of May, 1645, the King wrote to the Prince, directing that Goring should be admitted to exercise all the functions and privileges of one of his established Council; that all military commissions should be granted by him; and that the Prince should give him no orders so binding as to preclude him from using his own discretion, as circumstances might seem in his opinion to require: thus invested with almost absolute military powers, Goring was presently after again sent into the western counties.

The circumstances of this his last campaign in the civil war present an almost unvaried tissue of misfortune and misconduct. The dismay and confusion in which the King, and those immediately about him, became involved by the fatal issue of the battle of Naseby, which happened almost immediately after Goring had received this new appointment, left him in a manner without controul, and he gave way unreservedly to all the extravagances of his nature. The authority which he had obtained seemed worthless to him merely because the title of Lieutenant-General to the Prince had not been annexed to it; and the state of independence in which he had been placed of his Royal Highness and his council, answered no end but to make them the objects of his insolence and derision. He compelled the rebels to raise the siege of Taunton, attacked them on their retreat with much gallantry and effect, and rendered those services abortive by the gross errors into which he fell immediately after. He suffered, through mere negligence, a detachment of his Horse, amounting to more than a thousand, to be surprised by the rebels in the neighbourhood of that town; and on the following day was unexpectedly attacked at the head of his main force by Fairfax, routed, and driven disgracefully into Bridgewater. He slighted the King's positive order that he should march, with the remains of his Horse, to Oxford, and from thence to join his Majesty near Newark, and, while in the very commission of this act of disobedience, pressed the Prince with arrogant and indecent importunities to enlarge the faculties, already too extensive, which had been lately placed in his hands, and was refused. Finding him

self at length a General without an army; a public servant without confidence; and an object of universal disgust in a country which had suffered more from the rapine of his troops than from the enemy: he suddenly asked the Prince's permission to visit France for a time; transported himself thither before he had obtained it; and never returned leaving behind him a character known to be of little worth, and strongly suspected of infidelity to the cause in which he had been engaged.

Lord Goring left England in November, 1645, from which period few particulars of him have been preserved. After having passed some time in France, he went into the Netherlands, where he obtained a commission of Lieutenant-General in the Spanish army. He afterwards, as Dugdale informs us, served in the same. rank in Spain, under a commander named Don John de Silva, whom, finding him to have been corrupted by Cardinal Mazarine, he seized at the head of his troops, and sent prisoner to Madrid, where he was soon after put to death for that treason. We learn from the same authority, that Goring closed his irregular life in that country in the character of a Dominican friar. He left no issue, and his father, surviving him till 1662, was succeeded by his second son Charles, in whom the titles of Earl of Norwich and Baron Goring became extinct.