Buckingham: the most hated man in England

You don't have to be young and beautiful to get ahead in Stuart England but it really doesn't hurt. The is the story of 'gorgeous George' - that is to say George Villiers (later Duke of Buckingham) who in his early 20's became the favourite of James I of England (VI of Scotland). 

Despite his willingness to promote based on good looks, James I comes out of this rather well. He may have believed in witches (how else to explain what happened to his bride??) but he also believed in peace - greatly to the benefit of his subjects.

Of course his subjects weren't remotely grateful and were delighted when Charles I took over and (with Buckingham) started wars with Spain and France. As with so many wars the enthusiasm faded fast when it turned out these things cost money. And the Duke of Buckingham was in the firing line as members of the House of Commons were overcome with rage and the mob turned against him.

All sorts of extraordinary things in this episode - storm raising witches, wizards, false beards, mad, romantic journeys across Europe in search of a bride and (my personal favourite) the House of Commons grinding to a halt as one member after another bursts into tears. Lucy Hughes-Hallet is a brilliant guest. The story in her book The Scapegoat is (as she rightly says) much better than any fiction.

Seriously - get the book. We didn't cover a tenth of it. By turns hilarious and tragic it is a window into a world hovering between the medieval and the modern.

Transcript

Russell 0:04

Hello and welcome to Subject Change with me, Russell Hock. My guest today is Lucy Hughes Hallett. Lucy is a critic, a writer of fiction, an historian, and a multi-prize-winning biographer. I think her best known book is The Pike, which is the biography of Gabrielle D'Annunzio, and which won the Bailey Gifford Prize, it won the Samuel Johnson Prize, it won the Costa Book Award for Biography, and goodness knows how many more in addition. But today we're going to be talking about her latest book, which is The Scapegoat, and that's a biography of George Villiers, who was to become the first Duke of Buckingham. And just to give some context, Buckingham was a favourite of King James I of England back in the early 1600s, and he was also later a favourite of James's son Charles I. The book is fantastically readable. It's an absolute page turner, and some of the events it describes are just extraordinary. So I'm really looking forward to talking about it. Anyway, uh welcome Lucy to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Thank you very much.

Russell 1:14

Shall we just start by talking a bit about James I? And before he's James I of England, he's James VI of Scotland. So can you just say a bit about him and what kind of a life he had? I mean, I know that he was Mary Queen of Scots' son, which suggests he might have had a slightly uh difficult childhood.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

He certainly did. Yes. So before he could walk or talk, his father had been murdered, Darnley. His mother had been driven from her throne, obliged to abdicate and fled to England, where she was imprisoned for 20 years before Elizabeth I had her head chopped off. And so James was King of Scotland from his babyhood, and he was brought up pretty much under house arrest in Stirling Castle, which is a pretty forbidding building on the top of a crag. So there he was, a sort of helpless infant. He had guardians and regents, but most of them had their own interests at heart rather than his. And he was repeatedly abducted or tried to abduct him because they thought if they could get their hands on the baby king, they would effectively have got their hands on power in Scotland. So even as a small child, poor little James was witnessing terrible scenes. And he was in the room when his grandfather was shot. He was kidnapped by the Earl of Gary and held prisoner for some six months or so before being released, only on condition that he signed agreements which he signed in tears. He really didn't want to sign them. It's really quite astonishing that he grew up even halfway sane. In fact, he grew up to be, I think, one of the most admirable and wise monarchs this country has ever had. That might come as a surprise to some listeners, because for a variety of reasons, right from his own lifetime onwards, people were doing him down.

Russell 3:21

Now I know he was he was very nervous around crowds, is sort of one thing that uh that I know about him. Does that come from his childhood, or or does he have reason in his adult life to think that that people are out to get him?

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Well, it mostly comes from his childhood, obviously. And he grew up terrified of assassination. And it was said that it was fashionable to wear these sort of quilted doublets and and great sort of balloon-shaped britches, which was were stuffed, so that they were big. But James's doublets especially were double their quilting. Effectively, he was wearing body armor all his life. He was very much afraid of being assassinated. And it's partly because of the you know the violence with which he was surrounded as a child. So naturally, he he grew up quite wary of possibility of attack. It was partly, I mean, not paranoid at all, just you know, straightforward understanding of the way the world was. Two successive kings of France died by the assassin's knife. And of course, when he came to England in 1603, he came with a huge sense of relief. He did feel much more secure down here than he had up in Scotland. Scotland was really pretty pretty wild at the time.

Russell 4:44

And apologies to all Scots, but Well, I'm I'm a Scot myself and it's all ringing true.

Fear Of Assassination And Security

SPEAKER_00 4:52

The English weren't that well behaved either. But I mean, one big factor in Scotland was that the church, the Kirk, was opposed to the monarchy, so that one of the institutions, which you might have expected to be protective of the king, was actually fairly hostile. But anyway, so he came south, huge sigh of relief, um, thought that things were going to be easier from now on, not least because he would get his hands on the contents of the English treasury, and he'd been very short of cash up north. But then, of course, quite soon after his arrival in England came the gunpowder plot, which, if it had succeeded, would have been the most devastating terrorist act in history, I think. You know, the the entire British ruling class would have been wiped out. It's timed for Palace of Westminster to blow up during the state opening of parliament. The entire royal family would have been there, all the peers of the realm, all the members of the House of Commons. It didn't happen, but it wasn't just James, but really um you'll notice, you know, for the next 20 or 30 years in England, people are very much afraid of terrorist acts.

Russell 6:11

And are they very much afraid of Catholic terrorist acts? Is the gunpowder plot seen as a Catholic plot?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Absolutely. James called himself Rex Pacificus, the King of Peace. Came to the throne of England, and one of his first actions was to encourage Salisbury, Robert Cecil, who was effectively running England at that point, to hurry up the negotiations with Spain and bring to a complete end the long-drawn out sort of war that had been had, and I hesitate about saying war because it was often not officially declared, but hostilities between England and Spain had been going on for decades. And James put a stop to that. And his idea was that he, by marrying his children strategically to various, you know, princesses or princes from around Europe, he would be able to make Europe one great big happy family with him as everybody's father-in-law.

Russell 7:15

So, I mean, just coming back to this thing about nervousness around crowds, you have this great description of how he sort of cloisters himself away because you get you get room after room, which get less and less open to the public. I just thought that was great. So do you just want to explain how he sort of set up the royal apartments, even though he's sort of supposed to be open to the public, he kind of wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

That's right. And and the Palace Whitehall, which of course, the only bit of it that's left standing is Inigo Jones's banqueting hall. But it was it was vast and it was it was kind of a public space. I mean, people could stroll through the courtyards and they could come into the outer rooms of the palace. You had to look right. Uh, you know, people would dress up smart in order to to present themselves at court. If they you know, if they looked okay, they could they could go into the outer rooms and they would finally you needed an invitation to get into the room where the king atte his dinner, which was a public occasion, you know, that people would be milling around while he was sitting at his table eating. So not just anyone could walk in there. But then from beyond that chamber, you went into the privy chambers and you go into these secret spaces, which in many cases not no one except princes of the blood, in other words, James's own children and nobody else, could actually venture without his express invitation. And the gentlemen of the bed chamber were all important because they they were James's, they were his friends, they were his bodyguard, they were his confidants. And often, if if somebody wanted something from the king, if they wanted to influence him in any way, the best way to do it was to make friends with one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber and ask him to whisper in James's ear.

Russell 9:14

And tell us a bit about his his um his marriage, because I mean it seems to have been quite successful, I mean, at least at first, and actually kicks off in a fantastically uh romantic way.

Gunpowder Plot And Catholic Panic

SPEAKER_00 9:28

Yes, so he married um Anna of Denmark, Anne of Denmark as she was known in this country. Um they'd never laid eyes on each other, married uh by proxy before he even saw her. But uh, she was chosen from a very small pool of suitable princesses, and he needed to marry a Protestant because the English wouldn't tolerate a Catholic queen, and all the Scots, of course. And at that point, he was only King Scotland, not yet England. Um Anne at that point was fifteen, and James was twenty-three, which made him a very, very old royal bridegroom, because of course the main task of a monarch is to beget the next generation of monarchs. But he finally made up his mind to get married, chose Ann. And then that great difficulty. She was having to cross the North Sea, storms blew up. James became convinced that these storms had been sent by witchcraft, which you know, James's anxiety about witchcraft, which led to his up deplorable backing of the ghastly North Berry witch trials, which resulted in large numbers of people being killed. It stems from here, it's from this moment that he he really believed the witches were out to get him. Happily, and so when Queen Anne first set out to come from Denmark via Norway to Scotland, the storms blew up, she had to turn back, she wasn't going to be able to start again until spring, because they left it too late in the year, really. But then James decided that he was going to go and get her. So he took ship and he managed to arrive in Norway in three days, the storm had dropped. And I think to begin with, they they got on fine. He got her pregnant seven times, only three of the children lived past infancy. And I mean, we it's it's hard to know what they felt about each other. I mean, royal marriages were not based on romantic love, you know, they were they were dynastic arrangements planned for political or religious reasons. Right. But Anne was an interesting person, she was an extremely clever woman, and by the time they were in England, they were leading fairly separate lives, and she tended to live either in Greenwich or in one of the country palaces, whereas James was in Whitehall, or he was off hunting. He spent a lot of time in his hunting lodges near Newmarket, Royston. But by all accounts, they got on quite well. You know, Anne understood the nature of the relationship. She got her children, she'd done her duty, he'd done his in that regard, and she established a fairly separate court, surrounded herself with clever women, and several of her her ladies were authors, scholars in their own right. She staged masks in which she danced, she loved performing. So she she was an interesting woman. But yeah, there was there was quite a distance between them. But she did play an interesting part in the introduction to James's life of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, who was in a sense to become his other partner.

Russell 12:55

Well, but I'm just about ready to talk about uh George Villiers, but um but before talking about him in particular, I just wanted to understand what is a favorite, because because James is notorious for having favourites, but but but what what exactly is a favourite and how do they differ from, say, did you mention Cecil, a normal minister? What's the difference?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Well, it's very hard to define because actually the word favourite is used of all sorts to describe all sorts of different relationships. So Cecil, as you say, was he was incredibly important to James, um, and as his father, William Cecil, or Baley, had been to Elizabeth. Because of course, in a hereditary monarchy, it's an extraordinary stroke of luck, which very seldom occurs, that the monarch turns out to be in any way capable of ruling a country. You know, it's it's a pure a lottery, pure chance, who who gets to be king or queen. And so some of them are very competent, some of them are mass murderers, some of them are completely bonkers, you know, that so that that there has to be someone else standing by. And there is the Privy Council in England at this point, who are really the people who are taking the big decisions. But everything has to be ratified by the monitor by the king. But the king, in the case of James, he doesn't want to be sitting in the on the council meetings. He wants to be safely away from court, he feels very vulnerable at court. When he first arrives in England, actually, he can't understand a word anyone's saying, as the you know, the English can't understand anything the Scots are saying. So that you know, there is it's quite tricky to begin with, made a bit easier by the fact that the business of government is largely carried on in Latin, but that complicates things for other people. But anyway, so basically, any monarch needs someone who's going to be hands-on day to day, acting as a sort of go-between between the privy council and the great officers of state and the king. And that's the role that James's favourites in particular, um, Robert Carr, future Earl of Somerset, and George Villers, future Duke of Buckingham, will play. And that's a role that can be played actually by an ordinary-looking old man, not a woman at this point in history. But in James's case, he loved beautiful young men, and so his favourites tended to be beautiful young men, and some of them were also his love objects. Say that carefully rather than lovers, because it's not always clear in the case of these several different relationships to what extent this was an erotic, romantic relationship, but with some of them it certainly was.

Russell 16:02

So, how does Buckingham, and you sort of hinted that the Queen has some role? Does she dislike Buckingham? Does I mean is is she sort of horrified by the existence of this beautiful young man, you know, sort of coming into James's life?

Whitehall Court Access And Power

Marriage To Anne Of Denmark

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Well, poor old dad, I mean, she was used to it by then. I mean, even while he was still up in Scotland, um, he had young men who were sleeping in his chamber, sleeping in his bed, whom he was very attached to. And we can't always say what that relationship was, but it's fairly clear that and I don't ever use this word in my book because I try to think as they thought in the early 17th century. But uh to put it in modern language, James was probably gay. But you know, he was capable of fathering children, and he would have been not shocked or appalled, but just completely puzzled by my saying that, because to him and his contemporaries, the idea that a person's identity would be shaped and defined by their choices of sexual partner would have just seemed bizarre. That wasn't the way they thought. So he had uh young men around him up in Scotland. They were mostly uh his sort of friends, loving friends, and didn't get too much involved in government. But after he came to England, he became very taken with young Robert Carr, who is a handsome young blonde fellow, um, who was riding in a tournament quite soon after James's accession to the throne of England, and Carr's horse fell on him, breaking his leg. And James was very he was very concerned about health. He was a bit of a hypochondriac himself, and he liked fussing over invalids. He just felt enormous pity for this beautiful young man, he was very good looking, who'd fallen off his horse, and James started to visit him day after day after day and bring him presents. And one courtier remarked rather wryly that Robert Carr should be extremely grateful to his horse for falling on him, because as a result, he became James's beloved favourite for seven years, and he became Lord High Chamberlain, he became Earl of Somerset, he became immensely rich. But then he fell from favour. And the story of how Somerset fell from favour is lurid and sensational in the extreme, and it's it's it's very, very complex, but uh a lot of it is still uncertain what what is entirely true. But basically, he he wanted to marry the Countess of Essex, her marriage had to be annulled, scandalous, scandalous um court hearings which went on for days upon days, very shocking details about the sex life, or rather the non-existence of the sex life of the of the Essexes. Anyway, it resulted in an annulment. So that was very scandalous and difficult and embarrassing for James. But then what was much worse was that Somerset and his new wife were found guilty of having murdered his best friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, the murder weapons being a combination of witchcraft and poisoned custard tarts. Oh God. And do we think it's true? Yes, I think it is. What I'm not sure about, and I mean I'm not sure because nobody's sure, is how much Somerset knew. Certainly, I think his wife was guilty. The evidence is is very, very strong. There was a woman who was one of her ladies at the bedchamber, who was a witch. And you know, when you say that, you know, what do we mean in this day and age? But what I mean is that the woman in question thought she was a witch. She would she believed in her own witchcraft. She thought that she could murder someone, and she seems to have known how to prove poisons. And the trail leads right back to to Francis, and by this time, Countess of Somerset. Whether Somerset himself was in on the on the plot, I has never been proven. But it's hard to believe he didn't know about it. Anyway, so Somerset man and wife are in the tower, and King James is lonely.

Russell 20:48

And so in comes George Villiers, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

And then in comes gorgeous George. Um, George Villiers was he wasn't anyone special, he wasn't one of the great aristocratic families who felt themselves too born to rule, you know, not one of the Howards or the Percy's or the Seymour's. He was the fourth son from the second marriage of an obscure country gentleman. But we don't quite know how it happened, but somehow he came to the attention of a group of ultra-Protestant grandees who wanted to find a new love object for the king, a new favourite, so that they could influence the king's policy using this young man as a puppet. And they heard tell that there was this particularly lovely young man available, and they arranged for him to join the royal hunt at Apthorpe Castle, sorry, Apthorpe Palace, where James loved to go for the hunting. It was sort of near Peterborough's in the Midlands, good hunting country, and George Villa's. Looked very good on a horse, and there he was out hunting, and it was noticed that the king had noticed him, and very soon he was at court initially as the royal cupbearer, which was fairly you know, low down the ladder of promotion at court, but it was a good position to have because the royal cupbearer stood beside the king as he ate his dinner, you know, topping up his glass, and and so they they could chat. And it was actually forbidden for anyone other than the cupbearers to come that close to the king. There was a sort of patch of carpet on which the royal table was set. The king sat eating alone. I mean, not alone in a room full of people who were staring at him, but you know, there was no one else eating at his table. Only the cupbearers could approach him. And so, you know, he and young George had plenty of opportunity to get to know each other. And soon George Villers was a gentleman of the bedchamber, which gave him unlimited access to the king. But the queen becomes important here because after a few months of this, we get to St. George's Day, where there's a great ceremonial procession in honour of the Order of the Garter. And it's a big day, the whole court turns out. And after the all the ceremonies on that particular day, this is uh 1615, um, the Queen invites the King and Charles, the Prince of Wales, of that, to come to her apartments in Whitehall Palace after the ceremony. And there she and Charles go down on their knees and ask the king to receive George Villers and to make him a knight. Now, this is obviously it's a charade if they're doing what the king, I mean that the king has uh has set set this up, or anyway, hinted that he would like something of this kind to happen. But the point is that it was by this time well known that the queen saw that it was going to be important for her to be friends with the favourites as they came and went. And she and George Villers seemed to have become surprisingly fond of each other. I mean, after only a few months of his position at court, the queen was writing to him as my dear dog, because the king called him. Or rather, when Villers was writing to the king, he signed off his letters, Your Majesty's humble slave and dog, which may seem a bit bizarre until you, but you have to bear in mind that the king loved hunting, and he was probably more fond of his hounds and his horses than he was of most human beings.

Russell 24:55

Just to go back though to this question of homosexuality, and you said, Oh, you know, people wouldn't have seen themselves defined in that way. But I thought that the one crime for which you could not be forgiven was sodomy. And maybe it's later, but I certainly know that in that in Georgian days, on sailing ships, for example, you could get you know lashed for striking an officer. But sodomy was something you would be hanged for, and there'd be no there'd be no pardon, there'd be no getting away from it. So I'm sort of puzzled as to were were attitudes different in the 1600s, or you know, I'm just puzzled as to how James sort of gets away with having apparently openly homosexual relations with these men.

What A Royal Favourite Does

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Well, this raises the question of what sodomy actually is. And um James certainly he he wrote a book framed as a letter to his eldest son, Henry. Henry never got to be king because he died in his teens. But this this this book is a kind of instructional manual for a future king and how to how to behave yourself, how to think about this, that, and the other thing. And in it, James explicitly says sodomy is an abomination, and it's the one thing you you must never go near yourself, and you mustn't forgive it in others. But then there is a lot of uncertainty about what exactly is defined as sodomy. And by the way, it's not it's a capital crime, certainly. It's also a mortal sin, so you'll burn in hell forever and ever if you're a sodomite. But there is a certain amount of debate about the definition of the word, and the great jurist, Sir Edward Cook, who's a terrifically influential figure in this period in England, who basically defines the common law. Um, Edward Cook says, I mean, one of the difficulties about defining sodomy is everybody um flinches away from actually saying anything very explicit because it's something you you can't speak of it. And that's something people say, this is not to be said, this is not to be named. But uh, what Edward Cook calls it is um thing in thing, rays in ray. And as long as thing doesn't penetrate thing, you can tumble around in bed as much as you like. So that you know there are lots of other pleasurable activities um which in which James and these lovely young men could indulge just so long as they you know they didn't go the whole way.

Russell 27:35

One person who almost certainly wasn't gay is is Buckingham because he marries Catherine and seems to have a you know a very loving relationship with his wife. So does that bother King James? Uh you know, is he is he jealous of of the fact that Buckingham in some way has found another lover?

SPEAKER_00 27:53

James seemed to actually rather enjoy finding rich wives for his favourites once they were, you know, his affections for them were were waning. And in Buckingham's case, you know, there was no waning involved. He still loved Buckingham, but he certainly helped him to marry Catherine Manners, who was the richest heiress in the country. So you know that was another favour that he was doing his favourite. And as you say, yes, uh Buckingham and Catherine exchanged letters which are very tender, very affectionate. They had children, and she at one point there's a very painful, loving letter she writes to him later on when he's going to war, and she doesn't know whether she's ever going to see him again, and she kind of describes their marriage and says, you know, how happy it's made her. But of course, it's been very painful because often he's away at court or he's off on campaign or diplomatic missions and she doesn't get to see enough of him. And there is, she says, his one foot of loving women too well. So certainly he was extremely interested in the opposite sex. But hey, you know, if the king's in love with you, the advantages that accrue to the royal favourite are very, very considerable. And I think Buckingham thought, well, you know, hey, why not?

Russell 29:17

I mean, looking at it from James's point of view, I wondered if, as much as being gay, this is sort of James's absolutely miserable childhood. He has no family at all. He's got these rather ferocious guardians, and and these these young men, he can't have young women around him. That's impossible. So these are almost like it's like he's almost getting a new family. This must have been wonderful for him to be sort of part of this. So he would he would push himself into the Buckingham Catherine family.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Absolutely. Yes. And um, he started um addressing Catherine as my daughter, and when she and and Bucknight had had started having babies, he called them my grandchildren. It was like a sort of a huge cuckoo in in the nest of their family. Yes, it's true. I mean, his he wasn't a very good um father to his own children. Um, he and Henry didn't get on at all well, mainly for political reasons. I mean, James was, as I've said, you know, the king of peace, and Henry was much more conventionally sort of masculine, militaristic, and I mean he died when he was uh just 18. But it seems extremely likely that if he'd lived long enough to have a real influence over political affairs, he would have been pushing James to go back to war with Spain. Henry was ultra-protestant, very much less tolerant of religious difference than James was. So they had their differences, and then along came Charles, the future Charles I, and who'd obviously, because Henry was the heir, Charles had been brought up as a spur, no one took much interest in him. Yeah. And he was very nervous and anxious. And once he was into his twenties, he and James established some sort of affectionate relationship, but it was always quite distant. Whereas in his in his sort of surrogate family, his adopted family, the Buckingham family, King James was a very kind of doting person, a sort of grandpa figure, fairy godfather. A wonderful account by a fairly hostile courtier who says that the king's quarters, his privy chambers, uh, which had been more or less barred to all women, were now full of Bachim's women folk, his his wife, his mother, his his sister, and little children running up and down like fairies, says this man. So, yes, rather weirdly, uh late in life, uh, he'd kind of having slightly failed to establish a happy family as of his own, James borrowed somebody else's family.

Russell 32:02

And what does Buckingham do day to day? Because my my image of a favourite is someone who just sort of flops around looking decorative. But in your book, he seems to have actually been quite busy.

Robert Carr And The Overbury Murder

SPEAKER_00 32:13

He was very hard working. I mean, he was also extremely decorative. I mean, he was described as being the handsomest man in Europe. Uh, he sat for his portrait over 30 times, and those portraits show him wearing very, very short britches and very long legs in lovely white silk hose and masses of pearls and fabulous clothes. And certainly he was he was um he was a picture. But obviously, you know, portraits don't don't tell you everything, and they don't tell you what he was doing every day, as you say. And very quickly, I mean, very quickly, when he was in his early twenties, Buckingham had some very important jobs. Uh, first, and so he, you know, he became gentle for the bedchamber, and then he he joined the Privy Council in England and in Scotland. He became master of the king's horse, which could be just a sort of ceremonial role, but Buckingham took it seriously. And effectively, to be master of the horse was to be minister for transport. You know, you couldn't go anywhere without a horse. And it was essential for making war, you know, you needed horses. And then he became admiral of the fleet, still in his mid-twenties by then. There was no standing army, so the admiral of the fleet was in charge of the defense of the realm. We know from his his surviving correspondence that you know he wasn't just relying on deputies, as you know, many, many of the officers, the sort of aristocratic officers of state would have done. Buckingham was really working at it, writing endless boring letters to people talking about um you know providing enough flour and enough boots and enough tar for the ships. You know, he was he was an administrator, very, very hard-working one. There's a wonderful letter that when he first saw that he was about to get this extraordinary role of being the king's favourite, and he he really wasn't prepared for it at all. But he had the good sense to write to possibly the cleverest man in England, Sir Francis Bacon, great philosopher, essayist, inventor of empirical science, some would say. Young George Villis writes to Bacon saying, I in this extraordinary position, I really don't quite know how to conduct myself. Bacon advises him how to how to deal with an employer who believes, as James did, that he's God's representative on earth. That can complicate the relationship. And also it it lays out what the favorite, what his job is. And basically, the job is receiving the vast deluge of petitions, which you know they want something from the king, money or a job, or a seat on the privy council, or a title, and it's for the favorite to sort of filter those suits, as they'll call them by those petitions, uh, and then pass on the chosen few to the king with a recommendation saying, you know, you should say yes to this one. So that you can see that this gives Buckingham enormous influence, uh, and very soon it also makes him immensely rich. Because if you want to get the ear of the king, you have to give Buckingham what they would not have called a bribe, but we might. And the bribe would be not just a little brooch or or a nice bottle of wine, it would be vast sums of money, or a mansion house with all its lands, or something of that nature.

Russell 35:58

Buckingham, he's attacked later on by Parliament for being corrupt. But is this corruption accepting bribes like this, or is this just these are the perks of the job, and you know, this is how business is done?

SPEAKER_00 36:13

I think the latter. I mean, it seems to be completely normal. And I mean, it's certainly the royal Francis Bacon was also eventually disgraced, accused of corruption, of accepting bribes. But it was precisely it was normal behaviour. It would have been, I mean, it would have been awfully rude not to offer something to a person um if you were asking him to do a favour for you, you give him something in return. I mean, that's that's the way the world went. But of course, it did mean that it did make people vulnerable. And I think in Buckingham's case, a lot of the um the hostility towards him was was snobbish. You know, he didn't come from one of the great families. If he'd been a a nephew of, you know, the a member of the Howard family or a nephew of Cecil's or, you know, someone someone who was expected to hold high office, then that all would all have seemed uh much more normal. And the fact it is true that he helped his brothers and his cousins and his other relations to places around court. But that would have seemed perfectly okay in a member of the aristocracy. In fact, not to do so would have been condemned. I mean, people who didn't take care of their family members were seen as being very undutiful. But what the kind of, you know, the the the the upper class, the aristocracy, to which Buckingham hadn't belonged, what they really took obsession to was all these common people arriving at court, these mere sort of country gentlefolk, and being given and positions at court that they didn't seem to be, you know, who are these people? It was kind of and we're having to respect them as though they were our sort when they're not. And so that that is uh part of the of of the objection to Buckingham, and when people turned against him, that's one source of of um people's distaste for him. Then there's the religious issue. I mean, Buckingham's wife, Catherine, um, came from a Catholic family. She converted in order to marry him. After he died, she converted back to Catholicism almost immediately. This is purely opportunistic conversion. Um, his mother probably converted to Catholicism. We don't know for certain, but it's very likely that she did. So, of course, the very strict Protestants, the ultra-Protestants, and especially the Puritans, were very suspicious of him for that reason. And also there was simply envy. I mean, he wrote about this a lot in his letters, and there are there's a particular painting of him by Rubens in which there's a sort of scaly monster who is envy trying to Buckingham is sort of flying up into the clouds because you know, in the in the cloud of glory, and envy is trying to sort of drag him down. And I mean, it was annoying, you know. Here's this young fellow with no qualifications whatsoever, turns up and suddenly gets the top job. People got annoyed by that.

Russell 39:34

Um, I'm dotting around a bit, so apologies for that. But but one of the things I thought was so interesting was when you said in your book that the time of James I'm kind of, despite the fact that we've got Bacon, you know, producing empirical science and writing uh about that, we're still to some extent in the world of the Middle Ages. And and I know, you know, you said that that James was interested in witchcraft and frightened the witches, and there was the Berwick witch trials, but he seems to become more skeptical as he went along. But I was interested to see that that Buckingham even employs somebody, you know, he employs a wizard. I think sort of what kind of world is this where we've got empirical science on the one hand and and witches and God savers wizards as well.

Buckingham Arrives And The Queen Backs Him

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Yes, and that's one of the things I'm fascinated by in this period. And of course, witchcraft and and medicine overlap. And when poor poor Prince Henry was dying, and they tried out all kinds of medicines on him, but they also tied dead pigeons to the top of his head because they thought that that was that might somehow extract the evil from him. You know, it looks much more like a magic spell than like a sort of medical intervention. And yes, Buckingham had this very suspect character called Dr. John Lamb, who was part of his household. And Lamb was a nasty piece of work, and he was found guilty of raping an 11-year-old girl. Buckingham shouldn't have been having anything to do with him, but he was obviously amusing and charming and clever, and quite a lot of the nobility liked to have John Lamb round. He would to do sort of conjuring tricks almost, and no one could quite make out whether he was a brilliant uh charlatan or a seriously rather frightening sorcerer. And when things started to go very badly wrong for Buckingham towards the end of his life when he'd become very unpopular, there was an occasion when John Lamb had gone to the theatre. He was just outside the city walls near where Old Street now is, and he was recognized, and the cry went up, it's the Duke's wizard, it's the Duke's wizard, get him. And Lamb was chased from the theatre and sort of pursued through the narrow streets of old pre-grape fire London, the narrow, narrow streets, and found himself in a cul-de-sac, whereupon a lynchmoth almost literally tore him to pieces. There's a gruesome description of Lamb's end. But um that this sort of idea that magic was um one and the same time, it was totally reprehensible, and witches were to be horribly, horribly punished. But at the same time, it came so close to to medicine and to science that very serious, you know, proper scholars were constantly at at risk of of being described as witches. And I think that I mean that the overlap between religion, magic, and science at this period is it's it's a very tangled grey area where you know the same person might be involved in all three.

Russell 43:06

So so getting back to, I mean, you you said earlier on that that James's great policy is peace, but it all goes it all gets slightly tricky when his uh his daughter, when his daughter Anne's well, his daughter Anne marries, I can't remember, is it Frederick, who is the elector of the Palatine? Princess Elizabeth. Princess Elizabeth, okay. So it all gets slightly tricky when his daughter, Elizabeth, her husband decides to accept the throne of Bohemia, uh, which is sort of one of these acts of self-imolation you see in history from time to time. And it's all a bit confusing, but can you just briefly explain how how the Thirty Years' War it starts to uh affect politics in Britain, despite James's best efforts?

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Yes. So Frederick was the sort of leading Protestant prince in the Holy Roman Empire, which is this sort of ragbag. Of small states all crammed together and ruled by a Catholic emperor, but there were still Protestants within the Emperor. And Frederick's accepting the Kingdom of Bohemia, I don't think we want to go into this, it's quite complicated, but it's it's very provocative. Um the Emperor Ferdinand drives him out and then drives him out of the Palatinate, which is his own place. So Princess Elizabeth, you know, lovely English princess, um, finds herself a homeless exile. Whereupon a lot of English people are saying, come on, we've got to go and avenge our, you know, our beautiful princess. And there's a lot of kind of romantic kind of uh evocations of the old code of chivalry and people swearing to be her loyal knight and so forth. And it's all very impractical. How are you going to rescue her? You can't. Somebody pointed out, if you want to make war on the Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, you're going to have to fly there because France is in the way. France isn't going to let you march an army through. Um, and James, anyway, is determined not to. I mean, he, you know, I'm sure he's sorry for his daughter, but he is not going to embroil England and Scotland in the that ghastly sequence of conflicts that we now know as the 30 Years' War. And it's only just beginning at the time, so nobody can really foresee how devastating it'll become of laying waste the whole of Central Europe. But James is just absolutely determined to keep out of it. But there are strong, you know, loud voices calling for war. They're saying, you know, we must protect our princess. But also, I mean, James, the two decades of his reign gives England uh peace and prosperity, and the English people just are not grateful for it. And this is, I think, a point where you begin to see a sort of very unfortunate tendency in human nature to find warfare exciting, and in particular, to find it manly and virile. And under James, I find this so interesting. English people seem quite able to put up with his um preference for his own sex when it comes to you know falling in love. You know, some of them sort of shocked and disgusted by it, but they can handle it. Um, what they find really unsettling is his preference for peace over war, because it seems to call into question not only his masculinity, but that of all his male subjects. And there are a lot of pamphlets from the time and sermons. I mean, you know, the the pulpit was a great um a great platform for public speaking, so that um often what was being said in the pulpit was as important as what was being said in in the Palace of Westminster. And over and over again you find this word effeminate. The English people, English men in particular, have become effeminate because they've had years and years and years without a war, and real men fight.

Russell 47:22

But I mean, James has this I mean brilliant idea. He's going to snuggle up to the Spanish, who are then going to help him, presumably, get Elizabeth's uh throne back. And and and his idea is to have Charles marry uh Maria Anna, who's the King of Spain's uh daughter. So so that seems like a great plan, but but secretly I think the Spanish are not telling James, but they don't want anything to do with it. And then you've got this extraordinary, I mean, it's one of the strangest episodes in history. And and when I read your book, I thought, well, why have I never heard about this before? Because Buckingham and Charles, they decide to sort of cut the Gordian knot. So do you just want to tell people what the plan was?

Sodomy Laws And What Counted

SPEAKER_00 48:06

That's right. Yes. So James's idea was so he'd married Elizabeth to the Electra Pandetine, a um a Protestant match, and so now he wanted a Catholic match for the heir to the throne. And to begin with, it was Henry, but then Henry died. And so then Prince Charles was the become Prince of Wales, was going to be married to a Spanish princess. And the negotiations began when Charles was 10 years old, so there really didn't seem to be much of a hurry. But they went on and on and on and on. And eventually it became very clear that the Spaniards had never for a single second intended to allow this marriage to go ahead. I mean, why would they want their princess to marry a heretic from England? No way. But what they did want to do was to prevent Charles from marrying a French princess, because you know, an Anglo-French alliance would have been they didn't want that. So it went on and on and on and on and on, and then Charles, by this time age 23, begins to become impatient for his wife, for personal reasons, no doubt, but also because as the heir to the throne, his number one job was to beget an heir for the next generation. So he needed a wife. And they suggested this to James, and James obviously would have imagined that they were going to go, you know, they would go with a great train of courtiers and troops, and you know, the whole thing would be very unwieldy and it would take forever, and maybe with any luck, he was probably thinking it would never actually happen. And so he promised they could go, and then as soon as they got his promise, the two younger men, so Buckingham's just 30 by this time, and Jane Charles, sorry, is he 23, they say, right, you've promised. A man of honour can't go back on his promise. It's not going to be the way you think it is. We're going with just three attendants. We're going incognito. We're going to call ourselves Tom Smith and Jack Smith. We're going by public transport, and we've already bought our false beards. So they put on their false beards and they gallop off to Spain. And public transport, of course, means post horses. And I think one of the most fascinating things about this whole bizarre story is that it shows how incredibly efficient the system of posting ins and post horses was. So they set off from just outside Chelmsford, where Buckinger had a one of his many fabulous houses. And in a fortnight, they were at they were at Madrid. Having stopped off in Paris, where they went, they realized that people kept recognizing them in their full spears, so they went and bought great full bottom wigs as well. And then they went they went into the Louvre, which, you know, like uh like Whitehall Palace, was sort of semi-open to the public. Of course, Charles, who was going to be King of England, was rather keen to see King Louis of France, who was only about the same age as him. And he they went into the Louvre, and again, you know, if you just sort of looked right and acted confident, people would say this way, you know, in your government.

Russell 51:38

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 51:39

And so they they watched the royal family dancing, very formal ballet going on. And Charles noticed the Queen of France, and what he didn't he didn't particularly notice, Princess Henrietta Maria, the king's little sister, who whom he would eventually marry. But anyways, you know, they weren't they weren't rumbled, they nobody recognised them in their wings, or anyway, they pretended not to notice. And on they went and they arrived in Spain, and they stayed there for six months. And the story of the negotiations that went on there is probably too complex to go in here. But they were effectively held hostage in the royal palace in Madrid. The Spanish were hoping to persuade Charles to convert to Catholicism, um, which would have been a great sort of coup for them. And only if he did so would he be allowed to marry the infanta. And the poor little infanta, actually, I think her part in the story is is very poignant. So she was she was 15 years old. She did not want to marry Charles because she thought she'd, you know, he was going to hell. Um if if she was sort of forced to convert as well, she'd be going to hell, their children would be going to hell. You know, it was it wasn't a prospect that she relished. And that there are wonderful descriptions of their incredibly awkward meetings where the Spanish royal family would be sitting in a row with Prince Charles and the Infanta separated by the king and queen sitting between them, and had these very, very stilted conversations, constantly through an interpreter because she spoke no English. He he was trying to learn Spanish, but he wasn't making much progress. And you know, they have conversations. How are you? I am very well, thank you. Interpreter stepping in. It's it's sort of agony to read. Uh, but anyway, uh, long story short, that they finally, um, basically Buckingham and Charles had to lie through their teeth to say yes, yes, yes. Uh, that they they had to rush home to talk to King James, they would persuade him to repeal all the laws against Catholics in this country and so forth. And on these false promises, they must have had fingers crossed behind their back all the time, they were allowed to leave and came home safely. And came home rather sheepishly, thinking they'd failed, and that's was going to be rather embarrassing and humiliating, to find that they were the heroes of the hour. The English people did not want a Spanish Catholic queen, so they would received a great acclamation, people lighting bonfires.

Russell 54:15

Is this the point where we go to war with Spain? I mean, whose idea is that? Is that Bucking's idea? Is it is it Charles and is it Charles and Buckham's idea because they've been humiliated? Is this parliament has pushed for it? I mean, James must have been horrified at the idea.

SPEAKER_00 54:30

Yes, and James resisted it and he resisted it. And Buckingham and Charles, maybe because they'd um they'd they'd seen Spain close up and they didn't like what they saw, maybe they um maybe simply they they did feel they felt that they'd be made fools of there. They were personally offended. Or maybe they just felt, as a lot of people in this country did, that somehow Spain was the natural enemy because it was a great Catholic power. So Spain and the Catholic faith were the natural enemies. Well, not so much the Catholic faith as the the secular power of the Pope. And so there was a you know, there was a strong pro-war feeling in this country, and Buckingham and Charles were increasingly speaking for it, but James steadily refused, you know, he would not countenance going to war. But then, in spring of 1625, King James died. Basically, when King James died, almost immediately Buckingham and Charles began to think about making war.

Russell 55:37

And it seems extraordinary because what are they going to achieve? What does war with Spain look like? It's a long way away, they've got no army. You can, I suppose you can rob some treasure fleets, but but what's the point? It's all gonna I don't really get it.

Buckingham’s Marriage And James’s Surrogate Family

SPEAKER_00 55:55

Robbing the treasure fleet is certainly part of the point. I mean, the amount of wealth crossing the Atlantic in those treasure ships from the Americas was still tremendous, although not nearly so much so as it had been a bit earlier. And actually the wealth of Spain, which was built on that treasure flowing in from America, was very much in decline at this point. But still, um, you know, the fleet was largely run on the principle that participants would share in the treasure, so which was was what partly why people were so excited by the idea of war. It was a way of getting rich quick. So that was part of it. I think also there was just this sense of a longing for glory. I think Buckingham had had, you know, he'd started off with beauty and charm, and that had brought him a king's love, which had brought him influence, which had brought him enormous wealth, which had brought him power, as wealth does. But he still wanted glory. And I a clue to this is just about the time that of King James's death, or shortly thereafter, anyway, Buckingham met Rubens for the first time and became quite good friends with him. And he commissioned a portrait of himself from Rubens, a portrait of himself riding on a large war horse and wearing armour, as though going into battle as a military hero. And at that point, Buckingham had not taken part in any act of war. But this is this shows his kind of you know his new fantasy of a role he might like to play. And Charles was absolutely for it as well. Charles came back feeling from the Spanish trip feeling very hostile to Spain and very um very sort of proud of his role as a kind of defender of the Anglican faith against against Catholicism. I mean, uh disaster followed disaster, and it turned out that neither of them was very well equipped for being a military commander. And as I've said, Buckingham worked very hard in trying to, you know, lay in provisions for the army to recruit men. There was no arms, no, you know, this was a conscript army being dragged reluctantly from their homes, and then someone had to find them weapons and boots and you know, all the things, so food, particularly things that soldiers need. And it bankrupted the treasury. It meant that in order to raise enough funds, Buckingham and Charles resorted to some illegal, unconstitutional taxation, which made them extremely unpopular. And I mean, when they first came back from Spain, they were, you know, the nation's darlings, but within a year that goodwill had all evaporated, and people were rioting outside Buckingham's house, yelling that they wanted rid of him.

Russell 58:54

But one thing I don't understand, uh, because it's a constant refrain in your book, no money, and it's it's quite amusing because every time they've got a plan to do something intelligent, you know, you're you're you you punctuate it with no money, so you can't do it. But but everybody hates the Catholics. They want war, you know, they've been they've been made effeminate. But but when they go to Parliament, say, Oh, can we have some money to make this a reality? Parliament says, Ah, no, there's some other things we'd like to discuss first. There seems to be a um mismatch here.

SPEAKER_00 59:28

Yes, it's quite true. And I think you know that the the the the excitement, the war fever, which does initially make Charles and Buckingham very popular at the beginning of Charles' reign, evaporates very, very quickly when people realise it means high taxation, and as I say, most of it illegal taxation, because Charles doesn't want to summon Parliament, because as soon as he does, they start complaining. You know, they don't want, for instance, they don't want troops billeted in their towns. They don't want to be paying these very high taxes. They don't want their husbands and fathers and brothers to be going off to war and getting killed. So that the excitement, which I think, you know, throughout history, there's always been this pattern of the sense of elation and excitement and you know, talk of honor and glory at the beginning of a war, which very soon turns into exhaustion and grief and resentment. So, yes, it flips. And because Charles, as his latter career amply demonstrates, was very, very bad dealing with Parliament. And in order to raise taxes with the consent of the people, he had to go through Parliament, and he didn't want to go through Parliament, so he kept imposing, with Buckingham's help and cooperation, imposing these non-constitutional taxes. The forced loan was the one that made people very angry, euphemistically called it was a loan that was never ever going to be repaid. And so that they became very unpopular, and the initial enthusiasm for going off and you know, walloping the Spaniards quickly died away as people realized how it was actually England that was becoming impoverished as a result.

Russell 1:01:17

But they do have a good idea because the ally with France, and then it turns out that the French are the most unreliable allies ever.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:28

King Charles by this time marries Henrietta Maria, the French princess. But actually, within weeks, that's causing trouble. You know, Henrietta Maria arrives with her little group, her courtiers, which include a lot of Catholic priests, they're very unpopular. She and Charles quarrel a great deal. You know, they greet each other rapturously on first meeting, and then all at once that you know that the the squabbling begins. Squabbling actually is a it's it they have a serious quarrel, you know. She sees her duty to try to cling fast to her Catholic faith and to convert the entire English nation if she can. And that's not going to happen, but she really does think that she ought to be doing that. And that marriage fails to make a proper alliance between France and England. And very soon the English, Buckingham and Charles, have decided that they need to intervene in the French squabbles, quarrels between the French royal family, the army, and the Huguenots, who are the French Protestants who are holding out in sort of semi-independent enclaves around the country, especially La Rochelle. French Royal Army besieges La Rochelle, and Buckingham and Charles decide they must go and relieve that siege. So they're now at war with France and Spain and doing really badly on both fronts. It's a disaster.

Russell 1:03:02

I do rather admire, well, I don't know if Meir Buckingham is quite the way to put it, but he does personally lead an expedition to La Rochelle. And although it's it's another disaster, and he gets goodness knows how many thousands of men killed in these campaigns to know for no earthly reason. It makes no sense whatsoever, even if even if they win, it makes no sense whatsoever. But nonetheless, he leads it. I mean, his personal courage, you can't uh you can't doubt, I don't think.

Buckingham’s Real Jobs And Patronage

SPEAKER_00 1:03:34

That's true. Absolutely. He does. He's brave and he's um he's very dedicated, and really actually one of the the worst aspects of his um his his expedition to relieve La Rochelle, which turns, I mean, he never actually gets to La Rochelle, it all turns into a kind of uh terrible tangle on the Isle de Ray, which is an island just offshore from La Rochelle. It really would all have been very much better if he'd realized he was beaten and given up and gone home much, much sooner. But he's determined, you know, he feels he's on a bound to carry out his mission. And and he has, I mean, again, this thing of you know, we're half in the modern age and half in the Middle Ages. The code of chivalry is still very strong. This idea, actually, it goes further back from chivalry, it's the old sort of pagan idea that you you know you fight to the death, you never surrender, and if you're defeated, you just fall on your sword, rather than do the sensible thing and enter into diplomatic negotiations and see if you can arrange a peace. So he keeps fighting for far too long, and he he survives, but so many people don't. And actually, one of the most sort of ghastly things about really any account of warfare in this period is that some people die on the battlefield, and maybe they could tell themselves that there's some sort of glory attached, but the great majority of the of the deaths are from disease. So, you know, that there's definitely just nothing heroic or grand about that. It's just squalid, tragic waste of life.

Russell 1:05:18

And of course, because there's no because there's no money, yet again, there's this there's no money to pay them. So when they get back, they're more or less starving to death because you know they've you know they've been taken out of their jobs and they've not been paid.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:32

Yeah. And one of those people who's not been paid is going to be a part in the story, a rather unsuccessful officer from Suffolk called uh John Felton. And after that these military failures, Buckingham has become part of a great confrontation. Um, it's really the first stirrings of what will become the civil wars. Great confrontation between King Charles First and Parliament. And The members of the House of Commons decide they've got to get rid of Buckingham. And my book is called The Scapegoat, because it seems to me that Buckingham is being held responsible for everything, despite the fact that Charles is probably more bellicose, more belligerent in his policies than Buckingham is. But the two of them together have started these two catastrophic wars. And Parliament has decided to blame everything on Buckingham. And they think if they can get rid of him, then maybe they can reason with the King and everything can get better.

Russell 1:06:39

But it's quite interesting because there is a question of who's to blame here, because in your book it's quite clear that Buckingham is much more subtle, much more supple in his negotiations. He's prepared to stand up and explain himself to Parliament. Whereas Charles just says, I'm the King. You know, what are you even doing questioning me? Whereas whereas Buckingham, he's he's prepared to talk, he's prepared to win people round. So it's interesting to me who really is to blame here for the catastrophe. Is it is it Charles or is it Buckingham? You know, it it's a bit unclear to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:10

Yes. Well you're quite right that Buckingham, Buckingham can play politics. He's he's very good at it. Almost everyone who comes in contact with him, even if they detest him, and a lot of people did by the end of his life, they say that he's he's very charming, he's very gracious, um, he's very modest, you know. He he doesn't throw his weight around, he persuades, he he coaxes, he he's a diplomat. And so if left on his own, might have been able to to somehow at least uh soothe Parliament. But Charles feels uh he feels really affronted when the members of the House of Commons in particular criticize what he's doing. You know, I mean that's not what it's supposed to be like being a king. You're supposed to be all powerful and above criticism. He can't bear it. I mean, he's I mean Charles is a sort of pathetic figure, really, because uh he doesn't mean to do such terrible harm, but my goodness he does, out of a kind of stubbornness and and and an inflexibility for me. Just cannot negotiate. And so Parliament resolved to impeach Buckingham. That fails, and Charles dissolves Parliament. Then Charles needs more money because the illegal ways of raising taxation have really kind of run out. So he needs Parliament to authorise a further package of taxes. He summons them again, and we're now in the summer of 1628, and the leaders of the House of Commons agree that they're not going to talk about Buckingham because whenever they criticize Buckingham in the House, Charles just dissolves Parliament again. So this time they're just going to, they're not going to say that name, they're going to talk about the rights of the citizen, they're going to talk about the rights and statutes and the constitutional principles that have to be upheld that are being breached repeatedly in these illegal taxes. And so they meet and they don't talk about Buckingham, but even so, Charles won't listen to their complaints. And there comes a day when a speaker, who's the sort of the intermediary between Parliament and the Commons, particularly, and the monarch, he's left the Commons Chamber, he's going to Whitehall Palace to see the King, and they know that he'll come back with a message from the King once more dissolving Parliament. And there's no there's no certainty whether Charles will ever summon Parliament again. He's already mentioned to several people he'd much rather do without it. So they think, you know, they've perhaps got one hour before the speaker returns, and one of them stands up and he says, This is the crisis of parliaments, and they're all overcome with emotion. There are wonderful contemporary descriptions of the scenes in the Commons chamber that day. And one of the newswriters says there were over a hundred weeping eyes, and there are these scenes which would just be comic if they weren't so tragic, when one after another the great orators of the Commons stand up and then have to sit back down again because they're sobbing so hard they can't get the words out.

Russell 1:10:36

Gosh.

Corruption Claims And Class Hostility

SPEAKER_00 1:10:37

And then finally, upstands Sir Edward Cook, great jurist, you know, the father of the law, 78 years old, which you know is pretty old in those days, and he's been in the tower before he was locked up by James for defying the king a few years earlier. And Edward Cook says, I know I shall never speak in this house again, so now I must speak plainly. He says, The Duke of Buckingham is the source of all our miseries. And he's sort of broken the taboo, he's said the name, and then pandemonium breaks out, and there's sobbing, there's weeping, there's there's other people standing up and shouting against Buckingham in the comments chamber, and they call him, you know, the that the core, the causing cause of all our evils, things like that. And in the end, of course, Charles dissolves Parliament, so they scatter, but somehow, you know, the the flood tide has broken. And one of the things that I find fascinating about this period is that it's it's the beginning of the press. So the first time in English history, perhaps in any history actually, that the people can read very, very quickly within a matter of hours what their rulers are saying to each other in Westminster Palace or in the Privy Council. And also for the first time, people can have a voice, you know, that they can, they're writing pamphlets. Some of those pamphlets are sort of handwritten and just passed out in the street, some of them are printed. Again, preachers in in pulpits are telling the people what's going on. And John Felton from Suffolk, one of Buckingham's unpaid officers, gets hold of the text of Edward Cook's speech. And so he reads that Buckingham is the source of all the nation's miseries, and Felton decides that he can do his country a great service. So he buys a knife. Buckingham has gone down to Portsmouth, where he's assembling a fleet for yet another ill-advised and ill-prepared invasion of France. Felton walks there, he can't afford a horse. He goes to the Greyhound Inn where Buckingham has set up his headquarters. He makes his way to the room where Buckingham is having breakfast with his officers. Lots of people coming and going, very busy. No one notices Felton. Felton leans against a windowsill and he waits for his moment. And when the moment comes, he steps forward and he kills the Duke of Buckingham with one blow to the heart.

Russell 1:13:28

Oh my. And do you think do you think Buckingham had it coming?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:33

Um Well, I don't want to think that, because I do think that it was really uh he shared all responsibility, or you can call it guilt, with Charles, absolutely equally. And he he was a loyal servant to the king. But it certainly is true that after Buckingham's death, the king uh seems to have lost his appetite for these futile wars, and he made peace first with first with Spain and then with France. And thereafter ensued sort of 11 years of peace before the civil wars began. And so I it it's hard. It's interesting what people at the time wrote about Buckingham. They thought that this mighty favorite, he was seen as being incredibly powerful, almost sort of superhuman. Um, he seemed to sort of loom over English political life, especially, but even over a lot of European life, as this rather baleful colossus, as great character. But then when he died, actually nothing much immediately changed. And I think that people realize that I think that what was happening was that people were becoming restive under the institution of monarchy, and particularly under the Stuart idea of monarchy, that King James and King Charles shared of the king as God's representative, who was the father of his people and should be obeyed absolutely. But at the same time, the the mystique of monarchy, almost the worship of monarchy, was very, very powerful, so that it was very difficult for anyone to say the king had done anything wrong. And even during those last few months of Buckingham's life, when the sort of great orators in the commons, particularly Sir John Eliot, who was said to be the most mesmerizing speaker, would stand up and they'd um they'd criticize Buckingham. But Elliot, for instance, always began his speeches saying, We love our king, we venerate our king. So the king could do no wrong. But everything had to be loaded onto Buckingham. And so there was an idea that once they got rid of him, once he was dead, then everything would get better. But of course it didn't. There still was a pretty absolute monarchy, and Charles, from you know, only a few months later dispensed with parliament altogether. The monarchy became more and more autocratic. And it's hard, in a sense, it becomes less vocal. The opposition to the monarchy goes underground because of those 11 years during which Charles didn't summon Parliament. But then, of course, at the at the end of the 1630s, it would erupt into the dreadful sequence of civil wars.

Russell 1:16:40

We didn't talk about it, but during his French adventures with uh with the courtship, I think of I'm not quite sure, but but Buckingham is in France uh for a bit, and and there he sort of wanders into an Alexander Dumas novel. And so I'm wondering, I'm wondering if you're going to use all the uh all the research that you've done. Are you going to out Duma Duma and uh rehabilitate Buckingham through a fictional novel?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:04

Do you know I did think about writing my book as fiction? I thought actually, this is too good. You know, the real story is too good to mess with. Um, but it's true, I first met Buckingham when I read The Three Musketeers as a child. Um it now seems to me a rather obnoxious book. You know, all those kind of cocky young men swaggering around parrots picking fights. But at the time I thought it was very romantic and exciting.

Russell 1:17:27

Okay, um, well, uh Lucy Hallett Hughes, thank you very much indeed. Now, have I got that the right way around? Uh no. Lucy Hughes Hallett, thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:38

Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.