made presents to the masters of the ceremonies from thirty to fifty “pieces,” or in plate or jewels; and some so grudgingly, that Sir John Finett often vents his indignation, and commemorates the indignity.  As thus,—­on one of the Spanish ambassadors-extraordinary waiting at Deal for three days, Sir John, “expecting the wind with the patience of an hungry entertainment from a close-handed ambassador, as his present to me at his parting from Dover being but an old gilt livery pot, that had lost his fellow, not worth above twelve pounds, accompanied with two pair of Spanish gloves to make it almost thirteen, to my shame and his.”  When he left this scurvy ambassador-extraordinary to his fate aboard the ship, he exults that “the cross-winds held him in the Downs almost a seven-night before they would blow him over.”

From this mode of receiving ambassadors, two inconveniences resulted; their perpetual jars of punctilio, and their singular intrigues to obtain precedence, which so completely harassed the patience of the most pacific sovereign, that James was compelled to make great alterations in his domestic comforts, and was perpetually embroiled in the most ridiculous contests.  At length Charles I. perceived the great charge of these embassies, ordinary and extraordinary, often on frivolous pretences; and with an empty treasury, and an uncomplying parliament, he grew less anxious for such ruinous honours.[100] He gave notice to foreign ambassadors, that he should not any more “defray their diet, nor provide coaches for them,” &c.  “This frugal purpose” cost Sir John many altercations, who seems to view it as the glory of the British monarch being on the wane.  The unsettled state of Charles was appearing in 1636, by the querulous narrative of the master of the ceremonies; the etiquettes of the court were disturbed by the erratic course of its great star; and the master of the ceremonies was reduced to keep blank letters to superscribe, and address to any nobleman who was to be found, from the absence of the great officers of state.  On this occasion the ambassador of the Duke of Mantua, who had long desired his parting audience, when the king objected to the unfitness of the place he was then in, replied, that, “if it were under a tree, it should be to him as a palace.”

Yet although we smile at this science of etiquette and these rigid forms of ceremony, when they were altogether discarded a great statesman lamented them, and found the inconvenience and mischief in the political consequences which followed their neglect.  Charles II., who was no admirer of these regulated formalities of court etiquette, seems to have broken up the pomp and pride of the former master of the ceremonies; and the grave and great chancellor of human nature, as Warburton calls Clarendon, censured and felt all the inconveniences of this open intercourse of an ambassador with the king.  Thus he observed in the case of the Spanish ambassador, who, he writes, “took