This scene takes place on Tuesday. On Thursday the VII. 18. committee meets again; the King has not accepted his 1606. defeat, nor will the Commons enlarge their vote. Saturday brings no change of mood. On Monday the committee Mar. 22. must report to the House; and Bacon, who has been made reporter, will have to report against his own convictions of what is best for the country and the Crown. He sees the committee sullen, almost savage. Monday is the anniversary of the King's accession, yet no one rises to propose a holiday.

Fagged with work, he must ride down to Gorhambury for a day of rest. He does not wish to appear as if flying from his post, so he takes up his pen and writes:

BACON TO THE EARL OF SALISBURY.

This Saturday, the 22nd of March, 1606.

IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP,

I purpose upon promise rather than business to make a step to my house in the country this afternoon, which, because your Lordship may hear otherwise, and thereupon conceive any doubt of my return to the pursuance of the King's business, I thought it concerned me to give your Lordship an account that I purpose (if I live) to be there to-morrow in the evening, and so to report the subsidy on Monday morning; which, though it be a day of triumph, yet I hear of no adjournment, and therefore the House must sit. But if, in regard of the King's servants' attendance, your Lordship conceive doubt the House will not be well filled that day, I humbly pray your Lordship I may receive your direction for the forbearing to enter into the matter that day. I doubt not the success, if those attend that should. So I rest, in all humbleness, at your Lordship's honourable commands,

F. BACON.

VII. 18.

1606.

Mar. 22.

Mar. 25.

An hour after this note is penned a rumour rises, none knows how, that the King is dead. Some say he has been shot, some stabbed, some smothered in his bed. No one asks where the King is; all agree that he is killed. Members rush to the council, to the city: but the ministers, the aldermen, know as little as themselves. Some spur for Theobalds, some for Royston. London yields itself to the wildest terrors. Hundreds of men concerned in the Powder Plot are still at large. Garnet is still unhung; the priests are sworn to have blood for blood; the Jesuits, it is said, have threatened to burn London to ashes, to massacre all the Protestants, should that shining example of Christian virtue come to harm. Citizens bar their doors and swing on their Toledo blades.

A horseman, Sir Herbert Crofts, dashes into Palace Yard. He has seen the King! The King is safe, and near the town. Fear now mutinies into joy. Bells laugh over London roofs, crowds ride in procession to meet their Prince. If he is safe, the realm is safe. The Peers and Commons go to Whitehall. Ben Jonson bursts into music. As night comes down, the streets start out with fire, and the taverns of Fleet-street and Cheapside roar with patriotic songs.

19. Sunday and Monday pass in rejoicings and receptions. Tuesday brings up Bacon. He has not, he tells the House of Commons, drawn a word-for-word report from the committee, for his soul is shaken with too much fear and joy. What, he cries, are a few debts to the exultation now straining every loyal heart? These debts are less the King's than the late Queen's. The Queen made war, the country

19. Com. Jour., i. 286, 299; Cecil to Wotton, Mar. 19, June 18, 1606, S. P. O.; Statutes 3 Jacobi, c. 26.

1606. Mar. 25.

must repair the ravages of war. Reparation costs money. VII. 19. The Crown debts, too, must be paid in full, next year if not this year; and why prefer a vote one session to a vote another session? The House can name its time; but he says, Vote to-day! In that rapturous and sacred moment, when a great alarm has pressed heart to heart, and made the whole nation one, he calls on the gentlemen of England to crown their own happy work by voting the subsidies necessary to support the power of the country, the independence of the Crown.

His eloquence bears away the House.

Hyde fronts the stream; but the tide has turned towards Whitehall, and he strives against genius and enthusiasm, if manfully yet in vain. A bill for another subsidy is passed.

20. In the flush of this triumph, with his fame now May 6. fixed, and with a great place, won by himself, not tossed to him by a patron, within reach of his hand (not, as Lord Campbell says, when he is poor and down in the summer of the Queen's death), he begs the lady of his love to name her day. Three years ago they were pledged to each other; he could have made her Lady Bacon then, or at any time since then; but he has hoped to give to his bride a more settled fortune and a more illustrious name. Renown beyond the dreams of woman he can give her. Nor is he poor in those worldly gifts which girls are taught to covet even more than character and fame. Besides the grants bestowed upon him by Elizabeth, the reversion in the Star Chamber (not yet fallen in), and the leases of Cheltenham and Charlton Kings, of the Pitts and Twickenham

20. Bacon to Egerton, Tanner MSS. 251, fol. 38 b; Rawley's Resuscitatio, 41; Domestic Papers, James I., xix. 33; Heath's Preface, Bacon's Works, vii. 576.

1606. May.

VII. 20. Park, the death of poor Anthony (dead of the vices and excesses caught from his noble friend) has given him Gorhambury and the lands about it, where he now lives when not at Gray's Inn, and where, in after years, he will build Verulam House by the pond, taking his house, as he says, to the water, when the water will no longer flow to his house. More than all, the patent of Solicitor-General may be now sealed to him any day or week, a post of not less value than three or four thousand pounds a-year, with openings to higher office and greater pay, to the Privy Council, the Peerage, and the Seals. He is rich, too, in genius and in noble friends. If Cecil plays with him fast and loose, the Lord Chancellor pushes his fortunes at the bar, and Lady Egerton smooths his suit with the young beauty and with her domineering kin. Sir John is in high spirits. True, the bill to exempt the four shires from Lord Zouch's jurisdiction has been dropped by the Lords; but the King has assured Sir Herbert Crofts with his own lips that right shall be done; and the loyal country gentleman believes that when a prince promises to do right he will of course maintain his word.

May 10.

The day is named; the tenth of May.

21. By help of Sir Dudley Carleton we may look upon the pleasant scene, upon the pretty bride, the jovial knight, the romping girls, and the merry company, as through a glass. Feathers and lace light up the rooms in the Strand. Cecil has been warmly urged to come over from Salisbury House. Three of his gentlemen, Sir Walter Cope, Sir Baptist Hicks, and Sir Hugh Beeston, hard drinkers and men about town, strut over in his stead, flaunting in their

21. Carleton to Chamberlain, May 11, 1606, S. P. O.; Bacon's Will; Spedding's Bacon, i. 8.

1606.

swords and plumes; yet the prodigal bridegroom, sump- VII. 21. tuous in his tastes as in his genius, clad in a suit of Genoese velvet, purple from cap to shoe, outbraves them all. The bride, too, is richly dight; her whole dowry seeming May 10. to be piled up on her in cloth of silver and ornaments of gold. The wedding rite is performed at St. Marylebone chapel, two miles from the Strand, among the lanes and suburbs winding towards the foot of Hampstead Hill. Who that is blessed with any share of sympathy or poetry cannot see how that glad and shining party ride to the rural church on that sunny tenth of May? how the girls will laugh and Sir John will joke, as they wind through lanes now white with thorn and the bloom of pears; how the bridesmaids scatter rosemary and the groomsmen struggle for the kiss? Who cannot imagine that dinner in the Strand, though the hunchback Earl of Salisbury has not come over to Sir John's lodging to taste the cheer or kiss the bride? We know that the wit is good, for Bacon is there; we may trust Sir John for the quality of his wine.

Alice brings to her husband two hundred and twenty pounds a-year, with a further claim, on her mother's death, of one hundred and forty pounds a-year. As Lady Pakington long outlived Bacon, that increase never came into his hands. Two hundred and twenty pounds a-year is his wife's whole fortune. What is not spent in lace and satins for her bridal dress, he allows her to invest for her separate use. From his own estate he settles on her five hundred pounds a-year.

Now, in what sense can a marriage in which there seems to be a good deal of love, and in which there certainly is no great flush of money, be called, on Bacon's side, a mercenary match?