Civil War: The History of England Volume III (14 page)

The popular prejudice against the Catholic cause was strikingly demonstrated when a garret attached to the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed on 26 October 1623. A Catholic priest was preaching to a congregation of some 400 people when the floor gave way, pitching the people into the ‘confession room’ beneath. Over ninety were killed, among them eight priests and fifteen ‘of note and rank’. It was widely believed that the accident was the direct result of God’s particular judgement against the papists, and the bishop of London refused to allow any of the dead to be buried in the city’s churchyards. A mob had also gathered outside the residence of the French ambassador, shrieking execrations against the old faith. Some of the survivors were assailed with insults or assaulted with mud and stones.

The press for war against Spain was growing ever stronger. The situation of the Protestants in Europe was worse than it had been for many decades. The imperial troops were undertaking the forced conversion of the people of Bohemia, while Frederick’s erstwhile subjects in the Palatinate were suffering from religious persecution. The defeat of the forces of Christian of Brunswick, one of the last Protestant leaders still standing, heralded the supremacy of the Holy
Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, and his fellow Habsburg Philip IV of Spain. Thomas Gataker, an English Protestant theologian, declared that ‘the last hour is now running. And we are those on whom the end of the world is fallen.’

The king himself was growing weaker. A memoir on the king’s health drawn up at the end of 1623 reported that he was ‘easily affected by cold and suffers in cold and damp weather’; he used to enjoy hunting but ‘now he is quieter and lies or sits more, but that is due to the weakness of his knee-joints . . . His mind is easily moved suddenly. He is very wrathful, but the fit soon passes off.’ He was now opposed by his son and by his favourite; Charles and Buckingham, as impetuous in their hatred of Spain as they had once been recklessly in favour of a Spanish match, were now directing the pressure for war.

For Buckingham the chance of fighting a pious crusade against the heretic promised great rewards for his domestic reputation as well as for his private fortune; his post as lord high admiral guaranteed him a tenth of all prizes won upon the seas. The policy of ‘the sharp edge’, as it became known, might also allow the young prince to acquire some sort of military glory without which, as the example of his father showed, kingship lost half of its lustre. It was Charles, therefore, who began to assume command of state affairs. He took the chair of the privy council while his father preferred to remain in the country, where Buckingham was able to insulate the king from any Spanish overtures. The Venetian ambassador told his doge and senate that ‘the balance of affairs leans to the side of the prince, while Buckingham remains at Newmarket to prevent any harm . . .’

A parliament assembled in February 1624, when the king’s opening speech was tentative and hesitant. He could neither disown his son-in-law and the freedom of the Palatinate nor press for war against Spain and the imperialists. He did not know where to turn. In private he had ranted and sworn, pretending illness to avoid difficult decisions, demanding repose and even death to end his sufferings. In his public speech to parliament, he asked for help. He said that as a result of his son’s fruitless journey to Madrid ‘I awaked as a man out of a dream . . . the business is nothing advanced neither of the match nor of the palatinate, for all the long
treaties and great promises’. In the past James had earnestly upheld his sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs as part of his royal prerogative. But now ‘I shall entreat your good and sound advice for the glory of God, the peace of the kingdom, and weal of my children’. Five days later Buckingham met the Lords and Commons in the Banqueting House where he whipped up their anger against the duplicitous Spaniards.

A peace party still existed at the court and council. The lord treasurer, the earl of Middlesex, was adamantly opposed to any war with Spain. There was no money left. It would be folly to embark on a foreign enterprise when there was not coin enough to pay the servants of the Crown in England. Charles and Buckingham, therefore, found it necessary to destroy him. At the beginning of April the earl was charged with various counts of financial corruption; he had no chance. ‘Remove this strange and prodigious comet,’ Sir John Eliot declared of him, ‘which so fatally hangs over us.’ He was impeached by the Commons and judged to be guilty by the Lords. James himself was much more aware of the dangers of such a proceeding than his son. He declared that Charles had set a dangerous precedent that would in time weaken the power of the throne. The prince, in other words, had invited parliament to collaborate with him in the destruction of one of the king’s own ministers. Would it not be tempted to exploit some of its newfound power? James’s prophecy would soon enough have the ring of truth.

For the time being, however, Charles and Buckingham could effectively lead the common cause described by one of their supporters as that of the ‘patriots’; it was defined by its anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish animus abroad, together with its supposed fight against court corruption at home. For the first, and perhaps the last, time in his life Charles was in broad agreement with the gentlemen of the Commons and the country. At the end of February 1624, the Lords asked that any negotiations with Spain should be broken off. A deputation to the king in the following month requested the fitting of a fleet and the repair of maritime fortifications; the occupation of the Palatinate by Spanish and Bavarian troops should be ended.

For these measures James needed money and, at his urgent request, he was granted £300,000. But how was any war to be
fought, and against whom was it to be directed? Against the Holy Roman Emperor or against the king of Spain? Or against Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, who now controlled the Palatinate? The king prevaricated in his usual manner. ‘But whether I shall send twenty thousand or ten thousand, whether by sea or land, east or west, by diversion or otherwise, by invasion upon the Bavarian [Maximilian I] or the Emperor, you must leave that to the king.’ The parliament might wish for war with Spain, but it might be in the interests of the English king only to threaten war; the Spaniards might then agree to restore Frederick to his throne. Many in the court and council were themselves wary of a direct war against the Spanish; battles on sea or on land cost money, and money could only be raised by imposing fresh taxes.

The Spanish envoys had meanwhile found their way to the king through the connivance of certain courtiers. It soon reached the king’s ear that they accused Buckingham of ‘affecting popularity’, and charged him with drawing up a plan that would effectively imprison James in a convenient country house so that the prince might rule in his name. They suggested that the favourite believed the king to be a poor old man unfit to govern. There may or may not have been truth to these claims but the king took the unexpected step of interrogating his councillors on the matter. All of them swore that they had never heard a whisper of treason from Buckingham. The favourite was saved.

James had signalled his willingness to prepare himself for the possibility of war ‘if he could be seconded’. The only possible ally was Louis XIII of France; the French king, at least, had the power to stand against the Spanish or the imperialists in Germany. Soon after parliament had assembled, two envoys were sent from London to Paris with the instruction to seek the hand of the French king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, for Charles. Their proposals were indeed welcomed; it was in the interests of France permanently to separate England from Spain. Louis was a better Frenchman than he was a Catholic, and had no reason to shrink from conflict with his co-religionists. Yet the French court insisted, at the beginning of the negotiations, that English Catholics be given the same liberties as the Spanish had demanded for them in the previous marriage treaty.

This was of course a perilous matter. It would test once more
the king’s good faith. By marrying a Catholic princess, also, Charles might alienate the very ‘patriots’ whom he had previously courted. The king therefore decided to prorogue parliament before news of the French demands became known. It had not been an unproductive assembly; it had passed thirty-five public Acts and thirty-eight private. The private Acts alone are evidence that the members were representing local demands and grievances on a significantly increased scale. But parliament had achieved more than that. With its impeachment of the lord treasurer, and its active collaboration with Charles and Buckingham, it had proved itself to be an indispensable limb of the body politic.

Preparations for war with Spain were begun. The Spanish ambassador noted ‘the great joy and exultation of all the cobblers and zealous bigots of the town’. Cobblers were well known for their radical Protestant sympathies. The English ‘mice’, as they were called, were ready to take on the Habsburg ‘cats’. On the departure of the Spanish legation from London the citizens cried out: ‘All the devils in hell go with you, and for those that stay behind let Tyburn take them!’ London and the suburbs were now the venue for newly recruited soldiers, all of them waiting for the happy beat of the drums.

A defensive league was formed with the seven United Provinces; envoys were sent to the kings of Sweden and Denmark with proposals for a holy crusade against the Catholic powers. This served further to excite the martial enthusiasm of the populace. The more realistic of the king’s councillors doubted that the Palatinate could be fully recovered, or Spain defeated, but they hoped at least to assert English power and subdue Spanish pretensions. In the summer of 1624 a play by Thomas Middleton,
A Game at Chess
, was staged at the Globe where its satire of Gondomar and the Spanish clique at the English court was an unprecedented success; crowds besieged the theatre for nine days, while the laughter and general hubbub could be heard on the other side of the Thames. ‘Sir, your plot’s discovered!’ one of Gondomar’s aides bursts in to tell him. The ambassador asks him which of the 20,958 plots he means. He explains his methods.

With pleasant subtlety and bewitching courtship . . .

To many a soul I have let in mortal poison

Whose cheeks have cracked with laughter to receive it;

I could so roll my pills in sugared syllables

And strew such kindly mirth o’er all my mischiefs,

They took their bane in way of recreation.

Thus spoke the erstwhile Spanish ambassador on the stage.

An Anglo-French league was now likely but by no means certain. The French still insisted in principle that penal measures against English Catholics be lifted, and that they should be allowed to practise their religion in peace. Both the king and his son, however, had promised the last parliament that no articles in favour of the Catholics would ever be entertained. It was considered that, in the last resort, it would be better to go to war without the aid of the French than to force a crisis between Crown and parliament.

All the flexible skills of diplomacy had now to be deployed. An English envoy at the court of Louis XIII suggested to James that the French demands were made for ‘their own honour’ only, and that ‘it will always be in your majesty’s power to put the same in execution according to your own pleasure’. It was a policy of hypocrisy and prevarication but none the worse for that. Buckingham was equally sanguine. He was so intent upon martial glory in any Protestant crusade that he urged the king to accept the French terms. James was not willing to concede so much, but he was prepared to write a private letter to Louis in which he promised that his Catholic subjects ‘shall enjoy all the liberty and freedom which concerns the secret exercise of their religion which was granted by the treaty of marriage made with Spain’. It was not quite enough. The French insisted upon their original demands, with the enthusiastic support of Buckingham. The king finally yielded, with the proviso that he should sign a letter and not a contractual engagement. It was vital now that parliament should not intervene; a promised summons in the late autumn was therefore postponed until the following year.

On 12 December 1624, the marriage articles were signed; the king’s hands were so crippled with gout that he was obliged to apply
a stamp rather than a signature. To this document Charles appended a secret engagement to the effect that ‘I will promise to all the Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown of Great Britain the utmost of liberty and franchise in everything regarding their religion . . .’ Twelve days later the courts were forbidden to prosecute recusants under the penal laws; all Catholics in confinement for their faith were then released from the prisons of England.

In this month the king wrote a plaintive letter to Buckingham.

I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow life without you, and so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dad and husband

James R.

It was the last letter that Buckingham would ever receive from the king.

The time of war was approaching. Ernest, count of Mansfeld, the principal German ally of Frederick, came to England in search of troops; the soldiers of the previous summer, in their gay feathers and buff jerkins, had been volunteers. Now the county officials had to conscript local men for service and, naturally enough, they preferred to choose those for whom they had the least use. Some of the conscripts preferred radical action to avoid being pressed for service. One hanged himself for fear, while another ran into the Thames and drowned; one cut off all the fingers of his right hand, while another put out one of his eyes with salt. An observer wrote that ‘such a rabble of raw and poor rascals have not lightly been seen, and they go so unwillingly that they must rather be driven than led’.