[Footnote 14: “Drinking tobacco” has an odd look; but it was a phrase of the time. One version of a well-known refrain ran:—
“Think this while you’re drinking tobacco”.]
[Footnote 15: He was executed on Tower Hill on 14 May, 1631. A fresh patent of nobility was afterwards granted to his son.]
The appointment of Newcastle to attend the King to Scotland, noticed at the end of the next letter, was destined to put him to enormous expense.
“FRANCIS, LORD COTTINGTON TO THE EARL OF NEWCASTLE.
“1632, DECEMBER 13. CHARING CROSS.—The death of the two Kings, Sweden and Bohemia, with his Majesty’s late sickness of the small-pox, has almost put by here all kind of home negociations; yet I must tell you from my Lord Treasurer that you are lively in the memory both of the King and of his lordship. The King is now well though he still keeps his chamber, and my Lord Deputy[16] is precisely sent for, so that you will have one friend more here. You are appointed to attend the King into Scotland which I conceive might be a good motive for your friends to put it to a period.”
The “good motive for your friends to put it to a period” probably alluded to an object that Newcastle had very much at heart, of which we shall hear more by and by.
Clarendon tells us something of the personality of Newcastle.[17] “He was a very fine gentleman, active, full of courage and most accomplished in those qualities of horsemanship, dancing and fencing, which accompany a good breeding, in which his delight was. Besides that, he was amorous in poetry and music, to which he indulged the greatest part of his time.”
[Footnote 17: _History_, Book viii. p. 507.]
Newcastle seems also to have been “amorous” in pictures, if we may judge from the following letter.[18]
[Footnote 18: _Hist. MSS. Comm._, 13th Rep., Appendix, Part II, p. 131.]
“W. EARL OF NEWCASTLE TO SIR ANTHONY VANDYKE.
“1636 (7) FEBRUARY. WELBECK.—The favours of my friends you have so transmitted unto me as the longer I looke on them the more I think them nature and not art. It is not my error alone. If it be a disease, it is epidemical, for such power hath your hand on the eyes of mankind. Next the blessing of your company and sweetness of conversation, the greatest blessing were to be an Argus or all over but one eye, so it or they were ever fixed upon that which we must call yours. What wants in judgment I can supply with admiration, and scape the title of ignorance since I have the luck to be astonished in the right place, and the happiness to be passionately your humble servant.”