VII. 22. 1606. June. 22. A slight more galling than has yet been put on him awaits the close of his honeymoon. Only a few days after his marriage to Alice, Sir Francis Gawdy of the Common Pleas, stricken with apoplexy, is removed from his chambers at Serjeants' Inn to Easton Hall, where he soon after dies. Coke goes up to the bench, and Doderidge, the Solicitor-General, ought by the custom of the law to follow Coke, leaving the post of Solicitor void. But Sir Francis Gawdy having been a partizan of the Essex faction, and his daughter married to the son of Lady Rich, Cecil, either anxious not to offend that powerful faction, which he has made his own by a double contract of marriage, or doubtful of his cousin's subserviency in office, sets aside the usual order of promotion at the bar, and July 4. raises Sir Henry Hobart, his obscure Attorney of the Court of Wards, over Doderidge's as well as over Bacon's head, to the high place of Attorney-General. Bacon complains to Egerton and Cecil of the insult even more than the wrong of such a trick. The Lord Chancellor, who sees the error made by the government in alienating the most powerful man in the House of Commons, proposes to heal the wound by asking Sir John Doderidge to yield his patent to Bacon, taking in exchange the place of King's Serjeant, together with a promise of the first seat that shall fall vacant in the King's Bench. To this Sir John and Cecil both object. Oct. Nov. 23. When Parliament meets in November to discuss the Bill of Union, Bacon stands back. The King has chosen 22. Foss's Judges of England, vi. 158, 306, 329; Chron. Jurid. 181; Montagu, v. 297; Council Reg., Oct. 14, 1606. 23. Carleton to Chamberlain, Dec. 18, 1606, S. P. O.; Foster to Mathews, Feb. 16, 1607, S. P. O.; Com. Jour., i. 314, 333; Lane's Reports in the Court of Exchequer, 22, 31; M'Crie's Life of Melville, ii, 234. 1606. Νον. his Attorney; let the new Attorney fight the King's VII. 23. battle. The adversaries to be met are bold and many. During the recess Cecil has imposed on the country a Book of Rates, pretending that taxes may be lawfully laid in the King's ports at the King's pleasure. John Bates, a merchant trading with Venice, resisting a tax unsanctioned by the House of Commons, has been condemned in the Court of Exchequer; but this condemnation of Bates rousing a nation of taxpayers, from every port into which ships can float come protests against Sir Thomas Fleming's reading of the law. Beyond the Tweed, too, people are mutinous to the point of war; for the countrymen of Andrew Melville begin to suspect the King of a design against the Kirk, and Melville himself, lured by a false pretence from St. Andrew's to London, has been provoked into an indiscretion, and clapped in the Tower. Under such crosses, the Bill on Union fares but ill. Fuller, the bilious representative of London, flies at the Scots. The Scots in London are in the highest degree unpopular. Lax in morals and in taste, they will take the highest place at table, they will drink out of anybody's can, they will kiss the hostess or her buxom maid without saying "By your leave." Brawls fret the taverns which they haunt; pasquins hiss against them from the stage. Such broils distract the poor King, who sees no way to put them down save by commanding Popham to whip and pillory the rogues who beat his countrymen and friends. Three great poets, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston, go to jail for a harmless jest against these Scots. Such acts of rigour make the name of Union hateful to the public ear. Hobart goes to the wall. James now sees that the battle is not to the weak nor the race to the slow. Bacon has only Dec. 1606. Dec. VII. 23. to hold his tongue and make his terms. Alarmed lest the Bill of Union may be rejected by an overwhelming vote, Cecil suddenly adjourns the House. He must get strength. The plan proposed by Egerton for making Doderidge a King's Serjeant, Bacon the Solicitor-General, is revived. Pressed on all sides, here by the Lord Chancellor, there by a mutinous House of Commons, Cecil at length yields to his cousin's claim, Sir John Doderidge bows his neck, and when Parliament meets after the Christmas holidays Bacon holds in his pocket a written engagement for the Solicitor's place. 1607. 24. The Bill of Union, drawn by Egerton, consists of Feb. 14. four parts: hostile laws, border laws, laws of commerce, laws of navigation. Three of these parts present no difficulties to the House of Commons. Statutes which forbid a Scot to pass the Tweed, which fill the dales of Ettrick and Yarrow with feud and slaughter, which prohibit the sale of English wool in Scotland and of Scottish furs in England, find no advocates. All the old barbarous laws are at once annulled. But the knights and burgesses resist the King's design of naturalizing the whole Scottish population. Nicholas Fuller reopens the debate. A union of these two countries, says the uncivil member for London, would be a marriage of the rich with the poor, the strong with the weak. With the pardonable pride of a London burgess he points to the arts, the industry, and wealth of England, to its orchards swelling with fruit, its pastures fat with kine, its waters white with sails, to its thriving people, abundant agriculture, inexhaustible fisheries, woods, and mines. With all these riches he contrasts a land of crags and storms, peopled by a race of men rude as their climate, poor in resources 24. Com. Jour., i. 333-337; Lords' Jour., ii. 469, 472; Statutes, 4 Jac. c. 1. 1607. Feb. 14. and in genius, a nation with pedlars for merchants, and VII. 24. two or three rotten hoys for a fleet. Such countries, he contends, are best apart. What man in his senses, having two estates divided by a hedge, one fruitful, one waste, will break down his fence and let the cattle stray from the waste into garden and corn-field? Will any one mingle two swarms of bees? why then two hostile swarms of men? England is bare as the land round Bethel; so that nature and God call out to separate the nations, as Lot chose the left hand, Abraham the right. He denies that the King's accession has changed the relations of the Saxon to the Scot and sits down with demanding whether, if Mary had borne a son to Philip, that son being heir to his father's crowns, an English Parliament would have naturalized the people of Sicily and Spain? 25. The speech makes a deep impression. Fuller speaks to men convinced; men sore from daily wrongs and insults. Bacon, rising to reply, begins with that shower of image Feb. 17. and illustration which his experience tells him is never lost on a learned and poetic House. He begs his hearers to forget all private feuds, to raise their minds to questions of the highest state; not as merchants dealing with mean affairs, but as judges and kings charged with the weal of empires. Glancing in scorn at Fuller, he passes with his light laugh the moral of that tale of Abraham and Lot, a parting cursed with a cruel war and a long captivity, to his illustration of the fence. The King, Bacon says, threw down the fence when he crossed the Tweed; yet the flock of Scots has not yet followed through the rent. Proud and lavish, doting on dress and show, the Scottish gentle 25. Speech by Sir Francis Bacon in the House of Commons concerning the Naturalization of the Scots, 1641; Wilson, 37. 1607. Feb. 17. VII. 25. man will rather starve at home than betray his poverty abroad. The Roman commons fought for the right to name Plebeian consuls, and, when they had won the right, voted for Patricians: so with the Scots: they claim the privilege of coming into England; yield the right, and they will not come. It is said the land is full. London, he grants, is thronged and swollen: not the open downs and plains. France counts more people to the mile. Flanders, Italy, Germany exceed us in population. Are there no English towns decayed? Are there no ancient cities heaps of stones? Why, marsh grows on the pasture, pasture on the plough-land. Wastes increase; the soil cries loud for hands to sow the corn and reap the harvest. But this bill for naturalizing the Scots stands on a far higher ground. A people, warlike as the Romans and as ourselves, a race of men who, like wild horses, are hard to control because lusty with blood and youth, offer to be one people with us, friends in the day of peace, allies in the day of strife. Take from the Scots this brand of aliens, they will stand by our side, bulwarks and defenders against the world. Should you shut them out from England, treating them as strangers and enemies, they may prove to you what the Pisans proved to Florence, the Latins to Rome. In our ancient wars the invader found the gates of our kingdom open. France could enter through Scotland, Spain through Ireland. Pass this bill, we close our gates. No minor argument deserves a thought. Union is strength, union is defence. You object that the Scots are poor. Are not strong limbs better than riches? Has not Solon told us the man of iron is master of the man of gold? Does not Macchiavelli pour his scorn at the false proverb which makes money the sinews of war? The true sinews of war are the sinews of valiant men. |