Eight noblemen, the Marquis of Hamilton at their head, and six gentlemen of honourable families, attended the Duke. Amongst them were his brother-in-law, the Earl of Denbigh, and one of his brothers, designated simply as “Mr. Villars.” When to these there were added twenty-four knights, of great worth, all of “whom carried six or seven pages a piece, and as many footmen,” the train amounted to six or seven hundred. Nor were those all. “When,” says the writer of this account, “the list is perfect, there will appear many more than I have named.”[201] Footnote 201: See Ellis’s Original Letters, 1st series, vol. i., p. 189. The nuptials for which some of this grand preparation was made, had, however, taken place before it was Buckingham’s fate to cross the Channel. The day after King James’s funeral was to have witnessed the departure of Buckingham for France. This was on the eighth of May, and the future Queen was expected to be at Dover by the eleventh.[202] But the Duke did not arrive in Paris until the twenty-fourth; nor did Henrietta Maria land on the shores of England until the twenty-second of June.[203] Footnote 202: Ellis’s Letters. Footnote 203: Rushworth, p. 170. During the seven days that Buckingham remained at the French court, an uninterrupted succession of feasting and rejoicing occupied his time; whilst his imagination was engrossed by an object to which no man who had not been brought to the highest point of presumption by a career of prosperity would have ventured to aspire. The painful and degrading position in which Anne of Austria was placed, under the sway of her mother-in-law, destitute as the young Queen was of all good advisers, and exposed by her youth and her attractions to the snares of the designing, in the vitiated sphere in which she moved, has been already referred to. Some additional traits of the appearance and character of a Princess whose fascinations produced a powerful effect upon Buckingham may not be deemed impertinent. She was not then a mother; and the importance of giving birth to a future monarch of France was not permitted to her until thirteen years afterwards.[204] By her attendant and partizan, Madame de Motteville, a character so beautiful has been given of the Queen Consort of Louis the Thirteenth, as would inspire compassion for the sacrifice which bound her at the altar to a husband wholly unworthy of a wife so graceful and so virtuous, could an entire credence be assigned to that partial testimony. Footnote 204: Louis XIV. was not born on the 5th of September, 1538.--See Memoir of Madame de Motteville, vol. i., p. 71.