Everything is said to come to him who knows how to wait. Possibly this may not be a universal experience; but the Governorship of the Prince of Wales did come at last to the long-waiting Newcastle. The appointment was conveyed by the following very courteous letter, and it was accepted by a somewhat obsequious reply.

“Mr. Secretary Windebank to the Earl of Newcastle.[24]

“The Earl of Newcastle to Mr. Secretary Windebank.

In Lodge’s opinion, although Windebank says the King had commanded him to assure Newcastle that he did not owe his appointment “to any whatsoever,” it “was most probably with Wentworth’s advice” that the King gave it to him, which seems likely enough. It is pretty clear that, all through, Newcastle had asked for the appointment himself and had got others to ask for it for him. We have seen that he sought Wentworth’s services in the matter and suggested that Wentworth should also obtain those of Lord and Lady Carlisle. At the same time he wanted to have the credit of having been given the appointment by the King, solely on the King’s own initiative, without any begging whatever, either by himself or by anybody else. Nor is it unlikely that Strafford, knowing Newcastle’s anxiety on this point, may have inspired Windebank to write the last paragraph of his letter, in which, with very suspicious ostentation, he assures Newcastle that he does not owe his appointment to any outside influence.

Few details exist concerning Newcastle’s conduct and experiences as Governor of the future Charles II. On one occasion he seems to have had reasons for complaining of his pupil to the boy’s mother, the Queen, who wrote to the little delinquent:—

It may have been in sarcastic reference to this little episode that the Prince wrote the following letter in a round hand, between double lines, when his correspondent was apparently also a patient.

“Charles, Prince of Wales, to His Governor,
Lord Newcastle.

A letter of instructions written by Newcastle to his pupil is a curiosity in its way. It is a sort of English Il Principe. Only portions of it are given here.

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

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

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”.

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”.

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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”.

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.”

“Sir John Suckling to the Earl of Newcastle.[34]

Aubrey favours us with a portrait of this correspondent, and evidently familiar friend, of Newcastle: “He was of middle stature and slight strength, brisque round eie, reddish faced, and red nose (ill liver), his head not very big, his hayre a kind of sand colour; his beard turned up naturally, so that he had a brisk and gracefull looke”.

As will soon be seen, a good service which Suckling tried to do for Newcastle, resulted rather to his detriment.

After the expedition to the borders of Scotland and the settlement of his affair with Lord Holland, Newcastle returned to Welbeck, “to his great satisfaction,” says the Duchess, “and with an intent to have continued there, and rested under his own vine and managed his own estate”. As we shall find in the next chapter, he did not rest under his own vine very long.