The same members who had before recited the enormous gifts and lavish generosity of King James to his favourite, now taxed the very man who had only to ask, to obtain, with the murder of one who was loading him with benefits. The disease of King James, Heylyn reports, “was no other than an ague, which, though it fell on him in the spring, crossed the proverb, and proved, not medicinal, but mortal.”[316] The King was old, not indeed in years, but in constitution; the wonder was not that he died before the full span of age was complete, but that he lived so long. The appearance of the body after death has been insisted upon by Whitelocke as a proof of poison; but it is well known that in many diseases this appearance occurs, especially in affections of the heart, a class of complaint but little understood in those times, but a malady that is not unfrequently the result of rheumatic affections, to which James seems to have been liable. Footnote 316: Life of Archbishop Laud. Wandesford, one of the chief speakers on this occasion, declares that the “poor and loyal Commons of England were troubled at hearing that great distempers followed the drink and plaisters which Buckingham had pressed on the King--droughts, raving, faintness, and intermitting pulse;” these are, however, the usual concomitants of that passage through the valley of the shadow of death which precedes a final dissolution; the plaister was declared to have driven the complaint inwards; both the administration of the drink or posset, and the application of the plaister, were avowed by Buckingham, who protested that neither of these intended remedies had been used without the permission of the physicians; on hearing a rumour that he had done so, Buckingham affirmed that he went to the dying king, “who exclaimed, ‘They are worse than devils who say so.’”[317] Footnote 317: Brodie, vol. ii., p. 125. On the whole, this part of the impeachment seems to have fallen to the ground; and we are disposed to credit Clarendon, who states that though “investigated in a time of great licence, ‘no criminality was discovered.’” King Charles also became afterwards the subject of aspersions on this point--one of those slanderous and impossible accusations that weaken all the previous charges, and taint them with the hue of malice. It is remarkable, as Hume observes, that the most vulnerable point in Lord Bristol’s attack was altogether ignored by the Commons in this “large impeachment.” The most blamable circumstance in Buckingham’s whole life, as the same historian observes, was the Duke’s conduct in breaking the Spanish treaty, and in hurrying the nation into a war in order to gratify his private passions. But there was a general conviction of the insincerity of Spain; and the unjustifiable conduct of the Duke, in the affairs relative to that country, was suffered to escape unnoticed, whilst charges, almost untenable, were got up in the hope of ruining him with the King.