II. 12.

1587. Feb. 8.

When the deed is done that makes England freedone by Davison's command if not by the Queen's-she casts the courageous minister from power; nor will she to her dying day consent to see his face or hear his name. There ought to be no doubt of the sincerity of her grief.

13. The letters which have been printed in more recent times, suggesting that Elizabeth, while affecting to withhold her consent to Mary's death, instigated Paulett to commit a private murder, are odious and clumsy literary forgeries. These letters have been adopted by Lingard, and have half imposed on the cautious Hallam. Yet the originals are nowhere to be found, the name of the pretended discoverer of them is unknown, and they have never been seen by any competent or reputable man! The circumstances of their publication suggest forgery for a political end, while the style and statement of the letters prove them to be inventions of a later time. The alleged discovery of these papers, so damaging to the English Church and so fatal to the Protestant Queen, was made by partisans of the Papist Pretender in the hottest days of the Jacobite feud. The dates, the names, the facts adduced, establish the comparatively recent fraud.

The Queen, slow to shed blood, meant to save Mary from the block, but her people and her parliament, free from her woman's weakness and her ties of blood, required that high political justice should be done. Mary was the first and worst of all their foes; the princes of Spain and Italy were her soldiers, the Babingtons and Salisburys of London her assassins. England could only meet the league of Kaiser,

13. Comp. Hallam, Hist. of Eng., i. 159 n.; Lingard, viii. 282; with a Note in Charles Knight's Hist. of Eng., iii. 205.

1587. Feb. 8.

Pope, and King by snatching away their flag. Mary gone, II. 13. the invaders were without a cause, the conspirators without a cry. Who shall say what might have chanced had Mary been alive, when the Duke of Medina Sidonia rode off the Lizard, to excite a rising in the western shires, or even to divide the loyalty and check the courage of the English fleet?

14. Bacon's fame as a patriot, as an orator, is in these transactions formed and fixed. To know him is to be happy; to have been at school with him, distinguished. William Phillippes, wanting a place under Davison for his son, thinks it enough to remind the great minister that his boy was trained with the young member for Taunton.

1589.

15. Years hurry past. The Armada comes and goes. While the watch-fires are yet burning on the cliffs, the Feb. 4. wrecks of a hundred keels yet tossing in the foam from Devon to Caithness, Parliament meets. Bacon now sits for Liverpool. Danger is past; the Queen has been to thank God at St. Paul's, and a merry Christmas has been kept in hall and cottage, many a spar washed up from the wrecks of the Spanish fleet crackling in the festive fires.

14. Phillippes to Davison, Oct. 5, 1586, S. P. O. In citing those State Papers from which a main portion of the following narrative will be derived, I must express my obligations to Sir John Romilly, Master of the Rolls, for the facilities which, during many years, he has given to my researches among the public documents of which he has the legal charge. My thanks are no less due to Lord Stanley and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, for the courtesy with which, when Secretaries of State, they listened to my proposals for certain changes in the State Paper Office favourable to historical students, and for the promptitude with which they consented to remove restrictions that had made any general and critical study of the State Papers next to impossible.

15. Not. Parl., iii. 121; D'Ewes, 430-439; Statutes of the Realm, 31 Eliz., c. lũ.

II. 15.

1589. Feb. 4.

In this new session Bacon serves on the most important committees, speaks on the most important bills: now standing for the privileges of the House of Commons, now assaulting the Royal purveyors, now denouncing the forestallers, regrators, and engrossors. The great debates of this year occur on subsidies and grants.

Hatton proposes two subsidies and four fifteenths and tenths; to which Bacon, whose soul is in the patriotic tug, agrees: he moves, however, to insert in the bill a clause explaining that these grants are extraordinary and exceptional, meant for the war, and only for the war. To this the Queen objects, as fettering her future acts: enough for the squires to pronounce their Yea or Nay. The squires stand firm. Many men support what one man dares. After much debate, the Crown proposes to lay the bill, with Bacon's amendments to it, before the Learned Counsel; to which the House of Commons, insisting first that the author of the amendments shall be present at the sittings of that learned board, consents. Under his soft, persuasive tact, the interests of the sovereign are reconciled with the interests of her people, and the bill is passed to the satisfaction of Queen and Commons. Power and fame now seem to be in his grasp. Elizabeth sends for him to the palace; the electors of Middlesex cast their eyes upon him; and, when parliament meets again, he will represent the wealth and courage of that great constituency. From the session of 1589 dates his firm ascendency in the House of Commons.

16. Lady Bacon and her sons are poor. Anthony, the

16. Wotton's Baronetage, edited by Johnson and Timber, i. 8; Patent Rolls, 16 Eliz., par. 6, mem. 3 (see App. v. 1); Lady Bacon to Anthony Bacon, Lamb. MSS. 648, 106, 650, 75, 651, 54; Lady Bacon to her brothers Francis and Anthony Bacon, Lamb. MSS. 648, fol. 10.

1591.

loving and beloved, with whom Francis was bred at II. 16. Cambridge and in France, has now come home. His health, bad at the best, has broken in the south; so he lies for a long time in bed or on a couch at his brother's rooms in Gray's Inn Square. The two young fellows have little money and expensive ways. Anthony, as the elder brother, owns a seat at Redburn, in Hertfordshire, with a few farms lying round it. Gorhambury, too, will be his when Lady Bacon dies. But the rents fall far below his needs, not to speak of the needs of his brother, who is now prominent at court, a leader in the House of Commons, and a candidate for the glory of representing in parliament the metropolitan shire. Their half-brother Sir Nicholas, who inherits Redgrave and the broad Suffolk acres left by the Lord Keeper, a man with penurious habits and a swarm of children, deems his own nine sons and three daughters burthen enough, without having to pinch for the offspring of Lady Ann. When he marries a daughter they may get an invitation to Redgrave; but his brotherly hospitalities end with the feast. Nathaniel may paint their portraits and present them with game on canvas, but the artist can do nothing to fill their mouths. Edward has a lease from the Crown of Twickenham Park, a delightful place on the river, of which Francis makes a home. Lady Ann starves herself at Gorhambury that she may send to Gray's Inn ale from her cellar, pigeons from her dovecote, fowls from her farmyard; gifts which she seasons with a good deal of motherly love and not a little of her best motherly advice. The young men take the love and leave the advice, as young men will. Like Buckhurst, Herbert, and the race of gay cavaliers, while waiting for better days and brighter fortunes, they relieve their wants by help of the Lombards and Jews.

II. 17.

1592.

Feb. 18.

The

17. Francis looks for an opening to mend their means. A rich alderman dies, leaving his son a ward. guardianship of a Queen's ward is often a profitable toil, and the care of Hayward's son is in Burghley's gift. Francis urges Lady Ann to apply to her sister's husband

for this lucrative trust.

MADAM,

BACON TO LADY BACON.

From my Lodgings, Feb. 18, 1591-2. Alderman Hayward is deceased this night. His eldest son is fallen ward. My Lord Treasurer doth not. for the most part hastily dispose of wards. It were worth the obtaining, if it were but in respect of the widow, who is a gentlewoman much recommended. Your ladyship hath never had any ward. If, my Lady, it were too early for my brother to begone with a suit to my Lord before he had seen his Lordship, and, for me, if I at this time procure (?) my Lord to be my friend with the Queen, it may please your ladyship to move my Lord, and to promise to be thankful to any other my Lord oweth pleasure unto. There should be no time lost therein. And so I most humbly take my leave.

Your Ladyship's most obedient son,

FR. BACON.

My Lord (Lord Burghley) is a leal friend to him with the Queen; a little slow, as his nature is, but honest, sage, and sure. While waiting for a post, and only that of Attorney-General or Solicitor-General will serve his turn, the young barrister fags at his books; framing in his mind. a magnificent scheme for reducing and codifying the whole

17. Lambeth MSS. 648, fol. 5, 106, 110.