the Levant passed through his hands, and he was on friendly terms with Rubens, Gentileschi, and other painters employed by the king. He also helped to procure the Earl of Arundel pictures from Spain (Sainsbury, Original Papers relating to Rubens, 1859, pp. 146, 203, 293, 324, 353).
During the two Scottish wars Porter was in constant attendance on the king. In the Long parliament he represented Droitwich, and was one of the fifty-nine members who voted against Strafford's attainder, and were posted up as ‘Straffordians’ and ‘traitors’ (Rushworth, iv. 248). In August 1641 he accompanied the king on his visit to Scotland. What he witnessed there filled him with the gloomiest anticipations, and he told Nicholas that he feared this island would before long be a theatre of distractions (Nicholas Papers, i. 40, 45). When Charles left Whitehall, Porter still followed his master. ‘Whither we go and what we are to do I know not, for I am none of the council; my duty and loyalty have taught me to follow my king, and, by the grace of God, nothing shall divert me from it’ (Fonblanque, p. 75). On 15 Feb. 1642, however, the House of Commons voted him ‘one that is conceived to give dangerous counsel,’ and on 4 Oct. following included him among the eleven great delinquents who were to be excepted from pardon. In the subsequent treaties of peace he was consistently named among the exceptions, and on 10 March 1643 he was disabled from sitting in parliament (Commons' Journals, ii. 433, 997; Report on the Duke of Portland's MSS. i. 98). The reasons for this animosity against a man who was not a minister of state or a public official were partly the great confidence which Charles reposed in Porter, and partly the supposition that he was one of the chief instruments in the ‘popish plot’ against the liberties and religion of England. He had been the favourite and the agent of Buckingham. His wife Olivia was a declared catholic, and has been described as ‘the soul of the proselytising movement’ in the queen's court. She had converted her father, Lord Boteler, and attempted to convert her kinswoman, the Marchioness of Hamilton (Gardiner, viii. 238). A denunciation of the supposed plotters, sent to Laud by Sir William Boswell, the English ambassador in the Netherlands, made the following assertions: ‘Master Porter of the King's Bedchamber, most addicted to the Popish religion, is a bitter enemy of the King. He reveals all his greatest secrets to the Pope's legate; although he very rarely meets with him, yet his wife meets him so much the oftener, who, being informed by her husband, conveys secrets to the legate. In all his actions he is nothing inferior to Toby Matthew; it cannot be uttered how diligently he watcheth on the business. His sons are secretly instructed in the popish religion; openly they profess the reformed. The eldest is now to receive his father's office under the king which shall be. A cardinal's hat is provided for the other if the design succeed well’ (Prynne, Rome's Master-Piece, 1644, p. 23). Wild though these accusations were, they gained some credence. What helped to make them believed was that Porter was undoubtedly implicated in the army plot, and was suspected of a share in instigating the Irish rebellion. On 1 Oct. 1641 the great seal of Scotland had been in his custody, and it was asserted that he had used it to seal the commission produced by Sir Phelim O'Neill [q. v.] (The Mystery of Iniquity yet Working, 1643, p. 37; Rome's Master-Piece, p. 33; Brodie, Hist. of the British Empire, ii. 378). The charge was probably untrue, but it is noteworthy that Porter subsequently assisted Glamorgan in the illegitimate affixing of the great seal to his commission to treat with the Irish (1 April 1644). He was not a man to stick at legal formalities in anything which would serve his master (English Historical Review, ii. 531, 692).
In the list of the king's army in 1642, Porter appears as colonel of a regiment of foot, but his command was purely nominal, and when he made his composition with the parliament he could assert that he had never borne arms against it (Peacock, Army Lists, p. 14). Porter followed the king to Oxford and sat in the anti-parliament summoned there in December 1643 (Old Parliamentary History, xiii. 75). He left England about the close of 1645, stayed some time in France, and then proceeded to Brussels. ‘I am in so much necessity,’ he wrote to Nicholas in January 1647, ‘that were it not for an Irish barber, that was once my servant, I might have starved for want of bread. He hath lent me some monies, which will last me a fortnight longer, and then I shall be as much subject to misery as I was before. Here, in our court, no man looks on me, and the Queen thinks I lost my estate rather for want of wit than for my loyalty to my master; but, God be thanked, I know my own heart and am satisfied in my own conscience, and were it to do again I would as freely sacrifice all without hopes of reward as I have done this’ (Nicholas Papers, i. 70). In the Netherlands, thanks doubtless to his Spanish friends, Porter found it easier to
