Inigo Jones, of course, was the name that connected the chapel with other activities at Somerset House; as well as building the chapel, he was also constructing a theatre there from 1632, and the connection was not lost on men like William Prynne. The new theatre was to be the venue for a new kind of play, a French pastoral by Walter Montagu. It was called The Shepherd’s Paradise, it lasted for seven hours, and was in rehearsal for four months. It was about love. It was about faith. It was about four hours longer than the audience was used to.
For William Prynne, the problem with such work wasn’t that it was long and exceedingly moral and rather dull; anyone who thought Montagu’s playtexts on the long and wordy side had only to sample Prynne’s prose to find Montagu positively crisp and succinct. No, for Prynne the problem was that it was all far too terribly exciting, so that Tempe Restored, another drama of the same sort, was for him a ‘Devil’s mass’, a Catholic ritual. In this masque, there is a kind of confession, and a scene of absolution: Tempe is cleansed of the evil beasts of Circe.
Everyone at court took the hint, though not all were willing to act from expediency. They could see that the tides of fashion were flowing in the queen’s favour. Laud, who hated Rome because he was somewhat seduced by it himself, stridently issued a proclamation against those resorting to Mass, and the queen as belligerently responded by holding a special midnight Mass for all converts. Endorsements of the Virgin Mary, including Maria Triumphans, an anonymous work dedicated to defending the Virgin, linked Henrietta – Queen Mary – with Mary the Queen of Heaven: ‘She whom [the book] chiefly concerns, will anew become your patroness, and thus will Mary, the Queen of Heaven for a great queen upon earth, the mother of our Celestial king for the mother of our future terrene king. And finally, by your protecting and pleading for it, the immaculate virgin will (in a more full manner) become an advocate for you, her Advocate.’
This was not the wisest move the queen could have made. It arose from her name: the king liked to call her Maria, and the English did call her Queen Mary, a name that now sounds positively stuffy and cosy, but which at the time had a dangerous ring. England had had a Queen Mary, and a Catholic one at that. She had also narrowly missed another in Mary Queen of Scots. ‘Some kind of fatality, too,’ wrote Lucy Hutchinson waspishly, ‘the English imagined to be in her name of Marie.’ When Marian devotion was constantly evoked, so too were the queen’s dismal predecessors, Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots. It did offer the queen an opportunity to knit together the Platonic cult of devotion to her, evoked by many sighing sonnets, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, so that she and the Virgin could be understood in the same way; as intercessors, whose special grace it was to plead with the king … of earth, of heaven. It made the tiny queen feel important. Being Mary’s votary involved (again) touches of theatre; one could be Mary’s bondslave, for instance, and wear a length of chain to show it.
But it was the sheer flagrant unapologetic visibility of Henrietta’s Catholicism and its proximity – in every sense – to the centre of monarchic power that really alarmed those who hated and feared popery. We might detect a trace of defiance in Henrietta’s openness, a trace, therefore, of fear. But to the godly, she seemed a shameless emissary of the Whore of Babylon. Her attempts to secure the religious toleration of Catholics seemed to many a sinister plot. When she and her helper Conn tried to facilitate Catholic marriages (then illegal) and to obstruct a plan to take into care the eldest sons of all Catholic families to bring them up as Protestants, she was thwarting the godly.
The fact that the godly were witnessing the happiest royal marriage in English history only made them more miserable, for what might the emissary of the Whore do with the king? Everyone knew how close they were, and for anyone who doubted it, there was the long row of children to prove it. Lucy Hutchinson thought, with many, that Charles was more in love with his wife than she with him, describing him as ‘enslaved in his affection towards her’. She was, thought Hutchinson, ‘a great wit and beauty’, which only made matters worse. Just as ordinary women could persuade their husbands to buy them pretty dresses while cosily tucked up between the sheets, thought one pamphlet, so the queen might incline the king to popery: note the connection between popery and feminine frills and furbelows. ‘Some say she is the man, and reigns’, said Mercurius Brittanicus more bluntly and much later (15–22 July 1644). When Parliamentarians said ‘evil counsellors’, it was often the queen they meant. Surely, they felt, it was only a matter of time before Henrietta managed to persuade the king to greater toleration – or worse … In fact, perhaps, even now … The dreads represented by the queen were knitted together and became suspicion of the king. At one London house in May 1640, a woman named Mrs Chickleworth told all she knew: ‘the queen’s grace, she said, went unto the communion table with the king, and the queen had asked your grace [Archbishop Laud] whether that she might not be of that religion which the King was – yes or no? Whereupon his Grace answered her Majesty “you are very well as you are, and I would wish to keep you there.” And now the King goes to Mass with the queen.’ The story spread, and was retold in the same London neighbourhood later that year, this time (optimistically?) by a Catholic. The king, she said, ‘was turned to be a Papist’.
Actually, this was unlikely to the point of impossibility. Charles was horrified by the rate of conversion the queen’s efforts had made possible, just as Laud was. In 1630 he ordered his subjects not to attend Mass at Denmark House, and he repeated the ban the following year. Laud was even less enthusiastic. In particular, he was dismayed by the ructions in the Falkland family. Lady Newport and Lady Hamilton converted. Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, had not only converted to Catholicism, but managed to persuade her daughters to it as well, and Laud was alarmed. It was partly because he so feared the new waves of conversion that Laud thought it sensible to readmit the beauty of holiness to the simplicity of the Church of England. The queen’s favourite, Walter Montagu, had also converted, and when he returned to England from France the only people who would receive him were the earls of Holland and Dorset. Charles ordered his subjects not to attend embassy Masses, and ticked off the Spanish ambassador for going so openly to Somerset House. But suspicion continued to rise, and as Laud tightened his grip on ordinary worship, people formed simple equations: altar-rails, popery, the queen, the king. What it amounted to was that England, elect Protestant nation, was believed to be in danger from its own sovereign.
Nevertheless, despite all these doubts and difficulties, the terrifying thing about Charles’s personal rule is not that it was bound to fail, but that it nearly succeeded. There were tensions, there were fears, even panics; there was also opposition. But these things were common, and had accompanied the Tudor reforms of the monarchy, too; indeed, Elizabeth I was threatened with far greater outbursts of popular dissent than Charles faced before 1642. The Civil War was not bound to occur; it would take a special, exceptional set of circumstances to make it happen.
Like all those keen to redefine their powers by extending them, Charles eventually stretched his arm too far, and only in this sense was he ‘doomed’ to failure. But had he managed to avoid this characteristic tendency to test the limits one more time, he might well have succeeded in transforming the English monarchy at any rate from a leadership role amidst a system of checks and balances to something that would look to history like the rule of the Bourbons in France. Such absolutism might have produced a comparable cultural renaissance. Certainly this would have suited Charles; without the restraints of the implied need for consultation, he might even have endorsed something like Catholic toleration, and equally probably a more determined attempt to confine and restrict Calvinist Protestantism. After all, these became the settled policies of both his sons when they eventually succeeded him.
And we should not assume too blithely that the sequel would therefore have been a more violent and more total repudiation of the monarchy at some later date. But it would also have had an immeasurable impact on the history of the world. If there had been no English Civil War, would there have been an American or a French Revolution? It may be that Charles could have redefined government in autocratic terms for the whole of Western civilization, almost indefinitely. The result might well have been a British Empire that looked a good deal more like the Roman Empire, with concomitant court corruption and rivalry. Charles’s good characteristics – taste, refinement,