4. =Charles's Second Parliament. 1626.=--The new Parliament met on February 6, =1626=. Charles, in order to secure himself against what he believed to be the attacks of interested and ambitious men, had hit on the clever expedient of making sheriffs of the leaders of the Opposition, so as to secure their detention in their own counties. The Opposition, however, found a leader in Sir John Eliot, who, though he had formerly been a friend of Buckingham, was now shocked at the misconduct of the favourite and regarded him as a selfish and unprincipled adventurer. Eliot was not only a natural orator, but one of the most pure-minded of patriots, though the vehemence of his temperament often carried him to impute more evil to men of whom he thought badly than they were really guilty of. At present, he was roused to indignation against Buckingham, not only on account of the recent failures, but because, in the preceding summer, he had lent some English ships to the French, who wanted to use them for suppressing the Huguenots of Rochelle, then in rebellion against their king, Louis XIII. Before long the Commons, under Eliot's guidance, impeached Buckingham of all kinds of crime, making against him charges of some of which he was quite innocent, whilst others were much exaggerated. The fact that the only way to get rid of an unpopular minister was to accuse him of crime, made those who would otherwise have been content with his dismissal ready to believe in his guilt. Charles's vexation reached its height when he heard that Eliot had branded Buckingham as Sejanus. "If he is Sejanus," he said, "I must be Tiberius." Rather than abandon his minister, he dissolved Parliament, before it had voted him a sixpence. [Illustration: Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I.: from a painting by Van Dyck.]