It was not long before James began to suspect that he had been abused by the favourite whose fidelity ought to have been secured by gratitude. Among the friends of the Duke, there was one who looked disapprovingly on his conduct. This was the Lord Keeper Williams; a man of “as deep and large wisdom,” says Bishop Hacket, “as I did ever speak with.” Confessing the greatest obligations to Buckingham, Williams had the courage to oppose him, when conscience dictated a remonstrance. “His enemies,” says his biographer, “liked nothing worse in him than his courage, and he pleased himself in nothing more.” Of a stately presence, and possessing abilities to maintain that lofty demeanour which is absurd when not supported by real superiority of intellect, Williams could cope with the haughty Buckingham, whose headstrong will had become such that none of the King’s ministers could move it. Williams, too, was of temper somewhat irritable. “Choler and a high stomach were his faults, the only defects in him.”[73] His manners were, at times, even supercilious. He was not likely to be daunted by one whose capacity was, therefore, to his own, as that of the infant to the man, and over whom he exercised an ascendancy through a very noted channel; namely, the influence which the Lord Keeper possessed over the Countess of Buckingham. “Those dangerous and busy flies,” writes Bishop Hacket, “which the Roman seminaries send abroad, had buzzed about the Countess of Buckingham, had blown upon her, and infected her. She was mother to the great favourite, but in religion became a step-mother.” Her conversion had taken place about a twelvemonth previously. The Countess doted on her son; but her conversion was certain to be highly injurious to him, especially at that juncture, just before the Spanish journey. Complaints were uttered, importing that the mother, who was thought almost to govern her son, must indirectly sway the monarch who was now little other than that son’s slave. The part which Laud had taken to remedy the evil has been already detailed. The Lord Keeper also had foreseen and endeavoured to prevent the mischief which might arise from these rumours. “Safety,” he considered, “is easiest purchased by precaution.” “An instrument that is swung may be used upon a little warning.” Anxious for the welfare of the Duke, Williams addressed him to the following effect. “Your mother,”[74] he observed, “is departed from the bosom of the Church of England, in whose confession of faith she was baptized;--a strange delusion in any to go astray from that society of Christians among whom they cannot demonstrate but salvation may be had. I would we could bring her home so soon that it might not be seen she had ever wandered.” His concern, he intimates, was, however, not so much for the Countess’s eternal welfare, as for her son’s temporal security. It was, he thought, time to inform the Favourite “that clamours were