fortune he might cram into his greasy pockets. Prince Charles – or
as his Sowship called him, Baby Charles – being now PRINCE OF
WALES, the old project of a marriage with the Spanish King’s
daughter had been revived for him; and as she could not marry a
Protestant without leave from the Pope, his Sowship himself
secretly and meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it. The
negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in
great books, than you can imagine, but the upshot of it all is,
that when it had been held off by the Spanish Court for a long
time, Baby Charles and Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas
Smith and Mr. John Smith, to see the Spanish Princess; that Baby
Charles pretended to be desperately in love with her, and jumped
off walls to look at her, and made a considerable fool of himself
in a good many ways; that she was called Princess of Wales and that
the whole Spanish Court believed Baby Charles to be all but dying
for her sake, as he expressly told them he was; that Baby Charles
and Steenie came back to England, and were received with as much
rapture as if they had been a blessing to it; that Baby Charles had
actually fallen in love with HENRIETTA MARIA, the French King’s
sister, whom he had seen in Paris; that he thought it a wonderfully
fine and princely thing to have deceived the Spaniards, all
through; and that he openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as he was
safe and sound at home again, that the Spaniards were great fools
to have believed him.
Like most dishonest men, the Prince and the favourite complained
that the people whom they had deluded were dishonest. They made
such misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in this
business of the Spanish match, that the English nation became eager
for a war with them. Although the gravest Spaniards laughed at the
idea of his Sowship in a warlike attitude, the Parliament granted
money for the beginning of hostilities, and the treaties with Spain
were publicly declared to be at an end. The Spanish ambassador in
London – probably with the help of the fallen favourite, the Earl
of Somerset – being unable to obtain speech with his Sowship,
slipped a paper into his hand, declaring that he was a prisoner in
his own house, and was entirely governed by Buckingham and his
creatures. The first effect of this letter was that his Sowship
began to cry and whine, and took Baby Charles away from Steenie,
and went down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts of nonsense. The end
Page 199
Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
of it was that his Sowship hugged his dog and slave, and said he
was quite satisfied.
He had given the Prince and the favourite almost unlimited power to
settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage; and he
now, with a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all Roman
Catholics in England should exercise their religion freely, and
should never be required to take any oath contrary thereto. In
return for this, and for other concessions much less to be
defended, Henrietta Maria was to become the Prince’s wife, and was
to bring him a fortune of eight hundred thousand crowns.
His Sowship’s eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the
money, when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him; and, after
a fortnight’s illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, one
thousand six hundred and twenty-five, he died. He had reigned
twenty-two years, and was fifty-nine years old. I know of nothing
more abominable in history than the adulation that was lavished on
this King, and the vice and corruption that such a barefaced habit
of lying produced in his court. It is much to be doubted whether
one man of honour, and not utterly self-disgraced, kept his place
near James the First. Lord Bacon, that able and wise philosopher,
as the First Judge in the Kingdom in this reign, became a public
spectacle of dishonesty and corruption; and in his base flattery of