against him in the Star Chamber for breach of the peace, XI. 12. and allow his daughter the shelter of the Attorney-General's house. Coke shudders at this order for his appearance in the Star Chamber. Recently fined four thousand pounds in that court for taking bail of a pirate, he fears lest a second accusation should end in a second fine. He cannot count on either gratitude or wisdom in the Villiers people. These thriftless adventurers may think it safer to take his money than wait for the chance of obtaining his wife's broad lands. He finds it wiser to defer to the Privy Council. With a rancorous animosity in his heart towards Bacon, and with fiery rage against Yelverton, he bends so far as to undergo a pretended reconciliation with his wife. Bacon joyfully announces to the King that peace is made. 1617. July 21. 13. A line of writers closing in Lord Campbell repre- July 25. sents Bacon as first selfishly striving to thwart the match; then, finding Buckingham bent on it, as plotting with Lady Hatton by underground and criminal practices to defeat it; next, after bearing with abject spirit the most provoking taunts and threats from the favourite, as meanly condescending to eat his words and to forward a match which he must have detested with all his soul. The dates supplied by the Council Register correct these errors. Bacon's first note to Buckingham on the match has the date of July twelfth, his first note to the King that of July twenty-fifth. Before the earlier date, Lady Hatton and her daughter ran away, the ex-Chief Justice broke into Withipole's house, the Council met to consider his offence, and Clement Edmondes, their clerk, took charge 13. Bacon to Buckingham, July 12, 25, 1617; Bacon to James, July 25, 1617. R XI. 13. of the girl. Before the later date, and before a single word was heard from Buckingham in answer, Bacon calmed the outrage, reconciled husband and wife, and restored Frances Coke to her father's house. 1617. July 25. Oct. 14. After all this was done, he wrote to Buckingham and the King the reasons which, in his opinion, made a marriage between John Villiers and Frances Coke undesirable: the refusal of Lady Hatton, the dependency of the young girl on her mother, the quarrelsome temper of the two parents, the notoriety and scandal of their domestic feuds, the disapproval of leading men in the Government, the recent disgrace of Coke, the divisions which his return to the Council would bring with it-sage and honest reasons, one and all, which received the most prompt and signal justification from events. But Buckingham was blind. The King himself forbad Bacon to oppose the favourite's schemes of family aggrandisement. Unable either to resist his Majesty's commands, or to close his eyes on the coming evil, he accepted the duty laid upon him: "For my Lord of Buckingham, I had rather go against his mind than against his good. Your Majesty I must obey." 15. Lady Hatton, on publishing a prior contract between her daughter and the young Lord Oxford, is put into arrest, and the marriage of Sir John and Frances celebrated with regal pomp. It begins in misery to end in shame. Lady Hatton resists every persuasion to appear, nor is there a single Cecil present at the rite. James makes the bride 14. Vere to Carleton, Aug. 12, 1617, S. P. O.; Gerard to Carleton, Aug. 18, 1617, S. P. O. 15. Council Reg., Sept. 24, 1617; Obligations and Oaths of Frances Coke to become the Wife of Henry Vere, July 10, 1617, S. P. O.; Gerard to Carleton, Aug. 18, 1617, S. P. O.; Herbert to Carleton, Oct. 6, 1617, S. P. O.; Vere to Carleton, Oct. 20, 1617, S. P. O. QUARRELS OF THE PAKINGTONS. 243 1617. Oct. groom Viscount Purbeck; but he cannot make the young XI. 15. bride love or respect a man to whom she has been sold. Coke is content. To the chagrin of the Lord Keeper, to the terror of Yelverton, he returns to the Privy Council-a lawyer out of work-the situation in which his enmity can oftenest wound and his activity oftenest thwart the detested rival who holds the Seals. Expecting a coronet, Coke chooses for himself the title of Lord Stoke. He believes, as the world believes, that his rise will be the signal for Bacon's fall; yet such are the suavity and zeal, the splendour and success of the new Lord Keeper-such his popularity on the bench and at Whitehall-that, in spite of new scandals brought upon him and his family by Sir John and Lady Pakington, he is able to defy the malice of his enemies and to soar above every storm. 16. When her daughter's husband received the Great Seal, Lady Pakington supposed that her day of deliverance from Sir John was at hand. The lusty knight, who has sunk her rents in his brine-pits and fish-ponds, has now grown old, verging on seventy years of age, while she is still young and hale. But time, which slackens his thews, has left untamed his temper and his pride. The mother of a Lord Keeper's wife can surely get justice done to her at last against the tyrant! She appeals to the law, and brings him before the Court of High Commission, where her cold easy manner tells in her behalf, and his fluster and violence get him sent to jail and put under lock and guard. To Bacon's deep mortification, and despite his strenuous efforts to avoid the case, this domestic broil is referred to him. Under trials of excessive difficulty and delicacy, he 16. Dom. Papers James the First, xcii. 88. XI. 16. bears himself between husband and wife, in this miserable 1617. Oct. 1618. Jan. stage, in a way to extort the praise of even those newswriters and gossips who are in other matters the harshest critics of his life. He tells Lady Pakington she is in the wrong and that she ought to yield. He warns her against the hope of finding in him a lenient judge so long as she follows her cold unbending course. This is the testimony of an unfriendly hand: CHAMBERLAIN TO CARLETON. July 5, 1617. There be great wars betwixt Sir John and his lady, who sues him in the High Commission; where, by his own wilfulness, she hath some advantage of him and keeps him in prison. But the Lord Keeper deals very honourably in the matter, which, though he could not compound being referred to him, yet he carries himself so indifferently that he wishes her to yield, and tells her plainly and publicly that she must look for no countenance from him as long as she follows this course. 17. Notwithstanding these scandals and vexations in his own family, the Lord Keeper rises in power, expands in fame. In January, 1618, he attains the higher grade of Chancellor. In July of the same year he becomes a Peer. His slanderers sink beneath his feet. No severity seems to the Privy Council too great for those, however high in rank, who menace his person or dispute his justice. For a saucy word they send Lord Clifton to the Fleet: for a complaint against one of his verdicts they commit Lady Ann Blount to the Marshalsea. In 1620 he publishes his 17. Council Reg., Dec. 30, 1617, Mar. 17, 27, 1618; Grant Book, 241, 283; Herbert to Carleton, Dec. 30, 1617, S. P. O.; Chamberlain to Carleton, Feb. 3, 1621, S. P. O. 1618. Jan. Novum Organuma book which has in it the germs of XI. 17. more power and good to man than any other work not of Divine authorship in the world. He is now at the height of earthly fame. First layman in his own country, first philosopher in Europe, what is wanting to his felicity? Neither power, nor popularity, nor titles, nor love, nor fame, nor obedience, nor troops of friends. All these he has no man in greater fulness. If his heart has other longings, he has only to express his wish. In January, 1621, he receives the title of Viscount St. Albans, in a form of peculiar honour-other Peers being created by letters-patent, he by investiture with the coronet and robe. 18. Yet, only seven months after printing the Greatest Birth of Time, only three months after receiving in the King's presence the robe and coronet, he is stripped of his honours, degraded from his great place, condemned to a monstrous fine, and flung into the Tower. The tale of this fall is the most strange and sad in the whole history of man. 18. Lords' Jour., iii. 105. 1620. 1621. Jan. 27. |