For some time, an affection, on the one hand expressed in parental terms, and gratitude on the other, continued. “And now, my George,” wrote the Archbishop, “because, out of your kind affection to me, you style me your father, I will from this day forward repute and esteem you for my son, and so hereafter you know yourself to be; and in token thereof I do now give you my blessing again, and charge you, as my son, daily to serve God, to be diligent and pleasing to your master, and to be wary that at no man’s instance you press him with many suits, because they are not your friends who urge those things upon you, but have private ends of their own, which are not fit for you. So praying God to bless you,
Extract from a letter quoted in Bishop Goodman’s Life, vol ii., p. 160. This epistle is endorsed “To my very loving son, Sir George Villiers, Knight,” and dated Lambeth, December 10th, 1615.
The conduct of Villiers on a subsequent occasion made a deep impression on the mind of the excellent prelate who thus befriended the youth. “The Roman historian, Tacitus,” he bitterly remarks, “hath somewhere a note, that benefits while they may be requited, seem courtesies, but when they are so high that they cannot be repaid, they prove matters of hatred.”[88] This was a severe reflection on one who ought never to have forgotten the greatest of all obligations, those bestowed on the unfriended by one in the height of favour. Villiers may henceforth be regarded as fairly launched in his career; it was perhaps his misfortune that so few important obstacles occurred in his progress, and that it was achieved by an apparent concurrence of lucky events, and not by patient merit, nor by any of the legitimate sources of success. “The genius of the man,” observes a modern writer, “was daring and magnificent, and his elocution was graceful as his manners; but these were natural talents; he possessed no acquired ones.”[89]
Rushworth’s Collections, vol. i., p. 460.
See the Character of Buckingham, Disraeli’s Charles I., ii., p. 167.
A true, free-spoken, conscientious friend might have guarded his youth from peril, and given to his aspiring mind a laudable bias. Abbot would have been that friend, but Abbot was soon discarded, and an incident occurred some years afterwards which clouded this excellent prelate’s days, and produced a temporary, though unmerited, disgrace.