In 1645, he was advanced to the Earldom of Norwich. He died in 1662, leaving his title to George Goring, the celebrated loyalist, of whom so masterly a portrait has been drawn by Clarendon.
Nichols, ii. p. 38, note; apud Sir Anthony Weldon.
The King proceeded by easy journeys of ten, twelve, and seventeen miles a day northwards. It is curious to find him resting a day and a night at the home of Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, near Huntingdon.[160] At Lincoln, he healed fifty persons of the Evil, a gracious act which was succeeded by an attendance upon a cock-fighting, at which His Majesty was very merry. This diversion was varied by horse-racing.
On his arrival near Edinburgh, the King took up his arrival at Seton House, the seat of the Earl of Wintoun, whose family continued to be faithful to the descendants of James during the calamitous contest between the modern Stuarts and the Hanoverians. James remained in Scotland until the fifth of July, when he returned by the west coast of Scotland to Carlisle.
The three great objects of his Majesty’s journey to Scotland, were the extension of episcopal authority; the establishment of some ceremonials in religion; and the elevation of the civil above the ecclesiastic authority.[161] It does not, however, appear that Buckingham took any active part in these designs, or that he was at this period regarded in any other light than as one of the ministering agents to the amusement of James’s vacant hours. It is possible that he may have viewed Scotland with that prejudice with which the English at that time regarded that nation. The revenues of that country being then insufficient to maintain the Government, Buckingham probably deemed it, as others did, nothing but a drain upon the resources of England—a barren ground from which “a beggarly rabble (like a fluent spring),” to use the words of Osborne, “was for ever to be found crossing the River Tweed.”[162] The national prejudice was likewise considerably strengthened by the King’s favourite, but abortive scheme of union between the two crowns; thus dividing the kingdom into halves, so that he, “a Christian king under the gospel, should no longer be a polygamist to two wives, under which discreditable imputation he conceived that the partition of the kingdom placed him.”[163] Whether Buckingham may have been propitiated by the hospitality of the Scots or not, or whether he thought with Sir Anthony Weldon that “the country was too good for them that possess it, and too bad for others to be at the charge to conquer it,” does not appear. In some passages of the Royal Progress it is most likely that the young courtier found but little delight. At St. Andrews, disputations in divinity, and at Stirling in philosophy, were honoured by the King’s presence. They were delivered by some members of the University of Edinburgh, and were to have been held in the college there, had not public business interfered.”[164]