aged thirty.  The poet Cowley, who had known the Duke since their Cambridge days together, acted as his best man at the wedding, which was celebrated with great festivities at Nunappleton, Cowley contributing a poem.  But surely it was a most extraordinary marriage, and, though there had been rumours of such a possibility for several years, it was heard of with surprise.  The only child and heiress of the great Parliamentarian General, one of the founders of the Commonwealth, married to this Royalist of Royalists, the handsome young insurgent in the Second Civil War of 1648, the boon-companion of Charles II. for some time abroad, his boon-companion and buffoon all through his dreary year of Kingship among the Scots, his fellow-fugitive from the field of Worcester, and ever since, though less in Charles’s company than before, and serving as a volunteer in the French army, yet a main trump-card in Charles’s lists!  How had it happened?  Easily enough.  The great Fairfax, with ample wealth of his own, had made most honourable and chivalrous use of the accessions to that wealth that had come in the shape of Parliamentary grants to him out of the confiscated estates of Royalists.  Now, one such grant, in lieu of a money pension of L4000 a year, had been a portion of the confiscated property of the young Duke of Buckingham, including an estate in Yorkshire and York House in the Strand.  The young Duke, stripped of his revenues of L25,000 a year, had been living meanwhile on the proceeds of a great collection of pictures, Titians and what not, that had been made by his father, and which had been quietly conveyed abroad for sale.  But Fairfax had not forgotten the splendid young man, and had every wish to retrieve his fortunes for him.  There had probably been communications to that end, not only with Buckingham himself, but even with Charles II.; and the result had been the Duke’s return to England and appearance in Yorkshire, early in 1657, to woo Mary Fairfax or to complete the wooing.  Who could resist him?  It might have been better for Mary Fairfax had she died in her girlhood, fresh from Marvell’s teaching; but now she was Duchess of Buckingham.  York House and the estate in Yorkshire had been restored to her husband by gift, and Nunappleton and other Fairfax estates were to be settled on him and her for their lives, and on their heirs should there be any.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Markham’s Life of Fairfax, 364-372.]

Naturally, the Protector might have something to say to the arrangement.  The great Fairfax was a man to whom anything in reason would be granted; and, though Cromwell had no reason to believe that Fairfax favoured his Protectorate, and there had been even reports from Thurloe’s foreign agents of correspondence between Fairfax and Charles II.,[1] no one could challenge Fairfax’s honour or doubt his passive allegiance.  But a son-in-law like Buckingham about him altered the case.  Little wonder, therefore, that the marriage