The reverses of fortune which brought George Villiers to abject misery were therefore, in a very great measure, due to his own misconduct, his depravity, his waste of life, his perversion of noble mental powers:  yet in many respects he was in advance of his age.  He advocated, in the House of Lords, toleration to Dissenters.  He wrote a ’Short Discourse on the Reasonableness of Men’s having a Religion, or Worship of God;’ yet, such was his inconsistency, that in spite of these works, and of one styled a ‘Demonstration of the Deity,’ written a short time before his death, he assisted Lord Rochester in his atheistic poem upon ‘Nothing.’

Butler, the author of Hudibras, too truly said of Villiers ’that he had studied the whole body of vice;’ a most fearful censure—­a most significant description of a bad man.  ‘His parts,’ he adds, ’are disproportionate to the whole, and like a monster, he has more of some, and less of others, than he should have.  He has pulled down all that nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his own.  He has dammed up all those lights that nature made into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loopholes backward by turning day into night, and night into day.’

The satiety and consequent misery produced by this terrible life are ably described by Butler.  And it was perhaps partly this wearied, worn-out spirit that caused Villiers to rush madly into politics for excitement.  In 1666 he asked for the office of Lord President of the North; it was refused:  he became disaffected, raised mutinies, and, at last, excited the indignation of his too-indulgent sovereign.  Charles dismissed him from his office, after keeping him for some time in confinement.  After this epoch little is heard of Buckingham but what is disgraceful.  He was again restored to Whitehall, and, according to Pepys, even closeted with Charles, whilst the Duke of York was excluded.  A certain acquaintance of the duke’s remonstrated with him upon the course which Charles now took in Parliament.  ’How often have you said to me,’ this person remarked, ’that the king was a weak man, unable to govern, but to be governed, and that you could command him as you liked?  Why do you suffer him to do these things?’

‘Why,’ answered the duke, ’I do suffer him to do these things, that I may hereafter the better command him.’  A reply which betrays the most depraved principle of action, whether towards a sovereign or a friend, that can be expressed.  His influence was for some time supreme, yet he became the leader of the opposition, and invited to his table the discontented peers, to whom he satirized the court, and condemned the king’s want of attention to business.  Whilst the theatre was ringing with laughter at the inimitable character of Bayes in the ‘Rehearsal,’ the House of Lords was listening with profound attention to the eloquence that entranced their faculties, making wrong seem right, for Buckingham was ever heard with attention.