182 THE COMPANY AND THE KING aster, courtier, speculator, virtuoso, patron of the Muses and of the Olympic Games on the Cotswold Hills, was a sort of Jacobean echo of Elizabethan Philip Sidney, with Zutphen left out. We have seen Sidney himself a defaulting subscriber to Northwestern Passages. Porter married the niece of Buckingham, accompanied the favourite and Prince Charles to Spain, and on Charles's succession to the crown became groom of the king's bedchamber. His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery shows a tall and graceful dilettante, with a face full of interest and intrigue, while another portrait of him in the same gallery displays a stouter sylvan hero elaborately accoutred for the chase. On more than one occasion this royal official had acted as go-between to the court and the Company; and in 1635, certain drainage projects of his on a royal grant of land in Lincolnshire having failed, he was on the look- out for some means of mending his fortunes. The confederates, Courten, Pindar, and Porter, com- manded a greater capital than the Company could then raise, and they wielded an influence with which it could not cope. In 1628 it had asked Parliament either to uphold it or to abolish the trade. Parliament had vouchsafed no answer, and the Company had ever since been wearying the king with tales of its losses. A trade so disastrous to its conductors could scarcely be profit- able to the realm, within the meaning of the charter, especially when new capitalists were willing to take it up with more energy and spirit. The three allies formed the bold design of erecting themselves into a
