During these diversions, James’s good humour, often interrupted by disease and self-indulgence, was maintained by his partiality for Buckingham. “The King,” writes Mr. Chamberlain, “is never out of tune, but that the sight of the Earl of Buckingham doth settle and quiet all.” Meantime, one of those meteoric appearances to which the superstition of the day attached some portentous meaning, excited popular alarm, and suspended even the course of public business. “On Wednesday,” writes one of the functionaries of government, “we had no Star Chamber, by reason of the Lord Chancellor’s indisposition; that was the first day we took notice here of the great blazing star, though it was observed at Oxford a full week before. It is now the only subject of discourse, and not so much as little children, but as they go to school, talk in the streets that it foreshows the death of a king or a queen, or some great war towards.”[229] Footnote 229: T. Locke to Sir Dudley Carleton, Nov. 17, 1618, State Paper Office, inedited. At another time a race of two footmen from St. Albans to Clerkenwell diverted the Court. Many money bets were laid upon the result, and Buckingham won three thousand pounds upon that day. “The story,” as the narrator of it well observes, “were not worth telling, but that you may see we have little to do when we are so far affected with these trifles, that all the Court in a manner, lords and ladies, and some further off, and some nearer, went to see this race, and the King himself almost as far as Barnet; and though the weather was sour and foul, yet he was scant _fils de bonne mère_ that went not out to see, insomuch that it is verily thought there was as many people as at the King’s first coming to London; and for the courtiers on horseback, they were so pitifully bewrayed and bedaubed all over, that they could scant be known one from another, besides divers of them came to have falls and other mishaps, by reason of the multitude of horses.” On some of these occasions, the lavish disposition of Buckingham was exhibited. On St. George’s Day, a festival observed with much solemnity, he presented forty of his gentlemen with fifty pounds a piece “to provide themselves,” and twenty to ten of his yeomen, besides a hundred pounds to treat them with a supper and a play on the following night at the Mitre in Fleet Street. A retinue of fifty persons appears, in modern days, a tolerable attendance for a nobleman even of high rank; but it had recently been found necessary to limit them to that number, owing to the unbounded ostentation and extravagance of many of the nobility.[230] Footnote 230: Nichols, vol. iii., p. 477.