Excerpt from Letters Relating to the Mission of Sir Thomas Roe to Gustavus Adolphus: 1629 30

To ordinary minds the winter of 1628-9 would have appeared a most unsuitable time for any warlike designs on the part of the King of England. The surrender of Rochelle in the previous autumn had been the crowning disaster of a long series of failures, and the domestic troubles had risen to such a height that no prudent man would have run the risk of entering upon diplomatic action which might possibly draw him into a war, which, in default of supplies from Parliament, could only end in disgrace and failure. But Charles had at least one quality in common with the nation over which' he ruled. He never knew when he was beaten, and we find him in the years which followed the assassination of Buckingham as ready to interfere on the! Continent diplomatically as he had been ready to interfere by force of arms whilst his favourite minister was alive.

In this course of action he had by his side till February 1632 the new Secretary of State, Viscount Dorchester, who, as Sir Dudley Carleton, had spent many years of his life as an ambassador at Venice and the Hague, and in two special missions to the court of France. He had thus acquired a considerable knowledge of continental affairs, and from his residence at the Hague and his intimate relations there with the exiled Elizabeth and her husband, as well as from his own bent of character, he had always taken a strong Protestant and anti-spanish view of the questions at issue. But his absence from England dated from the autumn of 1610, before that winter session which marked the first open breach between the King and the Lower House; and, except for two brief intervals, he did not see his own country again till the Spring of. 1626, when he found himself suddenly called upon to answer for the Government in the House of Commons, then bent upon impeaching Buckingham. The opposition in Parliament and the nation therefore struck him as something not merely unreasonable but even unintelligible, and he would naturally be of opinion that a decided move in the defence of Protestant interests in Germany would strengthen the Crown in the eyes of Charles's subjects.

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