CARLETON, Dudley (1574-1632)

One of the ablest diplomats of the early Stuart period, Dudley Carleton had the misfortune to be a prominent supporter of the ‘Calvinist international’ at a time when his masters sought a rapprochement with Spain. Moreover, shortly after his return to court in 1625, his desire for an Anglo-French alliance in support of the Dutch was discredited in the eyes of King Charles. During the few years in which he stood at the centre of English policy-making, Carleton’s views became increasingly marginalized, and shortly before his death in 1632, he had the galling experience of seeing his master revive the pro-Spanish policy of the early 1620s.

Career before 1626

Carleton’s grandfather, receiver for Westminster Abbey, left modest estates in Oxfordshire to his son Anthony Carleton^‡. The latter was returned to the 1559 Parliament for Westbury, Wiltshire on the patronage of James Blount^†, 6th Lord Mountjoy, and served as an Exchequer receiver during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. Anthony’s son Dudley, still an infant when his father died in 1576, followed his uncle George to Christ Church, Oxford, and then served under ambassadors Henry Unton^† and Anthony Mildmay^† at Paris in the 1590s. Although Carleton received a godly upbringing – his uncle had been part of the Midland puritan circle which produced the Marprelate tracts – on his return to England in 1603 he took a position as comptroller to the Catholic Henry Percy^*, 3rd earl of Northumberland, newly restored to favour at the Jacobean court. Carleton secured a seat in the Commons in 1604, but as lessee of the cellar in which Guy Fawkes stored his powder, he was nearly ruined by the Gunpowder Plot; he slowly worked his way back into favour by courting Robert Cecil^*, 1st earl of Salisbury.36 HP Commons 1558-1603, i. 552; HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 442-5.

In 1610 Carleton obtained the diplomatic posting he had been seeking for several years, as ambassador to the Venetian Republic. A decade of service in Venice, Turin and The Hague established him as a key member of the early Stuart diplomatic corps: in 1615 he negotiated the treaty of Asti, under which Spanish troops withdrew from Savoyard territory; while in the Low Countries he brokered the Synod of Dort, liaised with King James’s fugitive son-in-law, Frederick V, Elector Palatine, at The Hague, and handled the furore over the Amboyna massacre. He clearly chafed at James’s reluctance to intervene in the rapidly spiralling conflict in Germany – when Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown in September 1619, he endorsed the Dutch war party’s view ‘that since the revolution of the world is like to carry us out of this peaceable time it is better to begin the change with advantage than with disadvantage’.37 HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 445-7; Carleton to Chamberlain ed. M. Lee, 271; B.C. Pursell, Winter King, 149, 206.

Carleton’s best opportunity for preferment came in 1624, with the collapse of negotiations for a Spanish Match. Prince Charles (Stuart^*, prince of Wales) and the royal favourite, George Villiers^*, 1st duke of Buckingham, worked hard to persuade a sceptical James to construct an anti-Habsburg alliance. As a first step, an Anglo-Dutch treaty was concluded in London in May 1624, with Carleton (at The Hague) assisting by explaining that the Dutch would not offer cautionary towns to guarantee repayment of any subsidy as they had under Elizabeth. Once this potential misunderstanding had been cleared up, the English quickly agreed to maintain four new regiments as auxiliaries in Dutch service.38 T. Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 254-8.

The breach with Spain persuaded the hispanophile secretary of state, Sir George Calvert^‡, to announce his intention to resign in the autumn of 1624. Carleton lobbied hard to succeed him, sending Buckingham £400 worth of sculpture as an inducement. However, his attachment to ‘persons averse to the duke and his undertakings’ – particularly William Herbert^*, 3rd earl of Pembroke – probably damaged his chances, as Pembroke, a longstanding advocate of the Palatine cause, had an uneasy relationship with the favourite, who excluded his followers from negotiations for the French Match.39 Ibid. 154-6; R. Lockyer, Buckingham, 176-9, 209, 235. Carleton eventually succeeded in convincing the duke of his trustworthiness, as he was offered the vice chamberlainship of the household as an alternative to the secretaryship. In December 1625, having helped Buckingham negotiate an offensive alliance with the Dutch and the Danes at The Hague, he returned to England, took up his appointment, and was sworn a privy councillor.40 CSP Dom. 1623-5, pp. 344, 450, 457; SP16/6/35; P.H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy, 387-91; L.J. Reeve, Chas. I and the Road to Personal Rule, 39-40, 192-3.

The price of Buckingham’s support was Carleton’s enrolment among the duke’s clientage. At the general election of 1626, Carleton was returned to the Commons for Hastings on Buckingham’s interest as lord warden of the Cinque Ports but, before he could take up his seat, he was dispatched to Paris, in company with Henry Rich^*, earl of Holland, to shore up the French alliance, which was fracturing only months after Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria.41 HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 446; T. Cogswell, ‘Prelude to Ré: the Anglo-French Struggle over La Rochelle, 1624-7’, History, lxxi. 1-18. Carleton returned in April 1626 with assurances that the outstanding disputes were resolved, which he delivered to the Commons, prompting MPs to increase the supply they had earlier granted in principle. Yet the progress of the subsidy bill was delayed by the formulation of Buckingham’s impeachment charges, which were relayed to the Lords on 8 and 10 May.42 C. Russell, PEP, 291-2, 300-2; Procs. 1626, iii. 17-20. Sir John Eliot^‡ and Sir Dudley Digges^‡, having charged the duke with hastening the death of King James by medical malpractice, were promptly arrested, and on 12 May Carleton worsened a fraught situation by raising the possibility that Charles might follow ‘new counsels’ and dissolve the session. He himself was a keen advocate of Parliament, and his speech was intended as a warning against provoking the king to such courses, but it lost him the confidence of the House of Commons.43 HP Commons 1604-29 iii. 447-8; Russell, 304-7; Reeve, Personal Rule, 13.

Court and Parliament, 1626-8

Buckingham rescued Carleton from his predicament by procuring him a peerage, one of several creations which reinforced his own supporters in the Lords. Introduced to the upper House on 22 May as Baron Carleton of Imbercourt, Carleton was immediately appointed to the committee for the examination of evidences and witnesses relating to the impeachment charges the king had filed against Buckingham’s chief adversary, John Digby^*, 1st earl of Bristol. Although he attended the Lords almost every day during the final month of the session, Carleton, as the most junior government spokesman in the House, was much less prominent than he had been in the Commons. On 24 May he and James Hay^*, 1st earl of Carlisle, were sent to ask the king when the House might present a petition for the release of Thomas Howard^*, 21st (or 14th) earl of Arundel, from the Tower.44 Procs. 1626, i. 540-2, 545. Arundel eventually resumed his seat on 8 June, when the House resumed normal business; Carleton ‘expressed his joy of all impediments removed’ and called for the Lords’ standing committee for defence to meet. This plea was ignored until Secretary of State Lord Conway (Edward Conway^*, later 1st Viscount Conway) renewed the motion two days later, whereupon Carleton was added to the committee’s membership. A meeting was arranged for 12 June, which resulted in a decision to press the Commons to proceed with the subsidy bill. At the same time (10 June) Carleton was named to a committee to investigate how English ships had come to be used by the French crown against the Huguenots of La Rochelle, one of the issues discussed on his recent mission to Paris.45 Ibid. 590, 602-3, 605; Russell, 320. Meanwhile, in the Commons, Carleton’s ennoblement was mooted as an additional charge against Buckingham: his estates, worth £700 a year, were claimed to be too modest to sustain the dignity of a peer, and his barony, Carleton of Imbercourt, was named after a crown manor in Surrey of which he was merely the sub-tenant. It was also observed that with a seat in the Lords, Carleton would be able to have a second vote on impeachment charges he had already scrutinized as an MP.46 Procs. 1626, iii. 361-4; VCH Surr. ii. 465.

The king dissolved the Parliament on 15 June, but thereafter, at the Council board, Carleton was one of the advocates of a fresh summons, a viewpoint which put him at odds with the duke. Nevertheless, he subsequently served as a commissioner for the Forced Loan, the device by which the king attempted to raise the subsidies lost at the dissolution. He was active in both Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and in the latter county, despite the opposition of William Fiennes^*, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, 86 per cent of the assigned quota was collected, comfortably exceeding the national average of 72 per cent. Carleton clearly set his personal opinions aside in performing this service: in the next Parliament he ruefully observed ‘that those that lent monies, as those that refused, did both with good hearts’.47 R. Cust, Forced Loan, 58, 112, 125, 289; S. Healy, ‘Oh, What a Lovely War? Direct Taxation and Pols. in Eng. 1624-9’, Canadian Jnl. of Hist. xxxviii. 446-7, 463; Lords Procs. 1628, p. 639. Abroad, the Anglo-French alliance which Carleton had striven to reinvigorate collapsed with the news that France and Spain had resolved their differences in Italy by the treaty of Monzón (24 Feb. 1626). This allowed the French royal army to turn against La Rochelle in the spring of 1627, whereupon Buckingham sailed with an English relief force in June. Meanwhile Carleton, despite rumours that he was to replace Conway as secretary of state, was sent to the Low Countries to pursue overtures for a settlement with either Spain or France – neither of which proved possible.48 Wilson, 377-84; Harl. 7000, f. 213v; T. Osborne, Dynasty and Diplomacy in the Ct. of Savoy, 122-40.

Although Carleton missed the first two-and-a-half months of the 1628 session of Parliament, he did not enter a proxy, presumably because he was only on an extraordinary embassy. He returned to England at the start of June, just as the crisis over the Petition of Right came to a head. Charles’s first, grudging answer caused uproar in the Commons, but on 5 June the Lords were advised that the king had no intention of dissolving Parliament, a modest olive branch which invited a compromise. The next day Robert Devereux^*, 3rd earl of Essex renewed Bristol’s motion of the previous day for the establishment of a committee ‘to consider the present state of the kingdom’, presumably in the hope of producing a catalogue of Buckingham’s shortcomings similar to the one the Commons embarked upon at the same time. Carleton attempted to pour oil upon troubled waters: ‘the happiness of this kingdom stands in the well ending of this session, and I think no man here is so blind but sees the unhappiness we are likely to fall into if we end not well’. Bristol registered his support for Essex, but the House was eventually persuaded to lay the question aside.49 Lords Procs. 1628, pp. 587-8, 591-2. The Lords were instead allowed their head in pursuit of the cleric Roger Manwaring^† (later bishop of St Davids), who was impeached for his sermons in favour of the Forced Loan, which had been printed by royal command. As the House discussed their sentence on 13 June, Carleton made a feeble (and ultimately futile) plea in mitigation, claiming that Manwaring preached from error, not malice, and urging against the public burning of his tracts, ‘that we offend not his Majesty herein’.50 Ibid. 638-9. These debates aside, Carleton played a modest role in the final weeks of the session, when he was named to committees for the recusancy bill; for naturalizing Buckingham’s client the painter-cum-diplomat Balthazar Gerbier and the children of another diplomat, his friend William Trumbull^‡; for estate bills concerning the earl of Arundel and Queen Henrietta Maria; and for a bill for the sale of dyed and dressed cloths. In addition, on 12 June, when the Lords proceeded against an army officer for insulting Viscount Saye, Carleton moved that the English agent in the United Provinces (his nephew Dudley Carleton junior) instruct the English troops there to look out for the fugitive.51 Ibid. 582, 606, 627, 629-30, 641, 690, 692.

Secretary of state, 1628-31

After the end of the parliamentary session, several members of the pro-Spanish faction at court were promoted in a ministerial reshuffle, including Richard Weston^*, Lord Weston (later 1st earl of Portland), who was appointed lord treasurer. However, the elevation of the pro-Dutch Carleton as Viscount Dorchester on 25 July suggested that the question of peace with Spain had not been definitively settled. He remained at the centre of diplomatic policy-making – indeed, Buckingham was about to set out for a meeting with the king and Dorchester on 23 Aug. when he was assassinated by John Felton. Dorchester oversaw Felton’s arrest and was present at his initial interrogation.52 Reeve, Personal Rule, 40; Procs. 1628, pp. 214-15. This unexpected development threw the court into chaos, and so the reshuffle was not completed until December, when Dorchester finally secured the secretaryship of state he had coveted for a decade.

The policy advocated by Dorchester was a revival of the system of 1624-6: an anti-Habsburg alliance between England, the German and Scandinavian Protestants, France, Savoy and Venice. At first glance, the circumstances seemed entirely unpropitious: by late 1628 Emperor Ferdinand II had brought the German and Danish Protestants to the point of surrender; the Dutch were still on the defensive against the army of Flanders; and the French crown was at war with the Huguenots. Yet while Carleton’s plan may have been wildly optimistic, it was not completely unfeasible: the Habsburgs had overplayed their hand, alarming the French, the Dutch and the Swedes, and with parliamentary supply, the English might yet tip the balance of power on the Continent. At least in his professional correspondence, Dorchester naturally hoped for a successful session when Parliament reassembled early in 1629: ‘all things, by his Majesty’s personal order in Council, are provisionally so disposed that he may the better hope for a fair and loving meeting with his people’.53 SP104/170, pp. 1-3; Russell, 393-4; Reeve, Personal Rule, 228-35; Wilson, 419-53; L.J. Reeve, ‘Secretaryship of State of Viscount Dorchester, 1628-32’ (Camb. Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1983), 262-75; SP92/14, f. 225.

Formally introduced to the Lords as a viscount on 20 Jan. 1629, Dorchester left no trace on the second session’s proceedings, which were dominated by debates in the Commons over Arminianism and tunnage and poundage.54 LJ, iv. 6a. The collapse of the Parliament in mid March represented a severe setback for Dorchester’s hopes. Writing to Christian IV of Denmark the day before the dissolution, he paraphrased the language of Charles’s dissolution proclamation, warning that any prospect of financial assistance had been dashed ‘by the disobedience and seditious carriage of some disaffected persons in the House of Commons’, news which forced the Danes to conclude a peace treaty with Emperor Ferdinand at Lübeck in May.55 Stuart Royal Proclamations I: Jas. I ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes, 223-4; SP104/170, p. 6; Reeve, Personal Rule, 102-4, 107-8, 234-6; Wilson, 423. Later that same month, Dorchester also assisted in the formulation of the proclamation in which Charles set his face against a fresh summons of Parliament. This document misrepresented parliamentary proceedings by suggesting that Eliot’s resolutions of 2 Mar. – attacking the Arminians and the collection of customs dues without statutory approval – had been rejected by the Commons, and it castigated those merchants who refused to pay customs duties as ‘unworthy of our protection’. Dorchester clearly had little opportunity to influence the strident tone of this proclamation, although it should be noted that it did not completely rule out the prospect of a new Parliament, once tensions had cooled.56 Stuart Royal Proclamations II: Chas. I ed. J.F. Larkin, 227-8; Reeve, Personal Rule, 109-12. Over the course of the next year, Dorchester was involved in prosecuting Eliot and his associates, joining with several other councillors in searching for a compromise which would permit a fresh summons of Parliament. However, most of the prisoners and some of the judges declined to cooperate with his efforts, and on 5 Feb. 1630 Eliot and two other defendants were sentenced to heavy fines and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. In his diplomatic correspondence, Dorchester hoped this judgement would make MPs ‘more moderate and circumspect hereafter’, but the continued incarceration of the prisoners suggested otherwise.57 Reeve, Personal Rule, 128, 133-6, 139-57; SP16/162/18.

The impasse within domestic politics frustrated Dorchester’s attempts to pursue an anti-Habsburg foreign policy, as without funds the English could offer little assistance to potential allies. Nevertheless, Dorchester made some headway in clearing diplomatic obstacles to a coalition. With the Venetians as intermediaries, he led negotiations for a peace with France: Cardinal Richelieu, now preoccupied with breaking the Spanish siege of the fortress of Casale in northern Italy, quickly obliged, and the treaty was signed on 14 Apr. 1629. However, despite Richelieu’s interest, no attempt was made to revive the Anglo-French alliance of 1624-6.58 SP104/170, p. 15; Reeve thesis, 264-71; K. Sharpe, Personal Rule of Chas. I, 65-6, 82-3; Wilson, 441-3.

The second strand of Dorchester’s diplomacy involved the reconstruction of an alliance with the German and Scandinavian Protestants, which Sir Thomas Roe^‡ was sent to pursue in June 1629. The Swedes, as the Protestant power with the largest army in the region, were the key to these negotiations, and King Gustavus Adolphus, already troubled by Habsburg plans to seize control of the Baltic, welcomed Roe’s assistance in mediating a six-year truce in his war with Poland, so leaving him free to redeploy his army to Germany during the summer of 1630. However, King Charles undermined any chance of a closer alliance by declining a Swedish request for financial support.59 SP104/170, pp. 31-40; Reeve, Personal Rule, 236-8; Reeve thesis, 276-9; Wilson, 459-65; Sharpe, 79.

Diplomatic frustration and death, 1631-2

Dorchester’s efforts to construct an anti-Habsburg coalition were subverted by Charles’s quest for an accord with Spain, promoted by Lord Treasurer Weston, which began in April 1629. This was a promising moment for negotiation, as Spain was reeling from a series of fiscal and military reverses, and worried by the swift conclusion of the Anglo-French war. However, Charles rushed to offer terms which a more experienced statesman might have withheld, the better to see what Spain was prepared to concede.60 Reeve, Personal Rule, 238-42; Wilson, 434-7; Osborne, 157-60; J.H. Elliott, Count-Duke of Olivares, 367-8, 387-8; Reeve thesis, 279-82. Weston’s client Sir Francis Cottington^† (later Lord Cottington) was sent to Madrid in November 1629, but the Spanish, negotiating simultaneously with Dutch, hoped to play the allies off against each other. Dorchester, aware of the danger, complained to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia that ‘the Devil cannot do us a greater mischief’.61 SP81/35, f. 218; Reeve thesis, 283-7; Reeve, Personal Rule, 241-8. In March 1630, with no meaningful concessions from Spain, Dorchester expected the talks to collapse, but Charles, unwilling to summon another Parliament, declared himself satisfied by a vague Spanish undertaking to back the Palatine cause at the forthcoming imperial Diet. Cottington concealed the details of these negotiations from Dorchester, who responded by excluding Weston from some of the official correspondence. Despite these hindrances, the principles of the deal were agreed in May 1630, and the treaty was signed at Madrid in November.62 Reeve, Personal Rule, 250-6; M.J. Havran, Caroline Courtier, 92-101; Sharpe, 70-1.

In January 1631 Cottington signed a secret alliance whereby Spain agreed to pay Charles a monthly subsidy of 100,000 escudos (about £22,000) if he declared war on the Dutch. This treaty never came into effect, but Cottington’s apparent success as a negotiator encouraged Weston to press for his protégé’s appointment as secretary of state in place of Dorchester, who was to be moved to the presidency of the Council, a largely honorific office recently vacated by the death of Lord Conway. In the event, Dorchester remained in post, but his influence over foreign policy was clearly weakening, as the only assistance Charles offered his co-religionists in 1631 was to allow James Hamilton^*, 3rd marquess of Hamilton [S] (and 2nd earl of Cambridge), to recruit 7,000 Scots for the Swedes.63 Havran, 101-2; Elliott, 403-5; CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 510; Reeve, Personal Rule, 265-8; Reeve thesis, 296-301.

Cottington’s subterfuge was exposed in August 1631, when Diego de Quiroga, a Spanish agent at the imperial court, revealed the general terms of the anti-Dutch alliance to the English envoy, Sir Robert Anstruther, a close associate of Dorchester. The war party at the English court was stunned by this revelation, but any strategic implications it might have had were nullified by the Swedish victory over the imperialists at Breitenfeld only two weeks later. By the end of the year, Swedish forces were in control of Heidelberg and other Palatine garrisons on the east bank of the Rhine, rendering any Spanish promise regarding Frederick’s patrimony moot.64 Reeve, Personal Rule, 269-74; L.J. Reeve, ‘Quiroga’s Ppr. of 1631’, EHR, ci. 913-26; Wilson, 472-9.

Gustavus’ triumph vindicated Dorchester’s vision of a broad-based anti-Habsburg alliance which – many years later – brought an equitable peace to Germany, but it must have been professionally frustrating for him to see the interests of England and the Palatinate sidelined. It was at this equivocal moment, on 15 Feb. 1632, that Dorchester died of ‘a violent catarrh’. ‘Lamented by many’, he was buried near his first wife in Westminster Abbey at night ‘with no great pomp’. Although he died intestate, his second wife received a cash payment of £6,000 under the terms of her jointure agreement, while his lands passed to his posthumous daughter, who died in infancy. Thereafter his estates were partitioned between his nephews, including Dudley Carleton junior. After much lobbying, the secretaryship went to the hispanophile Sir Francis Windebank^‡.65 CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 214; PROB 11/161, f. 356; CSP Ven. 1629-32, p. 593; C115/105/8144, 8147.