The World полностью

Yet in private the planetary one was insecure, pious, playful and amorous, directed by a masterful valido (premier), the count-duke of Olivares, a sturdy and florid extrovert with a nose like a red hammer, who promoted himself in martial magnificence. The valido had won favour by a mix of old-fashioned sycophancy – bearing the brimming royal chamber pot and arranging royal assignations with actresses – and magnetic confidence: he had a plan to invigorate Spain, tarnished by financial crisis and military overstretch, and it was already working. Red-haired with flying moustaches, Philip was no fool but admitted to being overwhelmed by a ‘sea of confusions and ocean of difficulties’, which is why he needed Olivares. The king ‘is endowed with all the gifts’, wrote the artist Peter Paul Rubens, who knew him well, but ‘mistrusts himself, and defers to others too much’.

It was just at this time that another artist, the twenty-three-year-old Diego Velázquez, a notary’s son from Seville, arrived to meet the king – just before Charles and Buckingham. Olivares had invited him for a royal audition. Now he had to wait while Philip and Olivares dealt with the clumsy Englishmen. The English marriage could not happen without the liberating of English Catholics and Charles’s conversion to Catholicism. Had Buckingham come to offer Charles’s conversion? If not, the visit was going to be very awkward. Philip allowed Charles to glimpse his veiled sister, but she refused to marry a heretic. Meanwhile, the two macho showboats Olivares and Buckingham argued and almost came to blows.

The one thing Philip and Charles shared was a love of art, the only winner in the whole debacle. Charles was given two Titians by the exceedingly polite Philip. Both men sat for Velázquez. Philip loved Velázquez’s style, showing the Habsburg as both flawed man and planetary majesty. After painting Olivares in all his bloated self-importance and sensitively portraying Philip and his jaw, Velázquez was appointed usher of the privy chamber.

Charles now realized that unless he signed a face-saving agreement Olivares would not let him return to London. He signed. Determined to avenge themselves on the Habsburgs, he and Buckingham returned home, where the public were delighted that they were not accompanied by an infanta. But all factions now wanted war against Spain – and a French alliance. Charles and Buckingham unwisely allowed the impeachment by Parliament of their own treasurer in return for war subsidies. In March 1625, James died with Buckingham holding his hand – shortly before Charles married the fifteen-year-old French princess, Henrietta Maria, whose dark eyes revealed her Medici blood.

Travelling to Paris to collect the bride, Buckingham flaunted his glamour in twenty-five diamond-encrusted suits and at a garden party shamelessly flirted with Louis XIII’s wife, Anne of Austria. At court, he met one of the most fascinating figures in Europe, the Flemish diplomat-artist Rubens, whose extraordinary energy and ambition owed something to the notorious downfall of his father.^* Rubens’s extravagant, glitzy, colourful, sensuous art was the aesthetic wing of the Catholic resurgence, designed to outshine as well as outfight dour Protestantism and to display Habsburg magnificence.^* But he was unimpressed by the diamond-spangled Buckingham, who hired him to decorate his London palace.

When Charles met Henrietta Maria he could not believe how small she was. They matched, but she was irked by the restrictions at court. ‘I’m the most afflicted person on earth,’ she wrote. Brought up in Paris, daughter of a great king, the assassinated Henri IV, she was devoutly Catholic and very extravagant, her entourage numbering 200, including her favourite dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson. The latter was presented to her by Buckingham, jumping out of a pie in a suit of armour and becoming her inseparable Lord Minimus. Hudson would have a life almost as dramatic as those of his royal masters. But Charles’s marriage was dominated by Buckingham, while their policies floundered in the escalating European war.