The duke pulled it down:  and the house, which was erected as a temporary structure, was so superb that even Pepys, twenty years after it had been left to bats and cobwebs, speaks of it in raptures, as of a place in which the great duke’s soul was seen in every chamber.  On the walls were shields on which the arms of Manners and of Villiers—­peacocks and lions—­were quartered.  York House was never, however, finished; but as the lover of old haunts enters Buckingham Street in the Strand, he will perceive an ancient water-gate, beautifully proportioned, built by Inigo Jones—­smoky, isolated, impaired—­but still speaking volumes of remembrance of the glories of the assassinated duke, who had purposed to build the whole house in that style.

‘Yorschaux,’ as he called it—­York House—­the French ambassador had written word to his friends at home, ’is the most richly fitted up of any that I saw.’  The galleries and state rooms were graced by the display of the Roman marbles, both busts and statues, which the first duke had bought from Rubens; whilst in the gardens the Cain and Abel of John of Bologna, given by Philip IV. of Spain to King Charles, and by him bestowed on the elder George Villiers, made that fair pleasaunce famous.  It was doomed—­as were what were called the ‘superstitious’ pictures in the house—­to destruction:  henceforth all was in decay and neglect.  ‘I went to see York House and gardens,’ Evelyn writes in 1655, ’belonging to the former greate Buckingham, but now much ruined through neglect.’

Traylman, doubtless, kept George Villiers the younger in full possession of all that was to happen to that deserted tenement in which the old man mourned for the departed, and thought of the absent.

The intelligence which he had soon to communicate was all-important.  York House was to be occupied again; and Cromwell and his coadjutors had bestowed it on Fairfax.  The blow was perhaps softened by the reflection that Fairfax was a man of generous temper; and that he had an only daughter, Mary Fairfax, young, and an heiress.  Though the daughter of a Puritan, a sort of interest was attached, even by Cavaliers, to Mary Fairfax, from her having, at five years of age, followed her father through the civil wars on horseback, seated before a maid-servant; and having, on her journey, frequently fainted, she was so ill as to have been left in a house by the roadside, her father never expecting to see her again.

In reference to this young girl, then about eighteen years of age, Buckingham now formed a plan.  He resolved to return to England disguised, to offer his hand to Mary Fairfax, and so recover his property through the influence of Fairfax.  He was confident of his own attractions; and, indeed, from every account, he appears to have been one of those reckless, handsome, speculative characters that often take the fancy of better men than themselves.  ‘He had,’ says Burnet, ’no sort of literature, only he