The youthful peer soon gave indications of genius; and all that a careful education could do, was directed to improve his natural capacity under private tutors.  He went to Cambridge; and thence, under the care of a preceptor named Aylesbury, travelled into France.  He was accompanied by his young, handsome, fine-spirited brother, Francis; and this was the sunshine of his life.  His father had indeed left him, as his biographer Brian Fairfax expresses it, ’the greatest name in England; his mother, the greatest estate of any subject.’  With this inheritance there had also descended to him the wonderful beauty, the matchless grace, of his ill-fated father.  Great abilities, courage, fascination of manners, were also his; but he had not been endowed with firmness of character, and was at once energetic and versatile.  Even at this age, the qualities which became his ruin were clearly discoverable.

George Villiers was recalled to England by the troubles which drove the king to Oxford, and which converted that academical city into a garrison, its under-graduates into soldiers, its ancient halls into barrack-rooms.  Villiers was on this occasion entered at Christ Church:  the youth’s best feelings were aroused, and his loyalty was engaged to one to whom his father owed so much.  He was now a young man of twenty-one years of age—­able to act for himself; and he went heart and soul into the cause of his sovereign.  Never was there a gayer, a more prepossessing Cavalier.  He could charm even a Roundhead.  The harsh and Presbyterian-minded Bishop Burnet, has told us that ’he was a man of a noble presence; had a great liveliness of wit, and a peculiar faculty of turning everything into ridicule, with bold figures and natural descriptions.’  How invaluable he must have been in the Common-rooms at Oxford, then turned into guard-rooms, his eye upon some unlucky volunteer Don, who had put off his clerkly costume for a buff jacket, and could not manage his drill.  Irresistible as his exterior is declared to have been, the original mind of Villiers was even far more influential.  De Grammont tells us, ’he was extremely handsome, but still thought himself much more so than he really was; although he had a great deal of discernment, yet his vanities made him mistake some civilities as intended for his person which were only bestowed on his wit and drollery.’

But this very vanity, so unpleasant in an old man, is only amusing in a younger wit.  Whilst thus a gallant of the court and camp, the young nobleman proved himself to be no less brave than witty.  Juvenile as he was, with a brother still younger, they fought on the royalist side at Lichfield, in the storming of the Cathedral Close.  For thus allowing their lives to be endangered, their mother blamed Lord Gerard, one of the Duke’s guardians; whilst the Parliament seized the pretext of confiscating their estates, which were afterwards returned to them, on account of their being under age at the time of