5—
Prince of Wales

Not until Monday 4 November, 1616, was Charles formally created Prince of Wales. It was a simple ceremony without show, for several reasons: it was very cold, Charles had been unwell, the Queen could not bear the memories evoked of Henry, the King did not wish to make too much of his successor, and money was short. But Charles came down river from Richmond on the previous Thursday, as Henry had done before him, and was 'most joyfully met' at Chelsea by the Lord Mayor of London and the City Companies in their various barges, with banners flying, music playing, and drum and trumpet sounding. Thomas Middleton composed a water masque for the occasion in which, braving the cold, London was seen sitting on a sea unicorn flanked by Neptune and the rivers Thames and Dee, with six tritons before her. Spectators thronged the banks of the river to see, if not to hear, Charles addressed as 'Treasure of hope' and 'jewell of mankind/Adorn'd in titles, but much more in minde'. After this they all proceeded down river, the tritons sounding their horns, and were met at Whitehall by the two deities, Hope and Peace, likewise defying the weather. Peace, sitting on a dolphin, concluded the river festivities with a song of welcome to the Prince:

Welcome, oh welcome, Spring of Joy and Peace!
Borne to be honour'd, and to give encrease
Welcome, oh welcome, all faire joyes attend thee,
Glorie of life, to safety we commend thee!

The Prince then landed at Whitehall stairs preceded by nobles and officers of the Court. As he made his way through the palace he was received by various dignitaries until he reached the door of the Presence Chamber where the festivities ended for the day.

On the following Monday, 4 November, the actual investiture took place. Preceded by heralds and trumpeters, by the Earl Marshal,

the Lord Chamberlain, twenty-six Knights of the Bath newly created to mark the occasion and various dignitaries carrying his robes and symbols of office, came Charles, bareheaded, supported by the Earls of Suffolk and Nottingham and followed by the Gentlemen of his household. So he entered the Presence Chamber where the King was seated on his throne with his barons and bishops on one side, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London with the Judges and members of his Council on the other. It was now Charles's turn to have the words of investiture addressed to him, to receive the ring and the sword from the hands of his father, to be robed and crowned as Prince of Wales. After the patent was read it was handed to him by the King, who kissed him twice. At this moment the trumpets and drums sounded, after which the King rose and departed.

Charles remained to dine in the Hall, and was served with great state and magnificence. The meal was formal, the Prince at the head of the table, the nobles seated according to their degree, none nearer than four yards to the Prince. The Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Dorset, bareheaded, acted as cupbearer and carver, Dr Senhouse, the Prince's chaplain of the golden voice, said grace. The newly-created Knights of the Bath sat at a separate table on the Prince's right and he courteously drank their health. At a decent distance were the members of the Court privileged to be onlookers, among them Sir Symonds D'Ewes, destined to report other things than the Prince's inauguration, who remarked with satisfaction that he was standing very near the Prince's chair all the time. The King and Villiers watched from a balcony. If by Court standards the entertainment had not been lavish they had, as the Venetian Ambassador predicted, 'spent money by handfuls'.^[1]

The Careys had again been observing the formation of Charles's household with more than ordinary interest. Would Sir Robert become Chamberlain to the new Prince of Wales? If he were so advanced, what of the influential bedchamber post? James, still determined not to loosen the reins round Charles, gave orders that no one be enrolled into the Prince's household without his knowledge. This complicated matters. But Carey was equal to the occasion. He sought out the Queen, won her support—for had not he and his family served the Prince exceedingly well from his infancy?—and so managed affairs that he secured both offices. 'Thus', he remarked complacently in his Memoirs after telling the story in detail, 'did God raise up the Queen to take my part.' Carey had already married his daughter to Lord Whar-

ton's heir; his eldest son was made Knight of the Bath at the time of the Prince's creation, and in 1620 married Martha, eldest daughter of the wealthy City financier, Lionel Cranfield. Cranfield was then rising rapidly to the height of his power and influence; he had been knighted in 1613 and became Privy Councillor in the year of the marriage. In the following year he would become Lord Treasurer and in 1622 Earl of Middlesex, his rise being due to the simple fact that he was the only one to make some success of clearing out the Augean stables of the royal finances. His career was typical of the combination of business and politics, private interest and public advantage which were characteristic of the time. In giving good service while turning the occasion to his own profit, Lionel Cranfield was doing in one sphere what Robert Carey was doing in another.^[2]

Charles, Prince of Wales, was, at sixteen, well accustomed to such men. He perceived, however, that in George Villiers, who was rapidly taking the place of both Salisbury and Somerset, James had an adviser of a different stamp. The rise of Villiers was unimpeded. Between January and August 1616 he had become Master of the Horse, Knight of the Garter, Viscount Villiers and Baron Whaddon. On 5 January 1617 he was created Earl of Buckingham. As he grew in power he grew in strength and beauty. He had, like Prince Henry, an indefinable charm. Like Henry he excelled in all things physical. Impetuosity and quick temper rather added to his charm until power and influence burned them to arrogance and impatience. The impact which his physical presence made on contemporaries is astounding. 'He was one of the handsomest men in the whole world', wrote Sir John Oglander. 'From the nails of his fingers—nay from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. The setting of his looks, every motion, every bending of his body was admirable,' wrote Bishop Hacket. Bishop Goodman wrote in greater detail:

All that sat in the Council looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as if it had been the face of an angel. . . . He was the handsomest bodied man in England; his limbs so well compacted, and his conversation so pleasing, and of so sweet a disposition. . . . I have heard it from two men, and very great men . . . that he was as inwardly beautiful as he was outwardly.

Sir Symonds D'Ewes, not perhaps easily influenced, 'saw everything in him full of delicacy and handsome features'.^[3] His wife repeatedly asserted that she regarded it as the greatest privilege to be married to

him. King James was captivated and went so far as to acclaim his infatuation out loud to his Privy Council in the autumn of 1617: 'You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf, and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John, and I have my George.'^[4]

But if Buckingham resembled Prince Henry in some ways, he was at the same time less earnest than Henry and intellectually less able. Charles was bound to compare the two. Moreover Buckingham, who was only eight years older than Charles, was usurping the place close to his father which Charles might well have expected to be his. That the Prince's own sword should have been used for Buckingham's first step up the ladder was bitter. The relationship between the two young men was strained. When Charles accompanied his father Buckingham was there too — quick of speech, sensing the appropriate remark, guiding the humour of the King. If Charles compared the new favourite with Henry he perhaps compared both with himself. Although he was now fit to take his place as Prince of Wales, not only without embarrassment but with dignity and a certain charm of his own, it was a strange irony that three of the people of his own generation to whom he was close early in his life were outstanding—his brother, his sister, and now his father's favourite. In spite of Charles's development some feeling of inadequacy, some failure, in his own mind, to measure up to what was expected of him, the awkwardness of his continuing stammer, even some resolutely suppressed resentment, show in the diffident stance of his portraits and the nervous fixity of his eyes. Nothing could express the difference between George Villiers and Charles Stuart more tellingly than two portraits painted by Daniel Mytens about this time.

Yet at fifteen Charles retained some of the boy's curiosity, some of the impish humour apparent in the letters to Henry and his mother. In 1616 he was attracted to a ring the favourite was wearing and tried it on. He absent-mindedly kept it. When, some time later, the ring was required it could not be found. James scolded Charles who was reduced to tears but ultimately the ring was discovered in the pocket of one of his suits. On another occasion, when the trio were walking in the gardens of Greenwich Palace, Charles turned the fountain of an ornamental pond full on Buckingham and drenched his suit. James boxed Charles's ears. Charles played tennis with Buckingham but they

quarrelled. Buckingham's temper induced some physical action whereupon Charles responded every inch the Prince: 'What, Sir, you intend to strike me!' James was alarmed. He commanded the young men to love one another. Buckingham staged a great feast of reconciliation, which he termed the friends' feast, at his newly purchased house at Wanstead in Essex. It was held out of doors with hangings draped from the trees to form an imaginary palace. Many of the favourite's family were present and James drank to them all in turn, vowing to advance their race above all other and confident, so he said, that his posterity would do likewise. Charles entered into the spirit of the reconciliation and James wrote to him shortly afterwards: 'I must confess to my comfort without flattery that in making your affections to follow and second thus your father's, you show what reverent love you carry towards me in your heart.'^[5]

Charles, indeed, needed a friend. He was genuinely fond of his father but such was James's regard for his favourite that he could not have one without the other. Subtly the relationship changed. Charles used for Buckingham the nickname James adopted, Steenie, because of a fancied resemblance to St Stephen. Buckingham called him, as his father did, Baby Charles. Charles's letters to Buckingham became intimate and he used him as intermediary with his father. There was, for example, a misunderstanding concerning his mother's will. Charles believed that the King wished him to persuade her to make one, leaving her jewels to Charles. James thereupon became extremely angry. Charles wrote a letter of apology and explanation. Buckingham then told Charles of his father's continuing anger, possibly exaggerating it, and Charles begged Steenie to intervene with his father, writing with a mixture of dignity and abjection: 'I sent to have the King's aprobation of that which I thought he had desyred . . . my meaning was never to clame anie thing as of right . . . I pray you . . . tell him . . . that I will be content to have anie pennance inflicted upon me so he may forgive me.' He signs himself 'Your treu constant loving frend Charles P.'^[6]

In 1617 James paid his first, and what was to be his only, visit to Scotland since his accession to the English throne. He was absent from the capital for seven months, of which part of May and the whole of June and July were spent in his native land. Buckingham went with him but Charles, to his deep disapointment, was left behind. 'I am sorie for nothing', he wrote to his father after he had left 'but that I cannot be with your Majestie at this tyme both because I would be

glad to wait upon you, and also to see the Cuntrie whair I was borne and the customes of it.'^[7] The Prince, however, who had been made a member of the Privy Council the previous year, was one of a Council of six, which included his mother and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would be responsible for governing the country while his father was away. Although the Venetian Ambassador remarked that he thought the Queen and the Prince would not play a great part in the decisions of the Council, Charles was becoming familiar with affairs of state. He received ambassadors, he was getting used to talking to them, he asked pertinent questions, and always took a written account of the proceedings to read to the King afterwards. He was described as 'very grave and polite' and he dressed for the occasion. When he received the Venetian Ambassador at the end of 1617, for example, he was in scarlet and gold with a gilt sword at his side and white boots with gold spurs on his feet.

The Venetian Ambassador noted that Charles was 'very dear' to his parents. But it was undoubtedly his father whose influence at this time was the most profound. Whatever the ultimate judgment on James, he was not a man to be ignored. The figure he cut at Court in his younger days was not unimpressive. The eyes were shrewd. Although not tall, he was above middle height and well built, while the hunting he delighted in gave him an air of physical fitness and a ruddy complexion: several of his early portraits depict a handsome man. His speech was 'swift and cursory, and in the full dialect of his country'. The remarks he made were terse and apposite though often astonishingly crude, metaphor, simile and allusion coming naturally to him. In serious discourse he could hold his own with anyone. If his undoubted learning did not sit lightly upon him he at least knew how to use it with effect; if his writings and his speeches were sometimes over-long they were packed with matter and were rarely dull.

Charles learned from his father the love of God and the supremacy of kings: 'first of all things, learne to know and love that God, whom-to ye have a double obligation; first for that he made you a man; and next, for that he made you a little God to sit on his Throne, and rule over other men.' He learned of the Divine Right of Kings and the importance of the royal prerogative; if in practice James stretched it too far yet he could warn that 'prerogative is a secret that ryves (tears) in the stretching'. He was warned against Puritans — 'very pests in the church and commonweal' not to be suffered 'except ye would keep them for trying your patience, as Socrates did an evil wife' — and

against the 'horrible crime of witchcraft' which Charles was 'bound in conscience never to forgive'. He was told to embrace knowledge and learning, which is 'a light burden, the weight whereof will never presse your shoulders' and, particularly, to study his own craft, which was to rule his people: 'And when I say this, I bid you know all crafts: For except ye know everyone, how can yee controll every one, which is your proper office?'

As a guide to language, on which James was competent to speak, he advises 'be plaine, honest, naturall, comely, cleane, short, and sententious'. Indeed, in the apt phrase, the pointed aphorism, James had few equals, even in that age of fine language and word play. Whatever the occasion James could redeem it by a phrase. When he wished country gentlemen to leave the Court and return to their seats in the country he told them that a 'country gentleman in town is like a ship at sea, which looks very small; a country gentleman in the country is like a ship in a river, which looks very big.' His diatribes against tobacco were famous. It was probably his love of the hunting field with its good, clean air that gave him such a detestation of tobacco smoke that 'maketh a kitchen of the insides of men'. He cut down the Preface to the Trew Law of Free Monarchies 'least the whole Pamphlet runne out at the gaping mouth' thereof. He had decided opinions on most things. Football was 'meter for laming then making able the users thereof'; idleness was 'the mother of all vice'. If the royal pronouncements to Parliament were often far from tactful they contained many phrases upon which an heir to the throne could ponder.

In biblical matters James' thoughts ranged widely and his works included A Meditation upon the Lord's Prayer , dedicated to Buckingham in 1619, A Meditation upon St. Matthew's Gospel , written in 1620, and a translation of the Psalms, whose printing was authorized by Charles in 1631. 'Your inheritance', the Bishop of Winchester told Charles in editing James's collected works in 1616, 'consists as much in the workes of your Father's Royall Vertues, as in the wealth of his mighty Kingdom.'

Some of his precepts James most abjectly failed to live up to. The man who could advise his son: 'impaire not by your Liberalitie the ordinarie rents of your crowne' was doing exactly that. The man who could advise that kings in their persons should be 'as bright lamps of godlinesse and vertue' grew more dependent upon handsome young men, would be seen lolling upon their necks, caressing them in public. As he grew older James became, also, more careless of his appearance and would slobber his wine, of which he drank increasing quantities

both with and between meals. He was also inclined to dribble his food. Possibly he gave little heed to his eating, for his custom was to have learned men near him with whom he could converse at meal times. In his dress in his younger days he was quite dapper, but he had a morbid fear of assassination, quite natural after the experiences of his youth, and took to wearing padded and quilted garments which gave him a somewhat grotesque rotundity. His legs, which had never been strong, were afflicted with arthritis and he tended to walk one-sided. His propensity for the ridiculous was constantly landing him in ludicrous situations, as when he was thrown from his horse into a stream in winter, going in through the ice head first and up to his waist so that only his legs were visible kicking the air. On another occasion he leaped from bed crying 'treason!' when some sporting guns were let off nearby. He slept in the middle of a mass of empty beds so that no assailant might come near him.

In his prime he was able to combine hunting and absence from Court with a steady hand upon affairs of state and he could get through more work in a couple of hours than most men in a day; that the hand was less steady and more often withdrawn in his later years was the effect as much of illness as of age or inability. Taking him all in all, James was no mean king and not one to be ignored. Nor, as a father, was he to be underestimated. And Charles neither ignored nor underestimated. The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings he carried with him to his dying day, so implicitly that he never felt the need to enunciate it in so many words. It was his tragedy that, whereas James was not called upon in the final count to vindicate the theory, Charles gave his life for it, or for something very like it.^[8]

The object of the Scottish visit was largely James's concern to bring the Scottish Church into a nearer conformity with English worship. His intention to end faction in the English Church had been demonstrated by the conference at Hampton Court over which he presided in the first year of his reign. That conference, if it did nothing else, authorized a new translation of the Bible and emphasized James's abhorrence of Presbyterianism in the words 'no bishop, no King'. Bishops had been re-established by the Scottish Parliament in 1612 but had been given scant approval by the Scottish people as a whole. James nevertheless now wanted to introduce other customs such as kneeling whilst taking communion. That he had his way, albeit with difficulty, was partly because the fervour of religious controversy in Scotland

was at the time somewhat cooled. But there was nevertheless astonishment and protest at the installation of an organ in the chapel of Holyrood House and the arrival by sea of carved wooden figures of patriarchs and apostles. The carvings had to be removed as 'popish images' although, as James remarked, there would have been no objection if he had set up dragons and devils.

Nearly £22,000 had been assigned from the Exchequer for the Scottish journey, a sum not particularly large but sufficient to emphasize the shortage of money generally and so to add to the gloom of the autumn and winter of 1617/18 after the King's return. Charles agreed to act as sponsor to Elizabeth's second son, born on Christmas Eve, but there was still no money to attend the christening. James was plagued with arthritis and gout, Anne was ill, Christmas was dull, the Twelfth Night masque, Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue , was undistinguished, although Charles's dancing was praised. But the February valentining went forward in the usual way. Each man and woman drew from one of two boxes and, thus paired, danced together, ate together, exchanged presents, and kissed whenever and wherever they met. Charles joined in with the rest. The royal family was further cheered in February by the Muscovite Ambassador, who paid his first visit to the King in great state. It was a considerable tonic to James that the presents he brought exceeded in value those he had given to Queen Elizabeth. They included skins of martens, of ermine and black foxes, silks and cloth-of-gold, heavily jewelled Turkish bows, scimitars with precious scabbards, knife cases powdered with turquoise and other fine jewels, and twelve large Icelandic falcons, their hoods embroidered with pearls. Sixty Muscovites, wearing their long native robes and fur caps, with gorgets of great price around their necks, marched through the streets of London before the gaping populace. The Ambassador himself, a 'bulky monster', dined with the King and threw himself on the floor, touching the ground with his head, when the King drank his health.^[9]

Some of the great figures of Charles's boyhood were meanwhile making their final bow. Before the year 1618 was out the tragedy of Raleigh had drawn to its conclusion. Raleigh was released from the Tower in order to equip an expedition to search for the gold he still believed existed in the region of the river Orinoco near Spanish territory in Guiana, but on condition that he provoked no quarrel with Spain. Charles and his mother looked approvingly on Raleigh and watched his preparations with interest, while Gondomar spoke darkly

to the King of upsetting Spain and jeopardizing the Spanish match. The inevitable clash with Spanish settlers occurred and Raleigh returned without gold and without his son, a young man of great promise who had been killed on the Orinoco. His trial and condemnation — he was still under the death penalty from his conviction at the beginning of the reign — followed inevitably though Anne interceded earnestly for his reprieve. Raleigh was beheaded on 29 October 1618 and one of the last links with Elizabethan life was cut.

Bacon remained, shrewdly observing the scene. He could see Charles, as well as his father, being brought increasingly under the influence of Buckingham and as early as 1616 he had taken the bold step of writing to the favourite reminding him of his responsibilities to the Prince: 'it would be an irreparable stain and dishonour upon you . . . if you should mislead him, or suffer him to be misled by any loose or flattering Parasites'.^[10] Charles, for his part, recognized the quality of the man and when Bacon became Chancellor in 1617 Anne and Charles showed their respect by sending, in the King's absence in Scotland, their own representatives to do him honour.

In Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, Charles saw a man of different stamp, a lawyer whose name he would become accustomed to see widely in print and whose views would play a big part in the constitutional controversies of his reign. Coke's physical courage sometimes quailed before the wrath of James, but he never abandoned his position. When James assured Coke that he, as King, would defend the common law, Coke replied that, on the contrary, the common law defended the king. But when James turned on him in fury, shouting that the king was protected by none but God, that the king protected the law not the law the king, Coke fell on his knees in terror. Coke's insistence that the common law was supreme over any other jurisdiction, that it could be expounded only by the judges, and could be halted for no one, not even the king, hit at the heart of the prerogative as James understood it. He told Coke he was a knave who argued in sophistries and threw the ultimate jibe at the great lawyer — that he should go and study the common law. He proceeded to punish Coke by sequestering him from the Council; he forbade him to ride the summer circuit, insulted him by ordering him to revise his law reports, and dismissed him from the bench. Charles and his mother were very concerned for the Chief Justice, and Anne intervened with the King 'to have him used less insolently', but to no avail.

While his father and Buckingham increasingly supplied the impetus to his life, other influences round Charles were subtly changing. In 1617 Sir Henry Vane had joined his Household as cofferer. Vane's appointment, indeed his whole career up to this time, was typical of Court preferment in its mixture of patronage and purchase. According to Clarendon, who did not like him, Vane was a man 'of very ordinary parts by nature, and he had not cultivated them at all by art, for he was very illiterate. But being of a stirring and boisterous disposition, very industrious and very bold, he still wrought himself into some employment.' He was a very different type from the Murrays and Dallingtons, and even from the Careys of Charles's young days.

In the tittle-tattle of Court life, meantime, the old gossip flared up from time to time. There were snide references to Jimmy Davidson. Occasionally the even uglier rumour was revived in great secrecy by Bedy the Dane, that he was the natural father of Prince Charles. Charles shut his ears to such talk. He blushed, indeed, 'like a modest maiden' at any loose conversation or lewd word and this, in itself, was sufficient to fan gossip. When the Venetian Ambassador wrote in 1616 that Charles's constitution was still sufficiently delicate for him to wait two or three years before taking a wife, the Courts of half-a-dozen Princes took note. Warming to his theme the omniscient Ambassador announced that Charles either did not feel, or instantly subdued, the passions normal to a young man. It was, indeed, still being rumoured widely in Germany in 1621 that the Prince was physically incapable of becoming a father. 'So far as one knows', wrote the Venetian Ambassador as late as 1622, 'he has not tasted certain youthful pleasures and apparently has not felt love except by some show of poetry.' But for once the Venetian was wrong. Charles had, in a stiff and decorous way, sown a very few wild oats. In 1615 he was involved in an affair for which, as he wrote to Buckingham, his father gave him 'a good sharp potion'. But, he continued, 'you took away the working of it by the well-relished comfits ye sent after it.' Charles had met a lady with whom he was enamoured and was going to meet her again — possibly the arrangements for the meeting were the 'well-relished comfits' which Buckingham sent.^[11]

A few years later the verses, which are possibly those to which the Venetian Ambassador referred, were penned. In the summer progress of 1618 the King, Buckingham and Charles stayed at the house of Sir Nicholas Bacon where Anne Gawdy, his granddaughter, was also

living. The girl was beautiful and was made much of by the King and the two young men. The Prince, in particular, was 'so far in liking' that he wrote some adolescent lines to her, whose merit depended solely upon the fact that they contained an anagram of her name:

Heaven's wonder late, but now earth's glorious ray,
With wonder shines; that's gone, this new and gay
Still gazed on: in this is more than heaven's light —
Day obscured that; this makes the day more bright.

It is likely that in this respect, as in other physical matters, Charles was late in developing — was 'slow enough to begin to be eager after the feminine prey', as Buckingham put it. Indeed, Buckingham did not regard him as ready and ripe for these affairs until he was twenty-one or two years old.^[12]

But, quite apart from his own feelings or his own capabilities, the Prince of Wales could not be ignored in the European marriage market. Gondomar, in particular, had been sitting quietly at the centre of his own web of intrigue, close by the King's person, since 1613, and since time was on his side in the sense that the Prince must certainly marry someone, he was prepared to wait, weaving his web with patience, to ensure that the marriage would be between Charles and the Infanta Maria. James, for his part, was not sorry when the French match cooled in 1616 and he was able to turn his attention exclusively to Spain. But there were difficulties. His Privy Council would be against a Spanish match, his Archbishop of Canterbury would be against, Buckingham was against, a Parliament would certainly be against. Charles himself — conscientious, hard-working, dutiful, decorous Charles — was hardly considered.