Scarcely had he entered the town, when a half-drunken soldier caught hold of his bridle, as if he wanted to beg; instantly a gentleman of the Duke’s train, though at some distance, rode up, and, with a violent thrust, severed the man from the Duke, who, with the others, galloped quickly through the streets. Either from his usual indifference to danger, or fearing, as Sir Henry Wotton says, to “resent discontentments too deep” to be allayed, no notice was taken of this incident of Buckingham’s journey to London,[95] nor any inquiries made as to the projected assassination. Footnote 95: Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, p. 230. On his return to Court, the king received him graciously; no change appeared in the outward demeanour of those who met him; but his horse regiment had been composed of the sons of the noblest families in the land, and smothered regrets for the loss of “such gallant gentlemen” were as prevalent amid the higher classes, as deep resentment was in the indignant and vehement lower orders of society. “The effects of this overthrow,” Lord Clarendon observes, “did not at first appear in whispers, murmurs, and invectives, as the retreat from Cadiz had done; but produced such a general consternation over the face of the whole nation, as if all the armies of France and Spain were united together, and had covered the land.”[96] Footnote 96: Clarendon, vol. i. p. 40-1. Charles was, however, resolved to see no fault in his favourite, to acknowledge no disgrace; with a confidence in the Duke that would have done honour to a private friendship, he wrote to him, saying, that with “whatever ill success he came, he should ever be welcome--one of his greatest griefs being that he was not with him in that time of trial, as they might have much eased each other’s griefs.” Adding, that the Duke “had gained, in his mind, as much reputation as if he had performed all his desires.”[97] The terms on which they stood towards each other were those of one young man towards another--his companion in pleasures and pursuits, his fellow-traveller, his confidant--not those existing between a sovereign and a trusted subject, amenable to public opinion. Footnote 97: State Papers, vol lxxxv., No. 10 and 11.