prerogative while it had yet any work in the
world to do, he believed in it to the last as the
only thing that could help him; and he was not
the less ready to seize Pym and Hampden in
1641 because of his defeat and discomfiture in
the attempt to seize Eliot in 1626."

Peter Heylin said of the line taken by the
king, that all his gains and settings by it might
have been "put in a seamstress's thimble, and
yet never fill it." The story of John Eliot will
show why this was so.

He was a Cornishman born, and an esquire's
son of old Devonshire descent. His great-uncle
had, by exchange of properties, become
possessed of the Priory of St. Germans, on a branch
of the Plymouth estuary, and called the place,
according to Cornish custom, from its situation
by the water-side, Port Eliot. Port Eliot is still
the seat of Eliot's descendant; the Earl of St.
Germans.

At Port Eliot then, in the great house, by a
poor fishing village irregularly built on an uneven
rock, John Eliot was born on the twentieth
of April, two hundred and seventy-four years
ago. His easy hospitable father died when the
son was a gentleman commoner of Exeter College,
Oxford, and nineteen years old. Thus,
therefore, John Eliot in earliest manhood came
into his inheritance, and was at once, upon his
coming of age, the representative of an important
county family.

He left the university about a year after his
father's death, and studied law for a short time
at one of the inns of court— some knowledge of
the laws of his country being then considered a
necessary part of the education of any gentleman,
a part of whose share in the business of
life it would be to help to administer, maintain,
or amend, them. Then young Mr. Eliot went
abroad— as it also became every well-educated
gentleman then to do in his youth; and in the
course of his journey he fell in with young
George Villiers, who was by two years and four
months Eliot's junior, and journeyed in friendly
company with him to several places.

George Villiers was the younger son of Sir
George Villiers, of Leicestershire, and of the
beautiful and clever kitchen-maid whom Sir
George took for his second wife. The ex-kitchen
maid, as Lady Villiers, proved her cleverness.
Her husband's family estates went, on his death,
about this time, to his heir by the previous marriage,
and it depended on her wit to make provision
for her son George (who was surpassingly
handsome), and her other children. George,
therefore, had been sent abroad to perfect
himself, by three years of travel, in French,
horsemanship, fencing, and dancing. Meanwhile,
his mother at home married again, and
through a third husband, Sir Thomas Compton,
whom she afterwards deserted, she found means
to push the fortunes of her children.

Young Mr. Eliot, having returned to Cornwall,
at once married and settled down as a
discreet, though very earnest and warm-hearted
country gentleman; he married at the age of
twenty-one, Miss Rhadagund Gedie, daughter
of a wealthy Cornish squire. His eldest son
was born to him in the course of the next year
and very soon afterwards, in his twenty-fourth
year, he entered parliament as member for the
borough of St. Germans, with which town, as
we have seen, his estate of Port Eliot was
immediately connected. It was the same second
parliament of James the First in which Pym
entered on his political life, and Bacon ended
his career as people's representative. There
were many young men in that parliament; for
some of their elders had given way in disgust
before Sir Henry Nevile's plan of " undertaking"
for a court majority. The parliament thus said
to have been " undertaken for" spent its breath
on abuse of " undertaking," and its whole business
was created by the disputed returns that
arose out of it. But of all this, Eliot said
afterwards, when drawing on his recollection of
the first parliament in which he sat, "I hold
that our jealousy in this case was the advantage
of the ill-affected, who made it the instrument
of their designs to dissolve that meeting, that
they might follow their own projects and inventions
then on foot; which (as we have since
felt) trenched more upon the liberties and privileges
of this kingdom, than the uttermost
' undertakings' in parliament can ever do."
That parliament, which first met on the fifth of
April, as it would not proceed to consideration
of supply, was dissolved by the king, off-hand, on
the seventh of June, and was familiarly known
in its time as the Addle Parliament.

Young Mr. John Eliot went home. A few
months later, young Mr. George Villiers, having
perfected himself abroad in all graces, displayed
his beauty before the eyes of his Majesty King
James the First, then in or close upon his
fiftieth year. Mr. George Villiers seemed to
his Majesty so to adorn a divertissement given
by the students of Cambridge, that he was even as
an Adonis; and the mature male Venus having
a keen eye for a well-dressed Adonis, loved the
young man at first sight. Then, his mother,
taking care to present him at court without
delay, astutely bought for him (nearly all the
dignities and offices being kept on sale by the
royal shopkeeper), the office of cupbearer to his
Majesty. So Villiers became the handsome
cupbearer with whom his Majesty talked at his
meals, and with whose clever answers he expected
all his courtiers to be as much delighted
as he was himself; the cupbearer also, of whose
moral education that great Solomon took charge,
hopeful that out of such an Alcibiades he might
produce a Socrates of his own time, as beautiful
as the old Socrates was not. The youth, who
had a fierce will under a bland voice and effeminate
skin, needed no plotting for his own
advancement. The foolish king huddled upon
his head, honours and riches. He was made, as
fast as he could be made, knight, gentleman of
the chamber, Baron, Viscount, Marquis of
Buckingham, Lord High Admiral, Lord Warden
of the Cinque Ports; dispenser of the honours,
gifts, offices, revenues of the three kingdoms.
He took care of his family, his instruments, his