ABSTRACT
At noon on Sunday, 27 March 1625 James I died. The evening after he heard of the death of his friend, the Marquis of Hamilton, James complained of feeling ill. In a sense the heralds were proclaiming the wrong man for in the three years after James’s death the Duke of Buckingham in many ways ruled England, making the period from Charles’s accession to Buckingham’s assassination a whole. Charles’s new broom wanted not to just to tidy up the sick and sweep away the layabouts, but to get a grip on the government by establishing investigating committees. A confession of faith Charles almost certainly wrote in January 1626 proved Neile correct. In the early summer of the first year of his reign Charles was far more concerned with an immediate issue, his marriage to Henrietta Maria, which took place by proxy at Notre Dame, Paris, on May Day 1625.
