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“1636 (7) February. Welbeck.—The favours of my friends you have so transmitted unto me as the longer I looke on them the more I think them nature and not art. It is not my error alone. If it be a disease, it is epidemical, for such power hath your hand on the eyes of mankind. Next the blessing of your company and sweetness of conversation, the greatest blessing were to be an Argus or all over but one eye, so it or they were ever fixed upon that which we must call yours. What wants in judgment I can supply with admiration, and scape the title of ignorance since I have the luck to be astonished in the right place, and the happiness to be passionately your humble servant.”

Clarendon evidently thought that Newcastle’s loyalty to the King and the Church did not proceed entirely from disinterested motives; for he says: “He loved Monarchy, as it was the foundation and support of his own greatness; and the Church, as it was well constituted for the splendour and security of the Crown; and religion, as it cherished and maintained that order and obedience that was necessary to both; without any other passion for the particular opinions which were grown up in it, and distinguished it into parties, than as he detested whatever was likely to disturb the public peace”. As indeed a man with a large estate and a large income well might!

The Duchess writes: “His shape is neat, and exactly proportioned; his stature of a middle size, and his complexion sanguine”. She was too refined to talk about a red face. “His behaviour is such that it might be a pattern for all gentlemen; for it is courtly, civil, easy and free, without formality or constraint; and yet hath something in it of grandure, that causes an awful respect towards him.” Was there ever a better description of pomposity combined with condescension? “His discourse is as free and unconcerned as his behaviour, pleasant, witty and instructive.... He is neat and cleanly; which makes him to be somewhat long in dressing.... He shifts,” i.e., changes his clothes, “ordinarily once a day, and every time when he uses exercise, or his temper” (temperature?) “is more hot than ordinary.... He makes but one meal a day, at which he drinks two good glasses of small-beer, one about the beginning, the other at the end thereof ... and a little glass of sack in the middle; which glass of sack he also uses in the morning for his breakfast, with a morsel of bread. His supper consists of an egg and a draught of small-beer.... His prime pastime and recreation hath always been the exercise of mannage and weapons.... The rest of his time he spends in music, poetry, and the like.”

The Duchess of Newcastle was such an admirer of her husband that it may be wise to give something more than full credit to her admissions respecting him. Among these are that he had “not so much of scholarship and learning as his brother Sir Charles,” that he was “no mathematician by art,” and that he had one vice in that “he has been a great lover and admirer of the female sex; which whether it be so great a crime as to condemn him for it, I will leave to the judgment of young gallants and beautiful ladies”. She also says: “He is quick in repartees”. The uncharitable may suspect that she had frequently winced under them.

WELBECK

Double-page engraving from Newcastle’s book on horsemanship

As to his religion, we learn something from a letter written by George Con, the papal agent at the Court of Queen Henrietta, to Barberini.[19] “In matters of religion,” he wrote, “the Earl is too indifferent. He hates the Puritans, he laughs at the Protestants, and he has little confidence in the Catholics.”

[19] Additional MSS. 15,391, fol. 1.

On 5 May, 1633, a proclamation was issued that King Charles was about to make a progress to Scotland. Rushworth (Hist. Collections, Part ii. p. 178) states that he left London on the 13th, that after visiting “Giddon near Stilton in Northamptonshire, which by the vulgar sort of people was called a Protestant nunnery,” he went to Welbeck, among other places, and that he “was treated there at a sumptuous feast, by the Earl (since Duke of Newcastle), estimated to stand the Earl in some thousands of pounds”.

Probably a very small part of this money was given to Ben Jonson for the Masque, “Love’s Welcome at Welbeck,” which Jonson’s friend, Newcastle, employed him in writing for the occasion.

Of this entertainment Clarendon says (Hist., Book i. pp. 78-9): “Both King and Court were received and entertained by the Earl of Newcastle, and at his own proper expense, in such a wonderful manner, and in such an excess of feasting, as had scarce ever been known in England, and would still be thought very prodigious, if the same noble person had not, within a year or two afterwards, made the King and Queen a more stupendous entertainment, which (God be thanked) though possibly it might too much whet the appetites of others to excess, no man ever in those days imitated”.

His Duchess writes of it:—

“When his Majesty was going into Scotland to be Crowned, he took His way through Nottinghamshire; and lying at Worksop-Mannor hardly two miles distant from Welbeck, where my Lord then was, my Lord invited His Majesty thither to a Dinner, which he was graciously pleased to accept of: This Entertainment cost my Lord between Four and Five thousand pounds”.

In the July of the previous year (1633), Wentworth had been created a Baron and sent to Ireland as Lord Deputy. He was not made Lord Strafford until 1640. Among the Strafford Letters[20] are a good many from Newcastle. The first to be noticed was written after the journey to Scotland, and it throws some light upon the expense to which Newcastle was put by the King’s visit to Welbeck, as well as upon the costs incident upon Newcastle’s state attendance on the royal progress. Besides this the letter seems to have reference to another matter. Of that matter we find a notice in this paragraph from the Duchess’s book:—

“Within some few years after, King Charles the First, of blessed Memory, His Gracious Soveraign, ... thought Him the fittest Person whom He might intrust with the Government of His Son Charles, then Prince of Wales, now our most Gracious King”.

[20] The Earl of Strafford’s Letters and Despatches, London: Wm. Bowyer, 1739.

She omits to mention that her husband had specially desired this office and that he had for a long time schemed, begged, and asked his friends to beg, in order to obtain it. A letter from Newcastle to Strafford shows how keenly he was longing for it, although hope deferred was evidently making the heart sick.