Free A History of Britain, Volume 2 by Simon Schama Page B

alliance between his son, Charles, and the daughter of King Philip III of Spain. In return for expressions of his own sincerity in seeking the match, James had been told not to worry about the Palatinate itself. Even after the occupation, the Spanish disingenuously claimed that their presence in the Rhineland was merely pressure to dislodge Frederick from Bohemia. Such was his aversion to conflict that, given this straw to grasp at, James was prepared to believe the transparent lie. He was abetted in this pathetic self-deception by his new favourite, George Villiers (the son of an impoverished Leicestershire knight), whose star had risen when those of Somerset and the Howards had crashed. In rapid succession Villiers had been promoted to become Knight of the Garter, privy councillor, baron, earl, marquis and, finally, especially shocking since there had been no dukes in England since the execution of Norfolk in the reign of Elizabeth, Duke of Buckingham.
    The last Spanish marriage – between Mary Tudor and Philip II – had not turned out well for anyone, so the gambit was from the beginning fraught with controversies that went to the heart of national and religious sensibilities. There were those, like the Puritan Sir Robert Harley in Herefordshire, who were old enough to remember the Spanish Armada. And Camden’s immensely popular history of the reign of Elizabeth ensured that the epic of the wars against Spain was very much alive in Jacobean England. The Spanish court and government simply sat back and enjoyed the inexplicable desperation of the English, delighted that they were so keen to rule themselves out as adversaries in the wider European war. Their terms were aggressive. As a condition of the marriage they insisted (pushed by an equally overjoyed Rome) that the Infanta Maria be allowed not just a private chapel but a church that would be open to the public as well. Until they were into their adolescence, the responsibility for educating the children of the union would fall to the infanta, not the prince. And, most daring of all, they stipulated that English Catholics should now be allowed open freedom of worship. James must have known that to accept these terms would be to light a wildfire in both England and Scotland, but he was in absurd thrall to the beauteous Duke of Buckingham. In letters James addressed him as ‘Steenie’, a Scots endearment referring to his supposed resemblance to an image of St Stephen. Inreturn Buckingham wrote back to his ‘deare dade’, knowing that no flattery would be too cloying for the besotted king, thus: ‘I naturallie so love your person and upon so good experience and knowledge adore all your other parts which are more than ever one man had that were not onelie all your people but all the worlds besids sett together on one side and you alone on the other I should, to obey and pleas you, displeas, nay despise them.’ Gouty old men should, of course, be wise enough in the ways of the world to discount sycophancy on this scale. But evidently James needed someone to lean on, both metaphorically and literally, and Buckingham, who had been entirely ‘made’ by the king as much as if he had fathered him, was obviously assigned the role of the perfect son: virile, clever and dynamic. He could do no wrong, especially when expanding on the wonderfulness of King James.
    Charles might have been a tougher nut for Buckingham to crack, being so reserved in his demeanour and alienated from the unbuttoned bonhomie of his father, but a special feast that Buckingham gave for him took care of that. Together, Charles and Buckingham managed to persuade James – over what was left of his better judgement – that a way to nail the match was for them to go to Madrid, woo the infanta in person and confront the court there with a
fait accompli
. James was so anxious to avoid a war that he agreed to the hare-brained plan. In 1621 he had come through the