Buckingham’s conduct drew forth still more severe censures. It was observed that in advising the Prince to break off the treaty, he had only counselled what he had often done himself; for he was said to have given promises of marriage to many within the Court, and to have withdrawn from the fulfilment.[113] Harassed by the censures cast upon him, Buckingham’s health and spirits sank under the alternate excitement of his too dazzling career, and the depression of blame and opposition. “A fever, the jaundice, and I know not what else,” are described, in a letter from Mr. Chamberlain, as his disease. For this he was “let blood thrice;” “yet the world,” adds the same writer, “thinks he is more sick in mind than body, and that he declines apace.” The King in vain endeavoured to reconcile him to the Earl of Bristol, who had returned from Spain some time previously. That nobleman was ordered not to leave his house, although many gracious messages were sent to him from the King.[114] Buckingham, however, passed much of his time with the King, “with as much freedom and love as ever.”[115] Footnote 113: Ibid, pp. 972, 975. Footnote 114: Hacket, from Cabala, p. 223. Footnote 115: State Papers. The Duke of Buckingham was attended in his illness by Sir Theodore Mayerne, the favourite court physician. From an entry in a journal of cases kept by that eminent man, and styled by him his “Ephemerides Anglicæ,” it appears that Buckingham was not unfrequently the subject of his care and skill. In 1617 he had been troubled with a tumour in the right ear, owing to riding bareheaded in the winter, when hunting with the King; and the mode of life pursued in James’s society, the habits of intemperance prevalent in those days, and the absence of any strict moral principle, were, as Mayerne’s details are said to prove, highly injurious to the general health of the Favourite,[116] who is specified, in Sir Theodore’s voluminous collection, under the name of Palamedes. Every one remarked that Buckingham had, since his return, become pensive. “The Prince,” writes Mr. Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, “hath got a beard, and is cheerful; the Marquis (some conceive) not so.” The expenses of the Spanish journey were very considerable; and in the impoverished state of James’s treasury, they might naturally provoke difficulties far from agreeable to the main projectors of that enterprize. They amounted, according to a release given by Prince Charles to Sir Francis Cottington, to 50,027_l._ Prince Charles, before he left Spain, had given presents to the amount of 12,000_l._ Footnote 116: Ellis’s Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii., p. 245-46. There are nineteen volumes in the Sloane MSS., British Museum, consisting of notes in Latin, in the handwriting of Mayerne, forming a journal of the cases which he attended from 1611 to 1649. “These,” says Sir Henry Ellis, “may be styled, for the period they embrace, ‘Medical Annals of the Court of England.’”