It was during the year of inaction which Villiers passed at Goadby, that he became acquainted with the family of Sir Roger Aston. This knight was the father of four daughters, for one of whom Villiers, in the quiet hours of his country life, conceived an attachment. One might, on a first view of this incident, wonder at the want of caution in Lady Villiers, in detaining her son at Goadby, there to shackle his future course by an early, and, apparently, unprofitable engagement; but she was not acting, it appears, inconsistently with her schemes of future advancement, when she permitted the intimacy which produced this result. Sir Roger Aston was, it is true, only the base-born son of John Aston, of Aston, in Cheshire;[42] he could, therefore, derive no lustre from that ancient family; he had held formerly the office of barber to King James when in Scotland, where Sir Roger was chiefly educated.[43] He was, in time, made a groom of the royal chamber, and further promoted to be master of the wardrobe, and, however humble his birth and education may have been, became a person of no inconsiderable influence at Court. During the last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign, he was the continual correspondent of Cecil, whom he supplied with details of all that transpired in Scotland. The powerful minister was not, it appears, ashamed to owe much important information to the former barber, and, fortunately for those who rested upon the good offices of Aston, he is reported to have been a “very honest, plain-dealing man, no dissembler, neither did he do any ill office to any man.”[44] Footnote 42: Court of James I., by Dr. Godfrey Goodman, edited by the Rev. T. S. Brewer, vol. i., p. 16. Footnote 43: Carte’s History of England, vol. ii., p. 42. Footnote 44: Bishop Goodman, 1, p. 18. In addition to these acquired advantages, Sir Roger was enabled to provide his daughters with portions. It may, therefore, be inferred that Lady Villiers—who could never have foreseen that her son would have claimed the hand of an heiress of ducal line, nor have anticipated that those attractions, of which she could but partially calculate the value, should captivate in after times even a royal mistress—approved of the growing affection which sprang up amid the rural scenes of Goadby. It was permitted, indeed, at first, by both the parents, whose interests were concerned in it, and it seems, on the part of the lady, to have been a fervent and disinterested sentiment. But the question of a settlement intervened: Villiers, in consideration of a handsome dower, to which the young damsel was entitled, was required to settle upon her the moderate sum of eighty pounds a-year. The arrangement was impracticable, for all his fortune at that time, and even after he had appeared for some time at Court, amounted to only fifty or sixty pounds annually.[45] Footnote 45: Carte, vol. ii., p. 43.