It had been bought, with immense expense, partly by the duke’s agents in Italy, the Mantua Gallery supplying a great portion—­partly in France—­partly in Flanders; and to Flanders a great portion was destined now to return.  Secretly and laboriously did old Traylman pack up and send off these treasures to Antwerp, where now the gay youth whom the aged domestic had known from a child was in want and exile.  The pictures were eagerly bought by a foreign collector named Duart.  The proceeds gave poor Villiers bread; but the noble works of Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, and others, were lost for ever to England.

It must have been very irritating to Villiers to know that whilst he just existed abroad, the great estates enjoyed by his father were being subjected to pillage by Cromwell’s soldiers, or sold for pitiful sums by the Commissioners appointed by the Parliament to break up and annihilate many of the old properties in England.  Burleigh-on-the-Hill, the stately seat on which the first duke had lavished thousands, had been taken by the Roundheads.  It was so large, and presented so long a line of buildings, that the Parliamentarians could not hold it without leaving in it a great garrison and stores of ammunition.  It was therefore burnt, and the stables alone occupied; and those even were formed into a house of unusual size.  York House was doubtless marked out for the next destructive decree.  There was something in the very history of this house which might be supposed to excite the wrath of the Roundheads.  Queen Mary (whom we must not, after Miss Strickland’s admirable life of her, call Bloody Queen Mary, but who will always be best known by that unpleasant title) had bestowed York House on the See of York, as a compensation for York House, at Whitehall, which Henry VIII. had taken from Wolsey.  It had afterwards come into possession of the Keepers of the Great Seal.  Lord Bacon was born in York House, his father having lived there; and the

    ‘Greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’

built here an aviary which cost L300.  When the Duke of Lennox wished to buy York House, Bacon thus wrote to him:—­’For this you will pardon me:  York House is the house where my father died, and where I first breathed; and there will I yield my last breath, if it so please God and the King.’  It did not, however, please the King that he should; the house was borrowed only by the first Duke of Buckingham from the Archbishop of York, and then exchanged for another seat, on the plea that the duke would want it for the reception of foreign potentates, and for entertainments given to royalty.