Notwithstanding all these precautions and pains taken to bring Somerset to a safe frame of mind, he appears to have been very untractable; and the king's dread of his conduct during his trial, and anxiety to know the result, seem to have amounted to agony. His behaviour cannot be so well described as in the words of Sir Anthony Weldon.
"And now for the last act enters Somerset himself upon the stage, who, being told, as the manner is, by the lieutenant, that he must provide to go next day to his trial, did absolutely refuse it, and said they should carry him in his bed; that the king had assured him he should not come to any trial, neither durst the king to bring him to trial. This was in a high strain, and in a language not well understood by George Moore, [Sir George Moore, lieutenant in the room of Elwes,] that made Moore quiver and shake; and, however he was accounted a wise man, yet he was near at his wit's end. Yet away goes Moore to Greenwich, as late as it was, being twelve at night; bounceth at the back-stairs as if mad; to whom came Jo. Loveston, one of the grooms, out of his bed, inquiring the reason of that distemper at so late a season. Moore tells him he must speak with the king. Loverton replies, 'He is quiet,' which in the Scottish dialect is, fast asleep. Moore says, 'You must wake him.' Moore was called in (the chamber left to the king and Moore). He tells the king those passages, and desired to be directed by the king, for he was gone beyond his own reason to hear such bold and undutiful expressions from a faulty subject against a just sovereign. The king falls into a passion of tears: 'On my soul, Moore, I wot not what to do: thou art a wise man; help me in this great strait, and thou shalt find thou dost it for a thankful master;' with other sad expressions. Moore leaves the king in that passion, but assures him he will prove the utmost of his wit to serve his majesty. Sir George Moore returns to Somerset about three o'clock next morning of that day he was to come to trial, enters Somerset's chamber, tells him he had been with the king, found him a most affectionate master unto him, and full of grace in his intentions towards him. 'But,' said he, 'to satisfy justice you must appear, although you return instantly again without any further procedure; only you shall know your enemies and their malice, though they shall have no power over you.' With this trick of wit he allayed his fury, and got him quietly, about eight in the morning, to the Hall; yet feared his former bold language might revert again, and, being brought by this trick into the toil, might have more enraged him to fly out into some strange discovery, that he had two servants placed on each side of him, with a cloak on their arms, giving them a peremptory order that if Somerset did any way fly out on the king, they should instantly hoodwink him with that cloak, take him violently from the bar, and carry him away; for which he would secure them from any danger, and they should not want a bountiful reward. But the earl, finding himself overreached, recollected a better temper, and went on calmly in his trial, where he held the company until seven at night. But who had seen the king's restless motion all that day, sending to every boat he saw landing at the bridge, and cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily judged all was not right, and that there had been some grounds for his fear of Somerset's boldness. But at last one bringing him word he was condemned, and the passages, all was quiet."
The reader will remember that the abrupt termination of the proceedings against Sir Thomas Monson, who was carried off from the bar by a party of yeomen of the guard, was caused by the Lord Chief Justice's having made some indiscreet allusion to suspicions regarding the death of Prince Henry, the king's eldest son, which had taken place in 1612, about four years before the time of these trials.
This young prince at a very early age displayed talents and virtues which endeared him to the nation. The accounts of his short life are pleasing and interesting. He was thus described when he was twelve years old, in a letter from the French ambassador. "None of his pleasures savour in the least of a child. He is a particular lover of horses, and what belongs to them; but is not fond of hunting; and, when he does engage in it, it is rather for the pleasure of galloping than for any which the dogs give him. He is fond of playing at tennis, and at another Scotch diversion very like mall;[20] but always with persons older than himself, as if he despised those of his own age. He studies two hours in the day, and employs the rest of his time in tossing the pike, or leaping, or shooting with the bow, or throwing the bar, or vaulting, or some other exercise of that kind; and he is never idle. He is very kind to his dependents, supports their interests against all persons whatsoever, and urges all that he undertakes for them or others with such zeal as ensures it success; for, besides his exerting his whole strength to compass what he desires, he is already feared by those who have the management of affairs, and especially by the Earl of Salisbury, who appears to be greatly apprehensive of the prince's ascendency; as the prince, on the other hand, shows little esteem for his lordship." This high-spirited and magnanimous boy could not fail to be aware of the faults and vices of his father's character. He entertained great admiration for Sir Walter Raleigh; was often heard to exclaim, "No king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage;" and his aversion to the Earl of Salisbury was understood to have arisen from that nobleman's share in Raleigh's ruin.[21] His strong sense of religion rendered his father's habit of profane swearing repulsive to him. "Once," we are told by Coke, "when the prince was hunting the stag, it chanced the stag, being spent, crossed the road where a butcher and his dog were travelling. The dog killed the stag, which was so great that the butcher could not carry him off. When the huntsman and the company came up, they fell at odds with the butcher, and endeavoured to incense the prince against him; to whom the prince soberly replied, 'What! if the butcher's dog killed the stag, how could the butcher help it?' They replied, if his father had been served so, he would have sworn as no man could have endured it. 'Away!' replied the prince, 'all the pleasure in the world is not worth an oath.'"
A young prince, who, at twelve years old, was "feared by those who had the management of affairs," must, when he grew up, have been a formidable object to a worthless minion like Carr. He disliked this man from the first; and his aversion grew into a rooted hatred. When Carr was made Viscount Rochester, Henry, then about fourteen, as we are told by Osborn, "contemned so far his father's election of Rochester, that he was reported either to have struck him on the back with his racket, or very hardly forborne it." The prince continued to express on all occasions an abhorrence of favourites, and an utter contempt of Carr; and made no secret of his resolution to humble both him and the family into which he was allied if ever he came to the throne.
Carr, then, must necessarily have feared and hated the prince; and it is hardly to be supposed that such feelings would remain passive in a mind like his. Henry did not enjoy his father's favour. The king's "genius was rebuked" in the presence of a son so much his superior in every moral and intellectual quality; and he was jealous of the esteem and admiration in which the youth was held by the nation. "The vivacity, spirit, and activity of the prince," says Dr. Birch, "soon gave umbrage to his father's court, which grew extremely jealous of him."—"The king," says Osborn, "though he would not deny any thing the prince plainly desired, yet it appeared rather the result of fear and outward compliance than love or natural affection; being harder drawn to confer an honour or pardon, in cases of desert, upon a retainer of the prince, than a stranger." The prince himself, in a letter written within a few weeks of his death, excused himself from applying on behalf of a friend, for some piece of court favour, "because, as matters now go here, I will deal in no businesses of importance for some respects." At this time Carr was in the height of his power; and this position of the prince at his father's court must be ascribed in no small degree to the influence of the favourite.
Prince Henry died on the 6th of November 1612, (at the age of eighteen,) of an illness under which he had laboured for two or three weeks. The symptoms (as detailed by Dr. Birch in his Life of the prince) were of the most violent kind; dreadful affections of the stomach and bowels, excessive thirst, burning heat, blackness of the tongue, convulsions, and delirium. The physicians "could not tell what to make of the distemper," were confounded by "the strangeness of the disease," and differed in their opinions as to its treatment. The day after the prince's death his body was opened by order of the king; and the report of the physicians who examined it does not indicate the operation of poison. They say, in particular, "his stomach was without any manner of fault or imperfection."
The grief of the nation pervaded all ranks, and almost all parties. The king himself, however, manifested the utmost insensibility. Only three days after the prince's death, Carr (then Lord Rochester) wrote, by the king's orders, to the English ambassador at Paris, directing him to resume the marriage treaty, which had been begun for Prince Henry, in the name of his brother Charles. After a very short interval, all persons were prohibited from appearing in mourning before the king; and orders were given that the preparations for the Christmas festivities should proceed without interruption. The Earl of Dorset, in a letter written at this time to the English ambassador in France, uses these expressions: "That our rising sun is set ere scarcely he had shone, and that with him all our glory lies buried, you know and do lament as well as we; and better than some do, and more truly, or else you are not a man, and sensible of this kingdom's loss."
Suspicions that the young prince had come foully by his death became prevalent immediately after that event. They were by no means of that vague and unmeaning kind which the untimely end of an illustrious person is apt to occasion among the vulgar. "The queen," says Dr. Welwood, "to her dying day could never be dissuaded from the opinion that her beloved son had foul play done him." Bishop Burnet, in his History of his own time, says, that Charles the First declared that the prince, his brother, had been poisoned by the means of the Viscount Rochester, afterwards Earl of Somerset. And contemporary writers afford innumerable proofs of this opinion having been entertained by persons engaged in public affairs, and conversant with the transactions of the time.
The opinions of modern writers, as may be supposed, are divided on a question so dark and mysterious. "Violent reports were propagated," says Hume, "as if Henry had been carried off by poison; but the physicians, on opening his body, found no symptoms to confirm such an opinion. The bold and criminal malignity of men's tongues and pens spared not even the king on the occasion; but that prince's character seems rather to have failed in the extreme of facility and humanity, than in that of cruelty and violence." Hume's facts, it is notorious, often assume the colouring of his political feelings; of which a pretty strong instance occurs in this very case of Sir Thomas Overbury, whose imprisonment in the Tower, says this historian, "James intended as a slight punishment for his disobedience" in refusing to go as ambassador to Russia. James ordered Overbury to be most rigorously confined, and even sent a gentleman to the Tower for having simply exchanged a word with the prisoner. Nay, more: James knew all along that Overbury was languishing in his dungeon; having received, and disregarded, repeated petitions from his afflicted father for his release. And this, according to Hume, was intended by James as a slight punishment for what was, in truth, no offence.