Noble Blood - Death and the King's Favorite (with Benjamin Woolley)

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

George Villiers was in his early twenties when he caught the eye of King James the VI and I. Almost immediately, George became an intimate "favorite," catapulted into a new title and world of courtly power. Whether the relationship between the two men was sexual is still a question historians debate, but the thing that can't be denied is that their relationship would have deadly consequences. Dana is joined by author Benjamin Woolley, whose book The King's Assassin inspired the new television series Mary & George. Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. In 2005, the English Heritage Team working on restoring Ape Thorpe Hall in Northamptonshire made a phenomenal discovery. Their job wasn't an easy one, though Apethorpe had once been a magnificent estate that hosted Tudor and Jacobian royalty,

over the centuries it had fallen into disrepair. First, during a period where it was used as a youth detention facility, and then later when it was purchased, presumably as an investment, by a Libyan businessman who never spent a single night, there. The palace was crumbling, and the only reason it even lasted long enough to be protected by the English government was because of an elderly gardener-slas-caretaker who continued working without salary, to block windows, stop leaks, and chase away would be vandals. When the English heritage restoration began, the magnificence of the house slowly became apparent again. There were

centuries-old grotesque wall paintings that had been covered in the 18th century, and plaster freezes hidden under attic floorboards. But the best discovery was in the chamber that had originally been built in order to accommodate the visits of King James I. James I, also known as James VI in Scotland, frequently visited Ape Thorpe. It was the estate he spent the most time at outside of his own palaces, and in his bedchamber, the restoring team removed a wall of plaster to uncover a secret passageway. Passageway that led to the room that would have been occupied by the king's favorite, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

A secret passageway between the bedrooms of two men, just normal platonic dude stuff. If you know King James at all, it's probably because of the Bible that bears his name, or the episode on this podcast we did about his habit of witch hunting. Neither of those two character traits seem particularly aligned with the other big thing about King James, that he had a pattern of selecting close male favorites. These relationships were absolutely intimate, undeniably wrong, romantic and probably sexual, although that's a matter of much debate even today among scholars. Personally, I defer to Antonia Frazier's view, which she wrote in her 1975 biography of the king,

quote, in sexual matters, it is generally better to assume the obvious unless there is some very good reason to think otherwise. And that was decades before they found the secret bedroom tunnel. Whatever the extent of the physical relationship between King James and George Villiers, the relationship itself reshaped English politics. George went from being a minor second son of landed gentry to a duke, a meteoric rise that first delighted and then terrified and threatened other nobleman. King James had been in his late 40s when they met, George in his early 20s. The young man had been thrust into court by his ambitious mother, Mary,

who saw her handsome son as a key into high society. But even she could not have imagined just how successful George would be. But no one can rise forever, and the intimate, jealous closeness that George and James shared might have, in the end, cost them both. their lives. I'm Dana Schwartz and this is Noble Blood. I'm thrilled to be speaking today with Benjamin Woolley, a professor at Goldsmith's University of London and the author of The King's Assassin, which was the basis of the new television series, Mary and George, that's finally available in the US. I'm so thrilled to be talking with you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I look forward to it. So let's start with Georgia's early life, though obviously

obviously he would have this meteoric rise through court politics. His early prospects were extremely limited. You write that he was the second son of a father who had already been married and already had earlier sons from that marriage. So what did that mean in terms of George's future in the 17th century? Well, being a second son at that particular time was not a comfortable position to be in. So they stood to inherit nothing under the system of primogeniture, as it's called, where the eldest son inherits everything in the family. If there's an eldest son, that obviously means they're in line to get that, so the second son has nothing. And that can make life extremely difficult. I mean, you kind of see it now, don't you,

in the relationship between, I don't know, princes, William and Harry. It's a complex, difficult relationship. It's a difficult position for people like Harry. You know, you have the air in the spare. And that was very much the case for second sons, even more so, right through the entire system as it worked in that time. And George was, as you say, in an even worse position because he wasn't even in the first family. He was a second son in a second family. So his prospects were bleak. And a kind of measure of that is that if you look through the history of that time, people who were in his position, who came from sort of, I suppose, middling gentry rung.

So they went from the aristocracy, but they weren't peasants by any stretch of the imagination, but this sort of gentry class, it was really difficult for them, and they would do things like, well, notably, a lot of them piled, well, not that many, but some of them piled on a ship and set off Virginia and the US to set up Jamestown. The people who did that was a really motley crew who were made up of a lot of second sons, who had nothing else to do. So that was his predicament. That was his situation. And that is what makes, made for me his story and his mother's role in that story all the more remarkable. So from a pretty early age, his mother is able to see some sort of potential in him. What does she see in him? And then how does she cultivate that?

Well, she sees some potential in him and some lack of potential in her eldest son, John. So the eldest who would inherit whatever fortunes the family made was, I think, right from the start, clearly had a problem of some sort. I mean, in more modern terms, I suppose you'd say he had some sort of mental illness, probably, congenital mental illness, because it seemed to show up quite early on, and it certainly manifested itself in violent ways later on in his life. So he was a difficulty, and she couldn't see. what she could do with him because she was determined,

a very determined woman who was going to try and sort of get the ranking she thought she deserved. She thought her and her family. She came from this family which she later claimed was related to five kings of Europe. I mean, that's highly debatable, but she nevertheless thought she came from a very special line. And John wasn't going to carry that. not as a reflection of her line and background,

nor as that of her husband who died when John and George were young, who was called Sir George Villiers. So George's father was also called George, one of those things that happened throughout history of that time causing chaos for those of us trying to research the families. But she could see that George was a much better prospect, if you like, for realising her ambitions than John. He wasn't very scholarly, he wasn't very intellectual.

So he wouldn't be a good fit for the church. Exactly. So if you're looking at the options that were available, that's exactly the sort of option that might have been considered. But he was, obviously, he good-looking, charismatic, seemed to be musical, very good dancer, physically sort of self-assured. And all those things made it clear.

that he would have a successful time if she could somehow get him within the orbit of the royal court. I mean, most people, it wouldn't have in her position, which was complicated in any number of ways. I mean, she was what was called a waiting woman to a richer relative, which doesn't mean she was a servant exactly or a sort of scullery made,

and her enemies would make her out to be as such later on. But she was in a kind of one of, of those very ambiguous social positions, which was between service, if you like, and companionship to another higher-ranking individual. So she was low in the pecking order. And so to even think about trying to get somebody into the Royal Court was itself, you know, that was a moonshot, as it were in, in talking about the times we're in. But nevertheless, she was that ambitious. And George seemed to present a prospect of somebody who she could just shape him into, to the sort of person who would do the job,

would have a possibility of success. So that was her aim, her singular aim, and various sort of historical forces basically aligned themselves to make this a completely unexpected possibility. You wrote that there was the sort of benefit of the fact that James, obviously, coming from Scotland, had surrounded himself sort of with Scottish men,

He had had a favorite Somerset who was sort of disliked by nobility. And so English nobility had a vested interest in helping to propel an English boy into the king's orbit. Exactly so. One of the courtiers was complaining how the English were unable to see the beams of his royal sunlight or something. I can't quite remember the exact quote. But they couldn't get a look in, literally, to the king, or, well, the King's Bedchamber, which was, it wasn't just a bedroom. It was the sort of locus of power at the time, the place where people who counted, so to speak,

had to have access in order to get the King's ear, physically get the King's ear. It was like that. It was that kind of court. So they needed a glamorous young English boy to catch the King's eye. And George went down to London. His mother obviously sent him down the king's way, as it was called, down from Leicestershire, which is in the Midlands of England, down to London. And George hung around court.

In fact, he nearly ended up marrying the child of a prominent courtier who died before a marriage could be achieved. I don't know what the father's attitude towards it would have been, but the executive of the father's will of the bride to bees or the... the prospect of a bride to be, the executors of his will just did everything to prevent George wheedling his way into that particular family line. So that whole scheme fell apart. I don't know if that was something that Mary was involved in or not. The historical record doesn't tell us. But it was some time and somewhere after that that this group of nobles, led by the Earl of Pembroke initially, it seems, got together.

So he was actually Pembroke's share is in Wales. And so he had Welsh connections. But Wales and England were essentially one nation at the time, one kingdom. And so he worked to come up with a scheme. And George was pushed forward as the candidate to fulfil that scheme. And that's when the scheming really began. And it turned out to be extremely successful. culminating in its first stages

with George catching the king's eye by doing a beautiful dance. I had the privilege of watching being recreated for the show, Mary and George. He did this dance that caught the king's eye and that is what set the bull rolling. It reminds me of the famous masquerade that Anne Boleyn danced in

to catch Henry the 8th's eye that these masquerades were just a market for people to see beautiful people. people. Exactly. And they were very effective of that when it came to the royal court. And that's a very good comparison. It subsequently led to George being knighted and being made a gentleman of the bedchamber, which means it's a kind of ticket to enter and be part of the bedchamber. It doesn't mean at this stage anything relating to having any kind of physical intimacy with the king. There were lots of gentlemen of the bedchamber. They were essentially not not

just the sort of intermediary between the king and his people, or more particularly individuals like his Privy Council and so on, you know, the people who ran the government. It wasn't just that. It was also a protective ring around him because obviously the monarch was vulnerable. His entourage. I mean, yes, an entourage that was there to protect him, so it had to be very closely monitored. Because within two years of James coming down from Scotland when he inherited the English throne, because Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms at this time, would remain so throughout James' reign, much to his frustration.

But he barely got his backside onto the throne when somebody tried to blow him up. So that's the famous gunpowder plot. It was called of 1605. So he was paranoid already, as he put it in. He had been nourished in fear because of his extraordinary early years. He inherited the Scottish throne when he was still a baby. He was the cradle king. Of course.

And just backing up a little for the context, his mother would have been Mary Queen of Scott, who was beheaded. His father was murdered when he was just an infant. This is someone who has seen death and destruction since he was born. I can't even imagine. Exactly. Yeah. So he'd never had a period when he was settled.

than safe. And that was reflected in his behaviour throughout his reign in England as well as Scotland. He was restless. He would never stay in one place for very long. He would tour the country bankrupting local grandees by insisting they put him up for a little while. And he would, you know, he would hunt and he would distract himself with any number of entertainments. You know, he was a great patron of course of the arts of the King's Men, which was Shakespeare's troop of players, actors. So he was somebody who constantly needed distracting from his fears, if you like, constantly worried that he was going to come under attack. So for somebody to get into the bedchamber was to give them a level of trust that was extremely important and special.

And it was how that trust was used that would define George's career. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience, rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans,

a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Before we jump back into George's career, I think it's probably worth just taking a moment to address the elephant in the room, which is, in terms of, you mentioned James liking distractions. He has a history of male favorites. George was certainly not the first male favorite. And historians, I think for centuries, have been trying to parse out what those relationships were, whether they were physical, whether they were sexual, whether they were romantic. What is the conclusion you've come to in terms of James' relationships with his male favorites and George in particular? Well, I think what I'd say about that, and obviously I've been thinking about it a lot. And when I was involved in this production as historical consultant. We have these extraordinary conversations about what the nature

of the intimacy was between George and James. They had their own reading of that situation. Well, television is always more dramatic than true history. Yeah. It's not only that it has to be more dramatic, it has to really physically show you what's going on. You know, you can't, I mean, you can obviously be a little bit euphemistic about it. Bedroom doors can close at vital moments, but that clearly isn't the way things go at the moment when it comes to historical drama. So I just should make it absolutely clear.

I love the scripts. I love the people who worked on it, and I'm really pleased with what they did with it. But thinking of this historically, there's this key to it in a way is a series of letters, which were helpfully drawn together into an edited. So there was an edited edition of these letters published by an American academic called Bergeron called King James and the Letters of Homeroorotic Desire. And it's a really good piece of academic work because he's dug into the letters, you know, the references that the lessons make to people and places and so on are explored.

but they also, because they're in a collection, and because when I first encountered this, I just read it through from beginning to end. It's an extraordinary collection. Now, if it was a collection of letters between a man and a woman, I think you would just take it as read, that this was a romantic, intimate, sexual relationship.

I don't think you would start to fret about whether or not it was sexual in nature. The complication is obviously that this was the same-sex relationship, and it was being conducted in a period when, as we see it now, they were much more, you know, homophobic, whatever term you want to use for it. That's where I think it gets tricky.

And from my perspective, as somebody who sort of researched it and thought about it, I think part of the problem is us. We assume that the past is always slightly more in terms of sexual relationships and politics and that sort of thing, more regressive. and as you further you go back. It's like homophobia just escalates and gets worse and worse and worse, although any number of those sorts of things considered to be wrong now. That's to use an anachronistic concept, I think,

to try and think about what was going on. Now, I'm a romantic in the sense that I do think romantic love is something that's probably common through various centuries of history. I keep, as it were, running into it when I'm writing and researching and writing the people I write about. But then I consider myself a biography. I'm always sort of looking for that kind of thing. But how those relationships form and what form they take is if you look at it through contemporary eyes without bearing in mind what was going on at the time, you kind of lose the picture of what could be happening, what sort of relationship it,

could be. And so if you think about that time, we're thinking about a time when, you know, gender fluidity, if you like, was something that was much more a part of life. I mean, you've only got to think of Shakespeare. Every Shakespeare played had men playing boys and men playing women. In some of James's letters, I believe he even calls George wife. Yes, yes, so he did. He made this plea to George after James lost his wife and of Denmark, the Queen. he wrote this extraordinary letter to George asking him to be his wife. And George reciprocated with very loving letters back to James. Now, obviously there's a power dynamic here.

For example, a lot of the criticism, if that's the word from people, particularly in the past of portraying James as in inverted commas, gay or homosexual, and I'm putting them in inverted commas because those were concepts would be nothing to people. who lived in that period. I mean, they just wouldn't know what you were talking about. The idea of sexuality wouldn't have made any sense to them. But anyway, so one of the objections to painting their relationship as being sexual

was because of the sodomy laws of the time and James' support of those laws. But there were sodomy laws. They weren't anti-homosexual laws or same-sex relationship laws. they were very specific about a very specific physical act, a bit like rape law. And I think partly there because of concerns about power relations and about how men abusing boys and so on. Obviously there are biblical prohibitions against men lying with men, to use the terminology of the King James Bible, of course. but again, I think to read that through contemporary eyes assuming that this is evidence of basically being sexually regressive in some way,

that wasn't the preoccupation. The preoccupations were in all sorts of different directions and concerns with all sorts of different issues, theological and otherwise. So I think James could happily have an intimate sexual relationship with another man without him thinking that he was breaking really many taboos. I mean, sexual acts themselves were taboo in the sense you didn't do them in public, you didn't talk about them in public, things like that. That more or less applies now.

But the idea that the same-sex relationship itself was something that he had to particularly hide or was particularly concerned about or that it's particularly controversial, even to consider. I think that's to look at it through an anachronistic lens. I think that's so well said, especially, I've read some people that talk about, because for someone who doesn't know much of history, they might hear King James and only associate him with the Bible, and he was married with, I believe, seven children with women. Well, seven, not all three, yeah, not all that survived. But, you know, had clearly a sexual relationship with a woman, but I agree with you that I don't think, in my opinion, the reading

feels like it wouldn't have precluded a romantic or sexual relationship with men as well. The thing is, is what I loved about it was the romance. It was a very romantic relationship, at least, particularly for James, and James, for me, emerges from this story as a fascinating, really fascinating character. And I have to say, the chap who played him in Mary and George, Tony Curran, I had a long discussion with him

before he started out on this production. It was a big, you know, it was a massive amount of work for him. Six months or so they were filming. And he did point out after he'd been filming for a couple of, well, maybe a couple of months, I can't remember, but he said when I went to the set one day,

and he said it was nice to be able to talk to me with some clothes on. He, you know, it was a, it demanded a great deal of this actor. And I think Tony did an amazing job of it. I'm not sure that everyone picks it up, having looked at the aftermath of the show and some of the reviews, which is a shame. Not everyone kind of sees what I saw, but then, of course, I'm seeing it from a very particular perspective. But I think he pulls out the subtleties of a very, very interesting historical character,

who is bizarrely almost completely absent from our historical record as a significant figure. I cannot understand why that's the case. You know, we've all heard of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but why James the first, sixth, isn't up there with the sort of the big names of British monarchy? I have no idea. I just have to say, I also love Tony Graham. I have loved him from the episode of Doctor Who, where he plays Vincent Van Gogh. So anyone who has seen that episode of Doctor Who, it's the same wonderful actor.

Back to George, this close relationship with the king leads to a, I will say, meteoric rise in court. I believe, is this correct? He's the first non-royal family member or the only non-royal family member at the time to become a Duke. Yes, dukedons were generally for members of the royal family, and that's still the case, actually. But there were some other dukedoms that I shouldn't, you know, pretend there weren't. I mean, for example, the Duke of Norfolk, the Howard family, they were not, they didn't have direct. They had links to the royal family, but they're very remote. So there were dukes around who weren't members of the royal family, but nobody had been made a duke for the best part of a century.

Elizabeth I didn't make any of her courtiers dukes. She made some lower, you know, earls, for example, she made no one a duke. And in fact, had she done so, that would have changed the shape of her reign because it would have implied in some way, I suppose, because she was childless, that the person she promoted to that position

was in line for the throne, even. Sure. You know, it carries a lot of weight that. title. And indeed during George's time, when he was made Duke, which was around the time, well, in the midst of this amazing escapade, him and Charles, hairing off through France to Spain to try and capture the hand of the infanta, the Spanish princess. He was made Duke then, but it immediately aroused rumours that he was aiming to seize the throne. His enemies certainly thought that that was a possible motive. In any case, it was the most extraordinary

promotion and it was something that elevated the Villiers family to a social rank that even Mary, who had this very high opinion of her social position, a true, if you like, or natural social position, even she couldn't have imagined that happening. And she became a countess. It's a special title. It was one that James basically bestowed on. It wasn't heritable, but it was one he just thought, I'm going to make you a countess. I think you're such an amazing woman. Here's a countess ship. So with Mary becoming a countess, she also gained incredible access to the king. George obviously has sort of unprecedented access to the king's person. Your book is called The King's Assassin. Can you sort of walk us through what you've determined about King James's.

illness and then death with regards to George and Mary? Yeah, so there's two controversies surrounding what I wrote about this. One of them is, you know, to just accept that George and James had a sexual relationship, but the other one is that George and Mary were somehow involved in James's death. I'm slightly puzzled by both controversies. What I don't say in the book is that George and Mary definitely killed James. There's no way of knowing that. That, though, is not, as I see it, the issue.

So I first encountered these two when I was researching another book called The Herbalist about a sort of completely different figure. He was a sort of a radical from the Civil War period called Nicholas Culpepper. And his nemesis was a doctor called William Harvey. Brilliant doctor, incidentally, discovered the circulation of the blood, for example, changed the course of medical history, could say. But William Harvey was at James's bedside in his final hours.

Alongside him were these two figures, Mary and George, and I thought, who on earth are they? And then they started to interfere in the King's care in what was being in the medicines dispensed to him. Now, what we do know from among other things actually spies that were in

the King's Court at the time who had somehow had access, we don't know their names, but who had access to the King's bedside and saw what was going on. So these were people who were reporting back to their spy masters back in Catholic Europe what was going on. So we know something was going on. And what seemed to be going on was that Mary and George decided to apply a medicine that their own apothecary, Mary's apothecary, to be specific, had mixed up as a plaster and potion in James's

final hours. While he was ill with what was diagnosed, fairly familiar disease at the time, malaria because malaria was endemic in England then. Having dismissed the royal doctors from the king's bedside and then subsequently trying to force them to sign a declaration to say they had agreed to the dispensing of this medicine to James, having done all that, leading to James having a series of fits and dying. Now, he was weak, he was ill, he was not that old, but he was aging and he could have died of natural causes. But soon after, he was weak, he was ill. He was not that old, but he was aging. He, you know, he could have died of natural causes. but soon after his death, the rumours started to spread that they had poisoned him. On paper, it's a little suspicious, but impossible to convict based on the circumstances.

Oh, yes, absolutely. But, I mean, it would be more or less impossible to convict anyone of any poisoning at that time. Because, of course, there's no forensic evidence to be had. And that's not the point. The significance of this is the impact it had subsequently, because the House of Commons, set up essentially a sort of secret committee that interviewed the doctors and asked them what had happened and they used it in order to draw up a case against George because by this stage the Parliament which had once hailed George as St George on horseback, the great champion of the people, had turned against him because of his involvement with Charles

and it poisoned. They may not, Mary and George may not have poisoned James, but what they did poisoned relationship, between Parliament and the king, the new king, Charles I. And even when Charles was arrested by parliamentary forces, so Charles tried to rule without Parliament for a period basically of two decades or over two decades. And the upshot was that Parliament went to war with Charles. That was the civil war. Just for any listeners, Charles I, James's son after James died. Exactly, who inherited the throne here when James died.

Charles eventually lost to Parliament and was arrested, and one of the charges brought against him was that he was involved in the death of his father. So that rumour had been rumbling around throughout that period, and I think that's the aspect of it that makes it so important historically. And the roots to that was when George and Charles, this was when James was still alive. When they went to Spain to try and see if Charles could marry the infanta, the Spanish king,

that would have changed the geopolitics of Europe in an instant. England, which had been a sort of hostile Protestant power, James had tried to regularize relationships between Britain and Spain. That would have secured it if that had happened. It didn't happen. And George has sort of tactically decided, well, if you're not going to, to support that, will turn against you. James wasn't prepared to do that when James died. He was conveniently out of the way and him and Charles, who subsequently married a French princess,

could pursue a policy of antagonism towards Spain. And that's what George did. It didn't go well. It went very badly, in fact. George was not a terribly good tactician, you could argue. But he was a really interesting politician and he tried to set up a kind of northern Protestant cluster of nations hostile to Catholic Europe. And when I was researching this, Brexit was underway. So the British referendum which led to the decision to leave the European Union. And in a sense, George was a sort of proto-Brexitier, you could argue. He thought, thought that, you know, Europe should be more open, more Protestant. It shouldn't, you know, cout to the Pope and to the Habsburgs, who were the royal sort of the royal dynasty that ruled

Catholic Europe. He thought that there should be a challenge to that. America was bound up in this, Jamestown and the founding of Jamestown was during this period. It was seen as part of this sort of Protestant, this new Protestant order. And one way, another, George was at the heart of this. That's why he's a much more significant figure than maybe we really appreciate him to be. And that's why a really chunky piece of scholarship exploring his life and politics is something we need. One thing I found actually a little touching is that relationship between George and Charles. Obviously, George had this intimate relationship with Charles' father.

But the age gap between George and the son, Charles, is much closer. And once Charles becomes king, he really not, I feel a little bad making this pun, but sticks his neck out again and again for George and protects him. I find that very touching. Yes, they start off as antagonists because Charles, when James is still alive, Charles is feeling neglected by his father and he makes a couple of attempts to actually get George into trouble

and James sticks by George at Charles's expense and George turns it around. He actually stages a kind of banquet. He calls it the Friends Banquet or something like that to which he invites Charles and lots of other sort of leading members of court to patch up the relationship. And then that's followed up by then

it's just the two of them and about two others in support who ride across France to Madrid, across the Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates France and Spain onto Madrid and turn up at the doorstep of the English ambassador. It's frightening the living daylights out of the poor chap because they had no idea that this was going to happen and putting the entire sort of future of the kingdom at stake in that manoeuvre. and they're glued together from then on.

And that's why, you know, the poisoning thing comes up subsequently. Charles was at Theobald's, the country retreat, where James fell in and died during that time. And so that's why there was suspicion surrounding Charles that he was plotting with George and Mary. And George stood by him until George was assassinated by, by, well, actually that in itself is an interesting question, but by one of the naval personnel who claimed he hadn't been paid.

But George was assassinated. And that, in a sense, is one of the first things that leaves Charles so marooned politically that civil war is too strong to say at that point would have seemed inevitable, but certainly seemed more likely, I would say. I've already kept you, and I'm so grateful for your time, but before you leave, just one more quick question. George had this incredible rise, but he would die fairly young and fairly tragically when he was assassinated. Can you speak to that just a little bit? Once Charles was on the throne, George decided to throw everything at trying to sort of carve out himself, a role for himself, as a role for himself, as a

kind of military leader of the Protestant cause. So there was this big tension, geopolitically speaking, between the Protestant countries, kingdoms, mostly, of Northern Europe, to put it very crudely, and the Catholic countries of Southern Europe. And he wanted to try and build an alliance, actually, out of countries, the Protestant countries in the north of Europe. And he embarked on a number of military campaigns to do this. And one of them, one involved an attempt to try and actually go in support of Protestants in Spain and France with two two missions, and they went very badly wrong, and he was heavily defeated. And also, by this stage, under Charles, the regime was running short of money because these military operations are very expensive.

Salers who had been press-ganged into taking part in these expeditions were going unpaid. And there was one of these figures called a figure called John Felton, who met George when he was acting as Admiral of the Fleet and had gone to Portsmouth and had gone to an inn called the Greyhound, John Felton came up to him and essentially stabbed him to death. And that assassination sent shockwaves through the entire court because it was going to change everything, basically, in terms of the power dynamics of Charles's court. And his body was brought back, his mother was still alive. She was there to receive the body when it was brought back to London. And as I suppose the last gesture of the sheer ambition of this rise to power of the Villiers family, she ordered

the most spectacular, arguably spectacularly vulgar memorial to George, which took up a whole side room, so to speak, of the royal part of Westminster Abbey. In other words, he was buried among the kings and queens of England and Britain in probably the biggest and gaudiest memorial of all. Ironically, James is also buried there, but there's now a plaque, but there was no memorial to him. There wasn't even a plaque when he was interred

in Westminster Abbey. So those who go to Westminster Abbey can see George in all his magnificence. And if they just pop over to the other side of the chapel, they will also see his mother, lying alongside his father, the one who died when he was young, making her claims to being the offspring of five rulers of Europe. They made it all the way to Westminster Abbey.

They did, in style. Thank you so much. This was fascinating. To any listeners, I highly recommend watching the television series wherever it is streaming, wherever you geographically are located. Thank you again so much. What a privilege. Thank you.

It's been great. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Danish Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Julia Malani, and Armand Kasam. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't

resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.