Of the knights of this reign, Grave Maurice, Prince of Orange, and Frederick the (Goody) Palsgrave of the Rhine, were among the most celebrated. They were installed in 1613, the Prince by proxy, and the Palsgrave in person. A young and graceful Count Ludovic of Nassau, was chosen at the last moment, to represent the Prince, whose appointed representative, Count Henry, was detained in Holland by adverse winds. “The feast,” says an eye-witness, “was in the Great Hall, where the king dined at the upper table alone, served in state by the Lord Gerard as Sewer, the Lord Morris as Cupbearer, the Lord Compton as Carver; all that were of the order, at a long cross table across the hall. The Prince by himself alone, and the Palatine a little distance from him. But the Count Nassau was ranged over-against my Lord Admiral, and so took place of all after the Sovereign Princes, not without a little muttering of our Lords, who would have had him ranged according to seniority, if the king had not overruled it by prerogative.” Wilson, in his history of James I., narrates a curious anecdote respecting this Grave Maurice and the ribbon of the order. “Prince Maurice took it as a great honor to be admitted into the Fraternity of that Order, and wore it constantly; till afterward, some villains at the Hague, that met the reward of their demerit (one of them, a Frenchman, being groom of the Prince’s chamber) robbed a jeweller of Amsterdam that brought jewels to the Prince. This groom, tempting him into his chamber, to see some jewels, there, with his confederates, strangled the man with one of the Prince’s Blue Ribbons; which being afterward discovered, the Prince would never suffer so fatal an instrument to come about his neck.” James, by raising his favorite Buckingham, then only Sir George Villiers, to the degree of Knight of the Garter, was considered to have as much outraged the order as Henry VIII. had done by investing Cromwell with the insignia. Chamberlain, in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, says, “The King went away the next day after St. George’s Feast, toward Newmarket and Thetford, the Earl of Rutland and Sir George Villiers being that morning elected into the order of the Garter, which seemed at first a strange choice, in regard that the wife of the former is an open and known recusant, and _he_ is said to have many dangerous people about him; and the latter is so lately come into the sight of the world, and withal it is doubted that he had not sufficient likelihood to maintain the dignity of the place, according to express articles of the order. But to take away that scruple, the King hath bestowed upon him the Lord Gray’s lands, and means, they say, to mend his grant with much more, not far distant, in the present possession of the Earl of Somerset, if he do _cadere causâ_ and sink in the business now in hand.” The last passage alludes to the murder of Overbury.