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Love’s Knight-Errant
by
Who was this eager errant knight? All London by this time knew, and it is time that we should learn. Indeed, while the youthful wayfarers were speeding away on their mad and merry ride, the privy councillors of England were on their knees before King James, half beside themselves with apprehension, saying that Prince Charles had disappeared, that the rumor was that he had gone to Spain, and begging to know if this wild rumor were true.
“There is no doubt of it,” said the king. “But what of that? His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather all went into foreign countries to fetch home their wives,–why not the prince, my son?”
“England may learn why,” was the answer of the alarmed councillors, and after them of the disturbed country. “The king of Spain is not to be trusted with such a royal morsel. Suppose he seizes the heir to England’s throne, and holds him as hostage! The boy is mad, and the king in his dotage to permit so wild a thing.” Such was the scope of general comment on the prince’s escapade.
While England fumed, and King James had begun to fret in chorus with the country, his “sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romanso,” as he had remarked on first learning of their flight, were making their way at utmost horse-speed across France. A few miles beyond Bayonne they met a messenger from the Earl of Bristol, ambassador at Madrid, bearing despatches to England. They stopped him, opened his papers, and sought to read them, but found the bulk of them written in a cipher beyond their powers to solve. Baffled in this, they bade Gresley, the messenger, to return with them as far as Irun, as they wished him to bear to the king a letter written on Spanish soil.
No great distance farther brought them to the small river Bidassoa, the Rubicon of their journey. It formed the boundary between France and Spain. On reaching its southern bank they stood on the soil of the land of the dons, and the truant prince danced for joy, filled with delight at the success of his runaway prank. Gresley afterwards reported in England that Buckingham looked worn from his long ride, but that he had never seen Prince Charles so merry.
Onward through this new kingdom went the youthful scapegraces, over the hills and plains of Spain, their hearts beating with merry music,–Buckingham gay from his native spirit of adventure, Charles eager to see in knight-errant fashion the charming infanta of Spain, of whom he had seen, as yet, only the “counterfeit presentment,” and a view of whom in person was the real object of his journey. So ardent were the two young men that they far outrode their companions, and at eight o’clock in the evening of March 7, seventeen days after they had left Buckingham’s villa at Newhall, the truant pair were knocking briskly at the door of the Earl of Bristol at Madrid.
Wilder and more perilous escapade had rarely been adventured. The king had let them go with fear and trembling. Weak-willed monarch as he was, he could not resist Buckingham’s persuasions, though he dreaded the result. The uncertain temper of Philip of Spain was well-known, the preliminaries of the marriage which had been designed between Charles and the infanta were far from settled, the political relations between England and Spain were not of the most pacific, and it was within the bounds of probability that Philip might seize and hold the heir of England. It would give him a vast advantage over the sister realm, and profit had been known to outweigh honor in the minds of potentates.
Heedless of all this, sure that his appearance would dispel the clouds that hung over the marriage compact and shed the sunshine of peace and union over the two kingdoms, giddy with the hopefulness of youth, and infected with Buckingham’s love of gallantry and adventure, Charles reached Madrid without a thought of peril, wild to see the infanta in his new role of knight-errant, and to decide for himself whether the beauty and accomplishments for which she was famed were as patent to his eye as to the voice of common report, and such as made her worthy the love of a prince of high degree.