spies, while all that was servile in the nation
scraped tongues at his feet. So, Villiers, afterwards
Duke of Buckingham, rose in the "great"
world after the short session of the Addle
Parliament, and during the five years of Eliot's life,
spent by Eliot as a quiet country gentleman in
Cornwall, and as the sober father of a steadily
increasing family.

At the beginning of those five years, the king's
favourite was the Robert Carr who had won
the king's eye, and broken his own leg, at a
tournament: the handsome Scotch lad whom the
king consoled by teaching him Latin Grammar
as he lay sick of his broken leg, and had
proceeded to make by swift stages of royal favour,
Baron Branspeth, Viscount Rochester, Knight
of the Garter, and Earl of Somerset. This
favourite, as my Lord of Rochester, had fixed
his eyes on the young and vicious Lady Essex,
daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. The lady, as
little Fanny Howard, aged thirteen, had been
married to the Earl of Essex, only a year older
than herself; and the boy husband had then been
sent away to complete his education at the
University, and on the Continent. When he came
back to his young wife, who meanwhile had
grown in every grace but the one that endures
for ever, she received him with dislike; the
king's handsome favourite, my Lord of Rochester,
having pleased her eye not less than the
king's. My lord of Rochester, who thought
himself ordained at court to have whatever he
desired, proposed the lady's divorce from Lord
Essex, and her marriage to himself; but his
young companion of old time and constant
counsellor, Overbury, a man given to literature
and a careless life, who was content to have become
plain Sir Thomas, not only advised against,
but finding advice vain, became active in, opposition
to this infamous procedure. Rochester therefore
procured his imprisonment in the Tower,
where he afterwards supplanted the lieutenant
with a creature of his own, through whom Overbury
was killed by slow poison. The divorce
was then procured, the wedding was honoured by
Rochester's creation Earl of Somerset, and for
two years the guilty favourite had received worship
at the base court with his guilty wife, when,
at the beginning of November, in the year sixteen
'fifteen, George Villiers being then in the
first months of his career as next favourite,
Somerset was sent to the Tower. Six months
afterwards he received sentence of death as one
of the murderers of Overbury. While dying
of secret poison in his prison, Overbury had
addressed to his false friend lines in his poem of
"the Wife," of some of which, thought Sir
John Eliot, for whom such events were the chief
topics of political discourse during these years
of his retirement on his Cornish property, none
of the past writers it was so much the custom
to laud could more perfectly have expressed this
fancy:

And all the carnal beauty of my Wife
Is but skin deep, but to two senses known;
Short even of pictures, shorter liv'd than life,
And yet survives the love that's built thereon.

Of that poem written in the Tower, Eliot, when
himself in the Tower, wrote, " As it is of my
country, I honour it the more; and as it was the
production of this place, my admiration is the
greater, that in such solitude and darkness,
where sorrow and distraction mostly dwell, such
happy entertainments and such minutes were
enjoyed."

Of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh,
basely accorded to the enmity of Spain against
him— another of the moving events of this period
of Eliot's outward repose, and an event of which
he seems to have been a witness— Eliot, who
had himself the genius of a writer of some mark
but exercised it for his country as a keen thinker
and speaker weighty though impassioned, wrote:
"All preparations that are terrible were presented
to his eye. Guards and officers were
about him, the scaffold and the executioner, the
axe, and the more cruel expectation of his
enemies. And what did all this work on the
resolution of our Raleigh? Made it an impression
of weak fear, or a distraction of his reason?
Nothing so little did that great soul suffer. He
gathered only the more strength and advantage;
his mind became the clearer, as if already it had
been freed from the cloud and oppression of the
body; and such was his unmoved courage and
placid temper, that, while it changed the affection
of the enemies who had come to witness it and
turned their joy to sorrow, it filled all men else
with admiration and emotion, leaving with them
only this doubt, whether death were more acceptable
to him or he more welcome unto death."

At the age of eight-and-twenty, Mr. Eliot of
Port Eliot, still quietly resident on his Cornish
estate by the Plymouth estuary and the Devonshire
border, was knighted and made Vice-
Admiral of Devon. About the same time my
lord of Buckingham became Lord High Admiral
of England, and it was from him, therefore, that
Eliot received the patent of his office. Buckingham
was a man of the court, who, helping none
but himself, pushed his way and lost it. Eliot
was an honest man of the people, who, warm
with a sense of what England should be, went
far to make it what it is. Eliot and Buckingham
were, in a manner, friends at their first meeting.
Now, they were High Admiral and Vice-Admiral
in business relations with each other, but still,
in a manner, friends.

But the pith of the relations between Vice-
Admiral and Lord High Admiral, where the
Lord High, &c., looks rather to the income
than the duties of his office, is that the Vice-
Admiral exists to detect on his own part of the
coast all opportunities of fine or seizure that
bring gold into the purse. What he gets, he
divides; a part is his; a part is the Lord High
Admiral's. Eliot looked simply and faithfully
to the discharge of his duty; when he had done
that, and had rendered minute account to save
himself from slander, he was content. But there
was in his part of the country one Mr. James
Bagg, who was in the habit of telling people that
if they trusted their affairs to their true friend,
Mr. James Bagg, they would thrive the better.