The morals of the nation, up to the time of Charles’s execution, were about as bad as badness could make them. The chief amusements of the court were masques, and emblematic pageants, some of which cost more than £20,000 each. Extravagance in dress and personal adornment had become an absolute phrenzy. James I., when transported from the scantily-furnished halls of Holyrood to the plentiful palaces of the south, burst from a clumsy, ungainly figure into a gilded coxcomb, almost daily figuring in a new suit, and his courtiers copying his example. When Buckingham was sent ambassador to the court of France, his suit of white velvet was set all over with diamonds, valued at £80,000; and, besides this, he had another suit of purple satin, embroidered with pearls worth £20,000. In fact, the beaux of this period were animated trinkets. Prodigality in feasting soon became as conspicuous as extravagance in dress; and gambling kept pace with both. The manners of the court, and of both sexes in the higher classes, were gross in the extreme. English taverns were dens of filth, tobacco smoke, roaring songs, and roysterers; and yet, even in such places, women of rank allowed themselves to be entertained, and tolerated those freedoms from their admirers which are described with such startling plainness in our old plays and poems. The streets of London, and even of the inferior towns, were filled with prowling sharpers; and the highways of England were equally infested with robbers, concealing their faces with visors, and carrying in their pockets false tails for their otherwise well-known horses. Divination was a thriving business; and fortune-telling was frequently a cover to the worse trades of pandering and poisoning. The stars were more eagerly studied than the diurnals; and both cavaliers and roundheads thronged to astrologers to learn the events of the succeeding week. Exorcising devils was common, and the belief in witches became the master superstition of the age; so that between three and four thousand persons are said to have been executed for witchcraft between the year 1640 and the Restoration.