Читать книгу The English Civil War: A People’s History - Diane Purkiss - Страница 8

The key to the kingdom in 1639 was London, and it was mushrooming from town to megalopolis. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was as small and compact as a provincial town in modern Britain. Now it was growing rapidly, and its growth imposed structural change. The old ways of life in London had to alter to accommodate the city’s new immensity. It was possible to begin to think new thoughts – political, religious, social – in this new space.

The old city had been hugger-mugger since the days of the Romans, and all through the Middle Ages the rich lived cheek-by-jowl with the poor. An aristocrat could be deafened by the hammering of a blacksmith next door. This created a kind of unity. There was just one London, whoever you were. Now the capital was breaking down into many cities, as Jacobean and Caroline London began sorting itself into zones. Industry was slowly being exiled from the city, and was always excluded from the new, pretty residential areas for the better-off. Increasingly, the suburbs were the site of manufacturing industries – pewterers in Billingsgate and Bishopsgate, for instance. Immigrants were crucial to the development of new industries: London’s first fine glass came from the Broad Street Glasshouse, run by an emigrant from Venice originally, and later by Englishmen who learned his skills. This influx created further divisions; some industries were different culturally and linguistically from one another and from their customers.

The result of the new industrial suburbs and the new residential areas, taken together, was a city that was divided, at least to some extent, by social class: the rich lived mostly in the newly built West End, in beautiful regular buildings, while the poor lived around the walls of the old city and by the river, and – increasingly – in the expanding, wild, unregulated ‘East End’. It would be wrong to equate the West End with Royalism to come, and the emerging East with Parliamentarianism, or to see in that sharp class division the inevitable, bloody division of a nation. But it would also be wrong not to, because the East End did declare all but unilaterally for Parliament. A concomitant West End support for the king did not emerge, however, and the East Enders’ Parliamentarianism proceeded less from class hatred than from the much more subtle expression of social class in religious difference. Getting to know two women, Anna Trapnel from the East End, Lucy Hay from the West End, will help to show why matters were complicated.

We need to recall that both the West and East Ends were reacting against a sturdy, ageing centre; in the seventeenth century, the aristocracy could be as innovative as the workers, and as eager to extend its power. Between those two extremes, the old city of London still stood, walled against attack as it had been in the now-vanishing Middle Ages. The great gates in its walls could be closed against invaders: and had been, as recently as the reign of Elizabeth. It was a city preoccupied with two things: religion, and work. It was the home of churches, and of the trade guilds that ruled men’s lives and professions. There were so very many churches, hundreds of tiny intricate parish boundaries: All Hallows, Honey Lane, All Hallows the Great, All Hallows the Less, St Benet Sherehog, St Faith Under St Paul’s, a parish church actually inside the great cathedral, St Laurence Pountney, with its tall spire. And the guildhalls clustered round them, bakers and silversmiths and chandlers and shoemakers, civil and ecclesiastical authorities knitted together in the twisting, weaving, narrow streets. It was a city governed by hierarchy which constrained enterprise, but because it was a boom city enterprise still managed to flourish there.

One such enterprise was the West End itself, new-built estates run up by nobles. Far more of the West End that Lucy Hay knew is still visible; Anna Trapnel’s East End was all but erased by the giant hands of industry and the Blitz. There are some constants, though, most of all the street plan. If Anna Trapnel were blindfolded, her feet could still trace the way along the length of Poplar High Street to St Dunstan’s church, Stepney. And the church that was the centre of her world is still standing, though smudged and blurred by Victorian ‘restoration’.

Anna Trapnel was nobody in particular. She was one of many nobodies given a voice by the war. She came from the world of radical religious outlaws, the independent sects, and in it she became – briefly – a well-known figure. Then she faded, and we do not even know how or when she died. But she left writings behind which open something of her life to us. Anna Trapnel tells us that she was born in Poplar, Stepney, in the parish of St Dunstan’s. There is no record of her baptism, and this might mean that she wasn’t baptized as a baby, suggesting very strong godly views on her parents’ part. She also tells us that she was the daughter of William Trapnel, shipwright.

‘Shipwright’ is a vague term. It could mean anything from a master designer who could keep in his head complex and secret plans that allowed a ship to be buoyant and able to manoeuvre, to a man with an adze – but even a man with an adze was a man of remarkable skill. Shipwrights were among the most skilled workers of their day, trained to assemble large and heavy timbers into a vessel which would withstand the enormous stresses both of the sea and wind and of a heavy cargo, or guns. On their skill many lives depended. A master shipwright was also a manager, controlling huge teams of workers. And yet as one expert on the seventeenth-century navy remarks, a shipyard at that time must have been a pretty dangerous place. It was, necessarily, full of inflammable materials – wood, tar, cordage. As in later shipyards, heavy weights would have been slung on relatively rickety sheers, using vegetable cordage, tackles and capstans. And everywhere, fires: fires for steaming timbers into flexibility, fires to melt pitch, to mould iron. There were sawpits too, and other dangers: the mis-swung adze or axe. It would have seemed nearly infernal to a young girl, with its brilliant red fires and smoking tar.

The Poplar shipyards were created to be outside the jurisdiction of the shipwrights’ guild which governed shipbuilding at the London docks. It was outside the walls of custom and law. Independency in trade perhaps encouraged Independency in religion. For St Dunstan’s Stepney, the East End church, was one of the most staunchly godly and anti-Laudian churches of the time. This was in part because its congregation included a high proportion of Huguenot refugees from the wars of religion in France, men and women who could tell many stories of how papists persecuted the people of God.

It was industrial, cosmopolitan, but also rural. Poplar obtained its name from the great number of poplar trees that grew there. Poplar High Street was open to fields on both sides; Poplar Marsh raised cattle, and its grass was esteemed. An eighteenth-century visitor noted the mix of rural and urban: ‘Part of this marsh is called the Isle of Dogs, although it is not an island, nor quite a peninsula. It is opposite Greenwich in Kent; and when our sovereigns had a palace near the site of the present magnificent hospital, they used it as a hunting-seat, and, it is said, kept the kennels of their hounds in this marsh. These hounds frequently making a great noise, the seamen called the place the Isle of Dogs.’ Anna could have heard the royal hunters, and they in turn could have heard the hammer of the shipyards. Poplar High Street was lined with shipwrights’ houses, but it was also a sailors’ town, so these were interspersed with pubs: the Green Man, the Spotted Dog, the Black Boy, the Green Dragon. Dragonish indeed to the godly: freedom could become lawlessness. Poplar saw many sailors’ riots.

Later, when Anna Trapnel had moved inside the walls of the City of London, Poplar became an industry town, even a boom town. Within the parish of St Dunstan’s were huge new shipyards at Blackwell (for the East India Company), Limehouse, Wapping and Ratcliffe. The East India Company – in a manner almost anticipating Ford and Microsoft, and limping in the footsteps of landowning gentry – began to build its own amenities for its employees, including a chapel, which was erected in the year 1654 by a subscription of the inhabitants.

As London divided into better and worse areas, where Londoners lived began to make a difference to how long they lived. Slums like Bridewell and Blackfriars suffered much more from the 1636 plague than the richer central areas. Stepney’s burials outnumbered baptisms by 80%, though this statistic may mislead us as it may be due to godly reluctance to baptize. Some 90,000 people lived east of the City, in the parishes of Poplar, Stepney and Hackney. John Stow said these people inhabited what he called ‘base tenements’, which may simply reflect Stow’s prejudice against new build. And houses were smaller and more cramped. In Shadwell and Tower Liberty in the 1650 survey, 80% of houses were one or two storeys with an average of four rooms each, compared with 6.7 rooms in the West End. And the East End houses were mostly of timber and boards, not brick, and only one-third had gardens (often crucial economically) compared with 42.9% in the West End. Already, too, the East End had more constables.

Housing design, even for the rich, was in a state of flux. In this period domestic architecture was moving from what are called hall houses to the organization of separate chambers. The hall house was a large room with many smaller rooms built onto it. The hall had a central hearth. In the hall, communal male activities took place, while the private chambers were occupied by women and children. But in the sixteenth century houses changed, a process which had begun much earlier but now became commonplace. Segregation by sex was replaced by segregation by class, with servants cut off from everyone else. Upstairs and downstairs assumed their significances. As a result, great houses became disconnected from those whose economic activity supported them – farms, quarries and the like were separated from houses by distance. Finally, domestic surroundings became increasingly elaborate – more and more windows had curtains, more tables were encased in cloths, more floors were covered in carpets and rugs. This inspired plenty of shopping, and shipping to fill the new shops with exotica, and to that end London acquired its first shopping mall, the Royal Exchange.

The kind of house Trapnel probably knew best was multipurpose, a dwelling and also a business. Houses above or with a shop often used the ground floor exclusively for business purposes, and the family rooms were on the upper floors. But the ‘shop’ would also be a manufacturing place – a workshop – and so it could be noisy or dusty. Many businesses needed kitchen facilities, so households would have to share their kitchen with the dairying or laundry. We can get a glimpse of this kind of house from probate inventories. When Daniel Jeames, a chandler from Middlesex, died in 1663, shortly after the tumultuous events described in this book, his house contained the following:

Kitchen: Sixteen porringers, two great flagons, nine little flagons, two pewter candlesticks, six chamber pots, one brass kettle, one brass pot, one fire shovel and tongs, and five forks, four spits and dripping pan, one gridiron, one chopping-knife, one iron pot, one iron kettle, and a jack, two cup-boards, one table, three chairs and three stools.

In the shop Butter and cheese and other commodities

In the room over the shop seven chairs, two tables, one form, one set of hangings, one chest, one cupboard

In the room over the kitchen six pairs of shoes, two dozen of napkins, three table clothes, one dozen of towels, one Featherbed, two Featherbolsters, one Flockbed, one drawbed, one green rug, one Trundle bedstead mat, one Feather pillow, two blankets, one jug, one table, three chairs, two stools, a little trunk with some other things

In the garrett two featherbeds, one bolster, a set of striped curtains and valance, one table one cupboard and one old sawpot [?] with some other lumber

Item two Bibles and a Testament

Item two silver bowls and two silver drinking cupes

Item in ready money iiii pence

Item his apparel

It all seems pitifully little, if we imagine how extensive our own inventories might be. The stress on bedclothes, too, is alien to us; before washing machines, to own a lot of bedlinen was an important source of comfort. For ordinary tradespeople like the Trapnels, home was still a bare place, about warmth and family rather than interior design. But the few possessions needed to make it livable were doubly precious.

Paradoxically, at exactly the moment people demanded more space, and more privacy, housing in London and in some other fast-growing towns like Bristol was getting hard to find; so scarce that most people lived in lodgings or took in lodgers. The family of John Milton shared a house with five other families. Anna Trapnel, when she moved to central London from Poplar, lived with two different landladies. They may have been her employers, too, for everyone but the very poorest also had servants. Servants were vital assistants in the constant struggles for food, warmth and cleanliness, which all centred on the hearth and the fire. Later eras have sentimentalized the phrase ‘hearth and home’, but in the kind of house Anna Trapnel lived in, the maintenance of a good fire involved much vital, risky and backbreaking work, wrestling not only with heavy, dirty fuel but with extreme heat, red-hot implements, and boiling liquids.

While Anna Trapnel’s father struggled with hot metal in the shipyard, or with bubbling tar, she grappled with blistering cauldrons at home. The difference between industry and cooking – in smell, risk, filth – was much less marked than it later became. Despite women’s efforts, inadequate fires meant that houses were not comfortable. Most bedrooms had no fireplaces, and even the biggest houses, with fifteen or more rooms, had on average only a third of them heated. Innovations were beginning to change this, and with the developments in heating came social changes. Just as the city was dividing into rich and poor districts, so the house itself was increasingly marked off into different areas.

Though Poplar was outside the walls, Trapnel was still a Londoner, an inhabitant of by far the largest and most important city in the British Isles. Between 1600 and 1650 the population grew from 200,000 to 375,000, despite outbreaks of bubonic plague. If this book were to attempt the impossible task of writing about the Civil War experience ‘representatively’, then most of those it studied would need to be Londoners. In 1642, London stretched for five miles from Stepney to Westminster, and south five miles more to Rotherhithe. One of the main sights of the old city was London Bridge, with its eighteen solid stone piers which rested on piles that forced the current into narrow and swift channels; the boatmen couldn’t shoot the bridge on a flood tide, and it was also dangerous on an ebb tide. Many people avoided the danger by getting out at Old Swan Stairs, on one side of the bridge, walking down Upper Thames Street, and getting back into boats at Billingsgate Stairs. Fifty watermen or so died every year trying to shoot the bridge, usually by drowning.

While the East End was being built, rich landowners were arriving in town for what came to be known as the season. They also needed housing, and it was for them that the West End was built. The new city catered for the rich, and for their new power to shop. For a gentleman like Sir Humphrey Mildmay, the whole day could be spent shopping. When you had promenaded down Paul’s Walk, the middle aisle of St Paul’s, which was also a shortcut that saved walking around the cathedral itself, you could say that everyone important had seen your new clothes. Or you could go to an ordinary, or eating house, which were graded according to cost. They served good simple food. Servants could eat at a threeha’penny ordinary. Around St Paul’s too were the London booksellers and the tobacconists. In Cheapside there were the goldsmiths’ shops, the nearest London came to actually having streets paved with gold. The menagerie in the Tower was another spectacle.

But Trapnel may not have done any of these things. They were part of a richer, more leisured life than hers. Her focal point was the church. As she herself wrote:

When a child, the Lord awed my spirit, and so for the least trespass, my heart was smitten, and though my godly mother did not see me offend, that she might reprove me, which she was ready to do, being tender of the honour of her beloved Saviour, even the least secret sin, that the world calls a trifle, though I thought it nothing, yet still the all-seeing eye watched my ways, and he called to me, though I knew it not … a child of wrath as well as others.

We don’t know how old Trapnel was when she wrote this, but she was part of a local community which felt the same. In 1641, Stepney produced the first call to allow parishes to appoint their own lecturers, visiting speakers, often not in holy orders, who might preach for hours. Many disliked their way of speaking, which was to allow themselves to say anything prompted by the Spirit. Ex tempore, thought one critic, excludes the pater noster. One lecturer was Jeremiah Burroughs, suspended by Bishop Wren and later chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, a defender of popular sovereignty; another was William Greenhill who established a gathered church in 1644.

Greenhill was a man who had been in trouble for refusing to read The Book of Sports, the Stuart guide to maypole building and hock-carts which had upset godly people up and down the country. He was the afternoon preacher to the congregation at Stepney, while Jeremiah Burroughs ministered in the morning, so that they were called respectively the ‘Evening Star’ and the ‘Morning Star’ of Stepney. In 1643, he was to preach before the House of Commons on the occasion of a public fast, and his sermon was published by command of the House, with the title ‘The Axe at the Root’, a title which suggests his strong independent opinions. His later career shows his ability to reach children: after the death of Charles, he became Parliament’s chaplain to three of the king’s children: James, Duke of York (afterwards James II); Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and the Princess Henrietta Maria, and he dedicated a work on Ezekiel to Princess Elizabeth, at that time a little girl.

To us it is difficult to imagine that sermons could be exciting or radical, and comparisons with political meetings or public lectures do little to convey the mixture of shivering tent-revival rapture and sharp thought which they produced. But to the average Protestant, and especially to the godly, all individuals – and the nation itself – were always understood to be trembling on the brink of an abyss, the pit of hell, from which they could be snatched to safety at the eleventh hour by the strong words of an heroic preacher. This was just the sort of drama – a kind of endless, high-emotion soap – likely to attract an adolescent girl whose circumstances were otherwise obscure. Anna herself describes her eager response:

When I was about fourteen years of age, I began to be very eager and forward to hear and pray, though in a very formal manner; Thus I went on some years, and then I rose to a higher pitch, to a more spiritual condition, as I thought, and I followed after that Ministry that was most pressed after by the strictest Professors, and I ran with great violence, having a great zeal, though not according to knowledge, and I appeared a very high-grown Christian in the thoughts of man; … providence ordered that I should hear Mr Peters speak … though I thought myself in a very good condition before, yet now it seized upon my spirit, that surely I was not in the covenant … I then went home full of horror, concluding myself to be the stony ground Christ spoke of in the parable of the sower; I apprehended divine displeasure against me … I ran from minister to minister, from sermon to sermon.

Anna Trapnel’s religious background supported her notion that she was worthless, while feeding her longing for compensation through being specially chosen by God. This drama had its dark side. During a prolonged spiritual depression, Anna contemplated murder and suicide, but on New Year’s Day 1642 she heard John Simpson preaching at All Hallows the Great, and there was an immediate (and joyful) conversion. The godly typically went through these periods of joy and misery; they were an intrinsic part of Calvinist salvation.

Simpson was relatively young, in his thirties, and another of the St Dunstan’s lecturers. A man of passionately independent views, he was removed from his lectureship in St Aldgate in 1643, and banned from preaching. He was soon in trouble again for asserting, allegedly, that Christ was to be found even ‘in hogs, and dogs, or sheep’. In 1647 Simpson became pastor of the gathered congregation at All Hallows the Great. He was also to fight against Prince Charles at Worcester in 1650. Unlike many radicals, Simpson placed no trust in Oliver Cromwell as the instrument of God. He reported visions in which God had revealed to him Cromwell’s lust for power and his impending ruin. He became a leader of the Fifth Monarchists, a group who believed themselves the elect and the end of the world near. Many contemporaries were bewildered by Simpson’s volatile and passionate nature and thought him mad. But everyone recognized his power as a preacher. In the heady atmosphere of freedom from guild restraints, immigrants bringing novel ideas, the wildness of the East End, and the religious adventure of St Dunstan’s, the unthinkable was soon being thought, and not only by Trapnel. Joan Sherrard, of Anna Trapnel’s parish, said in 1644 that the king was ‘a stuttering fool’ and asked passionately ‘is there never a Fel[t]on yet living? [Felton was the man who had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham.] If I were a man, as I am a woman, I would help to pull him to pieces.’ It was the kind of thing one housewife might shout at another in a noisy high street. It was unimaginable at court, only a few miles distant.

The world was an altogether different place for noblewoman Lucy Hay. West End, not East End; magnificent houses, not wooden terraces; shopping, not working; the court, not the pulpit – though Lucy was religious, and militantly Protestant at that. Lucy Hay was England’s salonnière, a beautiful woman who enjoyed politics, intrigue, plots, but also intellectual games, poetry, love affairs (intellectual, and probably occasionally physical), fashion, clothes and admiration. She was one of Henrietta Maria’s closest and most trusted friends, but also her competitor and sometime political enemy. Her world was more introverted than Trapnel’s, with the obsessive cliquishness of an exclusive girls’ school. But like many a pupil, Lucy struggled not only to dominate it, but also to find ways to widen it.

Her success was founded on her face. She was such a beauty that when she contracted smallpox, the whole court joined forces to write reassuring letters to her husband, telling him that she was not in danger of losing her looks. She asked for and received permission to wear a mask on her return to court, until her sores were entirely healed; when she removed it, people said that she was not only unblemished, but lovelier than ever.

Lucy Hay came from an extraordinary family, the Percys, Earls of Northumberland, a family of nobles always powerful in dissent. Her great-uncle was a leader in the Northern Earls rebellion, beheaded for it in 1572, and her father was imprisoned in the Tower for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. The Percys were a noble family inclined to see the monarch of the day as only primus inter pares, and to act accordingly. Lucy’s father was known as ‘the wizard earl’ because of his interest in magic, astronomy and mathematics – he was so interested in numbers that he kept three private mathematicians at his side. Hard of hearing, remote of bearing, and often shy, he was also a passionate gambler, and his contemporaries found him difficult to understand. His wife, Dorothy Devereux, was the sister of the Earl of Essex who was Elizabeth’s favourite late in her life, and Dorothy, too, was loved by the queen. But like the Percys, the Devereux found it difficult to accept the absolute sovereignty of the monarch. They had their own power and they wanted it respected.

Within the marriage this mutual strong-mindedness did not make for harmony. The couple separated, and after Elizabeth had brought about a reconciliation which produced a male heir, fell out again. There was no divorce, but they lived apart. Henry Percy did not take to James I. He disliked in particular the many Scots James had brought with him and may have seen their promotion to the nobility as a threat to established families like his own. In the autumn of 1605, he retired to Syon House to think more about numbers and less about politics. His choice of retreat points to the way the Percys had come to see themselves as a southern family; there was no question of a retreat to the north, to the family seat at Alnwick.

This mathematical pastoral was, however, threatened in two ways. First, the Gunpowder Plot exploded, and Northumberland’s kinsman Thomas Percy, four years his elder and one of the chief conspirators, had dined on 4 November with Northumberland at Syon House. Though not a papist, Northumberland was a known Catholic sympathizer, who had tried to secure the position of Catholics with James when he became king. Although he had few arms, horses or followers at Syon, and had known none of the conspirators excepting Percy, he was sent to the Tower on 27 November. He tried to excuse himself in a manner which reveals the Percy attitude to affairs of state: ‘Examine’, he said, ‘but my humours in buildings, gardenings, and private expenses these two years past.’ He was not believed. On 27 June 1606 he was tried in the Court of Star Chamber for contempt and misprision of treason. At his trial, he was accused of seeking to become chief of the papists in England; of failing to administer the Oath of Supremacy to Thomas Percy. He pleaded guilty to some of the facts set forth in the indictment, but indignantly repudiated the inferences placed upon them by his prosecutors. He was sentenced to pay a fine of 30,000 pounds, to be removed from all offices and places, to be rendered incapable of holding any of them hereafter, and to be kept a prisoner in the Tower for life. Voluntary exile had become forced imprisonment. The hand of royalty was heavy.

Northumberland protested to the king against the severity of this sentence, but his cries went unheard. Much more significantly, and perhaps more effectively, his wife Dorothy appealed to the queen, Anne of Denmark, who took a sympathetic interest in his case. This may have been where Lucy learned that women have power, that one can work through queens where kings are initially deaf. The king nevertheless insisted that 11,000 pounds of the fine should be paid at once, and, when the earl declared himself unable to find the money, his estates were seized, and funds were raised by granting leases on them. Northumberland did pay 11,000 pounds on 13 November 1613. He and his daughter had learnt an unforgettable lesson about royal power and nobles’ power.

Typically, Northumberland tried to recreate his private paradise inside the Tower. Thomas Harriot, once Walter Ralegh’s conjuror-servant, Walter Warner, and Thomas Hughes, the mathematicians, were regular attendants and pensioners, and were known as the earl’s ‘three magi’. And Northumberland had Walter Ralegh himself, also in the Tower, as an occasional companion. Nicholas Hill aided him in experiments in astrology and alchemy. A large library was placed in his cell, consisting mainly of Italian books on fortification, astrology and medicine; he also had Tasso, Machiavelli, Chapman’s Homer, The Gardener’s Labyrinth, Daniel’s History of England, and Florio’s Dictionary.

During her stay in the Tower, did Lucy read them? An intelligent girl might have been expected to do so. Another Lucy, Lucy Hutchinson, recalled her own intensive education:

By the time I was four years old, I read English perfectly, and having a great memory, I was carried to sermons, and while I was very young could remember and repeat them exactly … I had at one time eight tutors in several qualities, languages, music, dancing, writing and needlework; but my genius was quite averse from all but my book, and that I was so eager of, that my mother thinking it prejudiced my health, would moderate me in it. Yet this rather animated me than kept me back, and every moment I could steal from my play I would employ in any book I could find, when my own were locked up from me. After dinner and supper I still had an hour allowed me to play, and then I would steal into some hole or other to read. My father would have me learn latin, and I was so apt that I outstripped my brothers who were at school, although my father’s chaplain, that was my tutor, was a pitiful dull fellow.

Lucy Hay never became an eager reader, as Lucy Hutchinson did. Instead, she whiled away her time in exactly the way any adolescent girl would: she fell wildly in love with someone her father thought very unsuitable, the king’s Scottish favourite James Hay. But Lucy was also still a daughter in her father’s house. As dutiful daughters, Lucy and her elder sister Dorothy paid their father a visit in the Tower. In Lucy’s case duty was not rewarded. After he had given her sister a few embraces, Northumberland abruptly dismissed Dorothy, but instructed Lucy to stay where she was, asking her sister to send Lucy’s maids to her at once. ‘I am a Percy,’ he said, ‘and I cannot endure that my daughter should dance any Scottish jigs.’ The Percys who had been keeping the Scots out of England for several hundred years were speaking through him.

‘Come, let’s away to prison’, Northumberland might have said to his errant Cordelia, hoping that they would sing like birds in the cage. However, since he snatched Lucy away from an exceptionally lavish party put on just to impress her by her very passionate suitor, it seems unlikely that she was pleased. In any case, all her life, Lucy wanted anything but retirement. She wished to be at the centre of things. And her choice of partner was a sign of her lifelong brilliance at spotting just who was able to open secret doors to power.

To Northumberland, imprisoning his daughter along with him, and thus depriving the king’s favourite of his desires, might have seemed a nice and ironic revenge on the king who had unfairly locked him away. Revenge apart, however, Northumberland loathed James Hay. First, he was a Scot, and there was great resentment among English courtiers and nobles against those Scots brought south by James Stuart. Secondly, he was a favourite of the king who had just punished and shamed Northumberland. But more than all this, the antipathy seems to have been personal. On reflection it is hard to think of two more dissimilar men. Northumberland was intellectual, shy, proud, private, and above all of an ancient family. James Hay was a social being. If Northumberland loved books, James Hay loved banquets and parties.

Especially, he loved giving them. When he held a banquet, Whitehall hummed with servants carrying twenty or twenty-five dishes from the kitchens to the banqueting hall. It was James Hay who invented the so-called antefeast: ‘the manner of which was to have the board covered, at the first entrance of the guests, with dishes, as high as a tall man could well reach, and dearest viands sea or land could afford: and all this once seen, and having feasted the eyes of the invited, was in an manner thrown away, and fresh set on the same height, having only this advantage of the other, that it was hot’ Hay’s servants were always recognizable because they were so richly dressed. Or because they were carrying cloakbags full of uneaten food: ‘dried sweetmeats and comfets, valued to his lordship at more than 10 shillings the pound’. Once a hundred cooks worked for eight days to make a feast for his guests. The party he had put on to impress Lucy involved thirty cooks, twelve days’ preparation, seven score pheasants, twelve partridges, twelve salmon, and cost 2200 pounds in all. John Chamberlain thought it disgustingly wasteful, an apish imitation of the monstrous ways of the French. But it was exactly the ways of the French – elegance, taste, fashion – that made James Hay so personable, so modern. He also liked elegant clothes, court socials and courtly pursuits, especially tilting. He introduced Lucy to the pleasures of the court masque, a musical drama which combined the attractions of amateur theatricals, drawing-room musicmaking, and a costume ball. His wedding to Honora Denny had been accompanied by a masque by Thomas Campion, and in 1617, the year of his courtship of Lucy, he sponsored a masque subsequently known as the Essex House Masque. He also funded a performance of Ben Jonson’s Lovers Made Men.

Hardest, perhaps, for Northumberland to bear, Hay was the son of a gentleman-farmer of very modest means. He was on the make, charmingly and intelligently. He was no fool: he spoke French, Latin and Italian, and one of the reasons he liked to live at a slightly faster pace was that he had spent his youth in France learning about food, wine and pleasure. His choice of Lucy Percy as a bride was astute and sensible, too; he must have spotted her as a future beauty, and of course her family credentials were good, or would be when he had wheedled Northumberland out of gaol.

Lucy was abandoning her father’s world and its values in choosing James Hay. He must have fascinated her, enough to make her put up with virtual imprisonment to get her way, but it was not his looks that made him so appealing. Surviving portraits bear out Princess Elizabeth’s nickname for him, which was ‘camelface’. Encumbered with a notoriously shy and distant father, it may have been James’s easy charm that Lucy found irresistible. And she was only a teenager; though used to magnificence, she was not used to courtly sophistication. James exuded the suavity of French and Italian courts. He knew all about how things were done in those foreign places, then as now redolent with associations of class and chic. And coming from a difficult, even tempestuous marriage between two people of equal rank, she knew that nobility in a partner was no passport to married bliss. Most of all, and all her life, Lucy was alert to power – who had it, who did not, who was in, who out.

Finally, banquets and masques and feasts and court life offered Lucy a chance to take centre-stage. Northumberland was never going to offer her that. He thought great men’s wives existed ‘to bring up their children well in their long coat age, to tend their health and education, to obey their husbands … and to see that their women … keep the linen sweet’. Or so he wrote to his sons, at the very time when Lucy was incarcerated with him. He added that if wives complained, the best idea was to ‘let them talk, and you keep the power in your hands, that you may do as you list’.

Northumberland may have thought he had power, but as many men were to find when the Civil War began, the women in his family knew exactly where real influence lay. About this his daughter was wiser than he. Eventually she wore her father down. He began using pleas rather than force. He offered her 20,000 pounds if she publicly renounced James Hay. Lucy declined; she probably knew that he didn’t have the money, encumbered as he was by fines. Instead, she escaped from the Tower, and fled straight to James, who as Groom of the Stool was resident in the Wardrobe Building. Alas, he was in Scotland with the king, but he knew his Lucy. He left a fund of 2000 pounds for her entertainment while he was away.

James, on his return, worked sensibly on and through Lucy’s mother and sister, winning them with the same charm that had dazzled Lucy. Finally, in October 1617, the old earl gave in. He blessed the pair. Perhaps he was tired of seclusion in the Tower and knew Hay could procure his release. Perhaps Northumberland was forced to recognize what his daughter had noticed long before, that power had passed to a new and very different generation.

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 was changing. As portraits became more realistic, gardens assumed a new and striking formality: mannerist gardens, with grottoes and water-works, gave way to the new French-style gardens, which were all about geometry and precision, and acres of gravel on which no plant dared spread unruly roots. André Mollet, a French designer whose ideas prefigured Le Nôtre’s Versailles, created gardens at St James’s and at Wimbledon House for Charles and Henrietta. It was not for nothing that this style became associated with the absolutism of the Bourbon kings, and Louis XIV in particular. Such baroque planting in masses seemed richly symbolic of the ordered world of obedient and grateful subjects beyond the garden gates. It symbolized their mastery over the realm; every little dianthus, in a row, identical, massed, smiling. No weeds.

But Charles and Henrietta were not just buyers of pictures and makers of gardens. They wanted to be great patrons, like the Medici. One of the first seriously talented artists that Charles managed to lure to England was Orazio Gentileschi, now best-known as the father of Caravaggio’s most brilliant follower, Artemisia Gentileschi. Orazio arrived in England in October 1626, perhaps as part of the entourage of Henrietta’s favourite Bassompierre. He came to England directly from the court of Marie de Medici. Orazio was so much Henrietta’s painter that he was buried beneath the floor of her chapel at Somerset House when he died, an entitlement extended to all the queen’s Catholic servants. She may have liked him because, like her beloved husband, he always wore the sober, elegant black of the melancholy intellectual. He was also small and slight, like Charles.

His greatest commission was probably Henrietta’s own idea; nine huge panels for the ceiling of the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Greenwich itself, referred to as ‘some curious device of Inigo Jones’s’, was also called ‘the House of Delight’. The house was elegant, smooth, very feminine – seventeenth-century minimalism, but with curves, with grace. The paintings added colour and fire. The white-and-gold ceiling was augmented with the brilliant colours of a sequence that was to be called Allegory of Peace and the Arts under an English Crown. The so-called tulip staircase is a misnomer, but a felicitous one, since it conveys the long elegant lines of the curling flights. And like the tulip craze, the palace’s glory was short-lived, for its mistress did not enjoy it for long. Its post-war fate was to become a prison for Dutch seamen, a victim of Parliament’s iconoclasm.

In the seventeenth century, artists often worked with family members; in acquiring Orazio’s services, Charles and Henrietta also gained those of his brilliant daughter. Artemisia almost certainly helped her father with the sequence, while the plague raged through London and the armies gathered reluctantly for the Bishops’ Wars. Orazio’s two sons played a crucial role in Charles’s activities as a collector, going to the Continent to advise King’s Musician Nicholas Lanier when he was negotiating to buy the Duke of Mantua’s collection, the biggest single picture purchase by an English sovereign. Lanier also bought Caravaggio’s astounding and magnificent Death of the Virgin for Charles secretly in Venice. And the melancholy, artistic Richard Symonds suggests a closer relationship between these two exceptionally talented royal servants; in describing Lanier, Symonds calls him ‘inamorato di Artemisia Gentileschi: che pingera bene’ (lover of Artemisia Gentileschi, that good painter) while Theodore Turquet de Megerne says Nicholas Lanier knew artistic techniques that were Gentileschi family secrets; they could have met in Rome or Venice, via Artemisia’s brothers. If so, this was an affair between two of the most talented people at Charles and Henrietta’s court. However the country felt about them, the king and queen had created a world in which such talent could flourish, and find an echo in the mind of another.

And the royal couple could be influenced by this cultural world of their own making. Artemisia says something in one of her letters that is very reminiscent of remarks Henrietta makes about herself during the war: ‘You will find that I have the soul of Caesar in a woman’s heart’ (13 November 1649). Henrietta was to call herself a she-generalissima in similar fashion.

Other schemes came to nothing. Henrietta had ordered a Bacchus and Ariadne from one of her favourite artists, Guido Reni of Bologna, whose Labours of Hercules was one of the paintings Charles had acquired from the Duke of Mantua. It was never sent to London because Cardinal Barberini thought it too lascivious. A cut-price deal was done to ornament the withdrawing room with twenty-two paintings by Jacob Jordaens, a pupil of Rubens, bound to charge much less than the master himself. Balthasar Gerbier tried to get the job for Rubens, promising that the master would not seek to represent drunken-headed imaginary gods, but that he was ‘the gentlest in his representations’. Nonetheless, the royal couple chose the cheaper pupil, with instructions not to tell Jordaens who the clients were, in case he raised his price. He was also firmly told to make his women ‘as beautiful as may be, the figures gracious and svelte’. Gerbier kept on pushing to get the commission for Rubens, but on 23 May, he had to report the failure of his hopes with Rubens’ death. Eight of Jordaens’s paintings were duly executed; like many another artist in the service of Charles and Henrietta, he saw only a small portion of his promised fee, £100 of £680.

The might of the court, its self-absorption and glory, is best glimpsed in the way it displayed its own world to itself. The court masque was like a mirror, gleaming, shining. It was also like an insanely elaborate production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a well-endowed school; big sets, but amateur actors.

Shrovetide 1630 was a festivity from the seventh Sunday before Easter till the following Tuesday (now called Shrove or Pancake Tuesday). The idea was to eat up all the meat, eggs, cheese and other foods forbidden in Lent. But Shrove also meant shriving or confession of sins, and the gift of absolution from them. The godly didn’t like it much; it was ‘a day of great gluttony, surfeiting and drunkenness’, thought one godly minister, and it was also a day for football and cockfights. In choosing it for her first big masque, called Chloridia, and telling the story depicted in Botticelli’s Primavera, Henrietta was trying to tame festivity, to make it her own, and to combine fun with the shriving of sin, with redemption. The masque’s preface recorded the splendour of the event:

The celebration of some Rites, done to the Goddess Chloris, who in a general counsel of the Gods, was proclaimed Goddess of the flowers, according to that of Ovid, in the Fasti. The Curtain being drawn up, the Scene is discovered, consisting of pleasant hills, planted with young trees, and all the lower banks adorned with flowers. And from some hollow parts of those Hills, Fountains come gliding down, which, in the far-off Landshape, seemed all to be converted to a River. Over all, a serene sky, with transparent cloudes, giving a great lustre to the whole work, which did imitate the pleasant Spring. When the spectators had enough fed their eyes, with the delights of the Scene, in a part of the air, a bright Cloud begins to break forth; and in it is sitting a plump Boy, in a changeable garment, richly adorned, representing the mild Zephyrus. On the other side of the Scene, in a purplish Cloud, appeareth the Spring, a beautiful Maid, her upper garment green, under it, a white robe wrought with flowers.

The resemblance to a mythological painting by an Italian or Flemish master is clear. Inigo Jones, the creator of its visual aspects, carefully borrowed books about continental wedding pageants from the Cotton library. He suggested a costume for Henrietta herself, ‘several fresh greens mixed with gold and silver will be most proper’. This was Ben Jonson’s last court masque, and he made the most of it. Attendance was by invitation, and those not among the called and chosen had little hope of getting in; boxes were overflowing with richly dressed ladies as it was. They wore shockingly low-cut dresses, too, thought the Venetian embassy chaplain: ‘those who are plump and buxom show their bosoms very openly, and the lean go muffled to the throat’. There were feathers, and jewels, and brightly coloured dresses. One of the scantily-clad dancers was Lucy Hay. The masque began at about 6 p.m., and afterwards the king attended a special buffet supper for the cast. At the end of the evening the supper table would be ceremoniously overthrown amidst the sound of breaking glass, so dear to the upper classes, as a kind of violent variant of James Hay’s double feasts.

Charles and Henrietta were good at the visual, and they also had in Nicholas Lanier a fine musician. Their pet poets were less distinguished. Here is William Davenant: ‘How had you walked in mists of sea-coal smoke,/ Such as your ever-teeming wives would choke/ (False sons of thrift!) did not her beauteous light/ Dispel your clouds and quicken your dull sight?’

Shakespeare it isn’t, but it is fascinating testimony to the returning traveller’s first impression of London; coal fires – whoever you were. Coal, and its black dust, linked Henrietta and Lucy to Anna Trapnel’s Stepney.

And Lucy Hay, too, had to instruct her maids to get the coal dust off the new upholstery. The first years of Lucy’s marriage were difficult. She fell ill, so seriously that she nearly died, and perhaps as a result of this illness, she suffered the tragic stillbirth of the only baby she would ever carry. Having married a man with no money of his own, dependent on the king for favours, Lucy was in an oddly vulnerable position. She and her husband needed her efforts to survive James I’s death in 1625 without loss of position. And they had a tremendous stroke of luck early in the new reign. Exasperated with Henrietta Maria’s French ladies-in-waiting, Charles literally threw them out on 7 August 1626. James Hay may have been among those who urged this; Buckingham certainly was. The list of replacements included Lucy. But Henrietta didn’t want her – hers was the name which made the young queen balk.

It is easy to understand the queen’s difficulties. Henrietta was young, and rather daunted by England and the English court. Lucy was beautiful and clever and seems to have struck every man who met her as a kind of goddess. What queen consort in her senses would want her footsteps dogged day and night by somebody so very desirable, so charismatic? Henrietta wanted to lead; she didn’t want to follow. And Lucy’s sexual reputation had begun its nosedive. It was widely assumed that she was the mistress of that most glittering, most hated upstart of all, the Duke of Buckingham, and that Hay and Buckingham both hoped to use her to gain power over the young queen. Henrietta was quite intelligent enough to resent this. And she hated Buckingham, and detested his power over her husband.

Her mixed feelings about Lucy might have had another, darker cause. It may be that James Hay and Buckingham were both hoping that Charles might become infatuated with Lucy, that they might be able to control the king through his mistresses. This was not a stupid idea: the strategy was to pay rich dividends with Charles’s son, after all. And even the rumour cannot have endeared Lucy to the young, insecure queen, who believed passionately in marital fidelity.

And how might Lucy have felt about these plans? The self-willed girl, who chose her own husband? Perhaps the sense of being used and ordered in and out of bed bred a curious solidarity between Lucy and the queen, since in these unpromising circumstances Lucy somehow triumphed. By the summer of 1628, she had become Henrietta’s best friend and closest lady-in-waiting. As James Hay had taught her, she used dinners and entertainments: Bassompierre, the French ambassador, reported on Lucy’s cosy supper parties ‘in extreme privacy, rarely used in England, and caused a great stir, since the Queen rarely associates with her subjects at small supper gatherings’. This was high fashion, exciting, vivid, very faintly transgressive. It was women-only, too. Bassompierre noted that the king ‘once found himself in these little festivities … but behaved with a gravity which spoiled the conversation, because his humour is not inclined to this sort of debauche’. The kind of games which may have been played are exemplified by Lucy’s doglike and ambitious follower Sir Tobie Mathew, who wrote a character of her; it can be read as nauseatingly fulsome or very double-tongued indeed. Those who saw it as flattery agreed that it was ‘a ridiculous piece’. In his character, Mathew praises her ability to turn aside her followers’ wooing by seeming not to understand them. What Lucy liked was the idea of love, love as a game: a solemn Platonic game, yes, but one that could at any moment be deflated by sharp satire.

It was typical of Lucy that she could bring triumph even out of the disaster of serious and disfiguring illness. When she developed smallpox in the hot summer of 1628, it coincided very neatly with the death of the Duke of Buckingham, who had come to be James Hay’s rival and enemy. Buckingham’s death left an enormous gap at the very centre of power, a gap which James and Lucy Hay raced to fill. Everyone wrote to James, who was in Venice, urging him to return to England at once, even urging Lucy’s illness as a good excuse. In fact, though, James was both too late and not needed. The person who stepped into Buckingham’s position of power and influence over Charles was in fact his queen, Henrietta. And Lucy had assiduously cultivated her. Henrietta loved Lucy so much that she could hardly be restrained from nursing her personally. When Lucy began to recover, Henrietta rushed to her side.

But despite these glowing moments, the relationship had its ups and downs. Tobie Mathew could report in March 1630 that Lucy and Henrietta were not as close as before, and by November William, Lord Powys could inform Henry Vane that Lucy was back in full favour again. The problem sometimes seemed to be that Lucy was not very good at being a courtier: her natural dominance sometimes overpowered her political instincts. Powys remarked that ‘she is become a pretty diligent waiter, but how long the humour will last in that course I know not’. And although she and Henrietta had much in common, they were very different in inclination and temperament. Lucy’s rather Jacobean liking for fun, frivolity and parties was not altogether shared by Henrietta, who liked her parties too, but preferred them to have serious moral themes. When another of Henrietta’s advisers lamented that the wicked Lucy was teaching the queen to use makeup, he was complaining that she brought some Jacobean dissoluteness to the primness of the new court. Henrietta had moods in which she found this fun, and moods in which it made her feel shamed and guilty, particularly since Lucy could not share the great passion of her life, her Roman Catholic religious zeal. Finally, as Tobie Mathew remarked, Lucy was really a man’s woman: ‘She more willingly allows of the conversation of men, than of Women; yet, when she is amongst those of her own sex, her discourse is of Fashions and Dressings, which she hath ever so perfect upon herself, as she likewise teaches it by seeing her.’

She liked admiration and she also liked politics and intrigue. Her main interest in Henrietta was almost certainly centred on the access the queen gave her to her own powerful court faction, and Henrietta, like anyone, may sometimes have resented the fact that she was never liked for herself. And both women were locked in the competition that court society imposed on them, an unspoken, deadly scramble for notice, importance, power, access, which neither could ever truly win. Henrietta was always ahead because of her position, but like most people, wanted to be loved for her own qualities, and there Lucy could outdo her in wit, charm and beauty. It was easier for Henrietta to blame Lucy for her occasional eclipse than to question why her husband’s nobles so resented her influence; it was easier for Lucy to triumph over and rival Henrietta than to ask herself why her role in affairs always had to be a minor one.

Lucy and Henrietta were also frustrated because no one really took them seriously. They were both encased in a role which compelled them to be sweet and wise and self-controlled in public. Though women were often seen as emotionally and sexually uncontrolled, behaving that way led to social ostracism. They were not allowed to display or even to have feelings of competitiveness, anger, and frustration, which meant that those feelings raged unexpressed and unchecked. Composing bons mots of detraction, laughing at adorers, and slighting each other gave those feelings temporary release. What they both truly wanted was to have an impact on policy.

So, late in the 1620s, Lucy was a trifle bored. It all seemed so easy. At first the new monarchy of Charles I appeared a little dull and straitlaced: ‘If you saw how little gallantry there is at court,’ Lucy complained, ‘you would believe that it were no great adventure to come thither after having the small pox, for it is most desolate and I have no great desire to return.’ But this is the carelessness of success. A 1628 painting shows her translated to the centre of feminine power at court, transformed by masque costume into a goddess. The Duke of Buckingham, as Mercury, leads a procession of the arts to the king and queen, Apollo and Diana; the countess can be seen directly behind the queen’s shoulder, handily placed for whispering in her ear. Such allegorical names could be codewords, too; the countess’s brother-in-law referred to himself as Apollo, Walter Montagu as Leicester (a name that hinted at his role as the queen’s favourite, and perhaps implied something about their relationship). Lucy sponsored a performance called The Masque of Amazons, and danced in other masques. She was on top of her own small world.

But then it all fell apart. For reasons about which we can only speculate, Lucy declined a personal invitation to dance in William Davenant’s The Temple of Love, in 1634. And she never danced again in a court masque. Her absence from court was also noted by Viscount Conway in 1634: ‘now and a long time she hath not been at Whitehall, as she was wont to be, which is as when you left her: But she is not now in the Masque. I think they were afraid to ask and be refused … What the Words [quarrel] were, I know not, but I conceive they were spoken on the queen’s side, where there will never be perfect friendship. For my Lady of Carlisle … will not suffer herself to be beloved but of those that are her servants.’ Conway’s diagnosis was that Lucy was spoiled, could not bear to play second fiddle to the queen any longer, but it’s notable that he attributes the final unforgivable words to Henrietta.

While James Hay was accomplishing his gorgeous dash through Europe, Lucy was pursuing her own interests with equal vim and excess. With her customary adaptability and nose for fashion, she picked up from France the one role that would allow a woman in her position exactly the kind of power that her father had declared to be impossible. She was a salonnière, which meant something more than an influential hostess. A salonnière was a woman who was married or widowed, beautiful, sought-after, enormously literate and well-informed, fun to talk to, and interested in politics. Her salon consisted of her followers, chosen (like guests at a dinner party) with both business and pleasure in mind – a mix of poets and politicians. These followers played a half-joking, half-serious amorous game, presenting themselves as devoted to their lady, writing sonnets and letters to her, composing love games for her. Yet the focus was on wit and skill rather than merely on sex; the game of courtship provided a thrilling occasion for exercising power and talent. In particular, the goal was to find new ways of praising the salonnière herself – and new extremes of praise, too. So when Edmund Waller assured Lucy that in her presence all men ‘ambition lose, and have no other scope,/ Save Carlisle’s favour, to employ their hope’, William Cartwright could trump him by telling Lucy that any jewels she wore could only darken her lustre. And it was not only professional poets, perhaps hungry for advancement, who wrote. Courtiers and nobles addressed verse to her too. The Earl of Holland wrote love poems. Lucy’s sister Dorothy thought they were awful, ‘he is more her slave than ever creature was’, she wrote disgustedly, ‘many verses he hath lately writ to her, which are the worst that ever were seen’.

But then, Dorothy was biased. Like Lucy, Dorothy was ambitious and intelligent, but unlike Lucy she was married to a quiet, mild-mannered nobleman with strong principles, a member of the Sidney family with little interest in making a place for himself at the centre of the Caroline court. That did not stop Dorothy intriguing for him night and day, though. Her letters to and about Lucy burn with a frustrated ambition that allows us to see how galling it must have been for other women to witness Lucy’s success. But she was admired by men. Perhaps her effect was most eloquently summarized by the ageing Earl of Exeter:

The night is the mother of dreams and phantoms, the winter is the mother of the night, all this mingled with my infirmities have protracted this homage so due and so vowed to your ladyship, lest the fume and vapours so arising should contaminate my so sacred and pure intention. But much more pleasure it were to me to perform this duty in your lodgings at Court when you see your perfections in the glass adding perfection to perfection approving the bon mots spoken in your presence, moderating the excess of compliments, passing over a dull guest, without a sweet smile, giving a wise answer to an extravagant question … Were I young again, I should be a most humble suitor.

It sounds idyllic. But for her critics, and for the critics of salons and their female patrons in general, the salon was a nightmarish space full of horribly spoiled women whose caprices could unfairly influence national policy.

For a while, Lucy did not care, and could afford not to. But the game of love toyed with the deadly serious game that Lucy and James were also playing: advancement. For James Hay, whose power had been based on James I’s favour, the transition to Charles’s reign was a struggle, and though he kept his hand in, he was never quite so central again. Charles made him Governor of the Caribbees in 1627, and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1633. But he died relatively young, on 20 April 1636, when he was only fifty-six, and he did it, like everything else, with character and in style. ‘When the most able physicians and his own weakness had passed a judgement that he could not live many days, he did not forbear his entertainment, but made divers brave clothes, as he said, to out-face naked and despicable death withal.’ It was a gallant remark, but one that showed James Hay’s limitations. Even facing death, his mind ran along its usual graceful, frivolous paths.

Next time, Lucy would look for someone more serious. Just as she had altered her world spectacularly by marrying James, so she would seek out extreme change again and again. James’s death left her a rich, young and beautiful widow, perhaps the ideal position for a woman in the seventeenth century who wanted both power and a good time. No patriarchs and no mental limits would stop her now. And perhaps having had a husband of glorious frivolity is precisely why she then sought seriousness, and sought it before the now-ailing James had died. Political power for Lucy was to come next through Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, one of her most self-abasing followers, but also one of the shrewdest and least disinterested. Holland was an eager member of a faction which included Lucy’s brother the Earl of Northumberland, which argued passionately for a French alliance and for movement against the rising power of the Hapsburgs. Henrietta Maria often supported this faction. It was anti-Spanish, bursting with military ambition and rather reminiscent of the Earl of Essex and his followers during the reign of Elizabeth in its dash and impracticality.

Seriousness led to seriousness. She had had troops of frivolous followers, but when Lucy fell in love again, it was not with a gallant cavalier. The man who caught her eye was like her father and her husband in that he was powerful, mobile, and ambitious. But Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, was utterly unlike the easygoing and high-living James Hay. He wasn’t content with a life of pleasure, as Hay had been. He wanted to rule, and Lucy was a vital part of his political plans.

Wentworth’s ambitions had changed radically in the course of his lifetime. He had begun as an ardent defender of Parliament’s ‘ancient and undoubted right’, and in 1627 had eagerly gone to gaol for refusing to pay the Forced Loan. But he always opposed the godly, and attempts to control the king, and these considerations led him to change sides abruptly, a volte face which led directly to a barony and elevation to the Privy Council. Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay commented that he was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was ‘a baptism into the community of corruption’. Part of the loathing he aroused in contemporaries was caused by dislike of the opportunist turncoat. But he may have sincerely believed that in the all-too-evident split between the king and Parliament, it was the king who was ruling the country. Lucy was part of his plan to ingratiate himself thoroughly with the court.

Wentworth knew the language he should use to approach someone like Lucy, the fashionable vocabulary of literary Platonism, on which he was drafting a short dissertation designed to please the ladies. In a letter to Viscount Conway, as early as March 1635, Wentworth wrote: ‘I admire and honour her, whatever her position be at court. You might tell her sometimes when she looks at herself at night in the glass, that I have the ambition to be one of those servants she will suffer to honour her … a nobler or a more intelligent friendship did I never meet with in my life.’ As a result of drawing the most powerful courtier in Britain into her net, Lucy was confirmed as a source of power – frightening but indispensable. Like a rich relation, she had to be conciliated and placated. And it went straight to her head – to Wentworth’s, too. For him, Lucy was a kind of trophy, a sign that he had made it, to the very top of the world. They exchanged portraits, full-sized ones by Van Dyck; Wentworth could literally hang Lucy on his wall.

But for Lucy it was all part of a pathway to a sterner, fiercer kind of love, the love of God. For she became, and ardently remained, a Presbyterian, an adherent of the Scottish Kirk, one of those who longed to see the achievements of the Scots repeated in the English Church. Perhaps Wentworth had told her stories about Ireland, or possibly she was intimidated by the tight knot of Catholics around Henrietta. Perhaps attaching herself to Wentworth, who was rather Godlike in his own estimation, helped form her views. She was as partisan, as militant, as Anna Trapnel on behalf of God. She never became fanatical – at the end of her life she could still tell ribald jokes about godly Scots – but she was serious. And she was also very practical. Her new admirer could help her protect her property in Ireland from the papists. Women like Lucy used their power to keep their estates intact.

So the streets of London in the late 1630s threaded through radically different worlds. They were stitched together by trade. A piece of silk might have known a wider London than any of those who wore it, for the silk would have come into the country through Poplar docks, new home of the East India Company. Unloaded on a wharf, surrounded by spices and scents from the East, it was also thrown about by hardworking navvies who lived in the sprawling, brawling East End, which was terra incognita to the West End that it served. Luxury passed by the life of a poor girl like Anna Trapnel, but did not settle in her hard world. Yet her London was linked to the brighter London of Lucy Hay through a finely spun skein of silk, and both women would be affected by the war.