them ("possibly drunk as well as sober"), would serve himself one way or other. "When they sought," his lordship added, "to sift him—who, to give him his due, was but too open—he failed not to make his best of them."[1]
His love of wine was the common failing of his age. The couplet which I shall have occasion hereafter to include among his happy replies—
Good store of good claret supplies everything,
And the man that is drunk is as great as a king,
affords no ill notion of the feeling current at Whitehall. When the Duke of York, after dinner, asked Henry Saville if he intended to invite the King to the business of the day, Saville wondered what he meant, and incurred the displeasure of the Duke by continuing the King in the belief that hard-drinking was the business before them.[2]
His great anxiety was the care of his health, thinking it, perhaps, more reconcileable with his pleasures than he really found it. He rose early, walked generally three or four hours a day by his watch, and when he pulled it out skilful men, it is said, would make haste with what they had to say to him. He walked so rapidly with what Teonge calls
