at Madrid,” might have been true enough.  The seven years which had passed in apparent negotiation resembled the scene of a fata morgana,—­an earth painted in the air, raised by the delusive arts of Gondomar and Olivarez.  As they never designed to realise it, it would of course never have been brought into the councils of his Spanish majesty.  Buckingham discovered, as he told Gerbier, that the Infanta, by the will of her father, Philip the Third, was designed for the emperor’s son,—­the catholic for the catholic, to cement the venerable system.  When Buckingham and Charles had now ascertained that the Spanish cabinet could not adopt English and protestant interests, and Olivarez had convinced himself that Charles would never be a Catholic, all was broken up; and thus a treaty of marriage, which had been slowly reared during a period of seven years, when the flower seemed to take, only contained within itself the seeds of war.[233]

Olivarez and Richelieu were thorough-paced statesmen, in every respect the opposites of the elegant, the spirited, and the open Buckingham.  The English favourite checked the haughty Castilian, the favourite of Spain, and the more than king-like cardinal, the favourite of France, with the rival spirit of his island, proud of her equality with the continent.

There is a story that the war between England and France was occasioned by the personal disrespect shown by the Cardinal-Duke Richelieu to the English Duke, in the affronting mode of addressing his letters.  Gerbier says, the world are in a ridiculous mistake about this circumstance.  The fact of the letters is true, since Gerbier was himself the secretary on this occasion.  It terminated, however, differently than is known.  Richelieu, at least as haughty as Buckingham, addressed a letter, in a moment of caprice, in which the word Monsieur was level with the first line, avoiding the usual space of honour, to mark his disrespect.  Buckingham instantly turned on the cardinal his own invention.  Gerbier, who had written the letter, was also its bearer.  The cardinal started at the first sight, never having been addressed with such familiarity, and was silent.  On the following day, however, the cardinal received Gerbier civilly, and, with many rhetorical expressions respecting the duke:  “I know,” said he, “the power and greatness of a high admiral of England; the cannons of his great ships make way, and prescribe law more forcibly than the canons of the church, of which I am a member.  I acknowledge the power of the favourites of great kings, and I am content to be a minister of state, and the duke’s humble servant.”  This was an apology made with all the politesse of a Gaul, and by a great statesman who had recovered his senses.

If ever minister of state was threatened by the prognostics of a fatal termination to his life, it was Buckingham; but his own fearlessness disdained to interpret them.  The following circumstances, collected from manuscript letters of the times, are of this nature.  After the sudden and unhappy dissolution of the parliament, popular terror showed itself in all shapes; and those who did not join in the popular cry were branded with the odious nickname of the dukelings.