The Cradle King (42 page)

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While James’s reputation was increasingly tarnished, his son and heir was coming into his own. On Twelfth Night 1610, an entertainment known as the ‘Barriers’ effectively marked the start of his public career. This spectacle, staged in the Whitehall Banqueting House by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, drew on Arthurian themes and lauded England’s warlike kings, culminating in the figure of Chivalry being stirred from sleep in her cave to hail Prince Henry. This was followed by the ‘barriers’ proper, fifty-six ‘challenges’ with various ‘shows and devices’ that lasted until dawn. Henry, it was recorded, rose to the occasion with panache, performing ‘to the great wonder of the beholders’, and parrying thirty pushes of the pike, and 360 sword strokes, ‘which is scarce credible in one so young in years, enough to assure the world, that Great Britain’s brave Henry aspired to immortality’.
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On 4 June 1610, his status was enhanced as he was created Earl of Chester and Prince of Wales, in great state. From that point on, he held court at St James’s Palace – a court that often appeared more popular than the King’s own, much to James’s chagrin: ‘Will he bury me alive?,’ he was reported to have exclaimed. At St James’s, Henry built up significant collections of art, antiquities and books, as well as a winter house and a deer park. A gentleman travelling with the Landgrave of Hesse marvelled at Henry’s collection of ostriches, American chickens, pheasants, rabbits, turtle doves, ‘a large eagle-owl’ (Buhu), parrots, and ‘a rare Indian bird called an emu that can devour burning coals’.
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Henry’s intellectual and scientific interests were wide ranging: he asked Ottaviano Lotti, the Duke of Tuscany’s agent in London, to obtain for him the plans for Michelangelo’s staircase in the Laurenziana Library, Galileo’s latest book, a new magnet from Elba, and the recipe for cement that joined terracotta piping so that it could carry water.
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Henry was also an avid reader of news of foreign affairs. Even as early as 1607, Salisbury had encouraged this by forwarding ambassadorial despatches to him: ‘I have sent to you with the last dispatch from Ireland, the reading whereof will every day prove more proper to the Prince of Bretany than Aristotle or Cicero.’
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To his father, Henry was a valuable bargaining chip in the European royal marriage game. Throughout the years when he was absorbed in challenging the Roman Church in print, James was in regular negotiations with Catholic princes to further the fortunes of his own family. As the eldest, Henry was the first of James’s three surviving children to go on the market. In 1604, when the Constable of Castile visited the English court, Queen Anna was vocal in her support for a proposal that he should marry the Infanta Anne, eldest daughter of Philip III of Spain and heiress to the Spanish throne; negotiations were quickly scuppered when Philip insisted on a precondition that Henry be sent to Spain to be educated as a Roman Catholic, and attempts to revive the proposal foundered in 1605 and again in 1607. For Elizabeth, James had looked initially to France, but the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 spelled the end of his hopes there. James turned his attention fleetingly to other European princes in Germany and Sweden – even the widowed King of Spain. In April 1611, a suggestion came that Elizabeth should marry the Prince of Piedmont, the eldest son of the Duke of Savoy, on the condition that Henry marry the Duke’s eldest daughter, but James would not bite. Two more possible wives for Henry were paraded – a Savoyard princess, and the eldest daughter of the Regent of France – but Henry remained noncommittal.

The Prince of Wales had his own ideas about who he and his sister should marry. From the age of ten, Henry had been in correspondence with his first cousin Frederic Ulric, son of the Duke of Brunswick; in the summer of 1611 he petitioned his father to allow Frederic Ulric to marry Elizabeth. James refused this, as he did a simultaneous bid from Otto, Landgrave of Hesse, who visited England for the purpose. Finally, in the summer of 1611 James entered negotiations with the family of Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who ruled from Heidelberg. It seemed a good match: the Count Palatine was the most senior secular prince in Germany, and one of four entitled to elect the Holy Roman Emperor; in time Frederick would become the titular head of a Protestant union in the area. His mother was Louisa Juliana, the daughter of the Low Countries hero William of Orange, ‘the Taciturn’. Henry liked the idea, it was rumoured, since he harboured secret plans to accompany his sister to Germany, and there to find a wife for himself.

In May 1612, a deputation from the Palatinate came to London to agree the contract for the marriage between their Elector and Princess Elizabeth. James offered a dowry of £40,000 and an allowance; Frederick would give his bride £1,500 per annum, and provide for her retinue of thirty-six men and thirteen women. If she were widowed, Elizabeth would receive an income of £10,000 and be able to live where she chose. The marriage of the couple’s children would be subject to the advice and consent of the King of Great Britain. The only sticking point in the negotiations was Queen Anna, who made no attempt to hide her disdain for the match, which she thought to be beneath her daughter’s dignity. She teased Elizabeth that she would be known as ‘Goody [goodwife] Palsgrave’.
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Frederick arrived in England on Friday 16 October. Two days later he was received at the Banqueting House in Whitehall where he was embraced by James, kissed the Queen’s hand, and saluted Henry. Elizabeth, demurely, had not looked ‘with so much as a corner of an eye towards him’. As the Elector made to kiss the hem of her gown, she made a deep curtsey, and ‘with her hand staying him from that humblest reverence, gave him at his rising a fair advantage (which he took) of kissing her’.
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James pronounced himself pleased with the Elector’s ‘good and discreet carriage’, and even Anna, who was still ‘not willing to the match’, began to come round to the idea. Over the next few weeks, Frederick avoided the usual young men’s pastimes of hunting, hawking and tennis, and spent much of his time in Elizabeth’s Whitehall apartments, seeming to ‘take delight in nothing but her company and conversation’.
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On Thursday 29 October, Prince Henry was noticeably absent from a banquet at London’s Guildhall in honour of the Palsgrave, and two days later a scheduled play was cancelled; it was said he was suffering from a fever. This was not surprising. From the beginning of 1612, Prince Henry had been noted to be pale. He attempted to deal with this by forcing his body to the limit, riding hard, playing tennis ‘for the space of three or four hours’ in his shirt ‘as though his body had been of brass’, and swimming in the Thames at Richmond; he would ‘also delight many times to walk late at night by the river’s side in moonlight to hear the trumpets sound an echo, which many suspected, because the dew then falling did him small good’. By the autumn, keeping to his gruelling routine, Henry was visibly weaker with ‘dead, sunk eyes’, and had started to suffer from a ‘continual headache, laziness and indisposition increasing (which notwithstanding … he strove mightily to conceal), whereas oft before, he used to rise early to the morning to walk the fields, he did lie abed almost every morning until nine of the clock, complaining of his laziness, and many mornings before his rising, ask the grooms of his Bedchamber, “How do I look this morning?” … which they, fearing no danger, would put off with one jest or another’.
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Henry’s condition quickly worsened at the end of October. He was afflicted by ‘a great looseness, his belly opening twenty-five times’; physicians attempted to heal him, first with the usual bleedings, purgatives and enemas, before, in desperation, turning to pearl, the bone of a stag’s heart, unicorn’s horn, and a poultice of ‘warm cocks and pigeons newly killed’. The gravity of the situation was publicly guessed at when neither the King nor the Queen attended Bishop Andrewes’ court sermon on 5 November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and by the prayers the Bishop offered up for the Prince. In time, Henry’s sight faded and he could not endure the candlelight in his chamber. It was claimed that his last words before descending into delirium were for Elizabeth: ‘Where is my dear sister?’ Elizabeth had tried to visit him, but was not allowed into the chamber since it was feared the Prince’s illness was contagious.
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Henry died at around eight in the evening of 6 November 1612.
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As with virtually every royal death of the period – and especially the unexpected, early deaths – rumours of foul play swirled. John Chamberlain wrote that it was ‘verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary ague that had reigned and raged all over England since the latter end of summer’, and that Henry had been killed by bad medical practice – he pointed the finger at James’s own physician, Mayerne.
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Latter-day experts have suggested enteric fever, typhoid fever or porphyria,
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but at the time poison was the most popular explanation – and more than one commentator pointed the finger directly at James, jealous of his son’s own popularity. Francis Osborne claimed that ‘King James was by fear led into this extreme: finding his son Henry not only averse to any popish match, but saluted by the Puritans as one prefigured in the Apocalypse for Rome’s destruction’. Osborne was informed by Primrose, Henry’s ‘foster-brother’ that James ‘did dread’ his son to the point that ‘he would not deny anything he plainly desired’. He tells of how the King’s jester Archy once taunted James that he ‘did look upon Henry rather as a terror than a comfort to the King’. Although James upbraided Archy for his insolence, those present did not fail to notice that the jester’s words had reduced the King to tears.
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James was not at his son’s deathbed. A few hours earlier, ‘apprehending the worst and not enduring to be so near the place’, he had secretly left for Theobalds, where he fell seriously ill for three days, missing his son’s funeral at Westminster Abbey on 8 November. When he was well enough to travel, he elected to go to Kensington, ‘not brooking well the sight of any of his own houses’. Chamberlain noted that Henry’s death ‘was exceeding grievous’ to both King and Queen and ‘specially to the King who takes it with more impatience than was expected’.
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But Anna too was deeply moved. The Venetian ambassador reported that he did not offer the Queen condolences on the death of her son. ‘I was advised to act thus, and so have other ambassadors, because she cannot bear to have it mentioned; nor does she ever recall it without abundant tears and sighs.’
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It may be that Anna never recovered from the loss of her first-born. When Charles was installed as Prince of Wales four years later, she refused to attend, according to Chamberlain, ‘lest she renew her grief by the memory of the last Prince who runs still so much in some men’s mind’.
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Chamberlain’s remark was no hyperbole. If he had been popular and admired in his lifetime, then Henry became a legend in the years after his death. Elegies and lamentations in his honour were legion.
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The lawyer and parliamentarian Simonds D’Ewes later wrote that ‘The lamentation made for him was so general, as men, women and children partook of it’.
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Over the next few years, as James encountered new and major challenges to his rule, Henry came to stand for a glory that England had lost. In the words of the courtier and poet Fulke Greville, to take just one example: ‘A man may say of this Prince, as was said of Maecenas, both for wisdom and strength of body, there was not the like to be found among the English.’
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While allowing that Henry deserved ‘the highest epithets belonging to an active, generous, and noble cavalier’, Francis Osborne was less carried away. ‘The truth is, Prince Henry never arrived at the great test, supremacy in power, that leaves the will wholly to its own guidance.’
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But the idea of Prince Henry as the embodiment of England’s ‘Lost Renaissance’ is a tradition that has continued to this day.
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Elizabeth’s marriage was postponed. This was not only out of respect for her dead brother: with only her younger brother Prince Charles between her and the English throne, was not Elizabeth now too grand to marry the Palsgrave? By Christmas, the matter was resolved, and on 27 December 1612, Elizabeth and Frederick were formally affianced and contracted in the Banqueting House in Whitehall in the presence of the King. Anna was absent, ‘as they say, troubled with the gout’, but widely rumoured still to be set against the marriage. Frederick, who arrived escorted by Prince Charles, wore purple velvet trimmed with gold lace; Elizabeth was in black relieved by only a little silver lace, but with a plume of white feathers on her head ‘which fashion was taken up the next day of all the young gallants of the court and city, which hath made white feathers dear on the sudden’. James kissed them both and gave them his blessing, then ‘directed them to go down, hand in hand, some twenty paces or more, into the middle of that great room; where was a carpet spread on the floor for them to stand on’. Sir Thomas Lake, filling in the still vacant post of Secretary, read the relevant passages from the Book of Common Prayer, in French for Frederick’s benefit; but sadly his Englishman’s French was as incomprehensible to the Palsgrave as his English, and the couple dissolved in helpless giggles until the Archbishop of Canterbury stepped in to give the proceedings some gravitas.
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