“Your grace’s devoted servant,” he professed himself, bowing and smirking. “I shall study to discharge my office creditably, and to allay any qualms my youth may leave in your grace’s mind.”
“And youth,” said Buckingham, smiling, to reassure Albemarle, “is a fault that time invariably corrects.”
Albemarle rose slowly to his feet, and the others bowed themselves out of his presence.
Then he sat down again heavily, took his head in his hands, and softly loosed an oath.
Holles came an hour later, radiant with expectation, a gay, youthful-looking, commanding figure in his splendid red coat, to be crushed by the news that proved him Fortune’s fool again, as ever.
But he bore it well on the face of him, however deeply the iron was thrust into his soul. It was Albemarle who for once showed excitement, Albemarle who inveighed in most unmeasured terms against the corrupt influence of the Court and the havoc it was working.
“It needed a man for this office and they have constrained me to give it to a fribble, a dolly in breeches, a painted dawcock.”
Holles remembered Tucker’s denunciations of the present government and began to realize at last how right he was and how justified he and his associates might be of their conviction that the people were ready to rise and sweep this Augean stable clean.
Albemarle was seeking to comfort him with fresh hope. No doubt something else would offer soon.