Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/76

 negotiation was suspended, though articles concerning the household and personal position of the infanta were agreed to, as Philip made demands on behalf of the English catholics which James was unwilling to accept [see ].

Charles himself was still too young to take much interest in the choice of a wife. His education had not been neglected, and he had acquired a large stock of information, especially of such as bore on the theological and ecclesiastical questions which made so great a part of the learning of his day. In 1618 there was a boyish quarrel between him and his father's favourite, Buckingham, which was promptly made up, and from that time a close friendship united the two young men.

When the troubles in Germany broke out, Charles did not hesitate to declare himself on the side of his sister, the Electress Palatine, whose husband had been elected to the Bohemian throne. In 1620 he rated himself at 5,000l. to the Benevolence which was being raised for the defence of the Palatinate, and on the news of the defeat of his brother-in-law at Prague shut himself up in his room for two days, refusing to speak to any one. In the House of Lords in the session of 1621 he took Bacon's part, and induced the peers to refrain from depriving the fallen chancellor of his titles of nobility.

After the dissolution of James's third parliament the Spanish marriage negotiations were again warmly taken up. Charles was now in his twenty-second year. He was dignified in manner and active in his habits. He rode well, and distinguished himself at tennis and in the tilting-yard. He had a good ear for music and a keen eye for the merits and the special peculiarities of a painter's work. His moral conduct was irreproachable, and he used to blush whenever an immodest word was uttered in his presence (Relazioni Venete, Ingh. p. 261).

Of his possession of powers befitting the future ruler of his country nothing was as yet known. His tendency to take refuge in silence when anything disagreeable to him occurred was indeed openly remarked on, and his increasing familiarity with Buckingham attracted notice; but it was hardly likely that any one would prognosticate so early the future development of a character of which these were the principal signs. Charles was in truth possessed of a mind singularly retentive of impressions once made upon it. Whatever might be the plan of life which he had once adopted as the right one, he would retain it to the end. Honestly anxious to take the right path, he would never for expediency's sake pursue that which he believed to be a wrong one; but there was in him no mental growth, no geniality of temperament, leading him to modify his own opinions through intercourse with his fellowmen. This want of receptivity in his mind was closely connected with a deficiency of imagination. He could learn nothing from others, because he was never able to understand or sympathise with their standpoint. If they differed from him, they were wholly in the wrong, and were probably actuated by the basest motives. The same want of imagination led to that untrustworthiness which is usually noted as the chief defect of his character. Sometimes, no doubt, he exercised, what earlier statesmen had claimed to exercise, the right of baffling by a direct falsehood the inquiries of those who asked questions about a policy which he wished to keep secret. The greater part of the falsehoods with which he is charged were of another description. He spoke of a thing as it appeared at the time to himself, without regard to the effect which his words might produce upon the hearer. He made promises which would be understood to mean one thing, and he neglected to fulfil them, without any sense of shame, because when the time for fulfilment came it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be convinced that they ought to be taken in a sense more convenient to himself.

The same want of imagination which made Charles untrustworthy made him shy and constrained. The words and acts of others came unexpectedly upon him, so that he was either at a loss for a fitting answer, or replied, after the manner of shy men, hastily and without consideration. In early life his diffidence led to an entire devotion to Buckingham, who was some years his senior, who impressed him by his unbounded self-possession and his magnificent animal spirits, and who had no definite religious or political principles to come into collision with his own.

The ascendency acquired by Buckingham over the prince was first manifested to the world in the journey taken by the two young men to Madrid. Charles swallowed eagerly Buckingham's crude notion that a personal visit to Spain would induce Philip IV who had succeeded his father in 1620, not merely to give his sister's hand on conditions considered at the English court to be reasonable, but actively to support the restitution of the Palatinate to Frederick, the son-in-law of the English king.

The first idea of the visit seems to have been suggested by Gondomar, who before he left England in May 1622 had drawn from