Leave him the oar that best knows how to row,
    And state to him that best the state doth know. 
    If I by industry, deep reach, or grace,
    Am now arriv’d at this or that great place,
    Must I, to please your inconsiderate rage,
    Throw down mine honours?  Will nought else assuage
    Your furious wisdoms?  True shall the verse be yet—­
    There’s no less wit required to keep, than get. 
    Though Lambe be dead, I’ll stand, and you shall see
    I’ll smile at them that can but bark at me.

After Buckingham’s death, Charles the First cherished his memory as warmly as his life, advanced his friends, and designed to raise a magnificent monument to his memory;[244] and if any one accused the duke, the king always imputed the fault to himself.  The king said, “Let not the duke’s enemies seek to catch at any of his offices, for they will find themselves deceived.”  Charles called Buckingham “his martyr!” and often said the world was much mistaken in the duke’s character; for it was commonly thought the duke ruled his majesty; but it was much the contrary, having been his most faithful and obedient servant in all things, as the king said he would make sensibly appear to the world.  Indeed, after the death of Buckingham, Charles showed himself extremely active in business.  Lord Dorchester wrote—­“The death of Buckingham causes no changes; the king holds in his own hands the total direction, leaving the executory part to every man within the compass of his charge."[245] This is one proof, among many, that Charles the First was not the puppet-king of Buckingham, as modern historians have imagined.

FELTON, THE POLITICAL ASSASSIN.

Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, by the growing republican party was hailed as a Brutus, rising, in the style of a patriotic bard,

    Refulgent from the stroke.—­AKENSIDE.

Gibbon has thrown a shade of suspicion even over Brutus’s “god-like stroke,” as Pope has exalted it.  In Felton, a man acting from mixed and confused motives, the political martyr is entirely lost in the contrite penitent; he was, however, considered in his own day as a being almost beyond humanity.  Mrs. Macaulay has called him a “lunatic,” because the duke had not been assassinated on the right principle.  His motives appeared even inconceivable to his contemporaries; for Sir Henry Wotton, who has written a Life of the Duke of Buckingham, observes, that “what may have been the immediate or greatest motive of that felonious conception (the duke’s assassination) is even yet in the clouds.”  After ascertaining that it was not private revenge, he seems to conclude that it was Dr. Eglisham’s furious “libel,” and the “remonstrance” of the parliament, which, having made the duke “one of the foulest monsters on earth,” worked on the dark imagination of Felton.