(George duke of Buckingham), an ingenious and witty nobleman, whose mingled character rendered him at once the ornament and disgrace, the envy and ridicule, of the court he lived in, was son to that famous statesman and favourite of king Charles I. who lost his life by the hands of lieutenant Felton. He was born in 1627, the year before the fatal catastrophe of his father's death. The early parts of his education he received from various domestic tutors, after which he was sent to the university of Cambridge. Having here completed a course of studies, he, with his brother lord Francis, went abroad under the care of one Mr Aylebury.—Upon his return, which was not till after the breaking out of the civil wars, the king being at Oxford, his grace remained thither, was presented to his majesty, and entered of Christ-church college. Upon the decline of the king's cause, he attended prince Charles into Scotland, and was with him at the battle of Worcester in 1661; after which, making his escape beyond sea, he again joined him, and was soon after, as a reward for this attachment, made knight of the garter.
Defrauded, however, of retrieving his affairs, he came privately to England; and in 1657 married Mary, the daughter and sole heiress of Thomas lord Fairfax, through whose interest he recovered the greatest part of the estate he had lost, and the assurance of succeeding to an accumulation of wealth in the right of his wife.
We do not find, however, that this step lost him the royal favour; for after the restoration, at which time he is said to have possessed an estate of £20,000 per annum, he was made one of the lords of the bed-chamber, called to the privy-council, and appointed lord-lieutenant of Yorkshire and master of the horse. All these high posts, however, he lost again in the year 1666. For having been refused the post of president of the north, he became disaffected to the king; and it was discovered that he had carried on a secret correspondence by letters and other transactions with one Dr Heydon, tending to raise mutinies among his majesty's forces, particularly in the navy, to stir up sedition among the people, and even to engage persons in a conspiracy for the seizing the tower of London. Matters were ripe for execution; and an insurrection, at the head of which the duke was openly to have appeared, was on the very eve of breaking out, when it was discovered by means of some agents whom Heydon had employed to carry letters to the duke. The detection of this affair so exasperated the king, who knew Buckingham to be capable of the blackest designs, that he immediately ordered him to be seized; but the duke finding means, having defended his house for some time by force, to make his escape, his majesty struck him out of all his commissions, and issued a proclamation requiring his surrender by a certain day.
This storm, however, did not long hang over his head; for, on his making a humble submission, king Charles, who was far from being of an implacable temper, took him again into favour, and the very next year restored him both to the privy-council and bed-chamber. But the duke's disposition for intrigue and machination could not long lie idle; for having conceived a resentment against the duke of Ormonde for having acted with some severity against him in regard to the last-mentioned affair, he, in 1679, was supposed to be concerned in an attempt made on that nobleman's life by the same Blood who afterwards endeavoured to steal the crown. Their design was to have conveyed the duke to Tyburn, and there to have hanged him; and so far did they proceed towards the putting it in execution, that Blood and his son had actually forced the duke out of his coach in St James's Street, and carried him away beyond Devonshire house, Piccadilly, before he was rescued from them.
It does not appear, however, that this transaction hurt the duke's interest at court; for in 1671 he was installed chancellor of the university of Cambridge, and sent ambassador to France. Here he was very nobly entertained by Louis XIV. and presented by that monarch at his departure with a sword and belt set with jewels, to the value of 40,000 pistoles; and the next year he was employed in the second embassy to that king at Utrecht. However, in June 1674, he resigned the chancellorship of Cambridge, and about the same time became a zealous partisan and follower of the Nonconformists. On the 16th of February 1676, his grace, with the earls of Salisbury and Shaftesbury and lord Warton, were committed to the Tower by order of the house of lords, for a contempt in refusing to retract the purport of a speech which the duke had made concerning a dissolution of the parliament. This confinement did not last long; yet we find no material transaction of this nobleman's life recorded after it, till the time of his death, which happened in 1687. Wood tells us that he died at his house in Yorkshire; but Mr Pope, who must certainly have had very good information, and it is to be imagined would not have dared to advance an injurious falsehood of a person of his rank, has, in his epistle to lord Bathurst, given us a most affecting account of the death of this ill-starred nobleman, whom, after having been master of near £50,000 per annum, he describes as reduced to the deepest distress by his vice and extravagance, and breathing his last moments in a mean apartment at an inn.
As to his personal character, it is impossible to say anything in its vindication; for though his severest enemies acknowledge him to have possessed great vivacity and a quickness of parts peculiarly adapted to the purposes of ridicule, yet his warmest advocates have never attributed to him a single virtue. His generosity was profuse, his wit malice, the gratification of his passions his sole aim thro' life, his very talents caprice, and even his gallantry the mere love of pleasure. But it is impossible to draw his character with equal beauty, or with more justice, than in that given of him by Dryden, in his Absalom and Achitophel, under the name of Zimri, to which the reader is referred.
As a writer, however, he stands in a quite different point of view. There we see the wit, and forget the libertine.—His poems, which indeed are not very numerous, are capital in their kind; but what will immortalize his memory while language shall be understood, or true wit relished, is his celebrated comedy of The Rehearsal.