Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

The people were now permitted to applaud to their hearts' desire, as no further pretence of a secret existed. Glad acclamations attended the progress of the royal cortege. The people shouted with joy, and all, high and low, sang a song composed for the occasion by Lope de Vega, the famous dramatist, which told how Charles had come, under the guidance of love, to the Spanish sky to see his star Maria.

"Carlos Estuardo soy

Que, siendo amor mi guia,

Al cielo d'Espaiia voy

Por ver mi estrella Maria."

The palace was decorated with all its ancient splendor, the streets everywhere showed signs of the public joy, and, as a special mark of royal clemency, all prisoners, except those held for heinous crimes, were set at liberty, among them numerous English galley-slaves, who had been captured in pirate vessels preying upon Spanish commerce.

Yet all this merrymaking and clemency, and all the negotiations which proceeded in the precincts of the palace, did not expedite the question at issue. Charles had no thought of becoming a Catholic. Philip had little thought of permitting a marriage under any other conditions. The infanta hated the idea of the sacrifice, as she considered it. The authorities at Rome refused the dispensation. The wheels of the whole business seemed firmly blocked.

Meanwhile, Charles had seen the infanta again, somewhat more closely than in a passing glance from a carriage, and though no words had passed between them, her charms of face strongly attracted his susceptible heart. He was convinced that he deeply loved her, and he ardently pressed for a closer interview. This Spanish etiquette hindered, and it was not until April 7, Easter Day, that a personal interview was granted the ardent lover. On that day the king, accompanied by a train of grandees, led the English prince to the apartments of the queen, who sat in state, with the infanta by her side.

Greeting the queen with proper respect, Charles turned to address the lady of his love. A few ceremonial words had been set down for him to utter, but his English heart broke the bonds of Spanish etiquette, and, forgetting everything but his passion, he began to address the princess in ardent words of his own choice. He had not gone far before there was a sensation. The persons present began to whisper. The queen looked with angry eyes on the presuming lover. The infanta was evidently annoyed. Charles hesitated and stopped short. Something seemed to have gone wrong. The infanta answered his eager words with a few cold, common-place sentences; a sense of constraint and uneasiness appeared to haunt the apartment; the interview was at an end. English ideas of love-making had proved much too unconventional for a Spanish court.

From that day forward the affair dragged on with infinite deliberation, the passion of the prince growing stronger, the aversion of the infanta seemingly increasing, the purpose of the Spanish court to mould the ardent lover to its own ends appearing more decided.

While Charles showed his native disposition by prevarication, Buckingham showed his by an impatience that soon led to anger and insolence. The wearisome slowness of the negotiations ill suited his hasty and arbitrary temper, he quarrelled with members of the State Council, and, in an interview between the prince and the friars, he grew so incensed at the demands made that, in disregard of all the decencies of etiquette, he sprang from his seat, expressed his contempt for the ecclesiastics by insulting gestures, and ended by flinging his hat on the ground and stamping on it. That conference came to a sudden end.

As the stay of the prince in Madrid now seemed likely to be protracted, attendants were sent him from England that he might keep up some show of state. But the Spanish court did not want them, and contrived to make their stay so unpleasant and their accommodations so poor, that Charles soon packed the most of them off home again.

"I am glad to get away," said one of these, James Eliot by name, to the prince; "and hope that your Highness will soon leave this pestiferous Spain. It is a dangerous place to alter a man and turn him. I myself in a short time have perceived my own weakness, and am almost turned."

"What motive had you?" asked Charles. "What have you seen that should turn you?"

"Marry," replied Eliot, "when I was in England, I turned the whole Bible over to find Purgatory, and because I could not find it there I believed there was none. But now that I have come to Spain, I have found it here, and that your Highness is in it; whence that you may be released, we, your Highness's servants, who are going to Paradise, will offer unto God our utmost devotions."

A purgatory it was,—a purgatory lightened for Charles by love, he playing the rôle assigned by Dante to Paolo, though the infanta was little inclined to imitate Francesca da Rimini. Buckingham fumed and fretted, was insolent to the Spanish Ministers, and sought as earnestly to get Charles out of Madrid as he had done to get him there, and less successfully. But the love-stricken prince had become impracticable. His fancy deepened as the days passed by. Such was the ardor of his passion, that on one day in May he broke headlong through the rigid wall of Spanish etiquette, by leaping into the garden in which the lady of his love was walking, and addressing her in words of passion. The startled girl shrieked and fled, and Charles was with difficulty hindered from following her.