with his fleet disorganized, demoralized, and crippled, and covered with military disgrace. The people of England charged all this to Buckingham. Still the king persisted in retaining him. It was his prerogative to do so. [Sidenote: Buckingham's quarrel with Richelieu.] [Sidenote: He resolves on war.] After a while Buckingham got into a personal quarrel with Richelieu, who was the leading manager of the French government, and he resolved that England should make war upon France. To alter the whole political position of such an empire as that of Great Britain, in respect to peace and war, and to change such a nation as France from a friend to an enemy, would seem to be quite an undertaking for a single man to attempt, and that, too, without having any reason whatever to assign, except a personal quarrel with a minister about a love affair. But so it was. Buckingham undertook it. It was the king's prerogative to make peace or war, and Buckingham ruled the king. [Sidenote: The French servants dismissed.] [Sidenote: War declared against France.] He contrived various ways of fomenting ill will. One was, to alienate the mind of the king from the queen. He represented to him that the queen's French servants were getting to be very disrespectful and insolent in their treatment of him, and finally persuaded him to send them all home. So the king went one day to Somerset House, which was the queen's residence--for it is often the custom in high life in Europe for the husband and wife to have separate establishments--and requested her to summon her French servants into his presence, and when they were assembled, he told them that he had concluded to send them all home to France. Some of them, he said, had acted properly enough, but others had been rude and forward, and that he had concluded it best to send them all home. The French king, on hearing of this, seized a hundred and twenty English ships lying in his harbors in retaliation of this act, which he said was a palpable violation of the marriage contract, as it certainly was. Upon this the king declared war against France. He did not ask Parliament to act in this case at all. There was no Parliament. Parliament had been dissolved in a fit of displeasure. The whole affair was an exercise of the royal prerogative. He did not dare to call a Parliament to provide means for carrying on the war, but set his Privy Council to devise modes of doing it, through this same prerogative. [Sidenote: Expedition to France abortive.]