By the late 1620s, the court of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria had acquired a new curiosity. He was a dwarf from Rutlandshire named Jeffrey Hudson, a boy so small that at the age of eight he stood barely a foot and a half tall. He had been presented to the royal couple by the Duchess of Buckingham, and to amuse them he was dressed in armor and brought out of a giant pie. Charles and Henrietta were delighted, and the boy was taken into the Stuart court, where he would spend the next two decades.
Born in Oakham, Rutlandshire, on June 14, 1619, Hudson was the son of a butcher named John Hudson, who worked within the clientage network of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham had risen to become the favorite of King James I and retained that position under his son Charles I. The family connection to Buckingham shaped the course of Jeffrey’s entire life. Though his parents were of ordinary size, Jeffrey grew as a dwarf, a condition apparent from his earliest years.
His introduction to the king and queen likely occurred in early 1627, and his striking appearance made him a fixture at court. Hudson was placed in the household of the queen, where he lived among other unusual figures, including several other dwarfs, a monkey named Pug, and a giant from Wales named William Evans. He became a recognizable presence in court life, appearing in paintings by leading artists of the period. A Daniel Mytens scene from around 1630 depicts him in a wooded setting, and the most famous portrait of all, painted by Anthony van Dyck in 1633, shows Henrietta Maria with Hudson and a monkey at her side.
Hudson was far from a passive victim of his circumstances. He was reportedly well aware of his position and developed a sense of self-importance to match it, earning the names the Queen’s Dwarf and Lord Minimus. Some contemporaries considered him one of the wonders of the age because of his extreme yet proportioned smallness. As he entered his teenage years, he appeared in court masques and entertainments, which in early modern Europe was a common enough practice, with dwarfs also present in the courts of Madrid, Paris, and Vienna.
There were signs of a sharper personality beneath his courtly role. Hudson took an interest in military affairs and attended the siege of Breda in the Low Countries in 1637, during the height of the Thirty Years’ War. In 1636, he converted to the Roman Catholic faith of his queen, a choice unusual in an overwhelmingly Protestant England. He also gained a measure of fame after an incident in 1630, when he was only ten or eleven years old.
Hudson had been sent to Paris as part of a government mission, and on the way he was captured by pirates sailing from the port of Dunkirk. The news disturbed Queen Henrietta Maria so deeply that the Venetian ambassador reported the English court was more upset by Hudson’s capture than it would have been by the loss of an entire fleet. The episode later inspired a satirical epic by the English playwright William Davenant, published in 1638 under the title Jeffereidos. By then, the broader political situation in England was deteriorating.
Charles I ruled in an authoritarian manner, aiming to establish an absolute monarchy in the style emerging in France. After dissolving Parliament in 1628, he governed without calling another one for twelve years. Discontent with Stuart rule grew through the 1630s, and by the end of the decade the king faced a serious rebellion in Scotland, where a coalition of interests known as the Covenanters invaded northern England. That crisis contributed to a major revolt in Ireland in the autumn of 1641, and the following year civil war broke out in England between the king and a parliamentary opposition.
Before the conflict began in earnest, Queen Henrietta Maria and her household had already left England for The Hague in the Dutch Republic. Her departure served several purposes, including her safety, but it also removed a figure whose Catholicism had become a focus of criticism against Charles’s government. The Dutch Republic was the wealthiest state in Europe, and Henrietta Maria was sent there in 1642 to raise large loans and subsidies to send back to England in support of the royalist cause. Hudson traveled with her to The Hague in the spring of 1642.
He returned briefly to England with the queen in the months that followed, and she appointed him captain of horse in the royalist forces. His command may have been limited, possibly amounting to the role of her personal escort. He was certainly with her in 1644, when the royalist war effort collapsed and Henrietta Maria was forced to flee England once again, this time to her native France. Charles remained in England, where he spent years negotiating and fighting with Parliament before his execution in 1649.
An eleven-year republic followed, dominated largely by Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, until the monarchy was restored in 1660 under Charles II, the son of the executed king. During this later exile, Hudson became involved in a duel with serious consequences. In October 1644, possibly provoked by the mockery of one of his fellow English exiles, Hudson challenged William Crofts, the brother of the captain of the queen’s guard, to a duel. Crofts arrived treating the affair as a joke, carrying a water pistol of the type common in the early modern era.
Hudson, however, had the last laugh. He shot Crofts in the head with a real weapon and killed him. He was then charged with murder, but the queen intervened to save him from execution. To satisfy the French authorities, Henrietta Maria was forced to banish him from France.
As he was leaving France in the aftermath of the affair, Hudson was captured by pirates for the second time in his life. This time his captors were crews operating from the Barbary coast of North Africa, the great stronghold of piracy in the mid-seventeenth century. He was not as fortunate as he had been in 1630. He was carried to North Africa and sold into slavery, a condition in which he would remain for the next twenty-five years.
Almost nothing is known about his life during that quarter century, an absence of evidence unsurprising for someone held in bondage. One curious development is that Hudson began to grow during these years, particularly in the 1650s, when he entered his thirties, eventually reaching a height of three feet nine inches. Hudson finally escaped this dreadful situation at the end of the 1660s, after the intervention of George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, the son of the duke and duchess who had presented him to Charles I and Henrietta Maria more than forty years earlier. A ransom was paid, and Hudson returned to England by 1669.
He spent the next several years back in his native Oakham in Rutlandshire, the smallest county in England, which led some to call him the smallest man from the smallest county. During these years he was interviewed by James Wright, a historian and antiquary from Rutlandshire, who included him in a history of the county published in 1684. In 1679, Hudson returned to London, apparently hoping to find employment at the court of Charles II, or perhaps to petition successfully for a pension in recognition of his service to the king’s parents during the 1630s and 1640s. He met with misfortune once again.
In the late 1670s, a fabricated Catholic plot stirred panic in London against the followers of the Roman Catholic Church. The Popish Plot centered on Titus Oates, a clergyman who claimed involvement in a scheme to assassinate Charles II. Oates was also from Rutlandshire, and Hudson, because of his Catholicism, became falsely suspected of participating in the conspiracy. Shortly after his arrival in the capital, he was arrested and imprisoned for a time in Westminster’s Gatehouse prison.
There was some compensation at the end of his troubles. After his release from the Gatehouse in 1680, Hudson received fifty pounds from Charles II in June 1680, a considerable sum at the time. That was followed by an additional payment of twenty pounds in April 1681, shortly before his death in 1682 at around the age of sixty-two. His significance to the court life of Stuart England was recognized by contemporaries, and some of his clothing has survived.
His doublet, breeches, and stockings can be seen on display today at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.