Whatsoever may have been the faults of James the First, it is probable that they would not essentially have affected the well-being of his son, had not the system of favouritism, which was one of James’s greatest weaknesses, acted upon the character of the young Prince, whose earliest associations were stamped with devotion to Buckingham. At once minister, minion, and master, the power behind the throne, to whose dictation, during the years of his brief and bright career, even the High Court of Parliament submitted—the distinction of being the last royal favourite in England is due to this ill-fated man. By him the “sluice of honour,” as an old writer expresses it, “was opened and closed at pleasure.” He was to King James a sort of “Parhelion,”[5] at whose course foreign Courts wondered, whilst the sagacious and prophetic at home trembled as they beheld at once its eccentricity and its splendour. At his death the experiment, which had been tried once too often, was abandoned, never to be renewed; and no acknowledged successor in the meteoric career of Buckingham ever appeared before the dazzled gaze of our countrymen. The minutest circumstances relative to his origin are interesting, not only as they concern one whose noble bearing and powers of fascination almost effaced, during his life, the remembrance of his errors, but as they unfold the foundation of a great family which still influences our national councils. Footnote 5: Bishop Hacket’s Life of the Lord Keeper Williams, p. 39. Until the elevation of George Villiers from low estate to an unparalleled career of success, the race from which he sprang, though ancient and honourable, was but partially known to fame, and his ancestors, how valiant and loyal soever they had proved, had held the tenor of their way with little variation, and with only an occasional gleam of celebrity on one or other of its lineage; a course of moderate prosperity maintaining, without altering, its condition—rather, as Sir Henry Wotton has well expressed it, “without obscurity than with any great lustre.”[6] “I will, however,” adds the same quaint writer, after referring to the difficulty of making a proper estimate of all public characters, “show, therefore, as evenly as I can, and deduce him from his cradle through the deep and lubrick waves of State and Court till he be swallowed in the Gulf of Fatality.”[7] Footnote 6: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ. Life of Geo. Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, p. 208. Footnote 7: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.