In the week of waiting Charles sought permission { 83} to visit Philip privately in return for the interview in the Prado on Sunday night, and he and Buckingham gave the following account of the meeting to their "Dear Dad and Gossip."
"The next day your Baby desired to kiss the King's hand privately in the palace, which was granted, and thus performed. First, the King would not suffer him to come to his chamber, but met him at the stair-foot, then entered into the coach and walked in his park. The greatest matter that passed between them was compliments, ... and then by force he would needs convey him (_i.e._ Charles) half way home, in which doing they were both almost overthrown in brick pits. Two days after we met his Majesty again in his park with his two brothers; they spent their time in seeing his men kill partridges flying and conies running with a gun."[38]
In the meanwhile the people with pride and delight had quite satisfied themselves that the coming of the Prince meant the intended conversion of himself to Catholicism and the return of England to the fold of the Church,[39] and Olivares pressed this { 84} point so persistently and publicly upon Charles, that Buckingham himself began to take fright. He noticed that whenever the Count-Duke found himself near Charles, which indeed was continually, he turned the conversation towards the Catholic religion. Charles was young, the son of a Catholic mother, and was certainly for the time smitten by the Catholic Infanta: his father had professed himself Catholic again and again; and at this moment was writing thus to his "Sweet boys": "I send you, my Baby, two of your fittest chaplains for this purpose, Mawe and Wren, together with all stuff and ornaments fit for the service of God. I have fully instructed them, so as all their behaviour and service shall, I hope, prove decent and agreeable to the service of the primitive Church; _and yet as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done; for it hath ever been my way to go with the Church of Rome usque ad aras_." But whatever may have been the tendencies of Charles himself, Buckingham in his saner moments, and certainly Bristol, must have seen the pitfall laid for the Prince, and thus early, in the midst of all the complimentary billing and cooing before the state entry, the young adventurers began to realise the { 85} difficulty of the task, which looked so easy from a distance.