“Your humble slave and doge,
“Steenie.
“For the best of Fathers and Masters.”
On another sheet, written at the same time, but signed by “Steenie” alone, and perhaps written without the Prince’s knowledge, he says:—“The cheefest advertisment of all wee omitted in oure other letter, which was to let you know how we like your daughter, his wife, and my ladie mistris. Without flatterie, I think there is not a sweeter creature in the world. Babie Charles himself is so touched at the hart, that he confesses all he ever yett saw is nothinge to her.”
The King, in his answer to this letter, dated March twenty-fifth, says:—“I have written a letre to the Condé d’Olivares, as both of you desired me, as full of thankes and kyndnes as can be desyred, as indeed he well deserves.“
“I know not,” says the King, in reply, “quhat ye meane by my acknowledging the Pope’s spirituall supremacie. I am sure ye wolde 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 booke against Bellarmine, quhaire I offer, if the Pope wold guyte his godheade, and usurping over Kings, to acknowledge him for the Cheefe Bishoppe, to whom all appeals of churchmen ought to lye en dernier ressort; the verie wordes I sende you heere inclosed, and that is the furthest my conscience will permit me to goe upon this pointe, for I am not a Monsieur, quho can shifte his religion as easilie as he can shifte his shirte quhen he commeth from tennice.”
The passage in his hook, which the King fancied Buckingham might allude to (though he more probably had never read it), is thus written, in the King’s own hand, on a separate slip of paper: “And for myselfe, if that were yett the question, I wolde with all my hairte give my consent that the Bishoppe of Rome showlde have the first seate. I, being a Western king, wolde go with the Patriarche of the West. And for his temporall principalities over the seignorie of Rome, I do not quenell it nether, lett him in God’s name be primus Episcopus inter omnes Episcopos et Princeps Episcoporum, so it be no other wayes but as St. Peter was Princeps Apostolorum.”[[436]]
To these letters, Endymion Porter added an account in a letter to his wife, that the Prince and Duke were “most handsomely received. The King, Queen, and Infanta,” he adds, “drove out yesterday[[437]] in a coach, when the Prince, in another coach, saw his mistress, and was much stricken with her beauty.”[[438]]
It was soon found necessary to retrench the numbers that were to go to Spain, that the ships “might not be pestered;” no lord was to have had more than four men, no gentleman more than two. Even this seems to us rather a full complement in the present day; but, when it is remembered what an extraordinary number of jewels were worn in the dresses of that day, it will not appear too many to take care of the valuables conveyed by each peer, or to maintain the dignity and state so much insisted on at that period.
Amongst other personages who followed Charles, or, as he was called in Spain, “the wooer to the Spanish Court,” was Archy, King James’s fool, who must needs also have his attendant, which was at first refused, but afterwards allowed. By April, the Prince’s household, jewels, apparel, and the robes for St. George’s Day, were gone; tilting armour, caparisons, and horses, asked for by Charles and Buckingham, were also to follow. “The dispensation,” Conway wrote, from Spain, to Sir Thomas Wentworth, “will soon be there, and nothing but either the desperately envious, or vile almanack-makers, arguing from conjunction of planets, now talk of delay.”