In early May 1626, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, sat with the rest of the English peers in the House of Lords and listened silently for two full days while the House of Commons presented an evaluation of his life's work as royal favourite. On 8 May, and continuing two days later, select members of the House of Commons dissected Buckingham's political career and argued that the results of their investigation justified his impeachment. But the argument being put forward by his accusers drew upon more than a critical reading of Buckingham's political actions. In his dramatic conclusion to the two-day process, John Eliot explained to the House of Lords that ‘in all these now your Lordships have the idea of the man, what in himself he is’.Footnote 1 Buckingham had suffered through, not just charges of political corruption or incompetence, but an explicit challenge to his manhood. Eliot's use of language of manhood reflected the problematic junction between gender and politics Buckingham represented. Eliot's claim that the Commons had proven the need for impeachment through revealing ‘the idea of the man’ was an assertion that political legitimacy, or lack thereof, could be determined through manhood. An examination of the framing of the House of Commons’ attack on Buckingham in 1626 demonstrates how these evaluations of manhood were translated into political action.
In the spring of 1626, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, faced a direct threat to his political position as royal favourite. The broad anti-Habsburg coalition he had formed over the previous year had brought only failure. Both Ernst von Mansfeld's expedition to the Palatinate and Buckingham's designed raid on the Spanish treasure fleet at Cadiz ended in defeat. Troubling as well was Buckingham's attempts to bring France into the alliance. A contingent of English ships, loaned to the French in order to secure their support against the Habsburgs, were instead brought to bear against a Huguenot uprising in La Rochelle. Meanwhile, in England, war with Spain closed off important trade lines, and the ships sent to Cadiz and France left local shipping vulnerable to the harassment of pirates out of Dunkirk. As the Cadiz fleet returned home in defeat, Charles was forced to turn to parliament to cover the ever-increasing expenses of war. As principal architect of the military endeavours of the past year, Buckingham proved to be the target of the parliament's frustration and fears over the precarious military and economic position the kingdom found itself in. As a result, the bulk of the parliament would be devoted to the removal of Buckingham from power through the legal instrument of impeachment.
The duke of Buckingham has been an important figure in the revisionist interpretation of early Stuart politics, and the debates which have since developed. Beginning in the 1980s, revisionist historians, unsatisfied with the assumed ideological opposition to the institution of the royal favourite in political culture, provided re-evaluations of Buckingham. Roger Lockyer described Buckingham as ‘an Elizabethan spirit’, sharing with the ‘patriot’ faction a sense of romantic military daring and merely a convenient lightning rod for criticism more accurately directed at James or Charles.Footnote 2 Mark Kishlansky saw the ‘astute and hardworking’ Buckingham surrounding himself with the brightest minds of the nation in his attempt to reform the state.Footnote 3 However, as the revisionist position has been challenged, or qualified by subsequent historians, so too have perceptions of Buckingham. Victor Treadwell allows that Buckingham had undeniable talents, though is less charitable in assigning them a moral value.Footnote 4 In Treadwell's account, Buckingham is a master manipulator, of both parliament and the distribution of royal land and offices, treating Ireland as his personal backyard, all the while leading the three kingdoms of Britain into civil war with his greed.Footnote 5 Alastair Bellany goes so far as to credit Buckingham himself for opening the ideological rifts in English political society.Footnote 6
The return of, if not the villainous Buckingham, then at least the deeply unpopular Buckingham to historiographical prominence, is representative of an approach to early Stuart political culture which seeks to broaden the discussion beyond the existence, or absence, of ideology within the political tensions of the 1620s. The tendency within recent scholarship has been less to identify distinct ideological camps, than to examine the process by which political identities or communities are formed. James Holstun refers to a ‘structure of feeling’ within early Stuart political culture, ‘a body of lived beliefs and collective values that stops short of a formal ideology’.Footnote 7 Michelle O'Callaghan's analysis of neo-Spenserian poets similarly describes shared narratives of political authority, which nevertheless did not constitute ‘a unified and ideologically coherent opposition’.Footnote 8 Ann Hughes describes this process as an ‘imaginative engagement with particular identities, or narratives of existence’.Footnote 9 The discussion of Buckingham's manhood in the parliament of 1626 is a visible demonstration of this process of identity forming. O'Callaghan has noted how the poetry of men like George Wither and Christopher Brooke created a public space in which the reformation of the king's advisers was necessary, and parliament was the venue to achieve that goal.Footnote 10 Similarly, Alastair Bellany has argued that libel poetry created a political environment in which Buckingham's assassination was both imaginable and desirable.Footnote 11 Phil Withington describes the seventeenth century as one in which ‘values that ideally defined citizens were a vantage point from which to judge’ political and social superiors.Footnote 12 An analysis of the challenges to Buckingham's manhood in the parliament of 1626 provides a window into this interaction between carefully constructed identities and the question of political legitimacy. Buckingham's youth, and the associated qualities of experience and inexperience, impulse and self-control, formed the rhetorical basis for a debate on the terms by which political figures could be judged. Markku Peltonen has suggested that historians return to parliamentary speeches as they were a ‘main form of participating in adversary politics’, and thus constructing the narratives of existence described by Hughes.Footnote 13 In this sense, the parliament of 1626 is an ideal venue to examine narratives of personal identity and political authority contesting with one another, and being explicitly deployed to settle a political and legal dispute – the future role of the duke of Buckingham in the kingdom.
I
Youth played a dominant role in perceptions of Buckingham from his emergence at court in 1614 at the age of twenty-two.Footnote 14 Even as he aged, Buckingham's young years were commented upon by observers, particularly in relation to his political position. When Buckingham was appointed to share the office of lord admiral with the aged earl of Nottingham in 1618, Piero Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to England, wrote to the doge that ‘the appointment proves very unpalatable to many of the noblemen of the Court, who resent seeing an inexperienced youth raised to such high rank without having merited it by any signal feat’.Footnote 15 Simonds D'Ewes observed that Buckingham appeared to be the chief of a group of ‘young indiscreet gentlemen’ who ignored ‘wise men of great experience’.Footnote 16
Youth has been a subject of particular scrutiny for gender historians in recent years. Crucial to these explorations are the two interrelated, yet distinct, terms ‘age’ and ‘youth’. While a male's age played a significant role in determining how he was perceived within the categories of youth and adult, age did not act as an exclusive determinant. Character traits and behaviours could be manifestations of a youthful spirit no matter the age of the man. Alexandra Shepard outlines the relationship between youth and age by describing adulthood as being functionally more than chronologically defined. Various medical texts placed the transition from youth to adult anywhere from fifteen to forty-five years of age.Footnote 17
The privileging of function over the simple arithmetic of age had important consequences for how boyhood was perceived. Will Fisher has noted that in the early modern period ‘masculinity was not only constructed in contrast to femininity, but also in contrast to boyhood’.Footnote 18 In order to act as an effective comparative structure to manhood, youth required defining aspects of its own beyond mere age. Conversely, a young age need not exclude a male from manhood provided he excelled in manly virtue. As Francis Bacon commented upon the appointment of the relatively young John Williams to the position of lord keeper, a ‘minoritie of yeares was not to be regarded where there was a majoritie of parts’.Footnote 19 The flexible definitions of youth could at times offer Buckingham the opportunity to embrace his young age and redefine youth as a buttress rather than a hindrance, to his manhood.
This flexibility is representative of the ambivalent position youth held in forming manhood. While youth could be used as a category to define fully realized manhood against, it was also a transitional period during which proper manhood was learned. Youth was not manhood, yet it was a crucial period for the development of men. Boys raised exclusively by women risked exhibiting ‘unmanly weakness, softness, delicacy and self-indulgence’ in later life.Footnote 20 A more balanced and appropriate childhood and adolescence included competition with other young males in the venues of drinking, violence, and sexual exploits. Such an upbringing emphasized the reckless behaviour expected of youth, and prepared young males for the competitive world of manhood. Thus, youthful vices such as aggression, recklessness, and sexual desire were not necessarily discouraged among youths. Over-drinking, fighting, and aggressive sexual behaviour, though looked upon with disapproval in men, were useful instruments for boys to test their abilities and learn the boundaries of manhood.Footnote 21 According to Shepard, youth simultaneously represented the best and worst of the male condition – an ‘unrivaled capacity for spirited and courageous actions and a seemingly unlimited potential for vice’.Footnote 22 While the former remained a central element in the identity of men, the latter was more problematic. As a result, Tim Reinke-Williams argues that male youths had to be controlled by more responsible, adult, men, in a similar fashion to females.Footnote 23
By the opening of parliament in 1626, Buckingham had established himself as the patriarch of a household, normally the final step in the transition from youth to manhood. According to Will Fisher the defining characteristic of boys, in relation to men, was their inability to procreate.Footnote 24 Therefore, Buckingham's marriage to Katherine Manners in 1620, the birth of a daughter, Mary, in 1622, and a son, Charles, just before the opening of parliament, offered Buckingham a strong counter to perceptions of him as a young and inexperienced political figure. The analogous connection between leadership of the household and leadership of the political unit has been described as universal among early modern political ideologies by Susan Amussen.Footnote 25 In fact, Buckingham deliberately drew upon his status as household patriarch in his answer to the charges brought against him by the House of Commons in 1626. Buckingham's answer to the charge of nepotism before the House of Lords invoked the ‘law of nature’ to justify his actions, and, indeed, paint them as merely the duties of a household leader.Footnote 26 Had he ‘minded only his own advancement and had neglected those who were nearest unto him’ he would face condemnation from God and society.Footnote 27
However, Buckingham's attackers did not leave his claim to the achieved manhood of household leadership unchallenged. John Strangways turned Buckingham's benign interpretation of his advancement of family upside down, describing how Buckingham's policy of elevating those within his family brought ruin to the realm: ‘when men of mean estate, ambitious, made honorable, having not estates answerable, fall into necessity and save so poor as the King is forced to maintain them at his own charge.’Footnote 28 Subsequent investigations coincided with Strangways's criticism, citing the numerous Villiers relations Buckingham had ‘raised out of mean fortune … whose maintenance must arise from the King's estate’ as the cause of the kingdom's struggles.Footnote 29 Far from fulfilling the role of manly household leader, Buckingham was transferring his responsibilities to the crown. The Villiers family stood not as a testament to Buckingham's achieved manhood through his performance as patriarch, but an example of his fabricated manhood, achieved under false pretences.
Buckingham's public persona had problematic associations with youth beyond the matter of his achieved manhood through household leadership. Buckingham's youth was crucial in narratives of his sexual relationship with James I. Alan Bray has argued that the difference in perception between intimate friendship between two men and sodomy often hinged upon the relative social positions between them.Footnote 30 Buckingham was not merely James's subject, but also his inferior in age and experience, a fact which dominated descriptions of their sexual relationship in the libel poetry sources which Thomas Cogswell and Alastair Bellany have uncovered in recent years.Footnote 31 ‘The Five Senses’, a libel poem adapted from a court masque in which Buckingham played a leading role in 1621, portrays Buckingham as a supple, young boy who dooms the kingdom through his sexual manipulation of the king.Footnote 32 Youth is central to the young favourite's power: ‘such a smooth, and beardless chinn/As may provoke, or tempt to sinn.’Footnote 33 Ultimately, the young corrupter takes the reins of power himself, but while his youth helped secure power, it proves incapable of helping him rule: ‘Whose skillesse and unsteaddie hand/May prove the ruine of a land’.Footnote 34 A similar libel poem, ‘The Warres of the Gods’, also relies on youth to describe Buckingham's sexuality. ‘The Warres of the Gods’ adapts the classical story of Ganymede, a young boy who sexually distracts Zeus from the affairs of governance, to contemporary court events somewhere between 1619 and 1622.Footnote 35
While Buckingham's sexuality was never directly referred to in the parliament of 1626, the libels, disseminated as recently as four years earlier, which relied heavily on perceptions of Buckingham as a youth sexually influencing James, could not have been far from many men's minds. The criticisms of Buckingham's youth and inexperience brought against him in 1626 would have struck a familiar chord with the politically engaged men sitting in parliament – a key demographic for libel poetry consumption.Footnote 36
II
By the time of Charles's second parliament, in 1626, the enthusiasm with which parliament had greeted his entrance into the political world in 1624 had largely been forgotten.Footnote 37 Frustrations over the management of the war with Spain and lingering animosity over the handling of Charles's first parliament in 1625 did not inspire co-operation.Footnote 38 Indeed, anticipating this, Charles named six of the most vocal MPs from 1625 as sheriffs the next year, making them ineligible to sit in parliament.Footnote 39 However, the tactic failed to achieve any relief as events conspired to increase the frustration of many within parliament. Just before parliament was to sit, a fleet which had set out to raid the Spanish port of Cadiz returned in shambles and defeat.Footnote 40 Edward Kirton provided an inauspicious opening to parliament when he noted that in the previous year's parliament there had been ‘no speech but of our invincible navy’, and yet now it returned in defeat and England was left undefended.Footnote 41 Meanwhile, Buckingham had lent another portion of the English fleet to the king of France. Ostensibly, this was in order to put down an internal rebellion and convince the French to join in the Spanish war.Footnote 42 However, the French instead attempted to use the ships to subjugate the Huguenots at La Rochelle – an unacceptable outcome for those who saw the whole purpose of English involvement on the continent as protecting the interests of the Protestant Palatine against Catholic aggression.Footnote 43 As Buckingham had planned the Cadiz expedition, and played a key role in the negotiations with the French, he quickly became a focal point for the frustrations of many in parliament. However, if context and opportunity explain why Buckingham came under assault in the parliament of 1626, issues of youth and manliness determined how the attacks were articulated.
Almost immediately upon sitting, the Commons turned to identifying the root of the ills facing England. As parliament opened, the remnants of Buckingham's failed Cadiz expedition slowly began to arrive back in England. With the earlier failure of the Mansfeldt expedition on the continent, both prongs of Buckingham's grand strategy had been rendered ineffectual and England appeared as vulnerable as ever. Age and experience formed a key part of the criticism of Buckingham's military decisions. William Coryton argued that failure had been inevitable since ‘many unexperienced men [had been] employed with command’.Footnote 44 John Haynes deemed the selection of ‘men unable’ to positions of leadership as the primary cause of the defeat at Cadiz, and more specifically that the men ‘put in trust aim at their own ends, pleasures, honors’ rather than those of the kingdom.Footnote 45 Both Coryton and Haynes were reiterating concerns which had been expressed at the outset of the expedition. The previous year, the Venetian ambassador had noted some disapproval of Buckingham's selection of officers, recording that ‘sailors of long experience who have served as captains of ships are placed under inexperienced courtiers; so the complaints in the matter are of no little import’.Footnote 46 Perhaps not unrelated was Robert Harley's explanation for the kingdom's woes. In laying blame on ‘the effeminateness of this land’, Harley was in effect questioning the manhood of those chosen to represent England on the battlefield.Footnote 47
Implied within these complaints was an anxiety about the generation of young men who had been raised during the lengthy Jacobean peace. Sir Dudley Digges argued the point explicitly, attributing the recent military failures to the fact that ‘we do not follow those counsels which were in Queen Elizabeth's time’. Digges was no doubt aware that many of the men chosen to lead Elizabethan fleets still lived, idle at home, while the fleet had sailed.Footnote 48 Digges was in fact tapping into an undercurrent of Elizabethan nostalgia, against which Buckingham's military failures were measured.Footnote 49 The long Jacobean peace had given English men little opportunity to prove their manliness on the field of battle. In the words of Michael Young: ‘where were the men of England to be found when the Thirty Years War broke out? Indeed, if they failed to join the battle, were they men at all?’Footnote 50 The anxieties expressed within parliament echo those noted by Michelle O'Callaghan amongst the neo-Spenserian poets of the early Stuart period who saw the Jacobean peace as ‘effeminizing’ and called for a return to the ‘aristocratic martialism’ of the Elizabethan heroes Essex and Raleigh.Footnote 51 On 13 June, just two days before parliament closed, William Gouge delivered a sermon to the Artillery Company of London warning that now, more than ever, ‘military Men must be of mighty minds. They must bee Men indeed, and able to play the Men.’Footnote 52 Buckingham had become the focal point of anxieties about the manliness of English men, and the costs of the Jacobean peace. It is in this context that the earl of Arundel stood as a counter-point to Buckingham. The earl marshal represented traditional, neo-medieval forms of honour and nobility – gravitas, as Kevin Sharpe describes it – and it is significant that Charles took the pretext of the clandestine marriage of Arundel's son to the daughter of the duke of Lennox to bar the peer from the House of Lords for most of the parliament.Footnote 53 Buckingham was representative of a generation of young men who had failed to achieve proper manhood due to their absence from the field of battle. As Sir John Savile warned the House of Commons ‘ease makes us effeminate. Peace may conquer us but never war’.Footnote 54 As a product of the ‘ease’ of James's reign, Buckingham's manhood became vulnerable to challenges.
However, while these criticisms were levelled indirectly at Buckingham – either as the man who made the faulty selections or as the most visible of the young and inexperienced men involved – none directly named the favourite. The formal introduction of Buckingham's name as the chief grievance of the kingdom served as a key turning point of the session.Footnote 55 On 11 March, Dr Turner presented a formal accusation against the duke, proposing he be explicitly named as the cause of the present state of the kingdom, setting the stage for the impeachment proceedings.Footnote 56 Once the dramatic step of naming Buckingham had been taken, the process of pursuing a case against him could begin.
However, if Turner's speech set the practical framework for the eventual charges, a dramatic flourish by William Walter the following week proved to set the thematic and rhetorical tone of the impeachment. Walter drew upon Turner's accusations of corruption and incompetence, calling for a fundamental shift in whom the king entrusted the governance of the nation. While in some ways Walter merely echoed Turner, decrying ‘courtship, flattery, and presents’ and the selling of offices, the crux of his argument was not that Buckingham's actions disqualified him from power, but his inherent qualities as a man rendered any successful governance on his part impossible.Footnote 57 On 20 March, William Walter organized these complaints into a speech, which argued that Buckingham's nature as a liar, an upstart ‘of a night's growth’, a coward who failed to execute the offices he had been entrusted with, and a man undetermined in matters of religion disqualified him from legitimate authority.Footnote 58 For Walter, it was the nature of the man, rather than the acts through which that nature manifested itself, that should qualify a man for office. In his final point, Walter turned to Buckingham's youth, which ultimately disqualified him even if he had been a young man of virtue.
Lastly, Moses chose them (Numbers 11) elders, not young men … Solomon by miracle and revelation was wise, being young, but neither his son nor his young counselors had that privilege. No more is it expected in any of our counselors until by age and experience they have attained it.Footnote 59
According to Walter, political leadership required ‘men of courage such as will execute their own places, and not commit them to base and under-serving deputies’, men of honesty ‘such as the King and kingdom may trust’, and men of industry, rather than ‘such as live upon other men's pains’.Footnote 60 Buckingham's failures were a product of his inherent insufficiencies as a man. As one parliamentary diarist put it, in his succinct recording of Dudley Digges's attack on Buckingham; ‘he young, ambitiously got them [Offices]’.Footnote 61 This connection between Buckingham's youth and his abuse of power continued throughout the parliamentary discussion and into the formal impeachment charges. Even the seemingly unrelated charge of one man holding too many offices was explained through the folly of youth. The first charge laid against Buckingham was that he, ‘being young and unexperienced, has of late years with exorbitant ambition and for his own profit and advantage procured and engrossed into his own hands the said several offices’.Footnote 62
Though Walter has not drawn the notice of historians, his speech was, like Turner's, distributed among political observers and news-followers in manuscript form.Footnote 63 As a result of Walter's framing of the discussion, the issue became not Buckingham's crimes but his essentially insufficient character. Youth and inexperience provided Buckingham's enemies with the easiest avenue to reaching such a conclusion. Edward Herbert lamented the fact that the nation's fortress – the fleet – had been placed ‘in an unexperienced hand, and so in insufficient hand’.Footnote 64 Thus, Buckingham's failure as lord admiral became inevitable before he had made a single action from that office. Ultimately, Herbert judged that Buckingham had ‘too little ability to do service’ even ‘if he used his best industry’.Footnote 65
III
The reliance on youth as an explanation for Buckingham's failures facilitated a wider discussion of the nature of youth and adulthood which at times moved beyond the bounds of a strict attack on Buckingham. Youth, while it afforded Buckingham's opponents ample opportunities to assail his manhood, by no means held a uniform meaning within political, or masculine, rhetoric. One speech, sympathetic though still critical of Buckingham, framed his youth, not in terms of criminal incompetence, but as a correctable error.Footnote 66 A manuscript draft of the speech is preserved in the state papers collection, although it is unclear who wrote it, or whether it was delivered in parliament. Perhaps significantly, it is dated to March 20, the same day as Walter's speech. Buckingham's faults could indeed be traced back to his ‘young yeares’, but this did not necessarily mean that he could not be trusted in the future to provide better council to the king: ‘but tyme and experience will better instruct these passions, and bring him to a better understanding of himself’ thereby making ‘a good reparation for all omissions past’.Footnote 67 Considering the speech's discussion of youth, and the timing of its production, it is likely that it was composed, if not delivered, as a response to Walter's use of youth as an instrument of challenging Buckingham's position. If youth disqualified males from being men, it was not a permanent disqualification. A youth, by definition, had the potential to achieve manhood through experience and the exercise of self-control.
For his part, Buckingham provided his own interpretation of youth which unsurprisingly differed dramatically from that of his opposition. Buckingham was not unmindful of the thrust the impeachment proceedings were taking. In his impassioned speech in his own defence, delivered before both houses on 30 March, Buckingham deftly addressed his youth and inexperience. Rather than deny his unprecedented youth upon taking the position of lord admiral, Buckingham readily admitted to having misgivings about his ability to fulfil the obligations of the position.Footnote 68 With adroit rhetoric, Buckingham turned the issue to the hypocrisy of his enemies. Buckingham used the words of one of his accusers, Robert Mansell, to vindicate his actions. Mansell featured prominently in the attack on Buckingham in 1626. His position as vice-admiral provided him with information regarding the management of the navy which the impeachment proceedings would require, and Buckingham's naval reforms which had revealed Mansell's corruption provided a motive. In fact, before proceedings against Buckingham had even formally begun, Mansell eagerly offered to testify against the lord admiral regarding the carriage of the navy over the past eight years.Footnote 69 However, at the time Buckingham had become lord admiral, in 1618, Mansell had been an ally to the favourite. Buckingham recalled that upon being presented with the office, ‘I objected I was young and inexperienced yet he said by the favour with my master I might do more good in procuring due payment for that charge and because I was young and inexperienced, I took advice.’Footnote 70 In fact, there is reason to believe Buckingham turned down the position at first due to his lack of experience, and for a time Buckingham shared the duties of the office with the older incumbent, the earl of Nottingham.Footnote 71
In addition to discrediting Mansell, Buckingham drew an image of youth that bore little resemblance to the impulsive, irresponsible, and incompetent one put forward by men like Haynes or Walter. Rather than making him stubborn and arrogant, Buckingham's youth had made him more pliable, more willing to listen to the advice of his elders. Here, Buckingham could boast of his tutelage at the hands of Francis Bacon and James himself. Certainly, Buckingham saw himself as an avid learner in his formative years and relied heavily upon Bacon's advice for his management of political affairs. Buckingham's experience as lord admiral had taught him to mistrust the entrenched interests of the previous generation. The elderly Nottingham had proven incapable of reforming the abuses within the navy that Buckingham found upon his assumption of the office of lord admiral. Many of the faults inherent in the navy were ‘excused by reason of old age and the imperfections that depende thereon’.Footnote 72 More troubling, many of the officers Buckingham inherited, like Mansell, were corrupt and incompetent.Footnote 73 If anything, Buckingham drew the exact opposite conclusion from his parliamentary opposition from his experience with the navy. A new generation of men was needed to wash out the corruption and complacency of the old.
As a result, Buckingham turned the criticism of the inexperience of youth on its head, describing youth as the salvation, rather than the undoing, of England. Buckingham used his defence against the accusations to call upon the kingdom's young men to fulfil their crucial role in the defence of the realm: ‘and you that are young men may in these active times gain honor and reputation, which is almost sunk, and gain the ancient glory of our predecessors’.Footnote 74 It is indicative of Buckingham's ability to adapt the terms of debate to his advantage that he managed to appeal simultaneously to Elizabethan nostalgia and the virtues of the current generation. In his own defence, Buckingham claimed that ‘being young and active’ were qualities needed in a lord admiral, rather than disqualifications.Footnote 75 Buckingham's speech was part of an ongoing negotiation of the definition and limits of youth and manhood.
Observers of the parliament also brought their own perceptions of youth to their interpretations of the impeachment proceedings. In recording Buckingham's speech in his diary, John Rous ignored Buckingham's larger defence of the youth of England and saw the contested concept of ‘youth’ merely as an excuse. Thus, Buckingham ‘not denying many articles, but intreating favourable construction, as, namely, his offensive incontinency, that it might be imputed to his youth’.Footnote 76 Rous was not alone in seeing Buckingham's defence as merely hiding behind the excuse of his age. In reference to accusations of his promiscuity in Madrid, the Venetian ambassador recorded that ‘he excused his pleasures on the score of youth’.Footnote 77 If the impeachment proceedings at least partially turned on contested definitions of youth, they were definitions which not all observers found convincing or even relevant.
IV
Despite the relative unimportance placed on youth by Rous, for Buckingham the maintenance of the appearance of manhood proved to be as crucial as his legal response to the charges. As the proceedings increasingly became about the nature of Buckingham as a man as much as his actions, the way in which he presented his responses to the accusations were as important as their content. It was crucial that Buckingham maintain the calm, collected detachment which was the hallmark of a rational, and therefore authentic, man throughout the proceedings against him. Impassioned outbursts were remarked upon with disapproval by critics and supporters alike and only served to reinforce the image being built by the Commons that Buckingham remained a prisoner to his youthful vices. Therefore, in addition to Buckingham's impassioned defence of himself, and the young men of England as a whole, he sought to maintain carefully the image of the rational man, able to restrain all impulses. Now that he was directly threatened with impeachment, wielding his considerable political power to exact revenge upon his enemies was more tempting than ever.
As one of his closest political advisers, Secretary Conway's advice to Buckingham upon the commencing of impeachment proceedings against him is revealing. Conway began his address with commiseration: ‘with that wretch Turners speech to the committee I lost all patience, and was greived to think what you suffered’.Footnote 78 However, Conway quickly turned to the crux of his letter, employing the language of cool rationality to convince Buckingham not to destroy his enemies in his wrath.
My gratious patron, I know that innocency wounded doth call up all the forces and passions of a noble heart to defence and revenge, but reason sees the vanity of the attempt and assures a glorious issue to the innocent, and chance & confusion to the false accuser. And that iniuryes done by a vile and base person make them the more loathsomely offensive, because reason cannot finde out a cause in that extreame distance and inequality which cannot advail a competent revenge and satisfaction with reducing that person and all that belongs to him to nothing. And therefore honor hath (by the power of reason) recourse to contempt and neglect of soe false base and vile attempts as admits noe equality competency or possibility of satisfaction or revenge.Footnote 79
Conway attempted to convince Buckingham to move away from the emotional, and private, realm of revenge, to the rational, public arena of legal recourse.
And yet such offences must not pass unremarkd nor unpunished not for your Grace's interest or the kings (because these worthes and vertues are without the power of soe mean base and false attempts) but for the common justice, Hate and punishment belong to such scandalous offences, which if they should bee suffered unpunished would leave noe maide her modesty, noe man his honor, noe seate of justice integrity, nor noe king the integrity of his sacred rule and dignity.Footnote 80
Conway's letter reflects the growing importance of humanist and classical-inspired conduct in the carriage of political figures noted by Richard Cust and Phil Withington. For Cust, the true ‘public man’ displayed wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude in the political venue, while the ‘private’ man exploited his political position out of ambition, pride, or anger.Footnote 81 Meanwhile, Conway's use of the language of public legal recourse reflected the expansion of the legal public sphere which Withington ties to the growth of civic humanism in political culture.Footnote 82 The norms of virtuous public conduct as opposed to selfish private ends closely followed those of the experienced man as opposed to those of the impetuous youth. It was as important for Buckingham to maintain his appearance as a virtuous public man as it was to defend himself against the detailed charges against him. Evidently, Buckingham found Conway's advice convincing as his reaction to the impeachment proceedings, at least the one on display before parliament, was calm, measured, and without malice. His answer to the charges was successful in this regard. Observers noted that his response to the charges was ‘very modest and void of all bitterness, and in some things satisfactory; his sectaries say, in all’.Footnote 83 Throughout the parliament, Buckingham eagerly defended his policies and repeatedly attributed the case against him to misunderstandings. Early in the parliament Buckingham had pleaded with the House of Lords to be allowed to explain his actions to the Commons in order to facilitate co-operation.Footnote 84 Peltonen has suggested that Buckingham's defensive strategy was in part based on Cicero's theories on rhetoric, which called for self-assurance and openness about one's character in order to convince a hostile audience.Footnote 85 This had the benefit of being rhetorically effective, as well as blending seamlessly with Buckingham's goal of discrediting the image of him as a rash youth. The campaign of restraint, as much a part of Buckingham's defence as the legal wrangling in parliament, did not go unnoticed. The Venetian ambassador noted with approval, and perhaps some surprise, that Buckingham faced the accusations with the ‘utmost self-command and contempt for every attempt of parliament’.Footnote 86
Even when the earl of Bristol augmented the attack on Buckingham in parliament by presenting the House of Lords with a charge of treason against Buckingham on 1 May, citing his lewd and treasonable behaviour in Spain, Buckingham maintained a manly self-control: ‘the duke heard him quietly in complete silence and with self-command asked leave of the House to answer’.Footnote 87 Bristol attempted to exploit the perception of Buckingham as a man carried beyond reason by emotion and vengeance. When the Spanish match dissolved, Bristol described how Buckingham had been ‘so far incensed that he swore he would have me questioned for my life’, upon Bristol's refusal to recant and adopt Buckingham's anti-Spanish line.Footnote 88 Bristol also employed the dual image of Buckingham as a courtly flatterer and a creature driven by vengeance in describing his ‘courtly manner of menace’ in trying to intimidate him into silence.Footnote 89 Bristol concluded his presentation of the charge of treason against Buckingham by expressing his anxiety that he might ‘perish through the malice of a potent adversary’ for his testimony.Footnote 90
Despite the growing momentum against him, Buckingham emerged from the skirmish the clear victor. While the content of Bristol's charges for the first time raised treason as a possible charge against Buckingham, Bristol's emotional carriage and Buckingham's manly self-control won the favourite the respect of the House of Lords. One newsletter writer in London reported that ‘at his [Bristol's] first calling thither [1 May] and confronting of the Duke he demeaned himself in a very passionate manner.’Footnote 91 While Bristol emotionally hurled accusations with unmanly vitriol, Buckingham's stoic response acted as a mirror, reflecting the indictments back upon his accuser. Bristol lost face, and the sympathy of the House of Lords, for his unwelcome display of emotion. It was only two weeks later that Bristol ‘recovered the credit he lost by the warmth of his first speech’.Footnote 92 Buckingham seized on the opportunity to present himself as devoid of passionate animosity after Bristol had laid his charges. Denying that any personal dislike for Bristol motivated his actions, Buckingham claimed that ‘if the Earl of Bristol had been my brother, consider his carriage in this business I should have thought the Tower the fittest lodging for him’.Footnote 93 Similarly, Buckingham made an effort to express his lack of animosity towards those pressing for his impeachment in the lower house, telling the Lords that he would not ‘cast dirt on those who have taken pains to make me foul’.Footnote 94
The fine balance between calm, rational self-control, and dismissiveness of the legitimacy of the case for impeachment was crucial for Buckingham to maintain his narrative of events. While his display in parliament was largely effective, it was clear that it was a taxing portrayal of calm rationality. In private, the Venetian ambassador noted the psychological toll the impeachment proceedings, and Buckingham's self-control, were taking: ‘the pallor of his face betrays his deep uneasiness at the embarassments in which he finds himself. He spoke of his affairs with a temperate vigour, though he showed that his mind was tossed by a thousand agitations’.Footnote 95 The stress of the impeachment, and the increasingly tenuous French alliance played havoc with Buckingham's nerves. While his displays before the Commons and the Lords were carefully constructed moments of self-control, he did fall victim to occasional outbursts of violence. Certainly, Buckingham did not help himself against Bristol's insinuations with his outburst against the earl of Worcester for helping the countess of Bristol petition the king to allow her sickly husband to be moved to a more healthy location: ‘if he had used such words unto the Earl as it is said he did, most unbeseeming and dishonorable’.Footnote 96 Buckingham also threatened to ‘offer him the stab’ to Lord North after he made a speech against Buckingham in the House of Lords.Footnote 97
V
Beginning on 8 May, and concluding on 10 May, the Commons formally presented the charges in a conference with the House of Lords. In effect, the presentation of charges represented the entire session in microcosm. Buckingham's enemies presented a dramatic portrayal of Buckingham the man. Meanwhile, Buckingham himself was judged by his ability to exhibit self-restraint in the face of accusations. Indeed, Buckingham may have been under as intense scrutiny as the men relating the charges. Despite the fact that he sat silently throughout the proceeding, Buckingham's reaction became a subject of heated discussion almost immediately. And finally, after the conference, Buckingham attempted to engage with the rhetoric of his enemies and adapt their exploration of himself as a man to his advantage.
Over two gruelling days, six members of the Commons presented thirteen articles of impeachment against the duke of Buckingham. The impeachment articles consisted of charges that Buckingham had; concentrated in his hands multiple offices; paid for, and sold, several offices; illegally purchased the title of lord warden of the Cinque Ports; neglected his duty as lord admiral to maintain control of the seas and various coastal fortifications; illegally detained the French merchant vessel St Peter to the detriment of the king's relations with France; extorted funds from the East India Company; loaned ships to the French; endorsed the use of the loaned ships against Huguenot forces; forced members of the aristocracy to pay for honours and titles that were theirs by right; sold positions at court; unduly promoted his own family; diverted funds coming to the crown from Ireland into his own revenue; and finally the Commons concluded with the accusation that Buckingham had poisoned James I.Footnote 98 The last charge, although the most dramatic, appeared the least likely to survive scrutiny. The testimony of James's doctors earlier in the session had revealed little to suggest Buckingham had poisoned James, and Humphrey May's assessment that the charge of poisoning would ‘add to the bulk of the charge, but not the weight of it’ is likely accurate.Footnote 99
It was fitting considering the rhetorical thrust of the proceedings against Buckingham throughout the parliament that the key moment of the conference came, not during the lengthy presentation of the details of the specific charges, but in a general summary of the man presented in a dramatic flourish by John Eliot. After expanding upon the formal charges against Buckingham, Eliot followed the personal strategy established by Walter. Rather than the details of his various crimes Eliot urged the House of Lords to ‘know the man’ behind the acts.Footnote 100 For Eliot, the truly damning evidence against Buckingham was his failure to hold any of the recognizable features of a man.
And first, I must take the inward characters, the patterns of his mind as you have heard them opened, full of collusion and deceit, crimes in themselves so odious and uncertain as the ancients knew not by what to term them and therefore they expressed them in a metaphor, calling them stellionatus from a discolored beast so doubtful in appearance as they knew not what to make it.Footnote 101
Eliot's claim that the House of Commons had demonstrated ‘the idea of the man, what in himself he is’, reflected the fact that the proceedings had not just been an evaluation of Buckingham as a political figure, but a condemnation of him as a man.Footnote 102
Mutability was the key to Buckingham's failings. How could he be a man if he had no permanent or discernible character to assess? Eliot defended his speech, and his illustrative use of the stellionatus, a chameleon-like lizard of the eastern Mediterranean explaining that he ‘used the word stellionatus, which is a beast of so many colors as one beholding it cannot tell of what color it is’.Footnote 103 In the report of the presentation of the accusations to the House of Lords, Eliot's conclusion was summed up with the phrase, he ‘took it upon him to set before you an idea of the man’.Footnote 104 The repeated references to his youth, impulsive temperament, and pride placed his very nature as a man in priority over the details of his actions. Ultimately, ‘his riots, his excesses’ became as important as, and indeed inseparable from, their manifestation in his specific acts of corruption.Footnote 105 In fact, the theme of Buckingham's permanently changeable character was prominent outside of parliament. The stellionatus invoked by Eliot was echoed in libel poetry: ‘Whatso'er intended or whatsoever meant/Chameleon like, hee slilie would prevent.’Footnote 106
Immediately following the presentation of the charges, Eliot and Dudley Digges, who had presented the preamble to the charges, were arrested and placed in the Tower. When the Commons clamoured for an explanation of this violation of their privilege, the king's agents in the House pointed to the disparaging account of Buckingham's character. Dudley Carleton explained that ‘in the preface it went very high against a man that stands yet rectus in curia.’Footnote 107 In a fashion of speech similar to Eliot, Digges had styled Buckingham ‘this man’ too often for the king's liking.Footnote 108 Later, when Charles relented and provided a more detailed explanation through Carleton, he specifically referenced Eliot's use of the stellionatus as a rhetorical device.Footnote 109 Buckingham as a man of indecipherable quality, and therefore impossible to measure against any standard, proved to be a contentious element of Eliot's presentation.
In response to the criticism of the phrase ‘this man’, Eliot retorted that he ‘never took him for a god’.Footnote 110 More sheepishly, Eliot later maintained that he used ‘this man’ for brevity's sake, rather than constantly repeat his many titles.Footnote 111 However, Charles's visceral reaction to the construction suggests a deeper significance. Referring to Buckingham simply as ‘this man’ certainly ignored his title and position, and afforded him insufficient respect in the eyes of the crown. A similar complaint was made of Herbert, who had related one of the charges against Buckingham during the conference: ‘Mr. Herbert, who spoke so plainly of the Duke in his own presence, as if he had been the meanest man in the company.’Footnote 112 However, the use of this casual address had other connotations that it is unlikely Eliot or Digges were unmindful of, considering the strategies employed in parliament up to that point. As Eliot's description of Buckingham as an individual driven by riots and excesses, by his doubtful ‘inward characters’, referring to him as ‘this man’ merely highlighted concerns over how apt ‘man’ was as a label.
As for Buckingham himself, the object of Eliot's pointed attack sat through the performance with stoicism. However, it is a testament to the impartiality of human observation that his performance received mixed reviews. No doubt seeking to avoid a display of unmanly anger or outrage during what was effectively a two-day-long attack on him as a statesman, and a man, Buckingham sat in cool silence throughout the conference. Sympathetic observers noted Buckingham's remarkable lack of scorn, even going so far as to describe cheerfulness in his countenance. However, to the impassioned members delivering charges against him, Buckingham's detached demeanour related confidence and arrogance. Christopher Wandesford lamented that their prey should ‘sit there with a greater confidence to hear his charge than I should be to deliver it’.Footnote 113
In his response to the charges after the conference, Buckingham was quick to latch onto his accusers’ tactic of making the impeachment proceeding about his character rather than the details of his actions. Crucially, he recognized the fundamental weakness in Eliot's account of the proceedings. If the Commons wished to see the man, as Eliot demanded, Buckingham was only too willing to demonstrate his manhood. He wondered whether the entire ordeal could have been avoided if only the Commons had engaged in open conversation with him to determine his character and motives: ‘when I look upon my charge in general (as they did) without seeking into the integrity of my heart and actions (which are yet unknown to most of them)’.Footnote 114
The attempted impeachment of 1626 proved to be a crucial moment in forming the political significance of Buckingham's manhood. Although in many ways an inconclusive affair – Charles dissolved parliament before the impeachment trial could be formally concluded – the proceedings brought into legal and political discussions anxieties over Buckingham's manly fitness that had been simmering in political culture. The moment's significance lies in how these anxieties were articulated. The criticisms of Buckingham which were deemed most effective, or relevant, for parliament focused on his youth and his impulsive behaviour. As political opponents were forced to articulate precisely why Buckingham was legally unsuitable as royal favourite, a coherent structure of acceptable manhood began to be formed. This process continued far enough by the time of Eliot's speech to form the rhetorical vanguard of the impeachment proceedings. Eliot's vigorous attack stands more as an indictment of Buckingham's failures as a man than his failures as a political leader. Indeed, for Eliot it was likely impossible to separate the two.
The direct connection between manliness and fitness to rule is particularly evident in discussions of Buckingham's youth. The rash behaviour and inexperience of youth provided Buckingham's critics with the ability to combine challenges to Buckingham's manhood and challenges to his political authority. The attempt to deploy youth as a legal pretext for removing Buckingham from power demonstrates the intrinsic ties between manhood and political authority. Buckingham's vulnerability in the realm of youth was as much defined by narratives of his behaviour as his age. Every emotional outburst brought on by diplomatic frustration, and every attack upon his political enemies served to further the narrative of Buckingham as a youth as yet unrestrained by the self-control of manhood.
Buckingham's attempt to counteract these perceptions, such as Conway's advice to exercise restraint, and Buckingham's own measured response to the articles of impeachment, drew upon existing narratives of ‘the public man’ Cust has observed within the country gentry.Footnote 115 However, the debate over Buckingham's fitness to take part in the political order also played into larger discourses of citizenship within the urban communities of early modern England. Phil Withington argues that the emergence and expansion of governmental, legal, and discursive public spheres within urban daily life injected civic and humanist virtues into political culture.Footnote 116 As a result, Buckingham attempted to vindicate himself as a legitimate political man within ongoing, and competing, humanist discourses. While Buckingham represented ‘centralized and uniform practice of public power’ of the ‘new’ Tacitean humanism, and had been tutored by Francis Bacon, one of its leading proponents, he still drew upon ‘old’ Ciceronian rhetoric to establish his status as a self-possessed man.Footnote 117
Despite his efforts, the image of the youthful and inexperienced Buckingham the House of Commons attempted to convey in 1626 held traction outside of parliament. The Buckingham of libel poetry ‘Whose skillesse and unsteaddie hand/May prove the ruine of a land’ closely mirrored that of the man charged with impeachment for his incompetent management of the kingdom.Footnote 118 Similarly, Buckingham's attempt to shape his public image through published reports of his campaign against the French on the Isle of Rhe met with little success. While the newsbooks portrayed Buckingham as the daring and self-possessed general, defeat ultimately negated any gains he may have made.Footnote 119 By the time he returned home, Buckingham's reputation as a rash and lustful youth was sufficiently ingrained into popular culture for rumours to circulate he had pursued the campaign against the French, not in the interests of the kingdom, but to exact revenge for the end of a flirtatious affair with the queen of France.Footnote 120 The parliament of 1626 was but one of a series of public moments which solidified the image of Buckingham as an irresponsible youth.
The debate to determine Buckingham's legitimacy rested not just on the specific policies enacted, or corruptions committed, but on an account of the man from which they emanated. Buckingham's self-conscious attempts to appear unmotivated by malice in his treatment of enemies, the Venetian ambassador's running commentary on Buckingham's various emotional, or self-controlled reactions to the proceedings against him in 1626, and Eliot's desire to provide the ‘idea of the man, what in himself he is’ all share the common trait of being attempts to divine the nature of the man through his carriage in public life.Footnote 121 The deeply personal and stressful world of politics provided a highly visible arena for the display of the rational self-control which was the hallmark of manhood. Unfortunately for Buckingham, politics could also display behaviour to which the unmanliness of youthful passions could be ascribed.
