Bishop Hacket’s Life of the Lord Keeper Williams, p. 39.
Until the elevation of George Villiers from low estate to an unparalleled career of success, the race from which he sprang, though ancient and honourable, was but partially known to fame, and his ancestors, how valiant and loyal soever they had proved, had held the tenor of their way with little variation, and with only an occasional gleam of celebrity on one or other of its lineage; a course of moderate prosperity maintaining, without altering, its condition—rather, as Sir Henry Wotton has well expressed it, “without obscurity than with any great lustre.”[6] “I will, however,” adds the same quaint writer, after referring to the difficulty of making a proper estimate of all public characters, “show, therefore, as evenly as I can, and deduce him from his cradle through the deep and lubrick waves of State and Court till he be swallowed in the Gulf of Fatality.”[7]
Reliquiæ Wottonianæ. Life of Geo. Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, p. 208.
It was the fashion of those who were opposed to the Duke of Buckingham in his political career to speak with contempt of his origin, and thus attack one who was endowed with every possible advantage of natural gifts—and upon whom honours were lavished—on what was erroneously supposed to be his vulnerable point. Sir Symonds D’Ewes, as might be expected, was not backward in his strictures against a courtier so favoured and envied. He compares Villiers, indeed, to a man of the highest rank, but draws the parallel in these offensive terms:—“He was likest to Henry Loraine, Duke of Guise, in the most of the later passages of his life and death, that possible could be, onelie in this they differed, that Guise was a prince born, but Buckingham was but a younger son of an ordinarie familie of gentrie, of which the coat armoure was so meane as either in this age or of late years, without any ground, right, or authoritie, that I could see, they deferred their owne coate armoure, and bare the arms of Weyland, a Suffolke family, being argent on a cross gules, five escalops, &c.”[8] And again, when speaking of Felton, the assassin of the Duke, Sir Simond cannot forbear remarking:—“His familie was, doubtless, more noble and ancient than the Duke of Buckingham’s, and his ende much blesseder.”[9] To similar strictures does Wotton probably refer, when he remarks that, in “a wilde pamphlet” published about the Duke of Buckingham, the writers, “beside other pityfule malignities, would scant allow him to be a gentleman.”