The Cradle King (45 page)

The tears and kneeling having failed, Abbot appealed to James’s intellectual vanity. He wrote to the King arguing that witchcraft-induced impotency was discussed in neither the Scriptures, nor in the writings of the Church Fathers, nor in the records of councils of the primitive Church. It may have existed under the rule of the Roman Church, but now, in enlightened post-Reformation days, it had disappeared. The Essexes should turn to prayer or medicine to solve their marital woes. James rose to the challenge with a wonderfully imaginative response. Abbot could not expect the Scriptures, the Fathers or the councils to provide an
exact
answer, he claimed, but those sources said nothing that would make such a divorce impossible. In those early days the Devil had probably not discovered impotency through witchcraft, but had invented it during the papist years. ‘Look [at] my
Daemonologie,
’ James advised. The Reformation had not broken Satan’s power – indeed, was not this case before them vivid proof of that? Abbot was merely prejudiced against the Countess of Essex, a dangerous thing in a judge; he should recall how Christ had admonished us not to judge others. James, on the other hand, was completely impartial; now he called on Abbot ‘to have a kind of faith implicit in my judgement, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity’. The best thankfulness that Abbot, ‘you that are so far my creature’, could use towards the King was ‘to reverence and follow my judgement and not to contradict it, except when you can demonstrate unto me that I am mistaken or wrong informed’. Failing to win Abbot over, James finally proved the uprighteousness of his conscience by fiddling the figures: realising that he had five commissioners for and five against, he merely added two more amenable bishops to the list, and gained a seven to five victory on 25 September.
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Rochester was now free to marry his Frances. In October 1613, despite his residence in England, Rochester became Lord Treasurer of Scotland, and, for the marriage, James created Rochester Earl of Somerset, so that the erstwhile Countess of Essex could remain a Countess.
²²

The marriage took place on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December 1613, in the Chapel Royal.
²³
The King footed the bill – even though Crown lands worth £10,000 had to be sold off just to provide jewels for the bride. He also gave away the Countess, who was ‘married in her hair’, her free-flowing tresses symbolising her virginity, even though some observers felt that the date, place and minister of the marriage were unfortunately chosen: as Chamberlain pointed out, it ‘fell out somewhat strangely that the same man, should marry the same person, in the same place, upon the self-same day’ when the first husband was ‘yet living’. Despite James’s expenditure, Chamberlain was not impressed by the occasion: ‘Speech and expectation goes far beyond the matter,’ he commented, since the marriage had taken place ‘without any such bravery as was looked for.’
²⁴
The wedding day was capped with a masque composed by Thomas Campion in which married love between a man and a woman was piquantly evaluated against male–male friendship:

Some friendship between man and man prefer,

But I th’affection between man and wife.

What good can be in life,

Whereof no fruits appear?…

How can man perpetual be

But in his own posterity?
²⁵

The feasting and revels lasted right through the holiday period until Twelfth Night, when they were capped by a second, rival wedding, at ‘Queen’s Court’, Somerset House, as another Robert Ker, the Earl of Roxburgh, married one of Anna’s favourites, Jane Drummond. By the time the celebrations drew to a close, James was tired, and made a speedy retreat to Newmarket.
²⁶

Somerset’s continued ascent was remarkable. By now he was also wealthy: in the year before his marriage he was said to have got through some £90,000,
²⁷
and in April 1613 he even offered to lend £22,000 to help out the King.
²⁸
In politics, the Earl’s
modus operandi
was praised by the Spanish ambassador Sarmiento, who noted that at the Council table, Somerset ‘showeth much temper and modesty, without seeming to press and sway anything. But afterwards the King resolveth all business with him alone, both those that pass in Council and many others wherewith he never maketh them acquainted.’
²⁹
John Chamberlain complained that ‘there is no man (but one) so near that knows any thing of secret, but all things are carried
in scrinio pectoris
[in the secret space of their hearts] between them two’.
³⁰
When James opened Parliament in April 1614, Sarmiento noted that it was Somerset who led a horse to the right of the King as he processed, acting as Master of the Horse, even though that post belonged to the Earl of Worcester.
³¹

In the months following the marriage, the Howards consolidated their status. As 1614’s Addled Parliament drew to its untidy close, the elder Howard statesman, the Earl of Northampton, became seriously ill. Surgeons operated on a tumour in his thigh but, as with so many invasive operations of the period, infection set in and, within a week, Northampton was dead of gangrene.
³²
This blow to the Howards was tempered when James bestowed on Somerset the dead Earl’s offices of Lord Privy Seal and Warden of the Cinque Ports. In July, James made two further key appointments, naming Somerset’s father-in-law Suffolk as Lord Treasurer, ‘with many good words, as that he had made choice of him not for his learning in Greek and Latin, or for that he could make epigrams and orations, but for his approved fidelity and integrity’, another glancing blow at the memory of Salisbury. Suffolk’s fidelity and integrity would prove to be no remedy for James’s financial woes: soon even the victuallers providing the court’s food were being forced to allow the King credit; within a few months, James was openly selling titles. At the same time, Somerset was named as Lord Chamberlain, at the head of James’s household, thus sealing his control on the King’s intimate life; James commented that ‘no man should marvel that he bestowed a place so near himself at his friend, whom he loved above all men living’.
³³

It was the pinnacle of Somerset’s career – and it was shortlived. On 3 August 1614, during the summer progress, James visited Sir Anthony Mildmay’s Northamptonshire seat of Apethorpe to hunt.
³⁴
There his attention was diverted by a new face among the usual entourage, belonging to an exceptionally handsome and charming young man of twenty-one, named George Villiers. Like the young Robert Carr, he was extremely handsome although not mannish: Bishop Goodman recalled him as ‘the handsomest-bodied in England; his limbs so well compacted and his conversation so pleasing and of so sweet a disposition’, and Simonds D’Ewes found ‘everything in him full of delicacy and handsome features; yea, his hands and face seemed to me especially effeminate and curious’.
³⁵

Even within the month, news of a new favourite was becoming
passé:
Viscount Fenton wrote to tell the Earl of Mar but assumed ‘I think your Lordship has heard before this time of a youth, his name is Villiers, a Northamptonshire man; he begins to be in favour with his Majesty.’ Fenton was sure that this would not affect Somerset’s supremacy: ‘yet all things are absolutely done by one man [i.e. Somerset] and he more absolute than ever he was. Neither his father-in-law, with whom he keeps good quarter, nor any man else dare touch him.’
³⁶
But Somerset knew that George Villiers spelled the end of his dominance. When, in November 1614, Sir James Graham promoted Villiers as a potential Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Somerset stepped in immediately to object. ‘The fortune of Villiers, the new favourite,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘seems to be at a stand, or at least not to go very fast forward; for when it was expected he should be made of the Bedchamber, one Carr, a bastard kinsman of the Lord Chamberlain [Somerset] is stepped in, and admitted to the place.’ But Chamberlain was not convinced that Somerset really had the upper hand: ‘and yet most men do not believe that the world goes altogether so well on that side as it was wont.’
³⁷

Indeed, relations between Somerset and the King were deteriorating. James, shaken by a bad fall while riding when his horse crashed down on top of him,
³⁸
was first upset and then indignant at Somerset’s increasingly difficult behaviour. He laid bare all his anger and regret in a remarkably passionate and unguarded letter to the Earl.
³⁹
Somerset had forced the King, he wrote, to ‘turn his countenance’ from Villiers’s sponsor Sir James Graham, ‘the like whereof I never did to any man without a known offence’ – the entire incident being ‘done in a needless bravery of [show of opposition to] the Queen’. Since ‘this strange frenzy took you’, James objected, the Earl’s merits had been ‘powdered and mixed’ with ‘strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury, and insolent pride, and (which is worst of all) with a settled kind of induced obstinacy’. James conceded that the ‘trust and privacy’ between them allowed Somerset ‘an infinitely great liberty and freedom of speech unto me’, but ‘to invent a new art of railing upon me, me, nay to borrow the tongue of the devil … that cannot come within the compass of any liberty of friendship’. This ‘strange frenzy’ of ‘fiery boutades [outbursts]’ coupled with ‘a continual dogged sullen behaviour towards me’, was made much worse by being deliberately expressed at night, ‘bereaving me of my rest’. Worst of all, Somerset was now refusing to sleep with the King: ‘I leave out of this reckoning your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnest soliciting you to the contrary, accounting that but as a point of unkindness.’

‘What can or ever could thus trouble your mind?’ James demanded. Somerset and Suffolk had it sewn up. Did not all court graces and place come through him as Lord Chamberlain, and rewards through Suffolk as Lord Treasurer? Had not James placed Somerset’s nephew in his Bedchamber, and another kinsman in Charles’s Bedchamber, in addition to Somerset’s ‘own infinite privacy with me’? This should be enough to silence ‘these news-bringers and makers of fray’. Somerset must know that no man could come as close to James as he did. ‘I must ingenuously confess ye have deserved more trust and confidence of me than ever man did: in secrecy above all flesh, in feeling and unpartial respect, as well to my honour in every degree as to my profit … And in those points I confess I never saw any come towards your merit: I mean in the points of an inwardly trusty friend and servant.’

James swore that he had borne this grief (‘and as never grief since my birth seized so heavily upon me’) as well as he could. He pleaded with Somerset not to be ‘the occasion of the hastening of his death, through grief, who was not only your creator under God but hath many a time prayed for you, which I never did for no subject alive but for you’. It was now imperative that Somerset change, because his ‘furious assaults’ and ‘cross discourse’ with the King were beginning to be noticed, as well as Somerset’s ‘long being with me at unseasonable hours, loud speaking on both parts, and their observation of my sadness after your parting, and want of rest’; now ‘there must be some exterior signs of the amendment of your behaviour towards me’.

He made a plea to Somerset. ‘All I crave is that in all the words and actions of your life ye may ever make it appear to me that ye never think to hold grip of me but out of my mere love, and not one hair by fear.’ All Somerset’s being ‘except your breathing and soul’ came from the King; ‘I told you twice or thrice that ye might lead me by the heart and not by the nose.’ But if Somerset ever tried to provoke fear in James, then ‘all the violence of my love will in that instant be changed in[to] as violent a hatred. God is my judge my love hath been infinite towards you; and the only strength of my affection towards you hath made me bear with these things in you and bridle my passions to the uttermost of my ability. Let me be met then with your entire heart, but softened with humility. Let me never apprehend that ye disdain my person and undervalue my qualities, nor let it not appear that any part of your former affection is cooled towards me.’ Somerset’s ‘good and heartily humble behaviour may wash quite out of my heart your bypast errors’, but James would ‘carry that cross to the grave with me, for raising a man so high as might make one to presume to pierce my ears with such speeches’.

‘Love and heartily humble obedience’ were the only merits that would value Somerset to James. When anyone pleaded to him for favour to a Puritan minister because of his ‘rare gifts’, James had a stock response: ‘that I had rather have a conformable man with but ordinary parts than the rarest men in the world that will not be obedient, for that leaven of pride sours the whole loaf. Thus have I now sent down unto you what I would say if I were to make my testament,’ he concluded. ‘It lies in your hand to make of me what you please, either the best master and truest friend or, if you force me once to call you ingrate, which the God of Heaven forbid, no so great earthly plague can light upon you. In a word, ye may procure me to delight to give daily more and more demonstrations of my favours towards you, if the fault be not in yourself.’