When the Earl of Somerset’s lands were given away, after his forfeiture, the estate of Sherborne was offered to Villiers; he might, perhaps, have accepted it without odium, for upon Prince Charles had been bestowed all Somerset’s estates in the north. But he refused the offer of Sherborne, according to a passage in Birch’s MSS., “in a most noble fashion; praying the King that the building of his fortunes might not be founded on the ruin of another.”[129] Sherborne, the value of which was at this time about eight hundred pounds yearly, but was expected to be shortly double that sum, was given to Sir John Digby, upon the payment of ten thousand pounds, and has remained ever since in the same family. The respect of Villiers towards the memory of an unfortunate man was much appreciated; already had public opinion visited with its bitterest curse, the traitor, Sir Lewis Stukeley, who was afterwards a prisoner in that very “chamber in the Tower, in which Ralegh, whom he had betrayed, had spent twelve years of misery.”[130] Footnote 129: Birch’s MSS. 4176. This anecdote, so creditable to Buckingham, is confirmed by a grant in the State Paper Office. S. P. O. vol. cv., No. 20, see Calendar, 1616-17, March 12, the grant to the Earl of Buckingham, fee-simple of the manors of Beaumont, Oldhall and Newhall de Beaumont, Mose, Okeley Magna, Okeley Parva, Sligghawe, Okeley Park, Mose Park, Essex, together with all timbers and advowsons belonging to them, which the Lord Darcie of Chiche holdeth for terme of his life. Manor of Fleete, marshes of Trewdales, Fleetehouse Hall Hills, in Lincolne, in lieu of the manor of Teynton Magna, Gloucester, _part of value for Sherborne_, escheated to the Crown by Somerset’s attainder. Inedited MSS. Domestic, 1616-17. Footnote 130: Hutchins’s History of Dorsetshire, vol. iv., p. 83. Sir Henry Wotton compares the repetition of benefits conferred upon Villiers, to a kind of embroidering, or listing of one favour upon another. But all these preferments were, he adds, but the “faceings or fringeings of his greatness,” compared with that trust which the King shortly reposed in his favourite, when he made him “the chief concomitant of his heir apparent.”[131] Footnote 131: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ.