When we recapitulate the errors of this celebrated man--his omissions, his sins, his want of good faith, his overlooking the benefits he might have conferred on his country, until it was almost too late for repentance, his sacrifice of his Sovereign’s best interests to his own will--we must, at the same time, admit great extenuation. No mercy was shown to his faults by the historians of his time, nor of the age succeeding; they wrote under a sense of the deep injuries from which the Rebellion received its first impulse. We must not look for fairness in such a ferment. Even after the tomb had long been closed over his remains, it was scarcely safe, certainly scarcely prudent, to palliate the faults, or to place the virtues of Buckingham in a fair light. We have now, however, the satisfactory assurance that Buckingham was conscious of his faults; contrite for his misdeeds; and earnest in his resolution to repair them, had his life been spared.[245] Footnote 245: State Papers, vol. cxiv., No. 17; August 27, 1627. Calendar, edited by Mr. Bruce. Lord Clarendon closes his “Disparity” between the Earl of Essex and the Duke of Buckingham in these words:-- “He that shall continue this argument further may haply begin his parallel after their deaths, and not unfitly. He may say that they were both as mighty in obligations as any subjects; and both their memories and families as unrecompensed by such as they had raised. He may tell you of the clients that buried the pictures of the one, and defaced the arms of the other, lest they might be too long suspected for their dependants, and find disadvantage by being honest to their memories. He may tell you of some that drew strangers to their houses, lest they might find the track of their own footsteps, that might upbraid them with their former attendance. He may say that both their memories shall have a reverend fervour with all posterity, and all nations. He may tell you many more particulars, which I dare not do.” APPENDIX. APPENDIX. In the Calendar edited by Mr. Bruce (1859), there are the following details, amongst other curious particulars, of the state of affairs after the Duke of Buckingham’s unfortunate expedition to Rhé:-- "Lionel Sharp to Buckingham, reports his sermon preached (at St Margaret’s, Westminster), in which he had alluded to the censure thrown upon the Duke for his late failure at Rhé, and had declared that he who had ventured all that was dearest in the world for a foreign church, would, if he ‘had as many lives as hairs,’ venture them all for his own, with other laudatory personal allusions to the Duke. Is ready to ‘do the rest’ within two days, ‘if he may have the place in Westminster, or on Sunday next.’"--_Vol. cii., Domestic, No. 76, April, 1628._