From Chapter 1:
"'It requires no effort of the fancy to picture these three men [Shakespeare, Bacon and Raleigh] as lounging in a window of Durham House, puffing the new Indian weed from silver bowls, discussing the highest themes in poetry and science, while gazing on the flower-beds and the river, the darting barges of dame and cavalier, and the distant pavilions of Paris garden and the Globe.'" This is a pure "effort of the fancy" so far as Bacon and Shakespeare are concerned. Shakespeare's absolute silence about tobacco forbids us to assume that he smoked; but of Raleigh the picture may be true enough. The house had, as Aubrey tells us, "a little turret that looked into and over the Thames, and had the prospect which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the world"; and it would be strange indeed if the owner of the noble house did not often smoke a contemplative pipe in the window of that pleasant turret.

From Chapter 5:
If the restored king did not himself smoke, tobacco was far from unknown at the Palace of Whitehall. We get a curious glimpse of one aspect of life there in the picture which Lilly, the notorious astrologer, paints in his story of his arrest in January 1661. He was taken to Whitehall at night, and kept in a large room with some sixty other prisoners till daylight, when he was transferred to the guardroom, which, he says, "I thought to be hell; some therein were sleeping, others swearing, others smoaking tobacco. In the chimney of the room I believe there was two bushels of broken Tobacco Pipes, almost half one load of ashes." What would the king's grandfather, the author of the "Counterblaste," have said, could he have imagined such a spectacle within the palace walls?