Bacon — 09 - Chapter 5A

BACON ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR.

Thus, at last, at the age of fifty-two, Bacon had gained the place which Essex had tried to get for him at thirty-two.

The time of waiting had been a weary one, and it is impossible not to see that it had been hurtful to Bacon.

A strong and able man, very eager to have a field for his strength and ability, who is kept out of it, as he thinks unfairly, and is driven to an attitude of suppliant dependency in pressing his claim on great persons who amuse him with words, can hardly help suffering in the humiliating process.

It does a man no good to learn to beg, and to have a long training in the art.

And further, this long delay kept up the distraction of his mind between the noble work on which his soul was bent, and the necessities of that "civil" or professional and political life by which he had to maintain his estate.

All the time that he was "canvassing" (it is his own word) for office, and giving up his time and thoughts to the work which it involved, the great _Instauration_ had to wait his hours of leisure; and his exclamation, so often repeated, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_, bears witness to the longings that haunted him in his hours of legal drudgery, or in the service of his not very thankful employers.

Not but that he found compensation in the interest of public questions, in the company of the great, in the excitement of state-craft and state employment, in the pomp and enjoyment of court life.

He found too much compensation; it was one of his misfortunes.

But his heart was always sound in its allegiance to knowledge; and if he had been fortunate enough to have risen earlier to the greatness which he aimed at as a vantage-ground for his true work, or if he had had self-control to have dispensed with wealth and position--if he had escaped the long necessity of being a persistent and still baffled suitor--we might have had as a completed whole what we have now only in great fragments, and we should have been spared the blots which mar a career which ought to have been a noble one.

The first important matter that happened after Bacon's new appointment was the Essex divorce case, and the marriage of Lady Essex with the favourite whom Cecil's death had left at the height of power, and who from Lord Rochester was now made Earl of Somerset.

With the divorce, the beginning of the scandals and tragedies of James's reign, Bacon had nothing to do.

At the marriage which followed Bacon presented as his offering a masque, performed by the members of Gray's Inn, of which he bore the charges, and which cost him the enormous sum of £2000. Whether it were to repay his obligations to the Howards, or in lieu of a "fee" to Rochester, who levied toll on all favours from the King, it can hardly be said, as has been suggested, to be a protest against the great abuse of the times, the sale of offices for money.

The "very splendid trifle, the Masque of Flowers," was one form of the many extravagant tributes paid but too willingly to high-handed worthlessness, of which the deeper and darker guilt was to fill all faces with shame two years afterwards.

As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more prominent part in affairs, legal, criminal, constitutional, administrative, than he had yet been allowed to have.

We know that it was his great object to show how much more active and useful an Attorney he could be than either Coke or Hobart; and as far as unflagging energy and high ability could make a good public servant, he fully carried out his purpose.

In Parliament, the "addled Parliament" of 1614, in which he sat for the University of Cambridge, he did his best to reconcile what were fast becoming irreconcilable, the claims and prerogatives of an absolute king, irritable, suspicious, exacting, prodigal, with the ancient rights and liberties, growing stronger in their demands by being denied, resisted, or outwitted, of the popular element in the State.

In the trials, which are so large and disagreeable a part of the history of these years--trials arising out of violent words provoked by the violent acts of power, one of which, Peacham's, became famous, because in the course of it torture was resorted to, or trials which witnessed to the corruption of the high society of the day, like the astounding series of arraignments and condemnations following on the discoveries relating to Overbury's murder, which had happened just before the Somerset marriage--Bacon had to make the best that he could for the cruel and often unequal policy of the Court; and Bacon must take his share in the responsibility for it.

An effort on James's part to stop duelling brought from Bacon a worthier piece of service, in the shape of an earnest and elaborate argument against it, full of good sense and good feeling, but hopelessly in advance of the time.

On the many questions which touched the prerogative, James found in his Attorney a ready and skilful advocate of his claims, who knew no limit to them but in the consideration of what was safe and prudent to assert.

He was a better and more statesmanlike counsellor, in his unceasing endeavours to reconcile James to the expediency of establishing solid and good relations with his Parliament, and in his advice as to the wise and hopeful ways of dealing with it.

Bacon had no sympathy with popular wants and claims; of popularity, of all that was called popular, he had the deepest suspicion and dislike; the opinions and the judgment of average men he despised, as a thinker, a politician, and a courtier; the "malignity of the people" he thought great.

"I do not love," he says, "the word _people_."

But he had a high idea of what was worthy of a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist.

In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law.

This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd of lawyers who venerated him--men whom Bacon viewed with mingled contempt and apprehension both in the courts and in Parliament where they were numerous, and whom he more than once advised the King to bridle and keep "in awe."

Bacon presented his scheme to the King in a Proposition, or, as we should call it, a Report.

It is very able and interesting; marked with his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of practical needs, and with a confidence in his own knowledge of law which contrasts curiously with the current opinion about it.

He speaks with the utmost honour of Coke's work, but he is not afraid of a comparison with him.

"I do assure your Majesty," he says, "I am in good hope that when Sir Edward Coke's Reports and my Rules and Decisions shall come to posterity, there will be (whatever is now thought) question who was the greater lawyer."

But the project, though it was entertained and discussed in Parliament, came to nothing.

No one really cared about it except Bacon.

But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things happened of the utmost consequence to him.

One was the rise, more extravagant than anything that England had seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of the new favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham.

Bacon, like the rest of the world, saw the necessity of bowing before him; and Bacon persuaded himself that Villiers was pre-eminently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a man in his place would need.

We have a series of his letters to Villiers; they are of course in the complimentary vein which was expected; but if their language is only compliment, there is no language left for expressing what a man wishes to be taken for truth.

The other matter was the humiliation, by Bacon's means and in his presence, of his old rival Coke.

In the dispute about jurisdiction, always slumbering and lately awakened and aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts and the Chancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery with Præmunire.

The King's jealousy took alarm, and the Chief-Justice was called before the Council.

There a decree, based on Bacon's advice and probably drawn up by him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine maintained by the greatest and most self-confident judge whom the English courts had seen.

The Chief-Justice had to acquiesce in this reading of the law; and then, as if such an affront were not enough, Coke was suspended from his office, and, further, enjoined to review and amend his published reports, where they were inconsistent with the view of law which on Bacon's authority the Star Chamber had adopted (June, 1616).

This he affected to do, but the corrections were manifestly only colourable;

his explanations of his legal heresies against the prerogative, as these heresies were formulated by the Chancellor and Bacon, and presented to him for recantation, were judged insufficient; and in a decree, prefaced by reasons drawn up by Bacon, in which, besides Coke's errors of law, his "deceit, contempt, and slander of the Government," his "perpetual turbulent carriage," and his affectation of popularity, were noted--he was removed from his office (Nov.

, 1616).

So, for the present, the old rivalry had ended in a triumph for Bacon.

Bacon, whom Coke had so long headed in the race, whom he had sneered at as a superficial pretender to law, and whose accomplishments and enthusiasm for knowledge he utterly despised, had not only defeated him, but driven him from his seat with dishonour.

When we remember what Coke was, what he had thought of Bacon, and how he prized his own unique reputation as a representative of English law, the effects of such a disgrace on a man of his temper cannot easily be exaggerated.

But for the present Bacon had broken through the spell which had so long kept him back.

He won a great deal of the King's confidence, and the King was more and more ready to make use of him, though by no means equally willing to think that Bacon knew better than himself.

Bacon's view of the law, and his resources of argument and expression to make it good, could be depended upon in the keen struggle to secure and enlarge the prerogative which was now beginning.

In the prerogative both James and Bacon saw the safety of the State and the only reasonable hope of good government; but in Bacon's larger and more elevated views of policy--of a policy worthy of a great king, and a king of England--James was not likely to take much interest.

The memorials which it was Bacon's habit to present on public affairs were wasted on one who had so little to learn from others--so he thought and so all assured him--about the secrets of empire.

Still they were proofs of Bacon's ready mind; and James, even when he disagreed with Bacon's opinion and arguments, was too clever not to see their difference from the work of other men.

Bacon rose in favour; and from the first he was on the best of terms with Villiers.

He professed to Villiers the most sincere devotion.

According to his custom he presented him with a letter of wise advice on the duties and behaviour of a favourite.

He at once began, and kept up with him to the end, a confidential correspondence on matters of public importance.

He made it clear that he depended upon Villiers for his own personal prospects, and it had now become the most natural thing that Bacon should look forward to succeeding the Lord Chancellor, Ellesmere, who was fast failing.

Bacon had already (Feb.

12, 1615/16).

in terms which seem strange to us, but were less strange then, set forth in a letter to the King the reasons why he should be Chancellor; criticising justly enough, only that he was a party interested, the qualifications of other possible candidates, Coke, Hobart, and the Archbishop Abbott.

Coke would be "an overruling nature in an overruling place," and "popular men were no sure mounters for your Majesty's saddle."

Hobart was incompetent.

As to Abbott, the Chancellor's place required "a whole man," and to have both jurisdiction, spiritual and temporal, "was fit only for a king."

The promise that Bacon should have the place came to him three days afterwards through Villiers.

He acknowledged it in a burst of gratitude (Feb.

15, 1615/16).

"I will now wholly rely on your excellent and happy self....

I am yours surer to you than my own life.

For, as they speak of the Turquoise stone in a ring, I will break into twenty pieces before you bear the least fall."

They were unconsciously prophetic words.

But Ellesmere lasted longer than was expected.

It was not till a year after this promise that he resigned.

On the 7th of March, 1616/17, Bacon received the seals.

He expresses his obligations to Villiers, now Lord Buckingham, in the following letter: "MY DEAREST LORD,--It is both in cares and kindness that small ones float up to the tongue, and great ones sink down into the heart with silence.

Therefore I could speak little to your Lordship to-day, neither had I fit time; but I must profess thus much, that in this day's work you are the truest and perfectest mirror and example of firm and generous friendship that ever was in court.

And I shall count every day lost, wherein I shall not either study your well-doing in thought, or do your name honour in speech, or perform you service in deed.

Good my Lord, account and accept me your most bounden and devoted friend and servant of all men living, "March 7, 1616 (_i.

e. _ 1616/1617).

FR.

BACON, C.

S."

He himself believed the appointment to be a popular one.

"I know I am come in," he writes to the King soon after, "with as strong an envy of some particulars as with the love of the general."

On the 7th of May, 1617, he took his seat in Chancery with unusual pomp and magnificence, and set forth, in an opening speech, with all his dignity and force, the duties of his great office and his sense of their obligation.

But there was a curious hesitation in treating him as other men were treated in like cases.

He was only "Lord Keeper."

It was not till the following January (1617/18) that he received the office of Lord Chancellor.

It was not till half a year afterwards that he was made a Peer.

Then he became Baron Verulam (July, 1618), and in January, 1620/21, Viscount St. Alban's. From this time Bacon must be thought of, first and foremost, as a Judge in the great seat which he had so earnestly sought.

It was the place not merely of law, which often tied the judge's hands painfully, but of true justice, when law failed to give it.

Bacon's ideas of the duties of a judge were clear and strong, as he showed in various admirable speeches and charges: his duties as regards his own conduct and reputation; his duties in keeping his subordinates free from the taint of corruption.

He was not ignorant of the subtle and unacknowledged ways in which unlawful gains may be covered by custom, and an abuse goes on because men will not choose to look at it.

He entered on his office with the full purpose of doing its work better than it had ever been done.

He saw where it wanted reforming, and set himself at once to reform.

The accumulation and delay of suits had become grievous; at once he threw his whole energy into the task of wiping out the arrears which the bad health of his predecessor and the traditional sluggishness of the court had heaped up.

In exactly three months from his appointment he was able to report that these arrears had been cleared off.

"This day" (June 8, 1617), he writes to Buckingham, "I have made even with the business of the kingdom for common justice.

Not one cause unheard.

The lawyers drawn dry of all the motions they were to make.

Not one petition unheard.

And this I think could not be said in our time before."

The performance was splendid, and there is no reason to think that the work so rapidly done was not well done.

We are assured that Bacon's decisions were unquestioned, and were not complained of.

At the same time, before this allegation is accepted as conclusive proof of the public satisfaction, it must be remembered that the question of his administration of justice, which was at last to assume such strange proportions, has never been so thoroughly sifted as, to enable us to pronounce upon it, it should be.

The natural tendency of Bacon's mind would undoubtedly be to judge rightly and justly; but the negative argument of the silence at the time of complainants, in days when it was so dangerous to question authority, and when we have so little evidence of what men said at their firesides, is not enough to show that he never failed.