Henceforth he became important--went over to France on a mission of great confidence, to fetch an experienced _sage-femme_ for the Queen--was taken by the Pirates off Dunkirk on his return--was rescued, only to encounter the incessant raillery of the courtiers, which, to a man of his present size and importance, became exasperating. Faithful and trusty, he went with Henrietta Maria into France, and there, being goaded on by renewed insults from a Mr. Crofts, sent a challenge. Crofts came to fight him provided only with a squirt; the duel was to be on horseback, and with pistols, that Jeffrey, or, as he had now become, Sir Jeffrey, might be more on a level with his antagonist. By the first shot, Crofts was struck dead. The next event in this adventurous life was the capture of Jeffrey by a Turkish rover, during one of his voyages; he was sold as a slave, and taken into Barbary; he was, however, ransomed, or set free, so as to resume his attendance on the Queen. After the Restoration, he was suspected of being concerned in the Popish plot, and confined in the Gate House at Westminster. Here, a life that had been rendered worthy of record even by his very littleness was closed, in 1682; his old enemy, a gigantic porter at Whitehall in Charles’s time, with whom the little creature was in incessant strife, having long since been displaced--and another giant, Oliver Cromwell’s porter, established in his stead.
On Mytens the office of his Majesty’s “picture-drawer in ordinary, with a fee of 20_l._ per annum, was conferred in 1625, procured by the agency of Endymion Porter, who was the servant and relative of Buckingham, from the Duke.”[169]
Incited by the example of the Earl of Arundel, who employed a Mr. Petty to collect antiquities in Greece, Buckingham despatched for the same purpose Sir Thomas Roe, telling him, in explaining his wishes, that “he was not so fond of antiquity as to court it in a deformed or unshapen stone.”[170] Lord Arundel had begun to “transplant old Greece into England.” His agent, Petty, was indefatigable, “eating with Greeks on their work days, and lying with fishermen with planks,” so that he might obtain his ends. This valiant antiquary lost all his curiosities on returning from Samos, and was imprisoned as a spy, but, regaining his liberty, set forth again to his researches with the energy of a Layard.[171]