Never trust a man called Smith. Or rather, don’t trust him if he has
a fake beard and is travelling with another man called Smith who also
has a fake beard. This is one of the profound moral lessons which emerge
from one of the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history.
On 17 February 1623, the future Charles I and the royal favourite, the
Duke of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false
beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission
was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta
María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only
coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A
ferryman to whom they gave a silver 20-shilling piece decided they must
be noblemen who were going to fight a duel abroad, and reported them to
the authorities. At Rochester they spotted an ambassador and his escort,
and fled over the fields to Canterbury. There the mayor attempted to
arrest them, and Buckingham had to pull off his beard, confess his
identity, and claim that as admiral of the fleet he was off to arrange
an impromptu inspection at Dover. The prince and the favourite then
joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in
Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19
February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was
conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists
outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken
their disguises. These were effective enough to enable them to see the
sights of the French court without being identified. They then trekked
down the Iberian peninsula, where they behaved like the very best kind
of Englishmen abroad, rustling goats and provoking fights by making
tactless remarks about people’s mothers.
On 7 March they arrived
at the home of the most frigidly formal court in Europe. The English
ambassador, the Earl of Bristol, was, as a contemporary source had it,
‘in a kind of astonishment’ (early modern English for ‘gobsmacked’) when
a stranger pulled off his false beard to reveal that he was the heir to
the English throne. The Spanish court had to pretend that Charles was
invisible until an official reception could be organised for him on 16
March. To celebrate this occasion, more than three hundred prisoners
were released, including all Englishmen serving in the galleys, and
candles were ordered to be lit in every window in Madrid. ‘The voyage of
the Knights of adventure’, as the secretary of state Edward Conway
called it, finally seemed to be taking off. Buckingham recorded that
Charles was in love: ‘Baby Charles is so touched by the heart that he
confessed that all he ever saw is nothing to her.’
Poor Charles
was not to get the girl. The infanta declared that she would rather take
to a nunnery or die a martyr than marry a heretic. James I obligingly
sent out a brace of high Anglican churchmen to convince the Spanish that
England could do things with smells and bells too, but this was not
enough to persuade them. One of these unfortunate clerics never arrived,
having been jolted off his mule en route to Madrid. It rather sums the
whole venture up. Also among the larger entourage sent out to reinforce
Charles in making his suit was the king’s fool, Archie Armstrong. He had
been kitted out with a wildly expensive new suit for the trip, and the
climate clearly agreed with his sense of humour, which was always dry
and sharp. He saw more of the infanta than Prince Charles ever did, and
seems to have charmed her. When she remarked how extraordinary it was
that the Duke of Bavaria’s tiny Catholic army should have ousted the
Protestant forces from Prague, Archie merrily reminded her that it was
equally extraordinary that only ten ships had made it home from the
Spanish Armada. History does not relate how loudly she laughed.
The prince’s negotiations were impeded by his being caught up in a
hideously complex network of international negotiations and
misunderstandings which he only ever partially grasped. The Spanish
assumed that his sudden arrival could only mean that he intended to
convert to Catholicism, but were rapidly disabused of this
misapprehension. Charles himself had been led to believe that a
marriage, which had been the subject of negotiations between the two
countries since at least 1604 (when his elder brother was the
prospective groom), was more or less signed and sealed. The Spanish
ambassador to London, old Aesop Gondomar (as Jonson called him – he was
fond of telling animal tales), very much wanted to be in with James I,
and as a result persistently exaggerated the extent of his influence
over and knowledge of the inner workings of Spanish government. He
encouraged Charles to believe that the marriage would go ahead, and in a
letter of September 1622 which Glyn Redworth has unearthed in the
British Library, he urged Buckingham that it was time for the prince to
‘mount’ Spain. In fact, Gondomar was seriously out of touch with opinion
at home, and was more respected by James I than by his own king. He
never appreciated that the marriage would be impossible without
Charles’s conversion, or that the Spanish would demand toleration of
Catholicism in England to an extent to which Stuart Parliaments would
never have assented. Gondomar remained convinced that the religious
issue did not matter much because he believed the English people were
all eager to return to Catholicism.
Once Charles and his ever
growing entourage were established in Madrid, the Spanish faced a
serious problem: how to get rid of them without falling out
irretrievably with England. Felipe IV’s
favourite, the Count of Olivares (whose memorable mutton-chop whiskers
and multiple chins were recorded in loving detail by Velásquez), engaged
in some exceptional skulduggery to make sure that the match did not
come off. He later boasted that he had single-handedly scuppered the
whole plan. The diplomatic way of saying no to Charles was to make the
pope say no to him instead. A papal dispensation was needed for the
Catholic infanta to marry the Protestant Charles, and the terms of this
dispensation were critical. At first, the pope had been happy to insist
on greater toleration for British Catholics as the price of the match;
after Olivares got to him in April 1623, the condition was that ‘free
and public’ exercise of the Roman Catholic religion be approved by the
English council and Parliament. Olivares had Charles cornered, and
effectively imprisoned in Spain until he was prepared to offer more
concessions than he could ever in practice deliver. Then the pope died,
and the dispensation had to be sought again. Meanwhile, the Spanish
insisted that the infanta stay in Spain until it was clear that James
was actually improving the conditions of English Catholics. And
meanwhile, too, a large junta of Spanish clerics sat to determine, with
endless scholastic distinctions, the conditions that should be attached
to the marriage. The summer got hotter, and people on both sides began
snarling at each other.
Charles’s response to these nasty tactics
was entirely straightforward: he set about lying and scheming in
return. As a result of his lies, as John Elliot wryly puts it, ‘the
dishonours were ultimately even.’ He no doubt still wanted the infanta,
but through the later summer of 1623, as messages and counter-messages
shuttled between England and Spain, he adopted a sublimely duplicitous
negotiating strategy. He agreed to all the demands which Olivares had
been quite sure were impossible for him to agree to. He accepted that
there should be no further persecution of Catholics and no further laws
against them in the three kingdoms. He even persuaded his father (who
never had any difficulty remembering 5 November, when English Catholics
had apparently tried to blow him up) to go along with him. Everything
was signed and sealed in a most royal fashion: Charles left Madrid on 30
August 1623, having told the Earl of Bristol that he should give his
consent to marriage by proxy within ten days of the arrival of the
dispensation from the new pope. A stately pillar was erected on the site
of his departure from his future brother-in-law Felipe IV
to mark the solemn occasion. It’s an indication that Felipe at least
may have believed the marriage would happen. But Charles had learned a
trick or two in Spain. Once he was safely on his way, he coolly
countermanded the orders for his proxy marriage, telling Bristol not to
go ahead until he was assured that the infanta would not take herself to
a nunnery after the match in order to avoid its consummation. With
that, the noble prince did a bunk back to England.
There were
many reasons why the whole courtship failed. Neither party ever
understood the other, and it was not clear that anyone apart from
Charles really wanted the match. But the ultimate significance of the
affair derives from its complex relationship to a larger setting of
international politics. In 1623, English foreign policy was dominated by
one issue: the Palatinate. James I’s daughter Elizabeth had in 1613
married the Protestant Frederick, the elector palatine. In 1619 the
Bohemian estates chose Frederick as king of Bohemia, and in the process
ousted Archduke Ferdinand, who was a particularly devout and intolerant
Catholic. Unfortunately for Frederick, Archduke Ferdinand was elected
Holy Roman Emperor immediately after he was denied the throne of
Bohemia. Spanish and imperial troops ejected Frederick and the ‘Winter
Queen’ Elizabeth from Prague (so called because she entered her kingdom
in triumph in October 1619 and fled in November 1620), and seized much
of the Palatinate. Over the next few months the hotter sort of
Protestants in England called on James I to support European
Protestantism in the form of his daughter.
The major
historiographical debate about the Spanish match is concerned with what,
if anything, it had to do with a desire to help Elizabeth of Bohemia.
Old school historians had it that the Stuarts were already
autocratically detached from the interests of their people by the 1620s.
As a result, they tended to see the Spanish match as a frivolous
flirtation with Catholicism by an irresponsible prince who failed to
understand the level of popular hostility to a Catholic match.
Revisionist historians, who wish to see the Civil War as a consequence
of short-term miscalculations rather than of a long-standing and growing
alienation of subjects from Stuart tyranny, claim instead that James
was using the Spanish match as the majority of his countrymen would have
wished, to help ease the situation in central Europe and diminish the
Catholic threat. Certainly, it would have made some sense for James to
have reasoned that if the sister of the Spanish king married the heir to
the English throne, then the Spanish king would be unwilling to help
the Holy Roman Emperor drive the daughter of the king of England from
her realm. By the end of the affair, this is the outcome that James I
seemed to want: the final condition which he imposed on the match, after
Charles had left Spain and the agreement was in tatters anyway, was
that Felipe should help return the Palatinate to his daughter.
For Glyn Redworth, though, the story is rather more complex. James
believed that a strategic set of unions between Protestant and Catholic
dynasties might end discord in Europe. James also urgently needed money
to pay for troops to defend his daughter’s interests in the Palatinate,
which might be more readily obtained from a hefty Spanish dowry than
from a refractory House of Commons. For Redworth, it was only after the
event that Charles and Buckingham made the association between the
Spanish match and the fate of Elizabeth of Bohemia. The Spanish match
was primarily a hare-brained scheme cooked up by a foolish prince, who
was goaded on by an ill-informed Spanish ambassador, and which foundered
because two cultures failed to understand each others’ motives and
priorities. This view is in many respects extremely convincing. In
retrospect, it does seem very hard to believe that the Habsburg Catholic
ruler of Spain would in a month of (heavily ceremonial) Sundays do
anything which ran counter to the interests of his uncle the Habsburg
Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. If James, Buckingham or Charles thought
that marrying Charles to a Catholic princess would help the cause of
Protestant Europe, then they must have had their heads in the clouds.
But there is a problem with, or at least a consequence of, Redworth’s
thesis. In order to sustain his argument that the Spanish match really
had little or nothing to do with Bohemia, he has to be deeply
unsympathetic to Charles, whom he sees as a hot-headed fool ‘puffed up
with an almost adolescent recklessness’. Redworth’s Charles only
belatedly realised that he could pretend his mission was motivated by a
desire to help his sister. This is a beguilingly simple account of his
motives early in the courtship, but it is also curiously flat. Charles
was not just a hothead in love. He read the wrong kinds of book (for an
heir to the throne, anyway), and thought you could behave as though you
were in them. Early 17th-century
autobiographies do sometimes present their heroes as knights errant in
allegorical romances. Sir Kenelm Digby, who wrote one such
autobiography, was in Spain throughout the marriage negotiations (he was
a relative of the English ambassador), and returned to England with
Charles. Prose romance enjoyed a growing association with political
troubleshooting throughout the late 16th and early 17th centuries: in Sidney’s New Arcadia
the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles range around Europe in disguise,
acting as European constitutional troubleshooters and wooing princesses
with tales of their political adventures. John Barclay’s Argenis,
a neo-Latin romance, was a European hit from its first publication in
1621, and its tales of knights and swooning lovers were frequently
decoded as covert tales about political machinations in Europe.
It is no accident that James I referred to Buckingham and Charles as
‘sweet boys, and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new
romanso’. Loving romances, and living them, too, ran in the family:
Elizabeth of Bohemia, according to her granddaughter, ‘thought of
nothing but plays, masquerades, and the reading of romances’. Charles
was being fashionable, even slightly ahead of his times, in dashing
across Europe in a false beard: his culture made him think he knew that
gallant acts of social transgression were the way to a princess’s heart
and to the liberation of beleaguered states. Redworth aptly notes at one
point that Charles could be motivated by literary example: one of his
more ridiculous attempts to make contact with the infanta, who was in
the flesh rather less animated even than her portrait by Velásquez, was
to climb over a wall and leap down before her. This was probably an
imitation of one of the principal actions in Rojas’s bestselling La Celestina,
of which Charles bought a copy in Spain. But Redworth is too keen to
see Charles as just a silly young wag who was carried away by the hope
of some exotic totty – or, as he puts it, ‘As for Charles, his wish to
be united with her whose “idea is graven in my heart” needs no
explanation.’ Love always needs cultural explanation. And Charles partly
shaped his actions after books.
The wider cultural dimension of
the Spanish match may also have exerted a greater influence over the
ways in which the participants represented their actions than Redworth
allows. The voyage to Spain created just the kinds of great unfocused
expectation about European peace and erotic happiness that sets poets in
a frenzy, and the literary evidence strongly suggests that, throughout
the summer of 1623, English writers with links to the court were seeing a
connection between the Spanish marriage and the fate of Bohemia. Ben
Jonson set the two affairs side by side, as though keen to keep them
together but anxious not to press for a direct causal link, in poems
written in the very delicate period around June-July 1623 (at about the
same time he was probably translating Barclay’s Argenis).
His ‘Epistle Answering to One That Asked to be Sealed of the Tribe of
Ben’ makes the conjunction, as does one of his worst poems, ‘On the
dedication of the King’s new Cellar to Bacchus’. In the new ‘cellar’
(which was more like a grotto or private drinking-space), Jonson
imagines that King James
gratulates the passage
Of some well-wrought embassage,
Whereby he may knit sure up
The wishèd peace of Europe,
Or else a health advances,
To put his court in dances,
And set us all on skipping,
When with his royal shipping
The narrow seas are shady,
And Charles brings home the lady.
‘Sure up’/‘Europe’ is a hiccuping drunken rhyme so bad as to
acknowledge that the reality is likely to be harder to achieve than it
sounds. Jonson is careful to separate slightly events in the Palatinate
from those in Spain: skipping (prompted no doubt by a bit of sipping)
comes between the ‘embassage’ and Charles bringing home the lady. But
there is no doubt that for James’s subjects and panegyrists, the Spanish
match was being cautiously linked with the ‘wishèd peace of Europe’ in
the summer of 1623.
It’s a bit hard to believe that the linkage
was not there in the minds of Charles and Buckingham as they set off.
Certainly, the main Spanish witness to the negotiations, Fray Franciso,
felt that the English had all along concealed that their prime concern
was with the fate of the Palatinate. Thomas Howell (who was another
witness on the spot) records Gondomar as saying that ‘there is no other
way to regain the Palatinate, but by this match.’ But if Redworth is
right, and Charles when he set off really just wanted to ‘mount’ Spain,
then what may have happened is that the motives of the chief actors in
the debacle gradually caught up with the representations of those
motives that were circulating at home. Although Jonson’s poem on the
King’s cellar looked crashingly tactless by the time Charles returned
without the lady on 5 October 1623, it was sketching out motives which
Charles and Buckingham eventually claimed as their own.
Prince
Charles’s reception when he returned to England empty-handed was far
more enthusiastic than it would have been if he had indeed brought home
the lady. A real danger that there might be a Catholic heir to the
throne had been averted. As a result Charles was greeted as warmly by
the English on his return as he had been by the Spanish on his arrival.
There were more fireworks, much ringing of bells, and more prisoners
were set free. The released prisoners and manufacturers of fireworks
were among the very few winners in the affair. Archie the fool was
another: he claimed to have received a state pension from Felipe IV
which eventually amounted to £1500. But all that Prince Charles had to
show for his months in Spain was a desire for revenge, along with a few
jewels and gloves bestowed on him by the infanta. He also had four
camels and an elephant, which had been given to him by the Spanish king. (Read more.)
