alled himself his Majesty's dog and slave, and called his Majesty Your
Sowship. His Sowship called him STEENIE; it is supposed, because that
was a nickname for Stephen, and because St. Stephen was generally
represented in pictures as a handsome saint.

His Sowship was driven sometimes to his wits'-end by his trimming between
the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home, and his desire to
wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means of getting a rich
princess for his son's wife: a part of whose fortune he might cram into
his greasy pockets. Prince Charles--or as his Sowship called him, Baby
Charles--being now PRINCE OF WALES, the old project of a marriage with
the Spanish King's daughter had been revived for him; and as she could
not marry a Protestant without leave from the Pope, his Sowship himself
secretly and meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it. The
negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in great
books, than you can imagine, but the upshot of it all is, that when it
had been held off by the Spanish Court for a long time, Baby Charles and
Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas Smith and Mr. John Smith, to
see the Spanish Princess; that Baby Charles pretended to be desperately
in love with her, and jumped off walls to look at her, and made a
considerable fool of himself in a good many ways; that she was called
Princess of Wales and that the whole Spanish Court believed Baby Charles
to be all but dying for her sake, as he expressly told them he was; that
Baby Charles and Steenie came back to England, and were received with as
much rapture as if they had been a blessing to it; that Baby Charles had
actually fallen in love with HENRIETTA MARIA, the French King's sister,
whom he had seen in Paris; that he thought it a wonderfully fine and
princely thing to have deceived the Spaniards, all through; and that he
openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as he was safe and sound at home
again, that the Spaniards were great fools to have believed him.

Like most dishonest men, the Prince and the favourite complained that the
people whom they had deluded were dishonest. They made such
misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in this business of
the Spanish match, that the English nation became eager for a war with
them. Although the gravest Spaniards laughed at the idea of his Sowship
in a warlike attitude, the Parliament granted money for the beginning of
hostilitie