I will now exhibit some curious details from these archives of fantastical state, and paint a courtly world, where politics and civility seem to have been at perpetual variance.

When the Palatine arrived in England to marry Elizabeth, the only daughter of James the First, “the feasting and jollity” of the court were interrupted by the discontent of the archduke’s ambassador, of which these were the material points:—­

Sir John waited on him, to honour with his presence the solemnity on the second or third days, either to dinner or supper, or both.

The archduke’s ambassador paused:  with a troubled countenance inquiring whether the Spanish ambassador was invited.  “I answered, answerable to my instructions in case of such demand, that he was sick, and could not be there.  He was yesterday, quoth he, so well, as that the offer might have very well been made him, and perhaps accepted.”

To this Sir John replied, that the French and Venetian ambassadors holding between them one course of correspondence, and the Spanish and the archduke’s another, their invitations had been usually joint.

This the archduke’s ambassador denied; and affirmed that they had been separately invited to Masques, &c., but he had never;—­that France had always yielded precedence to the archduke’s predecessors, when they were but Dukes of Burgundy, of which he was ready to produce “ancient proofs;” and that Venice was a mean republic, a sort of burghers, and a handful of territory, compared to his monarchical sovereign:—­and to all this he added, that the Venetian bragged of the frequent favours he had received.

Sir John returns in great distress to the lord chamberlain and his majesty.  A solemn declaration is drawn up, in which James I. most gravely laments that the archduke’s ambassador has taken this offence; but his majesty offers these most cogent arguments in his own favour:  that the Venetian had announced to his majesty that his republic had ordered his men new liveries on the occasion, an honour, he adds, not usual with princes—­the Spanish ambassador, not finding himself well for the first day (because, by the way, he did not care to dispute precedence with the Frenchman), his majesty conceiving that the solemnity of the marriage being one continued act through divers days, it admitted neither prius nor posterius:  and then James proves too much, by boldly asserting, that the last day should be taken for the greatest day!—­as in other cases, for instance in that of Christmas, where Twelfth-day, the last day, is held as the greatest.

But the French and Venetian ambassadors, so envied by the Spanish and the archduke’s, were themselves not less chary, and crustily fastidious.  The insolent Frenchman first attempted to take precedence of the Prince of Wales; and the Venetian stood upon this point, that they should sit on chairs, though the prince had but a stool; and, particularly, that the carver should not stand before him.  “But,” adds Sir John, “neither of them prevailed in their reasonless pretences.”