the ill-feeling of the Spanish ministers against Buckingham, and thereby made the favourite an enemy for life.
When the prince quitted Madrid he left in Bristol's hands a proxy authorising him to appear for him in the marriage ceremony; but within a few days he despatched a letter to the ambassador, telling him not to use this proxy without further orders, lest the infanta should go into a nunnery after the marriage had taken place. During the remainder of the year Bristol did his best to avert the breach with Spain, on which Charles and Buckingham were bent, and it was only against his will that he informed Olivares that the marriage must be postponed until satisfactory assurances about the Palatinate had been given.
Bristol had offended too deeply to be allowed to remain in Spain. On 28 Jan. 1624 he took leave of Philip. Before he left Olivares told him that nothing he could ask would be denied him as a mark of the king of Spain's gratitude. Bristol replied that all that he had done had been done for his own master, and that he had rather offer himself to the slaughter in England than be Duke of Infantado in Spain.
On Bristol's return he was ordered into confinement in his own house at Sherborne. It was not that James was in any way angry with him, but that Charles and Buckingham were now the masters of the old king. Bristol at once began a course of that respectful but constitutional resistance, the merits of which neither Charles nor Buckingham was ever able to understand. He was ready to stand a trial in parliament, but he would not acknowledge himself to have been in the wrong. After the end of the session he was subjected to a series of interrogatories, but he could be brought no further than to acknowledge that he might have committed an error of judgment, and he was sent down to confinement in his house at Sherborne. In the beginning of 1625 he answered fully a fresh set of questions (‘The Earl of Bristol's Defence,’ in the Camden Miscellany, vol. vi.) After James's death Charles removed his name from the list of privy councillors, and continued his restraint at Sherborne, on the ground that though he had not been dishonest he would not acknowledge his error in trusting the Spanish ministers too much.
Bristol remained quietly at Sherborne for some months longer. In January 1626 he asked to be present at the coronation. Charles replied by an angry charge against the earl of having tried to pervert him from his religion when he was in Spain, a charge which Bristol met by a renewed application for a trial. Bristol received no writ of summons either to the first or the second parliament of the reign. On 22 March 1626, soon after the opening of the second parliament, he applied to the House of Lords to mediate with the king for a trial or the acknowledgment of his right to sit. Charles, to get out of the difficulty, sent him the writ, with an intimation in a letter from Lord-keeper Coventry that he was not to use it. Bristol, replying that the king's writ was to be obeyed rather than a letter from the lord keeper, took his seat, and craved justice against Buckingham, against whom he was prepared to bring an accusation. To anticipate the blow, Charles ordered the attorney-general to accuse Bristol, and on 1 May Bristol was brought to the bar. The lords, however, gave the king no assistance in this attempt to close his subject's mouth, and ordered that the charges of the king against Bristol and those of Bristol against Buckingham were to proceed simultaneously. Before either of the investigations had proceeded, for they were brought to an end on 15 June by the dissolution, Bristol was then sent to the Tower, and ordered to prepare for a Star-chamber prosecution. Before long he fell ill, and as he seemed likely to make awkward revelations if the trial were allowed to proceed, his illness was taken as affording an excuse for postponing the proceedings indefinitely. When on 17 March 1628 Charles's third parliament met, one of the first acts of the House of Lords was to insist on his restoration to liberty and to his place in parliament.
In the debates upon the king's powers of imprisoning without showing cause which preceded the introduction of the Petition of Right, Bristol was the first to propose a compromise. On 22 April he suggested that while limits might be fixed to the king's legal power there was behind it a regal power on which he might fall back in an emergency. ‘As Christ,’ he said, ‘upon the Sabbath, healed, so the prerogative is to be preserved for the preservation of the whole.’ The principle of this proposal was embodied in the propositions adopted by the upper house on 29 April; but it was rejected by the commons. When late in the session the petition of right was sent up to the lords, Bristol again tried to steer a middle course, but he evidently preferred the acceptance of the petition as it stood to its rejection. His final suggestion, made on 20 May, was that the petition should be accompanied by a mere verbal declaration that the houses had no intention of infringing the prerogative. On 7 June, after the king's first and unsatisfactory answer to the petition, he demanded a fuller and better answer.
