1604.

Aug.

of Sir Roger's ghost. A chain of ponds, alive with fish VII. 10. and fed by natural springs, drips past the ruin, and beyond these slants a bright green grassy upland, bare of wood, from the top of which, a level table-land, the eye sweeps lovingly over wood and water, hill and hamlet and orchard; near it the village spires of Ombersley and Hampton; far away the cathedral towers of Worcester; and in the distance, over leagues of country, powdered in May with the pink and white of innumerable apple-trees, in autumn warm with the ruddy glow of the ploughed red land, the bold purple ridge of the Malvern hills. On this plateau, high above the low-lying woods, Sir John has begun to build a big house and dig a big lake-a house of rough red brick, with a grand hall and a stateroom above it, panelled, carved, and tapestried: a house like himself, thoroughly genuine and English, in which he is to die, and his descendants are to live. His new lake, close by his house, is the wonder and bugbear of the shire.

11. Between this proud mother and this burly knight the course of Bacon's love for Alice has no great hope of running smooth. Lady Pakington adores great people; thinking more of Sir Francis Bacon as a friend and favourite of the Lord Chancellor than she would have thought of him had he already published the Great Instauration. Lady Egerton condescends to keep her in good humour while the man of genius waits and labours for a better time.

He has still to wait, even for that rise in his profession Oct. 28. which is incontestably his due. On the death of Sir

11. Bacon to Egerton, in Tanner MSS. 251, fol. 38 b; Doquets, Aug. 18, Oct. 28, 1604, S. P. O.

VII. 11. William Peryam, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and the third husband of his sister Elizabeth Bacon, Fleming becomes Chief Baron, yet the Solicitorship, vacant once more, is given over his head to Sir John Doderidge, serjeant of the coif.

1604. Oct. 28.

1605.

Nov.

Nov. 8.

12. A brief reference in the charge against William Talbot, a phrase here and there in his Essays, have told the world what Bacon thought of the Powder Plot. It has not been known that he had any part, slight or serious, in repressing this foul conspiracy, the natural sequel of the Essex plot.

The new facts are found in an unpublished letter from Bacon to Cecil.

The crime of Essex, the royal patronage of the conspirators, have borne their fruit in the Westminster mine. It is the eighth of November, four days after the strange discovery made by Lord Monteagle. Fawkes is in the Tower. Catesby, Percy, Christopher and John Wright are riding through the midland shires, flinging away cloaks and scarfs, the country at their heels. The fight is not yet won. Jesuits peer from the slums of Whitefriars, and many who have come to town for the fifth of November still lurk among the sheds of Drury-lane. True citizens keep watch and ward, lest, maddened by defeat, some desperate villain should commit midnight murder or scatter midnight fire.

John Drake, serving-man to Reynolds, a gentleman living in pleasant Holborn, hears a fellow named Beard declare that the plot was a brave plot, and that he, for one, regrets it has failed. Drake runs to his master, and Reynolds repeats to the Principal of Staple Inn the sus

12. Bacon to Cecil, Nov. 8, 1605, S. P. O.; Examination of John Drake, Nov. 8, 1605, S. P. O.

1605.

Nov. 8.

picious words his servant has overheard. The Principal VII. 12. sees that here is no case for a city Dogberry: Beard must be a Papist, may be a plotter. Away he posts with the ancients of his Inn to Bacon's rooms in Gray's Inn Square. The words are bad, but general-may mean little, may mean much. The knave should certainly be caught and questioned. Bacon sends the examination of Drake to Cecil, with the following note:

BACON TO CECIL.

IT MAY PLEASE YOUR LORDSHIP,

Nov. 8, 1605.

I send an examination of one who was brought to me by the principal and ancients of Staple Inn, touching the words of one Beard, suspected for a Papist and practiser,-being general words, but bad, and I thought not good to neglect anything at such a time; so with signification of humble duty, I remain, at your Lordship's honourable commands, most humbly,

F. BACON.

13. Even the atrocious plot of Fawkes and Garnet, though its success would have been death to him, as to so many more, does not sour Bacon into a persecutor. He classes their crime with the massacres of Paris; but while the bigots find in these monstrous aberrations a plea for hanging and embowelling Roman Catholics who have taken no part in them, he finds, as wise and tolerant men see in them now after a lapse of two hundred and sixty years, an argument against arming any one sect of men with the persecutor's sword. The traitor he gives up to the

13. Mathews to Carleton, July, 1606, S. P. O.; Ap. to Sainsbury's Original Papers relating to Rubens, 341, 343; Bacon's Essays, ed. of 1625, No. 3; Mathews to Bacon, April 14, July 16, 1616, Lambeth MSS. 936.

1606.

Jan.

1606.

Jan.

VII. 13. law; the heretic is to him a brother who has lost his way. In the noblest and most original of his Essays, penned in the prime of his intellectual powers, he especially explains and defends this principle of toleration. But the doctrine of his book had been previously exercised as a virtue in his life. The lapse of Tobie Mathews from the English Church, to Rome puts his tolerant philosophy to the proof. Born on the steps of the episcopal bench, his grandfather a bishop, his father a bishop, four of his uncles bishops, all his connexions in the Church, the fall of this young man makes a noise in England loud as the apostacy of Spalatro makes in Rome. The Puritans would cut him off branch and bole. When he comes from Italy to London, having given up all his old delights, cards, wenches, wine, and oaths, some, who are not themselves saints, would fling him into the Tower and leave him there to die, as Spalatro, venturing into Rome, is sent to perish in the dungeons of St. Angelo. James is bitterly incensed against him, looking on his fall as that of a column of his church; his father drives. him from his heart with a curse; yet, when his whole kin spit on him and cast him forth, Bacon, strong in his sympathy for a scholar and a man who has lost his way, takes this outcast and regenerate pervert to his house. Though he fights against his friend's new doctrines, he never will consent, with the less tolerant world, to hunt him down for a change in his speculative views, which every eye can see has made him a better and a happier man. The philosopher may not be always able, by any sacrifice of name and credit, to shield this enthusiast from the rage of sects, but he comforts him when in jail, procures leave for him to return from exile, softens towards him the heart of his father, and obtains for him indulgences which probably save his life.

1606.

14. In the session which meets after the plot Bacon VII. 14. plays a most active and brilliant part. The whole world has come to town: some to see that the King is safe, some to see the traitors hang. Among others have come up Sir John and Lady Pakington, together with the young ladies from Westwood Park.

Sir John has left behind him for a few weeks his brinepits, his great pool, his herds of deer, his new house in the wood, his petty squabbles with the neighbouring squires, and penned himself and the young ladies in a lodging of the Strand, not only that he may see the opening of parliament and hear the news, but that he may fight his way through two or three of his ugly scrapes. In digging his huge pond in Westwood Park, he has put under water some part of an old road, never doubting his power to do what he saw good on his own estate, the more so that he has given a turn to the road more convenient for himself and for every one else. A neighbour, between whom and Sir John no love is lost, seeing the flaw in this easy mode of making things straight, procures from the Crown an order to remove the pond and restore the King's ancient highway. This news he sends to Westwood, saying, with a politeness which the hot old gentleman reads for insult, that, though he has such an order in his hands, he shall not use it so long as the knight shall be pleased to live with him on friendly terms. Scorning to owe his pleasures to such a fellow, Sir John breaks down his banks, and, the pool lying high, the waters race and crash through the orchards, strewing the fields with dead fish for a mile or more, and discolouring the Severn as far off as

14. Carleton to Chamberlain, May 11, 1600, S. P. O.; Wotton, i. 184; Heath's Preface to Bacon's Speech on the Jurisdiction of the Marches, vii. 569; Dom, Papers James I., x. 86.

L

Feb.