John looked up from the water channel and wiped his hands on his old breeches. ‘He can’t be such a fool,’ he said anxiously. ‘He cannot have got as far as he has and still be a fool. He must know that there is a balance between king and Parliament and church and people.’ He thought of Cecil; he could not help but think of Cecil in this, his successor’s household. ‘He cannot hold the offices he has and be a fool,’ John said stoutly. ‘He must have some way to turn this all around.’

John did his lord a favour with such faith. Buckingham had no master plan and no plan hidden behind it. He was not a Cecil with a conspiracy for every eventuality. Everything in his life had come easily to him, and he had thought that this would come easily too. He had thought that he could seduce the Spanish as he had seduced everyone else. But the cold formal court of Spain proved hardhearted even to England’s heartbreaker; and his disappointment turned him against them. His letters from home from his mother and from his wife warned him that a Spanish bride would never be accepted and the man who tried to bring her to the English throne could meet with nothing but disaster. Buckingham turned like a weathercock; but Charles – who had learned early that love is always a matter of disappointment – clung to his picture of a desirable and unattainable woman. Indeed, the more unattainable she became, the more she mirrored Charles’s vision of true love and desire.

It was Buckingham’s task to lift the prince’s view from a woman who might never love him, whom he could trail behind for the rest of his days, as he had trailed behind his brother, and encourage him to think that as a prince of England he might hope for a little more.

It was not easy. Buckingham reminded him of the concessions of the marriage contract – wild promises of religious tolerance and the children of the marriage to be brought up as Papists. He questioned Spanish probity, wondering if the infanta could really be constrained into marrying a heretic, or if she would not, on her wedding day, make a dive for a nunnery and leave Charles looking like a fool. The steady drip, drip, of cynicism and doubt eroded the prince’s confidence, which was, at the best of times, unsteady. By the time the two had ridden from Madrid to Santander to meet the English fleet, Buckingham and the prince were the best of friends, and Spain was their opponent. By the time they sailed into Portsmouth they were as close as brothers and Spain was not to be the new alliance, but was once again the deadliest enemy, and the marriage contract which they had worked for so fervently was a trap that they were determined to escape.