The King sent a message to them to say it was the Prince’s doing, and not that of Buckingham; and that the Council was not told of the scheme because “secrecy was the soul of the business.” The Council was ordered to “stay,” by a proclamation, the “amazement of the people,” who began to conclude that the Prince would be married “at a mass.” It appears, however, without any doubt, that the whole was a plot of James’s; for the Treasurer of the Household, Lord Brooke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Heriot the jeweller, and others, had been commanded by His Majesty, when he was at Newmarket, to go to the Tower and select some fine jewels, suitable to wear in hats, and “the best rope of pearls,” and some fine jewels, fit for a woman, for His Majesty to choose, which he will send abroad. They were not all for presents, but some to be lent to the Prince, and restored on his return home.[403] Buckingham, we hear from the same authority, took Sir Paul Pindar’s great diamonds, promising “to talk with him about paying for them.” Footnote 403: State Papers, vol. cxxxix., No. 16. A more detailed account of the commencement of this singular journey than the preceding may, however, be collected from other services. The travellers slept one night at Newhall; on the following day[404] they were accompanied by Sir Richard Graham, Master of the Marquis’s Horse, and his own earliest friend, adviser, and confidant.[405] They set off with a very small retinue, some of which they dismissed at various places, upon some idle pretence or another, but only to get rid of them. Thus they proceeded towards Gravesend; but, on crossing the river, a difficulty occurred. They had no small pieces of silver about them; and for want of them, were obliged to give the boatman, who rowed them across, a piece of twenty-two shillings; which, as Sir Henry Wotton relates, “struck the poor fellow into such melting tenderness, that so good gentlemen should be going (for so he suspected) about some quarrel beyond seas,” that he thought it right to acquaint the officers of the town with his suspicions. A message was instantly despatched to detain the travellers at Rochester; but they had passed through the city before it arrived. Footnote 404: Feb. 18th. Footnote 405: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.