The Gunpowder Plot: Terror & Faith in 1605 (15 page)

This fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient Kings… your Princely offspring.

WELCOME SPEECH OF THE SHERIFFS OF LONDON
AND MIDDLESEX
to James I

‘
D
o you not think my Annie looks passing well?’ King James asked a courtier at Windsor on 30 June 1603. After this informal invitation to comment on the looks of his Queen, the King took his daughter Elizabeth in his arms and gave her a kiss. ‘My Bessie too is not an ill-favoured wench,’ added the fond parent. ‘And may outshine her mother one of these days.’
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It was not the unceremonious style of James I which made such a scene startling to the English. Although they would come to miss their gracious and dignified old Queen, this was still the honeymoon period for James, the robust male monarch who had come to do the work for which his sex was best fitted, after years of ‘unnatural’ female rule. This was a mood expressed with fervour (if not talent) by Cecil’s brother Burghley in an ode of acclamation:

And all the way of James he loudly sang,
And all the way the plain
Answered ‘James’ again.
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For England, ‘the horse of St George’, it was this phenomenon
of a Royal Family – as opposed to a solitary individual on the throne – which was so striking because it was so novel.

Queen Anne had brought Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth south with her in a triumphal progress of perpetual entertainment which occupied most of June. Great houses were almost as eager to welcome the distaff side of the new dynasty as they had been to bow before their sovereign. As for the great ladies, eagerly anticipating rich pickings at the new parallel court of the Queen Consort, they vied with each other in rushing north, as earlier their husbands had done. The race was won by the enterprising Lucy Countess of Bedford, who became one of the Queen’s closest friends.

There had not been a Queen Consort’s household – an elaborate structure second only to that of the King – since the days of Queen Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII. But Catherine Parr had been by birth a commoner whereas Anne of Denmark was a king’s daughter. Thus the true comparison was felt to be with the much more magnificent household of Henry’s first wife, the Spanish Princess Catherine of Aragon. This was also true of Queen Anne’s financial arrangements: Robert Cecil’s notes on her jointure refer back specifically to that period, almost a century before, of domestic royal innocence when Henry VIII made his first marriage.
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In the south King James grew cross with some of the appointments made by his ‘Annie’, threatening to ‘break his staff of Chamberlainship’ over one man’s head. He also occupied himself, in his pedantic way, with giving orders about the old Queen’s jewels and her heavily encrusted dresses (considered with reason treasures of state in their own right). By custom these went to the new incumbent, but James thought it necessary to have sent north only those things judged suitable for ‘the ordinary apparelling and ornament’ of his wife.
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None of this could mitigate Queen Anne’s sheer enjoyment of her new life. She bade fair to love riding the horse of St George quite as much as her husband, if for different reasons.

Queen Anne loved pleasure and quickly found that in England there was more pleasure to be had than in Calvinist
Scotland. But she was no fool and certainly not a Philistine. Her family had had a tradition of literary patronage, particularly her mother Sophia of Mecklenburg, who had supported the philosopher Tycho Brahe. The Queen’s new best friend the Countess of Bedford – ‘Lucy the bright’ as Ben Jonson called her – was one of the most cultured women of her age. When Emilia Lanier, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, envisioned Queen Anne as a patroness of female talent in a petition at the beginning of her reign, her words did not, like so many other petitions to royalty, have an utterly ludicrous ring:

Vouchsafe to view that which is seldom seen,
A woman’s writing of divinest things…
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Queen Anne’s own idea of pleasure was dancing in a masque written by Ben Jonson, with scenery and costumes designed by Inigo Jones (or having a palace built for her at Greenwich, also by Inigo Jones). These were royal tastes for which the English should be suitably grateful in view of the rich heritage which they handed down to posterity. All of this, of course, was extremely expensive, as pleasures usually are. The King’s grumbling (and Cecil’s more discreet moans) would become fearful. On the Queen’s journey south, however, as in so many royal beginnings, the mood was halcyon.

The most luminous of all the entertainments was a production of Ben Jonson’s masque
The Satyr
at Althorp in Northamptonshire on 25 June. The host was Sir Robert Spencer (created Lord Spencer, as a reward, in July).
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It was the Queen’s first encounter with Jonson’s work but she could hardly fail to be touched by verses which were both flowery and friendly. As fairies skipped about, and an eponymous satyr emerged from the undergrowth to apostrophise the visitors, the general tone of the proceedings was that which Disraeli would recommend when dealing with Queen Victoria two centuries later: ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.’ Two days later the King was reunited with his family, not seen since April, at Easton Neston, near Towcester.

On 2 July Prince Henry was invested as a Knight of the Garter at Windsor. At nine years old he was a tall, handsome boy, full of self-confidence. The wish expressed in
The Satyr –
‘O shoot up fast in spirit as in years’ – seemed likely to be fulfilled. Prince Henry made an excellent impression during the ceremony, just as he had on his way south with his dancing skills. Not only was his ‘princely carriage’ admired but also the intelligent, lively manner in which he answered the ritual questions. At the altar he performed his obeisance with grace. Like his mother, but unlike his father James, Prince Henry already possessed the kind of easy royal manners which courted popularity. The following spring at the procession before the Opening of Parliament, Prince Henry showed himself ‘smiling and overjoyed’ as he acknowledged the loyal cheers by bowing this way and that. All this was described as being to the ‘eternal comfort’ of the people.
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And there was more comfort to come, apart from the engaging Prince and the pretty Princess. For James did not delude himself about his daughter Bessie, who at just on seven years old was indeed an exceptionally attractive child, a natural enchanter like her grandmother Mary Queen of Scots. There was known to be another little princeling still in Scotland, Prince Charles, who would be four in November. True, Queen Anne had miscarried, in May, of the child she was bearing at the death of Queen Elizabeth, and another son, Prince Robert, had recently died at four months old. But there was every hope that she would continue to justify her reputation as ‘a most fruitful and blessed vine’.
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She was after all only twenty-eight.

It was notable how the congratulatory addresses to King James on his arrival stressed the importance of his family. A speech, given in the name of the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex by one Master Richard Martin of the Middle Temple, referring to ‘this fair inheritance from the loins of our ancient Kings… your Princely offspring’, hailed the return of ‘the sacred royal blood’ which had been lent for a hundred years to adorn the north.
⁹
And that was the point. It was
indeed a hundred years since England had enjoyed the spectacle of a king and queen living in public amity, with a quiverful of young children: for Master Martin was referring to King James’ great-great-grandparents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.

The rhetoric of royal addresses and the ceremonial investiture of the young Prince Henry were both intended to focus the nation’s mind on the amazing fact that after roughly a century of uncertainty on this vital question of the royal succession, there were now two heirs and one heiress in direct line to the throne, with the possibility of more. This was a radical change, and a politically important one, quite apart from the sentimental delights of a young Royal Family as a public spectacle. It was a change which meant that further changes could not be expected, or, if so, they would not be brought about by a change of dynasty.

This was an aspect of the new reign fully appreciated, for better or worse, by the Catholics. Gone were the days of eager speculation on the subject of the Archduchess Isabella or even that reputed Papist sympathiser, Lady Arbella Stuart. As Father Tesimond succinctly put it, the succession was now assured by the King’s ‘numerous progeny’. And it was to be a Protestant succession: for these were children ‘raised and thoroughly instructed in the opinions and doctrines of the father’. In Father Garnet’s words, not only the King ‘but the son that follows him’ had to be reckoned with, in regard to Catholic grievances. Father John Gerard also pinpointed a new feeling among the Catholics that things were now set in an unalterable pattern, given ‘the likelihood of continuance of that flourishing issue’ with which God had blessed the King.
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This power of instant ‘continuance’ was (and is) one of the theoretical strengths of hereditary monarchy as a system of government. It was a system which Gibbon would describe memorably two hundred years later as presenting at first sight ‘the fairest scope for ridicule’ yet establishing none the less an admirable rule of succession ‘independent of the passions of
mankind’.
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Certainly, the presence of a young prince, a direct heir, concentrated everybody’s attention.

The late sixteenth century, like our own, was an age when the assassination of leaders featured as a much dreaded phenomenon (these deaths included that of Henri III, King of France, who died at the hands of a fanatic in 1589; Elizabeth I had been considered by the government to be the target of a series of assassination attempts). For many years England had not enjoyed the particular strength of a hereditary monarchy, the possibility of instant ‘continuance’. But from 1603 onwards, if James departed, it would be once more a case of: ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

This vision of an endless line of Protestant Stuart monarchs might induce enthusiasm among loyal subjects.
(Macbeth,
with its ghostly procession of Banquo’s descendants, ending with King James, was written in the first years of the new reign.) But in some Catholics it might induce melancholy.

In a further striking aspect to the subject, any effort to change the government of England by force would have to reckon with this materialisation of ‘Princely offspring’. For one thing, it would not be feasible (even if desirable) to destroy the entire family. Quite soon, according to custom, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth would be given their own vast households, providing new employment for many beaming courtiers. Princess Elizabeth was given Lord Harington (Lucy Bedford’s brother) and his wife as governors, and set up in state at Coombe Abbey in the midlands near Rugby.

Prince Charles was brought down from Scotland late in 1604, and the Queen gave birth to another princess, Mary, in April 1605.
†
By then, you might say that the Royal Family to its enemies had become that mythical beast, the Hydra with
whom Hercules struggled, growing a new head for each one cut off. There was an alternative way of thinking. A multiplicity of heirs could also mean that one or other was adopted to front a new regime. But of course, in the high summer of 1603, a time of rising Catholic expectations, the royal children were not so much hydra heads as ‘young and hopeful olive plants’.
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(The allusion, as with the description of Queen Anne as a vine, was to Psalm 128: ‘Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.’)

At this early period there was still much Catholic confidence in the active piety of the Queen. This confidence, like so many other Catholic dreams, did however gradually fade. Perhaps more should have been deduced from Queen Anne’s treatment of some Catholic ladies of Lancashire who came to York to ‘put up supplications’ in order to have ‘by her means’ toleration of their religion. The Queen’s answer was, from the Protestant point of view, ‘wise enough’: that is, gracious but non-committal.
¹³
Cecil’s notoriously anti-Catholic brother Lord Burghley heaved a sigh of relief.

In Spain, however, Queen Anne was referred to openly as the ‘Catholic wife’, a description she herself seems to have done nothing to discourage, at least where the Catholic powers abroad were concerned. The emissary of the Grand Duke of Tuscany was assured by the Queen that she wished to live and die a Catholic. The French Ambassador, Comte de Beaumont, believed that Queen Anne was speaking to the King ‘very frequently’ on the subject of the Catholics. The Papal Nuncio in Brussels, Ottavio Frangipani, became over-excited. He even suggested that the ancient English-born Duchess of Feria, who as young Jane Dormer had been the play-fellow of Edward VI, should be brought back from Spain to her native country to act as an unimpeachably Catholic lady-in-waiting to the new Queen. It was an unrealistic plan not only because of the good lady’s advancing years and failing health, but because Rome, ever ambivalent towards Spanish political influence, gave the notion a chilly welcome.
¹⁴

The coronation of King James and Queen Anne took place on 25 July, one of those days which give English summers a bad name. It bucketed down with rain throughout. It was additionally depressing that fear of the plague had led to any unessential pomp being omitted. Common spectators, seen as carriers of the plague to mighty persons, were judged to come into this category of unessential pomp, and so the stands to house them at Westminster were abandoned. The deluge fell upon a mass of half-finished scaffolding.