hospitality that the Prince had thrown upon them.[26] For the greater part of that night the minister worked hard laying out all the plans for the entertainment of the Prince, and for avoiding without giving mortal offence the marriage he sought. At {75} eight o'clock next morning a meeting of high councillors, with Gondomar and the King's confessor, met in the Count-Duke's room in the palace, the result of their deliberations, being highly characteristic: namely, "first, to offer public prayers to God in thanks for the event, and in supplication for His guidance"; and secondly, to instruct Gondomar to sound Buckingham and Cottington (who was expected to arrive that day) as to how far the King of England might be squeezed, "in order to bring this visit to be a great and very signal service to the Church."[27] [Sidenote: Olivares meets Buckingham] A dozen knotty points of etiquette had to be settled, and Gondomar was busy all day speeding backward and forward between the palace and the "house with the seven chimneys";[28] but at last it was arranged that the pride of Olivares should be saved from making the first visit, by the device of an apparently chance meeting with Buckingham. Already Madrid was agog with the news that some great personage, the King of England some said, had arrived in disguise; and when, late on Saturday afternoon, the great swaying gilded coach of Olivares, with its leather curtains, its six gaudily decked mules, and its crowd of liveried servants and pages around it, was seen threading the green {76} alleys of the gardens below the palace on the banks of the Manzanares, all the idlers on "Liars Walk" knew that the Count-Duke was going to meet, "by chance," the Admiral of England, the favourite of his King. When the carriages met, Olivares alighted and greeted Buckingham half-way between their coaches, where, with carefully arranged politeness and high-flown compliments, as false as they were pompous, the great Guzman first measured his strength with brilliant, rash, unscrupulous George Villiers.