of Rhe sent home Buckingham discomfited,
and spread dismay through the nation. The best blood had been shed from
the wanton bravery of an unskilful and romantic commander, who, forced
to retreat, would march, but not fly, and was the very last man to quit
the ground which he could not occupy. In the eagerness of his hopes,
Buckingham had once dropped, as I learn, that "before Midsummer he
should be more honoured and beloved by the commons than ever was the
Earl of Essex:" and thus he rocked his own and his master's imagination
in cradling fancies. This volatile hero, who had felt the capriciousness
of popularity, thought that it was as easily regained as it was easily
lost; and that a chivalric adventure would return to him that favour
which at this moment might have been denied to all the wisdom, the
policy, and the arts of an experienced statesman.

The king was now involved in more intricate and desperate measures; and
the nation was thrown into a state of agitation, of which the page of
popular history yields but a faint impression.

The spirit of insurrection was stalking forth in the metropolis and in
the country. The scenes which I am about to describe occurred at the
close of 1626: an inattentive reader might easily mistake them for the
revolutionary scenes of 1640. It was an unarmed rebellion.

An army and a navy had returned unpaid, and sore with defeat. The town
was scoured by mutinous seamen and soldiers, roving even into the palace
of the sovereign. Soldiers without pay form a society without laws. A
band of captains rushed into the duke's apartment as he sat at dinner;
and when reminded by the duke of a late proclamation, forbidding all
soldiers coming to court in troops, on pain of hanging, they replied,
that "Whole companies were ready to be hanged with them! that the king
might do as he pleased with their lives; for that their reputation was
lost, and their honour forfeited, for want of their salary to pay their
debts." When a petition was once presented, and it was inquired who was
the composer of it, a vast body tremendously shouted "All! all!" A
multitude, composed of seamen, met at Tower-hill, and set a lad on a
scaffold, who, with an "O yes!" proclaimed that King Charles had
promised their pay, or the duke had been on the scaffold himself! These,
at least, were grievances more apparent to the sovereign than those
vague ones so perpetually repeated by his unfaithful commons. But what
remained to b