absolved him, but all the new bishops were so unwilling to receive consecration at his hand, that Abbot was obliged to appoint three prelates to consecrate for him. All forfeitures and penalties for this offence were remitted, and the archbishop restored to the King’s presence. There is, however, no proof of what one looks for with solicitude, the mediation of Buckingham in favour of his friend and patron, although there is no reason, from the result, to suppose that it may not have been exerted. Footnote 90: State Papers, Domestic, cxxii., No. 28. Footnote 91: State Papers, Ibid, No. 61. Footnote 92: Ibid, No. 97, vol. ii., 112. Footnote 93: Ibid, vol. cxxiii. Footnote 94: Ibid, cxxiii. No. 1000. This attempt to make the archbishop’s mishap a “culpable homicide,” originated in the Lord Keeper Williams, who had formed a plot for _depriving_ Abbot. The accusation was based upon the ground that the primate had been employed in an unlawful act when the accident occurred, but Coke decreed that “by the laws of the realm, a bishop may lawfully hunt in a park; hunt he may, because a bishop, when dying, is to leave his pack of hounds to the King’s free will and disposal.”[95] Footnote 95: Lord Campbell’s Life of Coke, p. 314. Such were the incidents which deprived Villiers, for a time, of the valuable counsels of Abbot. It must, however, be also remembered, when the real ignorance of Villiers is considered, and when his deficiencies and his errors are lamented as constituting in his case a national misfortune, that in his career as a courtier he wanted the needful element in all improvement, leisure. The daily existence of James was made up of toilsome pleasures,—the chase, the drama, the mask,—at which Villiers, weary, doubtless, at times, of the incessant pageant, sometimes assisted. He soon imbibed a still greater taste for display than even his crafty mother had implanted in him for ambitious purposes, and became, like most persons suddenly raised from poverty and obscurity, inordinately ostentatious and prodigal.