ABSTRACT
The only things about which the survivors of the Cadiz expedition need not have worried in the winter of 1625, as they made it back to the harbours of England, or were swept west against the Irish coast, were the reactions of the king or the duke. Far from being dispirited, or even pausing a while to see if they might learn any lessons from the catastrophe, Charles and Buckingham praised the fleet’s leaders and started planning another expedition. To pay for such an offensive they needed money, and had thus to call parliament, whose members were neither so forgiving nor so charitable. Instead the Commons tried to impeach Buckingham, whom they regarded as the architect of all England’s woes, and once more the king (who, if not chief designer, was at least senior partner) dissolved parliament to save his friend. The two did not, however, dissolve their plans to attack Re, the island a few miles off the French fortress of La Rochelle where Louis XIII was besieging Huguenot rebels: but this time, just to make sure of success, Buckingham was to lead the attack in person. In the two years between the Cadiz expedition and that to Re Charles’s marriage continued to deteriorate: Henrietta Maria was indifferent to English Protestant sensibilities: Charles had little consideration for his young wife’s misery, and the queen’s advisers went on encouraging their mistress’s obdurance. Buckingham, meanwhile, benefited from the failure of his friend’s marriage. Eventually Charles and Henrietta Maria’s rows climaxed in the expulsion of her French servants and though Louis XIII sent an ambassador to try and patch things up, gradually England and France drifted into open hostilities. Thus in many ways the second two years of Charles’s reign were a continuation of the opening stage, with a failed marriage, a failed parliament and a failed military adventure. Indeed John Rous could have been looking forward as well as back, when he wrote in his diary that the aftermath of the Cadiz expedition was a ‘shameful return’. 1
