all, and commanded them to
cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty of counsel, but not
of control"; and he closed the interview with a significant threat.
"Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are altogether in my power for
their calling, sitting, and dissolution: and therefore, as I find the
fruits of them to be good or evil, they are to continue or not to be."
But the will of the Commons was as resolute as the will of the king.
Buckingham's impeachment was voted and carried to the Lords.

[Sidenote: Impeachment of Buckingham.]

The favourite took his seat as a peer to listen to the charge with so
insolent an air of contempt that one of the managers appointed by the
Commons to conduct it turned sharply on him. "Do you jeer, my Lord!"
said Sir Dudley Digges. "I can show you when a greater man than your
Lordship--as high as you in place and power, and as deep in the king's
favour--has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain."
But his arrogance raised a more terrible foe than Sir Dudley Digges. The
"proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an attack from Eliot which marks a
new era in Parliamentary speech. From the first the vehemence and
passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, colourless reasoning
of older speakers. His opponents complained that Eliot aimed to "stir up
affections." The quick emphatic sentences he substituted for the
cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, his vivacious and
caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless invective,
struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous ostentation of
Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and gold, gave point to
the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land,
the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It
is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his
magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the
visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of
the immensity of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?" With the same
terrible directness Eliot reviewed the Duke's greed and corruption, his
insatiate ambition, his seizure of all public authority, his neglect of
every public duty, his abuse for selfish ends of the powers he had
accumulated. "The pleasure of his Majesty, his known directions, his
public acts, his acts of council, the decrees of courts--all must be
made inferior to this m