17
‘What sudden change hath darked of late
The glory of the Arcadian state?
The fleecy flocks refuse to feed,
The lambs to play, the ewes to breed;
The altars smoke, the offerings burn,
Till Jack and Tom do safe return.’
From a pastoral poem written by James I in response
to the Prince of Wales’ journey to Madrid in 1623
‘The King,’ wrote Sir Anthony Weldon, ‘was ever best when furthest from his Queen.’ And her death on 2 March 1619, appears to have been greeted with precisely the kind of broad equanimity that might have been anticipated in such circumstances. While Anne lay ill at Hampton Court with dropsy, James visited her dutifully twice a week, but it was Prince Charles rather than he who took up residence in an adjoining bedroom in an effort to provide some modicum of comfort and support. In the meantime, the king remained preoccupied with the issue of his wife’s will, for fear that she might leave the majority of her jewels to her Danish maid Anna – a worry that would remain unfounded – though the gems, valued at £30,000, nevertheless found their way into the maid’s possession illicitly with the help, it seems, of a Frenchman named Pierrot. Equally regrettably, before James left for a hunting trip at Newmarket in February, there had been angry words between the royal couple over the Catholic priests that hovered continually around the queen’s sickbed. Ultimately, indeed, only Prince Charles and his sister Elizabeth, who wrote from Heidelberg on 31 May to express her inexpressible sorrow at ‘so great a misfortune’, appear to have been genuinely stricken by the queen’s demise, and the verses that James later penned in her memory were largely coloured by more general reflections on the mortality of princes, ‘who, though they run the race of men and die’ were further ennobled by their passing, since ‘death serves but to refine their majesty’. In the words of one observer, the king took his wife’s death ‘seemly’, neither weeping publicly, nor managing, for that matter, to brave the illness that kept him from her funeral. Only later, arguably, as his own health collapsed and he reflected more broadly upon the transience of human affairs, would a deeper despondency descend upon him.
The malady that kept the king from Anne’s obsequies at Westminster on 13 May was, however, real enough. It had begun with ‘a shrewd fit of the stone’ coupled with arthritis during his stay at Newmarket, and by the time of his arrival at Royston in mid-March his condition had deteriorated significantly. He was weak and faint, could neither eat nor sleep and was debilitated further, we are told, by a ‘scouring vomit’. ‘After the Queen’s death,’ wrote James’s French physician, he suffered ‘pain in the joints and nephritis with thick sand, continued fever, bilious diarrhoea, hiccoughs for several days, bitter humours boiling from his mouth so as to cause ulcers on his lips and chin, fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness, intermittent pulse’. At one point, indeed, there had been fears for his life, and though he had recovered sufficiently to be removed from Royston to Ware on 24 April, he was nevertheless carried part of the way in a Neapolitan chair provided for him by Lady Elizabeth Hatton, and the rest of the way in a litter. Even by the time of his midsummer hunting trip to Oatlands, Woking and Windsor, moreover, James was still seeking to strengthen his legs and feet by bathing them in the bellies of slain deer.
Upon his arrival in London on 1 June, however, it was already clear that any residual shadow cast by Queen Anne’s death would not be long-lived. Riding through the city in a suit of pale blue satin, and sporting a hat of blue and white feathers, the king was received with such enthusiasm that the whole scene surprised and perplexed an embassy of condolence, sent by the Duke of Lorraine, which had arrived at the same time. The kingdom had thrown off mourning, it seems, to celebrate James’s recovery to good health, though the twenty-four Frenchmen, clad in unrelieved black, remained less than impressed by the apparent lack of sensitivity. Convention, if nothing else, required more of the king than what had amounted, in effect, to a fleeting and partially self-centred fit of dolour. Nor could his own undoubted fears of death and dissolution justify his current wish to return to normality so rapidly, especially at a time when any outward play at celebration was marred so obviously by growing pressure both abroad and at home. For, as events in Europe continued to darken, the need for action on all fronts increased daily.
Above all, the marriage of the king’s son was becoming a matter of particular urgency. Prince Charles, the sickly child who had never been expected to survive infancy and whose weakness of limb at the age of almost 5 made it necessary for the Earl of Nottingham to carry him at his investiture as Duke of York, had grown up shy, sensitive, obstinate, priggish and dull – mollycoddled and overawed by his father, and completely overshadowed his elder brother, who would often taunt him till he wept, ‘telling him that he should be a bishop, a gown being fittest to hide his legs’. Yet with Henry’s death in 1612, his own creation as Prince of Wales four years later, and the king’s declining health, Charles had gradually emerged, for all his deficiencies, as a figure of increasing importance both at court and in the kingdom at large. And though in the opinion of the Venetian ambassador writing in 1617, he remained ‘very grave’, exhibiting ‘no other aim than to second his father, to follow him and do his pleasure’, he had nevertheless developed into a young man ‘of good constitution so far as can be judged from his appearance’, who enjoyed theatricals, rode excellently and delighted in hunting.
The prince’s devotion to his father was, moreover, fully reciprocated by the king himself, though the glow of paternal pride and affection for his delicate, studious child was too often tainted by spiteful displays of annoyance. In consequence, the heir to the throne had come to harbour a particularly warm resentment towards the dazzling favourite whom all adored and who exercised such a hold over his father’s affections. That Charles should have manifested such antagonism towards George Villiers was hardly surprising in view of the rivalry he posed, but it was magnified significantly by James’s apparent partiality whenever the two fell out. In 1616, for instance, after Charles had tried on and mislaid one of Villiers’ rings, the king is said to have called for his son and ‘used such bitter language as caused his Highness to shed tears’, before banishing the prince from his presence until the elusive ring was eventually found in his breeches by a valet. The heir to the throne would feel the sting of his father’s anger, too, in a later incident that resulted from a childish prank where, by turning the pin of a fountain, he had caused water to spurt onto the favourite’s splendid clothes. Witnessing the mischief, James this time not only spoke angry words but gave the prince two boxes on the ear, though this would not, it seems, prevent a more serious quarrel between the prince and Villiers over a game of tennis in 1618, when the latter, who was the prince’s senior by eight years, is alleged to have raised his racket in anger. ‘What, my lord,’ said Charles with all the self-satisfied superiority of a young man enjoying an unfamiliar taste of victory, ‘I think you intend to strike me!’
James, however, wished only for peace between his ‘sweet babies’, and the result was a characteristically lavish and honeyed attempt at reconciliation staged by the favourite after the king had called the two together and urged them, upon their allegiance to him, to love one another. In consequence, at a sumptuous banquet held in June 1618 to signal to the entire court the dawning of a new entente between the freshly created Earl of Buckingham and the Prince of Wales, the older of the two duly courted his young rival, and not only mended the rift but established himself at one and the same time as the prince’s lasting idol. Held out of doors at Buckingham’s new estate at Wanstead, the so-called ‘Prince’s Feast’ was a triumph, in fact, for the host’s grasp of political necessities and timing, and a testament to his intuitive grasp of Charles’s underlying needs and inclinations. For their widely opposed temperaments, as Buckingham fully appreciated, could easily be turned to rich and permanent profit, if only the less prepossessing of the two could be offered the opportunity to share the glow of adulation in which he himself basked. Both, after all, were devoted to hunting, riding, poetry, music and painting, and for an introvert like the prince, who shared his father’s emotional volatility, the gulf between antipathy and hero-worship might be easily bridged – as indeed it was.
By the time, therefore, that James had risen from his table at the end of the feast at Wanstead and made his way over to the place where Buckingham and his kin were seated, the man who had previously been firmly entrenched as rival, enemy and embodiment of all the virtues lacking in the prince himself had already been transformed into mentor, role model and oracle – a radiant being from whom a formerly delicate, awkward and taciturn individual could draw unfamiliar sources of confidence and allure. Drinking a toast to each of the Villiers family in turn, James then swore that both he and his descendants would ‘advance that House above all others’. ‘I live,’ he declared, ‘to that end.’ And now, he added gratefully, he harboured no doubt that his heir would do the same. For Charles, too, would henceforth be turning to ‘Steenie’ for guidance and succour – writing to him as ‘your true constant friend’ and praying him ‘to commend my most humble service to his Majestie’.
But while the best behaviour of the prince, whom Buckingham would soon dub ‘Baby Charles’, was now assured, the same was hardly true of the MPs that James was eventually compelled to summon for only the third time in his reign. In the aftermath of the Addled Parliament of 1614, the king had intended to cope for as long as possible by means of forced loans and benevolences, by the sale of honours and monopolies, and by the judicious levying of impositions. With the assistance of Cranfield as treasurer, moreover, such expedients had for some time proved adequate for his ordinary financial needs. But the Spanish invasion of the Palatinate in August 1620, which had driven his English subjects to fury, also jarred James’s own sense of justice to such a degree that he was even prepared to vent his anger to Gondomar. He would never trust a Spanish minister again, the ambassador was told, amid angry tears, during an audience with James at Hampton Court in September. Nor, declared the king, would he permit either his children or his religion to perish. Instead, he would go in person to defend the Palatinate.
The outburst, it is true, was followed by misgivings and hesitation, as Gondomar presented the Spanish invasion as a pathway to long-term peace. Should Frederick renounce his claims in Bohemia, the ambassador contended, then the Palatinate could be duly restored to him. And such was Gondomar’s persuasiveness that James was even prepared to dismiss Sir Robert Naunton, his secretary, from office. He remained uneasy, too, not only at the popular hatred of Spain but at the freedom with which it was expressed, as Puritan preachers found time, amid their personal attacks upon Buckingham, to fume at Spanish perfidy and the plight of Frederick and his English wife. Complaining that his subjects were becoming too republican, James therefore issued a proclamation forbidding contentious discussion of state affairs, while Buckingham did all he could to throw in his weight with Gondomar. ‘The Puritans have rendered Buckingham Spanish,’ wrote Tillières, the French ambassador, ‘for seeing that they mean to attack him, he knows no way of securing protection against them except by the Spanish match.’
But however James handled the problem which faced him at Christmas 1620 he could not hope to do so unarmed and on an income barely sufficient even for his peacetime needs. For even if his role as mediator was to continue, as he always hoped, his efforts would carry little weight unless backed by at least the potential for military action. In the summer, therefore, when Spinola first threatened the Palatinate, James had permitted a force of 2,000 English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere to go to the defence of his son-in-law’s hereditary lands. And their presence at once provided a convenient toe-hold, which could be used to provide leverage, should war become desirable or unavoidable. At the same time, since Vere’s force was composed of volunteers, it could be disavowed or reinforced as advantage served. Under such circumstances, a summons of Parliament might prove a popular, comparatively low-risk strategy of precisely the kind that the king was so often inclined to favour.
The House of Commons that confronted James in January 1621, however, was soon threatening to prove even more truculent than its predecessor. Initially, there had been grounds for optimism. Both Crown and Parliament shared, after all, the same broad objective: the restoration of Frederick and his wife to at least their hereditary dominions in the Palatinate. Even Buckingham, for that matter, had temporarily joined the majority on the king’s council that clamoured for war, and James’s opening speech showed less of the customary cudgel bluntness and rather more humility than usual. He had been carried to the House in a portative chair and there were whispers that he might not walk again, but, in acknowledging the threat of war and his need for money, he appeared amenable and ready to curry sympathy. In speaking of his efforts to keep the peace, he also spoke graciously of his predecessor: ‘I will not say that I have governed as well as she did, but I may say we have had as much peace in our time as in hers.’ And his request for money was also couched in anything but strident tones. ‘I have laboured as a woman in travail,’ he declared, ‘… and I dare say I have been as sparing to trouble you not with monopolies or in subsidies as ever King before me, considering the greatness of my occasions and charges.’
It was the very issue of patents and monopolies, however, that soon dominated debate and led directly to criticism of those close to Buckingham. For, although the favourite had garnered little personal profit from the sale of exclusive marketing rights, he had nevertheless supported them for the benefit of his relations. Sir Giles Mompesson, one of the worst offenders, was connected to the Villiers nexus by his sister-in-law, while Buckingham’s brother Kit and half-brother Edward had also benefited handsomely. Such, indeed, was the favourite’s alarm that he initially sought the dissolution of Parliament, only to be rebuffed by the king, before opting to turn tail and disown his corrupt kinsmen. In the process, he spared himself by posing as nothing less than the champion of reform, though Francis Bacon proved less fortunate. Pleading guilty to a charge of corruption on 3 May and describing himself as ‘a broken reed’, the Lord Chancellor was debarred from office, subjected to a fine of £40,000 and consigned to the Tower at the king’s pleasure. ‘Those who will strike at your Chancellor,’ Bacon had warned James, ‘it is much to be feared will strike at your crown.’ But the king had insisted all the same upon an impartial hearing, before ultimately mitigating the sentence. Bacon had claimed, after all, that he had done no more than ‘partake of the abuses of the time’, and the king seems to have accepted as much. ‘In giving penalties,’ he declared, ‘I do always suppose myself in the offender, and then judge how far the like occasion might have tempted me.’
Such admirable sentiments did not, however, prevent James from making a foolish and costly lapse into dishonesty of his own. Though the Parliament of 1621 had been summoned in response to the crisis on the Continent, the issue of foreign policy remained, in accordance with tradition, beyond its remit, and the king himself had touched on the European situation in only the vaguest terms. Assuring MPs that peace remained his objective, James nevertheless made clear that he must negotiate ‘with a sword in his hand’, and that, if necessary, he would spare no personal cost to recover the Palatinate. But in asking for funds, he concealed the real sum required – a sum that had been made clear to him by a report he had specifically requested from a council of war some months earlier. Advised at that time that an army of at least 30,000 men was required for intervention on the Continent and that such a force would necessitate a down payment of £250,000, followed by further payments of around £900,000 per year thereafter, James nevertheless chose to ask for £500,000. The result was an interim grant of only £145,000 from MPs made suspicious of their king’s motives by his insistence on further negotiations with Spain rather than an immediate declaration of war.
When Parliament adjourned in June, therefore, the scope for optimism was limited. But when MPs reassembled in November, dissent was soon broadening ominously – not least because James had taken the remarkable decision to leave London for a Newmarket hunting trip before the new session began, leaving his ministers hopelessly exposed in their efforts to contain the situation. ‘His Majesty seems to hope,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘that the Parliament will readily afford him every means of making war with little trouble on his part.’ Yet before long, MPs were employing what they now declared to be their ‘ancient and undoubted right to free speech’ to encroach upon areas of policy that had always been closed to them. Some called for sea war with Spain rather than ‘pottering and pelting in the Palatinate’, as John Chamberlain put it, ‘only to consume both our men and means’. Others called for broader action against Catholics at home, as enemies of the commonwealth. There were demands, too, that Prince Charles should be ‘timely and happily married to one of our own religion’. And in the meantime James merely saw fit to dispatch from Newmarket an angry letter to the Speaker, which would pour oil from afar upon already troubled waters.
In suggesting that his absence – through what he termed an ‘indisposition of health’ – had emboldened certain ‘fiery spirits’ to debate matters ‘far beyond their reach and capacity’, James also complained how this had tended towards ‘our high dishonour and breach of prerogative royal’, and forbade that MPs should hereafter meddle in ‘deep matters of state, nor deal with our dearest son’s match with the daughter of Spain, nor touch the honour of that king’. But it was the threat accompanying the letter that forced the issue, for James also added ‘that we think ourselves very free and able to punish any man’s misdemeanours in Parliament as well during their sitting as after; which we mean not to spare hereafter upon any occasion of any man’s insolent behaviour there that shall be ministered unto us’. Instead of sticking to the point at issue, on which he was certainly within his constitutional rights, James had therefore plunged knee deep into questions that had best been left unmentioned. Worse still, he had chosen his battleground poorly, for in lacking the natural gravitas and finesse of his predecessor, he had nevertheless resorted to intimidation and threats of force that he was ill-equipped to deliver. An assault on individual members was likely to leave him not only penniless and discredited but at the mercy of Spain, and the tone of his warning represented in any case a challenge that the more recalcitrant elements of the House of Commons were hardly able to ignore.
The result was a meeting at Newmarket between the king and a parliamentary delegation that demonstrated all too palpably the scale of the rift between the two sides. Though the MPs had arrived ostensibly with the intention of expressing their requests more moderately than before, James was not only unbending but brashly dismissive. Greeting the delegates with a patronising request that his servants ‘bring stools for the ambassadors’, he balked once more at the suggestion that freedom of speech was ‘our undoubted right and an inheritance received from our ancestors’. ‘We are an old and experienced king,’ he objected, ‘needing no such lessons.’ He resented too, it seems, the petitioners’ ‘great complaints of the danger of religion within this kingdom, tacitly implying our ill-government on this point’, and rejected what he deemed to be their desire to ‘bring all kinds of causes within their compass and jurisdiction’ like ‘the Puritan ministers in Scotland’ had supposedly done before them. Almost inevitably, moreover, he concluded with a further declaration that Parliament’s privileges were solely ‘derived from the grace and permission of our ancestors and us’.
By equating the present with his Scottish past and treating an opportunity for conciliation as a reckoning, James had therefore inflamed and exacerbated, and, in doing so, called forth a formal protestation from MPs on 18 December, since there was now no point in further debate. Instead, the privileges of the House of Commons would be set forth in writing, with neither hint of retreat nor trace of apology, leaving James to broil in the kind of frustration and fury that had marred his reign in Scotland. ‘The plain truth is,’ he wrote, ‘we cannot with patience endure our subjects to use such anti-monarchical words concerning their liberties, except they had subjoined that they were granted unto them by the grace and favour of our predecessors.’ And though councillors urged that he should not dissolve Parliament, Gondomar added counter-pressure of his own by suggesting that Spain could not negotiate while such a body remained in existence. Nor was the Spaniard alone, it seems, in his desire for dissolution, for he recorded gladly how ‘the king was being valiantly urged on by the Marquis of Buckingham and other good friends’.
Finding that his bid for popularity by throwing his monopolist cronies to the wolves was unsuccessful, Buckingham had indeed returned to his former pro-Spanish course and predictably carried the heir to the throne with him. For now Charles too had begun to fancy himself as anxious for a Spanish match as his father. Cajoled, therefore, by those whose sympathy he most valued, and faced, apparently, with the intolerable prospect of surrendering to the House of Commons the very authority he had fought so strenuously to defend against the Scottish Kirk, James found diplomatic dependency upon Spain the only acceptable option. Nor, in doing so, could he temper his bile or resist the urge for a vacuously imperious gesture. Sending for the Journal of the House of Commons, he tore out, in the presence of his council, the very page on which the offending protestation had been recorded – an act which for Gondomar was ‘the best thing that has happened in the interest of Spain and the Catholic religion since Luther began to preach heresy a hundred years ago’. ‘It is certain,’ he added, ‘that the king will never summon another Parliament as long as he lives.’ With no prospect of English intervention now at hand, moreover, the Emperor Ferdinand would duly confirm by the end of 1622 that the Palatinate was to be presented to his cousin Maximilian of Bavaria, leaving James to dangle on the end of a Spanish hook, baited with lukewarm prospects of a marriage that was, in any case, bitterest wormwood to all red-blooded Protestant Englishmen.
The interminable negotiations for Charles’s union with a Spanish bride had already assumed a curious air of unreality since their initiation a decade earlier under the aegis of Carr and the Howards, when Gondomar had first arrived at the English court. Now, indeed, it was not only a different infanta, but a different prince: less passive, more influential, and, most significantly of all, altogether more passionate about the enterprise. For at the same time that Gondomar nursed dreams of the English royal family’s conversion to Catholicism, and James held fast to the notion that a Spanish alliance might yet confirm his status as the ‘peacemaker king’, Charles harboured boyish visions of emulating the romantic feat of his father by bringing back his bride from over the sea. While professional diplomats like John Digby, Earl of Bristol, tediously trod water in Madrid, and his father offered unconvincing half-promises of relaxing the penal laws and allowing a Catholic upbringing for the infanta’s children, the prince himself now dreamt of breaking the deadlock by direct action of the most effective kind. He would cross to France, incognito and without a formal pass, to win his bride in person. He would do so, moreover, in the sole company of his guide and mentor, Buckingham, who, seeing the opportunity for a spectacular personal victory, now encouraged the venture at every turn.
When Gondomar returned home in 1622, therefore, and while James and his council were seriously discussing a military expedition to recover Heidelberg, the prince and his hero were secretly writing to the absent ambassador of their intention. The Spaniard, indeed, had hatched the plan initially and, as negotiations flagged once more in February 1623, Charles and Buckingham mooted it with the king himself. As James well knew, the escapade would expose his son to the very real and largely unnecessary dangers of a journey halfway across Europe, unguarded and unattended. Equally recklessly, it would destroy at a stroke the delicate bargaining position built up by the Earl of Bristol and allow the Spaniards the opportunity to raise their terms as high as they pleased, while the king’s English subjects seethed with indignation. But ill health, despondency and a doting fondness for his two ‘sweet babies’ seem to have sapped James’s resolve until his consent was finally wrung from him during a surprise visit late one night. And though, according to Clarendon, he fell next morning ‘into a great passion of tears, and told them he was undone, and that it would break his heart if they pursued their resolution’, Charles and Buckingham were nevertheless allowed to prevail.
In consequence, on 18 February 1623 two heavily disguised young men using the names of Jack and Tom Smith crossed the Thames by ferry at Gravesend, leaving the King of England to brood and fret upon the dangers ahead of them. Wearing false beards, which in one case fell off inopportunely, they grossly overpaid the ferryman and further excited his suspicion by requesting that they be set ashore just outside Gravesend instead of at the usual landing place within the town. When, moreover, the local magistrates were subsequently informed of the likelihood that two suspicious travellers were slipping out of the country for the purpose of fighting a duel, an attempt was made to intercept them at Rochester, though they had left before they were apprehended. Escaping arrest, too, at the hands of Sir Henry Mainwaring, Lieutenant of Dover Castle, as well as the Mayor of Canterbury, the two would nevertheless reach Dover unscathed and arrive in Paris on 21 February after a wretchedly seasick crossing to Boulogne.
Just over a fortnight later, at 8 p.m. on 7 March, the Earl of Bristol was attending to important business at his embassy in Madrid when a mysterious Mr Smith demanded immediate access. The visitor, in fact, was Buckingham, and though Bristol disapproved of the venture, he had little option but to inform a jubilant Gondomar of the heir to the English throne’s arrival. Hastening to his superior, the Count of Olivares, who conveyed the news in turn to King Philip, Gondomar had achieved, it seems, the ultimate diplomatic coup. For, while Philip chose to remain cool until the attitude of the Pope had been clarified, the bargaining position of his government had been enhanced immeasurably, since any return to England without the infanta in tow would involve such an intolerable loss of face for the two visitors. From Gondomar’s perspective, meanwhile, the prince’s arrival could only be explained by his imminent conversion to Catholicism – a belief that both Charles and Buckingham foolishly saw fit to encourage initially.
So far, however, at least James’s worst fears for his son and Buckingham had not been realised. Though he had agonised over their safety, he had hailed them, nevertheless, as ‘dear adventurous knights worthy to be put in a new romanso’, and in spite of the Earl of Bristol’s misgivings, the first signs appeared encouraging. ‘I must confess ingenuously,’ Bristol informed James, ‘that if Your Majesty had been pleased to ask my advice concerning the prince his coming in this fashion, I should rather have dissuaded than given any such counsel, especially before the coming of the dispensation.’ But though the papal dispensation sanctioning the marriage, to which the earl referred, was never likely to prove acceptable, the Spanish king, at least, had hidden his reservations admirably and made himself suitably agreeable, riding beside Charles as he escorted him to a suite in the royal palace. Nor was the prince disappointed upon meeting his 16-year-old inamorata for the first time. Fair haired with languorous eyes and full lips, the infanta Maria made such an impression, in fact, that Buckingham wrote home to James to tell how his son was ‘so touched at the heart that he confesses all he ever yet saw is nothing to her’.
The initial meeting had been long delayed, however, as every conceivable device of the rigidly formal Spanish court was employed to keep the couple apart. And when at last an audience was granted, Charles was left in no doubt as to what he must wear and what he might say. Never allowed to speak to the infanta alone, he resorted ultimately to leaping the wall of her orchard – an act which not only breached the bounds of Spanish decorum but also succeeded in frightening his quarry uncontrollably. When permitted to see her at court theatricals, moreover, the prince found her impenetrably aloof as he watched from afar, ‘half an hour together in thoughtful posture’ and with an intense concentration that reminded Olivares of a cat watching a mouse. Convinced by her confessor of the eternal peril to her soul which would be entailed by each night sharing her bed with a heretic, the young girl was predictably repelled by the prospect of her sacrifice on the altar of marriage. And when Buckingham informed his wife of Charles’s predicament, she responded, in all good faith it seems, with a characteristically ingenuous attempt at helpfulness that captured the underlying oddity of the situation. ‘I have sent you some perspective glasses,’ she told her husband, ‘the best I could get. I am sorry the prince is kept at such a distance that he needs them to see her.’
In England, meanwhile, James was faced with increasing pressure as his councillors headed by the Earl of Arundel, the only Howard who now still held power, expressed consternation at the proposed marriage and dissatisfaction that the king had ever permitted the prince’s journey in the first place. When pressed, the king was merely inclined to heap all blame upon both Buckingham and his son’s high passion. ‘The king,’ wrote John Williams, Dean of Westminster, to the favourite, ‘would seem sometimes, as I hear, to take it upon himself (as we have advised him to do by proclamation); yet he sticks at it and many times casts it upon you both.’ And in sparing himself further opprobrium, James had clearly exposed Buckingham to the kind of hostility that he was less able than ever to ignore. ‘Detestation of the Marquis’, wrote the Venetian envoy Valaresso, ‘has increased beyond all measure’, while Dean Williams pulled no punches in informing the favourite how ‘all the court and rabble of the people lay the voyage upon Your Lordship’. Such, indeed, was the outcry in London churches that James had no choice but to forbid all prayers for the prince’s soul ‘now that he was going into the House of Rimmon’.
In spite of James’s misgivings about his predicament, however, the same flow of cloying correspondence to his two ‘sweethearts’ in Madrid continued unabated. ‘God bless you, my sweet baby,’ one letter ended, ‘and send him good fortune in his wooing, to the comfort of his old father, who cannot be happy but in him. My ship is ready to make sail, and only stays a fair wind.’ On another occasion, there were assurances to Buckingham that the king was wearing his picture ‘in a blue ribbon under my wash-coat, next my heart’. And while he expressed concern on 25 March about an implication from Buckingham that he might lean further towards Rome, the king was nevertheless prepared to interpret the suggestion in the most positive light possible. ‘I know not what ye mean,’ he wrote, ‘by my acknowledging the pope’s spiritual supremacy … but all that I can guess at your meaning is that it may be ye have an allusion to a passage in my book against Bellarmine, where I offer, if the pope would quit his godhead, and usurping over kings, to acknowledge him for the chief bishop, to which all appeals of churchmen ought to lie en dernier resort … For I am not a monsieur that can shift his religion as easily as he can shift his shirt when he comes from tennis.’
There were paternal concerns, too, about the prince’s welfare, as James begged his son not to exert himself in hot weather, ‘for I fear my baby may take fever by it’, and suggested that Charles and Buckingham should keep themselves fit by private dancing, ‘though ye should whistle and sing to one another, like Jack and Tom, for fault of better music’. The prince’s spending, it is true, continued to perplex the king, and after jewels valuing some £80,000 were dispatched in what proved to be a fruitless effort to dazzle the Spaniards, Charles was urged to be ‘as sparing as ye can’, for ‘God knows how my coffers are already drained’. But in other respects James’s fussing and indulgence remained unstinting. Garter robes and insignia, for example, were specially dispatched, so that they could be worn on St George’s Day, ‘for it will be a goodly sight for the Spaniards to see my boys in them’. Nor, it seems, were Buckingham’s relations neglected in James’s thoughts at this trying time. He had written letters to the favourite’s mother, consoling her during her son’s absence, and kept a particularly close watch, it seems, upon his wife, believing that she might be pregnant. ‘And, my sweet Steenie gossip,’ the king wrote, ‘I must tell thee that Kate was a little sick these four or five days of a headache, and the next morning, after a little casting, was well again. I hope it is a good sign that I shall shortly be a gossip over again, for I must be thy perpetual gossip.’
In spite of their futility, there were even arrangements for the prince’s heroic homecoming with his bride. Eight great ships and two pinnaces were to sail, and planning was in hand for the infanta’s magnificent cabin. A wing of St James’s Palace was also enlarged and refurbished and specially equipped with an oratory for her use. And all the while, the prince remained as wide-eyed and artlessly optimistic as ever. ‘I, your baby, have since this conclusion been with my mistress, and she sits publicly with me at the plays, and within this two or three days shall take place of the queen as Princess of England.’ But it was now two years since the pope had first been asked to sanction the marriage and the condition that James should grant full liberty of worship to English Catholics seemed as implausible as ever. ‘I have written a letter,’ James had already told his two ‘sweet boys’, ‘to the Conde de Olivares as both of you designed me, as full of thanks and kindness as can be devised as indeed he well deserves, but in the end of your letter ye put in in a cooling card anent the nuncio’s averseness to this business.’ ‘The pope’, James added ominously, ‘will always be averse’ unless the infanta be given ‘free exercise of her religion here’.
But when the precise terms for the dispensation were finally brought from Madrid by Sir Francis Cottington in the late summer, they proved far more shocking still. Not only was the infanta to control the education of her children, she was also to be permitted to open her chapel in London for public worship, and retain a fully Catholic household, the members of which were to be personally selected by none other than her brother, Philip IV. The religious life of this household, moreover, was to be administered by a bishop at the head of twenty-four priests, all of whom, though resident in England, were not to be subject to English law. Worse still, it was stipulated that there must be complete freedom of worship for Catholics, and that the Oath of Allegiance should be altered to accommodate them. To cap all, James and his entire council were to agree on oath to all clauses of the dispensation, while the king was to swear additionally that he would obtain parliamentary agreement to these terms within a year. Even the date of the infanta’s arrival remained doubtful, for that matter, since Spain remained reluctant to dispatch its princess until the year in question was finally over.
To suggest that Cottington’s tidings fell as a hammer blow upon the King of England’s pipe dreams would be an understatement. Vain hope gave way at once to despair, which dissolved soon after into hysteria, as James became convinced that his babes were now prisoners, and determined to recover them by signing anything that the Spanish government might now ask of him. The news that Cottington had brought him, he wrote to Buckingham and Charles on 14 June, ‘hath stricken me dead. I feel it shall very much shorten my days, and I am the more perplexed that I know not how to satisfy the people’s expectation here, neither know I what to say to the council …’ And as the true scale of his essentially self-inflicted predicament dawned upon him, James’s main concern remained personal: on the one hand, his own credibility, but above all the safety of the two individuals around whom his world centred. ‘But as for my advice and directions that ye crave,’ he wrote, ‘in case they will not alter their decree, it is in a word, to come speedily away, and if ye can get leave, give over all treaty … alas, I now repent me sore that ever I suffered you to go away. I care not for match nor nothing, so I may once have you in my arms again. God grant it, God grant it, God grant it; amen, amen, amen!’
All, then, depended from James’s perspective upon the swiftest possible conclusion of the marriage treaty, in the hope that something might be salvaged from the wreckage as a prelude to the return of his beloved boys. And accordingly, on 20 July, James formally ratified it in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall. For some time, in fact, the marriage had lost what little appeal in Spain it had ever had, but even the most outrageous Spanish demands, which had been raised largely with the intention of killing all negotiations once and for all, were now accepted without demur. The secret clauses, which had earlier reduced the King of England to a state of horrified incomprehension, were duly sworn by him in private before the Marquis of Inojosa, who had succeeded Gondomar as ambassador, and Don Carlos de Coloma, Philip IV’s special envoy. But there was no reference to the £600,000 dowry, to which the Spaniards had already whittled the intended windfall that had been dazzling James’s imagination for the past ten years, and without which, as he assured Buckingham, he must surely go bankrupt. Guarantees of Spanish help to bring about the restoration of Frederick and Elizabeth in the Palatinate also went unmentioned – leaving James to confess that he was ‘marrying his son with a portion of his daughter’s tears’. That same evening, however, in the new Banqueting House which Inigo Jones had built specifically for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, James and his Spanish ambassadors still dined in particular splendour from plates ‘of pure and perfect gold’.