A Jacobean Soap Opera
The sad story of Frances Coke Villiers
Over the last five months, I’ve reviewed three biographies of King James VI and I for The Times. In February came Gareth Hunt’s delightful Queen James, the title a reference to the fact that James was Britain’s most openly gay monarch. Then came Anna Whitelock’s disappointing The Sun Rising, a book that avoids personality issues almost completely, a rather strange approach in a biography. The third was Clare Jackson’s The Mirror of Great Britain, due to be published next month. There might be other volumes in the pipeline, but I’m now done with James. After finishing Jackson’s superb book, there seems no point in reading anything else. It’s that good.
The sudden popularity of James probably arises from the fact that this year is the 400th anniversary of his death. Quite by accident, I also recently read Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name, which takes place during the Jacobean period and features a lot of the shady characters with whom I’m now intimately familiar. Her novel explores the always intriguing question of how William Shakespeare managed to write all those magnificent plays and sonnets, calling upon background knowledge that he should not have possessed.
James was famously known as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. He was immensely intelligent, but that never stopped him from making incredibly idiotic decisions as King. Incidentally, James was very nearly murdered in utero by his father, Lord Darnley, on 9 March 1566 at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. Darnley was an accomplice in the attempt to topple his wife, Mary Queen of Scots, and claim the crown for himself. A rather stupid man, he joined with other immensely stupid men in a harebrained plot to cause Mary to miscarry, by murdering her much-loved private secretary David Rizzio in front of her. Denise Mina tells that gruesome story with great flair in her novelette Rizzio, which is well worth a read. The Jacobean court is a rich seam of drama for present day wordsmiths.
That said, I’m frankly quite tired of reading and writing about James, who seems to me a thoroughly unpleasant person that I’d normally prefer to avoid. Despite appearances, today’s little article isn’t actually about James, but rather about one of the unfortunate bit players in the enormously complex soap opera that was the Jacobean court. I want to tell the story of Frances Coke Villiers, firstly because it’s a love story of sorts and secondly because her feistiness was uncommon among women in the 17th century. I’ve got a fondness for women who defy convention.
Back then, the male spouse was often called the ‘yoke fellow’. For many wives, that term was painfully appropriate. Most women yielded to the yoke; some found love despite it. Frances, however, threw off the yoke and suffered for doing so. Had she submitted to the bondage of marriage, we would probably know nothing about her rather tragic life. Her notoriety arises from her defiant pursuit of genuine love.
In truth, what we do know about poor Frances is rather limited. Because she was neither a political nor a literary figure, preserving her story was never a priority among chroniclers of the time. As a result, her life has to be reconstructed from the words of those who wrote obliquely about her, and they were mainly people who despised her because of her stubborn defiance of convention. Her silence is ironic given that she was once castigated for being too loud – not a welcome characteristic when it came to women.
Frances was born into strife. Her mother, Elizabeth Hatton, and her father, Sir Edward Coke, despised one another. That's what often happens in arranged marriages. Their incompatibility took many forms but was most toxic when Frances’s betrothal was being arranged, when she was just fourteen. ‘Her beautie and person’, it was widely felt, made her ‘fitt for the greatest Earle of the Land’. Thanks to her father, she landed well short of that.
Coke wanted his daughter to marry Sir John Villiers, the younger brother of George Villiers, the 1st Duke of Buckingham. The latter was a great favourite of King James I, a relationship that was much more than platonic. George was pimped to King James by his mother Mary, who was a notoriously ambitious schemer aware of James’s fondness for gorgeous men. Their rather sordid story has been told with great flair in the British drama series Mary and George (2024), in which Julianne Moore plays Mary with delightfully Machiavellian menace.
James had quite a few male lovers, but George was by far his favourite. ‘By God, I love thee’, he would shout from across a crowded room. Their affair began in 1614, when Villiers was twenty-one and James was forty-eight. According to almost everyone, George was ‘one of the handsomest men in the whole world’. William Laud, later the Archbishop of Canterbury, once confessed that he had wet dreams about George. While the relationship was originally the result of Mary’s manipulative scheming, Villiers quickly developed a sincere affection for the King. When briefly separated, he wrote to James that once he ‘got hold of your bedpost again, I never again will quit it’. James, in turn, confessed to ‘such extreme longing that it might kill me’.
But back to poor Frances. For Edward Coke, union with the Villiers family made political sense, so much so that he was prepared to offer a dowry of £30,000 – around £7 million today. Elizabeth opposed the idea, like she opposed everything her husband did. Frances also resisted her father’s machinations, but her interests were immaterial. No surprise there. Within the gentry, young women were property to be bought and sold just like a piece of land or a prize heifer. In desperation, Elizabeth spirited her daughter away, but was soon apprehended by Coke, who snatched Frances back. With mother vanquished, the wedding went ahead on 29 September 1617. The bride reportedly cried throughout the ceremony.
John was a fool or, they said back then, ‘Hominem prope stupidum’. From our vantage point, he appears to have been bipolar, alternating between short periods of restless mania and long bouts of paralysing depression. He adored his beautiful wife, but was incapable of loving her in the fullest sense. Reference to his ‘soar legg’ might have been a euphemism for impotence. King James, alarmed at the embarrassment John might cause the Court, ordered his isolation. Meanwhile, Buckingham took the opportunity to swindle his sister-in-law, cheating her out of money which was, arguably, hers. They were a charming family, those Villiers.
Most women would have shied away from challenging a man like Buckingham, but Frances had guts. By threatening exposure of his financial shenanigans, she persuaded him to release an annuity on which she could live comfortably. She also embarked upon an affair with Sir Robert Howard, a landowner, MP and Royalist soldier. On the surface, the affair seems another act of defiance on the part of Frances, but it was in fact a genuine bond of love.
Frances might have been able to carry on a discreet affair without suffering scorn, if not for her untimely pregnancy. Ever the plotter, she concealed the evidence as best she could and then escaped the city to give birth in secret. To add to her troubles, she then contracted smallpox. It was not a good year for poor Frances.
Babies, especially cherished ones, are difficult to hide. Gossip soon spread across London. Stories were told of Howard scaling walls, crossing rooftops and climbing in windows in order to consummate his love for Frances. These stories were all the more powerful for being, in the most part, true. A slave to love, Frances was in deep trouble. Her predicament was Buckingham’s opportunity. He relished the chance to ruin his sister-in-law, her lover and their bastard son. His own notorious philandering with the King mattered not a jot.
Aided and encouraged by King James, the hypocrite Buckingham arranged for Frances and Howard to be tried for adultery. By this means, he hoped to ensure that their son Robert would never inherit the family fortune or title. Though the accounts of her trial are scanty, it appears that she put up a spirited defence. Under interrogation by the Lord Chief Justice and his assistants, she ‘marvayled at what those old cuckolds had to say to her’. Brought before the High Commission, she suggested that her accusers should make their own wives swear that they were ‘free from all faults’ before they assumed the right to pass judgement upon her. Good on her.
Frances spent the rest of her life either battling the law or trying to avoid punishment. On one occasion, she eluded capture by bluff and disguise – as a male servant donned in a dress went in one direction, she, dressed like a man, went in another. After escaping from prison, she fled to France for six years, where she tried to enlist the help of Cardinal Richelieu, but to no avail. All the while she remained devoted to her son Robert, and to his father. She waited in hope that her husband might die and free her to marry again, but John, feeble in mind, proved stubbornly robust in body.
Frances was probably an extraordinary woman, but we know so little of her. She remains a beguiling stranger – perhaps a great topic for a series of her own and for a scriptwriter untroubled by facts. In Mary and George, she’s played by Amelia Gething, which seems an appropriate choice. I have to confess that I fell slightly in love with Frances while researching her story. The nice thing about studying the past is that it’s possible to fall illicitly in love without present day consequences.
Frances’s conviction was never overturned, but her scandal was eventually smothered by a larger event – the English Civil War. During that conflict, she quite surprisingly supported King Charles, who had inherited his father’s contempt for her behaviour. That might be explained by the fact that her lover Robert was a committed Royalist. Never a particularly lucky woman, she found herself in Naseby precisely when Oliver Cromwell besieged the city. With food scarce and disease rampant, she fell ill and died, aged just 43. One suspects that she was defiant to the end, but we really don’t know.
Three years after Frances’s death, Howard finally married. He’d been loyal to her for 22 years, despite all the grief that entailed. The double standards of the day transformed what might have been a beautiful love story into something rather sordid and very tragic. It would be nice to put this sad story safely in the past and smugly assume that we’re more open and honest about relationships today. But I don’t think we are. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
As I’m almost at the end of the Rest is History’s 6 part series on Mary, Queen of Scots, this was a timely and interesting read, thank you.
Definitely sounds like a good one for a series to me !