s, and the treaties with Spain were publicly declared to be at
an end. The Spanish ambassador in London--probably with the help of the
fallen favourite, the Earl of Somerset--being unable to obtain speech
with his Sowship, slipped a paper into his hand, declaring that he was a
prisoner in his own house, and was entirely governed by Buckingham and
his creatures. The first effect of this letter was that his Sowship
began to cry and whine, and took Baby Charles away from Steenie, and went
down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts of nonsense. The end of it was that
his Sowship hugged his dog and slave, and said he was quite satisfied.

He had given the Prince and the favourite almost unlimited power to
settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage; and he now,
with a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all Roman Catholics
in England should exercise their religion freely, and should never be
required to take any oath contrary thereto. In return for this, and for
other concessions much less to be defended, Henrietta Maria was to become
the Prince's wife, and was to bring him a fortune of eight hundred
thousand crowns.

His Sowship's eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the money,
when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him; and, after a fortnight's
illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, one thousand six hundred
and twenty-five, he died. He had reigned twenty-two years, and was fifty-
nine years old. I know of nothing more abominable in history than the
adulation that was lavished on this King, and the vice and corruption
that such a barefaced habit of lying produced in his court. It is much
to be doubted whether one man of honour, and not utterly self-disgraced,
kept his place near James the First. Lord Bacon, that able and wise
philosopher, as the First Judge in the Kingdom in this reign, became a
public spectacle of dishonesty and corruption; and in his base flattery
of his Sowship, and in his crawling servility to his dog and slave,
disgraced himself even more. But, a creature like his Sowship set upon a
throne is like the Plague, and everybody receives infection from him.

CHAPTER XXXIII--ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE FIRST

Baby Charles became KING CHARLES THE FIRST, in the twenty-fifth year of
his age. Unlike his father, he was usually amiable in his private
character, and grave and dignified in his bearing; but, like his father,
he had monstrously exaggerated notion