1620. Dec. of safe and decorous villany. He got his first step by XII. 14. making love to his master's daughter; he grew rich by cheating the customs; he won notice from the Council by telling them how to squeeze rich aldermen while lightening the load on such poor devils as himself; he secured the protection of Lord Northampton by a bribe of land which was not his own; he pleased the King by a plan for jobbing away the Crown lands on a more extensive scale; he fixed himself on Buckingham by betraying to him, or to his cause, his first patrons the Howards. Cranfield was the chief instrument in denouncing Suffolk and placing the Staff in Buckingham's hands for sale. To reward this service, Suffolk's son-in-law, Viscount Wallingford, was compelled by threats of prosecution, fine, and ruin, to surrender to Cranfield the Court of Wards. Only a villain of stony heart and brazen cheek could have either done this deed or taken this reward; for these Howards whom he betrayed and spoiled were the very men who brought him into notice, presented him at court, and procured for him a seat in the House of Commons. But, in truth, there is no act of turpitude, short of the vulgar crimes for which men are hung, at which Cranfield, when his interests call, would stop. 15. Bishop Goodman, who knew him well and who has left a defence of him, such as it is, confesses for him to more dubious conduct and to more safe rascalities than would have blasted, the credit of ten ordinary men. Courting the society of wits and scholars, pretending to wit himself, he has no true knowledge of letters, no true sympathy for such weak fry as poets and playwrights. Pelf is 15. Goodman, i. 295-308; Coryat's Description of a Philosophical Feast, Dom. Papers, lxvi. 2, S. P. O. 1620. Dec. XII. 15. his god. His greed of money is a brisk passion, and he has a perfect familiarity with the crooked ways in which money can be got. No rogue can deceive Cranfield. "Tush, man!" he will say, "I was bred in the city." His hand is in every one's purse; and woe to the man on whose place he has set his heart! To pull down judges and councillors, for his own advancement and for his patron's gain, is the task to which he has now devoted a busy and teeming brain. Since his marriage with Lady Buckingham's niece he has been suffered to mulet and plunder at his ease; and though some of his victims, mad with their losses, threaten to cut his throat, the audacious speculator in human roguery holds his course as though there were no retribution for injustice, either in this world or in the next. A loftier vista opens to his sight; the Staff and the peerage seem within his reach; but he can only grasp them by the help of that powerful and vindictive woman to whom he lately owed the pleasant alternative of destruction or a wife. 16. This great lady, if old enough to have grandchildren, is not, in her own belief, too old to have a lover; and one more subtle than a serpent is at her side. John Williams was the chaplain to Egerton when Egerton held the Seals; but while blessing his master's meat and wine, he kept an eye on business; and when Bacon, coming to York House, offered to continue him in his post, the divine refused, having begun to dream of recovering the custody of the Great Seal from the lawyers to the churchmen. In the face of candidates like Bacon, Montagu, and Coke, such a hope would seem to most men vain; not so to one versed in the arts by which a low order of monks and priests have in all 16. Doquets, Nov. 5, 1619; Welden, 127, 130; Speaker's Note, Feb. 6, 1621, S. P. O.; Chamberlain to Carleton, Mar. 20, 1620, S. P. O. When he has in fight is well nigh 1620. Dec. ages striven to enslave the world. He makes court to Buck- XII. 16. ingham's mother; convinced that no woman is insensible to the flatteries of love, least of all an ambitious woman, greedy for pleasure, and past her prime. terested her passions in his career, his won. She puts him in the way to rise. him to her son; so shaping his course that, as either Lord Chancellor or as Archbishop of Canterbury, he may soon. appear to the world in rank and power a husband less unworthy of herself. Buckingham finds in Williams a divine of easy virtue and specious talents; who never prates to him about reform, who pays no homage to the primate, who detests the House of Commons with all his soul. At a word from his new mistress or from her son, Williams would not scruple to send his archbishop to the Fleet, or to resist and insult the whole Puritan parliament. A man capable of rising through an old woman's folly and a young man's vices has not been slow to rise. The needy chaplain has become Dean of Salisbury and Dean of Westminster. He is to have the first mitre that falls into the King's gift. If Bacon can be ruined, he is to have the Seals. 17. To three such schemers as an old Chief Justice, a Master of the Court of Wards, and an ex-chaplain to the Lord Chancellor, urged by the sharpest passions of cupidity and revenge, and backed by the whole tribe of Villiers, an accusation against the holder of the Seals is easy enough to frame. The courts of law are full of abuses. The highest officer of the realm has no salary from the state. 17. Gerard to Carleton, May 9, 1617, S. P. O.; Chamberlain to Carleton, May 10, 1617, S. P. O.; Proposals concerning the Chancery, 1650; Council Reg., Sept. 28, 1622. 1620. Dec. XII. 17. Custom imposes on him a host of servants; officers of his court and of his household; masters, secretaries, ushers, clerks, receivers, porters, none of whom receives a mark a year from the Crown; men who have bought their places, and who are paid, as he himself is paid, in fees and fines. The amounts of half these fees are left to chance, to the hope or gratitude of the suitor, often to the cupidity of the servant or the length of the suitor's purse. The certain fines of Chancery, as subsequent inquiries show, are only thirteen hundred pounds a-year, the fluctuating fines still less; beyond which beggarly sum the great establishments of the Lord Chancellor, his court, his household, and his followers, gentlemen of quality, sons of peers and prelates, magistrates, deputy-lieutenants of counties, knights of the shire, have all to live on fees and presents. The causes heard are many-five or six hundred in every term ; the servants of the court are not all honest; some indeed are flagitious rogues. The Chancellor has not taken them voluntarily into his service, nor can he always turn them adrift their places are their freeholds. Among thousands of suitors, all of whom must have paid fees into the court, half of whom must be smarting under the pangs of a lost cause, it will be strange indeed if cunning, malice, and unscrupulous power combined, cannot find some charge that may be tortured into the appearance of a wrong. 18. They find a fitting instrument for this nefarious search. John Churchill is a wretch whose days have been spent in the most sordid tricks and chicaneries of law. His father was a defaulter in the Court of Wards, he 18. Grant Book, 62; Crump to Churchill, April 14, 1605, S. P. O.; Acton to Churchill, April 14, 1605, S. P. O.; Mabel to Churchill, Aug. 28, 1605, S. P. O.; Ellis Churchill to Churchill, Aug. 29, Sept. 19, 20, Oct. 3, 1605, S. P. O.; Bourchier to Cecil, June 16, 1611, S. P. O.; Chamberlain to Carleton, Mar. 21, 1621, S. P. O. 1620. Dec. himself was early in life concerned in a most infamous XII. 18. fraud. Ten years before he lends his services to the enemies of Lord St. Albans, he sold to Sir John Bourchier for a thousand pounds down and eighty pounds a-year for life a manor which Bourchier found that he had previously conveyed to his two uncles for twenty shillings. Bacon, who found this rascal occupying a place of trust in the Court of Chancery, detecting him in an act of forgery and extortion, has been compelled to turn him into the street. Broken for his bad faith, liable to severe punishment for his fraud, sore against his superior, he is just the man for Williams and Coke. Familiar with the court and with its clients, every vicious witness, every maddened loser, every knave who has been exposed, every dupe who has been hurt, are known to him by name and sight. A promise of protection from the law, with a restoration to his place on Bacon's fall, sharpens at once his greed and his hate. He hunts among the victims of Chancery law. Every one who has a grievance, or who fancies he has a grievance, against the Lord Chancellor, he persuades or compels to set down his tale. 19. Ever since the day when Bacon got the Seals, Coke has been scoring up accusations against him. Lists were framed by the Villiers clan, ready to lodge with the King, before the Chancellor had been a year in office. Every month has helped them to new matter. By the industry of Churchill they are now prepared to go before the Star Chamber; but a patriotic proposal, made and pressed on the Crown by Bacon himself, shifts the scene of their accusation from the Star Chamber to the House of Peers. 19. Yelverton to Bacon, Sept. 3, 1617, in Birch, 138. |