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XI. 7. angels. Coke gets Lady Buckingham on his side. If he could only part with his hoards, his day of revenge might be near; happily he cannot pay down his money even to assuage the rancour of his heart.

1617. July.

He thinks of a plan by which he may gain his end, yet save his pelf.

8. A daughter has been born to Coke of his second wife. This wife and he never pulled together, and of late their wrangles have been louder than at first. Their marriage was a scrape, their wedded life has been a quarrel and a jest. She disdains to bear his name, she slams her door in his face. She gives entertainments in Holborn from which he and his friends are insolently shut out. Their tastes are in the strongest degree opposed.

He is penurious, she profuse. He loves folios and a farthing candle; she lights and revels, masques and plays. By day and night a rout of fiddlers, dancers, wizards, lovers, and magicians pours through the galleries of her great mansion looking on the Fleet. Coke slinks in shame from the sight of all this devilry to his den in Serjeants' Inn. Their misery makes the sport of wits and gallants; while in their quarrels and their unhappiness Bacon (though he has not himself escaped the common lot—a mother-in-law) has nevertheless, in his own modest and tranquil home, good reason to thank heaven night and day for his escape from such a wife.

9. The child of this dismal pair is blossoming into a

8. Jonson's Metamorphosed Gypsies; Bankes's Story of Corffe Castle, 35-44; Lady Hatton to Cecil, undated Papers, xl. 6, S. P. O.

9. Jonson's Gypsies Metamorphosed; Sherborne to Carleton, Dec. 7, 1616, S. P. O.; Chamberlain to Carleton, Dec. 21, 1616; June 4, July 19, 1617, S. P. O.; Winwood to Lake, May 27, 1617, S. P. O.

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beauty and a toast, whose sensuous loveliness Jonson XI. 9. depicts in some of his most luscious lines:

Though your either cheek discloses
Mingled baths of milk and roses;
Though your lips be banks of blisses,
Where he plants and gathers kisses;
And yourself the reason why

Wisest men of love may die!

Yet the beauty of her cheek and lips is the smallest part of Frances Coke's charms. As Lady Hatton's only child, she is heiress of Hatton House, of Corffe Castle, of Purbeck Isle. Coke privately offers this wealthy girl to Buckingham's mother for one of her pauper sons. A bargain is soon struck. Sir John Villiers is to take her with twenty thousand pounds dower and a settlement of two thousand marks a year. Buckingham is to pardon all Coke's offences, and use his power to restore him to high place and confer on him high rank.

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To this huckstering Frances Coke is much averse, her mother still more averse. The young lady hates Sir John, a man old enough to be her father, without person or talents, and poor as a church mouse. Her mother huffs at a contract made at her expense, without her leave. That Coke should propose a scheme is enough to make her loathe it. But in such a scheme as this match with Sir John Villiers she has better grounds for hesitation than a woman's whim. She very justly fears the tenure of a favourite's place. Has she not witnessed Somerset's golden rise and stormy end? A twinge of gout, a saucy word, a prettier cheek, may turn the King's eye another way. What then? With Buckingham's fall may come down all his house. Even now sharp eyes are turned on the rising star of Lord Mordaunt. Some note how James of late

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XI. 9. has begun to ogle a youth named Coney.

1617. July.

Bets are made that Buckingham's fortunes are on the wane. Lady Hatton will not hear of such a match for her only child. Husband and wife dispute and quarrel, as they have always done over lesser things; and when the Lord Keeper and the Council, anxious for peace, interpose between them, it is only, as results soon prove, to procure a reconciliation in which Coke tries to deceive Lady Hatton and Lady Hatton succeeds in deceiving Coke. Each plots to outwit the other; Coke bent on winning the good will of Buckingham; his wife on disposing of her daughter and her property as she herself thinks best. Each plays the spy, makes friends among the servants, gets up factions in the house. Her people take Lady Hatton's part, more because they scorn the penurious old curmudgeon than because they like his prodigal and imperious wife.

She steals a march upon him while he sleeps. Putting her child into a coach at dead of night, she slips away to Oatlands, where she hides from pursuit in her cousin Sir Edward Withipole's house.

10. These domestic broils occur while James and Buckingham are in the north: setting up organs in churches, wrangling over Kirk discipline, consecrating bishops in the land of Knox. The Lord Keeper is acting as a sort of regent. To him, therefore, in Council, Coke, when he has traced his wife and child, applies for warrants of arrest. Bacon refuses. Coke flies to Sir John's mother; his wicked wife, he tells this lady, has stolen his child, has poisoned her affections towards Sir John, and means to

10. Council Reg., July 11, 14, 1617; James to Bacon, July 25, 1617, in Birch, 133.

LADY HATTON'S APPEAL AGAINST COKE. 239

carry her into France to avoid the match with her lady- XI. 10. ship's son.

Her cupidity aroused, the great lady writes to command the Lord Keeper to arm Coke with full powers of search and arrest. Bacon again refuses. What he feels it right to deny in one quarter, he has courage to deny in another; though aware that his duty may be represented as an insult to Villiers, as an usurpation to the King.

His refusal to do wrong at her bidding transforms Lady Buckingham into a ruthless and inexorable foe.

11. Safe in the strength of his great patroness, Coke, defying the Lord Keeper and the Privy Council, arms a dozen of his servants, rides down to Oatlands, runs a beam against Withipole's door, and, smashing into his wife's retreat, without warrant of arrest, without a constable, he seizes the fainting girl, tosses her into his coach, and hurries her away to Stoke.

A universal howl pursues the perpetrator of this outrage on the public peace. The Council meet to consider this violation of domicile. As they are rising for the day, Lady Hatton raves to the door. How can they decline to see her? She is a woman and in distress; she is of kin by blood or marriage to the Lord Keeper, to the Lord Treasurer, to half the Council; she is pleading in her right. When admitted to the Council chamber, she describes with consummate art the outrage she has suffered, the confinement of her daughter in a lonely house, her sickness to the point of death, and she implores the lords, as only mothers robbed of their children can implore, that the

11. Chamberlain to Carleton, July 19, 1617, S. P. O.; Gerard to Carleton July 22, 1617, S. P. O.; Council Reg., July 14, 1617.

1617.

July.

XI. 11. child may be sent for, that her story may be heard, that a physician may see her lest she die.

1617.

July.

July 21.

The Council grant her prayer. An officer of the court rides down to Stoke, takes the girl from her imprisonment, and lodges her in town.

12. The Lord Keeper summons Coke to attend the Council and answer for this breach of the King's peace. With an insolence which his secret understanding with the favourite's kin makes safe for him, Coke declares that he has done his duty, that his wife meant to break the match with Sir John Villiers, that she would have carried his daughter away to France, that she herself traduced and set on her servants to traduce Sir John. Bacon, who may object to a marriage between Frances Coke and Sir John Villiers—a marriage projected for his own humiliation and for the recovery of power by the late Chief Justice-feels, as one of the Commissioners governing the realm, the gravest objection to such acts as those of Coke. He replies, therefore, in the name of the Council, that Villiers, as a gentleman worthy of the young lady, would have sought her in a noble and religious fashion, not with a gang of armed men, in a midnight brawl, in contempt of natural and statute law.

Yelverton, the Attorney-General, declares that the late Lord Chief Justice, in violating Withipole's house without warrant or constable, has grievously offended against the law. None of the Council, certainly not the Lord Keeper, has any wish to weigh upon the irascible old man; but when he fails to justify by witnesses any one allegation against his wife, they are compelled to file an information

12. Council Reg., July 21, 1617; Chamberlain to Carleton, June 4, 1617, S. P. O.; Yelverton to Bacon, Sept. 3, 1617, Lambeth MSS. 936.

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