“Afterwards, when a peace was concluded, and the army disbanded, the Earl of Newcastle thought fit to require an account of the Earl of Holland for the said affront which he had put upon him, and sent a challenge to him, and time and place where to meet appointed.[31] The Earl of Newcastle made choice of Francis Palmes for his second, a man of known courage and mettle.[32] The Earl of Newcastle appeared at the time and place, with his second; but the General of the Horse, his second, came alone, by which the Earl of Newcastle concluded that the design had been discovered to the King, who commanded them both to be confined and afterwards made a peace between them.”
[31] The Duchess says: “The place and hour being appointed by both their consents”.
[32] “A gentleman very punctual, and well acquainted with those errands,” says Clarendon, “who took a proper season to mention it to him [Holland] without a possibility of suspicion. The Earl of Holland was never suspected to want courage, yet in this occasion he showed not that alacrity, but that the delay exposed it to notice; and so, by the King’s authority, the matter was composed” (Hist., vol. I, part I. book ii.).
Of this incident Kippis remarks,[33] with a great deal of sense: “Little service could be expected from an army in which an inferior officer might challenge his general, on account of a supposed slight in the giving of orders; and those persons must have had strange ideas of the laws of honour who could blame a commander-in-chief for refusing so unsoldierly a challenge”.
[33] Biog. Brit., Kippis’s ed.
Shortly afterwards Newcastle received the following letter from Sir John Suckling, who, like Newcastle, had raised a troop of horse for the King, and had also led it on the same fruitless expedition to Scotland. Like Newcastle, again, he was literary and a playwright. He had been in a good deal of active military service on the Continent, and he was generous and amusing. If his troop of horse was only half the strength of Newcastle’s, it must have rivalled it, if it did not exceed it, in splendour. Aubrey says of it (Letters, p. 546):—
“Sir John Suckling, at his own chardge, razed a troop of 100 very handsome young proper men, whom he clad in white doubletts and scarlett breeches, scarlett coates, hatts and feathers, well-horsed and armed.”
“Sir John Suckling to the Earl of Newcastle.[34]
“(1640?) January 8. London.—Are the small buds of the white and red rose more delightful than the roses themselves? And cannot the King and Queen invite as stronglie as the roiall issue?