He was an infant when his father’s murder was perpetrated, and received his early education from several domestic tutors, and was afterwards sent to the university of Cambridge:  when he had finished his course there, he travelled with his brother lord Francis, under the care of William Aylesbury, esquire.  Upon his return, which was after the breaking out of the civil wars, he was conducted to Oxford, and presented to his Majesty, then there, and entered into Christ Church.  Upon the decline of the King’s cause, the young duke of Buckingham attended Prince Charles into Scotland, and was present in the year 1651 at the battle of Worcester, where he escaped beyond sea, and was soon after made knight of the garter.  He came afterwards privately into England, and, November 19, 1657, married Mary, the daughter and heir of Thomas lord Fairfax, by whose interest he recovered all or most of his estate, which he had lost before.  After the restoration, at which time he is said to have possessed an estate of 20,000 l. per annum, he was made one of the lords of the King’s bed-chamber, and of the privy council, lord lieutenant of Yorkshire, and, at last, master of the horse.

In the year 1666, being discovered to have maintained secret correspondence by letters, and other transactions, tending to raise mutinies among some of his Majesty’s forces, and stir up sedition among his people, and to have carried on other traiterous designs and practices, he absconded, upon which a proclamation was issued the same year for apprehending him.  Mr. Thomas Carte, in his Life of the Duke of Ormond[1], tells us, ’that the duke’s being denied the post of president of the North, was probably the reason of his disaffection to the King; and, that just before the recess of the Parliament, one Dr. John Heydon was taken up for treasonable practices, in sowing a sedition in the navy, and engaging persons in a conspiracy to seize the Tower.  The man was a pretender to great skill in astrology, but had lost much of his reputation, by prognosticating the hanging of Oliver to his son Richard Cromwel and Thurloe, who came to him in disguise, for the calculation of nativities, being dressed like distressed cavaliers.  He was for that put into prison, and continued in confinement sixteen months, whilst Cromwel outlived the prediction four years.  This insignificant fellow was mighty great with the duke of Buckingham, who, notwithstanding the vanity of the art, and the notorious ignorance of the professor of it, made him cast not only his own, but the King’s nativity; a matter of dangerous curiosity, and condemned by a statute which could only be said to be antiquated, because it had not for a long time been put in execution.  This fellow he had likewise employed, among others, to excite the seamen to mutiny, as he had given money to other rogues to put on jackets to personate seamen, and to go about the country begging in that garb, and exclaiming for want of pay, while the people oppressed with taxes,