In 1623, Charles and Buckingham went on a covert expedition to Spain at the King’s behest to negotiate the prince’s marriage to the Catholic Infanta Maria, sister of King Philip IV. There is no hint that Buckingham was a closet Catholic, although his elder brother John made little secret that he was attached to the ‘old faith’. They reached an agreement, but Charles was averse to the match and quickly repudiated it once he and Buckingham were back in England. The expedition had given the prince a taste of independence, which made his relations with the King increasingly strained. James also quarrelled with Buckingham and the scene in which they have a public spat upon his return is based upon original sources.
Only occasionally, in the interests of advancing the plot, have I strayed from the known chronology of events. The masque organised by Prince Charles took place on Twelfth Night 1618 rather than 28 March 1619, and the Marquis de Châteauneuf did not arrive as ambassador to England until 1629. In the narrative, Frances’s eldest son George begins university at the age of eighteen, although it was more common for boys to attend when they were as young as fifteen or sixteen.
The character around whom I have woven the most fiction is my heroine, Frances. The contemporary records shed precious little light upon her life, but I have included the few details that have survived – notably her marriage to Sir Thomas Tyringham, the fact that they had a large family (as many as five sons and five daughters, according to one account) and that they settled at Sir Thomas’s Buckinghamshire estate. Her husband retained the post of Master of the King’s Buckhounds until the end of James’s reign. Although little is known of his career, given how much of James’s later years were spent hunting it is a reasonable assumption that he spent a great deal of time with his royal master and thereby wielded significant influence.
In September 1624, the King’s health declined sharply. He had suffered from kidney problems and arthritis for years, and the latter now worsened. In his weakened state, by March the following year he had fallen prey to a fever, stroke and severe dysentery. There is no small irony in the fact that, having hunted witches for years, James called for the services of a wise woman on his deathbed. Her identity is not known, so I hope I can be forgiven the dramatic licence of having my heroine supply the role. I also borrowed some of Henry VIII’s last words for James, whose final utterances are less well attested.
Buckingham had raced to Theobalds to be by his master’s side. He insisted on ministering to the King himself, brushing aside the royal physicians. James’s condition rapidly worsened and within a few days he was dead. By now, Buckingham was widely despised, so it is not surprising that rumours of poison quickly spread across the court. But the new king’s apparent favour towards his late father’s lover protected him, and for a while it seemed that Buckingham would come to dominate Charles as much as he had James. The ranks of his enemies continued to swell during the years that followed, however, and after leading a series of disastrous military expeditions, the King began to lose faith in him.
On 23 August 1628, Buckingham was stabbed to death by John Felton at the Greyhound pub in Portsmouth, where he had travelled to prepare for another ill-advised campaign. Felton was an army officer who had been wounded during one of the duke’s previous expeditions and was said to be aggrieved at having been passed over for promotion. Such was Buckingham’s unpopularity by the time of his death that Felton was lauded as a national hero. This was not enough to spare him the gallows, though, and he went to his own death three months later.
Buckingham was buried in a lavish tomb in Westminster Abbey, which bears a Latin inscription meaning ‘The Enigma of the World’.