Bacon Part 3
CHAPTER IV.
BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL.
The great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world of knowledge to which the men of his own generation were blind, and which they could not, even with his help, imagine a possible one, had now won the first step in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in which for fourteen years he had been baffled. He had made himself, for good and for evil, a servant of the Government of James I. He was prepared to discharge with zeal and care all his duties. He was prepared to perform all the services which that Government might claim from its servants. He had sought, he had pa.s.sionately pressed to be admitted within that circle in which the will of the King was the supreme law; after that, it would have been ruin to have withdrawn or resisted. But it does not appear that the thought or wish to resist or withdraw ever presented itself; he had thoroughly convinced himself that in doing what the King required he was doing the part of a good citizen, and a faithful servant of the State and Commonwealth. The two lives, the two currents of purpose and effort, were still there. Behind all the wrangle of the courts and the devising of questionable legal subtleties to support some unconst.i.tutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence of some obnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical meditations still went on; the remembrance of their sweetness and grandeur wrung more than once from the jaded lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in words which had a great charm for him, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_--"My soul hath long dwelt" where it would not be. But opinion and ambition and the immense convenience of being great and rich and powerful, and the supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong even for his longings to be the interpreter and the servant of nature. There is no trace of the faintest reluctance on his part to be the willing minister of a court of which not only the princ.i.p.al figure, but the arbiter and governing spirit, was to be George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.
The first leisure that Bacon had after he was appointed Solicitor he used in a characteristic way. He sat down to make a minute stock-taking of his position and its circ.u.mstances. In the summer of 1608 he devoted a week of July to this survey of his life, its objects and its appliances; and he jotted down, day by day, through the week, from his present reflections, or he transcribed from former note-books, a series of notes in loose order, mostly very rough and not always intelligible, about everything that could now concern him. This curious and intimate record, which he called _Commentarius Solutus_, was discovered by Mr.
Spedding, who not unnaturally had some misgivings about publishing so secret and so ambiguous a record of a man's most private confidences with himself. But there it was, and, as it was known, he no doubt decided wisely in publishing it as it stands; he has done his best to make it intelligible, and he has also done his best to remove any unfavourable impressions that might arise from it. It is singularly interesting as an evidence of Bacon's way of working, of his watchfulness, his industry, his care in preparing himself long beforehand for possible occasions, his readiness to take any amount of trouble about his present duties, his self-reliant desire for more important and difficult ones. It exhibits his habit of self-observation and self-correction, his care to mend his natural defects of voice, manner, and delivery; it is even more curious in showing him watching his own physical const.i.tution and health, in the most minute details of symptoms and remedies, equally with a scientific and a practical object.
It contains his estimate of his income, his expenditure, his debts, schedules of lands and jewels, his rules for the economy of his estate, his plans for his new gardens and terraces and ponds and buildings at Gorhambury. He was now a rich man, valuing his property at 24,155 and his income at 4975, burdened with a considerable debt, but not more than he might easily look to wipe out. But, besides all these points, there appear the two large interests of his life--the reform of philosophy, and his ideal of a great national policy. The "greatness of Britain" was one of his favourite subjects of meditation. He puts down in his notes the outline of what should be aimed at to secure and increase it; it is to make the various forces of the great and growing empire work together in harmonious order, without waste, without jealousy, without encroachment and collision; to unite not only the interests but the sympathies and aims of the Crown with those of the people and Parliament; and so to make Britain, now in peril from nothing but from the strength of its own discordant elements, that "Monarchy of the West" in reality, which Spain was in show, and, as Bacon always maintained, only in show. The survey of the condition of his philosophical enterprise takes more s.p.a.ce. He notes the stages and points to which his plans have reached; he indicates, with a favourite quotation or apophthegm--"_Plus ultra_"--"_ausus vana contemnere_"--"_aditus non nisi sub persona infantis_" soon to be familiar to the world in his published writings--the lines of argument, sometimes alternative ones, which were before him; he draws out schemes of inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and cla.s.sifications about the subject of Motion, in English interlarded with Latin, or in Latin interlarded with English, of his characteristic and practical sort; he notes the various sources from which he might look for help and co-operation--"of learned men beyond the seas"--"to begin first in France to print it"--"laying for a place to command wits and pens;" he has his eye on rich and childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and Raleigh, on the great schools and universities, where he might perhaps get hold of some college for "Inventors"--as we should say, for the endowment of research. These matters fill up a large s.p.a.ce of his notes. But his thoughts were also busy about his own advancement. And to these sheets of miscellaneous memoranda Bacon confided not only his occupations and his philosophical and political ideas, but, with a curious innocent unreserve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use in order to win the favour of the great and to pull down the reputation of his rivals.
He puts down in detail how he is to recommend himself to the King and the King's favourites--
"To set on foot and maintain access with his Majesty, Dean of the Chapel, May, Murray. Keeping a course of access at the beginning of every term and vacation, with a memorial. To attend some time his repasts, or to fall into a course of familiar discourse. To find means to win a conceit, not open, but private, of being affectionate and a.s.sured to the Scotch, and fit to succeed Salisbury in his manage in that kind; Lord Dunbar, Duke of Lennox, and Daubiny: secret."
Then, again, of Salisbury--
"Insinuate myself to become privy to my Lord of Salisbury's estate." "To correspond with Salisbury in a habit of natural but no ways perilous boldness, and in vivacity, invention, care to cast and enterprise (but with due caution), for this manner I judge both in his nature freeth the stands, and in his ends pleaseth him best, and promiseth more use of me. I judge my standing out, and not favoured by Northampton, must needs do me good with Salisbury, especially comparative to the Attorney."
The Attorney Hobart filled the place to which Bacon had so long aspired, and which he thought, perhaps reasonably, that he could fill much better. At any rate, one of the points to which he recurs frequently in his notes is to exhort himself to make his own service a continual contrast to the Attorney's--"to have in mind and use the Attorney's weakness," enumerating a list of instances: "Too full of cases and distinctions. Nibbling solemnly, he distinguisheth but apprehends not;"
"No gift with his pen in proclamations and the like;" and at last he draws out in a series of epigrams his view of "Hubbard's disadvantages"--
"Better at shift than at drift.... _Subtilitas sine acrimonia_....
No power with the judge.... He will alter a thing but not mend....
He puts into patents and deeds words not of law but of common sense and discourse.... Sociable save in profit.... He doth depopulate mine office; otherwise called inclose.... I never knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen." ...
Then in a marginal note--"Solemn goose. Stately, leastwise nodd (?) crafty. They have made him believe that he is wondrous wise." And, finally, he draws up a paper of counsels and rules for his own conduct--"_Custumae aptae ad Individuum_"--which might supply an outline for an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for a rising official, a sequel to the biting irony of the essays on _Cunning_ and _Wisdom for a Man's Self_.
"To furnish my L. of S. with ornaments for public speeches. To make him think how he should be reverenced by a Lord Chancellor, if I were; Princelike.
"To prepare him for matters to be handled in Council or before the King aforehand, and to show him and yield him the fruits of my care.
"To take notes in tables, when I attend the Council, and sometimes to move out of a memorial shewed and seen. To have particular occasions, fit and graceful and continual, to maintain private speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more than one together. _Ex imitatione Att._ This specially in public places, and without care or affectation. At Council table to make good my L. of Salisb. motions and speeches, and for the rest sometimes one sometimes another; chiefly his, that is most earnest and in affection.
"To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of breath and voice. Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to induce and intermingle speech of good fashion. To use at once upon entrance given of speech, though abrupt, to compose and draw in myself. To free myself at once from payt. (?) of formality and compliment, though with some show of carelessness, pride, and rudeness."
(And then follows a long list of matters of business to be attended to.)
These arts of a court were not new; it was not new for men to observe them in their neighbours and rivals. What was new was the writing them down, with deliberate candour, among a man's private memoranda, as things to be done and with the intention of practising them. This of itself, it has been suggested, shows that they were unfamiliar and uncongenial to Bacon; for a man reminds himself of what he is apt to forget. But a man reminds himself also of what seems to him, at the moment, most important, and what he lays most stress upon. And it is clear that these are the rules, rhetorical and ethical, which Bacon laid down for himself in pursuing the second great object of his life--his official advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, they were the means which he deliberately approved.
As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had kept Bacon so long in the shade kept him at a distance from the King's ear, and from influence on his counsels. Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King had become accustomed to confide, in his own conscious strangeness to English ways and real dislike and suspicion of them; Salisbury had an authority which no one else had, both from his relations with James at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and as the representative of her policy and the depositary of its traditions; and if he had lived, things might not, perhaps, have been better in James's government, but many things, probably, would have been different. But while Salisbury was supreme, Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly busied with his official work; and the Solicitor's place had become, as he says, a "mean thing" compared with the Attorney's, and also an extremely laborious place--"one of the painfullest places in the kingdom." Much of it was routine, but responsible and fatiguing routine. But if he was not in Salisbury's confidence, he was prominent in the House of Commons. The great and pressing subject of the time was the increasing difficulties of the revenue, created partly by the inevitable changes of a growing state, but much more by the King's incorrigible wastefulness. It was impossible to realise completely the great dream and longing of the Stuart kings and their ministers to make the Crown independent of parliamentary supplies; but to dispense with these supplies as much as possible, and to make as much as possible of the revenue permanent, was the continued and fatal policy of the Court. The "Great Contract"--a scheme by which, in return for the surrender by the Crown of certain burdensome and dangerous claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were to a.s.sure a large compensating yearly income to the Crown--was Salisbury's favourite device during the last two years of his life. It was not a prosperous one. The bargain was an ill-imagined and not very decorous transaction between the King and his people. Both parties were naturally jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take offence, and not easy to pacify when they thought advantage had been taken; and Salisbury, either by his own fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look than it need have had.
Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person in the Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in smoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making their appearance. Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King's cherished claim to levy "impositions," or custom duties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative--a claim which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his best to prevent them from discussing, and to persuade them to be content with restraining. Whatever he thought of the "Great Contract," he did what was expected of him in trying to gain for it fair play. But he made time for other things also. He advised, and advised soundly, on the plantation and finance of Ireland. It was a subject in which he took deep interest. A few years later, with only too sure a foresight, he gave the warning, "lest Ireland civil become more dangerous to us than Ireland savage." He advised--not soundly in point of law, but curiously in accordance with modern notions--about endowments; though, in this instance, in the famous will case of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charter House, his argument probably covered the scheme of a monstrous job in favour of the needy Court. And his own work went on in spite of the pressure of the Solicitor's place. To the first years of his official life belong three very interesting fragments, intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the "Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sent in ma.n.u.script the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and unthinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him--the _Redargutio Philosophiarum_.
"I send you at this time the only part which hath any harshness; and yet I framed to myself an opinion, that whosoever allowed well of that preface which you so much commend, will not dislike, or at least ought not to dislike, this other speech of preparation; for it is written out of the same spirit, and out of the same necessity. Nay it doth more fully lay open that the question between me and the ancients is not of the virtue of the race, but of the rightness of the way. And to speak truth, it is to the other but as _palma_ to _pugnus_, part of the same thing more large....
Myself am like the miller of Huntingdon, that was wont to pray for peace amongst the willows; for while the winds blew, the wind-mills wrought, and the water-mill was less customed. So I see that controversies of religion must hinder the advancement of sciences.
Let me conclude with my perpetual wish towards yourself, that the approbation of yourself by your own discreet and temperate carriage, may restore you to your country, and your friends to your society. And so I commend you to G.o.d's goodness.
"Gray's Inn, this 10th of October, 1609."
To Bishop Andrewes he sent, also in ma.n.u.script, another piece, belonging to the same plan--the deeply impressive treatise called _Visa et Cogitata_--what Francis Bacon had seen of nature and knowledge, and what he had come by meditation to think of what he had seen. The letter is not less interesting than the last, in respect to the writer's purposes, his manner of writing, and his relations to his correspondent.
"MY VERY GOOD LORD,--Now your Lordship hath been so long in the church and the palace disputing between kings and popes, methinks you should take pleasure to look into the field, and refresh your mind with some matter of philosophy, though that science be now through age waxed a child again, and left to boys and young men; and because you were wont to make me believe you took liking to my writings, I send you some of this vacation's fruits, and thus much more of my mind and purpose. I hasten not to publish; perishing I would prevent. And I am forced to respect as well my times as the matter. For with me it is thus, and I think with all men in my case, if I bind myself to an argument, it loadeth my mind; but if I rid my mind of the present cogitation, it is rather a recreation.
This hath put me into these miscellanies, which I purpose to suppress, if G.o.d give me leave to write a just and perfect volume of philosophy, which I go on with, though slowly. I send not your Lordship too much, lest it may glut you. Now let me tell you what my desire is. If your Lordship be so good now as when you were the good Dean of Westminster, my request to you is, that not by p.r.i.c.ks, but by notes, you would mark unto me whatsoever shall seem unto you either not current in the style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or inconvenient for the person of the writer; for no man can be judge and party, and when our minds judge by reflection of ourselves, they are more subject to error. And though for the matter itself my judgement be in some things fixed, and not accessible by any man's judgement that goeth not my way, yet even in those things the admonition of a friend may make me express myself diversly. I would have come to your Lordship, but that I am hastening to my house in the country. And so I commend your Lordship to G.o.d's goodness."
There was yet another production of this time, of which we have a notice from himself in a letter to Toby Matthews, the curious and ingenious little treatise on the _Wisdom of the Ancients_, "one of the most popular of his works," says Mr. Spedding, "in his own and in the next generation," but of value to us mainly for its quaint poetical colour, and the unexpected turns, like answers to a riddle, given to the ancient fables. When this work was published, it was the third time that he had appeared as an author in print. He thus writes about it and himself:
"MR. MATTHEWS,--I do heartily thank you for your letter of the 24th of August from Salamanca; and in recompense thereof I send you a little work of mine that hath begun to pa.s.s the world. They tell me my Latin is turned into silver, and become current. Had you been here, you should have been my inquisitor before it came forth; but I think the greatest inquisitor in Spain will allow it.... My great work goeth forward, and, after my manner, I alter ever when I add.
So that nothing is finished till all be finished.
"From Gray's Inn, the 17th of February, 1610."
In the autumn of 1611 the Attorney-General was ill, and Bacon reminded both the King and Salisbury of his claim. He was afraid, he writes to the King, with an odd forgetfulness of the persistency and earnestness of his applications, "that _by reason of my slowness to sue_, and apprehend occasions upon the sudden, keeping one plain course of painful service, I may _in fine dierum_ be in danger to be neglected and forgotten." The Attorney recovered, but Bacon, on New Year's Tide of 1611/12, wrote to Salisbury to thank him for his good-will. It is the last letter of Bacon's to Salisbury which has come down to us.
"IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP,--I would entreat the new year to answer for the old, in my humble thanks to your Lordship, both for many your favours, and chiefly that upon the occasion of Mr.
Attorney's infirmity I found your Lordship even as I would wish.
This doth increase a desire in me to express my thankful mind to your Lordship; hoping that though I find age and decays grow upon me, yet I may have a flash or two of spirit left to do you service.
And I do protest before G.o.d, without compliment or any light vein of mind, that if I knew in what course of life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my thoughts, which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that center. But all this is no more than I am, which is not much, but yet the entire of him that is--"
In the following May (May 24, 1612) Salisbury died. From this date James pa.s.sed from government by a minister, who, whatever may have been his faults, was laborious, public-spirited, and a statesman, into his own keeping and into the hands of favourites, who cared only for themselves.
With Cecil ceased the traditions of the days of Elizabeth and Burghley, in many ways evil and cruel traditions, but not ign.o.ble and sordid ones; and James was left without the stay, and also without the check, which Cecil's power had been to him. The field was open for new men and new ways; the fashions and ideas of the time had altered during the last ten years, and those of the Queen's days had gone out of date. Would the new turn out for the better or the worse? Bacon, at any rate, saw the significance of the change and the critical eventfulness of the moment.
It was his habit of old to send memorials of advice to the heads of the Government, apparently without such suggestions seeming more intrusive or officious than a leading article seems now, and perhaps with much the same effect. It was now a time to do so, if ever; and he was in an official relation to the King which ent.i.tled him to proffer advice. He at once prepared to lay his thoughts before the King, and to suggest that he could do far better service than Cecil, and was ready to take his place. The policy of the "Great Contract" had certainly broken down, and the King, under Cecil's guidance, had certainly not known how to manage an English parliament. In writing to the King he found it hard to satisfy himself. Several draft letters remain, and it is not certain which of them, if any, was sent. But immediately on Salisbury's death he began, May 29th, a letter in which he said that he had never yet been able to show his affection to the King, "having been as a hawk tied to another's fist;" and if, "as was said to one that spake great words, _Amice, verba tua desiderant civitatem_, your Majesty say to me, _Bacon, your words require a place to speak them_," yet that "place or not place" was with the King. But the draft breaks off abruptly, and with the date of the 31st we have the following:
"Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great servant. But if I should praise him in propriety, I should say that he was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better. For he loved to have the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself, and to have all business still under the hammer, and like clay in the hands of the potter, to mould it as he thought good; so that he was more _in operatione_ than _in opere_. And though he had fine pa.s.sages of action, yet the real conclusions came slowly on. So that although your Majesty hath grave counsellors and worthy persons left, yet you do as it were turn a leaf, wherein if your Majesty shall give a frame and const.i.tution to matters, before you place the persons, in my simple opinion it were not amiss. But the great matter and most instant for the present, is the consideration of a Parliament, for two effects: the one for the supply of your estate, the other for the better knitting of the hearts of your subjects unto your Majesty, according to your infinite merit; for both which, Parliaments have been and are the antient and honourable remedy.
"Now because I take myself to have a little skill in that region, as one that ever affected that your Majesty mought in all your causes not only prevail, but prevail with satisfaction of the inner man; and though no man can say but I was a perfect and peremptory royalist, yet every man makes me believe that I was never one hour out of credit with the Lower House; my desire is to know whether your Majesty will give me leave to meditate and propound unto you some preparative remembrances touching the future Parliament."
Whether he sent this or not, he prepared another draft. What had happened in the mean while we know not, but Bacon was in a bitter mood, and the letter reveals, for the first time, what was really in Bacon's heart about the "great subject and great servant," of whom he had just written so respectfully, and with whom he had been so closely connected for most of his life. The fierceness which had been gathering for years of neglect and hindrance under that placid and patient exterior broke out. He offered himself as Cecil's successor in business of State. He gave his reason for being hopeful of success. Cecil's bitterest enemy could not have given it more bitterly.
"My princ.i.p.al end being to do your Majesty service, I crave leave to make at this time to your Majesty this most humble oblation of myself. I may truly say with the psalm, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_, for my life hath been conversant in things wherein I take little pleasure. Your Majesty may have heard somewhat that my father was an honest man, and somewhat you may have seen of myself, though not to make any true judgement by, because I have hitherto had only _potestatem verborum_, nor that neither. I was three of my young years bred with an amba.s.sador in France, and since I have been an old truant in the school-house of your council-chamber, though on the second form, yet longer than any that now sitteth hath been upon the head form. If your Majesty find any aptness in me, or if you find any scarcity in others, whereby you may think it fit for your service to remove me to business of State, although I have a fair way before me for profit (and by your Majesty's grace and favour for honour and advancement), and in a course less exposed to the blasts of fortune, _yet now that he is gone, quo vivente virtutibus certissimum exitium_, I will be ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majesty's royal hand shall set me.
Your Majesty will bear me witness, I have not suddenly opened myself thus far. I have looked upon others, I see the exceptions, I see the distractions, and I fear Tacitus will be a prophet, _magis alii homines quam alii mores_. I know mine own heart, and I know not whether G.o.d that hath touched my heart with the affection may not touch your royal heart to discern it. Howsoever, I shall at least go on honestly in mine ordinary course, and supply the rest in prayers for you, remaining, etc."
This is no hasty outburst. In a later paper on the true way of retrieving the disorders of the King's finances, full of large and wise counsel, after advising the King not to be impatient, and a.s.suring him that a state of debt is not so intolerable--"for it is no new thing for the greatest Kings to be in debt," and all the great men of the Court had been in debt without any "manner of diminution of their greatness"--he returns to the charge in detail against Salisbury and the Great Contract.
"My second prayer is, that your Majesty--in respect to the hasty freeing of your state--would not descend to any means, or degree of means, which carrieth not a symmetry with your Majesty and greatness. _He is gone from whom those courses did wholly flow._ To have your wants and necessities in particular as it were hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your lords and commons, to be talked of for four months together; To have all your courses to help yourself in revenue or profit put into printed books, which were wont to be held _arcana imperii_; To have such worms of aldermen to lend for ten in the hundred upon good a.s.surance, and with such entreaty (?) as if it should save the bark of your fortune; To contract still where mought be had the readiest payment, and not the best bargain; To stir a number of projects for your profit, and then to blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing but the scandal of them; To pretend even carriage between your Majesty's rights and ease of the people, and to satisfy neither.
These courses and others the like I hope are gone with the deviser of them; which have turned your Majesty to inestimable prejudice."
And what he thought of saying, but on further consideration struck out, was the following. It is no wonder that he struck it out, but it shows what he felt towards Cecil.
"I protest to G.o.d, though I be not superst.i.tious, when I saw your M.'s book against Vorstius and Arminius, and noted your zeal to deliver the majesty of G.o.d from the vain and indign comprehensions of heresy and degenerate philosophy, as you had by your pen formerly endeavoured to deliver kings from the usurpation of Rome, _perculsit illico animum_ that G.o.d would set shortly upon you some visible favour, _and let me not live if I thought not of the taking away of that man_."
And from this time onwards he scarcely ever mentions Cecil's name in his correspondence with James but with words of condemnation, which imply that Cecil's mischievous policy was the result of private ends. Yet this was the man to whom he had written the "New Year's Tide" letter six months before; a letter which is but an echo to the last of all that he had been accustomed to write to Cecil when asking a.s.sistance or offering congratulation. Cecil had, indeed, little claim on Bacon's grat.i.tude; he had spoken him fair in public, and no doubt in secret distrusted and thwarted him. But to the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this.
Had James disclosed something of his dead servant, who left some strange secrets behind him, which showed his unsuspected hostility to Bacon?
Except on this supposition (but there is nothing to support it), no exaggeration of the liberty allowed to the language of compliment is enough to clear Bacon of an insincerity which is almost inconceivable in any but the meanest tools of power.
"I a.s.sure myself," wrote Bacon to the King, "your Majesty taketh not me for one of a busy nature; for my estate being free from all difficulties, and I having such a large field for contemplation, as I have partly and shall much more make manifest unto your Majesty and the world, to occupy my thoughts, nothing could make me active but love and affection." So Bacon described his position with questionable accuracy--for his estate was not "free from difficulties"--in the new time coming. He was still kept out of the inner circle of the Council; but from the moment of Salisbury's death he became a much more important person. He still sued for advancement, and still met with disappointment; the "mean men" still rose above him. The lucrative place of Master of the Wards was vacated by Salisbury's death. Bacon was talked of for it, and probably expected it, for he drew up new rules for it, and a speech for the new master; but the office and the speech went to Sir George Carey. Soon after Sir George Carey died. Bacon then applied for it through the new favourite, Rochester. "He was so confident of the place that he put most of his men into new cloaks;" and the world of the day amused itself at his disappointment, when the place was given to another "mean man," Sir Walter Cope, of whom the gossips wrote that if the "last two Treasurers could look out of their graves to see those successors in that place, they would be out of countenance with themselves, and say to the world _quantum mutatus_." But Bacon's hand and counsel appear more and more in important matters--the improvement of the revenue; the defence of extreme rights of the prerogative in the case against Whitelocke; the great question of calling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" way of dealing with it. His confidential advice to the King about calling a parliament was marked by his keen perception of the facts of the situation; it was marked too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods and trust in the look of things; it bears traces also of his bitter feeling against Salisbury, whom he charges with treacherously fomenting the opposition of the last Parliament. There was no want of worldly wisdom in it; certainly it was more adapted to James's ideas of state-craft than the simpler plan of Sir Henry Nevill, that the King should throw himself frankly on the loyalty and good-will of Parliament. And thus he came to be on easy terms with James, who was quite capable of understanding Bacon's resource and nimbleness of wit. In the autumn of 1613 the Chief-Justiceship of the King's Bench became vacant. Bacon at once gave the King reasons for sending c.o.ke from the Common Pleas--where he was a check on the prerogative--to the King's Bench, where he could do less harm; while Hobart went to the Common Pleas. The promotion was obvious, but the Common Pleas suited c.o.ke better, and the place was more lucrative. Bacon's advice was followed. c.o.ke, very reluctantly, knowing well who had given it, and why, "not only weeping himself but followed by the tears" of all the Court of Common Pleas, moved up to the higher post. The Attorney Hobart succeeded, and Bacon at last became Attorney (October 27, 1613). In Chamberlain's gossip we have an indication, such as occurs only accidentally, of the view of outsiders: "There is a strong apprehension that little good is to be expected by this change, and that Bacon may prove a dangerous instrument."
CHAPTER V.