Then, rallying after this touch of pathos, Charles took his hearers over to Fecamp, in France—­thence to Rouen, where, he said, in his easy, irresistible way, ’I looked so poor that the people went into the rooms before I went away, to see if I had not stolen something or other.’

With what reverence and sympathy did our Pepys listen; but he was forced to hurry off to get Lord Berkeley a bed; and with ‘much ado’ (as one may believe) he did get ‘him to bed with My Lord Middlesex;’ so, after seeing these two peers of the realm in that dignified predicament—­two in a bed—­’to my cabin again,’ where the company were still talking of the king’s difficulties, and how his Majesty was fain to eat a piece of bread and cheese out of a poor body’s pocket; and, at a Catholic house, how he lay a good while ‘in the Priest’s Hole, for privacy.’

In all these hairbreadth escapes—­of which the king spoke with infinite humour and good feeling—­one name was perpetually introduced:—­George—­George Villiers, Villers, as the royal narrator called him; for the name was so pronounced formerly.  And well he might; for George Villiers had been his playmate, classfellow, nay, bedfellow sometimes, in priests’ holes; their names, their haunts, their hearts, were all assimilated; and misfortune had bound them closely to each other.  To George Villiers let us now return; he is waiting for his royal master on the other side of the Channel—­in England.  And a strange character have we to deal with:—­

    ’A man so various, that he seemed to be
     Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: 
     Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
     Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
     But, in the course of one revolving moon,
     Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.’[1]

Such was George Villiers:  the Alcibiades of that age.  Let us trace one of the most romantic, and brilliant, and unsatisfactory lives that has ever been written.

George Villiers was born at Wallingford House, in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, on the 30th January, 1627.  The Admiralty now stands on the site of the mansion in which he first saw the light.  His father was George Villiers, the favourite of James I. and of Charles I.; his mother, the Lady Katherine Manners, daughter and heiress of Francis, Earl of Rutland.  Scarcely was he a year old, when the assassination of his father, by Felton, threw the affairs of his family into confusion.  His mother, after the Duke of Buckingham’s death, gave birth to a son, Francis; who was subsequently, savagely killed by the Roundheads, near Kingston.  Then the Duchess of Buckingham very shortly married again, and uniting herself to Randolph Macdonald, Earl of Antrim, became a rigid Catholic.  She was therefore lost to her children, or rather, they were lost to her; for King Charles I., who had promised to be a ’husband to her, and a father to her children,’ removed them from her charge, and educated them with the royal princes.