This slight sketch is necessary to show how naturally Laud might be expected to succeed in gaining an influence over Buckingham, since he had been always engaged in winning over those of opposite opinions, and in the great battle of controversy. Cheerful, not too severe, nor even sufficiently strict, in his notions of morality, as appears from his conduct relative to Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire--a short, stout man, with a plump and merry visage, the very opposite of a Puritan or Calvinist minister--no man knew better than Laud how to lay aside the gravity which was unseasonable; accessible in his manners, staunch as a churchman to the interests of his order, but perfectly indifferent, personally, to the gifts of fortune, Laud delighted the great Duke, weary of fame, and perhaps of life, by the sweetness of manner and vivacity of temper which become so well men of high attainments. They were henceforth friends, until the thread of Buckingham’s existence was cut short by the assassin’s blow. It is impossible to estimate too highly the effects of this intimacy upon the character of the Duke. He seems to have yielded readily to the remonstrances of Laud against the misappropriation of church revenues; and indeed, according to another authority, his own disposition accelerated the effect produced by these impressions. Buckingham was not the rapacious oppressor described by the contemporary slanderers of his time. “Oppression and avarice,” observes Nichols, in his history of Leicestershire, “_he knew not_.” Williams, Lord Keeper, the early friend of Buckingham, was now wholly discarded from the Duke’s friendship, and from his presence, as appears from a letter addressed by Williams to Sir George Goring, and written from Foxley. The mixture of servility with religious professions; the evident desire to retain the favour of the Duke, and his own place, of course, and yet to make his case good;--and the dexterity with which all this is managed, lessen the regret that would otherwise be felt that Buckingham had lost in Williams an acute adviser, whose counsels were safer, at that juncture, than those of the earnest and fearless, but intemperate and prejudiced, Laud. No benefit to the disgraced courtier and prelate resulted from this appeal, and the new parliament was opened in the month of February, 1626, not by Williams, but by Sir Thomas Coventry, as Lord Keeper, in a strain of fulsome adulation to the King. But this address, followed as it was by an oration from Sir Heneage Finch, the Speaker, in terms still more exaggerated, was little regarded by the Commons, who immediately formed themselves into a committee of grievances, in which the evil resulting from bad counsellors about the King, the misappropriation of the revenue, the failure of the expedition against Cadiz, and the expenditure of the subsidy granted to the late King, formed the main points of consideration.