LITMIR.BIZ

       PROLOGUE

       ‘It is called superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and a dog into an ale-house.’

      Archbishop Laud

      On a winter’s day in 1624 Lord Kensington, England’s ‘wooing Ambassador’ as he called himself, rode into Paris to present as alluring a portrait as he could of the twenty-three-year-old Prince of Wales. Without recourse to the hyperbole which envoys on such a commission as his had commonly to employ, Kensington, himself an extremely handsome man ‘of a lovely and winning presence’, was confident that he could draw a picture sufficiently appealing to recommend the Prince as a husband for the King of France’s daughter, Henrietta Maria.

      He could honestly describe a courteous young man, kind and considerate, rather delicate, even feminine in appearance, it was true, and by no means tall, no more than 5 feet 4 inches in fact, but healthy, with limbs made strong by vigorous exercise, by riding, tennis and golf, a curious Scottish game, as Kensington had to explain, which required both skill and strength in wielding a crooked club to drive balls made of hard leather stuffed with feathers into certain holes made in the ground. The Prince was meditative and studious; he read often from a little book, written out by hand and containing – though Lord Kensington had never looked closely inside it – noble sentiments and spiritual advice; he was most regular in his religious observances. Yet he was a young man of action, too, and of physical courage; he hunted with splendid spirit and took a keen interest in military affairs, having once even asked his father for permission to go off and fight in the service of the Doge of Venice. He was renowned for his temperate tastes: he had a good appetite but never ate greedily, preferring plain food to rich; he enjoyed a glass of wine or ale but never drank to excess, often, indeed, contenting himself with a glass of water or fruit juice; there had never been the least suspicion of his misbehaving with any young ladies of the English Court.

      Lord Kensington took care not to emphasize this demure chastity, which seemed to some of the more uncharitable gossips in England to suggest that the Prince might be ‘less than a man’. Nor did Kensington find cause to lay too much emphasis on the solemnity of his nature, the rarity of those occasions upon which a smile of amusement lit up his small, pale, wistful face or brought a gleam of pleasure into his sad, rather prominent eyes, the even rarer occasions upon which he had been heard to laugh. There was certainly no need to mention his flashes of petulant temper, his occasional obstinacy, his disconcerting reserve, the stammer that sometimes impeded his speech, Scottish in accent like his father’s, though not so strongly so.

      He had been born in Scotland on 19 November 1600, twelve miles outside Edinburgh, in a bedroom overshadowed by the great stone tower of Dunfermline Abbey. His father was King of Scotland then, and although – as the son of the Queen of England’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, and as the great grandson of King Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret – King James was generally accepted as the rightful heir to the English throne, Queen Elizabeth had not yet nominated him as her successor. Nor had she done so until she was on her deathbed in March 1603 when, brought the long-awaited news at Holyroodhouse, King James rode fast for the English border, followed by his lively and handsome Danish wife Anne, and accompanied by numerous courtiers and retainers who hoped to share with him some of the profits of his inheritance. Prince Charles was left in the care of nurses and servants. He was three years old by then, but he had not the strength to walk and he could not speak.

      His father suggested that he might walk if his weak legs and ankles were placed in irons, and that he might perhaps talk if a surgeon were to cut the ligament at the base of his tongue. But the child’s kindly Cornish nurse warned that these drastic measures might well do more harm than good. If he were left in her care, living in the country, nature and love would do their work; and so they did. His legs admittedly were still rather bowed, his stammer was troublesome in times of stress, but he had grown, as Lord Kensington assured the French King, into a man of presence and worth. He was not as clever as his father, Kensington might have added; he did not have his father’s political judgement, though he shared to the full his belief that monarchs ruled their kingdoms by divine right, as God’s lieutenants on earth. Yet while King James was slovenly in manner, unprepossessing in appearance and argumentatively dogmatic in speech, Prince Charles was, above all, the very personification of courtliness. ‘He is grown a fine gentleman,’ one of Lord Kensing-ton’s friends observed, ‘and beyond all expectation I had of him when I saw him last; and, indeed, I think he never looked nor became himself better in all his life.’ In earlier years he had occasionally revealed his jealousy of his elder brother, Prince Henry, a clever, handsome, athletic boy, their mother’s favourite, but this paragon had died at the age of eighteen twelve years before; and Prince Charles was now the undisputed heir to the English throne.

      Complimentary as were the reports which Lord Kensington gave of the Prince of Wales in Paris, they were no more enthusiastic than those he sent back to London about the fourteen-year-old

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