At Belvoir, James made, on one occasion, a considerable number of knights, and, notwithstanding his writ of inquiry, he visited the hospitable palace every second or third year, from 1612 to 1621. In 1612, Henry, Prince of Wales, met his father at Belvoir Castle, riding thither from Richmond in two days, and received “very honourable entertainment” from Francis, Earl of Rutland, who, but a fortnight before, had attended the funeral of his brother at Bottesford.[280] Footnote 280: Note in Nichols’s Progresses, vol. i., p. 490. In August, 1619, the king again visited Belvoir, but it does not appear certain that Buckingham accompanied his royal master. Probably, the preliminaries to the union which subsequently took place, may have been entered into on that occasion. Early in the following year, the marriage contract was signed, a ceremonial which generally preceded the completed marriage by a period of forty days. In this instance, that event did not take place until the sixteenth of May. In the interim, Buckingham, either through the impatience of a lover, or, what is more likely, fearful of losing, from objections, the heiress of Belvoir, took a step which cannot be condemned without a full knowledge of every circumstance connected with it; but which seemed, on the first view, alike discreditable to the lover and to his mistress. He induced the Lady Katherine to leave her father’s house, and conveyed her to his own apartments at Whitehall. Of this transaction, an account is given by Arthur Wilson, whose puritanical principles caused him to regard Buckingham with dislike, and perhaps to misrepresent his conduct, and Buckingham is stated to have kept the lady there for several days, and then to have returned her to her father. “The stout old earl,” pursues the same writer, “sent him this threatening message, ’That he was too much of a gentleman to suffer such an indignity, and if he did not marry his daughter, to repair her honour, no greatness should protect him from his justice.’” It is conjectured that this elopement may have been contrived by Buckingham, in order to extort from the Earl of Rutland an unwilling consent. He quickly, therefore, says Wilson, “salved the wound before it grew to a quarrel; and if this marriage stopped the current of his sins, he had the less to answer for.”[281] Footnote 281: Wilson’s Life of James I., p. 149.