Among the revenges wrought by the ‘whirligigs of time’ before JAMES went to his grave, was the necessity laid upon him to direct a search for precedents how best to put a mark of disgrace on a Spanish Ambassador for misconduct in his office. The man selected by the Duke of Buckingham to make the search, and to report upon it, was Sir Robert COTTON. Some weeks before he had been chosen to draw up, in the name of both Houses of Parliament, a formal address to the King for the rupture of the Spanish match. [Sidenote: THE SEARCH FOR PRECEDENTS AGAINST AMBASSADORS.] When BUCKINGHAM made that famous speech at the Conference of Lords and Commons on the relations between England and Spain, to which COTTON’S well-known _Remonstrance of the treaties of Amity and Marriage of the Houses of Austria and Spain with the Kings of England_,[11] was to serve as a preface, he spoke with considerable force and incisiveness. [Sidenote: 1624. 27 April.] His arguments were not hampered by many anxieties about consistency with his own antecedents. His words were chosen with a view to clinch his arguments to English minds rather than to spare Spanish susceptibilities. The ambassadors—there were then, I think, two of them—were furious at a degree of plain-speaking to which they had been little accustomed. They appealed to the King. They knew that the versatile favourite, once loved, was now dreaded. They tried to work on the King’s cowardice. The Duke, they told His Majesty, had plotted the calling of Parliament expressly to have a sure tool with which to keep him in control, should he prove refractory to the joint schemes of the Duke and Prince CHARLES. ‘They will confine your Majesty’s sacred person,’ said they, ‘to some place of pleasure, and transfer the regal power upon the Prince.’ The framing of such an accusation, writes Sir Robert, in the Report which he addressed to BUCKINGHAM on ‘_Proceedings against Ambassadors have miscarried themselves_,’ would, by the laws of the realm, amount to High Treason, had it been made by a subject. [Sidenote: _Relation of Proceedings, &c._; MS. LANSD., 811, ff. 133–139.] He then adduces a long string of precedents for the treatment of offending envoys; advises that the Spaniards should first be immediately confined to their own abode; and should then, by the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament, in person, be exhorted and required to ‘make a fair discovery of the ground that led them so to inform the King.’