Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/355

Bacon suffer as long as money is made the mere object of the parliament, and without heats or contestations, or oppositions between him and his parliament, I hold to be a thing of invaluable consequence, both in reputation and towards the substance of future affairs.' If Bacon wished to see the king formally absolute, he wished him to be surrounded by the impalpable atmosphere of asympathetic union with his people.

It was not entirely to James's discredit that he could not realise Bacon's ideal. One of the modes of winning favour recommended by Bacon in this paper is that of taking advantage of the good understanding between France and Spain, to 'give fire to our nation, and make them aspire to be again umpires in those wars; or, at least, to retrench and amuse the greatness of Spain for their own preservation.' Bacon could give this advice honestly because he had always advocated a stirring foreign policy, pushed even to warlike action, as a means of bringing king and people together. With all his powers he was an English politician; James, on the other hand, with all his faults, was an international politician. To make war to advance his own greatness or the greatness of England was hateful to him. Unfortunately he was already deep in a negotiation for a marriage between his son and a Spanish infanta. Bacon's allusion to this is characteristic of the tenderness with which he handles the king's actions, and of the way in which he manages to spoil even the best advice by overmuch cleverness. James, he says, might frighten the commons into a grant of supply upon the opinion of some great offer for a marriage of the prince with Spain. 'Not,' he proceeds, 'that I shall easily advise that that should be really effected; but I say the opinion of it may have singular use, both because it will easily be believed that the offer may be so great from that hand as may at once free the king's estate; and chiefly because it will be a noteable attractive to the parliament, that hates the Spaniard, so to do for the king as his state may not force him to fall upon that condition.' How much higher would Bacon have stood with posterity if he had boldly spoken out the opinion which he indicated, instead of advocating such a poor trick as this!

No parliament was summoned at this time. The court was for some months fully occupied in the questions arising out of the detection of the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. When on 25 May 1616 Somerset was tried. Bacon appeared as chief prosecutor, doing his part with decorum, being anxious to secure a conviction, though he was aware that James intended to pardon both the earl and the countess.

Some time before Somerset's disgrace Bacon had welcomed the rise of Villiers. If there was to be a favourite at all, the change may well have seemed to be a good one, for Villiers was supported by the men of the anti-Spanish party. Villiers, too, was affable whilst Somerset had been morose, and Bacon once more hopefully believed that he had discovered that for which he had so long been seeking in vain, an influential personage who would support him in his great undertakings. Once more that yearning for political and scientific achievement which in Bacon was so inseparably mingled with desire for the good things of life, blinded his eyes to the instability of the foundations on which he was building, and he threw himself with unabated ardour into the service of Villiers, advised him as to his conduct, and assisted him in the management of his estate. His own hope of advancement was now greater than it had ever been before. When, in January 1016, lord chancellor Ellesmere was apparently dying. Bacon proposed himself as his successor. James gave him the promise for which he asked. Ellesmpre, however, recovered, and Bacon had to wait about a year longer. His language to Villiers was, as it remained to the end, that of devotion too warm to be altogether real. 'I am yours,' he wrote, 'surer to you than my own life. For, as they speak of the turquois stone in a ring, I will break into twenty pieces before you have the least fall.'

In asking to succeed Ellesmere as chancellor. Bacon was not asking merely for his own personal advancement. It was the system of Ellesmere that he wished to continue. 'Let me tell your majesty,' he explained himself to James, 'that that part of the chancellor's place which is to judge in equity between party and party ... concerneth your majesty least ... But it is the other parts, of a moderator amongst your council, of an overseer over your judges, of a planter of fit justices and governors in the country, that importeth your affairs and these times most.'

The part of an overseer over the judges was that which had the greatest immediate interest for Bacon. The struggle with Coke, of which the separate consultation with the judges on Peacham's case had been the preliminary skinnish, was by this time at its height. An action had been brought in the King's Bench in which the king's right of appointing to office was involved, and in 1615 Bacon, as attorney-general, produced a writ, 'De non procedendo liege inconsulto,' prohibiting the