The Cradle King (59 page)

This last night was the tenth night of his Majesty’s fever, which exercised such illness on a weak body, which, being reverenced and loved with so much cause as his Majesty hath given, struck much sense and fear into the hearts of his servants that looked upon him. Yet to deliver to you the state clearly, this day his Majesty hath taken broths, hath had large benefit of nature, and slept well. And, more to your comfort, his Majesty did, with life and cheerfulness, receive the Sacrament in the presence of the Prince, the Duke, and many others, and admitted many to take it with him; and in the action and the circumstances of it, did deliver himself so answerable to his writings, and his wise and pious professions, as did justly produce mixed tears between comfort and grief; and this day, and now this night, he recovers temper, rests, in appearance to us, strength, appetite, and digestion; which gives us great hope of his amendment, grounded not only upon desire, but upon the method of judicious observation.
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On the night of Friday 25th, a stroke loosened the King’s face muscles, so that his jaw dropped. His swollen tongue, combined with huge quantities of phlegm, constantly threatened to suffocate him: it was said that ‘his tongue was swollen so big in his mouth, that either he could not speak at all, or not be understood’.
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He was also afflicted with severe dysentery, suffering, it was reported, ‘in filth and misery’.

Sensing he was near death, he called for his trusted Andrewes, but Andrewes was himself ill with ‘a sore fit of the stone and gout’.
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Instead Lord Keeper John Williams and George Abbot came. After failing to engage the King with cheerful conversation, Williams knelt beside the bed and told the King that the end was near. James asked to partake of the Communion, repeated the Creed, declared himself in love and charity with his neighbours, and received the Sacrament, according to Williams, ‘with that zeal and devotion as if he had not been a frail man but a cherubim clothed with flesh and blood’. Conway wrote how James ended the Creed by saying ‘There is no other belief, no other hope!’ and when Williams asked him whether he would have the absolution read, answered ‘As it is practised in the English Church I ever approved it; but in the dark way of the Church of Rome, I do defy it.’
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On Saturday afternoon, his physician Sir William Paddy told him ‘that there was nothing left for me to do but to pray for his soul’.
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The King called for his son Charles and tried to speak to him, ‘but nature being exhausted he had no strength to express his intention’. Williams prayed with the King, and read out forty-one ‘sentences’, short devotional phrases that James attempted to repeat, ‘but his soul began to retreat more inward and so by degrees he took less notice of external things’. The end came on Sunday 27 March 1625, just before noon, when with ‘lords and servants kneeling on one side, his archbishops, bishops and other of his chaplains on the other side of his bed, without pangs or convulsions at all, Solomon slept’.
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*   *   *

On the night of Monday 28 March, the corpse of King James was brought from Theobalds back to London, travelling through Smithfield, Holborn, Chancery Lane, and down the Strand to Queen Anna’s old residence, Denmark House, to lie in state until 10 April. As he had been twenty-two years earlier, James was welcomed to the capital ‘by all the nobility about the town, the pensioners, officers, and household servants, besides the Lord Mayor and aldermen’, but according to John Chamberlain the solemnity was lost: ‘it was marred by foul weather, so that there was nothing to be seen but coaches and torches’.
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From the outset, the accession of King Charles was hailed as a fresh new start for British royalty. To the public, the twenty-four-year-old was already a dashing figure, due to his romantic exploits in Madrid and his committed military stance against Spain; to the Commons, he seemed to be well informed and receptive to their point of view. By the end of his reign, in stark contrast, James had become a distant, aloof monarch; his occasional forays into public life were hopelessly compromised by an innate distaste for crowds and an almost instinctive knack for putting his most offensive thoughts into words. Twenty-two years of what many perceived as negligent government, a grossly lavish lifestyle, and an unsavoury parade of pretty young favourites, was at an end, and not before time.

Immediate reactions to the new King focused on the destruction of James’s corrupt Bedchamber. Already James’s men, sent to Denmark House to attend on the late King’s body, were worried, ‘apprehensive that by their absence they might be dispossessed of their places and lodgings’. They were right to be concerned: they had been quietly ousted, and Charles’s smaller personal retinue had moved into lodgings next to his own at Whitehall.
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The Countess of Bedford reported on 12 April that Charles was showing all the right signs of being his own man: ‘for ought anybody yet can discover, he makes his own determinations, and is very stiff in them’. Already, the Countess wrote, he had ‘changed the whole face of the court very near to the same form it had in Queen Elizabeth’s time’, cutting down on his personal retinue, letting the Privy Council go no further than the Privy Gallery, and permitting only the Gentlemen of his Bedchamber to go beyond. The new King was pious, never failing, ‘morning and evening’, to come to prayers in his closet, and listening attentively to sermons: ‘so as there is all good signs that God hath set him over this kingdom for a blessing’.
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John Chamberlain confirmed that ‘The King shows himself every way very gracious and affable, but the court is kept more strait and private than in the former time. He is very attentive and devout at prayers and sermons gracing the preachers and assembly with amiable and cheerful countenance, which gives much satisfaction, and there is great hope conceived that the world will every way amend, if the necessity of the time constrain not the contrary now at the first.’
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The Venetian ambassador Zuane Pesaro was similarly impressed. ‘The King’s reputation increases day by day. He professes constancy in religion, sincerity in action and that he will not have recourse to subterfuges in his dealings. His attention to those things renders him more popular, and he conducts himself with every propriety.’ Charles was seen to spend many hours of his day reading a book, which was thought to be a manuscript collection of edifying maxims. Well briefed on matters of state, Charles made a point of appearing in the Privy Chamber every morning, ‘in the presence of all the lords and officials of that apartment. He detains some in conversation and salutes the others and leaves them all happy and devoted.’
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The finishing touches were put to the picture when Charles married Henrietta Maria by proxy on 1 May, and six weeks later welcomed his bride at Canterbury.

And yet this same gilded youth was to become the most despised of kings, the man who pushed the country into Civil War, was forced from his throne, tried for treachery, and died on the scaffold on 30 January 1649, in front of what had been his own Whitehall Palace. Why Charles should have fallen so precipitously has exercised the minds of historians, politicians and biographers for three and a half centuries, and no critical consensus has been reached. But some of the most rooted causes may lie not in his reign, but in that of his father. For Charles’s accession in March 1625 was not the clean start so lauded by contemporaries. James left many legacies, not all of them good. Even as he lay dying, his most recent foreign policy decisions were proving themselves murderously disastrous on the ground. His finances were hopelessly compromised. A series of scandals – the Overbury murder, the fall of Bacon and Middlesex – had shaken public confidence in government. His series of fraught encounters with the English Commons had left the Crown constantly on the defensive.

Another successor might have avoided some of these unwanted bequests, but Charles was already too implicated. Unlike James, who had consistently distanced himself from government, for the past five years Charles had shown himself keenly interested, a regular attender at Privy Council meetings and in Parliament. And Charles made one decision that was to prove highly damaging: he followed James by keeping Buckingham as his confidant and chief counsellor. Buckingham had reacted to the death of his self-styled maker by publicly wallowing in grief, falling seriously ill once again (‘much troubled with an impostume that brake in his head’ reported Chamberlain), and having to be carried to the funeral in a chair.
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Charles immediately adopted him: ‘I have lost a good father and you a good master,’ he said, ‘but comfort yourself, you have found another that will no less cherish you.’ Buckingham joined Charles’s own Bedchamber, and was confirmed in all his offices – Charles even gave him a golden key as a symbol of his right to enter any royal residence at any time of day or night.

But within months, Buckingham was a liability, despised by the public, and vilified by the House of Commons. Much of the opprobrium was a reaction to his foreign policy failures: various much-vaunted attempts at an alliance with France fell through, and a 1627 mission to save the Huguenots of La Rochelle ended in an ignominious siege on the Isle of Ré, leaving the Duke as the object of widespread ridicule. In 1626 Dr George Eglisham implicated Buckingham of malpractice in the deaths of the Duke of Lennox, the Earl of Southampton, the Marquis of Hamilton, as well as that of King James himself.
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Charges were brought against Buckingham, claiming that he had acted improperly when he caused an empirical medicine to be administered to the King, and a parliamentary inquiry was held in April, hearing evidence from the royal physicians, including William Harvey. The Duke was formally criticised but not condemned for his actions.
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Buckingham’s immediate influence came to an abrupt end on 23 August 1628, when he was stabbed to death by a discharged officer named John Felton. But Charles would never fully rid himself of the accusation that he owed his throne to murder. In February 1648, when a list of offences was being drawn up against the deposed and doomed King Charles, alongside the charges of violating the privileges of the kingdom, of causing the present Civil War, Parliament dredged up ‘old and almost forgotten charges, that his Majesty hastened the death of his father by poison, or that Buckingham attempted it with his consent…’.
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It is perhaps fitting that the death of King James aroused such speculation and innuendo. After all, his mother, it was said, had murdered his father. James himself, some had claimed, had connived at the death of his eldest son. And his father, many had claimed, had killed David Riccio precisely in order to ensure that Mary’s child would never be born alive. James, it seems, had not come so far from the bloody nest. As his life drew to a close, the attacks on him continued to multiply, many of them harshly
ad hominem.
When a libel entitled ‘The Commons’ Tears’ was dropped in court, James responded with a verse that opened ‘The wiper of the people’s tears | the drier up of doubts and fears’. Much of it was a typically uncompromising declaration of James’s superiority over the reader – ‘Kings walk the milky heavenly way | but you by bye-paths gad astray’ – but it did, however, contain an uncharacteristic admission of his own fallibility.

Tis true I am a cradle king

    yet do remember every thing

That I have heretofore put out

    and yet begin not for to doubt.
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It is only a passing stumble before James resumes his tirade – ‘O how gross is your device…’ – but in these four lines of doggerel rhyme, there is a rare hint of self-knowledge. For James was indeed a ‘cradle king’, crowned when barely a year old; by the time he came to respond to ‘The Commons’ Tears’ he was approaching sixty, and had over five decades of kingly experience on which to draw, all of which, as he here declared, he could still remember. But there is something telling in James’s expression here. Despite his age, despite his many years on two great thrones, he still uses the present tense – ‘Tis true I
am
a cradle king’ – as if, even now, he remains an infant, an innocent for whom the harsh realities of kingship are still unimaginable.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes.

PERSONAL ABBREVIATIONS