i5o THE HISTORY OF NEWMARKET. [Book III. 



the kin^ would have none other but Lake ; and here he grew 

 to be full of employment, and even noblemen did use his help 

 as well as others." — Memoirs, vol. i., p. 175. 



Although Mr. Chamberlain places on record that, 

 for the nonce, the king had "fallen out with Nev\r- 

 1609. market and Thetford," it seems his Majesty 

 February, p^jj ^ brief visit to the former locality 

 towards the end of February, 1608-9. Sir George 

 Chaworth, in a letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury (dated 

 Newmarket, February 28), refers to the favour 

 which Sir Robert Carr was attaining at the court, and 

 the cold shoulder given to Edmund Lacells," who, 

 although an accomplished courtier, had the misfortune 

 to be an English gentleman, in distress and friendless, 

 pressing for preferment, pleading past service done 

 in his country's cause, but pleading in vain.* 



^^ This gentleman was a younger son of an ancient family 

 formerly seated at Gateford, near Worksop, Nottingham- 

 shire, which descended from a cadet of the Lacelles of 

 Escrick, and Kirby Knowle, Yorkshire. His intimacy with 

 the Earl of Shrewsbury, which seems to have been formed 

 at an early time of life, probably originated in the proximity 

 of their fathers' country seats. James I., to whom he had 

 been of some service in London towards the end of the 

 late reign, appointed him a Groom of the Privy Chamber, 

 and, as appears by papers in the Talbot collection, he wasted 

 the whole of his small fortune at court without gaining any 

 further preferment. In the course of the following year he 

 was dismissed upon some trifling offence, and, after having 

 made several vain efforts to be re-admitted, was obliged to 

 fly from his creditors. He informs the earl, by a letter from 

 Utrecht, dated May 25, 1609, that he had been allowed to 



* Lodge, vol. iii., p. 246 ; Nichols' " Progress," vol. ii., p. 214. 



