Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/45

Rh absence from England, and when the results of the taking of Cadiz turned out to be inconsiderable, the favor of the Queen towards him began perceptibly to wane. Bacon's first extant letter of political advice is dated October 4, 1596. In it he advised Essex to give up his military ambition, to try to remove the common impression that he was opinionative, to disguise his feelings, and to "win the Queen." It was the cautious, worldly-wise admonition of a friend who knew well both the Court and the young Earl. But it was not in Essex's nature to be wary. He steadily overestimated his influence with the Queen and constantly thwarted her will. "I ever set this down," Bacon wrote later in his Apology, "that the only course to be held with the Queen, was by obsequiousness and observance. . . . . My Lord on the other hand had a settled opinion that the Queen could be brought to nothing but by a kind of necessity and authority." The breach between the friends widened during the year 1597.

Bacon meantime had been made one of the Queen's Counsel Extraordinary, as we learn from a lease of sixty acres of land in Zelwood Forest, Somerset, which was granted to him July 14, 1596. Very early in 1597, Bacon published his first book, the Essays, ten only, bound with two other works, his Meditationes Sacrae and Of the Colours of Good and Evil. The dedication is to "his deare Brother," Anthony Bacon.

The ninth Parliament of Elizabeth, which met October 24, 1597, was the one in which Bacon sat for Rh