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 The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy
  The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy; Part 5

The First Two Stuarts and their Foreign Policy; Part 5

Having failed to prevent the Spanish occupation of the Palatinate, James thought he could get the Spaniards to surrender it if he arranged a marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta, and he accordingly reopened the negotiations which he had begun in 1617. Finally Charles—fancying himself in love with the Infanta, whom, by the way, he had never seen—and Buckingham, James's favourite, persuaded James to let them go to Madrid and woo the Infanta (1623). As Tom and John Smith, they crossed the Continent, and arrived at Madrid at eight o'clock one night But the Spanish statesmen in return for the marriage, instead of being prepared to give up the Palatinate, tried to extract from Charles concessions for the Roman Catholics in England (Charles was only allowed one interview of a purely formal nature with the Infanta; he tried to effect another of a more informal character by leaping into a garden where she was walking, but the Infanta, who did not care for Charles, rushed away shrieking). Charles made ail sorts of promises—which no one knew better than himself that he could not have kept; and finally came back in disgust, to be received with acclamations and bonfires (There were a hundred and eight alone between St. Paul's and London Bridge), not so much because he had returned as because he had returned without the Infanta. Buckingham and Charles were now all for war to recover the Palatinate. James yielded and Parliament voted the money, and an army was collected (1624). But the army was, to quote a contemporary, "a rabble of raw and poor rascals", and never reached its destination, being diverted to another siege in 1625. In the same year James died, with the Palatinate still unrecovered.

When Charles came to the throne, the Protestants were fighting for their existence in Germany, but a new champion had arisen on behalf of the Protestant cause in the person of the King of Denmark. Charles agreed to pay him £360,000 a year for the conduct of a war in Germany. He paid one instalment of £46,000—and that was all. For one thing, Charles had obtained, largely through his own fault, insufficient supplies of money from Parliament For another, soon after Charles made the engagement to the Danish king, he and Buckingham, who largely controlled the king's policy, came to the conclusion that the Protestantism of Germany might best be succoured and the Palatinate recovered by an attack upon the Spanish ports. It was, doubtless, a roundabout plan to attack the King of Spain in order to put pressure on the Emperor to restore Frederick, but a naval war with Spain was sure to be popular, and it was easier than campaigning in Germany. Accordingly an expedition was organized to Cadiz, which was to repeat Drake's exploit, sack the town and capture the treasure fleet coming from America. But the expedition came to hopeless grief and took neither Cadiz nor the treasure fleet (1625) (The expedition had started in the stormy month of October, with pressed crews and soldiers, with ships whose hulls were rotten and whose sails—at all events in the case of one ship—dated from the Armada; and the food was exceedingly bad, "such as no dog in Paris garden would eat", said a contemporary. On reaching Cadiz, the men got drunk and the ships finally returned home with scarcely enough men to work them ). The next year the King of Denmark, with soldiers clamouring for pay in consequence of the failure of the English subsidies, was obliged to take the offensive, was decisively defeated, and accordingly returned to his own country (1626). Charles's initial interference in the Thirty Years War had, therefore, been disastrous.

Chronology
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