an accomplished player at hide and seek. Once the pursuivants catch a glimpse of her near an ambassador's house; they chase; she slips from her coach, runs through the gates, changes clothes with a page, who minces like a lady into her seat, and tears down the Strand with Buckingham's men at the wheels. She trips laughingly away, while the officers of justice follow the coach and seize the boy.

11. The very next Parliament which meets in Westminster strikes down two of his foes. Three years after his return to that trust he so grossly abused, Churchill comes before the House of Commons as a culprit. He has been at his tricks again, and is now solemnly convicted of forgery and fraud. Two months after Churchill's condemnation Cranfield is in turn assailed. Charges of taking bribes from the farmers of customs, of fraudulent dealing with the royal debts, of robbing the magazine of arms, are proved against him; when, abandoned by his powerful friends, he is sentenced by the House of Commons to public infamy, to loss of office, to imprisonment in the Tower, to a restitutionary fine of two hundred thousand pounds! "In future ages," says a wise observer of events, men will wonder how my Lord St. Albans could have fallen, how my Lord of Middlesex could have risen."

66

XIV.

10.

1624.

May.

12. The most subtle of his enemies falls the last. After 1625. his promotion to the Seals and mitre, Williams, silly enough Nov. 1. to dream that he could stand alone, began to neglect Lady Buckingham for younger and less exacting women.

Mur

11. Com. Jour., i. 591, 766; Nicholas to Nicholas, Mar. 17, 1624, S.P. O.; Chichester to Carleton, May 12, 1624, S. P. O.; Locke to Carleton, May 13, 1624, S. P. O.

12. Suckling to Buckingham, Oct. 24, 1625, S. P. O.; Williams to Goring, Oct. 30, 1625, S. P. O.

XIV. 12.

1625.

Nov. 1.

murs now rise against him; slowly at first, but gathering strength as his ingratitude, his arrogance, and his cupidity prove themselves month by month. When Lady Buckingham withdraws from him her countenance, he falls at once from his fatal height is stripped of the Seals with every mark of ignominy—and is driven, with a sullied reputation, though with sharpened powers for mischief, from the Court of Chancery into the more settled scenes of ecclesiastical strife.

13. Were there space in his generous heart for vengeance, how the passions of the great Chancellor would glow and leap as these adversaries fall before his eyes like rotten fruit! Never was the wisdom of counsel proved more signally, the vindication of conduct more complete. All that he foresaw of evil has come to pass. He does not, indeed, live to behold that fiery joy which lights and shakes the land when Buckingham's tyranny drops under an assassin's knife; but he lives long enough to find himself justified by facts on every point of his opposition to the scandalous family policy and private bargains of the Villiers clan. Frances Coke has made Sir John a perfectly bad wife. Elizabeth Norreys has run away from Sir Christopher, giving up her beauty and her fortunes to Edward Wray. Lady Buckingham herself, after moving earth and hell to pull down Abbott and make her lover an archbishop, has had to endure the pain and mortification of seeing the creature of her fantasy neglect her charms. Coke, Cranfield, Churchill, Williams, have been alike overwhelmed with misery and shame. But he feels no quickening pang of joy at the discomfiture

13. Chamberlain to Carleton, Mar. 30, 1622, S. P. O.; Bacon's Will; Montagu, xvi. part ii. 447; Dom. Papers of Charles the First, xxiv. 59.

HIS DEATH.

303 of these enemies. From the moment of his own trial, he has accepted the position of a necessary sacrifice. He breathes no word against the House of Commons, nor questions the justice of the House of Lords. He speaks no evil word of the men who made themselves the instruments of his fall. But he holds to his nobler intellectual work, and the Father of Experimental Philosophy dies at last in the very act of an experiment, quitting the world in peace with all men, leaving a young widow, who, like her mother, will marry again, and appealing for the vindication of his fame to time.

XIV.

13.

1625.

Nov. 1.

(305

APPENDICES.

No. I.

LADY ANN BACON TO LORD BURGHLEY.

(Original in Lansdowne MSS:, xliii. 48.)

Feb. 26, 1585.

I KNOW well, mine especial good Lord, it becometh me not to be troublesome unto your honour at any other time, but now chiefly in this season of your greatest affair and small or no leisure; but yet, because yesterday morning, especially as in that I was extraordinarily admitted, it was your Lordship's favour, so, fearing to stay too long, I could not so plainly speak, nor so well receive your answer thereto, as I would truly and gladly in that matter, I am bold by this writing to enlarge the same more plainly, and to what end I did mean.

If it may like your good Lordship, the report of the late conference at Lambeth hath been so handled, to the discrediting of those learned that labour for right reformation in the ministry of the Gospel, that it is no small grief of mind to the faithful preachers; because the matter is thus by the other side carried away, as though their cause could not sufficiently be warranted by the word of God. For the which proof they have long been sad suitors, and would most humbly crave still both of God in heaven, whose cause it is, and of her Majesty their most excellent.

X

APP.

I.