It might be presumed, from this harangue, that never had the Court of James been so magnificent, nor such a throng of the high-born and the opulent clustered in the metropolis as at that time. But the fact was that whilst obscure country gentlemen brought thither their families, the old nobility fled from a court which cherished Somerset and proscribed Raleigh, and where all the real business of the King’s life consisted in expedients to raise money in order to support an expenditure from which he derived no dignity. The great and gallant representatives of the Houses of Clinton, Blount, and Willoughby D’Eresby sought in continental countries the meed of honour which was denied them in the service of their own country by the pacific temper of the King.[39] The Tower entombed some of the noblest spirits. There still languished the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Wilton; the one beloved, nevertheless, by Henry Prince of Wales, though suspected of being concerned with his kinsman Percy in the Gunpowder Plot; the other a “very hopeful gentleman blasted in the bud,” who had been imprisoned since the Raleigh plot. Others prosecuted schemes of discovery; West, Earl of Delawarr, in Virginia, attempted to second Raleigh, and contenting himself with that return and inward satisfaction which a good mind feels in its own consciousness of virtue, died in the undertaking. Others, such as the Earl of Arundel, could not tolerate the vulgar revels, the tasteless prodigality of the Court of James; that nobleman confined himself, therefore, to the splendours of his stately home, for his soul was not that of a patriot, nor had he, says Lord Clarendon, “any other affection for the nation or kingdom than as he has a home in it, in which, like the great Leviathan, he might disport himself.”[40]
Quotation from Birch’s work on the Colonies. See Brydges’ Peers of England in the Time of James I., p. 171.
Clarendon’s History of England, vol. i., p. 55.
Room and opportunity there were, therefore, for fresh aspirants to compete for royal favour; nevertheless the Earl of Somerset still reigned pre-eminent, and had then been recently promoted to the highest office about the King’s person, that of Lord Chamberlain. The reason assigned for this new display of partiality was also such as to prove that Somerset was firmly planted in his sovereign’s favour. He succeeded in the high office the Earl of Salisbury, who, as James expressed it, was wont to entertain his royal master with “epigrams, discourses, and learned epistles, and other such nicks and devices.” These, the King observed, would pay no debts, and he therefore selected in Somerset, he said, a “plain and honest gentleman, who, if he committed a fault, had not rhetoric enough to excuse it.”[41] It seemed therefore very improbable that Villiers should ever hope to rival one who was so rooted in the King’s regard as the Earl of Somerset, but events which no human foresight could have anticipated worked for him in the dark secrecy of a woman’s guilty career.