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“(From a copy preserved with the Royal Letters in the Harleian MS. 6988, art. 62.)

[26] Ellis’s Letters, Series I. vol. III. p. 288.

“May it Please your Highness ...

“for your education Sir, It is fitt you should have some languages, though I confess I would rather have you study things then words, matter, then language; for seldom a Critick in many languages hath time to study sense, for words; and at best he is or can be but a living dictionary. Besides I would not have you too studious, for too much contemplation spoiles action, and Virtue consists in that. What you read, I woud have it History and the best chosen Histories, that so you might compare the dead with the living, ... and thus you shall see the excellency and errors both of Kings and subjects, and tho’ you are young in years, yet living by your wading in all those times, be older in wisdom and judgement then Nature can afford any man to be without this help.

“For the Arts I wou’d have you know them so far as they are of use, and especially those that are most proper for war and use; but whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will spoile your government, for you cannot be a good contemplative man and a good commonwealth’s man; therefore take heed of too much book.”

Presently we find this instructor of youth also warning his pupil against too much religious devotion.

“Beware of too much devotion for a King, for one may be a good man but a bad King; and how many will History represente to you that in seeming to gain the kingdome of Heaven, have lost their owne;”—unquestionably a very serious loss! But it seems to have escaped the notice of Newcastle that to keep a kingdom on earth and to lose the kingdom of heaven might also possibly entail certain inconveniences. Newcastle continues: “and the old saying is, that short prayers pierce the heaven’s gates; but if you be not religious, and not only seeme so..., God will not prosper you; and if you have no reverence to him, why should your subjects have any to you. At the best you are accounted for your greatest honour his servant, his deputy, his anointed, and you owe as much reverence and duty to him as we owe to you; and why, nay justly may not he punishe you for want of reverence and service to Him, if you fail in it, as well as you to punish us; but this subject I leave to the right reverend father in God, Lord Bishop of Chichester, your worthy tutor.

“But Sir to fall back again to your reverence at Prayers, so farr as concernes reason and your advantage is my duty to tell you; then I say S^r. were there no Heaven or Hell you shall see the disadvantage, for your government; if you have no reverence at prayers, what will the people have, think you? They go according to the example of the Prince; if they have none, then they have no obedience to God; then they will easily have none to your Highness; no obedience, no subjects.... Of the other side, if any be bible madd, over much burn’t with fiery zeal, they may think it a service to God to destroy you and say the Spirit moved them and bring some example of a King with a hard name in the Old Testament. Thus one way you may have a civil war, the other a private treason.”

There is something decidedly Machiavellian in this advice to the Prince to worship God in order that he may himself in turn be worshipped by his people, and in the warning against any excess of piety, lest his people should fall into the terrible error of worshipping their God so much as to neglect to worship their King. Later on, Newcastle says:—

“For Books thus much more, the greatest clerks are not the wisest men; and the greate troublers of the world, the greatest captains, were not the greatest schollars; neither have I known bookewormes great statesmen; some have here to fore and some are now, but they study men more now then bookes, or else they would prove but silly statesmen....

“But S^r. you are [not?] in your own disposition religious and not very apte to your booke, so you need no great labour to perswade you from the one, or long discourses to dissuade from the other.

“The things that I have discoursed to you most, is to be courteous and civil to everybody; ... believe it, the putting off of your hat and making a leg pleases more then reward or preservation, so much doth it take all kind of people. Then to speak well of every body, and when you hear people speak ill of others reprehend them and seeme to dislike it so much, and do not look on em so favourably for a few days after.”

After this come long exhortations to courtesy, and instructions as to being agreeable to everybody without losing dignity.

In addition to all this advice, Newcastle personally superintended the riding lessons of the future Charles II. Newcastle was one of the finest horsemen of his times, and, in his standard work on horsemanship which we shall meet with later on, he says: “Our gracious and most excellent King” (Charles II), “is not only the handsomest and most comely horseman in the world, but as knowing and understanding in the art as any man”.

Very many years later, when Newcastle’s pupil became King of England, he either wrote, or caused to be written, in the Preamble to a Patent (16 March, 1664) creating Newcastle a duke: “The great proofs of his wisdom and piety, are sufficiently known to Us from our younger years, and we shall always retain a sense of those good principles he instilled into Us: the care of our youth, which he happily undertook for our good, he has faithfully and well discharged”.

We are anticipating, in the matter of time, when we say that Newcastle held the post of Governor to the Prince of Wales for about two years only; but the Governorship may as well be dealt with finally here. Her husband, says the Duchess, “was privately advertised, that the Parliaments Design was to take the Government of the Prince from Him, which he apprehending as a disgrace to Himself, wisely prevented, and obtained the Consent of His late Majesty, with His Favour, to deliver up the Charge of being Governor to the Prince, and retire into the Countrey”.

In “apprehending a disgrace to himself,” and resigning the governorship of the Prince, if Newcastle did not meet with the “downfall” spoken of by Bacon, he at least suffered the “eclipse, which is a melancholy thing,” mentioned by the same writer. For so short a time, the appointment seems hardly to have been worth all the trouble which Newcastle had taken to obtain it. How far he succeeded in it we do not know, but one historian did not take a very exalted view of his success.

In his Personal History of Charles II, published as an appendix to Bohn’s edition of Grammont’s Memoirs, Sir Walter Scott says of the Prince: “His governors, successively the Earls of Newcastle, Hertford, and Berkshire, who had the care of his education, appear to have afforded him but few helps towards his improvement”. The Duchess’s statement that Newcastle “attended the Prince, his Master, with all faithfulness and duty befitting so great an employment,” evidently did not weigh heavily in Sir Walter’s opinion. The Prince, however, must have gained little by his change of governors; since Clarendon[27] says that Hertford, “for the office of Governour, never thought himself fit, nor meddled with it”.

[27] History, vol. II, part I. book vi.

Events of greater importance than the governorship of the Prince had begun to take place long before Newcastle resigned it, events which eventually proved of more moment than that governorship even to Newcastle himself. John Hampden had been condemned for refusing to pay ship money; Prynne had been pilloried for his writings; Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, had been suspended for libel; and the Scottish Parliament, after abolishing episcopacy, was preparing for war with England. Meanwhile the English Parliament was seething with disaffection.

King Charles mobilised an army to proceed against the Scots. He was sorely in need of money, and Newcastle gave him £10,000 towards the cost of the expedition. And he did more than this. Newcastle, says Clarendon,[28] “one of the most valuable men in the Kingdom, in his fortune, in his dependence, and in his qualifications, had, at his own charge, drawn together a goodly troop of horse of two hundred, which for the most part consisted of the best gentlemen of the North, who were either allied to the Earl, or of immediate dependence upon him, and came together purely on his account; and he called this troop the Prince of Wales’s troop, whereof the Earl himself was captain”.

[28] History, vol. I, part I. book ii.

Rushworth says[29] that, on the same day as the King, “the Earl of Newcastle marched with his troop, carrying the Prince’s colours, into Berwick; and sent out parties to scout upon the Scots borders. His troop consisted of all gentlemen, most of them of very good estates, and fortunes, some £2,000, £1,500, £1,000 and £500 per annum, and the rest of good annual revenue; all gallantly mounted and armed, and well attended, with their own servants well mounted; for the maintaining of which troop the King was put to no charge at all.”

[29] Collections, II, 929.

As everybody knows, this expedition was rendered fruitless, without a blow being struck, by an ill-judged treaty; but it was not altogether without adventure to Newcastle. The King’s cavalry were under the command of the Earl of Holland, and Holland not only disliked Newcastle personally, but was jealous of him on account of the £10,000 which he had given towards the expedition, and the brilliant troop which he had raised to accompany it. On a march over the Scottish border, says Rushworth, “the Earl of Holland put the Prince’s colours, commanded by the Earl of Newcastle, in the rear, which so offended the Earl of Newcastle, and that troop, as his Lordship commanded Cornet Edward Gray (brother to the Lord Gray of Wark), to take the colours from off the staff, yet marched in order without colours”.

Some pages farther on,[30] Rushworth continues this story. “The Earl of Holland, General of the Horse, after he returned from his first expedition into Scotland, complained to his Majesty of the Earl of Newcastle taking off his colours from his staff in that march; the King being also by another noble person made acquainted with the reason of his so doing, because the Prince his colours were put in the rear. The King commended the Earl of Newcastle’s prudence in so doing, and did not attribute it to any unwillingness or neglect of that Earl in his Majesty’s service on that occasion. And his Majesty commanded that, for time to come, that troop of the Earl of Newcastle should be commanded by none but himself whilst they remained upon duty.”

[30] P. 946.

“Afterwards, when a peace was concluded, and the army disbanded, the Earl of Newcastle thought fit to require an account of the Earl of Holland for the said affront which he had put upon him, and sent a challenge to him, and time and place where to meet appointed.[31] The Earl of Newcastle made choice of Francis Palmes for his second, a man of known courage and mettle.[32] The Earl of Newcastle appeared at the time and place, with his second; but the General of the Horse, his second, came alone, by which the Earl of Newcastle concluded that the design had been discovered to the King, who commanded them both to be confined and afterwards made a peace between them.”

[31] The Duchess says: “The place and hour being appointed by both their consents”.

[32] “A gentleman very punctual, and well acquainted with those errands,” says Clarendon, “who took a proper season to mention it to him [Holland] without a possibility of suspicion. The Earl of Holland was never suspected to want courage, yet in this occasion he showed not that alacrity, but that the delay exposed it to notice; and so, by the King’s authority, the matter was composed” (Hist., vol. I, part I. book ii.).

Of this incident Kippis remarks,[33] with a great deal of sense: “Little service could be expected from an army in which an inferior officer might challenge his general, on account of a supposed slight in the giving of orders; and those persons must have had strange ideas of the laws of honour who could blame a commander-in-chief for refusing so unsoldierly a challenge”.

[33] Biog. Brit., Kippis’s ed.

Shortly afterwards Newcastle received the following letter from Sir John Suckling, who, like Newcastle, had raised a troop of horse for the King, and had also led it on the same fruitless expedition to Scotland. Like Newcastle, again, he was literary and a playwright. He had been in a good deal of active military service on the Continent, and he was generous and amusing. If his troop of horse was only half the strength of Newcastle’s, it must have rivalled it, if it did not exceed it, in splendour. Aubrey says of it (Letters, p. 546):—

“Sir John Suckling, at his own chardge, razed a troop of 100 very handsome young proper men, whom he clad in white doubletts and scarlett breeches, scarlett coates, hatts and feathers, well-horsed and armed.”