“I have conferred with my Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Solicitor thereupon, and there is a scruple in it that it should be one of the grievances put down in Parliament; which, if it be, I may not, in my duty and love to you, advise you to deal in it; if it be not, I will mould in the best manner and help it forward.”[261] In a subsequent letter, three years afterwards, Bacon again discourages the continued solicitude expressed by Buckingham for the patent; for, in alluding to the patents “as like to be stirred in the lower house of parliament,” he mentions among them that of the ale houses; and recommending, through the “singular love and affection he bore to Buckingham,” that his Lordship, “whom God hath made in all things so fit to be beloved, would put off the envy of these things,” which, according to Bacon’s judgment, “would bear no great fruit, and rather take the means for ceasing them, than the note for maintaining them.”[262]
Miss Strickland’s Life of Anne of Denmark.
Made Chancellor on the 4th of January, 1617.
It was probably, on finding his first application, though assisted by his mother, useless, that Buckingham contrived a match between Sir Sebastian Harvey’s[263] only daughter and Sir Christopher Villiers. “The match,” writes Mr. Chamberlain, “being not to the joy of the poor father, so much against the old man’s stomach, as the conceit thereof hath brought him near his grave already, if at least the world mistake not the true cause of his sickness.”[264]
The marriage was urged on, nevertheless, by the Countess of Buckingham, who found, however, that Sir Sebastian, then the Lord Mayor, a wilful and dogged man, could not by any means, either foul or fair, be brought to yield; in the agony of his spirit, the old man wished himself and his daughter dead, rather than be compelled to comply. The truth is, the young lady was only in her fourteenth year, and very small in stature, and her father did not wish her to be married until four or five years afterwards. He was, nevertheless, incessantly annoyed with messages from the King; and these he took so much to heart that he was brought to death’s door, although Buckingham and others were sent to comfort him. The Lord Mayor and aldermen had not been present at the Queen’s funeral; and the King, wishing to please Harvey, and to atone for this apparent insult, ordered that St. Paul’s Cross should mourn on Trinity Sunday, and that the Mayor and Corporation should go there as mourners; but Harvey, “sick and surfeited”, declined attendance; nor, when his Majesty, on the fifth of June, made his triumphant entry into London, was he well enough to receive him. In truth, the honest pride of Englishmen began to revolt against having the relatives of the favourite forced upon them as sons-in-law. The King, however, entered in state, attended by Prince Charles and all the nobility—Buckingham, of course, a conspicuous object amid the throng. James, on this melancholy occasion, looked “more like a wooer than a mourner.” He had already laid aside his weeds for Queen Anne. A fresh suit of “watchet satin, laid with a blue and white feather,” rejoiced the eyes of the company, who were glad to see him so gallant; and ill accorded with the expected appearance of an embassy of condolence from the Duc de Lorraine, with two or three thousand persons all in deep mourning.[265] And when it was remembered that the King had, not long ago, formally recommended, as on his death-bed, his son, his favourite, and Lord Digby—who had suffered, he said, in popularity, for the Spanish match—to his council, and had expected his decease shortly, there was something almost ludicrous in the contrast.