself in Conscience as well obliged as of His Prerogative.

He could hardly have expected the Commons to be satisfied. They were, indeed, bitterly angry and Coke struck again at the man they still considered at the root of their troubles: 'let us palliate no longer. . . . I think the Duke of Buckingham is the cause of all our miseries . . . That man is the grievance of grievances . . . Let us set down the causes of all our disorders, and they will all reflect upon him.'^[2]

While Parliament was talking another fleet had sailed for Rochelle, financed and equipped in the same haphazard manner without even the advantage of a commander who believed in his cause and with sailors so disinclined for the battle that they had barricaded themselves in Plymouth town hall in an attempt to resist enlistment. When the Earl of Denbigh reached Rochelle on May 1 he found it under siege from French troops. Moles had been built on either side of the narrow entrance to the harbour and approach in the face of French opposition was virtually impossible. Before he could receive Charles's order of May 17 to hold on for as long as he could he was on his way home with the usual problems of sickness, rotting food, and unwilling men. For once Charles was furiously angry. 'If the ships had been lost', he cried, 'I had timber to build more!' He did not say whether he had more lives to spare. When Denbigh arrived off the Isle of Wight he was told to go back to Rochelle and await reinforcements. But continued sickness, the need for repairs, and the capture by Dunkirk pirates of three vessels laden with corn for Rochelle, marked the end of the expedition.

On the continent of Europe, while resources were being squandered off Rochelle and Parliament men were beginning to consider the

principles of political obligation, the death knell had sounded to Elizabeth's hope that her brother might be of help in recovering the Palatinate. This had, indeed, been apparent long before, but the end came when the little knot of English volunteers holding out in the town of Stadt at the mouth of the Elbe were forced into surrender on April 27. The details began to come in during May: a garrison of 4000 men, with practically no assistance in money or supplies from England, reduced by sickness and starvation to 1600, yet receiving more honour from the enemy General Tilly than from their own people, marched out of Stadt with arms in their hands and flags flying. For Charles, who had staked so much upon Rochelle, so little upon Stadt, the poignancy was less than the humiliation of knowing that in Europe he had reached the end of the road. It was too much that, while shaken by the surrender of Stadt, the failure at Rochelle, the hammering on his prerogative, he should be faced with a renewed attack upon Buckingham. Two days after Coke's outburst Charles, from his throne in the House of Lords, assented to the Petition of Right in the time-honoured way applicable to a private bill: Soit droit fait come est desiré . The Lords immediately ordered that the text of the Petition with Charles's second answer be printed like a Statute and enrolled in the Parliament rolls. On the 16th the Commons passed the Subsidy Bill.

There were bonfires in the streets of London that night and the church bells rang from City steeples; some said the rejoicing was due to the mistaken belief that Buckingham had been apprehended and some City youths burnt the scaffold on Tower Hill saying there would be a new one for the Duke. His unpopularity had by this time reached fever heat. Remaining covered in the King's presence was the least of the crimes attributed to him. He had not only poisoned James but half a dozen peers as well; he used love potions to inflame the women he could not otherwise win; he kept safely out of the way of danger on the Isle of Rhé. What might happen to the Duke was demonstrated when Dr Lambe, a quack doctor and astrologer, believed to be associated with Buckingham, was beaten to death in the streets of the City in a particularly brutal fashion, and it was allegedly said that if the Duke had been there he would have been treated worse. 'Who rules the kingdom?' asked a broadsheet found nailed to a post in Coleman Street. 'The King.' 'Who rules the King?' 'The Duke.' 'Who rules the Duke?' 'The devil.' 'Let the Duke look at it!.' This was but one of many ballads and verses chanted in City streets or passed from

hand to hand.^[3] As the Commons proceeded to prepare a Remonstrance that put the blame for all the disasters of the reign upon the Duke, Buckingham begged the King on his knees to be allowed to answer the charges. Charles refused permission and held out his hand for the Duke to kiss. Once more he had demonstrated his faith in his friend. But he was alarmed, and when the Commons returned to tonnage and poundage, maintaining that his acceptance of the Petition of Right had acknowledged it to be illegal without Parliamentary sanction, Charles hastened to end the session, before they could proceed further against the Duke or present him with a new Remonstrance.

Charles made it absolutely clear in his prorogation speech of June 26 that he had never intended to surrender his right to levy customs duties. He also made it clear that he never intended, and did not believe that Parliament had intended, to harm his prerogative, which he considered to remain intact, regardless of the Petition of Right. He told the House of Commons that they had no power to make or declare a law without his consent, and he reminded them that the Judges, under the King, were the sole interpreters of law. Besides the question of interpretation, there was also the question as to whether, and in what sense, Charles had given his approval to the Petition itself. Parliament had ordered its printing with Charles's second answer attached. But on the day Parliament rose Charles ordered the destruction of the 1500 copies so printed and the substitution of the Petition with his first answer and his prorogation speech. In this form the Petition of Right, with Charles's own explanation attached, was circulated in the country. The Parliament, Charles said, had put a false construction upon what he had granted, and the country must not be allowed to reach erroneous conclusions. Both sides were already appealing beyond the walls of Parliament to the people. The war of words had begun. But for the time being Charles's mind was chiefly on Rochelle, and with the expectation that some £275,000 would be coming into his treasury from the subsidies voted after his acceptance of the Petition of Right, he was fitting out yet another fleet, impressing yet more men. Charles went to Southwick, near Portsmouth, to help with his presence, while the Duke busied himself between London and the port. Buckingham's family was worried for his safety, a friend begged him to wear a suit of mail beneath his clothes, but Buckingham took little notice. His wife and sister were with him at Portsmouth on 23 August 1628. After breakfast that day he rose to enter an adjoining room where officers and friends, members of his

staff and others were jostling to talk to him. As he stepped into the crowd and leaned forward to answer a question a man struck him in the left breast with a knife saying, 'God have mercy upon they soul!' Buckingham drew the knife from his breast, but could do no more than cry, 'Villain!' before collapsing with blood pouring from his wound and from his mouth. He died instantly. A simple act, that could easily have been averted, had struck down at the height of his power one of the most remarkable men of his age. The favourite of two Kings, adored head of a large family, loved, feared, hated, admired, envied, bestriding his world, if ever any did, like a colossus, was struck down, not by an enemy who had watched and waited, not by the mob who had murdered Dr Lambe, not by anyone close to him, but by a half-crazy lieutenant named John Felton who had served at Rhé and whose motives were never quite clear. Felton had been refused promotion, was poorly paid, had read various declarations of Parliament and had come to believe that Buckingham was the cause both of the country's sills and his own. At a cutler's shop on Tower Hill in London he had bought a cheap knife and then made his way to Portsmouth. He mingled with the crowds around Buckingham's lodging and, since he had no fear for himself, the rest was easy and he stepped boldly forward to acknowledge himself as the assassin.^[4]

The news was brought to Charles at morning prayers at Southwick. Great shock is like a sudden blow. He gave no sign except for a spasm that crossed his face but knelt where he was and stayed in chapel until the service was done. Only then, flinging himself upon his bed, he gave way to bitter sobs. Buckingham had been as much part of Charles as one person can be of another; he was the only friend Charles ever had; Charles never assumed a kingly authority with Buckingham. As he wrote when he feared the disaster on the Isle of Rhé, if they had been together, they would much have eased each other's grief. Now Buckingham was gone and there was at once the overwhelming grief and no such consolation.

He kept his room for two days without admitting anyone, but he sent for the Duchess to be brought from Portsmouth to a village nearby. He ordered Court mourning for two days. He had Buckingham's body taken to London in his own coach. It was difficult to avoid the general rejoicing and the lighting of bonfires as the news of the Duke's death spread. Felton had to be executed, but he died amid general sympathy and well-wishing. Buckingham had to be buried, but his funeral was quiet and unobtrustive. His body, it was said, was

taken to the Abbey the day before the interment, in the night of September 10, to avoid abuse by the crowd. So even the consolation of burying his friend with pomp and honour was denied to Charles. All he could do was to bury him and reserve a place for his tomb in Westminster Abbey, among the kings of England. He could not even erect that tomb himself for he could hardly erect a monument to his friend before he had built one to his father.

He did all he could for Buckingham's family, paying his debts, preventing the sale of some of the Duke's jewels, confirming grants to his family, and maintaining his servants until they could be suitably discharged. Buckingham's wife he visited constantly, joining his sorrow to hers. Buckingham's children would be brought up in his own household. The world, he said, 'was greatly mistaken' in the Duke 'for it was thought that the favourite had ruled his Majesty; but it was far otherwise, for that the Duke had been to him a faithful and obedient servant.' He intended, he said, to manage all affairs of state himself, and there was no more than a brief hiatus before he flung himself into work, presiding always at the Council, familiarizing himself with its activities, going through all documents, amending and annotating with his own hand, getting through more work in fourteen days than Buckingham had done in three months. On September 7, four days before Buckingham's funeral, the fleet the Duke would have commanded sailed for Rochelle under the Earl of Lindsey, the former Lord Willoughby. The story of previous expeditions was repeated and while Lindsey was vainly encouraging his half-mutinous men the inhabitants of La Rochelle were literally starving to death. On October 18 they cut the knot and, in full view of the English fleet which had done nothing to help them, surrendered to Richelieu. The peace was not vindictive. If the Rochellese lost their privilege of a fortified enclave in a Catholic country they gained, with all Huguenots, a recognition, unpersecuted, within a united France.

For England and for Charles the surrender of Rochelle was the greatest blessing as well as the greatest humiliation. La Rochelle, more than anything else, had caused 'the crisis of Parliaments'. It was not the Palatinate which had reduced Charles to extremities. He had not asked for money for the Spanish war, to which the Commons had some commitment, nor for a European war such as his sister desired. Instead he had become bogged down in relieving La Rochelle because, so he thought, his honour was involved. It might be felt that his greater obligation was to his sister's cause. Perhaps he shied away

from the wider European strategy. Perhaps his intellect was too narrow for the wider theatre of war. Perhaps the details of a siege, the relief of a town rather than the broad movement of troops on the map of Europe were what he had learned from his models and his books. After the surrender of Rochelle Charles worked to extricate himself from direct involvement in war, though his financial commitments to the European Protestants remained. Already, in Buckingham's time, peace feelers had gone out to Spain and commissions of investigation sent to central Europe. Would his father's peace policy prevail after all? The journey to Madrid and the resentful aftermath were now as though they had never been. His efforts to help the French Huguenots were relegated to some part of his mind that could register defeat without being worried by it. A trail of wasted lives, treasure, time and talent marked the intense activity his foreign policy had generated. George Villiers, the uniquely beautiful Duke of Buckingham, was dead. Charles was left, not with the Spanish wife of his father's diplomatic choice and his own early passion, but with a faut-de-mieux French queen who so far had brought him nothing but trouble. But she was now all he had.

Henrietta-Maria, now eighteen years old, realized the situation better than Charles himself. When the news of Buckingham's assassination reached her, she set out at once to join Charles at Southwick.^[5] His loss and her sense that he needed her dispelled the petty misunderstandings of the past three years, and they were back to the day of their first meeting when he took a nervous little girl into his arms and kissed her. Now it was her turn to comfort him.

16—
The Last Parliament

Those who said the Duke swayed all looked in vain for a drastic change of policy now that Charles stood alone. Certainly there were modifications in government — but nothing immediately significant; efforts at retrenchment — but that was not new; attempts to raise money — but the methods had been drawn up at a Council meeting even before Buckingham's death. Moves towards peace with both Spain and France had begun in the Duke's time and the same influences continued to sway men's loyalties and actions. Charles showed the same attitude to the Palatinate, he made the same speeches, he kept up his reassuring correspondence with Elizabeth. There was, indeed, nothing to suggest that the guiding hand had been Buckingham's, no indication that Charles would now have either a different policy or no policy at all, no evidence that the Duke led the King. Policy, it seemed, had been based upon complete understanding and mutual trust between the King and his chief minister. This would not happen again. Laud would share his confidence to some extent; he would look to Weston for supplies; in the crisis of his reign he would turn to Went-worth. But never again would there be so close a relationship, so full an understanding, personal and political, with any other man. He found, indeed, now that he was alone, that he enjoyed it, and was at his best when acting singly — he 'now at last feels himself master, and perhaps begins to enjoy it', as the Venetian Ambassador put it. A month later Contarini was a little more doubtful. 'Since the Duke's death the King remains in suspense . . . He shows himself more confused than resolute', he wrote to the Doge and Senate. But the opinion was probably influenced by Charles's refusal to embrace the French — Venetian alliance that the Ambassador was pushing.^[1]

In considering his team of ministers anew, Charles's greatest emotional difficulty concerned the offices which Buckingham had held

himself. The Admiralty, which the Duke had made particularly his own, Charles put in commission, the money saved being used to pay the Duke's debts. The Earl of Holland became Charles's Master of Horse. He was a Buckingham supporter, which was one reason for the appointment; another may have been Henrietta's affection for the courtier who, as Henry Rich, Lord Kensington, had wooed her in Paris on his master's behalf. Holland also succeeded Buckingham as Chancellor of Cambridge University and in December 1629 he became High Steward to the Queen. In spite of these marks of favour Holland nursed a resentment at not being given the Admiralty. Changes in government which Charles and Buckingham had made in the summer of 1628 gave Charles Sir Richard Weston, whom he had raised to the peerage as Baron Weston in April 1628, as his Lord Treasurer and Henry Montague, Earl of Manchester, as Lord Privy Seal. Towards the end of 1628 Charles made further appointments. Secretary Conway was growing old. Charles made him President of the Council, bringing in Lord Dorchester, formerly Sir Dudley Carleton, to serve in his place. The other Secretary was Sir John Coke. Neither was particularly outstanding. Coke was slow, though careful, and his long association with the Admiralty was a decided asset. Dorchester was an upright and agreeable man but with the qualities of the dilettante rather than of the administrator: yet no one, Charles once said, could draw up a document more in accord with his own intentions than Dorchester. Already a strong influence on Charles, though not yet of his Privy Council, was William Laud, Bishop of London.

In the more intimate posts of Gentleman and Groom of the Bedchamber Charles kept his two friends, Will Murray and Endymion Porter. Both appreciated the paintings which were his passion and were themselves avid collectors. Murray, the little boy who had shared his early lessons, was his oldest friend; Porter was a lavish spender who wrote verses, bought pictures, and acted as an art agent for Charles. Both men could be trusted with a delicate commission and Porter had, indeed, served Charles well in this respect during the Spanish adventure. Two of the Carey sons Charles also kept close to him, and Tom and Will filled many roles as messengers and agents.

James Hay, Viscount Doncaster, Earl of Carlisle since 1622, was a great favourite with Charles. He held no office but was well versed in affairs of state and his influence was considerable. Believing that the French had broken the terms of the marriage treaty he had helped to negotiate, he also had turned towards Spain. He was an inveterate

spendthrift, willing to celebrate any occasion of note in an appropriately expensive manner. His wife, Lucy Percy, daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, served the Queen as a Lady of the Bedchamber. She was a great beauty and became one of Henrietta's closest friends. The boisterous Sir Henry Vane retained, perhaps surprisingly, the King's confidence. Though he was not yet a Privy Councillor his influence would increase over the years.

It soon became apparent, however, that Charles's most influential adviser after Buckingham's death was Lord Treasurer Weston. Weston understood well the twin needs of saving money and of raising money and his nature fitted him to do both, while his early training as Justice of the Peace, customs official, committee man, and Chancellor of the Exchequer gave him an insight into the niceties of administration. His equable, unheroic nature provided the prop that Charles needed, while his single-mindedness enabled him quite effortlessly to move from Charles's premise that because of his wars he needed money, to the more realistic assertion that he could not wage war because he could not afford to.

Weston had served in Parliament almost continuously since 1604 and, as Privy Councillor since 1621, had played an important role in the Lower House. He had served on the Royal Commission to reduce expenditure in 1617 and on the Navy Commission in 1618; he had reported on English trade in the Far East, on the tapestry industry, and the dyeing of silk. After the fall of Middlesex he had acted as Treasurer for seven months until the appointment of Sir James Ley, doubling meanwhile with his office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Friendship with Middlesex may have helped to delay his rise to the highest office; a close relationship with Sir Arthur Ingram, the financier, and consequent contacts with other City magnates were useful. He was something of a scholar, and enjoyed the patronage of Arundel. While not a connoisseur in the best sense of the word, he had a lively appreciation of paintings and antiquities. Charles had been aware of Weston, in one way or another, nearly all his life. But the first time he really made his mark with Charles was when, with Secretary Conway, he headed a small embassy to Europe at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. He was with Elizabeth at Prague at the time of the battle of the White Mountain and fled with her and Frederick the following day. Diplomatic immunity speeded his way over the disturbed continent and he arrived in England with the first personal news of the Elector and his family. Weston had been sufficiently pliant to support the Spanish

policy of Charles and Buckingham and in the 1624 Parliament sat for Bossiney in Cornwall on the nomination of Charles. He had relayed Buckingham's narration in the Lords to the House of Commons; in later Parliaments he had supported subsidy bills, he had approved the forced loan and he played no part in the impeachment of the Duke.

Weston was in many ways typical of his age. The cloth industry, the City of London, the law, an estate built up in two generations, such was his family history. He himself was at Trinity College, Cambridge and the Middle Temple. He held stock in the great customs farm, his mercantile interests included stockholding and membership of the East India Company. His second wife was a Catholic and he had many Catholic friends, including Cottington. Weston required the services of the shrewd, pro-Spanish courtier and partly through his influence, partly because the situation called for his services, Cottington was restored to favour and admitted to the Privy Council in November 1628. Less than a year later he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Charles knew of Weston's Catholic sympathies but now, when peace with Spain was again being considered, that was no handicap. In any case, it was not in Charles's nature to judge a man for his religious beliefs, and he was confident that Weston's main virtue, retrenchment, would not be affected by his religion. Weston, for his part, while he was fathering five sons and six daughters, finding husbands and dowries for the daughters, rich heiresses for the sons, had watched the shy, withdrawn little Prince develop into the sovereign under whom he would achieve eminence. Though twenty-five years older than Charles he had been content, under Buckingham's patronage, to wait upon events and his patience had been justified.^[2]

Of the other possible ministers Charles, even before the death of Buckingham, had begun to single out Sir Thomas Wentworth, 'Black Tom of the North' who, like Weston, begrudged the money spent on war. He was six years older than Charles, his elder brother, too, had died young and, like Charles, he was left with the responsibility not, indeed, of a kingdom, but of an estate and a family of ten brothers and sisters. Land, sheep, wool and aristocratic descent had combined to help his family rise to wealth and influence in Yorkshire. His education was conventional — St John's, Cambridge, the Inner Temple, travel in Europe. He came to Court at eighteen, was knighted by James and in the same year married a daughter of the Earl of Cumber-land. Wentworth drew attention to himself in 1626 by his refusal to

contribute to the forced loan. Like Sir John Eliot he was imbued with a strong sense of property and went to prison, not because he could not afford to pay, but because he saw a threat in extra-Parliamentary taxation. Wentworth was released with others in December 1627 and in Charles's third Parliament of 1628 he sat for his native shire. In attempting to bring together King and Commons, supply and redress of grievances, Wentworth was a leading figure in this assembly. The framing of the Petition of Right owed much to him but he lost his ascendancy in the dilatory proceedings which followed and took no part in the renewed hostility against the Duke. He was not a Buckingham man yet had never joined the hue and cry after him, giving the impression that he was less concerned with personalities than with constitutional issues.

Wentworth was a tall, spare, dark man who rarely smiled. He had no part to play in the artistic world of Charles and he was no scholar in the narrower sense. Yet he had a great feeling for words and had studied the classical orators. He could deliver a speech as elaborate and more cogent than most, but he could also be blunt and forceful. Charles realized something of the power and stability of the man. In 1628 he became Baron Wentworth, and by the end of the year was Viscount Wentworth and Lord President of the Council of the North. His first speech as President appeared to justify Charles's confidence. 'The Authority of a King', he said, 'is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government.' The metaphor was not original, being part of the common coin of seventeenth-century political discussion, but coming from a powerful minister it emphasized the joint interest of sovereign and subject. It told against Wentworth that Christopher Wandesworth, who had joined the impeachment against Buckingham, was his close friend, and that Denzil Holles, who was prominent in opposition in the 1629 Parliament, was his brother-in-law by his second marriage; but on the whole Charles's favour appeared to be justified and on 10 November 1629 Wentworth became Privy Councillor.^[3]

On 23 January 1629, meanwhile, after a seven-month recess Charles met his first Parliament without Buckingham. He had continued to levy tonnage and poundage but many merchants, encouraged by Parliament's Remonstrance, had refused to pay. Some had been brought before the Privy Council and were now imprisoned in the Fleet or the Marshalsea while their wine, currants and other merchandise were seized at the ports to the accompaniment of

considerable tumult in the customs houses. Prominent in organizing this resistance were the merchants John Rolle, who was a Parliament man, and Richard Chambers, who had told the Council to its face that merchants in no part of the world were so screwed and wrung as in England and that even in Turkey they had more encouragement. Chambers was referred to the Star Chamber for daring to imply that Charles's 'happy government' could be compared to a 'Turkish tyranny'. He refused to submit, coupling his refusal with many biblical texts, was fined £2000 and committed to the Fleet where he remained for six years. Parliament was on dangerous ground in encouraging disobedience but covered itself by insisting that it was acting in accordance with the Petition of Right. Charles continued to deny their interpretation of that document and claimed that if there was any question it was the Judges and not the House of Commons who should decide the issue.

In spite of this inauspicious background to the second session of his third Parliament, the Commons were mollified by Charles's first words. He had not, he said, taken tonnage and poundage as a right, pertaining to his prerogative, but as a necessity, and merely until Parliament had granted it to him, being assured, he asserted, that in the previous session they 'wanted Time, not Wills', to give it him. He spoke with the charm and slight diffidence he knew how to assume, cleverly taking the initiative in disclaiming any intention of arbitrary power. Now that Buckingham had gone the odds were in his favour, the speech was received with a murmur of applause, and men remarked on 'the King's fine speaking'. But, as Charles bitterly remarked later, 'his speech which was with good applause accepted, had not that good effect which he expected', for the Commons proceeded to make a further Protestation on March 2 in which they not only encouraged merchants to refuse to pay customs duties but branded those who did so as capital enemies to the kingdom and betrayers of the liberties of England.

This was not all. Even while tonnage and poundage appeared uppermost in their minds they had not let go of the religious issue. They were particularly incensed at the pre-empting of important church offices by Arminians. The years 1627 and 1628 saw the advancement of Richard Neile to Winchester, John Buckeridge to Ely, John Howson to Durham, Richard Corbet to Oxford, Laud to London, and Samuel Harsnet to the Archbishopric of York. The authoritarian Joseph Hall went to Exeter, the controversial Richard

Montague to Chichester in 1628. Charles offered compromise by suppressing the sermons of Roger Mainwaring to which the Commons had taken particular objection — 'No subject may, without hazard of his own damnation in rebelling against God, question or disobey the will and pleasure of his sovereign' — and the Apello Caesarem of Montague. At the same time he threatened that if controversial preaching and printing continued he would take action that would make the perpetrators wish 'they had never thought upon these needless controversies'. There was little doubt that Charles was thinking more of the proliferation of sectarian writing and printing than of the works of Mainwaring and Montague.

As the Commons turned to consider such questions they ordered a fast to prepare themselves for the transition. Charles sent word tartly that 'fighting would do them more good than fasting', that religion was not in such danger as they feared, and that he wished for a conclusion to the customs debate 'not so much out of the greediness of the thing' as to get it settled. But Oliver Cromwell, the Member for Huntingdon, making one of his earliest contributions to the debates of the House, proposed that the business of the King of Earth should give place to the business of the King of Heaven, and his motion was carried.

The business of the King of Heaven, it became clear, was the suppression of Papists and Arminians — 'An Arminian is the spawn of a Papist' — and the encouragement of 'godly' ministers. They believed, contrary to the King's assertion, that 'God's religion' was 'in great peril now to be lost', that popery was on the increase in England, that there was a frequent and public resort to mass, particularly in the Queen's household. Everything they objected to as 'Popery', 'superstitious ceremony' or 'innovation' was condemned and was to be removed. Charles lost patience. They had left tonnage and poundage high and dry for a formless and biased discussion on religion and on February 25 he adjourned the House for a week while his supporters tried to secure an understanding with the opposition. When a further adjournment was proposed on March 2 the House of Commons was angry and disorderly. 'No! No! No!' came from every side. Eliot half rose but the Speaker said he had an absolute command from His Majesty to leave the chair instantly if anyone attempted to speak. As he made to rise two young men, Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine, strode forward and held him down. Privy Councillors who were present helped him to break away, others stopped him, and he was

pushed back into his chair. 'God's wounds! you shall sit till we please to rise!' cried Holles. All was confused. Some Members tried to leave the Chamber but were restrained by others, orders were shouted to the Sergeant at Arms to close the door. When he hesitated Sir Miles Hobart turned the key in the lock and put the key in his pocket. Many Members tried to speak and called for a vote to express their views. Soon Black Rod, sent by the King to dissolve the House, was knocking at the door. Holles then, while the knocking continued, briefly recapitulated what he knew was in their minds: no innovation in religion, no tonnage and poundage unless sanctioned by Parliament; innovators in religion, any who counselled, gave or took tonnage or poundage to be proclaimed an enemy of the state. Holles himself put the question. 'Aye, Aye!' came from all sides of the House. The Commons then voted their own adjournment, the doors were thrown open, and the Members streamed from the House. It would be eleven years before the doors opened upon another Parliament. Charles immediately afterwards drew up a Proclamation for the dissolution and on the 10th went to the House of Lords himself. As he put it,

I never came upon so unpleasant an occasion. The reason is to declare to you, and all the World, that it was merely the undutiful and seditious Carriage in the Lower House that hath caus'd the Dissolution of this Parliament . . . yet . . . let Me tell you . . . that I know that there are many there as dutiful Subjects as any in the World; it being but some few Vipers amongst them that did cast this Mist of Undutifulness over most of their Eyes . . . To conclude, as these Vipers must look for their Punishment; so you, My Lords, must justly expect from me that Favour and Protection, that a good King oweth to his loving and faithful Nobility.

Once again he made the sharp division, consciously or unconsciously employing the old tactic of divide and rule.

As he disrobed after the dissolution Charles looked pleased and declared that he would never put on those robes again. This was not to be quite true, though there were many people, including the Venetian Ambassador, who shared this view. Meantime the chief 'vipers' Eliot and eight others including Holles, Selden, Valentine and Strode — were sent to the Tower or other prisons.^[4]

But Charles's mind was only half upon such affairs. His wife was five months pregnant. When he returned from the disorder of his Parliament to the tranquility of his home he was in high spirits as if, remarked an onlooker, he had freed himself from a yoke.

17—
Peace

The toils from which Charles expected to free himself included war as well as Parliament. He had realized at last the limitations imposed by his finances and without Buckingham his grandiose conceptions of foreign policy shrank to practical size. Already he was considering both French and Spanish peace proposals.

It had long been apparent that the French war was of no help to the Palatinate and that England could be of no assistance to the Huguenots. At the same time France under Cardinal Richelieu was preparing to stand against both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire and sought the neutrality, or better still the assistance, of the English fleet. The Venetian Republic had its own reasons for requiring peace between France, who could protect it against the Empire on land, and England, who could protect it against Spain at sea. The merchant classes of all three countries, who were losing money heavily in the disruption of trade which accompanied hostilities, were strong advocates of peace, while Charles himself would benefit from the increased customs revenue that would accrue from the free flow of merchandise. The efforts of the French and Venetian Ambassadors were backed by courtiers like the Earl of Holland who were pro-French in their sympathies, by ministers who knew the financial necessity of peace, and by the Queen herself, who ardently wished her husband and her brother to be reconciled.

Henrietta-Maria was, indeed, truly happy for the first time since she came to England. In spite of the war Charles sent to France for wine and fruit for her^[1] and he now talked to her of public affairs as well as of the trivia of everyday life — not that she enjoyed affairs of state but she no longer felt excluded. It was noted that the King was always with her, that he loved her dearly, and that his satisfaction over her pregnancy defied exaggeration. Their master and mistress, wrote one

of the Carey sons to Carlisle, were 'at such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again, and her gladder to receive his caresses than he to make them'. Charles celebrated her birthday by riding at the ring in truly chivalrous fashion, instituting himself her champion and taking the ring upon his sword in her honour. The Venetian Ambassador decided that the Queen's influence would grow and that he should ingratiate himself with her.^[2] Their happiness was clouded by the tragic news from The Hague early in 1629 of the fatal accident to Elizabeth's eldest son, the young Prince Frederick Henry. He had been with his father on the Haarlem Mere off Amsterdam when the weather suddenly deteriorated and their boat was rammed by a larger vessel in thick fog. The Elector was saved but the boy, who had just passed his fifteenth birthday, was found the next day, frozen to the mast to which he had been clinging in the icy weather. Charles put his Court into mourning for the nephew he had never seen, he sent Sir Robert Carey to the stricken parents, and tried to cheer Elizabeth by letter.^[3]

When a peace treaty between France and England was signed at Suza on 14 April 1629 the French made no claim for special treatment for Catholics in England, while the English were silent on the question of the Huguenots. Henrietta-Maria took part of the credit to herself and on May 10 came by river from Greenwich to Somerset House where a Te Deum was to be sung to mark the end of hostilities. As she eagerly rose to disembark the impact of the barge on the landing stage made her stumble backwards. She was tired on her return to Greenwich and was startled by two dogs fighting near her. Whatever the reason she fell into premature labour two days later and became critically ill. Madame Peronne, the famous French accoucheuse who was to have come from France, had not arrived; nor had Dr Mayerne, the royal physician. A local midwife was hurriedly summoned but the responsibility was too great and she swooned away in the royal bedchamber. The doctor in charge was left to do his best with a difficult breach delivery. Charles was distraught. He remained by his wife's beside begging the doctor to save her life regardless of the child. On the morning of the 13th Henrietta-Maria gave birth to a son, who lived for only a few hours. She herself rallied, fortified by her husband's devotion and her own buoyant spirit. It was unfortunate that Charles had to fight off her religious advisers in an anti-room to ensure the child's baptism by William Laud in the Anglican faith. The baby was buried that night in Westminster Abbey, close to his grandfather, the funeral service being spoken by Laud.^[4]

It was hard that after four years of marriage an heir should be born only to die immediately. But premature birth and death were too common to be regarded as a tragedy, even by the parents. Henrietta Maria's condition was the more alarming. As Charles had said when he begged the doctor to save her life, he would rather save the mould than the cast. But this was not the chief reason for his anxiety. The possibility of losing the wife he had treated so perfunctorily, and only recently learned to love, made him aware of the depth of his feeling for her, and as they resumed their normal life together Charles's affection appeared even greater than before. He kissed his wife repeatedly in public. 'You do not see that in Turin . . . Nor in Paris either!' he exclaimed, referring to the marriages of her sister and her brother. So difficult did he find it to tear himself away from her that some of his Councillors complained of his inaccessibility and he laughingly told her he wished she could accompany him to the Council Table! She went to Tunbridge Wells to complete her recovery, but so dependent had they become upon one another that she cut short her stay and rushed back towards London to be met half-way by a husband who, similarly, could not bear the separation.

So little was religion now a bar between them that, as her second pregnancy advanced, she would sometimes lie late in bed and Charles would scold her for not hearing mass before noon. So little did she care for public affairs at this time that even the efforts of the Marquis de Chateauneuf, the new French Ambassador, could not move her into the world of intrigue and, instead of drawing England into an alliance against Spain, as he had hoped, he was obliged to watch her amorous exchanges with a husband who thought she could do no wrong. Even her extravagances Charles treated lightly: after all, his mother had been extravagant. 'She is a bad housekeeper' was all that he would say, complacently. Henrietta's mother, fearing that badly-sprung English coaches had caused the miscarriage, sent her a wheelchair, in which she might make short excursions, and a little locket and chain for good luck. 'God be thanked', Charles wrote to his mother-in-law in acknowledging the gift, 'she is so careful of herself that I need exert no other authority than that of love.' Madame Peronne was again booked for a confinement.^[5]

The Court was already reflecting the King's tastes. Pictures from the Mantuan collection were still arriving, carefully packed and shipped by his agents and Ambassadors. All over Europe and the Near East

ambassadors, friends, and agents were seeking out pictures and other art treasures for his collections and those of his courtiers. Artists and art-lovers were beginning to flock to Whitehall. In 1626 Buckingham had invited the Pisan, Orazio Gentileschi, to England; he painted ceilings at York House and Greenwich Palace as well as many canvases. Not least of his attractions was his daughter, Artemisia, who accompanied him and herself painted several pictures. Charles made much of the Gentileschis. He also enjoyed the work of Gerard Honthorst, who arrived in England in 1628 and painted a large portrait group of Buckingham and his family shortly before the Duke's death. The poets, dramatists and men of letters were so numerous they were almost taken for granted by a Court where Sir Henry Wotton, John Suckling, Edmund Waller and a dozen more were normal contacts, while in the City the old master, Ben Jonson, continued to regail the younger poets at his London tavern until his death in 1638. Robert Herrick visiting the capital from his west-country vicarage, Richard Lovelace turning charming verses with his friends at Oxford, the young John Milton beginning to use his talent for words and imagery at Cambridge — all were part of the cultured and pleasant world in which Charles had moved all his life. That they clustered more thickly now was a tribute to himself and his Court. Among much that was ephemeral Charles recognized the enduring worth of some of their work and he acquired the 1635 edition of Donne's collected poems. But he enjoyed the playwrights most of all and particularly, perhaps, Beaumont and Fletcher. He had seen The Knight of the Burning Pestle as a young man; it exactly matched his sense of humour and the two dramatists were much in demand at his Court. He possessed a collected edition of their plays and, as he loved to do, made a list of the titles with his own hand.

It was particularly pleasant when Peter Paul Rubens came to the English Court as the accredited representative of Spain. It was not unusual to use an artist as diplomat and, indeed, diplomats were frequently amateur artists and art collectors. Charles and Buckingham had frequently employed Balthazar Gerbier — artist, architect, inventor, collector, dealer, and curator of Buckingham's art collection at York House — on their diplomatic missions. Sir Dudley Carleton who, before he became Secretary of State, was Ambassador first at Venice and later at The Hague, was painstaking agent for Charles and others, using his position at Venice to search out antiquities and works of art. He himself was an enthusiastic collector, particularly of Vene-

tian paintings, and he did much to bring their vogue into England. Sir Henry Wotton, sometime Ambassador at Venice, was equally assiduous as diplomat and art collector.

Rubens was in a class apart and was well known to Charles as a painter of the first rank. He was a Flemish Catholic, owing political allegiance directly to the Hapsburg Regents of Flanders and through them to Spain. Early in his career he had been used by the Duke of Mantua to take costly presents to Philip III of Spain and while in Madrid had painted the equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma which Charles had seen during his visit. His studio in Antwerp was famous for his own paintings and for the pupils he gathered round him. One of these, Anthony van Dyck, had already visited England briefly, but was now travelling in Italy. Rubens continued to mix art with diplomacy and business with both, and in 1621 had negotiated with Sir Dudley Carleton for the sale of a large canvas depicting a lion hunt for Charles's gallery. Charles possessed at that time only one painting by Rubens, an early work depicting Judith and Holofernes which he felt did little credit to the master's skill, and he was anxious for a more mature canvas. But the first picture sent was basically by a pupil of Rubens and, although allegedly gone over carefully by the master himself, was not acceptable to Charles, who found in it little evidence of the artist's own hand. As Rubens was at the same time executing a life-sized canvas of a lion hunt for Lord Digby on behalf of the Marquis of Hamilton he was probably pressed for time, but the real reason for the scant respect shown to the Prince's perception seems to have been money. He would have charged twice as much, Rubens told Carleton, for a picture entirely by his own hand. He nevertheless agreed to paint one for Charles.

Carleton himself was more fortunate. He had himself made an impressive collection of antiquities, including statues, torsoes, heads, urns and bas-reliefs and these he exchanged with Rubens, who wanted them for the large villa he had built outside Antwerp, in return for several of the artists' own canvases. About the same time Marie de Medici, the Queen Mother of France, asked Rubens to design and paint the panels for her new palace at the Luxembourg outside Paris and in 1625 the artist's twenty-five pictures depicting her early life were unveiled at a wedding feast to celebrate the proxy marriage of her daughter to Charles. While Rubens was in Paris to instal the canvases he met Buckingham and Gerbier, who were there to conduct Henrietta-Maria to England. He had time to draw the Duke's likeness

in preparation for an equestrian portrait which was commissioned, and there was also a certain amount of diplomatic exchange in which Rubens stressed the advantages of peace with Spain.

Rubens and Gerbier continued these exchanges over the next few years and there was a superficial friendship between Rubens and the Duke. But the artist-diplomat had not formed a high opinion of Buckingham, thinking he was 'heading for the precipice' and that when he considered his 'caprice' and 'arrogance' he 'pitied the young king who, through false counsel, was needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into war'. Nevertheless Rubens, who had possibly tired of his antiquities and whose style of life required a great deal of money, was quite prepared to sell them to Buckingham together with paintings by Italian and North European masters. It was an imposing acquisition for the Duke but Rubens prided himself on the fact that he kept back the gem of his collection, 'a divine cameo', a head of Octavius Augustus in white on a background of sardonyx with a garland of laurel in high relief. It was, wrote Rubens, 'of workmanship so exquisite that I do not recall ever having seen the like'.

But art and diplomacy were still hand in glove and the sale covered increased diplomatic activity between Rubens and Gerbier. An attempt of the two agents to meet at Calais without arousing suspicion did not succeed and Rubens kicked his heels vainly for three weeks. But early in January 1628 the two men met in Paris and late in February Gerbier was able to put Rubens in direct touch with Buckingham under cover of the art sale. Throughout the year the agents met in various cities of the United Provinces and by the spring of 1629 Charles was indicating that he would be pleased to deal with Rubens as plenipotentiary without waiting for the exchange of regular envoys with Spain. Charles had, indeed, every reason for wishing to meet Rubens and Cottington's statement, 'The King is well satisfied, not only because of Rubens's mission, but also because he wishes to know a person of such merit', was no doubt inspired. The despatch of Cottington himself to Madrid as Ambassador in August further indicated Charles's willingness to treat.

These diplomatic exchanges were as well known to Christian of Denmark as the actual treaty of peace with France and, angrily, he himself made peace with the Emperor at Lubeck on 12 May 1629. What else could he do? He had been fed with promises too long. Whatever his feelings towards his favourite sister's daughter, he received back his hereditary possessions that had been lost in the

fighting and retired from the war. This was a help to the Anglo–Spanish peace negotiations. The gallant Gustavus of Sweden continued his course. Charles did all he could, allowing Gustavus to levy one regiment of volunteers in England, another in Scotland. He permitted the Dutch — who had no alternative but to continue the war, for to cease fighting meant to cease to exist — to take English soldiers into their service.

Rubens arrived in London on 3 June 1629, and stayed with Balthazar Gerbier. It was less than three months after the dissolution of Parliament, less than two months after the treaty with France. He found, on the one hand, a peace party which was partly Hispanophile, to some extent Catholic, and wholly devoted to retrenchment. On the other hand, there was an anti-Spanish group, activated by the French and Venetian Ambassadors, who wished the English alliance with France to be cemented into an alliance against Spain. This was a Puritan and opposition group, but was in no sense a war party. However much religion cut across Englishmen's allegiance at this time, very few people wanted war, and Charles could count on support for his peace policy.

The day after his arrival Rubens was summoned to Greenwich where he talked a long time with the King. Charles emphasized, as he had always done, that neither his faith, conscience, nor honour would permit him to enter into any agreement with Spain without the restitution of the Palatinate. He added, however, that since he knew it was not in Spain's power to hand over the entire Palatinate, he would be content if the King of Spain would give up his garrison towns. Rubens, though not a trained diplomat, pointed out that such a gesture did not rest with Spain alone, since she held only some of the Palatine garrisons and that if she vacated these the Emperor and the Catholic League would immediately take possession. Charles brushed the argument aside with such impatience that Rubens feared the breaking off of negotiations; yet when he said as much to Weston and Cottington they told him the King had been too hasty and that the Privy Council would not endorse such a stand. Rubens remarked that 'Whereas in other courts negotiations begin with the ministers and finish with the royal word and signature, here they begin with the king and end with the ministers.' He felt that he was negotiating on two levels and remarked sadly that he was 'very apprehensive as to the stability of the English temperament'.

He did not understand, as Charles's ministers now did, that it was

necessary for Charles to say and to believe that he was acting in the interests of the Palatinate. Thus he told the Venetian Ambassador in August, when Rubens had been two months at Court, that his interests in Germany could not be exaggerated, that he kept his attention fixed there and was determined to do all in his power for the relief of his sister.^[6] Though his European commitments had fallen to pieces, and while he was actually negotiating for peace with Spain, Charles was making the same speech he had made at intervals over the years. Rubens, not at first realizing this, was understandably puzzled at the seeming difference between the King's heroic sentiments and the terms of the treaty his ministers seemed about to conclude. Later he jumped to the opposite conclusion, assuming that Charles in his heart desired a simple treaty with Spain and 'cursed the day when the Palatinate was forced upon his attention'. This may have been true at one level of Charles's consciousness, yet his affection for his sister and his determination not to relinquish his efforts on her behalf were real at another level, and resulted in the series of great self-deceptions that started in Spain at the time of the Spanish marriage negotiations. A Spanish marriage, a war against Spain, the relief of Rochelle, and now, once again, friendship with Spain, would somehow, by some alchemy, re-form the Palatinate out of the melting pot of European war so that he could restore it to his sister. His subconscious might have added: to restore it as Henry would have done.

His practical French wife knew better than he did that he was play-acting and, though she herself was traditionally opposed to a Spanish alliance, she accepted the inevitable. She would express her opinion now and then, but on the whole she was too taken up with her private life and her second pregnancy to make much of a stand. One morning, indeed, when Charles indicated the extent of his worry by sending her a white hair he had discovered on his head, she could not resist sending back word that Spain would give him many more before they consented to restore the Palatinate!^[7]

While his diplomatic negotiations continued Rubens also had the opportunity to see at first hand the art collection of which he had heard. With Rudolph II's great collection at the Hradschin Palace in Prague broken up and plundered during the course of the war, and the Mantuan collection largely in Charles's own hands, this was, indeed, apart from the Spanish, perhaps the most impressive collection in Europe, and Charles himself was probably the best informed of princes, as well as the best judge of a canvas. As Rubens examined the

Tintorettos, the Caravaggios, the Raphaels, he had never, he exclaimed, seen in one place so many fine pictures! He remarked, particularly, on 'the marvels of the cabinet of his Majesty' where Charles kept some of his choicest pieces. He told Charles of the Raphael cartoons — The Acts of the Apostles  — which Pope Leo X had sent to Flanders as models for the tapestries he required for the Vatican. They had been retained by the weavers as pledge for payment and were stored at Brussels. Rubens advised their purchase, but it was not until 1630, with his help, that Charles acquired them and sent them to his own tapestry works at Mortlake.

Rubens was impressed, also, by the collections, particularly the statues, of the Earl of Arundel, by the Greek and Latin inscriptions published with commentaries by John Selden, by the fine antiquarian library of Sir Robert Cotton, and by the superb collection of works of art made by Buckingham, which his widow kept intact at York House. He was hardly less enthusiastic about the hospitality he received and by the state in which some of the King's ministers lived. Cottington, for example, entertained Rubens at his country house at Hanwell in Middlesex where, wrote the artist, he lived 'the life of a prince, with every imaginable luxury'. Rubens enjoyed London. He portrayed Charles and Henrietta-Maria as St George and the Princess in a big landscape he painted showing the Thames as he saw it from his window in Gerbier's house. He depicted Gerbier's children in the great canvas The Blessings of Peace which symbolized his mission. He gave both pictures to Charles — indubitably by his hand and perhaps to make up for that first endeavour of the King to secure a mature Rubens. He also gave a self-portrait to Charles — the only monarch he had so honoured; and he agreed to design and execute a series of paintings in commemoration of James I for the ceiling of Inigo Jones's Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. He found Charles himself no mean draughtsman and went over some of his sketches with help and advice. Charles, for his part, knighted the painter with his own hand at Whitehall on 3 March 1630 afterwards presenting him with the jewelled sword which had been used for the ceremony, a diamond-studded hat-band, and a ring from the royal finger.^[8]

They were happy days for Henrietta. She wore always her mother's locket and her pregnancy proceeded normally, her only anxiety being the fate of her midwife and her dwarf, who were captured by pirates in the Channel when coming to England. An appropriate ransom, and perhaps some element of gallantry, secured

their release. The anxiety of Elizabeth and Frederick waiting in Holland was less easily assuaged, and they could scarcely believe the news of the negotiations in England. Frederick broke into sobs in front of Sir Henry Vane; Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes, declared her faith in Charles's old promise, and refused to believe that he would ever consider a treaty that did not include the full restitution of the Palatinate. She, like her sister-in-law, was pregnant. Henrietta's child was born on May 29, a large, healthy, very dark, and not at all beautiful boy who was christened Charles. A little girl, who was to be Elizabeth's last child, was born on October 13 and christened Sophie; she was a lively and pretty baby whose line was destined to take over the throne of England from her Stuart cousins. The christening of the two infants could not have been more dissimilar.

Charles was christened in the public chapel at St James's Palace on 27 June 1630. Turkish carpets covered the floors, there was rich damask on the altar and on the stairways, crimson taffeta curtains hung on the walls. Mary, Marchioness of Hamilton, carried the baby, wrapped in ermine, from the nursery to the chapel, preceded by the Aldermen of London in scarlet gowns, the peers, heralds, pursuivants, Gentlemen ushers and the deputy godparents. Laud read the prayers, a choir with two organs sang the Lord's Prayer. As the onlookers in the two galleries along each wall watched, Laud baptized the baby according to the Book of Common Prayer, the heralds recited the infant's titles, Laud preached the sermon, and led prayers for the King, the Queen, and baby Prince. The godparents had not been a difficult choice. Religion apart, Charles wanted his sister and her husband to share in his happiness and their consent gave general satisfaction. But politically, as well as for his wife's sake, he had to ask her brother, the King of France, and her mother, the dowager Queen, to sponsor the baby. He hoped, indeed, that none of them would be present at the christening, partly because he preferred a quiet ceremony, partly on grounds of expense: a French contingent, particularly, would cost more than he could afford. In the event Louis, on religious grounds, declined to sponsor the child, the Queen Mother felt it impolitic to come, and the Duchess of Richmond stood proxy for the Palatines, giving the baby a jewel worth £7000. Charles gave £1000 to Madame Peronne and appropriate presents all round. Henrietta-Maria was enormously proud of her big, ugly baby. 'He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him', she wrote to Madame de Saint-Georges, 'but his size and fatness supply the want of beauty. He is so

fat and so tall, that he is taken for a year old, and he is only 4 months: his teeth are already beginning to come: I will send you his portrait as soon as he is a little fairer.'^[9]

Meantime the diplomatic activity heralded by Rubens's visit ran its course and the Treaty of Madrid between Spain and England was signed by Cottington in Madrid on 5 November 1630. The King of Spain promised to do his best for the recovery of the Palatinate, Charles promised to mediate with the Dutch with a view to ending their resistance to Spain. French hopes of a union with England against Spain were dashed and England stood as uncommitted in Europe as she had done after James's treaty with Spain in 1604 — which, indeed, the new treaty much resembled. The Spain that thus held out the hand of friendship was less belligerent and weaker than the Spain that Charles had known in the previous decade, the fears of earlier years had died down and there was little open opposition to the treaty in England even if there was not much general enthusiasm — except, perhaps from the mercantile classes. Charles wrote affectionately to Elizabeth, assuring her he would always remain a good brother. Elizabeth was now able to take the news of the treaty calmly while her husband remarked that he supposed the King of England could not make war upon everybody. The wheel had come full circle. James's peace policy had prevailed. But his dream of heading a Protestant League in Europe lay in ashes, while his daughter and her family remained the visible sign of that failure. For Charles the spectre was always there. Not so much for the sake of religion; to lead a Protestant crusade was never his ambition. But the failure of his relationship with Elizabeth was ineradicable. The extent of his concern, and the lengths to which he was prepared to go, are indicated by the secret treaty he allowed Cottington to sign on 2 January 1631, by which he agreed to make war upon the Dutch and to partition the Netherlands with Spain in return for a nebulous offer of support in recovering the Palatinate. The terms were obviously unacceptable and Charles never ratified the engagement; but neither was Cottington reprimanded. On the contrary, he brought home £80,000 worth of Spanish silver bullion to the converted into Bills of Exchange payable in Brussels for the maintenance of the Spanish troops who were holding down the Dutch. Silver in hand in return for promises to pay so delighted Charles that he immediately raised Cottington to the peerage as Baron Cottington of Hanworth in Middlesex on 10 July 1631.

But there were other things for Charles to think about. He now

had a son who was the first male heir born to a reigning English monarch since the time of Henry VIII. The baby, moreover, whereas Charles himself was by birth a Scot, had been born on English soil: in the third generation the Stuart line had established itself in unimpeachable legitimacy and 'Englishness'. Henrietta-Maria's nationality did not affect this aspect of the situation. But her religion did; there was considerable unconcealed dismay at a half-Popish heir who would take precedence over the offspring of the Protestant Elizabeth, and the bonfires celebrating the birth of Prince Charles owed as much to obligation as to spontaneous joy. It was all the more necessary for Charles to show that the Prince would be brought up in the Protestant faith. He made one mistake in putting the baby in charge of the Countess of Roxburgh, a Scottish Catholic who, as Jane Drummond, had been one of his mother's closest friends and whose appointment would have pleased his wife. But he soon placated Protestant opinion by replacing her with the Countess of Dorset, the wife of the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, of unquestionable Protestant family.

He was, according to his lights, practising conciliation both at home and abroad and he had few misgivings for the future as family life opened up before him.