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1621

BACON CHARGED WITH BRIBERY.

65

March 15. Further

night before, it seemed, Hastings had told Bacon that Aubrey intended to bring a complaint against him. "Well, George," had been the Chancellor's reply, " if you lay inquiry. it on me, I must deny it on my honour;" and, unless his words had been misunderstood, he had recently made a similar declaration with respect to Egerton's story. An attempt was made by John Finch to turn the current of indignation against Hastings. He believed, he said, that it was true that Aubrey's money had been given to Hastings, but that Hastings had kept it in his pocket. Such assertions were out of place at this stage of the proceedings. The question was not whether the charges against Bacon were true, but whether there was sufficient evidence to make it worth while to further investigate the matter. The Committee therefore wisely decided upon reporting to the House that in both cases there were causes depending in Chancery at the time when the money was given.

That the Commons were in some degree prejudiced against Bacon on account of his conduct in the affair of the patents,

March 16. Feeling of the House.

it would be impossible to deny. But there was no wish to deal with him unjustly. On March 16, the question of the disputed jurisdiction between the Chancery and the Court of Wards came up for discussion. The debate was opened by Cranfield with his usual arrogance. But the House decided that there had been faults on both sides, and forced a member who had cast aspersions upon Bacon's character, to give a less offensive meaning to his words.1

On the 17th, the report of the Committee on the charges of bribery was brought in by Phelips. His language was sin

March 17.

The debate on the charges of bribery.

gularly temperate. He reviewed the evidence at some length, and pointed out the absolute necessity of a complete investigation. "It is a cause," he

said, "of great weight. It concerns every man here. For, if the fountains be muddy, what will the streams be? If the great dispenser of the King's conscience be corrupt, who can have any courage to plead before him?" He concluded

1 Commons' Journals, i. 558; Proceedings and Debates, i. 183.

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by moving that they should present this business singly to the Lords, and deliver it without exasperation.' It would be impossible to get at the truth in any other way. The Commons had no power to summon to their bar a peer of the realm, and they were equally incapacitated from examining his accusers upon oath. The best course for them to take would be to leave the matter entirely in the hands of the Upper House.

So precisely did this proposal meet the exigencies of the case, that Bacon's friends only wasted their breath in pointing

They are sent up to the Lords.

out discrepancies in the evidence. Calvert's suggestion, that the King should be asked to institute an inquiry, and the wild rants of Christopher Neville about the Chancellor sitting 'like a minotaur in the labyrinth of his court, gormandising and devouring all that came before him,' were equally disregarded by the House. The feeling of the vast majority was well expressed by Sir George More. "Were the Lord Chancellor," he said, "never so great, never so dear unto me, yet the Commonwealth, the mother of us all, is to be preferred before all. I will not speak in favour, nor against the Lord Chancellor. For, if it be gold, why should we fear to try it? I would have us go to the Lords, because we cannot do the Chancellor right without it." To such reasoning there was no reply; and Phelips was ordered to lay the evidence before the Peers, 'without prejudice or opinion.' 1

Pacon's

Meanwhile Bacon was presiding for the last time in the Upper House. The blow which now fell upon him was entirely unexpected. He seems to have had no conception feelings. that any really well-founded charge could be brought against him, and to have fancied that the Commons, baffled in their assault upon him as a referee, were eagerly adopting a few trumped-up stories in order to punish him for his support of Mompesson. The conduct of the House was, therefore, in his eyes, a mere factious attack upon authority, to be resisted

1 Commons' Journals, i. 560; Proceedings and Debates, i. 188. 2 Such is the feeling which seems to lie at the root of all his sayings at this time, and to be the explanation of the words used by his secretary Meautys, "He seeth the way is already chalked out."-Bacon's Works, ed. Montagu, xvi. note G. G. G.

1621

BACON'S APPEAL.

67

at all hazards. It was not merely his personal honour which was at stake; the highest interests of the Crown and of the State were involved in the contest.

His first thought on March 14, the day on which Aubrey's accusation was brought before the Commons, was to write March 14. to Buckingham. Recently-probably in speaking of His appeal the affair of the referees-something had been said

to Buckingham.

about the Chancellor's being in purgatory, from which the favourite perhaps wished him a speedy release. "Your lordship," wrote Bacon, pouring out his feelings in a letter which came straight from his heart, if any letter ever did, "spoke of purgatory; I am now in it, but my mind is in a calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands, and a clean heart; and, I hope, a clean house for friends or servants. But Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark, and accusation is the game. And if this be to be a Chancellor, I think if the Great Seal lay upon Hounslow Heath nobody would take it up. But the King and your lordship will, I hope, put an end to these my straits one way or other. And, in truth, that which I fear most, is, lest continual attendance and business, together with these cares, and want of time to do my weak body right this spring by diet and physic, will cast me down, and that it will be thought feigning or fainting. But I hope in God I shall hold out." 1

It was perhaps at this time that he replied to some one who recommended him to look around him, "I look above me." 2

His illness.

That which Bacon feared was not long in coming upon March 18. him. Under the pressure of anxiety, his health, never very strong at the best, broke down completely. On the morning of the 18th he was unable to leave his house. In this state he received a visit from Buckingham, who

1 Bacon to Buckingham, March 14, Letters and Life, vii. 213.
2 Bacon's Works, ed. Montagu, xvi. p. cccxxix.

found him, as he afterwards reported, 'very sick and heavy.' 1

March 20.

Ley appointed to preside in the House of Lords.

In one respect, the Chancellor's illness served him well. It would have been impossible for him to take his seat on the woolsack till the charges against him were cleared up to the satisfaction of the Peers;

and his sickness afforded a good excuse for the temporary appointment of Chief-Justice Ley to preside in the House of Lords during his absence.

The result of Buckingham's interview with Bacon may no doubt be traced in the proceedings of the Commons. "His Majesty," said Calvert, "hath understood of the crimes that are laid to the Lord Chancellor's charge, and is sorry that a man whom he hath preferred He was,

March 19. The King proposes to take the

case into his should be guilty of such great crimes."

own hands.

therefore, unwilling that accusations of such a nature 'should lie long on so great a person,' and was ready, in order to expedite the business, to direct a special commission to six members of the House of Lords and to twelve members of the House of Commons. He would see that they took up the matter vigorously, and that their inquiry was carried on during the Easter vacation, which was now at hand. He accordingly wished to have the opinion of the Commons on the course thus proposed. If they approved of it, he would send a similar message to the Lords. He hoped that the Chancellor would be able to establish his innocence; but if he failed, he was then prepared to show himself a most just King.'

The proposal was no doubt made in all honesty. By his conduct at the time of the attack upon the referees, James had shown that he had no intention of sacrificing his ministers to popular clamour. But the moment that a direct charge of malversation was brought, he was as ready to consent to a strict and impartial inquiry as he had six years before been ready to consent to a similar inquiry in the case of Somerset. All he asked was that he should have the appointment of the judges.

No doubt there was much to be said in favour of the scheme. The House of Lords was, with the single exception Buckingham's Declaration, Lords' Journals, iii. 54.

1621

A NEW TRIBUNAL PROPOSED.

69

of the House of Commons, the most unfit body in existence for conducting a political trial. Of all its members, now that the Lord Chancellor was set aside, Mandeville alone had received a legal education. There were many honourable men amongst them, though there were many who by no means deserved that title; but there were few, even among the best, who were not swayed one way or another by party feeling, and who could be depended upon to give a strictly judicial vote. If, however, some of the peers were factious, and some were servile, the House was still, as a body, tolerably independent, and this was more than could be said of the new tribunal which James proposed to create. That the innovation, if once permitted to come into existence, would be converted into a precedent, was certain ; and it was no less certain that, whatever confidence might be reposed in the fairness of the King's intentions in the present instance, it would be highly unwise to entrust the power of finally deciding upon the guilt or innocence of Government officials to a shifting and temporary court nominated from time to time by the Crown ; especially as there would be no other check upon the natural tendency of the Sovereign to support his ministers, than the very slight difficulty which he might find in selecting eighteen satellites of his own from so large a body as that of the two Houses.

In spite of all the objections which might be brought against his scheme, James very nearly carried his point.

Reception of his proposal by the Commons.

There was something enticing to superficial observation in the proposal to give twelve votes out of

eighteen to members of the Lower House. Popular speakers, like Perrot and Alford, gave in their adhesion to the Coke's plan. But Coke, whose natural acuteness was on this objection. occasion sharpened by his dislike of Bacon, threw the weight of his authority into the opposite scale. "Let us see," he said, "that this gracious message taketh not away our parliamentary proceeding." It was not fit, he held, that any answer should be returned till the Lords had been consulted.

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If there was a man in all that assembly qualified to express

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