In February, 1617, Nathaniel Brent wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton: “By the Marquis of Buckingham and his mother the Spanish match is much apprehended, though methinks there needs no such haste, the lady being yet scant eleven years old. In the meantime every man hopes or fears as he is affected, and they say the Lord Treasurer is so far possessed, that, like another Cato, that began to learn Greek at threescore years old, he hath got him a Spanish reader, and applies it hard.” The influence of the Countess of Buckingham doubtless, therefore, turned the scale against Ralegh, to the vexation of her son’s best friends. “She was,” writes Bishop Hacket, who knew her well, “mother to the great favourite, but, in religion, became a step-mother. She doated upon him extremely, as the glory of her womb, yet, by turning her coat so wantonly when the eyes of all the kingdom were upon her, she could not have wrought him a worse turn if she had studied a mischief against him.” “Many,” adds the same writer, “marvelled what rumbled in her conscience all that time; for, from a maid to a maiden, she had not every one’s good words for practice of piety.”[240] “Arthur Wilson complains also that the Countess of Buckingham was the cynosure that all the Papists steered by; but that it was above her ability to bear the weight of that metaphor.” Footnote 240: Hacket’s Life of Archbishop Williams, vol. i., p. 171. “The Countess was,” he adds, “a protectress of the Jesuits and Jesuitesses, the females of that order, of whom there were no fewer in England than two hundred English ladies of good families.” Her opinions were well known to affect her son, who now began to be accused by the Puritans of Armenianism, and became the friend and patron of Archbishop Laud. Gondomar saw well to what point to direct his insidious game. The Countess had a share in the management of State affairs; she, with her son, guided the helm, and as much court was paid to her as to Buckingham, whilst both received far more adulation than was thought necessary to bestow on the King himself. Wittily, though somewhat impiously, Gondomar wrote to the Spanish Court that “there never was more hope of the conversion of England than now; for there are more prayers and oblations offered here to the mother than to the son.”[241] Footnote 241: Oldmixon, p. 52.