lamented. His excellent qualities had endeared him to the love and expectations of all England. Germanicus was not more the darling of the Roman people and the untimely death of both those princes was universally believed to have been procured by poison. He had expressed, on all occasions, an abhorrence of minions, and an utter contempt of Somerset he had even declared a firm resolution, to humble both him and the family unto which he was allied, if ever he came to reign. Whether the unaccountable transaction I have been relating has any reference to the death of this amiable prince, or whether it does not point rather to an affair of a very different nature, the reader is left to determine. Villiers, now without a rival in the king's affections, was every day receiving new proofs of his bounty; at the same time that he more than shared with him the exercise of his authority. In the course of a few years he was made gentleman of the bedchamber, master of the horse, knight of the garter, earl, marquis and duke of Buckingham, chief justice in eyre of all the forests, and lord high admiral of England. One of those prodigies of fortune, who rise now and then upon the world, as the vulgar imagine of comets, at once to astonish and scourge it: a signal instance of the wantonness of sovereign power, and how far it may insult human kind in exalting and adorning what it should neglect or contemn. He drew up after him an obscure kindred, numerous and indigent, bestowed on them places of trust and profit, married them into the noblest families, and graced them all with dignities, which were to be supported at the common expence of a whole people; to whom if any one of them was merely harmless, it was his utmost praise. After having read, not only what the enemies of this favourite have said against him, but all that his partisans have alleged on his behalf, I do not find, during the whole time of his influence under two reigns, an influence supreme and unbounded, that he ever projected one scheme for the benefit of his country, or ever executed one underd VOL. I. Bacon, Cabala, p. 219. taking to its honour; the only great criterion by which we ought to judge those men that administer the public. The breaking off the Spanish match at last was solely a sacrifice to his own vanity and resentment. On the caprice of this youth, however, the first and ablest men in the kingdom were to depend entirely, for their access at court, for their advancement, for any opportunity of being able to serve their country and their sovereign. Sir Francis Bacon was sensible of this, and courted his friendship with a particular application. But he must have felt all the servitude and disagreeableness of his situation, when, to be well with the king, he found it necessary to turn steward to the estate newly bestowed on this young man; to study the ways and means of improving his lands, and of rendering his places most profitable to him. It is true he found his account in this service; as it proved the surest means of his own preferment: but, to a great and worthy mind, preferment so meanly obtained is disgrace, only a little disguised and gilded over. The lord chancellor Egerton, broken with age and infirmities, had often petitioned the king to be dismissed from his laborious employment. He was now seventy-seven years old, and had presided in the court of chancery from the year 1596, with an unblemished reputation as a judge in private cases; but his public conduct had been always framed to the directions of the court with an obsequiousness, of dangerous example in one, who held so great and important a trust. To this high dignity Sir Francis Bacon privately aspired: and as it was the utmost scope of his ambition, he had aimed all his endeavours in the king's service to merit it at his hands. He took care, at the same time, to strengthen his pretensions by the credit of Buckingham. His ambition even made him descend to artifices, that are as common in courts, as they are mean and unwarrantable; for he endeavoured to ruin in the king's good opinion such men as the voice of the public might probably design to the same office, and whom he Vol. V. Placita therefore considered as his rivals. He was particularly jealous of Sir Edward Coke, and represented Bacon, him as one who abounded in his own sense; one Letter who affected popularity, and likely to court the good. CXXVII. will of the nation at the hazard of the prerogative. For himself, he placed his great merit in obedience and submission; in the interest he had among the commons, and in being able to influence the lower house of parliament: a service which he magnifies as more important in a chancellor, than to judge in equity between party and party. This opinion of his own popularity in the nation was not groundless. The parliament that met in 1614, though extremely Petyt's out of humour with the ministers in general, distin- Parliam. guished him by an uncommon mark of favour and p. 174. confidence. An objection having been started in the house of commons, that a seat there was incompatible with the office of attorney general, which required his frequent attendance in the upper house the commons, from their particular regard for Sir Francis Bacon, and for that time only, overruled the objection; and he was accordingly allowed to take his place among them. If I observe farther, that the king raised him to the dignity of a privycounsellor while he was still in this very office, it will be instead of many instances to shew, with what an addressful prudence he steered his course betwixt the court and the nation. He was thus favoured by a prince, who exacted from all his servants an implicit submission to his maxims of government: he gave no umbrage to a parliament whom these maxims had rendered jealous of the prince, and of almost every man in his favour. But to return. These insinuations had their desired effect. Upon An. 1617. the chancellor's voluntary resignation of the seals, they were given to Sir Francis Bacon, with the title of lord keeper, on the seventh of March, 1617. To Bacon, what interest he more particularly owed this promotion we may learn from his letter of acknowledgment, written that very day, to the earl of Buckingham. A few days after he had the seals delivered to him, Vol. V. Letter CLXIX. Bacon, CLXXV. Rapin. he king went a progress into Scotland, carrying with nim the favourite, who was likewise his prime minister for to him all business, public or private, was addressed; and, according to his fancy, for the most part determined. The great affair that employed the deliberations of his council about this time, and had a fatal influence on his conduct ever after, was the marriage of prince Charles with the infanta of Spain. In this resolution, though contrary to all the rules of good policy, he persisted for seven years together; against his own interest, against the universal voice of his people only to procure the imaginary honour of an alliance with a crowned head; for all other alliances he thought below his dignity. Sir Francis Bacon, who saw through the vanity and danger of this intention, but who wanted resolution to be greatly honest, contented himself with insinuating softly, that it would be necessary to have the council unanimous in their suffrage on the occasion, whatever might be their private sentiments. This hint was not sufficient to open the king's eyes. On the contrary, he ran blindfold into the snare that Gundamor was spreading for him. That famous statesman, as much by his buffooneries as by his talent for intrigue, had gained an absolute ascendant over James, leading him on from error to error: till in the end he made him sacrifice his conscience to the pope, and his honour to the resentments of Philip, in the murder of his bravest subject Sir Walter Raleigh; the last terror of Spain, and the only surviving favourite of Queen Elizabeth. The Dutch too made advantage of the king's weakness and necessities. As the cautionary towns were still in the hands of the English, the States were under some apprehensions that the Spanish ministry might prevail upon James, who could not possibly conceal his fondness for the match in treaty, to put those important places into their power. They knew at the same time. that his treasury was exhausted, and that his courtiers were insatiable. To bring their purpose about, they ceased all at once to pay the English who garrisoned those places, as by their treaties they were obliged to do. Complaint being made of this to the Dutch envoy at London, he insinuated, as from himself, to some of the ministers, that if king James would desire it of the States, they would, out of consideration for him, take up money at an exorbitant interest, and in one payment discharge the whole debt due to the crown of England. This stratagem took effect. James wrote to the States; and the matter was immediately put into negotiation. The pensionary Barnevelt, whom they sent over, conducted the affair with so much address, that the king agreed to deliver up the cautionary towns for less than three millions of florins, in lieu of eight millions they had engaged to pay Elizabeth, besides the interest that had been running on for eighteen years. Such are the events of this reign; fit only to depress the writer, and distaste the reader. During the king's absence in Scotland there happened an affair, otherwise of small importance, but as it lets us into the true genius of those times, and serves to shew in what miserable subjection the favourite held all those who were in public employments. He was upon the point of ruining Sir Francis Bacon, the person he had just contributed to raise, not for any error or negligence in their master's service, but merely for an opinion given in a thing that only regarded his own family. Indeed such was the levity, such the insolence of his power, that the capricious removal of men from their places, became the prime distinction of his thirteen. years' favour; which, as bishop Hacket observes, was Life of like a sweeping flood, that at every spring-tide takes Abp. Wilfrom one land, to cast what it has taken upon an- Part II. other. The affair was this. The year before, my lord P. 19. Coke had been removed from his place of chief justice, and disgraced: the court having found him, in several instances, no friend to arbitrary will and pleasure, or to the prerogative, as it was called; but resolutely bent to maintain the integrity and honour of his post. One Peacham had been accused of in liams, |