The mere fact, indeed, that an English historian[7], deservedly esteemed for his acute and painstaking research, as well as for his eminent abilities, has honoured GONDOMAR’S story by endorsing it, is warrant enough for citing these despatches as they stand. But they have now to be compared with another account of the same transaction given by authority of Sir Robert COTTON himself. It was given upon a memorable occasion. The place was the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. The hearers were the assembled Lords and Commons of the Realm.[8] The Spaniard, it seems, was far, indeed, from holding—as he says that he held—his first conference with COTTON either in his own ambassadorial lodging, or upon credentials given in the name and by the command of King JAMES. That COTTON sought him he suggests, by implication. That the visit, in which the ground was broken, was made at the King’s instance, he states circumstantially. Both the suggestion and the assertion are false. As the reader has seen, Sir Robert’s openness in exhibiting his library and his antiquities was matter of public notoriety. [Sidenote: 1614. February.] Profiting by that well-known facility of access, the Spanish Ambassador presented himself at Cotton House in the guise of a virtuoso. ‘Do me the favour—with your wonted benevolence to strangers—to let me see your Museum.’ With some such words as these, GONDOMAR volunteered his first visit; led the conversation, by and bye, to politics; found that COTTON was not amongst the fanatical and undiscriminating enemies of Spain at all price—outspoken, as he had been, from the first, in his assertion both of the wisdom and of the duty of England to protect the Netherlanders; showed him certain letters or papers (not now to be identified, it appears), and in that way produced an impression on COTTON’S mind which led him to confer with SOMERSET, and eventually with the King. So much is certain. Unfortunately, the speeches at the famous ‘Conference’ on the Spanish Treaty, in 1624, are reported in the most fragmentary way imaginable. The reporter gives mere hints, where the reader anxiously looks for details. Their present value lies in the conclusive reasons which notwithstanding the lacunæ—they supply for weighing, with many grains of caution, the accusations of an enemy of England against an English statesman—whensoever it chances that those accusations are uncorroborated. King JAMES himself (it may here be added), when looking back at this mysterious transaction some years later, and in one of his Anti-Spanish moods—said to Sir Robert: ‘The Spaniard is a juggling jack. I believe he forged those letters;’ alluding, as the context suggests, to the papers—whatever they were—which GONDOMAR showed to COTTON at the outset of their intercourse, in order to induce him to act as an intermediary between himself and the Earl of SOMERSET.