Ibid, p. 887; from Birch’s MSS., Brit. Museum, 4174.
The Duke was also made now fully aware of the responsibility he had incurred in taking the Prince to Spain. Reports were often circulated that he had been made a prisoner there. Shortly afterwards James, being agitated with this fear, was assured that, “if there be trust on earth,” the Prince and Infanta were to be moving home on the twenty-eighth of August.
The King, meantime, wrote plaintively to his “sweete boyes.” He kept what he called the “feaste,” on the anniversary of the Gowry plot, at Salisbury, on the fifth of August, where the Spanish ambassador and all the _corps diplomatique_ were conveyed, at the King’s expense, in coaches, which cost twenty pounds a day; and here, besides a brace of bucks and a stag every day, the provision made for these Spanish grandees was so plentiful that, not being able to use it, they were stated to have buried it under dunghills, rather than bestow it upon heretics. “And though,” says Mr. Chamberlain, referring to this report, “I took it for a scandal or slander, yet I have heard it verified more than once; and that the neighbours were forced to complain, though to little purpose, for, I know not how, the Spaniard hath got such a hand everywhere, that he carries more away, when he comes, than all other ambassadors together.”[28]
It seems that this expensive allowance to the ambassadors was suffered to go on till after the 14th of August, when Secretary Conway wrote to Secretary Calvert to complain that it had not then been discontinued, and that the delay in doing so put the King out of all patience, fearing that the letters written on the subject were lost. The post, Conway remarks, travels slowly, taking ten hours from London to Staines. He recommends reformation therein.--State Papers, vol. cl., No. 98.
Buckingham, we are told, “lay at home under a million of maledictions.”[29] The poor King, indifferent to public opinion, and now visibly declining in health, was nevertheless constantly writing to Madrid in such terms as these:--"If ye haisten not hoame, I apprehende I shale never see you, for my longing will kill mee." To the Prince individually, he expressed himself in terms which left Charles no alternative but to return. “The necessitie of my affaires,” the King wrote, “enforced me to tell you that ye must preferre the obedience to a father to the love ye carrie to a mistresse.” Eager to do away with every possible impediment to the marriage, the King, on the seventh of August, signed, whilst at Salisbury, the “declaration, touching the pardons, suspensions, and dispensations of the Roman Catholics.”[30]