Some opposition to the engagement originated, therefore, with the friends of the young lady, though she, passionately enamoured, was at first fixed in her choice, and firm to her professions of affection. “The gentlewoman,” says Sir Anthony Weldon, “loved him so well as, could all his friends have made for her great fortune but a hundred marks jointure, she had married him presently, in despite of all her friends, and, no question, would have had him without any fortune at all.” But whilst the affair was under consideration, or probably when it was partially concluded, but was still cherished in the minds of the parties most concerned in it, a circumstance occurred which diverted the hopes of Villiers into another direction; a new stimulus was given to the energies of his nature, and ambition, as it is known to have done before, proved mightier than love. It was at a horse-race in Cambridgeshire that Villiers first attracted the attention of the King. The poverty of the young man was then such that even on this notable occasion, when the sovereign, on his annual progress, was expected, and at a time when the costliness, or, as it was well styled, the “bravery” of dress was at its height, he could not afford any new attire. An “old black suit, broken out in divers places,” was, as Sir Symonds D’Ewes asserts,[46] the garment in which his narrow means constrained him to appear amid the gay courtiers who composed the royal train. Footnote 46: Life of Sir Symonds D’Ewes, edited by Halliwell, vol. i., p. 86. As if this were not a sufficient mortification, other inconveniences arose. The race had taken place near Linton, and most of the company slept at that town. There was no room in the lodgings of the inn for the ill-dressed youth in the old black suit, “and he was obliged,” adds the same writer, “and even glad, to lie on a truckle bed in a gentleman’s chamber, of mean quality, also, at that time, from whose own mouth I heard this relation, who was himself an eye-witness of it.”[47] According to another account, it was at Apthorpe, whither King James, in the month of August, 1614, had sent his dogs, that the monarch was so struck by the appearance and deportment of Villiers, that he resolved to mould him, as it were “platonically, to his own idea.”[48] The impression produced upon the King was publicly observed by attendants and courtiers, and the success of Villiers was decided. About this time, indeed, Villiers formed an acquaintance upon whose counsels he acted, so as to take the tide of fortune at its height. Footnote 47: Life of Sir Symonds D’Ewes. Footnote 48: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, p. 210; and Nichols’s Progresses Sir Thomas Lake is said to have ushered of James I., vol. iii, p. 19.