The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart. Sarah Fraser

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      SEVEN

       A Home for Henry and Elizabeth

      OATLANDS

      The family reunited with the king at Easton Neston, sixty-five miles north of London. By the time the Stuarts reached Windsor Castle at the end of June, their train numbered over five thousand, a scale unseen for decades. Lady Anne Clifford, aged thirteen, and her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, killed three horses in their dash to reach the royal family and get a toehold near them. There ‘was some squaring at first between our English and Scottish Lords, for lodging and other such petty quarrels; but all is passed over in peace’. All the Stuarts had to do to repay this fervid reception, was satisfy the expectations of everyone in England who mattered.

      At Windsor, James created a host of Garter Knights, the highest order of chivalry, to celebrate his accession. One of the first was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, freed from the Tower where he had been imprisoned since 1601 for rising with his friend, the late Earl of Essex. For all the talk of continuity, this really was a new age – mixing English, Scots, European family and elites, and rehabilitating the disgraced Essexians.

      Prince Henry kneeled with Lennox, the earls of Mar and Pembroke, a proxy for James’s brother-in-law the King of Denmark, and the German Duke of Württemberg. When the prince stood up again, the Garter insignia – a gold-enamelled Protestant St George, thrusting the sword of truth down the maw of the Catholic hellfire-breathing dragon – rested on his breast. Princess Elizabeth and Anne Clifford watched from behind a screen. Lady Anne overheard ‘the earls of Nottingham and Northampton highly commended [Henry] … for diverse his quick witty answers, Princely carriage, and reverend performing his obeisance at the altar’. The earls’ flattery was normal court discourse, but it showed the ease with which Henry was able to play his public role at such a young age. Six weeks after leaving Stirling, Prince Henry had walked onto a stage of oppressive magnificence – and one he could never leave.

      The Stuarts’ increasingly grand and numerous progress towards the capital stalled at Windsor. Plague had broken out in London once more, forcing the king and queen to abandon plans for a great coronation. They slipped to Westminster to be crowned on 25 July, where their new subjects were forbidden from approaching them, and then rode away as fast as they could. The court and council followed in their wake, setting up temporary government wherever the king chose to stop.

      James was obliged to establish a royal household for the prince and princess in a hurry. He was advised to choose Oatlands palace in Surrey, some ten miles upriver from Hampton Court, though in an alien kingdom he cannot have had any real idea where it was.

      With the king unable to settle and establish his own court, Henry immediately took on some of his father’s public duties. At Oatlands he met with the Venetian Secretary, to receive the Republic’s congratulations on James I’s succession. ‘He is ceremonious beyond his years,’ Scaramelli wrote of the prince.

      When the Secretary asked him how he filled his days in England, Henry opened up. ‘Through an interpreter he gave me a long discourse on his exercises, dancing, tennis, the chase’ – in lengthy, excited detail. ‘He then conducted me … to visit the Princess. I found her surrounded by her Court under a canopy. They both said they meant to learn Italian.’

      Italian delegate and British royals charmed each other. King James’s tutor, Buchanan, had extolled the Venetian constitution, recommending it as a model to his followers. Buchanan’s student, Melville, would have passed the approval to his student, Adam Newton, who passed it to Prince Henry. Yet, Venice was a republic, and Henry the son and heir of a man proclaiming vocally and in print, the divine right of kings and absolute monarchy.

      The plague outbreak was the worst for a generation. Travellers carried it from London out into the countryside. The Lord Chamberlain and the Lord High Steward moved the royal couple on, and on – with the Privy Council and the law courts still following behind.

      Soon Oatlands fell victim to anxiety over the plague, forcing Henry and his train to follow his father’s court. Elizabeth was moved to new guardians, the Haringtons, parents of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, at Coombe Abbey in Northamptonshire. ‘I most kindly salute you,’ Elizabeth wrote to Henry when she was settled, ‘desiring to hear of СКАЧАТЬ