1622 BUCKINGHAM'S EXPOSTULATION. 355 tent. The new conditions sent from Rome were such as could tend to no other end but to bring his master in jealousy with the greatest part of his subjects. At Brussels Weston had been flouted by the Infanta, and the siege of Heidelberg was still going on. "And now," he continued, "let me, I pray you, in the name of your faithful friend and servant, beseech you to set apart all partiality in this case, and that you would be pleased as well, like a true Englishman, indifferently to consider of the straits we are driven into. If the Emperor shall in this fashion conquer the whole Palatinate, the ancient inheritance of his Majesty's children, what can be expected but a bloody and unreconcilable war between the Emperor and my master, wherein the King of Spain can be an auxiliary to the Emperor against any other party but his Majesty? And, therefore, as my master lately offered to the Infanta for satisfaction of her desire, that in case the auxiliaries would not be contented with reason, but still perturb the treaty, he offered, in that case, to assist the Emperor and her against them; so can he in justice expect no less of the King your master, that, if the Emperor will, contrary to all promises both by his letters and ambassadors, proceed in his conquest and refuse the cessation, that the King your master will in that case, and in so just a quarrel, assist him against the Emperor, in imitation of the King my master's just and real proceedings in this business from the beginning, who never looked, as you can well be witness, to the rising or falling hopes of his son-in-law's fortunes, but constantly kept on that course that was most agreeable to honour and justice, to the peace of Christendom, and for the fastening of a firm and indissoluble knot of amity and alliance betwixt the King your master and him, which was begun at the time of our treaty with France, and then broken at your desire that we might embrace this alliance with you. You are the person that many times before your departure hence besought his Majesty once to suffer himself to be deceived by Spain.1 We, therefore, do now 1 Meaning, perhaps, that Gondomar had answered James's complaints that he had been deceived by the renewal of the war in 1621, by begging him to suffer it for once, and that all would come right in the end. AA2 expect to find that great respect to honour in your master that he will not take any advantage by the changing of fortune and success of time, so to alter his actions as may put his honour in the terms of interpretation.1 You see how all the rest of Christendom envy and malign this match and wished conjunction. How much greater need then hath it of a hasty and happy dispatch? And what comfort can the Prince have in her, when her friends shall have utterly ruined his sister and all her babes? You remember how yourself praised his Majesty's wisdom in the election of so fit a minister as Sir Richard Weston in this business; but you see what desperate letters he writes from time to time of their cold and unjust treating with him in this business. You could not but wonder that any spark of patience could be left us here. And to conclude this point in a word, we ever received comfortable words from Spain; but find such contrary effects from Brussels, together with our intelligence from all other parts of the world, as all our hopes are not only cold but quite extinguished here." The writer then returned to the subject of the marriage. Gondomar, he said, could not but remember how, when the match was first moved, he had assured the King 'that he should be pressed to nothing in this business that should not be agreeable to his conscience and honour, and stand with the love of his people;' and he then went on to warn the Spaniard that if the match were to be broken off, 'his Majesty would be importunately urged by his people, to whose assistance he must have his recourse, to give life and execution to all the penal laws now hanging upon' the heads of the Catholics. "It only rests now," he concluded, "that as we have put the ball to your foot, you take a good and speedy resolution there to hasten the happy conclusion of this match. The Prince is now two and twenty years of age, and is a year more than full ripe for such a business. The King our master longeth to see an issue proceed from his loins, and I am sure you have reason to expect more friendship from the posterity which shall proceed from him and that little angel, your Infanta, That is to say, as may make it necessary for him to explain his actions, his honour having become doubtful and needing interpretation. 1622 BUCKINGHAM'S EXPOSTULATION. 357 than from his Majesty's daughter's children. Your friends here are all discomforted with this long delay, your enemies are exasperated and irritated thereby, and your neighbours that envy the felicity of both kings, have the more leisure to invent new plots for the cross and hindrance of this happy business; and for the part of your true friend and servant Buckingham, I have become odious already, and counted a betrayer both of King and country. "To conclude all, I will use a similitude of hawking. I told you already that the Prince is, God be thanked, extremely sharp set upon the match, and you know that a hawk, when she is first dressed and made ready to fly, having a great will upon her, if the falconer do not follow it at that time, she is in danger to be dulled for ever after. "Take heed, therefore, lest in the fault of your delays there, our Prince and falcon gentle, that you know was thought slow enough to begin to be eager after the feminine prey, become not so dull upon these delays as in short time hereafter he will not stoop to the lure, though it were thrown out to him. "And here I will end to you, my sweet friend, as I do in my prayers to God :- Only in thee is my trust,' and say, as it is written on the outside of the packets, Haste, haste, post haste!” 1 Excepting so far as they throw light upon the character of one whose influence was so ruinous to those who trusted him, Buckingham Buckingham's momentary expressions of opinion and James. during the reign of James are of no importance whatever. Whilst, like his still more versatile son, he was "everything by turns, and nothing long," it was only when the shifting tide of passionate impulses happened to coincide with some turn of his master's thoughts, that he had any chance of moulding the general policy of the Crown in accordance with his wishes. For the time, however, there was a complete agreement between the two; for if the words of the letter were the words of Buckingham, the thoughts were the thoughts of James. If, amongst the many miseries with which history teems, there is one more sad than another, it is to see so noble a policy as that of which Digby had been the mouthpiece, so utterly discredited and mishandled. It cannot be but that the historian, who has to tell, almost as a matter of course, of so many windy schemes and criminal follies, should feel a special regret when he is called upon to recount the failure of a wise and beneficent idea, in something of the same spirit as that which led the early poets to regard with peculiar sorrow the deaths of youthful warriors, the promise of whose lives was for ever to be unfulfilled, whilst they accorded but a few words of perfunctory sympathy to those whose existence had passed through the ordinary fortunes of men. To settle the war in Foreign and Germany by guaranteeing the independence of the Protestant States in religious matters, at the same time that the civil authority of the Emperor remained intact, and to settle the domestic difficulty by the gradual relaxation of the penal laws, was a policy worthy of the most consummate statesman. James, unhappily, was never able to appreciate either the greatness of his own projects, nor the magnitude of the obstacles which he would have to surmount. If he ever admitted lofty principles into his mind, it was always by their smallest side that he approached them. If he had judged rightly with respect to the contest for the Bohemian crown, it was simply because the large issues which were involved in it presented to him a narrow, technical idea which he was competent to grasp. If he now struggled for the religious independence of the Palatinate, it was not because he had formed any adequate notion of the requirements of the states of the Empire, but simply because the heirs of that territory happened to be his own grandchildren. In comparison with the claims of his daughter and her sons, all considerations of policy, all considerations for the cause of Protestantism, passed for very little in his eyes. And as it was with his foreign policy, so it was with his domestic policy. The great work of fostering the growth of a more tolerant spirit in the hearts of Englishmen, was thrown into the background in favour of a scheme for getting a richly dowered wife for his son, or for obtaining the co-operation of the King of Spain in a settlement of the German difficulties, to which, excepting under com 1 Buckingham to Gondomar [Sept. 9], Cabala, 224. The holograph draft is in Harl. MSS. 1583, fol. 353. 1622 A FUTILE POLICY. 359 pulsion, Philip could never give his consent without losing every feeling of self-respect. tween his words and As far as words could go, no man could be more unbending than James. Whatever might be the feeling of the English Contrast be- nation, it was to accept from him precisely that system of religious toleration which happened for actions. the moment to suit his own personal or political interests. Whatever might be the feeling of the German nation, or of Continental governments, they were to accept, without modification, precisely that arrangement of their disputes which happened to be consonant with the claims of his own family. If indeed he had shared in the beliefs which prevailed in the House of Commons, if he had thought with Phelips and Coke, that Frederick was an innocent martyr to the Protestant faith, he might well have used the language that he did. Nothing, however, was further from the true state of the case; for no one knew better than James how ruinous every act of his son-in-law's had been to the cause which he imagined himself to be serving. All Frederick's headstrong rashness, all his impracticable perversity and despicable incompetence, lay before him as in a book. In spite of all this he saw the solution of the question by which Germany was distracted, not in a mediation between the religious parties, not in a policy shaped in accordance with the public opinion of moderate men of all parties, but simply and solely in the complete restitution of his son-in-law, at whatever hazard to the future interests of the Empire. After all, James's fixity of purpose was confined to words alone. Ready at a moment's notice to issue hazy manifestoes in which the most praiseworthy maxims were shrouded in an almost impenetrable veil of loose verbiage, he never ceased to expect that the plans which he had formed should be carried out by others rather than by himself. He resembled no one so much as that unfortunate wight in the well-known legend, who, finding a horn suspended by the side of a sword at a castle-gate, summoned the warder to admit him by a long blast, and was swept away to destruction by a whirlwind issuing from |