CHAPTER VII.

  “What is wedlock forced, but a hell? “—­Henry VI., I., v., 5.

Little is recorded of the early married life of Sir John and Lady Villiers.  Before it began they had both been mere pawns in the game, and pawns they remained for a good many years afterwards.  If before her marriage the career of Lady Villiers had lain in the hands of her father and her mother; after her marriage it was, for a time, in the hands of her brother-in-law, Buckingham, as the career of Sir John always had been and continued to be during the life of Buckingham.

In the Secret History of James I.[42] we read concerning Buckingham:  “But I must tell you what got him most hatred, to raise brothers and brothers-in-law to the highest ranks of nobility, which were not capable of the place of scarce a justice of the peace; only his brother, Purbeck, had more wit and honesty than all the kindred beside and did keep him in some bounds of honesty and modesty, whilst he lived about him, & would speake plaine English to him.”  If this be true, there must have been some good in Sir John; but Buckingham was impervious to his advice and treated him just as he pleased.  It is possible, again, that Lady Villiers, without having any of the affection which a wife ought to have for a husband, may have had a sort of respect for him as a man of probity, much older than herself, who treated her well and even kindly.

George Villiers, a mushroom-grown Duke himself, having made the King create his mother Countess of Buckingham, bethought him of his eldest brother and determined to make him a peer.  And not only that.  He also conceived the idea of squeezing some more money out of his brother’s mother-in-law for him, by offering her a peerage, for the cash thus obtained.  It was suggested to her that she might be made Countess of Westmorland; but “she refused to buy the title at the price demanded."[43] Indeed, Lady Elizabeth was ready to fight anybody and everybody.  On the one hand, she resisted the attempts of the almighty Buckingham to bleed her still further for Sir John Villiers, and, on the other, she wrote to the King concerning her husband:  “I find how desirous he is to rubb up anie thing to make ill bloode betwixt my sonne Villiers & myselfe."[44] Meanwhile she prosecuted her husband in the Star Chamber.  Mr. Brant wrote to Carleton:  “...  The Ladie Hatton prevayleth exceedingly against her husband and hath driven him into a numnesse of on side, which is a forerunner of ye dead palsie, though now he be somewhat recovured.”