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William Paddy, erstwhile President of the College of Physicians, and Dr Henry Atkins, the current President, together with Drs Lister, Chambers, and William Harvey, whose role in the unfolding drama was to be as central as it was obscure.

      At this stage, James’s condition gave no cause for alarm, as malarial attacks were common, and in the past the King had managed to fight them off without too much difficulty. As the Venetian ambassador put it in a note to the Doge, ‘His majesty’s tertian fever continues but as the last attack diminished the mischief the physicians consider that he will soon be completely recovered. His impatience and irregularities do him more harm than the sickness.’¹ James was a notoriously difficult patient.

      However, on Monday, 21 March his condition took an abrupt turn for the worse. In the afternoon he anticipated a seizure, telling his doctors he felt a ‘heaviness in his heart’. The physicians appear to have been undecided on what to do. At about 4 p.m., the royal surgeon, one Hayes, arrived with a strip of soft leather and a box containing a thick syrup. Watched by Harvey, Hayes soaked the leather with the syrup and lay the impregnated ‘plaster’ upon the King’s abdomen. Soon after, the King suffered a series of fits, as many as eight according to one report.² The plaster was removed. However, later in the evening it was put back, whereupon the King started ‘panting, raving’, and his pulse became irregular. The following day, Tuesday, he went into dangerous decline, and it began to dawn on his medical team that the illness might prove fatal. He was given a soothing drink or ‘posset’ made with gillyflower together with some of the same syrup used to impregnate the plaster, but he complained that it made him ‘burn and roast’. Despite this, he apparently asked for more. Harvey left for London, perhaps to brief officials there. On the road he met John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and recently made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, the seal used to ratify documents of state. Harvey informed Williams of the King’s grave state.

      On Wednesday night, James suffered another violent fit. Blood was let in the hope of bringing relief. On Friday the plaster was apparently applied again, and in the evening another symptom reportedly appeared: his tongue swelled up to such a size that he could no longer speak clearly. On Saturday the physicians held a crisis meeting, but could not agree on the nature of the King’s illness or how to proceed. The following day, James died.³

      Within forty-eight hours, his body was back in London and subjected to a post-mortem. A witness described the procedure:

      The King’s body was about the 29th of March disbowelled, and his heart was found to be great but soft, his liver fresh as a young man’s; one of his kidneys very good, but the other shrunk so little as they could hardly find yt, wherein there was two stones; his lights [lungs] and gall black, judged to proceed of melancholy; the semyture of his head [skull] so strong as that they could hardly break it open with a chisel and a saw, and so full of brains as they could not, upon the opening, keep them from spilling, a great mark of his infinite judgement. His bowels were presently put into a leaden vessel and buried; his body embalmed.⁴

      The autopsy confirmed the King’s known problems with recurring urinary infections, kidney stones, and, as the blackened lungs and gall particularly indicated, the predominance of melancholia in his complexion. The surplus of grey matter that burst out of his brain case also provided the King’s subjects with reassuring physiological evidence of his intelligence. But nothing was revealed about the cause of death. Rumours soon began to circulate that he had been poisoned.

      Such suspicions were stimulated by widespread anxieties about the state of the court. Many believed it had become rife with corruption and Catholicism, nurtured by James’s favouritism. One man more than any other was seen as the embodiment of such concerns: George Villiers, James’s favourite, whispered to be his lover, ‘raised from the bottom of Fortune’s wheel to the top’.⁵ Villiers had benefited more than anyone else from royal favours. The son of a sheriff and a ‘servant woman’, Villiers had been elevated by James to Duke of Buckingham in 1623. The last duke in England had been Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, executed in 1572 for his plan to marry Mary Queen of Scots and found a Catholic dynasty to replace Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth, as parsimonious with titles as James was extravagant, and disturbed by having to order the execution of a close kinsman, had thenceforth refused to raise even her closest favourites to a rank traditionally reserved for those with royal blood, and now tainted with treasonous associations.

      Such a high position provided the perfect stage for Villiers to play out his political ambitions, which now included arranging the future of James’s son and heir, Prince Charles. The sickly, shy, stammering prince was initially jealous of Villiers’ closeness to the King. When he was sixteen, he had lost one of Villiers’ rings, prompting James to summon his son and use ‘such bitter language to him as forced His Highness to shed tears’. A few months later, during a walk in Greenwich Park, James boxed the boy’s ears for squirting water from a fountain into Villiers’ face.⁶ But by the later years of James’s reign, loyalties began to shift. Villiers began to lavish his attentions on Charles, who responded by declaring himself Villiers’ ‘true, constant, loving friend’, trusted enough to take charge of his marriage negotiations. Villiers promoted matches first with the Infanta Maria, the daughter of the King of Spain, then Henrietta Maria of France, both Catholic royals. The Puritans, a body with growing influence in the House of Commons, sensed danger, which intensified in May 1625, just two months after Charles had succeeded to the throne, when he married Henrietta Maria by proxy (she was still in France at that stage, Villiers having been dispatched immediately after James’s funeral to fetch her). Fears spread that with her arrival would come a Catholic dispensation and, as the MP John Pym put it melodramatically: ‘If the papists once obtain a connivance, they will press for a toleration; from thence to an equality; from an equality to a superiority; from a superiority to an extirpation of all contrary religions.’⁷ Thus, when the charges that James had been poisoned first emerged, there were many ready to identify Villiers as the chief suspect, working to hasten the succession of his new best friend.

      Suspicions were first voiced by John Craig. Being a Scottish doctor, he had initially practised in London without a licence but had agreed to submit himself to examination by the College of Physicians, appearing before the Censors on 2 April 1604 alongside Harvey, who was receiving his second examination that day. Unlike Harvey, Craig was admitted immediately, despite being a Scot and therefore according to the College’s own statutes ineligible for membership. Craig had very little to do with the College thereafter, devoting himself almost exclusively to the King.

      It was in the early days of James’s final illness that Craig’s suspicions were aroused. Villiers’ mother, the Countess of Buckingham, had taken it upon herself to nurse the King, and, Craig claimed, it was she who first applied a plaster to the King’s stomach without the permission of James’s attending physicians. Her intervention ‘occasioned so much discontent in Dr Craig, that he uttered some plain speeches, for which he was commanded out of court’. He was escorted from Theobalds and banned from returning to James’s side, and from further contact with Charles.⁸ Soon after, he accused the Countess and her son the Duke of poisoning the King.

      Aspects of Craig’s story were confirmed by others who were present in the ‘Chamber of Sorrows’. Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kellie, a Villiers supporter who was at Theobalds throughout, wrote in a letter dated 22 March 1625 to his kinsman John Erskine, Earl of Mar: ‘There is something fallen out here much disliked, and I for myself think much mistaken, and that is this. My Lord of Buckingham, wishing much the King’s health caused a plaster to be applied to the King’s breast, after which his Majesty was extremely sick, and with all did give him a drink or syrup to drink; and this was done without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctors; which has spread such a business here and discontent as you would wonder.’⁹

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