Charles the King (12 page)

“Two jacks, Madam,” she announced, and picked up her winnings. “Whatever made the King choose this man Wentworth? Shall I deal again?”

“One hand more, Lucy,” Henrietta said. “Bishop Laud advised it; he argued and argued with the King for days saying that Parliament wasn't to be trusted and that Wentworth would desert them if he was approached. You know what a dogged creature the Bishop is, and eventually he got his way. The King thinks a great deal of him you know.”

“I know,” the Countess said, “they have a mutual interest in theology. I didn't know it was extending to politics.”

“Everything is extending to politics,” Henrietta retorted. “The word Parliament sounds in my ears like a curse—everything is politics and money and the war. Oh, I'm so utterly sick of it!”

“Of course you are,” her friend leaned across and patted her hand sympathetically. “But I'm still curious about the new Lord Wentworth. What does the King think of him now that he's been at Whitehall for a month?”

Henrietta frowned. She had spent some time with Wentworth and she thought he was dictatorial and unattractive.

“The King has a wonderful opinion of him,” she answered. “I haven't seen him so drawn to a man since the Duke of Buckingham. God knows what it is they have in common—he doesn't care for music or art or religion, in fact there's nothing one can discuss with the man except hunting and politics.”

Lucy Carlisle trumped the Queen's hand and finished the game without mentioning the new Minister again. But she thought about him with great interest while she was talking to Henrietta about the new fashion for high collars on women's dresses. They covered the bosom, the Queen said, and the Countess said naughtily that the costume would not be popular with men. So Wentworth was not only the King's Minister but also his friend. He was a stern, outspoken boor, the last man in the world that she would have noticed or spoken to except for his extraordinary rise in power and importance. If the King liked him, he was worth cultivating. And there was only one way in which the Countess cultivated men. Later that evening, Wentworth was astonished to receive a note in the Countess's own handwriting, inviting him to dine at her house in the Strand. At the end of the evening he had impressed her with his energy, vision and abilities, and she had made him aware of his ambitions, warned him against those men near the King who were hostile to him and proved that she was not only beautiful, but alarmingly clever. He was not the man to be seduced at a first meeting and she did not make such an amateur's mistake. She offered her friendship, and in her position with the Queen it was of inestimable value to him.

She came to the door and gave him her hand to kiss as he left. She had a faultless instinct for those who were about to rise high in the world, and this strange man with his rugged face and domineering personality was going to be a great man and a very powerful force in the government of England. When she became his mistress, she would know his secrets and have a share in his power.

The King had signed the Petition of Right, and in return Parliament granted him an immediate subsidy of money as evidence of their good faith. But it was only a fraction of what was needed; now Eliot and the rest expressed their dissatisfaction with the way in which the King and his Bishops were governing the Church.

Exasperated, Charles ordered Parliament to adjourn, and went down to Portsmouth to see Buckingham.

It was August, 1628, and the expeditionary fleet was almost ready to sail. The streets were full of troops and sailors and the human rubbish which accumulates in ports. The town was packed with beggars and pedlars and prostitutes, and the King's arrival brought out the local gentry to present themselves and offer him hospitality. Among the crowd pushing and elbowing its way down the North end of Portsmouth High Street, was an unemployed ship's officer with a crippled left hand who had travelled from London the previous Tuesday. This was thirty-five year old John Felton, a poor Puritan who had twice made his way to Portsmouth when the first expedition to La Rochelle was gathering and besought the Duke of Buckingham to give him a command. He wanted to join what he believed to be a crusade against the anti-Christ and he had pestered the Duke's household and written letters to the Duke himself. He had been a persistent nuisance, and it was unfortunate that Buckingham received the last communication on a day when he was harrassed and short-tempered. Felton begged for the command without which, he explained, he could not live. Buckingham sent him the answer that in that case he would have to hang.

Felton borrowed tenpence and bought a knife from a cutler on Tower Hill and set out once more for Portsmouth, with the insulting dismissal of his faith and himself pounding in his head like an old Testament prophecy. At nine o'clock on that Saturday morning the Duke was breakfasting in public in the Hall of his house when he saw John Felton for the first time, moving towards him in the crowd. He had an appointment to wait on the King, and as he left the table the pale and shabby young man who had been staring at him suddenly rushed forward, and before anyone could stop him he drove his knife into Buckingham's heart.

Henrietta had never seen a man prostrate with grief before. For a moment she stood looking at her husband; he was white and haggard and his eyes were red with weeping. When he embraced her he clung like a child, and now it was her turn to strengthen, her hand that wiped his tears and stroked his hair, and she held him against her and rocked him as if he were the child she had never born. Her greatest enemy was dead—her rival, her persecutor in the early days—and she sat for a long time without speaking, nursing her husband in his grief without anything but love and pity in her heart. She heard him mumble the Duke's name repeatedly, and she hushed him gently, and for the first time as she listened to his outpouring of sorrow and regret, she understood what that ill-matched friendship had meant to him.

His courage, his confidence, even his marriage, were in some part due to the influence of the man Henrietta had hated and despised. She could see the reason for Charles's love, and she was no longer jealous of it. She was his wife and at last she was in full and undisputed possession of his love. She could afford to be generous to the dead.

That autumn, the last expedition sailed to relieve La Rochelle under the command of Lord Lindsey. Its original commander had been given an almost Royal burial in Westminster Abbey, and his assassin had fulfilled his destiny and been duly hanged. His remains were rotting in chains at Portsmouth as the fleet sailed. Charles had kept his word, but the cost was crippling and the result was worse than failure. La Rochelle surrendered to the King of France before the English could engage in battle.

Charles had rifled his Treasury and shattered his people's confidence for nothing. And the Parliament that reassembled that winter was in a very different mood from the assembly which had been swayed by the moderate council of Wentworth. Charles had granted the Petition of Right in the hope that they would appreciate his good will and unite under his sovereignty. They repaid his concessions by refusing him the revenue from the Customs and launching a violent attack upon the government of the Church. Everything possible was said and done to convince Charles that he had gained nothing by signing the Petition and that the House of Commons was seeking to encroach still further on his power by interfering with ecclesiastical matters. Pym and Eliot denounced the King's Bishops, particularly Laud who was known to favour the Anglican ritual and the solemn Communion Service. They raised an issue which struck at the King's heart and his dearest belief, by pressing for the abolition of diocesan government, an extreme which had been regarded as High Treason even during the Reformation. Charles' father had quelled such an attempt with the remark that without Bishops there would soon be no King, and the Parliament of the day had agreed with him. James had been a politician first and a Protestant after, but his son was a man to whom religion and the purity of his English Church was not an expedient but an article of deep faith and sacred trust. He bore the titles, Supreme Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith, and there was no basis in any law or precedent in the whole history of England for what his Parliament was trying to do in nullifying his authority.

He found little help at the Council table; Newcastle suggested imprisoning the leaders and fining the rest; Holland and Goring disagreed without suggesting a sensible alternative; and the Earl of Essex made Charles his lifelong enemy by supporting the Parliament.

In the end he sent for Wentworth.

The King sat by a blazing log fire in Henrietta's Audience Chamber at Whitehall, and his Minister stood in front of him, his hands behind his back in the attitude Charles knew so well. He was frowning, and he had listened to the King for twenty minutes while Charles confessed his anger and disgust with the attitude of the Commons and increased Wentworth's anxiety by telling him simply that he would rather resign his Crown than perjure his Coronation oath and permit his Church to be defiled by heresy.

The two men understood each other well; they had come from mutual respect to friendship, and finally to complete confidence and deep affection.

“As you know, Sire, I am not a particularly religious man,” Wentworth said at last. “But that doesn't mean I cannot appreciate your point of view. However, if you'll forgive me, I know the Commons and you don't. For every one who talks sincerely when he attacks the Bishops and sees the Pope lurking behind every surplice, there are fifty who are only interested in attacking them because it is a means of attacking the authority of the King. Pym may be honest according to his lights—I know Eliot is a hypocrite and a liar. If any man were to accuse them of seeking to destroy you, they would rise and deny it with their hands upon their hearts. But I tell you this. I sat in that Commons and I know the machinery it uses. I used it myself to present the Petition of Right, that was the only concession any loyal subject could expect you to grant. You granted it. In the last few months I am beginning to think it was a mistake.”

“I always thought so,” Charles said bitterly. “I don't blame you, Thomas, but it was weakness, and weakness only breeds contempt. When a King submits to his subjects, he ceases to be a King. This is one lesson Parliament has taught me, and I promise you I shall never forget it as long as I live.”

“You granted it, Sire, because you were in the one position which made you dependent upon them. You were at war. Now you have asked me for my advice and I am going to give it. Make peace with France. Make peace immediately. La Rochelle has surrendered and it is useless to continue. And dangerous. Sire. As long as that assembly sits at Westminster you are in danger. I know them, and I have been watching what they are trying to do. They are challenging more than the ritual of the Church. They are challenging the authority of the King to rule. So you will have to rule without them. Not for one year or two, but for the rest of your life.”

Charles rose and walked a few paces across the room. It was dark and very quiet.

“No sovereign has done that for hundreds of years,” he said at last. “Even the Tudors governed with Parliament.”

“Not this Parliament,” Wentworth said. “They ruled with the Council, and so must you. Parliament was never summoned except for money and then as seldom as possible. It was a good precedent and the Commons in those days were a flock of sheep compared to the wolves sitting at Westminster now.” He came close to Charles, his tall heavy figure overshadowing the slender King. If he had dared he would have touched him, so strong was his emotion, his
conviction
that what he was advising was the only course.

“You are the King,” he said. “You are God's Anointed. I may not have your faith, but I believe that above all things in the world. And you must
be
King, in the sense of that Divine vocation. Fulfil it, Sire. Rule England, and rule it alone. I swear to you it is the only way, and I swear that you can do it. You are the law; your word and your wisdom should be sufficient for your country. Dismiss this Parliament and let it be the last of your reign. So long as you keep England at peace, you need never summon them again.”

“And that is your advice, Thomas?”

“It is, Sire.”

Charles pushed a strand of red hair back from his forehead; he wore it down to his shoulders in the fashion described by the Puritans as lovelocks, a symbol of moral degradation and Satanic vanity.

“All my life I have known what I must
not
do,” he said slowly. “It is easier than knowing what I
must
do. God knows, in the past year I have wished that the government of my kingdom depended upon me alone, and yet I never thought it possible to alter what has always been—from the days of Edward I who founded Parliament. I love my country and I love my people. I want to do what is right for both. Leave me, Thomas. I want to think on this.”

He gave his hand to Wentworth who knelt and kissed it reverently. The door closed and Charles was alone. He went back to his chair by the fire and sat down, looking into the flames. He had been King of England for nearly four years, and his reign had brought nothing but discord and chaos at home and defeat in his enterprises abroad. Everything he did had been criticized and sabotaged by the representatives of his subjects; his wife was hated and vilified for her religion and her innocent love of dancing and play-acting; his wars had been fought against Parliament as much as the enemy, and he had been unable to win against either. A Puritan had murdered his best friend, and Puritans up and down the country were preaching sedition and heresy with the approval of the House of Commons.

He sat on, watching the logs blazing up the chimney, while the candles in the wall sconces flickered and died one by one, and his thoughts turned back to that day at Westminster Abbey when he drove out alone to his Coronation and made his solemn vows to defend his subjects and their liberty and protect the purity of his Church. He had walked down the long nave, following the path taken by his ancestors, by good men and tyrants alike, the younger son who had been chosen by God to be the King. He was the law, as Wentworth said. He was only a human being, with more than some men's burden of doubt and irresolution in his nature, innocent of personal ambition or love of power for its own sake. But he was the living embodiment of a Divine institution. Whoever attacked him attacked what he represented and if he capitulated anything to his enemies, his Coronation oaths were broken and his soul was stained with blasphemy. A King had founded Parliament. The time had come when a King must abolish it.