John Villiers, 1st Viscount Purbeck

[2][3][4][5] Villiers was knighted on 30 June 1616, and in the same year became Groom of the Bedchamber and Master of the Robes to James I.

The lady selected was Frances Coke (1599–1645), the daughter of Sir Edward Coke by his second wife, Lady Hatton,[6] daughter of Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter, and widow of Sir William Hatton.

The marriage proved a disaster; Anthony Weldon reports Buckingham as having said that "his brother Purbeck had more wit and honesty than all the kindred beside",[10] but according to Samuel Rawson Gardiner, he was "weak in mind and body", and soon after 1620 completely lost his reason.

[citation needed] Purbeck, whose insanity was intermittent, married, as his second wife, Elizabeth Slingsby (died 1696), widow of Colonel Chichester Fortescue of Dromiskin, Ireland, and daughter of Sir William Slingsby of Kippax, West Yorkshire.

The peerage became extinct, though the claim to it put forward by Robert Danvers was for many years a cause célèbre.