-an act of such gross disrespect
to royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded,
had not the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly
maimed.

Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to
show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the main planks
of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his
head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless,
insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple
country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had
risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.

The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that, as
John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness
in him--of the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as
megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect for
anybody or anything. The Commons of England and the immensely dignified
Court of Spain--during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at
Madrid--were alike the butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But
the crowning insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act
of which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the banks
of the river Somme.

Three weeks ago--on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise--Buckingham had
arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task of
conducting to England the King of France's sister, Henrietta Maria, who
three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.

The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of
his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion
for ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was
proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due
to himself to extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming
to the Louvre he literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet
with a short cloak in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with
diamonds to the value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond
clasped the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of
his sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten gold;
the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on his breast.
On the occasio