Contents

About the Book

Less than forty years after the golden age of Elizabeth I, England was at war with itself. The bloody, devastating civil wars set family against family, friend against friend. At the head of this disintegrating kingdom was Charles I. His rule would change the face of the monarchy for ever.

Charles I’s reign is one of the most dramatic in history, yet Charles the man remains elusive. Too often he is recalled as weak and stupid, his wife, Henrietta Maria, as spoiled and silly: the cause of his ruin.

In this new portrait – informed by previously unseen manuscripts, including letters between the king and his queen – Leanda de Lisle uncovers a Charles I who was principled and brave, but also fatally blinkered. He is revealed as a complex man who pays the price for bringing radical change; Henrietta Maria as a warrior queen and political player as impressive as any Tudor. Here too are the cousins who befriended and betrayed them: the peacocking Henry Holland, whose brother engineered the king’s fall; and the magnetic ‘last Boleyn girl’, Lucy Carlisle.

This is a tragic story for our times, of populist politicians and religious war, of a new media and the reshaping of nations, in which women vied with men for power. For Charles it ended on the scaffold. Condemned as a traitor and murderer, he was also heralded as a martyr: his reign destined to sow the seeds of democracy across Britain and the New World.

About the Author

Leanda de Lisle is the highly acclaimed author of three books on the Tudors and Stuarts, including the bestselling The Sisters Who Would be Queen and Tudor: The Family Story. A former weekly columnist for the Spectator, Guardian and Daily Express, she contributes to numerous national publications. She lives in Leicestershire.

Also by Leanda de Lisle

After Elizabeth: The Death of Elizabeth and the Coming of King James

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey

Tudor: The Family Story

List of Illustrations

PREFACE

VENTUROUS KNIGHT

MONSIEUR DE PREUX considered the request of the two Englishmen standing at the old eastern gate of the Louvre. It was Saturday 22 February 1623, and Paris was labouring under a third winter of exceptional cold. De Preux, a former tutor to the French king, was no longer young and perhaps his eyesight was not what it had been. In any event, he decided to overlook the Englishmen’s wigs and false beards. Nor did it seem to trouble him they appeared remarkably unalike for men whose names – John and Tom Smith – suggested they were related. One was still boyish, small and slight, his wig covering a high forehead; the taller man, well built and strikingly handsome. De Preux simply treated them as two gentlemen of fashion travelling Europe as part of their education. As such, he was happy to introduce them to the spectacle of the Bourbon court and, at its heart, his master, Louis XIII.

The men walked past the musketeer guards in their feathered hats and livery of blue and red to enter the palace. The buildings of the Louvre were strung along the Seine like a mismatched necklace, ancient medieval towers with arrow-slit windows alongside new light-filled Renaissance galleries. It seemed you never knew what you might find around the next corner. Yet little could have been as surprising as the true identities of the Louvre’s latest visitors. De Preux surely knew, however, or had heard rumours of the shocking truth. The older man was no less than the thirty-year-old George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham, Lord High Admiral of England and royal favourite to King James of Britain. Still more extraordinary, however, was the presence of the second man: James’s heir, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales.

Although by some measure the smaller of the two men, Charles was an attractive youth, his long hair swept back from a fine face and large eyes that turned down at the outer corners. His paternal grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was well remembered here in Paris. She had inherited her Scottish throne as an infant, and been the child bride of a King of France, loved for her beauty and charm. Widowed when aged only eighteen, she had returned to Scotland from France, the Catholic queen of a newly Protestant Scotland. As the senior descendant of Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, she had expected one day also to be queen of Protestant England. To help secure this inheritance she had married a junior Stuart who, like Mary herself, had English royal blood. But by the time Charles’s father, James, was born in 1566, Mary’s marriage had turned sour. Months later her husband was murdered. The Protestant lords and their allies in the Scottish ‘kirk’, or church, accused Mary and overthrew her. Her baby, James, was made king in her place and raised in the Protestant religion. Mary sought refuge with Elizabeth I in England but the Tudor queen instead imprisoned her Stuart cousin. Those who feared a Catholic heir to the English throne wanted Mary dead. Nearly twenty years later, in 1587, they got their way. After Mary’s desperate plots to escape she was tried for treason (although no subject of Elizabeth) and executed with a woodsman’s axe. There had been angry riots when the news reached Paris, but in London bonfires were lit in celebration.

Charles’s grandmother had not been the last monarch to fall victim to Europe’s religious divisions. The fault line in Western civilisation begun at the Reformation had sent seismic shocks across the Continent, triggering rebellions, civil wars and assassinations. Even now, the aftershocks continued. Beyond Paris’s Champs-Élysées, named after the heavenly Elysian Fields of Greek myth, the political and religious map of Europe was shifting, churches were in flames and thousands were dying.

The Reformation, launched in Germany in 1517, had been born in hell – or rather, in the question of how to avoid it. The Catholic Church taught that to gain salvation you needed to live a life of good works, such as giving to charity. Martin Luther, the great prophet of the Reformation, called for liberty from what he judged as spiritually burdensome rules, and railed against the corruption that had become part of them. The good work of giving to charity did not seem so good when you were being blackmailed with the prospect of hell, and the charities in question were the prestige projects and foundations of the mighty. Luther preached that God offered heaven to an elect few in return for faith alone, that nothing people did could gain them salvation. Scripture, furthermore, was the sole basis of religious truth: the ancient traditions of the Catholic Church and the teachings of its councils had no share in such a role.1

People had, however, soon begun to draw opposing truths from their reading of scripture. What became known as Protestantism split into faiths united only by their rejection of Catholicism. Lutheranism’s greatest rival within Protestantism were the so-called ‘Reform’ churches that had begun in Switzerland and came to be labelled ‘Calvinist’ after the theologian John Calvin.2 Reform Protestantism had swept away what Calvinists judged the obfuscations and half-measures of Lutheranism. They emphasised that God’s total power over salvation meant that while He had predestined an elect to heaven, He had also predestined everyone else to hell, whatever good deeds they did. The most significant departure from Luther’s teaching was, though, their rejection of any belief in the physical presence of Christ in consecrated bread and wine.fn1 Rituals and altars were rendered superfluous and even judged idolatrous, while in place of a caste of priests they had ministers, who had no special status beyond academic credentials, reflected in their black gowns. The religious life of Calvinists centred on reading scripture, listening to sermons, spiritual self-examination and prayer.

This was the Protestantism of Britain.

The Scottish kirk was the purer Calvinist church of the Stuart kingdoms, for the Church of England remained only partially reformed, retaining its pre-Reformation structure of priests, deacons and bishops. English Protestants nevertheless saw themselves as leading members of the international Calvinist community. This embraced parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland, the Electoral Palatinate in the Rhineland, the northern provinces of the Netherlands which formed the Calvinist Dutch Republic, and in Catholic France, where the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion had left a substantial minority of Calvinists known as the Huguenots who had been granted the right to practise their Protestant religion.3

There was no certainty of survival, however, for these Calvinist communities. Protestantism in Europe and in Britain had survived only when it had been imposed by rulers, or was permitted by them.4 To protect themselves British Protestants had, therefore, developed ‘resistance’ theories, which argued that rulers took their authority from the people who therefore had the right to overthrow, or kill, any monarch of the ‘wrong’ religion. These theories had justified the Scottish Protestant overthrow of Mary, Queen of Scots. But Catholics – especially those associated with the Jesuits – had also developed resistance theories. There had been several attempts to overthrow or kill their persecutor Elizabeth I. Indeed, she had only reluctantly permitted the execution of her fellow monarch, Mary, Queen of Scots, when she could no longer afford the risk of keeping her Catholic rival alive.

Resistance theories had thus cost James his mother but he believed they were also the source of much of the disorder of his early reign, and the sedition he had faced from fellow Calvinists in Scotland. James’s famous advocacy of the ‘divine right’ of kings was his answer to such theories, launched in a verbal war on religiously justified terror.5 His 1598 tract ‘The True Laws of Free Monarchy’ argued that kings drew their authority from God, not the people, and so had a ‘divine right’ to rule. A good king would choose to rule by the law, but in the last resort he was above the law – a ‘free’ monarch. Whether a king ruled tyrannically, or failed the ‘true’ religion, only God could punish him: there could be no religious justification for sedition or regicide. To the modern mind divine-right kingship appears like megalomania but its acceptance was intended to ensure stability, which was a basic function of monarchy.

By the time Elizabeth had died on 24 March 1603 James was ready to publish his religious and political works for an international audience. It was later said that her Privy Council had debated whether or not James should be invited to become King of England with conditions – in other words he would have to accept that his kingship was limited by English law and he would not be ‘free’ to do as he wished. This was voted down.6

With James’s ambition to inherit the English throne achieved, he had united the crowns of Britain for the first time, though not the kingdoms. To James’s frustration the English saw no advantage in a political union with their ‘old beggardly enemy’, the Scots.7 And even though many accepted James’s theories on divine right in principle, in practical terms England was a ‘mixed monarchy’. Sovereignty lay with the king, mixed with that of Parliament, which gave his actions the force of law. There could be no British union without Parliament’s agreement and English MPs would not agree to one. Consequently, while James had given himself the title King of Britain, there was no such political entity.

Charles was heir to the kingdom of England, together with its colony, Ireland (which had its own Parliament), and the entirely independent kingdom of Scotland (which retained its own system of law, its own Parliament and kirk). Nevertheless James’s achievement in 1603 had raised the Stuarts to the ranks of Europe’s greatest ruling dynasties. As the Stuart heir Charles should have been greeted in Paris with fanfare. He was, however, on a secret mission and wanted to pass through France undetected.

Charles was well rewarded by his visit to the Louvre, where he saw Louis XIII walking in a gallery among his courtiers: a young man, with black curly hair, a pursed mouth, and dark, guarded eyes.8 Aged twenty-one, Louis was Charles’s almost exact contemporary, but had become king of the most populous kingdom in Europe aged only eight.9 This had followed the assassination in Paris of his father, the great warrior Henri IV, at the hands of a Catholic fanatic: a reminder that kings, and the stability of their kingdoms, faced dangers even from zealots of their own religion.10 Marie de’ Medici had acted as regent for her son, until Louis overthrew her aged fifteen, in a coup that had begun with her unpopular favourite being cut down by swordsmen at the eastern gate of the Louvre. Louis now faced continued problems of religious division in France between Huguenots and Catholics and of a powerful nobility obsessed with matters of ‘honour’. Deaths in duels were commonplace and reflected the same contempt for the rule of law as modern gangland murders. The fact the killers came from the top of society, rather than the bottom, just made them more dangerous, with the nobility’s willingness to resort to violence leading to large-scale revolts. The strain on young Louis was evident in his frequent illnesses and bursts of temper. He was also said to be ‘so extreme a stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak as much as one word’.11

It would be untrue to say all was now forgiven and forgotten between Louis and his mother – who had even joined a noble revolt in 1619 – but there had been an official reconciliation. Charles and Buckingham saw Marie de’ Medici treated with honour at the Louvre, dining in state, her voluminous golden coiffure framing a sensual face immortalised many times in fleshy extravagance by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.12

Charles and Buckingham arranged with de Preux to return to the Louvre in the evening hoping also to see Louis’ Habsburg wife, Anne of Austria – a marriage that Marie had arranged during her regency. Anne was performing in a rehearsal for a form of allegorical dramatics called a masque and was reputed to be a green-eyed beauty.

While the Stuarts ruled the kingdoms of Britain and the Bourbons ruled France, the Habsburgs ruled seemingly almost everywhere else. Their origins lay in Austria and Switzerland, hence their sobriquet, the House of Austria. There were, however, two branches. At the head of the junior branch was Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, a title associated with the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, and the overlordship of over 200 independent territories in central Europe, both Protestant and Catholic. They extended to borders as far west as France, as far east as Poland, north to Denmark and south to Italy. Marie de’ Medici’s mother had come from this branch. Anne of Austria, despite her confusing appellation, came from the still more powerful senior branch, headed by her brother, the seventeen-year-old Philip IV of Spain. His empire, known simply as ‘La Monarchia’ – ‘the Monarchy’ – included Naples, Sicily, Lombardy and the southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium), as well as Spain, Portugal and their colonies. It was an empire upon which the sun could never set, spanning the globe from the Americas to Africa, to Asia and the Philippines.

That night de Preux’s son duly escorted Charles and Buckingham to Anne of Austria’s masque, where Louis’ youngest sister, Henriette-Marie, was also performing. The princess had been named after her parents Henri (IV) and Marie (de’ Medici). It was how she would always sign herself, although it is as the Italianate ‘Henrietta Maria’ that the future Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland is remembered.13 Her reputation remains tainted today by misogyny, religious prejudice and the propaganda of her enemies, but she was to prove every inch worthy of the names of her remarkable parents.

Aged thirteen, Henrietta Maria was a pretty, ‘black-eyed, brown-haired’ girl with a beautiful voice. She had been cast in the masque as the goddess Iris: in Greek myth the personification of the rainbow. The part was usually given to a young girl dressed with wings and in all the colours of the spectrum. Henrietta Maria was perfect for the role. Charles, however, barely noticed her. When he wrote to his father that night he didn’t mention her name, just noting there had been ‘nineteen fair dancing ladies’, of whom Anne of Austria was ‘the handsomest’.14 But then it was Anne of Austria’s sister, the infanta Maria, whom he was planning to marry, not the child Henrietta Maria, and, as he told his father, watching Anne dance gave him an even ‘greater desire’ to see the infanta.15

The next day Charles left Paris with Buckingham riding south-west for Madrid.16 He was ready for marriage and eager for a wife, but this journey was less about seeking a bride than about his resolve to settle a matter of family honour. ‘At bottom’, Charles said of his mission, ‘this concerns my sister.’17 For the first time Charles was striking out independently of his father in a foreign-policy endeavour of his own. Over 700 miles lay ahead of him before he would reach the capital of La Monarchia. He faced many possible dangers on the road, and to his father’s Calvinist subjects his destination marked the heart of an evil empire. English Protestant identity had been forged in the fires of the Elizabethan war with Catholic Spain, when their homeland and faith were threatened by the invasion attempt of the Armada. Today the threat to that identity appeared even greater.

In the 1590s Protestantism had held half of Europe, but it was now being rolled back. The Catholic Church had reformed since Luther and had emerged stronger than ever, with a well-educated, confident clergy, led by popes known for their personal austerity. Assaulted by the vitality of this Catholic Revival, also called the Counter-Reformation, and weakened by inter-Protestant quarrels, Calvinists once again faced the military might of the Catholic Habsburgs. The armies of both the Spanish and Austrian branches of the dynasty were on the march in Europe and they were re-Catholicising Protestants by force.18

James sent a message after his son and his favourite, praising them as ‘Venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance’. In truth, however, James too feared where Charles’s adventure in Spain would lead.

1

‘DEAREST SON’

CHARLES WAS FOURTEEN when Buckingham entered his life as James’s new favourite. The then plain Mr George Villiers was twenty-two, an ordinary gentleman, blessed with extraordinary good looks: ‘From the nails of his fingers – nay from the sole of his foot – to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. The setting of his looks, every motion, every bending of his body was admirable.’1 James, who had always been attracted to handsome men, gave his favourite the Scottish diminutive ‘Steenie’, after the angelic-faced St Stephen. Charles hated him with all the usual passion of a teenager towards an interloper in their relationship with a parent. The two young men often fought, Charles once spraying the favourite with water, and he in turn telling the prince to ‘kiss his arse’ – and getting away with it. The king was plying his favourite with wealth and office, making him a ‘Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Knight of the Order of the Garter; and in a short time (a very short time for so prodigious an assent) he was made a baron, a viscount, an earl and a marquess, and [in 1619] became Lord High Admiral of England’.2 Buckingham was still only twenty-six.

The new Lord Admiral had, however, come to realise that he couldn’t depend on an aging king to secure his future. Buckingham needed the goodwill of James’s teenage heir – and he had begun to take a serious look at the prince who would one day be king.

Charles was born in Scotland on 19 November 1600, a day of Gothic horror and of royal triumph. It began with the decomposing bodies of two Scottish noblemen being gibbeted and quartered at the Mercat – or Market – Cross near the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh. The traitors’ heads were then stuck on poles and their quarters were packed in salt and sent for public display in Dundee, Stirling and Perth.

It was early the following morning that a messenger arrived from Fife at Holyrood Palace and gave King James the news that his wife, Anna of Denmark, had delivered a son at 11 p.m. A delighted James tipped the messenger £16 and when the sun came up James left Edinburgh for Dunfermline Palace to see his ‘Annie’ along with their newborn child.3

The heads of the twenty-two-year-old John Ruthven, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, and his twenty-year-old brother, Alexander, would remain on view in Edinburgh through the lifetime of James’s new son. The noble brothers had been killed in August 1600, during what James believed was a kidnap attempt against him made in league with ministers of the kirk. Their motive was the fear that James was poised to impose Crown-appointed bishops over the kirk’s Calvinist councils – known as presbyteries – and so place it under tight royal control. The brothers never had an opportunity to answer the kidnap charges, but their rotting bodies had been propped up in court, tried and found guilty of treason. This had left James free to advertise his vengeance for insults to the Stuart crown dating back to the overthrow of his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, and he would now crush all remaining opposition to his rule.

By the time James’s cousin Elizabeth I of England died on 24 March 1603, his notoriously violent kingdom was at peace. Nevertheless, it was said that James was as delighted to leave Scotland as if he had spent forty years in the wilderness and was now to enter a land of milk and honey: England was known to be as rich as Scotland was poor. His wife and children were to follow him south – save for Charles, who had to be left behind.

The kirk disapproved of the Scandinavian Anna for her ‘night waking and balling’ as well as her Lutheran beliefs. But this dancing queen, the sister of King Christian of Denmark, had done her royal duty in producing heirs. Charles had an elder sister, Elizabeth, who was four years his senior, born on 19 August 1596, and a brother, Henry, born on 19 February 1594, who was a full six years older. But a younger brother had died only months earlier and Charles’s health was also fragile. He had been born with a lingual deformity, possibly ankyloglossia or ‘tongue tie’. This would have made feeding difficult, and the two-year-old Charles was undersized. It was only the following year, in 1604, and after James had sent a physician back to Scotland along with £100 for drugs and other medical necessities, that Charles was brought to his father’s new kingdom.4

A year later, Charles faced a threat to his life of a different kind. On 1 November 1605 one of his servants, Agnes Fortun, was questioned by a member of the royal ceremonial guard about Charles’s daily life, ‘the way into his chamber, when he rode abroad, how attended etc’.5 Four days later it emerged that this man, Thomas Percy, was part of an extremist conspiracy. A group of Catholics had planned to blow up the Palace of Westminster during the opening of Parliament, killing King James, the eleven-year-old Prince Henry, England’s peers and members of the House of Commons. They had then intended to kidnap the surviving royal children, but feared it would be particularly difficult to smuggle Charles out of London. One plan was to inflict a superficial stab wound, so that the four-year-old could not be moved before the Catholic takeover was complete. Happily the Gunpowder Plot was foiled, and the would-be bombers were either killed or executed. It was Charles’s first direct experience of the murderous consequences of resistance theory.

Charles, meanwhile, had continued to struggle with his disabilities. Some of his earliest memories must have been of trying to talk and communicate. His garrulous father once threatened to have the tendons under Charles’s tongue cut to help him articulate. Besides the problems with his speech, Charles’s legs lacked strength and he had trouble walking. But with courage and determination he came ‘through temperance and exercise to have as firm and strong a body as any’.6 By 1609 he was able to dance at the celebrations for his brother Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales, and he soon walked so quickly it was said he almost ran. Charles also found singing lessons helped him control his stutter and he later advised other sufferers that ‘the best and surest way is to take good deliberation first, and not to be too sudden in speech’.7 It enabled him to express himself far more eloquently than the stammering Louis XIII.

Being a second son, in a hereditary monarchy, Charles had to grow used to being treated as second best. When James spent £800 on a ‘chain of stone’ and an insignia of the Order of the Garter for Henry, he gave Charles a jewel worth only £130. In letters James wrote to Henry as ‘our dearest son’ and to Charles as merely his ‘dear son’.8 But Henry’s treatment reflected respect for rank as much as any emotional bond. Charles enjoyed security and family love such as his father had never known. He would remember his parents’ affection all his life and there were no signs of jealousy towards Henry who bore the heavier responsibilities. On the contrary, Charles admired and emulated his cleft-chinned and martial brother. He played with soldiers and read enough about war to be complimented on his knowledge of military affairs. He also shared Henry’s passion for art.

Britain had become something of an artistic backwater following the Reformation. For Calvinists all religious images, even crucifixes, were idolatrous, and in England and Scotland over 90 per cent of religious art – which was most art – had been destroyed since the Reformation. Henry embodied the aspirations of a new era, collecting mannerist painting from Italy and the Netherlands, as well as Florentine bronzes.

Charles was overseeing the preparations for a masque to celebrate Elizabeth’s forthcoming marriage when he was told that Prince Henry was ill. It was October 1612 and Elizabeth had matured into a golden-haired sixteen-year-old, admired for a tenacious memory and discerning judgement.9 Her groom was a contemporary, the Calvinist Frederick V, Prince-Elector of the Palatinate and, as such, already leader of a German military alliance known as the Protestant Union. Plans were being laid for Prince Henry to be married as well, possibly as early as the following year. Catholic brides from France or Savoy were mooted. This, James hoped, would boost the role he aspired to of peacemaker in Europe with his family acting as a bridge between religions. Henry, however, was now in the last stages of typhoid fever. Charles dashed to see him and stayed at his brother’s bedside while doctors treated Henry by tying a dead pigeon to his head.10 Charles was thirteen days short of his twelfth birthday when, on 6 November 1612, he watched Henry die.11

The following spring of 1613 Charles had to say farewell to his last sibling, Elizabeth, on board the ship that was bound for her new German homeland. Her leaving, she recalled, left her heart ‘pressed and astounded’.12 It was painful also for Charles who alone now bore the weight of national expectations as James’s ‘dearest and only son’, the sole male heir on whom the Stuart crown in England depended.13

The Spanish ambassador the Conde de Gondomar thought the twelve-year-old Charles a ‘sweet, gentle child’.14 In a cruel age Charles detested cruelty. ‘None but cowards are cruel,’ he later observed.15 He found people difficult to read and preferred his books to the competitive world of the court. He proved a better scholar than Henry had been in his studies. These included theology, French and Latin, while he particularly enjoyed history, music and mathematics. He liked having the time study gave him to weigh up arguments, and distrusted the instant judgements that come with instinct, marking his autograph books with a favourite Neostoic motto, ‘If you would conquer all things submit yourself to reason.’16 The static nature of the past, the precision of rules and logic, made them less disconcerting than courtiers with hidden agendas.

There was another less cautious side to Charles: a physical restlessness and a ‘nature inclined to adventures’. This made him ‘apt to take extreme resolutions’, if encouraged by those he trusted.17 For now, however, his energy was directed in line with his strong sense of the responsibility of his position, and he pursued a new physical regime to further improve his health. By April 1613, only five months after Henry had died, the Venetian ambassador had noticed an improvement in Charles’s physique. Nine months later Charles added running to his programme, taking a group of servants on a long circuit past the handsome houses around his residence, the ‘pleasant and splendid’ St James’s Palace. They soon found they were unable to keep up with him or even to finish the course.18

As Charles continued to grow stronger, and he began to perform successfully at the joust, his mother, Anna, encouraged his interest in the ancient chivalric Order of the Garter. Charles showed no trace of his father’s contempt for women and had a warm relationship with his mother, teasing her when she was ill that he missed not only her company, but also her ‘good dinners’. They shared an appreciation of beauty and courtly ceremony, and he found the chivalric and spiritual values of the Order of the Garter appealing. The knights were called on to defend the church and the weak, especially women, to be loyal to each other and to obey their king. The Garter insignia of St George killing the dragon represented the conquering of sin and of rebellion – the first sin having been an act of rebellion against God that brought disorder into the world.19 fn1 Almost two-thirds of fifty volumes found in Charles’s personal library at Whitehall at the end of his life would be connected to the Order, many of them gifts from Anna.

Charles’s closest childhood companion at this time was a boy called Will Morray, or in modern spelling, ‘Murray’, whose uncle Thomas was Charles’s tutor. The family was Scottish, a reflection of James’s decision to favour his native-born subjects amongst his family’s closest servants. Charles, in consequence, spoke English with a slight Scottish inflection, detectable in his spelling of ‘hes’ for ‘has’.20 William is also said to have been his whipping boy: legend has it that if Charles was badly behaved, it was Murray who was beaten. Yet there was no vogue for whipping boys in the early modern period. Louis XIII was beaten when he was a child king, as James had been. The tale is a literary phantom. Its origins lie in fiction, conjured in the aftermath to the English publication of James’s tracts on divine right, with their assertion that you could not legitimately raise your hand against God’s anointed. It has gained acceptance simply by repetition and because it appeals to our modern dismissal of divine-right theory as ridiculous and perverse.21

As James’s heir Charles accompanied the king on his progresses and attended all major state occasions. James did not think it necessary for Charles to visit Scotland or, indeed, Ireland. England was by far his greatest kingdom and James boasted, with some justice, that he could rule Scotland from London, at the stroke of his pen. He did, however, expect Charles to study his Scottish writings, while he also acted as his son’s spiritual instructor.22 James’s most significant tract in this regard was a ‘how to rule’ handbook that had been written for Prince Henry and was entitled the Basilikon Doron or ‘Royal Gift’. It was the contents of this ‘gift’ that had so disturbed the Ruthven brothers and their kirk allies in 1600.

In the Basilikon Doron James traced the sedition and instability that he had faced in Scotland to the beginning of the Scottish Reformation. In England, Henry VIII had claimed a ‘Royal Supremacy’ over the church, giving England’s monarchs the power to direct religious change. In Scotland, by contrast, the kirk was founded in defiance of royal authority and, James recalled, ‘many things were inordinately done by a popular tumult and rebellion’. For this James blamed the ‘fiery ministers’ of the kirk who had sought to take advantage of his period as a child king, seeking to create a ‘popular’ government, in which they would ‘lead the people by the nose and bear the sway of all rule’. The Basilikon Doron hammered home the dangers of ‘popularity’ – by which James meant demagogy which led to violent disorder – and its antidote, which was hierarchy, in church and state. James saw no clash between his Calvinist beliefs and his support for an episcopate (that is, church government by bishops). Episcopacy dated back to the earliest Christian times and he saw it as a pillar of monarchy, imposing control on those fiery ministers who, like the Pope, sought to usurp royal authority.

James had not yet felt able to bring the Scottish kirk into full alignment with the Episcopalian Church of England, as he would have liked, but there were now bishops – who dressed like ordinary ministers – working alongside the kirk’s presbyteries.

James’s lessons left Charles convinced that the Church of England was ‘the best in the world’, keeping ‘the middle way’ between the ‘pomp of superstitious tyranny’ of a Catholic Church led by the Pope, and ‘the meanness of fantastic anarchy’, represented by Protestants who rejected an episcopate.23 For others, however, the Church of England’s combination of Calvinist theology and Catholic structure was not so much a golden mean as a ‘leaden mediocrity’: a dangerous ‘mingle mangle of the popish government with pure doctrine’.24

The word ‘popish’ did not mean merely Catholic. It referred to a form of spiritual and political tyranny that challenged the scriptural authority of ‘true’ Protestantism, while also threatening its political security at home and abroad. It was associated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but could be applied to Lutheranism or any reversal of Calvinism. For it to be used about long-established aspects of the Church of England was indicative of the depth of divisions between English Protestants. Indeed some would later judge it was here, in the half-reformed Church of England ‘he had received from his fathers’, that the source of Charles’s future troubles lay.25

English Protestantism is usually dated from Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533. In fact Henry had ushered in little more than a nationalised form of Catholicism. It was under his son, the boy king Edward VI, that the Reform Protestantism of Switzerland and Strasbourg was first introduced to England. Edward VI had died aged only fifteen in 1553, leaving the process incomplete. A five-year hiatus under the Protestant-burning Catholic Mary I had followed. Then in 1558 the Protestant Elizabeth I had succeeded to the throne and it was assumed that she would continue to push the Reformation in England forward. Elizabeth, however, had proved to be a protestant of a very conservative kind.26

The Church of England owed its Catholic structure to the religious settlement established at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, when other ‘popish’ elements in the church were also retained. The term ‘Puritan’ was coined in the 1560s to describe those ‘hot’ Protestants who wished to abolish the use of a white clerical over-garment called a surplice. For Puritans the surplice was a remnant of the vestments Catholic priests wore for the Mass. It was therefore valid for mainstream Calvinists to complain about their use. Yet they were damned as fanatics, or ‘Puritans’. For Elizabeth surplices were simply part of the ceremonial style she preferred in her religious services and which she maintained in her royal chapels, along with a Catholic tradition of choral music abhorred by Calvinists as a distraction from prayer. By the 1590s Elizabeth’s example had encouraged a new religious movement within the Church of England whose members shared her tastes. But neglect of other aspects of her religious leadership had left many of her subjects ignorant of the basic tenets of their Protestant faith.27 It was the Puritans, as the most evangelical members of the church, who had done most to address this problem.

Puritans were distinctive from other Calvinists in their attention to moral detail and their shunning of the impious, often forming ‘godly’ communities to encourage each other.fn2 The sermons heard from their pulpits were full of showmanship, similar to the evangelical revivalism of later centuries. With Protestantism facing the challenges of the Counter-Reformation, they had attracted ‘the most ardent, quick, bold, resolute’ recruits, and had ‘a great part of the best soldiers and captains on their side’.28

In 1585 England had gone to war with Spain on the side of the Calvinist Dutch rebels against Habsburg rule in the Netherlands. Although Elizabeth is rightly remembered for her inspiring defiance of the Spanish Armada in 1588, what little enthusiasm she had ever had for the war had soon waned. She had disliked aiding rebels against a fellow monarch, and resented the huge financial burden of the war. This helped to turn her own favourite, the glamorous soldier-scholar Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, against her. Essex had belonged to a generation who believed it was the duty of the nobility not to simply obey royal orders, but to work for the commonwealth – a term that came from ‘commonweal’, meaning the public good. That meant showing dedication to great causes. For Essex, England’s war with Spain was such a cause: one necessary to the very survival of Protestantism in Europe.29

By the time Charles was born in 1600 the English Crown had been impoverished by inflation and by generations of land sales. Elizabeth was £400,000 in debt and desperate to make peace. On 3 February 1601 Essex attempted to raise London against the queen, hoping to invite James to London as her successor. His efforts failed and he was executed as a traitor.30 Yet Elizabeth went to her grave with ballads still being sung at court in praise of Essex.31

As soon as James had become king he had immediately set about healing the wounds left by Elizabeth’s reign. At the beginning of 1604 he had addressed the urgent need for reform of the Church of England at the Hampton Court Conference. He was extremely knowledgeable on issues of theology and had proved largely successful in splitting moderate Puritans (who wished to get rid of popish surplices and set prayers) from those he judged radical (which included any who wished to abolish episcopacy). James had since built a well-trained and effective clergy, commissioned the superlative translation of the Bible into English known today at the ‘Authorised Version’, or the King James, and he allowed a broad range of opinion to flourish.

James had named Essex his ‘martyr’ and leading members of Essex’s old war party had been placed in Prince Henry’s household. James had, however, shared Elizabeth’s fears concerning the expense of war.32 The Crown’s sources of income were still shrinking, and James was by nature extravagant. His experiences of violence and disorder in Scotland had, furthermore, shaped a determined conciliator. After James had signed a peace treaty with Spain in the summer of 1604, Prince Henry had become the focus of the war party’s hopes for the future. He had been a passionate advocate of a seaborne empire that would rival that of Spain. With Henry dead the old Elizabethan war party needed a new prince to look to.

When Charles’s mother Anna died in 1619, she left her son aged eighteen, a still awkward teenager, as isolated at his father’s rumbustious court ‘as a planet in its sphere’.33 But the new Lord Admiral Buckingham stepped in to offer him a helping hand into the adult world. Intelligent and charming, the twenty-six-year-old favourite ‘understood the arts and artifices of a court, and all the learning that is professed there’.34 He was also able to mediate Charles’s relationship with James. The prince responded with gratitude and growing affection.

In a letter of that year, Charles thanked Buckingham for smoothing out a quarrel with his father, and told him about an assignation he had with a woman ‘that must not be named’. With the physical energy that was characteristic of the Stuarts came a strong sex drive. James, however, took a strict line against mistresses, fearful that royal bastards could pose a threat to legitimate heirs. Charles’s unnamed woman had to be kept secret and Charles, with typical wit, asked Buckingham to leave his letter, once he had read it, in the ‘custody of Mr Vulcan’ – in other words to burn it. He signed the letter simply ‘Your constant, loving friend, Charles’. Buckingham was the only non-royal person to whom he would ever sign himself with his Christian name alone.35

James was delighted by the improvement in the relationship between his son and the man James would later call his ‘wife’. He told Charles his new friendship with Buckingham demonstrated ‘what reverent love you have towards me in your heart’. He also suggested it would be politically astute for Charles to keep Buckingham at his side as king, observing that those who had been loyal to his mother and predecessor Mary, Queen of Scots, had also proved to be amongst those most loyal to him.36

James used Buckingham as his amanuensis as he wrote his last political tract, which he dedicated to Charles. ‘A pattern for a King’s Inauguration’ looked at the last days before Christ’s crucifixion and examined the rites of the coronation ceremony in light of this. James compared Charles’s future role to that of Christ the King. He told Charles he would be God’s image on earth and that his subjects would owe him a duty of obedience as to God. James warned, however, that ‘he must not expect a soft and easy crown, but a crown full of thorny cares’.37 It was a heartfelt comment. James’s thorny cares included debts of £900,000.

Royal finances remained in urgent need of reform, but James’s profligacy with gifts and pensions – not least for Buckingham – had convinced his parliaments that his financial woes were of his own making. James responded by cultivating independent means of raising money. In particular he extended the raising of customs duties under his prerogative powers – that is, those powers exclusive to him as a monarch. But the money the duties raised only allowed James’s financial survival in peacetime. He could not afford to go to war without Parliament’s financial backing – and there would be a political cost to James for any money they raised for him.

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