“P. S.—My Lord Chancellor is prettily amended. I was with him yesterday for half an hour; we both wept, which I do not do very often.”[[105]]
That the fortunes of Villiers were ensured by the awful disclosures of guilt which ensued, there can be no doubt. It is worthy of remark, how vitiated must have been the state of that society, the highest in rank, the foremost in fashion, in which crimes so fearful, compassed and aided by associates of the lowest and most infamous description, could be ascribed to individuals, and yet those individuals continue to hold their position in society. It is true that, during that interval which must have been to the guilty Earl and Countess of Somerset a season of incessant fear and anguish, reports had been “buzzing about Somerset’s ears, like a rising storm upon a well-spread oak;” but he had considered himself to be too firmly planted in the King’s regard ever to be up-rooted. And perhaps, had Villiers not come forward opportunely to redeem the national credit, and to save a remnant of the King’s character from utter reprobation and contempt, England might have been still enslaved, until the close of James’s reign, by the extortionate Earl and his haughty and murderous Countess.
Meantime, Villiers continued to profit by the delinquencies of his rival. He profited in the way most gratifying to an honourable mind.[way most gratifying to an honourable mind.] No intrigues to supplant, no efforts to hasten the ruin of the Earl, are recorded to his discredit. He set, at this period of his career, a bright, though unhappily a transient, example of what a royal favorite might prove. He repudiated, not only the avarice, but the over-bearing of Somerset.
He was courteous and affable to all, and seemed to “court men as they courted him.” Free from all assumption, he still delighted to associate with the gentlemen in waiting, and to join in their amusements, which consisted, after supper, in leaping and exercises, in which none was so active as the young favorite.[[106]] He thus preserved in health and agility that noble form which excited the admiration of his country. Such was his popularity, even with the old and haughty nobility, that they were proud if they might aid in decking the “handsomest bodied man of England.”[[107]] His taste for gorgeous apparel now displaying itself, he was complimented by the nobles of James’s Court in the following manner:—one of them would send to “his tailor and his mercer to put good clothes upon the newly-made knight; another to his sempstress for curious linen; others took upon them to be his bravos, and all hands helped to piece up the new minion.”[[108]] So winning was the deportment of Villiers, that even his enemies were propitiated to acknowledge “that he was as inwardly beautiful, as he was outwardly, and that the world had not a more ingenious gentleman.”[[109]] He incurred, however, some risk in his ardour for amusement; and on one occasion over-strained himself in running, which greatly distressed the King.[[110]] So rapid was the rise of Villiers, that Lord Clarendon describes it by the term “germination.” “Surely had he been a plant,” says that great historian, “he would have been reckoned among the stoute nascentes, for he sprang without any help, by a sort of ingenious composure (as we may term it) to the likeness of our late sovereign and master, of blessed memory, who, taking him into his regard, taught him more and more to please himself, and moulded him, as it were, platonically, to his own idea, delighting first in the choice of his materials, because he found him susceptible of good form, and afterwards by degrees, as great architects used to do, in the workmanship of his regal hand.”[[111]] This flattering tribute to King James might have been spared, for the monarch, whose blind and almost wicked partiality emboldened, and perhaps corrupted, Somerset, can hardly be conceived to have formed the character of Villiers.
The testimony of Lord Clarendon that Villiers, like his supposed prototype, the Earl of Essex, was a “fair-spoken gentleman,” not prone and eager to detract openly from any man, “is a greater eulogy,” and to this, the noble historian adds another, which, he affirms, “the malignant eye could not refuse to Villiers;” “that certainly never man in his place or power did entertain greatness more familiarly,” an expression singularly felicitous, as conveying a sense of that innate greatness which exalts its possessor above conventional distinctions. His looks were “untainted by his felicity.”[[112]] No conscious importance, no haughty contempt, none of the littleness of pride, disgusted his equals or depressed his inferiors. “This, in my judgment,” remarks Clarendon, “was one of his greatest virtues and victories of himself.”
The elevation of Villiers appears, however, not to have been so spontaneous as Lord Clarendon supposes. “Once commenced, it ran,” says Sir Henry Wotton, “as smoothly as numerous verses, till it met with certain rubs in Parliament.”
Thus, to borrow still from the same author, “the course of royal favour being uninterrupted, the Duke’s thoughts were free.”[[113]]
Meanwhile, the most fearful disclosures were shocking the public ear, and rendering more secure than ever the prosperity of Villiers.
In the month of March, 1616, Lady Somerset was committed to the Tower. So promptly were the measures now resolved upon executed, that she had “scant leisure,” as a contemporary relates, “to shed a few tears over her little daughter at the parting.”[[114]] This was the single touch of natural affection which is latent in every heart, and was not wholly extinguished even in the heart of the unhappy woman. Having given way to that burst of emotion, she bore herself, as the same report states, “constantly enough,” until she was carried into the enclosure of the Tower. Then, affrighted and conscience-stricken, she did, according to the same account, “passionately deprecate, and entreat the Lieutenant, that she might not be lodged in Sir Thomas Overbury’s lodging, so that he was fain to remove himself out of his own chamber for two or three nights, till Sir Walter Raleigh’s lodging might be furnished and made fit for her.”
To this gloomy apartment, the wretched countess was consigned; her trial was fixed for the fifteenth of May. But when that day drew near, when the stage in the middle of Westminster Hall was completed, the scaffolding around it finished, and when seats had been purchased at the rate of four or five pieces each—that being an ordinary price—and when even a lawyer and his wife, as Mr. Chamberlain, the writer of the letter from whom these details are collected, states, agreed to give two pounds for himself and his wife for ten days, and fifty pounds was given for a corner that “would scarcely contain a dozen,” the eager public was disappointed. The trial was put off till the twenty-second of the same month.[[115]]