A man still well-remembered in England, though he had been dead fifteen years, was James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough, he had attained to that dignity only in his old age, having advanced to it through a long previous career. Born about 1552, the younger son of a Wiltshire squire, he had passed from Oxford to the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, and had attained to high eminence in his profession before the death of Elizabeth. Emerging from her reign, aged about fifty, he had been appointed by James to an Irish Chief Judgeship (1604); then brought back to England, knighted (1609), baroneted (1620), and made Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench (1621); and finally raised by the same King to the great office of Lord High Treasurer of England, and to a peerage with the title of Baron Ley of Ley in Devonshire (1624). In recognition of his long services, Charles, in the first year of his reign (Feb. 5, 1626-7), had created for him, when he was almost seventy-four years of age, the Earldom of Marlborough in his native Wiltshire. While thus promoting him, however, Charles appears not to have found him a minister such as he and Buckingham wanted. He had accordingly removed him from the High Treasurership in 1628, on the ground of his old age, but in reality to make way for the more compliant Lord Weston, and had shelved him into the less important office of Lord President of the Council. He had died at Lincoln's Inn, March 14, 1628-9, exactly four days after that ominous dissolution of Charles's third Parliament which announced his determination to have done with Parliaments and begin the reign of "Thorough." The death of the old peer at such a juncture had apparently the less been forgotten by reason of a tradition that the political anxieties of the juncture had had something to do with it. Now, at all events, in the days of the Long Parliament and the Civil War, there was still some respectful recollection of the old Earl of Marlborough as one of the best-liked ministers of James's reign and of the first years of Charles's. "He was a person of great gravity, ability, and integrity; and, as the Caspian Sea is observed neither to ebb nor flow, so his mind did not rise or fall, but continued the same constancy in all conditions." The words are Fuller's, and they probably express the character of the Earl that had come down among his countrymen. [Footnote: Dugdale's Baronage (1676), Vol. II. pp. 451, 452; Wood's Athenæ, II. 441, 443; Clar. Hist. (one vol. ed. 1843), p. 20; Fuller's Worthies, _Wiltshire_ (ed. 1840), III. 328-9.]