"The next day your Baby desired to kiss the King's hand privately in
the palace, which was granted, and thus performed. First, the King
would not suffer him to come to his chamber, but met him at the
stair-foot, then entered into the coach and walked in his park. The
greatest matter that passed between them was compliments, ... and then
by force he would needs convey him (_i.e._ Charles) half way home, in
which doing they were both almost overthrown in brick pits. Two days
after we met his Majesty again in his park with his two brothers; they
spent their time in seeing his men kill partridges flying and conies
running with a gun."[38]
In the meanwhile the people with pride and delight had quite satisfied
themselves that the coming of the Prince meant the intended conversion
of himself to Catholicism and the return of England to the fold of the
Church,[39] and Olivares pressed this {84} point so persistently and
publicly upon Charles, that Buckingham himself began to take fright.
He noticed that whenever the Count-Duke found himself near Charles,
which indeed was continually, he turned the conversation towards the
Catholic religion. Charles was young, the son of a Catholic mother,
and was certainly for the time smitten by the Catholic Infanta: his
father had professed himself Catholic again and again; and at this
moment was writing thus to his "Sweet boys": "I send you, my Baby, two
of your fittest chaplains for this purpose, Mawe and Wren, together
with all stuff and ornaments fit for the service of God. I have fully
instructed them, so as all their behaviour and service shall, I hope,
prove decent and agreeable to the service of the primitive Church; _and
yet as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done; for it hath ever
been my way to go with the Church of Rome usque ad aras_." But
whatever may have been the tendencies of Charles himself, Buckingham in
his saner moments, and certainly Bristol, must have seen the pitfall
laid for the Prince, and thus early, in the midst of all the
complimentary billing and cooing before the state entry, the young
adventurers began to realise the {85} difficulty of the task, which
looked so easy from a distance.
On the day following the state entry, Charles and Buckingham wrote to
the King--
"For our chief business, we find them by outward shows as desirous of
it as ourselves, yet they are hankering upon a conversion; for they say
that there can be no firm friendship without union in religion, but
they put no question in bestowing their sister, and we put the other
quite out of the question, because neither our conscience nor the time
serves for it."[40]