‘If I have not got the king, at least I have got the prince.’
Olivares and Gondomar now approached Philip IV with the astounding news that the prince of Wales had come in person to claim the hand of his sister. But what did Charles mean by travelling all this way to Spain? The grandees came to the conclusion that he was now ready to change his religion. Philip and Charles then agreed that they should meet in the open air, thus avoiding all the pomp and circumstance of a formal audience. The prince did not have a large enough retinue to appear with dignity. So he was invited into the king’s carriage, and a few days later he was conducted to the apartments reserved for him in the royal palace.
It was now widely believed that Charles was ready to convert, and indeed he gave no sign to the contrary. He continued to temporize on the matter, eager at all costs not to offend the Spaniards before he had obtained his wife. ‘We think it not amiss’, he and Buckingham wrote to James, ‘to assure you that, neither in spiritual nor in temporal things, there is anything pressed upon us more than is already agreed upon.’ They could not have been more wrong. The infanta herself declared that she would never agree to marry a Protestant. She had been told that she would be sleeping with a heretic who would one day burn in the fires of hell.
The foreign policy of England was now also entangled with Dutch affairs. On 27 February 1623, the principal merchant of the East India Company was tortured and then beheaded in Amboyna, now the Maluku islands of Indonesia; he was executed by order of the local Dutch governor, on the grounds that he was planning to attack the Dutch garrison. Nine other English merchants suffered the same fate, and the report of the incident provoked outrage in the nation on an unprecedented scale. It was the subject of plays and ballads, chapbooks and woodcuts, inflaming public opinion against the country across the North Sea.
In the following month some Dutch men-of-war chased privateers into the harbour of Leith and began firing at the town itself; this was considered by James to be an unwarrantable infringement of sovereign territory. A second incident of a similar kind occurred at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. For the king the actions of the Dutch were intolerable. In retaliation he sent a letter to his son in Madrid, asking him to open negotiations with the Spanish for a joint attack upon the Netherlands which the two countries would then partition. On few occasions has so small a pretext been used for so great a war. Yet it came to nothing. James’s anger cooled, and a compromise with the Netherlands was reached. His initial proposals, however, demonstrate how implicitly he still relied upon Spanish support; the whole episode also displays his impulsiveness and unpredictability.
* * *
Charles had not yet been given any opportunity of greeting his proposed bride, and so at the beginning of April he was invited to an audience with the queen of Spain and the infanta. The conversation was supposed to be limited to a few formal words of address, but the prince went so far as to speak of his affection for her. This was a grave breach of protocol in a court that maintained the strictest rules of behaviour. Charles realized that he had offended, and fell silent. The infanta herself was not impressed. The prince, however, had been profoundly affected by the sight of her; he wrote to England that she was even more beautiful than he had expected.
It was urged by his hosts that Charles might at least receive some instruction in the precepts of Catholicism. So he agreed to participate in a religious discussion with four Carmelite friars. Their meeting began in silence and, when one of the friars asked if he had any matter to propose for debate, he replied, ‘Nothing at all. I have no doubts whatsoever.’ Charles even went so far as to ask that the reformed English service might be conducted for him in the palace, whereupon Olivares sent for Cottington and told him that the entry of English chaplains would be resisted by force. This did not bode well for any settlement.
By May it had become clear to Buckingham and the prince that they had made a grave error in travelling to Madrid. If they had remained in England, all the conditions and qualifications could have been discussed by experienced diplomats; they themselves were simply confused and angered by all the demands now being made upon them.
Towards the end of that month a Spanish ‘junta of theologians’ decreed that the infanta must remain in her native land for twelve months after the marriage had been solemnized. In that period the king of England must prove his good intentions by allowing his Catholic subjects the free exercise of their religion; all penal laws against them were to be suspended. It was further suggested that the prince might also prefer to spend the following year in Spain. He would then enjoy to the utmost the fruits of the marriage.
Sir Francis Cottington returned to England with the news. ‘My sweet boys,’ James wrote, ‘your letter by Cottington hath stricken me dead. I fear 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 in the council … Alas I now repent me sore, that ever I suffered you to go away.’ He was in fact more concerned about his son than the changes of policy that the ‘junta’ had demanded. One observer noted that ‘the king is now quite stupefied’. ‘Do you think’, he asked a courtier, ‘that I shall ever see the prince again?’ He burst into tears.
The prince himself was mired in indecision. He was told that the delay between the marriage and the infanta’s departure for England could be shortened by six months. In an audience with Philip IV on 7 July, Charles assented to the terms. ‘I have resolved’, he said, ‘to accept with my whole heart what has been proposed to me, both as to the articles touching religion, and as to the security required.’ A few days before, he had made statements of precisely the opposite intent.
James knew well enough that parliament would never allow English Catholics permanent immunity from prosecution; and yet he feared that, if he did not sign the agreement demanded by the ‘junta’, his son would never be permitted to leave Madrid. He summoned the members of his privy council and pleaded with them to take an oath to uphold the Spanish terms. Faced with the importance of maintaining the king’s authority, and alarmed by the prospect of the heir apparent being detained in the Spanish capital, the council reluctantly agreed to take the oath.
The decision of the king, taken in confusion and anxiety, was perhaps not a wise one. It taught the English Catholics that they must rely for their safety on a foreign power, and it told the English people that James was willing to make a bargain with Spain against the obvious wishes of parliament. The Roman Catholic Church, for many years after, was identified with contempt for the rule of law. It was believed by many that, while the prince was detained in Spain, Philip could extort any terms he wished. John Chamberlain wrote that ‘alas our hands are bound by the absence of our most precious jewel’. It was widely noted that the crucifix, once the symbol of papistry, had been reinstalled in the royal chapel. Another chapel was even then being erected in St James’s Palace for the imminent coming of the infanta. Buckingham’s mother converted to Rome. When the archbishop of Canterbury told the king that the toleration of Catholics could not be permitted ‘by the laws and privileges of the kingdom’, it was related that the king ‘swore bitterly and asked how he should get his son home again’.
Two weeks after this reported conversation, on 25 July 1623, Charles and Philip signed the marriage contract. James dispatched jewels of great price to his son as gifts for the expected bride. When the prince asked for horses to be also sent to him, the king answered that his coffers were now empty.
Yet, after all this intrigue and resentment, the marriage never took place. The prince had changed his mind once more. His affection for the infanta had been gradually displaced by his resentment at his treatment in Spain; the king and his courtiers were endlessly prevaricating on the departure of Maria Anna. His companion, Buckingham, had been regarded with ill-concealed distaste. On 28 August he took an oath committing himself to the marriage, but he had already decided to leave Madrid without her. Three weeks later he and Buckingham
set sail from Santander to England. The news of their landing at Portsmouth, on 5 October, was the cause of general rejoicing; the blessed prince had been rescued from the jaws of the dragon. He had escaped the wiles of the harlot of Rome. Spain would no longer be able to command the councils of the king. When Charles crossed the Thames he was greeted with carillons of bells; the wealthy laid out tables of food and wine in the streets; debtors were released from prison and felons rescued from death. It was a day of rain and storm yet one contemporary counted 335 bonfires between Whitehall and Temple Bar; 108 bonfires were lit between St Paul’s and London Bridge alone. A contemporary ballad set the tone:
The Catholic king hath a little young thing
Called Donna Maria his sister,
Our prince went to Spain her love to obtain,
But yet by good luck he hath missed her.
A shorter rhyme was also carried from street to street:
On the fifth day of October,
It will be treason to be sober.
The two men rode straight from London to the royal hunting lodge at Royston where king, son and favourite all wept. Yet not all was well with the happy family. Buckingham, an erstwhile supporter of Spain, fell into a fury at all things Spanish; the contempt for him in Madrid was now common knowledge. One Spanish courtier, speaking of Buckingham, had said that ‘we would rather put the infanta headlong into a well than into his hands’. Charles was equally dissatisfied with his treatment at the hands of the Spanish court; they had denied him his bride and treated him like a fool. ‘I am ready’, he told his father, ‘to conquer Spain, if you will allow me to do it.’ At a stroke James’s well-considered, if not always well-executed, policy of twenty years would be destroyed.
Yet Charles had learned some useful lessons in Madrid. He had been impressed by Spanish formality and protocol that emphasized the divinity hedged about a king; he had also become an admirer of the art collected by the Spanish royal family and took back with him, to England, a Titian and a Correggio among other notable paintings. In his own reign the taste of the court would be generally elevated even if some of these ‘gay gazings’, as the paintings were called, smacked of the old religion.
The popular prejudice against the Catholic cause was strikingly demonstrated when a garret attached to the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed on 26 October 1623. A Catholic priest was preaching to a congregation of some 400 people when the floor gave way, pitching the people into the ‘confession room’ beneath. Over ninety were killed, among them eight priests and fifteen ‘of note and rank’. It was widely believed that the accident was the direct result of God’s particular judgement against the papists, and the bishop of London refused to allow any of the dead to be buried in the city’s churchyards. A mob had also gathered outside the residence of the French ambassador, shrieking execrations against the old faith. Some of the survivors were assailed with insults or assaulted with mud and stones.
The press for war against Spain was growing ever stronger. The situation of the Protestants in Europe was worse than it had been for many decades. The imperial troops were undertaking the forced conversion of the people of Bohemia, while Frederick’s erstwhile subjects in the Palatinate were suffering from religious persecution. The defeat of the forces of Christian of Brunswick, one of the last Protestant leaders still standing, heralded the supremacy of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, and his fellow Habsburg Philip IV of Spain. Thomas Gataker, an English Protestant theologian, declared that ‘the last hour is now running. And we are those on whom the end of the world is fallen.’
The king himself was growing weaker. A memoir on the king’s health drawn up at the end of 1623 reported that he was ‘easily affected by cold and suffers in cold and damp weather’; he used to enjoy hunting but ‘now he is quieter and lies or sits more, but that is due to the weakness of his knee-joints … His mind is easily moved suddenly. He is very wrathful, but the fit soon passes off.’ He was now opposed by his son and by his favourite; Charles and Buckingham, as impetuous in their hatred of Spain as they had once been recklessly in favour of a Spanish match, were now directing the pressure for war.
For Buckingham the chance of fighting a pious crusade against the heretic promised great rewards for his domestic reputation as well as for his private fortune; his post as lord high admiral guaranteed him a tenth of all prizes won upon the seas. The policy of ‘the sharp edge’, as it became known, might also allow the young prince to acquire some sort of military glory without which, as the example of his father showed, kingship lost half of its lustre. It was Charles, therefore, who began to assume command of state affairs. He took the chair of the privy council while his father preferred to remain in the country, where Buckingham was able to insulate the king from any Spanish overtures. The Venetian ambassador told his doge and senate that ‘the balance of affairs leans to the side of the prince, while Buckingham remains at Newmarket to prevent any harm…’
A parliament assembled in February 1624, when the king’s opening speech was tentative and hesitant. He could neither disown his son-in-law and the freedom of the Palatinate nor press for war against Spain and the imperialists. He did not know where to turn. In private he had ranted and sworn, pretending illness to avoid difficult decisions, demanding repose and even death to end his sufferings. In his public speech to parliament, he asked for help. He said that as a result of his son’s fruitless journey to Madrid ‘I awaked as a man out of a dream … the business is nothing advanced neither of the match nor of the palatinate, for all the long treaties and great promises’. In the past James had earnestly upheld his sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs as part of his royal prerogative. But now ‘I shall entreat your good and sound advice for the glory of God, the peace of the kingdom, and weal of my children’. Five days later Buckingham met the Lords and Commons in the Banqueting House where he whipped up their anger against the duplicitous Spaniards.
A peace party still existed at the court and council. The lord treasurer, the earl of Middlesex, was adamantly opposed to any war with Spain. There was no money left. It would be folly to embark on a foreign enterprise when there was not coin enough to pay the servants of the Crown in England. Charles and Buckingham, therefore, found it necessary to destroy him. At the beginning of April the earl was charged with various counts of financial corruption; he had no chance. ‘Remove this strange and prodigious comet,’ Sir John Eliot declared of him, ‘which so fatally hangs over us.’ He was impeached by the Commons and judged to be guilty by the Lords. James himself was much more aware of the dangers of such a proceeding than his son. He declared that Charles had set a dangerous precedent that would in time weaken the power of the throne. The prince, in other words, had invited parliament to collaborate with him in the destruction of one of the king’s own ministers. Would it not be tempted to exploit some of its newfound power? James’s prophecy would soon enough have the ring of truth.
For the time being, however, Charles and Buckingham could effectively lead the common cause described by one of their supporters as that of the ‘patriots’; it was defined by its anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish animus abroad, together with its supposed fight against court corruption at home. For the first, and perhaps the last, time in his life Charles was in broad agreement with the gentlemen of the Commons and the country. At the end of February 1624, the Lords asked that any negotiations with Spain should be broken off. A deputation to the king in the following month requested the fitting of a fleet and the repair of maritime fortifications; the occupation of the Palatinate by Spanish and Bavarian troops should be ended.
For these measures James needed money and, at his urgent request, he was granted £300,000. But how was any war to be fought, and against whom was it to be directed? Against the Holy Roman Emperor or against the king of Spain? Or against Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, who now controlled the Palatinate? The king prevaricated in his usual manner. ‘But whether I shall send twenty thousand or ten thousand, whether by sea or lan
d, east or west, by diversion or otherwise, by invasion upon the Bavarian [Maximilian I] or the Emperor, you must leave that to the king.’ The parliament might wish for war with Spain, but it might be in the interests of the English king only to threaten war; the Spaniards might then agree to restore Frederick to his throne. Many in the court and council were themselves wary of a direct war against the Spanish; battles on sea or on land cost money, and money could only be raised by imposing fresh taxes.
The Spanish envoys had meanwhile found their way to the king through the connivance of certain courtiers. It soon reached the king’s ear that they accused Buckingham of ‘affecting popularity’, and charged him with drawing up a plan that would effectively imprison James in a convenient country house so that the prince might rule in his name. They suggested that the favourite believed the king to be a poor old man unfit to govern. There may or may not have been truth to these claims but the king took the unexpected step of interrogating his councillors on the matter. All of them swore that they had never heard a whisper of treason from Buckingham. The favourite was saved.
James had signalled his willingness to prepare himself for the possibility of war ‘if he could be seconded’. The only possible ally was Louis XIII of France; the French king, at least, had the power to stand against the Spanish or the imperialists in Germany. Soon after parliament had assembled, two envoys were sent from London to Paris with the instruction to seek the hand of the French king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, for Charles. Their proposals were indeed welcomed; it was in the interests of France permanently to separate England from Spain. Louis was a better Frenchman than he was a Catholic, and had no reason to shrink from conflict with his co-religionists. Yet the French court insisted, at the beginning of the negotiations, that English Catholics be given the same liberties as the Spanish had demanded for them in the previous marriage treaty.
Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution Page 10