Page:The Queens of England.djvu/496

448 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. reluctantly, and at the king's suggestion ; obeying, in short, a new stroke of royal cunning. "He would not now," says the archbishop, "admit any to nearness about himself, but such a one as the queen should commend to him, and make some suit in that behalf ; in order that, if the queen afterwards, being ill-entreated, should complain of this dear one, he might make his answer, 'It is come of yourself, for you were the party that commended him unto me.' " Be this as it may, no violent dissensions seems in this case to have come between man and wife and the dear one. They are a very happy family party, and call each other names that betoken a delightful unmis- giving familiarity. Villiers soared far beyond Somerset in corrupt rapacity as well as in grasping ambition ; but the queen esteemed him her "watchful dog," her "kind dog," her "faithful dog," who is watchful and alert to prevent the "sow" trans- gressing, the sow being the king; and when, in obedience to her desire, he has "pulled the king's ear till it was long as any sow's," his majesty being at the same time informed that his dog has been commanded to make his ears hang like a sow's lug, she thanks him for "lugging the sow's eare," and tells him she will "treat him better than any other dog." The king himself calls Villiers, now Marquis of Buckingham, not only his dog, but his dog Steenie ; because he says his face is only to be compared to that of a saint with a glory around it, and there is exactly such a painted face of Saint Stephen at White- hall. He wears Steenie's picture under his waistcoat, near his heart ; Steenie's white teeth, he says, continually shine upon him ; and to Steenie he not unusually commences his letters, "Blessing, blessing, blessing on thy heart's roots !" But here the curtain falls on scenes and actors which have already perhaps detained the reader too long. The queen wrote the last letter preserved of her correspondence in Octo- ber, 1618. It was addressed to the Marquis of Buckingham. "My kind dog," it ran, "if I have any power or credit with you, I pray you let me have a trial of it at this time, in dealing sincerely and earnestly with the king, that Sir Walter Raleigh's life may not be called in question. If you do it, so that the success answer my expectation, assure yourself that I will take it extraordinarily kindly at your hands." We are not sorry thus to part from Anne of Denmark, though her well-meant intercession failed, alike with Buckingham and his master. Within a month after Raleigh's death, at the close of 1618, she was struck with the illness that proved fatal to her; and on