Buckingham retired to Wallingford House, where, sometime afterwards, the Lord Keeper Williams went to him, having with difficulty been admitted. “He found him,” says Bishop Hacket, “lying on a couch, in that unmovable posture that he would neither rise up nor speak, though invited twice or thrice with courteous questions.” But Williams generously consoled him, admonishing that he believed "God’s directing hand was in it, to stir up his grace;" he assured him that he came on purpose to bring him out of his sorrow with the light of the King’s favour. He besought the Duke to set off instantly for Windsor; not however to show himself to His Majesty before supper was over, and then to deport himself with all “amiable addresses;” not “to quit the King night or day, for the danger was that some would thrust themselves in to push his Majesty on to break utterly with the Parliament; and the next degree of theirs to be was, upon that dissolution, to see his grace convicted to the Tower, and God knows what would follow.”[79]
See Hacket’s Life of Williams. Also Mr. Chamberlain’s Letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, quoted in Nichols, 961, from Birch’s MSS., Brit. Mus., 417. These separate accounts are here connected; and Mr. Chamberlain’s date and statement of the place to which the King went, adopted upon the ground given by Nichols.
The Duke, as if awakening from a dream, aroused himself, and set off, on the following day, to Theobald’s, where he arrived before he was expected.
Thus, to Williams’ mediation, did Buckingham owe the avoidance of any open displeasure on the part of his sovereign; unhappily this obligation did not cancel in the Duke’s mind that avowal of a difference in opinion, and that condemnation of the policy pursued towards Spain which Williams esteemed it his duty to express.
Opinions differed as to the actual obligations of the Prince to complete the contract with the Infanta.
The Earl of Bristol declared that the King and the Prince stood as much engaged to it as princes could be; but Charles is said to have styled himself, as he knelt down before the King, at Royston, to have been “an absolute free man, but with one limitation--the restitution of the Palatinate.”[80]