he
people of England charged all this to Buckingham. Still the king
persisted in retaining him. It was his prerogative to do so.

After a while Buckingham got into a personal quarrel with Richelieu,
who was the leading manager of the French government, and he resolved
that England should make war upon France. To alter the whole political
position of such an empire as that of Great Britain, in respect to
peace and war, and to change such a nation as France from a friend to
an enemy, would seem to be quite an undertaking for a single man to
attempt, and that, too, without having any reason whatever to assign,
except a personal quarrel with a minister about a love affair. But so
it was. Buckingham undertook it. It was the king's prerogative to make
peace or war, and Buckingham ruled the king.

He contrived various ways of fomenting ill will. One was, to alienate
the mind of the king from the queen. He represented to him that the
queen's French servants were fast becoming very disrespectful and
insolent in their treatment of him, and finally persuaded him to send
them all home. So the king went one day to Somerset House, which was
the queen's residence--for it is often the custom in high life in
Europe for the husband and wife to have separate establishments--and
requested her to summon her French servants into his presence, and
when they were assembled, he told them that he had concluded to send
them all home to France. Some of them, he said, had acted properly
enough, but others had been rude and forward, and that he had decided
it best to send them all home. The French king, on hearing of this,
seized a hundred and twenty English ships lying in his harbors in
retaliation of this act, which he said was a palpable violation of the
marriage contract, as it certainly was. Upon this the king declared
war against France. He did not ask Parliament to act in this case at
all. There was no Parliament. Parliament had been dissolved in a fit
of displeasure. The whole affair was an exercise of the royal
prerogative. Nor did the king now call a Parliament to provide means
for carrying on the war, but set his Privy Council to devise modes of
doing it, through this same prerogative.

The attempts to raise money in these ways made great trouble. The
people resisted, and interposed all possible difficulties. However
some funds were raised, and a fleet of a hundred sail, and an army of
seven thousand men, were got together. Buckingham