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Charles and Buckingham went to war against Spain and sent an expedition to restore Frederick of the Palatinate, yet they also supported the French Protestants, who were being crushed by Louis XIII, Henrietta Maria’s brother. They ended up at war with both Spain and France – a perfect muddle, as well as placing Charles’s marriage under strain. Buckingham took command but his expeditions were all disastrous. He spent £10,000 on his own clothes for the expedition to save Protestants at La Rochelle (including £367 for a silver perfuming pan) but then did not pay his soldiers. He grew to be hated. Even Rubens, painting the duke, remarked, ‘When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham, I pity the young king,’ and predicted that the duke was ‘heading for the precipice’. Parliament insisted that ‘until this great person be removed from intermeddling with the great affairs of state, we are out of hope of any good success’. But Charles instead dismissed Parliament and the wars went on.

On 23 August 1628, Buckingham, still only thirty-five, headquartered at the Greyhound Pub in Plymouth to organize his Spanish expedition, was stabbed in the chest by an embittered soldier. ‘Villain,’ shouted Buckingham, then collapsed. His pregnant wife rushed downstairs to find him dead on the breakfast table. While crowds celebrated, Charles ‘threw himself upon his bed, lamenting with much passion and with abundance of tears’, and stayed in his room for two days. Later, disgusted by parliamentary delight in the murder, he heaped praise on Buckingham and effectively adopted his two sons, who were brought up with his own children. But the assassination ended Charles’s Spanish war, the peace negotiated by Rubens, and saved his marriage.^* Without Buckingham around, the chilly Charles thawed, and came to love Henrietta Maria. ‘Dear Heart,’ he wrote later, ‘thou canst not but be confident that there is no danger which I will not hazard, or pains that I will not undergo, to enjoy the happiness of thy company.’ In 1630, Henrietta Maria gave birth, aided by Peter Chamberlen and his secret forceps, to a prince of Wales, Charles, followed by a duke of York, James, and five other children.

Warm in private, Charles was obstinate and haughty in politics. He believed in divine kingship, even though English successions had long been confirmed by Parliament, made up of a House of Lords, hereditary and appointed, and a House of Commons of gentlemen, elected by around 5 per cent of the population – though women did not have the vote. Charles now dispensed with parliaments, funding himself through aggressive taxes. He was far from tyrannical: no one was executed, but his innovative taxes, levied without parliamentary consent, inspired loathing. Disapproving of the puritans in parliament, Charles adopted a High Church Protestantism that beautified churches and supported royal authority. Unlike continental rulers, English kings deployed fleets but not standing armies – and that meant they lacked the force to overrule their parliaments. Vicious religious strife became the sparkwheel that, combined with an ambitious but underfunded monarch, a divided nobility, an increasingly confident Parliament and a sense of millenarian catastrophe exacerbated by European war and economic hardship, cast England into sixty years of crisis. England was not alone, however: Germany, France, Spain, Poland, China and the Ottomans experienced their own devastating crises.

In this apocalyptic atmosphere, two men from opposite sides – a Catholic lord and a provincial puritan – looked not to England but to the New World. Jamestown had almost withered away: 3,000 out of the 3,600 settlers sent out between 1619 and 1622 had perished. But now Englishmen of different stamps sought a new life in America, not so much freedom for all as freedom for themselves from others.

SAINTS OF AMERICA: CROMWELL, WARWICK AND WINTHROP

A Huntingdonshire gentleman, elected to Charles’s last Parliament, was so disgusted by the king’s religious tyranny that he started to consider emigration to America. Oliver Cromwell would be the second remarkable statesman from his family.