d land for an
empty name. However, in July, Sir John Villiers was created Baron
Villiers of Stoke (Stoke Pogis) and Viscount Purbeck. This heaping up
of peerages in the Villiers family, in addition to the number of
valuable posts, and especially high ecclesiastical posts, obtained by
Buckingham for his friends, or for anybody who would bribe him heavily
enough to obtain them, led to much murmuring and ill-feeling among
those whom he did not thus favour, and greatly irritated the populace.
There was no apparent reason why Sir John Villiers should be ennobled,
and his peerages were looked upon as a glaring piece of jobbery.

The Court also, at this time, was becoming unpopular. Buckingham was
filling it with licentious gallants and with ladies of a type to match
them. At Whitehall, there was a constant round of dissipation and
libertinism. Besides the very free and easy balls, masques and
banquets, there were what were called "quaint conceits" of more than
doubtful decency, and there was much buffoonery of a very low type. In
the _Secret History of the Court of James I._ it is recorded that, at
this time, namely, about 1618 or 1619, there were "none great with
Buckingham but bawds and parasites, and such as humoured him in his
unchaste pleasures; so that since his first being a pretty, harmless,
affable gentleman, he grew insolent, cruel, and a monster not to be
endured."

Lord Purbeck held the appointment of Master of the Robes to Prince
Charles, and he seems to have lived in the palace of the Prince; for,
even as late as 1625, we read of Lady Purbeck remaining in "the
Prinses house."[45] In 1620 Chamberlain wrote to Carleton[46] that
when Buckingham was overpressed by business, he handed over suitors to
his brother Purbeck. On the 18th of January, 1620, a letter[47] of
Nethersole's states that Purbeck had resigned his post of Master of
the Robes, in order to become Master of the Horse to the Prince.

At some date between that of his marriage in the year 1617 and 1622,
Purbeck was received into the Catholic Church, by Father Percy, alias
Fisher, a Jesuit. This step does not appear in any way to have
affected his position at Court. In a manuscript in the library of the
large Jesuit College of Stonyhurst,[48] in Lancashire, it is stated
that "the Viscount de Purbeck (sic) brother of the Marquis of
Buckingham, having been converted to the Catholic faith and
reconciled to the Holy Church, by Father John Persens, S.J., bet