The Cradle King (54 page)

Charles later declared that ‘that heroic thought started out of his own brain, to visit the court of Madrid’.
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At some point, the Prince confided in Buckingham, winning his support and, according to their own later testimonies, Buckingham and Charles together then persuaded James to agree: the Prince ‘being of fit age and ripeness for marriage’, recalled James, ‘urged me to know the certainty in a matter of so great weight’. James’s response was to insist on a travelling companion: ‘I only sent the man whom I most trusted, Buckingham, commanding him never to leave him nor to return home without him.’
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But then the King got cold feet, and called in to give his advice Sir Francis Cottington, Charles’s own secretary, and a previous ambassador to Spain. When Cottington argued against the plan, James reportedly ‘threw himself upon his bed’, crying ‘I told you this before’, lamenting passionately ‘that he was undone, and should lose Baby Charles’. Buckingham then attacked Cottington ‘with all possible bitterness of words’ and berated the King, saying that if he did not allow Charles to go nobody could accept his word on anything: ‘It would be such a disobligation upon the Prince, who had set his heart now upon the journey after his Majesty’s approbation, that he could never forget it, nor forgive any man who had been the cause of it.’
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Buckingham’s vehement support won the day for the Prince, and the plan was put into commission in February 1623. On Monday 17th, Charles and Buckingham were with James at Theobalds. That day, the King departed for Royston, but Charles and Buckingham headed instead for Buckingham’s estate at New Hall. As they took their parting from the King, James said he expected them to ‘be with me upon Friday night’. ‘Sir,’ replied Buckingham, ‘if we should stay a day or two longer I hope your Majesty would pardon us.’ ‘Well, well,’ replied James. The little exchange was for the benefit of onlookers, because the King was well aware of their plans. After a night at New Hall, Charles and Buckingham rode to Gravesend calling themselves Thomas and John, or Tom and Jack Smith, accompanied only by Buckingham’s Gentleman of the Horse, Richard Greames.
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Despite his reservations, and his very real concern for the wellbeing of his son and favourite, James could not help but be struck by the romance of the plot. In his many letters written and sent during the time of the escapade, Charles and Buckingham became ‘My sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance.’
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He was even struck with the Muse long enough to pen an eight-stanza poem entitled ‘Of Jack, and Tom’ that saw the quest for the Infanta as an echo of his grandfather’s and his own advances to French and Danish princesses:

Love is a world of many Spains,

Where coldest hills, and hottest plains

With barren rocks, and fertile fields,

By turn despair, and comfort yields.

    But who can doubt of prosperous luck

    Where love, and fortune, doth conduct?

Thy grandsire great, thy father too

Were thine examples, this to do;

Whose brave attempts, in heat of love,

Both France and Denmark, did approve.

    So Jack and Tom do nothing new

    When love and fortune they pursue.

Kind shepherds, that have loved them long

Be not so rash, in censuring wrong

Correct your fears, leave off to mourn,

The heavens will favour their return.

    Remit the care, to royal Pan

    Of Jack his son, and Tom, his man.
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But as chivalric heroes, Tom and Jack were almost farcically inept. Their choice of supposed disguise, ‘fair riding coats and false beards’ immediately ‘gave suspicion they were no such manner of men’. While they were crossing the Thames at Gravesend, one of their beards fell off, and, to make matters worse, they used a gold piece to pay the ferryman who within minutes had raised the town officers, forcing them to escape by some energetic riding. Their bad luck continued. Near Rochester, they bumped into the train of the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, finishing its long journey to London – and, to avoid it, leapt over a hedge into the fields. Sir Lewis Lewkener, in attendance on the ambassador, took the two ‘for suspicious persons’ and sent word to the Mayor of Canterbury. They managed to evade capture at Rochester, but a horseman was despatched to follow them, and overtook them near Sittingbourne. By the time they reached Canterbury, the Mayor was waiting for these two antic men, and Buckingham was forced to reveal his identity, and claim that he was paying a secret visit to the fleet in his capacity as Lord Admiral before they were allowed to proceed. Even at Dover they were stopped again until they gave ‘some secret satisfaction’. In Dover, Endymion Porter, Sir Francis Cottington, James Leviston (one of the Prince’s Bedchamber) and a Scot named Kirk joined them, and they set sail for Dieppe on Wednesday morning.
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The same day, news of their flight broke, and was soon, according to John Chamberlain, ‘in every man’s mouth, but few believed it at first, because they could not apprehend the reasons of so strange a resolution as being a mystery of state beyond common capacities’. On Thursday, James wrote to the Privy Council explaining that he had not told them because ‘secrecy was the life of the business’. It was ‘the Prince’s own desire’, he continued, and Buckingham ‘had no hand in it but only by his [the King’s] commandment’. ‘The world talks somewhat freely,’ reported Chamberlain, ‘as if it were done’, that the Prince was planning to be married at a Catholic Mass in Madrid, to avoid the trouble it would cause at home. Whatever the cause, Chamberlain concluded, ‘all concur that it is a very costly and hazardous experiment’.
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Although James was undoubtedly privy to the planning of the posting to Spain, it is less certain to what extent Buckingham and Charles involved him from the moment they left France. It seems that they did not write to him until they had passed the border into Spain, so presumably James was dependent on the same news networks that informed the likes of John Chamberlain, who marvelled that messengers between Madrid and London ‘go up and down like a well with two buckets’. Yet even Chamberlain admitted on 8 March that ‘we have little certainty of the Prince’s journey’. On the Sunday after their flight, St Paul’s Cross had been packed, in expectation of news during the sermon, but the preacher merely prayed ‘for the Prince’s prosperous journey and safe return’. After landing on French soil on Wednesday, Charles and Buckingham arrived in Paris on Friday, and left again on Sunday: some had it that in Paris ‘they saw the King at supper, and the Queen practising a ball with divers other ladies’, but others pointed out that this was unlikely on the first Saturday in Lent. Word had it that they had been stopped again, or had passed Bayonne, or that Gondomar and Digby were waiting for them at the border. Now, others were planning to join them, following a list left by the Prince, with the addition (by James) of physician Dr John Craig, and two chaplains, Leonard Mawe and Matthew Wren ‘that were forgotten’.
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The sweet boys’ letters home to Dad were determinedly upbeat. Crossing the border into Spain, they met Walsingham Gresley, bearing the post from James’s ambassador Digby to London, and ‘saucily opened’ the letters directed to King James, discovering ‘your business so slowly advanced, that we think ourselves happy that we have begun it so soon’; it appeared that no marriage articles had been concluded, since the negotiators were waiting until a papal dispensation arrived, ‘which may be God knows when’.
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This lack of progress, neatly if tacitly ascribed to Digby, would make their unexpected arrival all the more welcome. Arriving in Madrid, Buckingham made sure James knew ‘how we like your daughter, his wife, and my lady mistress’, that is, the Infanta, ‘without flattery, I think there is not a sweeter creature in the world. Baby Charles himself is so touched at the heart, that he confesses all he ever yet saw, is nothing to her, and swears if that he want her, there shall be blows. I shall lose no time in hastening their conjunction.’ He also vouched for the ‘kind carefulness’ shown by his opposite number, King Philip’s chief counsellor the Condé de Olivares, towards Charles.
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They had hoped to keep secret Charles’s presence in Madrid, but they were soon forced to change plans; Buckingham knew that with so many posts ‘making such haste after us’, Charles could not be kept hidden. In Buckingham’s narrative, their reception in Madrid was remarkably smooth. He sent for Gondomar, who went to Olivares, who obtained for Buckingham a private audience with the King; Olivares properly insisted on saluting the Prince in Philip’s name. The next day, sitting in ‘an invisible coach’, they were treated to ‘a private visit of the King, the Queen, the Infanta, Don Carlos, and the Cardinal’ as they passed by three times. Then Olivares came into their coach and took them to their lodgings, telling them that King Philip ‘longed and died for want of a nearer sight of our wooer’. Olivares and Buckingham encountered Philip ‘walking in the streets, with his cloak thrown over his face, and a sword and buckler by his side’; the King leapt into their coach, and was brought to meet Charles; ‘much kindness and compliment’ passed between the two young men. ‘You may judge by this,’ Buckingham assured James, ‘how sensible this King is of your son’s journey; and if we can either judge by outward shows, or general speeches, we have reason to condemn your ambassadors for rather writing too sparingly than too much.’ He urged James to write ‘the kindest letter of thanks and acknowledgment you can’ to Olivares, and concluded by quoting Olivares’s latest come-on: ‘he said no later unto us than this morning, that if the Pope would not give a dispensation for a wife, they would give the Infanta to thy son’s Baby, as his wench.’ While the Spaniards were open, the Pope’s nuncio ‘works as maliciously, and as actively as he can against us, but receives such rude answers, that he hopes he will be soon weary on’t’. Charles and Buckingham inferred from this that the Pope was unlikely to grant a dispensation, and therefore asked for James’s directions as to ‘how far we may engage you in the acknowledgement of the Pope’s spiritual power, for we almost find, if you will be contented to acknowledge the Pope, chief head under Christ, that the match will be made without him’.
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This negative account of the papal nuncio was squeezed into the last paragraph of the letter, but James was not fooled, and singled out Buckingham’s ‘cooling card’ concerning ‘the nuncio’s averseness to this business’ for special attention. It was for this very reason that he had sent two of Charles’s chaplains ‘fittest for this purpose’, Leonard Mawe and Matthew Wren. He had, he wrote, fully instructed the clerics so that their ‘behaviour and service’ should at once conform to the ‘purity of the primitive [Anglican] church’ while getting ‘as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done, for it hath ever been my way to go with the Church of Rome
usque ad aras
’, literally, even unto the altars.
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But in truth James had very firm ideas about just how far he would go. He reminded Buckingham that Spain had never raised the possibility that the dispensation would not be granted; that Spain had set down the spiritual conditions, which he had then signed, and Spain had sent them to Rome, where the
consulto
opined that ‘the Pope might, nay ought, for the weal of Christendom grant a dispensation upon these conditions’. But, he continued, ‘I know not what ye mean by my acknowledging the Pope’s spiritual supremacy. I am sure ye would not have me to renounce my religion for all the world. But all I can guess at your meaning is that it may be ye have an allusion to a passage in my book against Bellarmine’ (his 1609
Monitory-Preface
) ‘where I offer, if the Pope would quit his godhead and usurping over kings, to acknowledge him for the chief bishop, to whom all appeals of churchmen ought to lie
en dernier resort
’. In case Buckingham and Charles did not have his complete works to hand, he enclosed a copy of ‘the very words’. That, he concluded, ‘is the furthest that my conscience will permit me to go upon this point; for I am not a monsieur who can shift his religion as easily as he can shift his shirt when he cometh from tennis’ – a sly dig at the once Huguenot, then Catholic Henri IV of France.
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Charles and Buckingham hurriedly wrote to James ‘to assure you, that neither in spiritual nor temporal things, there is any thing pressed upon us more than is already agreed upon’. Although the Spanish had tried to capitalise on their friendly relations, the Englishmen had outmanoeuvred them with ‘many forcible arguments’. The Spanish were also, they revealed, ‘in hope of a conversion of us both, but now excuses are more studied than reasons for it, though the[y] say their loves shall ever make them wish it. To conclude: we never saw the business in a better way than now it is. Therefore we humbly beseech you, lose no time in hastening the ships…’
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