Читать книгу The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne онлайн

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ssss1 The Duchess says: “The place and hour being appointed by both their consents”.

ssss1 “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,ssss1 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”.

ssss1 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):—