The Cradle King (46 page)

If Somerset paid attention to James’s passionate warning, any good intentions were quickly dissipated by the reality of the rise of George Villiers. Sir James Graham was still pushing hard for Villiers’s advancement. Money was raised to buy him a new wardrobe, and heavyweight lobbying led to Villiers’s appointment as Cupbearer, which allowed him to attend on James at table every alternate month. This allowed James to speak to him, and praise his conversation.
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In December 1614, it had been rumoured that James had given £1,500 towards the masque to be performed on Twelfth Night, just for ‘the gracing of young Villiers and to bring him on the stage’.
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Although James was no great lover of masques, the sight of Villiers dancing was enough for him to order it to be restaged two days later. Portraits of Villiers emphasise his long, slim legs, and Arthur Wilson testified that ‘No one dances better, no man runs or jumps better. Indeed,’ he quipped, ‘he jumped higher than ever Englishman did in so short a time, from a private gentleman to a dukedom.’ The jump to the dukedom was still in the future, but Villiers was already launched. In March 1615, James visited Cambridge, only to be surprised by Villiers appearing in a student play. As Roger Coke wrote, ‘At this play it was so contrived that George Villiers should appear with all the advantages his mother could set him forth: and the King, so soon as he had seen him, full of admiration of him, so as he became confounded between his admiration of Villiers and the pleasure of the play … This set the heads of the courtiers at work, how to get Somerset out of favour, and to bring Villiers in.’
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It was one of the leaders of the anti-Howard faction, the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, who proved to be instrumental in bringing a group of lords together to persuade the Queen to back Villiers’s suit to join the King’s Bedchamber. This was a necessity: in order for a new favourite to be allowed into the intimate circle of the King, Anna had to request it. This was strategic: if she were later to ‘complain of this
dear one,
he might make his answer, “It is long of yourself, for you were the party that commended him unto me”.’ Anna at first declined to help. ‘My lord,’ she told Abbot, ‘you and the rest of your friends know not what you do. I know your master better than you all, for if this young man be once brought in, the first persons that he will plague must be you that labour for him. Yea, I shall have my part also. The King will teach him to despise and hardly entreat us all, that he may seem to be beholden to none but himself.’ But ‘upon importunity’, the Queen agreed to do her part.

On St George’s Day, 23 April 1615, Anna was visited by James and Prince Charles. She took the opportunity to beseech her husband ‘to do her that special favour as to knight this noble gentleman, whose name was George, for the honour of St George, whose feast he now kept’. James allegedly ‘at first seemed to be afeard that the Queen should come to him with a naked sword’, but she ‘so pressed it with the King’, wrote Abbot, ‘that he assented’ being ‘so stricken while the iron was hot that in the Queen’s bedchamber the King knighted him with the rapier which the Prince did wear’. Somerset made a last plea that Villiers should be made only a groom and not a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, but Abbot got a message to Anna that she ‘would perfect her work’ if he were made a Gentleman. When Villiers, now a Gentleman of the Bedchamber with a £1,000 per annum pension, emerged from the Queen’s chamber, he threw himself at the Archbishop’s feet, protesting ‘that he was so infinitely bound unto me that all his life long he must honour me as his father’.
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It was a body blow to Somerset. He knew that now he could not expect always to be first in James’s affections, nor first to receive his protection. In July, evidently concerned that enemies might bring some past misdemeanour to light, Somerset asked the King to grant him a formal pardon under the Great Seal to indemnify him against prosection for all past offences in his life.
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The Venetian ambassador believed this was a pre-emptive strike against the rumour that Somerset was ‘said to have appropriated a considerable quantity of the Crown jewels’.
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Whatever the motive, James acquiesced, and signed a pardon, but this time he was stymied by his Lord Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere, who refused to put the Great Seal to it, claiming the pardon was unconstitutional. James conferred with Somerset and gave him instructions to stage a performance at the end of the Privy Council meeting on 20 August. As planned, the Earl rose and alleged ‘that the malice of his enemies had forced him to ask for a pardon’, and asked James to order Ellesmere, ‘if he knew anything against him, to say it there’. James instead ‘spoke at length in praise of Somerset, concluding by saying that he had done very well in asking for a pardon, and that he had granted it to him with great pleasure, not because he would have any need of it in his own days, for during his life he was quite safe’ – a clear message to the Council that Somerset remained in favour – ‘but because he wished that the Prince’, and here James put his hand on his son Charles, ‘may not be able to undo that which I have done. And so, my Lord Chancellor, seal the pardon immediately, for that is my will.’

Ellesmere fell on his knees, asking the King to understand that there was no precedent for such a warrant. Since James had made Somerset Lord Chamberlain, ‘guardian and keeper of his palace’, did he intend to ‘give him the jewels, the hangings, and the tapestry, and everything that was in the palace, since it was in the pardon that no account was to be taken of him for anything’? If the King wanted him to put his seal to the pardon, then Ellesmere required a formal indemnity for his ‘fault and offence’ in doing so. James ‘grew very angry, saying that he ordered him to pass it, and that he was to pass it’, and stormed out of the Council chamber. Somerset immediately set about finding precedents for such a pardon, employing the scholarly talents of the great manuscript collector, Sir Robert Cotton, but to no avail. The Council chamber exchange had been reported to the Queen, who went to see her husband, along with several others of the anti-Somerset camp. ‘She and the enemies of Somerset were so busy with him and perplexed him so’ that the Lord Chancellor got his way: neither the original pardon nor Cotton’s second attempt to procure one were ever sealed.
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Despite James’s highly theatrical support for Somerset, the Earl’s influence was clearly waning. Sarmiento reported that even in the Bedchamber, where the Earl had authority, ‘there are persons who will neither speak to him nor take off their hats to him’, giving ‘the greatest trouble and embarrassment’ not only to Somerset but to the King himself.
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There is evidence of James’s increasing exasperation with his erstwhile favourite. Somerset now tried to influence James in his appointments, promoting Thomas Bilson, the Bishop of Winchester, for a major post (perhaps Lord Privy Seal or Warden of the Cinque Ports), and worse, suggesting that Bilson go to Theobalds to beg the King for it. James was mightily irritated at such importunity, and dashed off another letter, complaining about being ‘needlessly troubled this day with your desperate letters’, and berating Somerset for sending the Bishop.
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James received Bilson ‘with good words’, said that ‘he thought well of him, and perhaps meant to bestow the place upon him, but he would take his own time and not do it at other men’s instance, so that he should do well to go home, and when there were use of him he would send for him’.
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The Bilson affair was a major rebuff for Somerset, and damaged further his relationship with James. But perhaps, as Villiers’s biographer Roger Lockyer has argued, the fatal blow came at the end of August 1615. James, returning from his summer progress, spent a few days at Farnham Castle. ‘It was there,’ claims Lockyer, ‘that Villiers played the trump card which ensured his victory over Somerset.’ Somerset had withdrawn from sharing a bed with James, and it seems that Villiers may have spent the night at Farnham with the King. Years later, writing to thank James for an enjoyable court visit, Villiers related how he had spent all the journey home asking himself ‘whether you loved me now … better than at the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’.
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In September 1615, news reached Sir Ralph Winwood that was to send Somerset crashing down. It was reported that his friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who had died in the Tower of London two years earlier, had been the victim of poison.
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The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Gervase Elwes, was summoned, and admitted that he had managed to thwart attempts by the Deputy Keeper Richard Weston to poison Overbury, but that ultimately Sir Thomas had fallen victim to an arsenic-laden enema, administered by an apothecary’s boy, which ‘produced sixty or more stools till he expired’.
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Elwes had not spoken of this because he was afraid of impeaching ‘great persons’: he did not mention the Somersets, but he did not need to. James was informed, and immediately placed the matter before the Privy Council. He ‘made in the Council a great protestation before God of his desire to see justice done, and that neither his favourite, nor his son himself, nor anything else in the world should hinder him’, resolving ‘to use all lawful courses that the foulness of this fault be sounded to the depth, that for the discharge of our duty both to God and man, the innocent may be cleared, and the nocent may severely be punished’.
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At this point, James may have suspected that ‘wicked persons of mean condition’ might have invented the story in order to ‘alienate his mind’ from Somerset. Reading Elwes’s confession, James wrote a memorandum that if the Deputy Keeper’s allegations were not proved true, ‘then there must be a foul conspiracy … for the finding out no pains is to be spared … When innocency is not clearly tried, the scar of calumny can never be clearly cured.’
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The Deputy Keeper, Weston, was first to be arrested and interrogated, and by the end of September he had implicated a woman named Mrs Turner and, through her, the Countess of Somerset. It seems that the Countess, disliking Overbury’s hold on her husband, and well aware of his personal antipathy to her, had decided to get rid of him by poison.

By now the investigators felt they had enough evidence, and their leader, Sir Edward Coke, set off for Royston to apprise the King of developments. Somerset, who was with James as usual, had already heard of the inquiry, and set off for London, meeting Coke en route and begging him to return to the capital; the Lord Chief Justice naturally refused, and Somerset knew he could hardly return to Royston with Coke, since this would ‘make much of the business’. Instead he continued on his way but returned early the following morning, once again passing Coke on his way, although this time ‘they passed one another with nothing more than a mutual salute’.
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When he met James again, Somerset realised that events had moved on and he needed to return to London to clear his name. In the courtier Anthony Weldon’s account, the parting of the King and his favourite was highly charged. ‘The King hung about his neck, slabbering his cheeks, saying, “For God’s sake, when shall I see thee again? On my soul, I shall neither eat nor sleep until you come again.” The Earl told him on Monday. “For God’s sake, let me,” said the King, “Shall I, shall I?” then lolled about his neck. In the same manner at the stair’s head, at the middle of the stairs, and at the stair’s foot. Yet as the Earl entered his coach James said: “I shall never see his face more.’”
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From London, Somerset wrote to James, charging him of being ‘too faint in not resisting the superb judges’ wilfulness’ in ordering an investigation. James had no regrets. He had only to look to his conscience before God, and his reputation in the eyes of the world. ‘I confess I ever was and will be faint in resisting to the trial of murder, and as bold and earnest in prosecuting the trial thereof.’ He complained that ‘from the beginning of this business’ both Somerset and Suffolk had consistently behaved ‘quite contrary to the form that men that wish the trial of the verity ever did in such a case’. James rejected Somerset’s claim that such a commission was unlawful and his suggestion that the unsympathetic Ellesmere should be replaced on the commission, and reproached the Earl for his ‘so much scribbling and railing covertly against me and avowedly against the Chancellor’. ‘I never had the occasion to show the uprightness and sincerity that is required by a supreme judge as I have in this,’ he protested. ‘If the delation [accusation] prove false, God so deal with my soul as no man among you shall so much rejoice at it as I, nor never shall spare, I vow to God, one grain of rigour that can be stretched against the conspirators. If otherwise (as God forbid), none of you shall more heartily sorrow for it; and never king used that clemency that I will do in such a case.’ If, by serving his conscience, ‘I shall lose the hands of that family, I will never care to lose the hearts of any for justice sake.’ The reference to ‘that family’, the Howards, was not incidental. ‘Fail not to show this letter to your father-in-law,’ concluded the King, ‘and that both of you read it twice at least; and God so favour me as I have no respect in this turn but to please Him in whose throne I sit.’
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