Lucy and James were married in November 1617. It was a quiet wedding by James’s usually ebullient standards, costing a mere £1600, but it was well attended: the king, Prince Charles, and George Villiers, later the powerful Duke of Buckingham, were among the guests. James Hay, in order, apparently, to overcome Northumberland’s prejudice against him, made every effort to obtain his release. In this he at length proved successful. In 1621 King James was induced to celebrate his birthday by setting Northumberland and other political prisoners at liberty. The earl showed some compunction in accepting a favour which he attributed to Hay’s agency.
James’s lightheartedness concealed a tragic past, however. His first wife, Honora Denny, was an intelligent and kind woman who had received dedications from Guillaume Du Bartas, one of John Milton’s role models. But she had died in 1614. Her death was the result of an attempted robbery; she had been returning from a supper party through the Ludgate Hill area when a man seized the jewel she wore around her neck and tried to run off with it, dragging her to the ground. Seven months pregnant, the fall meant she delivered her baby prematurely. She died a week later. Her assailant was hanged, even though Honora had pleaded that he be spared before her own death. It was a moment in which the two almost separate worlds of peerage and poor met violently; the meeting was fatal to both.
Despite this saintly act, Honora Denny Hay was no saint. Either James Hay’s taste in women was consistent, or his second wife modelled herself closely on his first. Honora Denny was a powerful figure because she was a close confidante of Anne of Denmark. Rumour said that she had used her position as the Queen’s friend to make sure a man who had tried to murder one of her lovers was fully punished. Lucy, the wilful teenage bride, was to become one of the most brilliant, beautiful and sought-after women in Caroline England, following her predecessor’s example studiously and intelligently. And if Honora Denny Hay had lovers, and got away with it, Lucy could learn from this too.
James Hay’s career was as glittering as she had predicted. Retaining his position as the king’s favourite without any of the slips that dogged the careers of Somerset and Buckingham, he did a good deal of diplomatic work which took him far from home. In 1619 he was in Germany, mediating between the emperor and the Bohemians, and paying a visit to William of Orange on the way home. William scandalized Hay by offering him a dinner in which only one suckling pig was on the table. On his next mission to France in 1621, James cheered himself by having his horse shod with silver; every time it cast a shoe there was a scramble for the discard. But it was not only the old-fashioned who might have preferred William’s solitary pig to James’s extravaganzas. The disapproval of courtly colleagues like Chamberlain symbolized the difficulty facing the Hays as they tried to get on in society.
This society was unimaginable to Anna Trapnel, as her world was to them. It was a milieu full of new and beautiful things, new ideas. The court was their world, headed by a king who came to own the greatest art collection in the history of England, while in Stepney people ate black bread and died daily in the shipyards that built trading vessels to bring his finds to England.
A Van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Maria with her dwarf Jeffrey Hudson painted in 1633 shows fragments, symbols of her court. The monkey is a representative of Henrietta Maria’s menagerie of dogs, monkeys and caged birds, while the orange tree alludes to her love of gardens. Van Dyck deliberately downplays regality; gone are the stiff robes and jewels of Tudor portraiture, and here is a warmer, more relaxed figure who enjoys her garden and pets and is kind to her servant.
Lapped in such care, the queen and Lucy were encapsulated in the jewel case of the royal household, which included everyone from aristocratic advisers and career administrators to grooms and scullions. At the outbreak of the war, it comprised as many as 1800 people. Some of these were given bed and board, others received what was called ‘bouge of court’, which included bread, ale, firewood and candles. The court also supported hordes of nobles, princes, ambassadors and other state visitors, who all resided in it with their households, such as Henrietta’s mother Marie de Medici, and her entourage.
The household above stairs was called the chamber (these were people who organized state visits and the reception of ambassadors); below stairs it was called simply the household (these were the people who did the actual work, the cooking, cleaning and laundering). Supporting the household accounted for more than 40% of royal expenditure. Many servants had grand titles, rather like civil service managers now: the Pages of the Scalding House, the Breadbearers of the Pantry. There were unimaginable numbers of them. The king had, for example, thirty-one falconers, thirty-five huntsmen, and four officers of bears, bulls and mastiffs. The queen had her own household, which included a full kitchen staff, a keeper of the sweet coffers, a laundress and a starcher, and a seamstress. There were over 180, not including the stables staff.
Charles’s court was divided into the king’s side and the queen’s side, horizontally. It was also very strictly divided vertically, with exceptionally formal protocols to enforce these divisions. Charles insisted on the enforcement of these protocols far more firmly than his father had. Only peers, bishops and Privy Councillors could tread on the carpet around the king’s table in the Presence Chamber, for example. All these labyrinthine rules had to be learnt and kept. The king’s chambers were themselves a kind of nest of Chinese boxes; the further in you were allowed, the more important you were. The most public room was the Presence Chamber; beyond it was the Privy Chamber, which could be entered only by nobles and councillors; beyond that was the Withdrawing Chamber and the Bedchamber, reserved for the king and his body servants, and governed by the Groom of the Stool.
Charles actively maintained seven palaces: Greenwich, Hampton Court, Nonesuch, Oatlands, Richmond, St James’s and Whitehall, and he also had Somerset House, Theobalds, Holdenby (in Northamptonshire), and Wimbledon, the newest, bought by Charles as a gift for Henrietta Maria in 1639. There were also five castles, including the Tower of London, and three hunting lodges, at Royston, Newmarket and Thetford (the last was sold in 1630). All were to be touched by the war. Many were ruined.
Whitehall was the king’s principal London residence, a status recognized by both the Council of State and Cromwell, who chose it as the principal residence themselves. It was a warren, a maze of long galleries that connected its disparate parts in a rough and ready fashion, and it was cut in two by the highway that ran from London to Westminster, and bridged (in a manner reminiscent of Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs) by the Holbein Gate. Set down in the middle of the medieval muddle, like a beautiful woman in a white frock, was the Inigo Jones Banqueting House: icy, classical perfection. The long, rambling corridors and rooms of Whitehall were full of tapestries, paintings, statues (over a hundred) and furniture; it illustrated the idea that a palace was about interiors and personnel, not architecture. In that, it was oddly like the houses Anna Trapnel knew.
But Charles and Henrietta tried to alter this muddle. Dedicated and knowledgeable collectors, they eagerly acquired and displayed beautiful art. St James’s had an Inigo Jones sculpture gallery in the grounds that had been built to house the astounding collection of the Duke of Mantua; a colonnaded gallery ran parallel to the orchard wall, whose roof was cantilevered over the gardens so the king could ride under cover if the weather was wet. Somerset House had belonged to Anne of Denmark, and now it became Henrietta Maria’s. There were thirteen sculptures dotted about its garden, some from the Gonzaga collection. In the chapel, some thirty-four paintings were inventoried during Parliament’s rule, some described in the angry terms of iconoclasm: ‘a pope in white satin’. (In a hilarious irony, this was where Oliver Cromwell’s body was displayed to the nation in 1658.) Hampton Court chapel had ‘popish and superstitious pictures’, later destroyed.
Among their other hobbies, Charles and Henrietta were eager gardeners – though neither picked up a spade. But they were both keenly interested in the visual and its symbolic possibilities. The garden, for the Renaissance, was not just an extra room, but an extra theatre, the setting for masques, balls and parties. But it was also a place to be alone and melancholy. It symbolized aristocratic ownership and control of the earth and its fruits. Like other visual arts, garden fashion