who, when Dr. Preston came one morning as usual, asked him whether he had ever disobliged him, that he should describe him to his party in such black characters.  The doctor, amazed, denied the fact; on which the duke instantly produced the letter, then turned from him, never to see him more.  It is said that from this moment he abandoned the puritan party, and attached himself to Laud.  This story was told by Thomas Baker to W. Wotton, as coming from one well versed in the secret history of that time.—­Lansdowne MSS. 872, fo. 88.]

[Footnote 228:  A well-known tract against the Duke of Buckingham, by Dr. George Eglisham, physician to James the First, entitled “The Forerunner of Revenge,” may be found in many of our collections.  Gerbier, in his manuscript memoirs, gives a curious account of this political libeller, the model of that class of desperate scribblers.  “The falseness of his libels,” says Gerbier, “he hath since acknowledged, though too late.  During my residence at Bruxelles, this Eglisham desired Sir William Chaloner, who then was at Liege, to bear a letter to me, which is still extant:  he proposed, if the king would pardon and receive him into favour again, with some competent subsistence, that he would recant all that he had said or written to the disadvantage of any in the court of England, confessing that he had been urged thereunto by some combustious spirits, that for their malicious designs had set him on work.”  Buckingham would never notice these and similar libels.  Eglisham flew to Holland after he had deposited his political venom in his native country, and found a fate which every villanous factionist who offers to recant for “a competent subsistence” does not always; he was found dead, assassinated in his walks by a companion.  Yet this political libel, with many like it, are still authorities.  “George Duke of Buckingham,” says Oldys, “will not speedily outstrip Dr. Eglisham’s ’Forerunner of Revenge.’”]

[Footnote 229:  The misery of prime ministers and favourites is a portion of their fate which has not always been noticed by their biographers; one must be conversant with secret history to discover the thorn in their pillow.  Who could have imagined that Buckingham, possessing the entire affections of his sovereign, during his absence had reason to fear being supplanted?  When his confidential secretary, Dr. Mason, slept in the same chamber with the duke, he would give way at night to those suppressed passions which his unaltered countenance concealed by day.  In the absence of all other ears and eyes he would break out into the most querulous and impassioned language, declaring that “never his despatches to divers princes, nor the great business of a fleet, of an army, of a siege, of a treaty, of war and peace both on foot together, and all of them in his head at a time, did not so much break his repose as the idea that some at home under his majesty, of whom he had well deserved, were now content to forget him.”  So short-lived is the gratitude observed to an absent favourite, who is most likely to fall by the creatures his own hands have made.]