CHAPTER I.
STATE OF ENGLAND ON THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. COMPARED WITH THAT WHEN ELIZABETH BEGAN TO REIGN—THE GREAT REBELLION ATTRIBUTABLE TO THE MISRULE OF JAMES—ALLUSION OF LORD CLARENDON TO THIS SUBJECT—THE LUXURY OF A FAVOURITE ESSENTIAL TO JAMES SINCE THE AGE OF FOURTEEN—BIRTH AND ORIGIN OF GEORGE VILLIERS—HIS FAMILY LITTLE KNOWN TO FAME UNTIL HIS ELEVATION—THE SNEERS THROWN UPON IT BY SIR SYMONDS D’EWES; AND ITS CLAIMS TO HONOURABLE DESCENT CONSIDERED—SIR HENRY WOTTON’S TESTIMONY—THE FAMILY OF VILLIERS LONG KNOWN IN THE COUNTY OF LEICESTER—THE DIFFERENT SPELLINGS OF THE NAME—THE FORTUNES OF THE FAMILY IN FRANCE—REMARK OF LORD CLARENDON UPON THE CONDITION OF THE VILLIERS FAMILY IN ENGLAND—ALSO OF THE HISTORIAN SANDERSON—BROOKESBY[BROOKESBY], THE NATIVE PLACE OF GEORGE VILLIERS—HIS MOTHER, MARY BEAUMONT—HER MENIAL CONDITION IN THE FAMILY OF SIR GEORGE VILLIERS—HIS MARRIAGE—THE FAMILY BY A FORMER UNION—SIR WILLIAM VILLIERS—JOHN, VISCOUNT PURBECK—THE CHILDREN OF THE SECOND MARRIAGE: MARY, COUNTESS OF DENBIGH, CHRISTOPHER, GEORGE—LADY VILLIERS RETIRES TO GOADBY—HER EFFORTS FOR HER SON’S BENEFIT—HIS EDUCATION, DISPOSITION, AND ACQUIREMENTS—THE SLENDER MEANS OF HIS MOTHER—HER SECOND MARRIAGE, TO SIR THOMAS COMPTON—GEORGE VILLIERS SENT TO PARIS TO COMPLETE HIS EDUCATION—STATE OF THAT CAPITAL IN THE 17th CENTURY—VILLIERS RETURNS FROM PARIS, IMPROVED, AND REPAIRS TO HIS MOTHER’S HOUSE AT GOADBY.
LIFE AND TIMES OF
GEORGE VILLIERS.
CHAPTER I.
The historians who attribute the calamities of the Great Rebellion to the misrule of James the First, under the pernicious influence of his favourites, draw a lively parallel between the condition of England at the accession of that monarch and the state of peril and embarrassment with which his great predecessor had to contend. Elizabeth, whose inauguration, long celebrated, after her death, as a day of jubilee, was regarded as the commencement of national prosperity, came to the throne under very adverse circumstances. The functions of Government were clogged with debt. The miserable state of the navy required a constant vigilance to repel the chance of invasion, and to drive away pirates by whom the narrow seas were infested. The revenues of the Crown were insufficient to maintain its power and dignity; the country, moreover, was embroiled in religious dissensions; whilst the authority of the Queen was lessened by a disputed succession, and her mind harassed and embittered by the pretensions of the Dauphin of France to the Crown of England, in right of his wife, Mary Stuart.
James, on the contrary, began his reign with every exterior advantage. His claim to the sovereignty was undoubted; and various causes had concurred to give great influence to the Crown. The subservient tributes of respect paid to its dignity were such as even to astonish the envoys of despotic France. Elizabeth had been served and addressed by her subjects on the knee; James, at all events for a time, continued that abject custom, which was a type of the prevailing national sentiment towards royalty. Commerce, in spite of monopolies, and of the injudicious interference of the Legislature with wages, was advancing; leases granted of large tracts of land had increased the opulence of the country; the improved prospects of the landholders acted on the prosperity of the manufacturing classes: whilst the general welfare was increased by emigration; the religious persecutions on the Continent, driving from foreign towns ingenious workmen, sent them into England, where they introduced arts hitherto unknown in this country. The Constitution, too, had been maintained; and, with the exception of the court of the Star Chamber, over which James presided in person, the principles of liberty had not been materially invaded. There was no standing army; the tenets of Protestantism were established; and the Presbyterian education of the King afforded a hope that certain traces of the faith which had been renounced would die away, and that ceremonials which were objectionable to many would be speedily discontinued. Thus, the first of the Stuart Kings enjoyed blessings not possessed by any of his predecessors; and, ascending the throne, opened a new era in the history of the country.[[2]]
James, nevertheless, was not long in showing how fallacious were all expectations founded on his good sense, and on the supposed liberal views which a people, now intelligent and prosperous, fondly anticipated in their ruler. Educated by Buchanan as if he had been destined for the Tutor of a College rather than for a King; his memory crammed; his capacity clogged with ill-digested learning; prejudiced as a Scotchman, yet prejudiced against the established church of his native country, James well merited the sneering appellation of Henry IV. of France, who called him “Captain of Wits and Clerk of Arms,”[[3]] and proved, too lamentably, how easy it is by wrong-headedness to embroil and debase a country.
The blunders which James committed in his civil government began before the subject of this memoir was introduced to royal notice; yet, since George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, figured prominently in that period which is supposed to have been the commencement of decay, the origin of the Great Rebellion has been attributed to his maladministration, nor has the grave responsibility been absolutely disavowed, even by Lord Clarendon, the apologist and admirer of the Duke of Buckingham.
“I am not,” writes Lord Clarendon, “so sharp-sighted as those who have discerned the Rebellion contriving from (if not before) the death of Queen Elizabeth, and fomented by several Princes and great Ministers of State in Christendom to the time it broke out; neither do I look back so far, because I believe the design to have been so long since formed, but that, by viewing the tempers, dispositions, and habits at that time of the Court and country, we may discern the minds of men prepared, of some to act, and of others to suffer all that has since happened.”[[4]]
Whatsoever may have been the faults of James the First, it is probable that they would not essentially have affected the well-being of his son, had not the system of favouritism, which was one of James’s greatest weaknesses, acted upon the character of the young Prince, whose earliest associations were stamped with devotion to Buckingham. At once minister, minion, and master, the power behind the throne, to whose dictation, during the years of his brief and bright career, even the High Court of Parliament submitted—the distinction of being the last royal favourite in England is due to this ill-fated man. By him the “sluice of honour,” as an old writer expresses it, “was opened and closed at pleasure.” He was to King James a sort of “Parhelion,”[[5]] at whose course foreign Courts wondered, whilst the sagacious and prophetic at home trembled as they beheld at once its eccentricity and its splendour. At his death the experiment, which had been tried once too often, was abandoned, never to be renewed; and no acknowledged successor in the meteoric career of Buckingham ever appeared before the dazzled gaze of our countrymen. The minutest circumstances relative to his origin are interesting, not only as they concern one whose noble bearing and powers of fascination almost effaced, during his life, the remembrance of his errors, but as they unfold the foundation of a great family which still influences our national councils.
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]]
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.”
It is far easier to make a charge of this nature than to maintain it, for the family of Villiers had long been known in the County of Leicester, where it removed from Kinalton, in Nottinghamshire, the first place of migration from Normandy; where, writes Sir Henry Wotton, “it had been long seated.” It does not appear that Leicestershire was the only place of residence which the ancestors of George Villiers possessed; as the same authority expresses it, they “chiefly continued” in that county for the space of four hundred years before the birth of the first Duke of Buckingham;[[10]] a time long enough, one might suppose, to satisfy a reasonable genealogist.
The name of Villiers, conformably to the arbitrary spelling of ancient times, was written differently, sometimes Villiers, at others Villers, Villeres, and Vyleres; nor did those who bore this famous surname finally adopt the spelling “Villiers” until the reign of James I.
The founder of the family, Philip de Villers, of Lisle Adam, was a Norman Seigneur; he was also Grand Master of the Island of Rhodes, and signalized himself in the defence of that island against the Turks. After the conquest, certain lands in Leicestershire were granted by William the Conqueror to a Norman Knight hearing the appellation De Villers; but another branch of the same race remained in France, and its various members have been distinguished in courts, in arms, and as legislators. Argiver de Villers was sewer[[11]] to Philip the First; Pierre de Villers held the office of Grand Master in his native country, under Charles the Sixth.[[12]]
Invention was therefore not requisite to dignify the long unbroken line of respectable progenitors to whom George Villiers owed his origin. “Heraldry,” remarks a certain writer, when referring to this celebrated man, “might blazon as large fields of his pedigree as might concern any subject to prove.”[[13]] Without bringing that assertion to the test, it is sufficient to add that successive generations flourished and passed away, sometimes emerging from their seclusion to follow the reigning monarch to the wars, as in the instances of Sir Alexander de Villers, and Sir Nicholas his son, the former assisting Edward the First in the Crusades, and adding to his name the designation of “Brookesby[Brookesby];” and the latter, after sundry exploits in the Holy Land, augmenting his armorial bearings by the Cross of St. George and five escalop shells, ancient badges of the Crusaders; so that the “coat armour,” esteemed so mean by Sir Symonds D’Ewes, and said to have been borrowed, was not without its distinctions, even at an early period.
But it is singular that from a personage of lowly fortunes, if not of humble family, sprang the generation which was so noted in its time.
At Brookesby[Brookesby], the manorial residence of the race, there had dwelt, for several centuries, successive proprietors, little remarkable, since the time of the valiant Crusaders, either for their career in arms, or for their ambition to rise in the State. A stream, dignified by the name of the River Wreke, flows near the house, which is said to have been the residence of the Villiers family; a gentleman’s seat, a plain and somewhat insignificant building, having a central division, and two projecting wings, now owns the name of Brookesby[Brookesby].[[14]]
The town of Brookesby[Brookesby] has, of late years, been returned as a decayed town; but its church is worthy of note in a county which, as Fuller remarks, “affordeth no cathedrals, and as for the parish churches, they may take the eye, but not ravish the admiration of the beholder.” This structure, dedicated to St. Michael, boasts a handsome tower, above which rises a small spire, well crocheted; the battlements of the tower are remarkably beautiful, being open worked, and embellished with a row of shields, of which the most conspicuous is that of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, and of his Duchess, and on it there is an honorary augmentation, showing the descent which he claimed from the blood royal of Edward the Fourth.[[15]] It seems as if, amid the decay which surrounds it, this church has remained as a witness of the former greatness of that now extinct branch of the Villiers family, whose glories emblazon its battlements and windows. The direct line of the favourite of James the First ceased in two generations after his proud and brief career.
From the retirement of Brookesby[Brookesby], one of its owners was summoned, during a royal progress, to the presence of Queen Elizabeth. This was Sir George Villiers, the father of the Duke of Buckingham, who was consequently knighted, when High Sheriff for Leicestershire,[[16]] by the Queen. Sir George married the daughter of William Sanders, of Harrington, in the County of Northampton, and had by that marriage two sons, William, who inherited Brokesby and became a baronet; and Edward, afterwards President of Munster, and the ancestor of the present Earl of Jersey.
Three daughters were also the issue of this marriage; Elizabeth, who married Lord Butler, of Bramfield; Anne, who married William Washington, of Pakington, County of Leicester; and Frances, unmarried.[[17]] Their mother died, and Sir George, perhaps imprudently, for his estate was not considerable, formed a second union.
Some circumstances rendered this step, indeed, peculiarly indiscreet; and nothing could account for so rash an act in a man of grave years, but an infatuation produced by extraordinary personal gifts, and probably by some ability and management on the part of his second wife.
It is evident that the Knight had never contemplated the probability of such an event, for he settled the greater portion of his estates upon his first wife and her children; and a mere pittance remained for the issue of any second marriage. Yet, in spite of these considerations, Sir George Villiers was captivated by a handsome person, the attractions of which appear not to have been wholly lost upon him even during the lifetime of the first Lady Villiers.
It happened that among the inferior servants of his household, there lived a young woman, named Mary Beaumont, the indigent member of an ancient family,[[18]] by some asserted to have been that of the Beaumonts of Cole-Orton, in Leicestershire, by others, to have been settled at Glenfield, in the same county.
The occupation of Mary Beaumont is stated to have been that of a “kitchen-maid” in the house of Sir George Villiers, but this assertion may possibly be traced to the desire of a certain class of writers to debase as much as possible the family of Villiers.
That she was, however, in a menial capacity of some kind, appears from common report to have been understood.[[19]] “Her ragged habit,” observes a contemporary historian, “could not shade the beautiful and excellent frame of her person, which Sir George, taking notice of, prevailed with his lady to remove her out of the kitchen into her chamber, which, with much importunity on Sir George’s part, and unwillingness of my lady, at last was done.”
After the death of his wife, the sentiments of the widower were expressed without reserve. He was observed “to look very sweet upon my lady’s woman;” he was known to bestow upon her twenty pounds, to purchase as good a dress as that sum would procure; and when he saw her attired in a manner suitable to her age and loveliness, he was transported with admiration. The result may easily be conceived; the knight married the serving-maid, and as ambitious a spirit as ever stimulated the energies of woman thus received its first gratification. Endowed by nature with such profuse outward gifts, Mary Beaumont possessed, no less, the advantages of a shrewd sense; she was fond, as her subsequent career showed, of state and profusion; she became, from her influence and her attractions, the leader of the highest circles; whilst she retained over the mind of her son that sway which she deservedly acquired by her care of his infancy and childhood.
In after times, it is curious to find Mary Beaumont, then Lady Villiers Compton, inviting her country kindred to Court, and providing a place for them to learn to carry themselves in a “Court-like manner.” It was the lowly serving-maid who first introduced what were called Country Dances instead of French dances, which her provincial relations could not learn soon enough for their deportment to assimilate with the costly garments with which their prodigal kinswoman supplied them, in order that they might do her credit in the gay spheres to which they were introduced.[[20]]
Three sons and a daughter were the offspring of this marriage; the eldest, John, afterwards created Baron Villiers, of Stoke, and Viscount Purbeek, was singularly infelicitous in his domestic life, but is said, by an historian adverse to the family, to have “exceeded them all in wit and honesty, and, by his influence, to have kept his brother George in some bounds of modesty, whilst he lived with him, by speaking plain English to him.”[[21]]
The next child of the second marriage was George Villiers, who was born at Brookesby, on the 20th of August in the year 1592.[[22]] Another son, Christopher, became eventually Baron Daventry, and Earl of Anglesea; a daughter, Mary, afterwards Countess of Denbigh, was also born, to encumber, as it seemed, the limited means with which the parents of this younger race were scarcely able to endow them.
On the fourth of January, 1605-6[1605-6], Sir George Villiers died. His landed property consisted at that time of the Manors of Brookesby, Howby, Godby Marward, and the Grange of Goadby. These were all settled on the children of his first marriage. He was also lay improprietor of the tithes of herbage and hay, in the parishes of Cadewell and Wikeham, and these, he settled on the three sons of Mary Beaumont, John, George and Christopher;[[23]] his daughter appears to have been left wholly portionless. When it is remembered that this family were all raised to rank and opulence, and that they were, in various instances, the sources from which the ancestry of several great houses is derived, the early privation and difficulties of their career form a strong contrast to their subsequent elevation.
It was not alone poverty that seemed likely to keep the younger children of Sir George Villiers in obscurity; there were wanting in his father’s heir those qualities which bring the humble forward, and enrich more than even prudence and frugality. Sir William, who now took possession of Brookesby, was contented with his country lot; and so much did he despise honours and titles, that when he was created a Baronet in 1619,[[24]] the dignity was almost forced upon him. “He was,” says a contemporary author, “so careless of honour in courting that compliment, as that the King (James First) said, ‘Sir William would scarce give him thanks for it, and doubted whether he would accept of it.’” Thus, little assistance in the career of life could be expected from one who would scarcely deem the prizes most sought for by men, worth the trouble of a little personal exertion.
Upon the death of her husband, Lady Villiers retired to Godby Marward, which was appropriated to her as a dower house. Her son, George, was then ten years old; the loss which he had sustained in the death of his father, great as it seemed, was fully compensated by the care of her whom Sir Henry Wotton entitles “his beautiful and provident mother.” The promising boy had already received some education at Billesdon, in Leicestershire, where he was sent to school, and instructed in music and in some “slight literature;” but to no common hands would Lady Villiers, as the dawning personal charms of her son unfolded, entrust the culture of this, her favourite child; she had him, henceforth, as his biographer expresses it, “in her especial care.”[[25]] Possibly, in her widowed seclusion, when she looked upon the face which afterwards captivated all beholders, she anticipated the day when her son should appear at Court, and attract some marks of that royal favour which had been shewn to Leicester, to Raleigh, and to Essex for no better reason than that they were handsomer and more graceful than their compeers, and that their manly beauty was set off by the gallant bearing of well-trained “carpet knights.” Queen Elizabeth had taught her subjects to value those attributes which had sunk so low in fashion and estimation in the troublous reign of Mary, or during the short and saintly career of Edward.
Lady Villiers had the discernment to perceive the deficiencies of her son’s mind and character, and resolved to avail herself of those advantages with which he was endowed, without forcing his attention to pursuits that were ungenial to him. She soon discovered that he was neither inclined to reflection, nor disposed to study; nor did he ever alter in those respects, but continued, through life, illiterate, a defect which his readiness in some measure supplied, but which prevented his becoming a great statesman, in spite of the fairest opportunities that ever man enjoyed. In after life he learned, when at Court, “to sift and question well,”[[26]] and to supply his own shallow stock of information by “drawing or flowing unto him” the best sources of experience and knowledge in others. His manner, says Sir Henry Wotton, was so sweet and attractive, “in seeking what might be for the public or his own proper use, that if the Muses favoured him not, the Graces were his friends;” and Lord Clarendon remarks of Villiers, that “concerning the traits and endowments of his mind, if the consideration of learning extend itself not further than drudgery in books, the Duke’s employment forbids us to suspect him of being any great scholar; but if a nimble and fluent expression and delivery of his mind (and his discourse was of all subjects) in a natural and proper dialect be considered, he was well lettered.”[[27]]
Lady Villiers seems both to have foreseen all these defects, and to have prognosticated the atoning graces in her son. She acted as a needy and ambitious woman was likely to act. Instead of supplying the deficiencies of her son’s character and intellect by a sound education, she directed his attention to dancing, fencing, and the other exercises, styled by Lord Clarendon “the conservative qualities and ornaments of youth.”[youth.”][[28]] And in these pursuits so rapid a progress was made, that the tutors of all the three brothers were obliged to restrain the progress of George Villiers in order that their other pupils should not be disheartened by his proficiency. Meantime, his expanding beauty of form and face seemed to his proud mother to render her son worthy of a higher culture than that which she could bestow upon him at Godby. Her jointure was very small, and although Godby, where she resided, was a suitable abode for the widow of Sir George Villiers, the Manor House being large enough to receive James the First and his retinue during a royal progress, yet her poverty obliged her to live in great retirement. A rigid economy must have been necessary to regulate its household. Lady Villiers had only two hundred a-year, both for herself and her family, and that income was to cease at her death, when her orphan children would have but a pittance besides their beauty and their talents.[[29]] Impelled, as it is hinted by several historians, by a desire to benefit her children, the widowed lady, still young and fair, resolved to marry again. Sir Thomas Marquin was first the object of her choice, and after his death, she bestowed her hand upon Sir Thomas Compton, Knight of the Bath, and brother of Lord Compton, First Earl of Northampton, whose marriage with the daughter of Sir John Spencer, Lord Mayor of London, and commonly called “rich Spencer,” had brought an increase of honour and influence to his family. This union was the more important to Lady Villiers and her children, because their half-brothers and sisters looked upon them with no good will, and were little disposed to further their interests.
It was at that time the custom to send our young nobility, and even their inferiors, to France to complete their education. Lady Villiers resolved to afford her son George this advantage. She selected him from her other children partly from partiality, for it is expressly stated that “he who was debarred from his father’s estate was happy in his mother’s love;”[[30]] and partly on account of his singular beauty of person. He is said, indeed, to have had, when he reached man’s estate, “no blemish from head to foot,” save that his eyebrows are stated to have been somewhat over pendulous, a defect which some of his admirers thought to be redeemed by the uncommon brilliancy of the eyes which flashed beneath them.[[31]] The Earl of Essex, to whom Villiers is compared, was taller, and of an “abler body” than the favourite of James I. But Villiers had the “neater limbs and freer delivery, he carried his well-proportioned body well, and every movement was graceful.” Nor does Lord Clarendon, who thus describes him, think it beneath the dignity of his subject to remark that Villiers “exceeded in the daintiness of his leg and foot,” whilst Essex was celebrated for his hands, which, says his panegyrist, though it be but feminine praise, “he took from his father.”[[32]] The complexion of George Villiers was singularly clear and beautiful, his forehead high and smooth, his eyes dark and full of intelligence and sweetness, whilst the perfect oval of his face, and delicate turn of features, fine, yet noble, and the air of refinement which characterised both his countenance and his bearing, rendered him one of the most attractive of human beings. As he attained to maturity, a peculiar courtesy of manner, a frankness and merriment which diverged at times into a total forgetfulness of forms, a power of throwing off the appearance of all oppressing business and secret cares, although of these he had his share, and of assuming “a very pleasant and vacant face,” a love of social life, and certain traits of character, half folly, half romance, won upon everyone that approached him before prosperity had changed courtesy into arrogance, or political intrigues marred the open expression of a physiognomy on which none could look without admiration.
The youth, whose promise, even at a very early age, augured the results which I have anticipated, reached Paris after the death of Henry IV.[[33]]
It was probably in the autumn that Villiers repaired to the Continent, since it is expressly stated that he was eighteen when he undertook that journey, and he had not attained that age until August, 1610. It seems, therefore, likely that Villiers beheld France under a strange aspect, that of a universal state of despair. Protestants and Catholics were alike overwhelmed by the recent calamity; the former might well dread a fresh massacre, but the grief of their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen dispelled that apprehension. The excess of lamentation, expressed somewhat theatrically—the cries of widows and orphans in the streets—the sight of women rushing through the mourners at the funeral, screaming—the orations, interrupted by sobs, in which the virtues of the deceased monarch were panegyrized—these must have ceased before Villiers visited Paris; but the Huguenots still sheltered themselves in the Arsenal, where the great Sully mourned his royal master and friend.[[34]]
In Paris, Villiers remained three years, prosecuting his studies, which consisted of French, and the practice of polite and martial exercises. His education tended, indeed, to increase his failings, to heighten his taste for display and love of pleasure, and to weaken his reasoning faculties. He had, according to the acknowledgment of his great partisan, Sir Henry Wotton, “little grammatical foundation;” and French appears to have been the only foreign language that he ever acquired; nevertheless, it is remarkable what application to business he evinced during the last few years of his life; his punctuality in correspondence, and the clear and simple style of his letters, prove how easily his mind might have been trained to higher pursuits than those on which his mother, worldly, but not wise, based her expectations of his future fortunes.
Paris, which Villiers was destined twice to revisit under circumstances very dissimilar to those of his first residence there, was then the resort of foreigners. The youth, who had emerged from the quiet haunts of Goadby Grange, took his first lessons in life in the city which Howell, in his familiar letters, styles, the “huge magazine of men.” “Its buildings,” says that writer, “were indifferently fair; its streets as foul during all the four seasons of the year; a perpetual current of coaches, carts, and horses encumbering them, narrow and dirty as they were, and were sometimes so entangled that it was an hour or more before they could proceed. In such a stop,” as Howell terms it, “was Ravaillac‘s[Ravaillac‘s] fatal opportunity afforded, and the great Henry slain.”[[35]] The plague[[36]] settled perpetually in one corner or another of Paris, but Villiers escaped that risk; he returned, apparently exempt from foreign vices, unscathed by a more fearful contagion than the plague; at least, thus may we infer from the assertion of Sir Henry Wotton. “He came home,” says that writer, “in his natural plight, without affected forms, the ordinary disease of travellers.”[[37]] It may reasonably be presumed that the young man who retains his simplicity of deportment, still possesses a corresponding integrity of character.
Villiers was now twenty-one years old; his accomplishments may shortly be summed up: he was an excellent fencer, an incomparable dancer, he understood the arrangement of costume and the art of dressing well, but those valuable acquirements lay dormant in one who possessed no wardrobe, for he went to France poor, and his family had not been enriched during his absence. Villiers was, in addition to these graces, a perfectly well-bred man. Lord Clarendon describes him to have been “a fair-spoken gentleman, of a sweet and accostable nature.” At present, his constitution, which afterwards gave way beneath the pressure of business, or in consequence of the excitements of his dazzling career, was in full vigour. Such was the youth who now returned to gratify his mother’s ambitious hopes, by that career to which the efforts of the young aristocracy of England were then chiefly directed. It may be here remarked as singular, that Villiers was trained to no specific profession; he had not been initiated into those elements of learning necessary to qualify him for the church or the bar; he had not served in the army; but was, in fact, literally brought up to follow his fortunes at the Court of James the First. It appears to those in modern times a bold speculation, but the character of the monarch upon whose peculiarities it was based accounts for the scheme, apparently so chimerical, of qualifying a son for nothing better than to depend merely upon the chances of an hour, for, had opportunity been wanting, the graces and accomplishments of George Villiers might have been for ever concealed, or disregarded.
But it is not improbable that Lady Villiers, especially after her second marriage, had certain dependence upon the exertions of personal friends, through whose agency she trusted to advance her son’s interests at Court. From them, too, she probably learned that the disgrace of Somerset was at hand.
When Villiers returned to England, he found no better prospect before him than to pass some time at Goadby, under the “wing and counsel of his mother.”[[38]] In this retreat, he had leisure to study the temper of the times, and to view from afar the characteristics of that sphere for which he was destined.
It appears to have been the fashion of the day to rush to London, and to desert those country seats to which James the First and his son Charles endeavoured by proclamations and harangues to restrain the gentry. The innovation was severely reproved by James in the summer of 1616, when he made that memorable speech in the Star Chamber, in which he censured the custom, attributing it, of course, to the wives and daughters of the offenders. “Thus,” remarked James, “do they neglect the country hospitality, and cumber the city.” He next complained of the new and sumptuous buildings in the metropolis, of the coaches, lacqueys, and fine clothes in which the higher classes indulged, comparing them to “Frenchmen,” or, as if that were not harsh enough, declaring that they “lived miserably in their houses, like Italians, becoming apes to other nations.” Finally, he proposed to remedy these evils by an edict of the Star Chamber.