Madrid was not quite so full of English courtiers as that, though their presence was conspicuous and assertive enough at Court. At the weekly representation of the comedies in the palace, only the royal party were provided with chairs; the ladies, in the usual Spanish Court fashion, being seated on cushions on the floor, and the gentlemen standing behind the royal family. This did not suit either Buckingham or the most ostentatious nobleman of his time, the upstart Hay, Earl of Carlisle, and they both fumed and fretted at what they considered a slight upon them. Buckingham, of course, was obliged to stay, but Hay and many others of the insolent crew left Madrid in dudgeon before the great heats came on. Hay, indeed, found it extremely difficult to obtain audience of the Infanta, whom the English already called Princess of Wales; and when, after much importunity, he was admitted, "he was brought into a room where the Infanta was placed on a throne { 104} aloft, gloriously set forth with her ladies about her: my lord, with his compliments, motions, and approaches, could not draw from her so much as the least nod, she remaining all the while as immovable as the image of the Virgin Mary.... At his coming away the Infanta gave him leave to kneel to her above an hour, whereupon our great ladies begin to consult how they shall demean herself when she comes."[17]
During the whole of the spring, matters in Madrid remained thus, the arrival of the dispensation being constantly delayed, whilst England was being every day more deeply pledged to an impossible policy by the folly of Buckingham and Charles and the eagerness of King James. James had made the fatal mistake--after saying, through Bristol, that the Pope's dispensation meant nothing whatever to him--of sending agents, Father Gage particularly, to Rome to negotiate for the dispensation to be modified and expedited, and he showed himself more squeezable on the religious point at every turn of the negotiation. "As for myself," he wrote to his son and Buckingham late in March, "I would with all my heart give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first seat. I, being a western King, would go with the Patriarch of the West. And as for his temporal seigniory of Rome I do not quarrel with that either. Let him, in God's name, be _primus episcopus inter omnes episcopos, et princeps episcoporum_, so it be no otherwise but as St. Peter was _princeps episcoporum_." So confident were they all that no serious hitch would stand in the way of the wedding { 105} at last, that the fleet which was intended to carry back the Infanta and her husband to England was ready to sail for Spain in April, and the silly doting King was busy settling the smallest details of the voyage for the comfort of his "sweet boys."