This unhappy and ill-advised affair, will ever remain one of the darkest blemishes on the uniformly pacific but inglorious reign of the royal pupil of Buchanan;--the whole detail is an ungrateful one of intrigue and ill-faith, and however justly Buckingham may be accused of exerting his baleful influence to dissolve the treaty, and that he did so in the wantonness of his power is now past doubt; the disgrace which should have attached to him, still hangs round the memory of the timid king and his weak yet gallantly-disposed son. I am more inclined to allow a high-mindedness of feeling to Charles than to his father. The king, who supposed the entire art of reigning lay in dissimulation, may not be charged with an over-scrupulous nicety in his observations of the rules of fair dealing; but the young prince, at this period, had the sentiments without the vanity of a knight-errant, his only error was in the constitutional weakness which bent to the arrogance of Buckingham’s somewhat stronger mind. With such a disposition, the favorite found it as easy to persuade Charles to break off the match, as he had with facility advised him to the romantic journey--as rash as it was impolitic. It would be almost an unprofitable occupation to search for Buckingham’s motives, they are quite unattainable, and, like hunting the hare in a wagon, conjecture might lead us on, but we should, at every step, be farther from our object. It is the received opinion, that the prince’s visit was begun in caprice; and with caprice it ended. Buckingham viewed it, perhaps, at first as a mere adventure, and he terminated it, because his wounded pride suggested to him that _he_ was not the favorite actor in the piece. His terms were, “Ego et rex meus,” and a less-distinguished station would not satisfy the haughty insolence of Somerset’s succession in the precarious favor of the king. Our British Solomon who willed, but could not restore, the Palatinate to his son-in-law, had long been accustomed to consider the union of Charles with the Infanta, as the only available means left by which he could secure the object he had so much at heart. He was not made of the stern stuff, which in other kings would have set a whole army in motion. That “sagacious simpleton” was never in so turbulent a vein. His most powerful weapon was an ambassador, and the best of these were but sad specimens of diplomacy, and thus, weak as he was, both in the cabinet and field, we may guess at his rapture when the marriage was agreed to by the Court of Spain--the restoration of the Palatinate talked of as a wedding present, and the bride’s dowry two millions of eight.