Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/361

BAC government, the declaration of the proceedings of the earl, which was published by authority after his execution for the information of the public. He has left us his own statement of the case in what is commonly referred to as his "Apology," being a long letter addressed to Essex's friend the earl of Devon (Charles Blount, better known as Lord Montjoy), which he printed in the year 1604. It is evident that he himself had no doubt that he had acted right. His defence is that he had only done what he was bound to do by his duty as a public servant, and that however intimate had been their relations at one time, all confidential intercourse between them had ceased from the time when the earl gave himself up to the new associates who had led him to his ruin. Their connection never had been such as to entitle Essex to expect that their former friendship should go for anything in the position in which he had now placed himself. It must be admitted that the question has usually been argued with too much reference to Essex's gift of the piece of land, as if that probably abundantly-earned payment for services rendered by Bacon, constituted an obligation never to be cancelled. On the other hand, it may perhaps be allowed that many a high-minded or sensitive man would, however superstitiously, have paid more observance to even the ghost of a buried friendship, and to the memory of what had once been, than Bacon thought himself called upon to show on this occasion. Nor can it be supposed that he would really have lost, or subjected himself to the risk of losing, anything by pleading his intimacy with Essex in other days as his excuse for declining now to take any part in bringing him to the scaffold. He would certainly by so acting have consulted his popularity at the moment, and would have considerably lightened the labour of the defenders of his fair fame in after times. His vindication from the charge of cowardice or want of patriotism in shrinking from an incumbent duty, if any such charge had ever been brought against him, would not have been found a difficult task.

Mr. Dixon has discovered that on the 6th of August, 1601, Bacon had a grant from the crown of £1200, being part of the fine imposed upon one of the conspirators whose life was saved. Still he received no official appointment while Elizabeth lived. But the old queen only survived the execution of her young kinsman and former favourite about two years. The new reign made a new world to everybody, and to hardly any one in a more remarkable degree than to Bacon. His career, in so far as it either was eminently conspicuous at the time or is still memorable, begins with the accession of James. He is now in his forty-third year. We have seen what was his rate of progress throughout the last quarter of a century. What it was in the next period of the same length is now to be told. On the 23rd of July, 1603, at the coronation of the new king, he received the honour of knighthood. About the same time he received from the crown a pension of £60 a year. In June, 1607, being now in his forty-seventh year, he got his foot at last on the first round of the ladder of office by being made solicitor-general, about two years after Coke had been raised to the bench as chief-justice of the common pleas. In 1611 he was appointed joint judge of a new court called that of the knight marshal or of the verge. In October, 1613, on Coke being removed to the king's bench, and the attorney-general, Sir Henry Hobart, succeeding him in the common pleas, Bacon became attorney-general. On the 9th of June, 1616, he was sworn of the privy council. On the 2nd of March, 1617, on the resignation of the Lord-chancellor Egerton (who, originally ennobled as Lord Ellesmere, had been recently created Viscount Brackley, and who died within a week), he received the seals as lord-keeper On the 4th of January, 1618, he was raised to the higher dignity of lord-chancellor; on the 11th of July in the same year he was made Baron Verulam; and on the 27th of January, 1621, he was advanced to the rank of Viscount St. Alban, a few days after he had celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his birthday, surrounded by his friends, in York house, his father's residence, in which he had first seen the light, and in which he had taken up his abode a few months before.

His prosperity, too, in other ways had kept pace with his professional advancement. His reversion of the office of register of the star chamber had fallen to him in 1610. Some years before this he had, by the death of his elder brother Anthony, come into possession of the estate of Gorhambury in Herts, together with a considerable sum in money, with which he is supposed to have purchased another property, Kingsbury, in the same county. In May, 1606, he had married Alice, one of the four daughters of a deceased London merchant, Alderman Benedict Barnham, whose other three daughters all made also good alliances, and whose mother was at this time re-wedded to Sir John Pakington, knight of the bath (ancestor of the present right hon. baronet of the same name), and lived to have a baron for a third husband, and an earl for a fourth. All the fortune that Bacon got with the lady was a matter of £220 a year; but their union seems to have been a love-match; it had been preceded by a courtship of some years, and up to the date at which we are now arrived it had, to all appearance, been cordial and happy. Then, as a public character, apart from his official position, no one stood higher than Bacon did; for thirty years and upwards he had been the first orator of the house of commons, and in every way one of the most conspicuous and influential members; nor does his popularity out of doors appear to have been less than his ascendancy within the house. Finally, and above all, as a writer and a thinker, he had, by a succession of literary performances—some given to the public as they were finished, many more stored up to be brought to light only after his death—been steadily widening and elevating the edifice of his truest fame, and stood already renowned throughout Europe as one of the chief intellectual luminaries of the time. His "Essays," his first publication, were, in a fourth edition which appeared in 1612, extended to nearly four times their original number; and new editions of the book in this enlarged form continued to be called for. In the last published in his lifetime, that of 1625, the original ten essays had become nearly six times as many. In 1605 appeared, dedicated to the king, his "Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human"—long afterwards, in 1623, expanded into the Latin treatise, in nine books, entitled "De Augmentis Scientiarum." In 1610 he published, in Latin, his remarkable treatise entitled "De Sapientia Veterum" (Concerning the Wisdom of the Ancients), a performance which, however fanciful his interpretation of the old classic mythology may be held to be, affords perhaps as striking a display of his fertile and brilliant genius as anything else that he has left us. And in October, 1620, had appeared, also in Latin, the greatest undoubtedly of all his works, the two books of his "Novum Organum Scientiarum," or new Instrument of scientific discovery, announcing what he himself believed to be a hitherto unthought-of method of questioning and extorting her secrets from nature destined to revolutionize the whole realm of philosophy, and to make the world itself as a habitation for man what no one heretofore had imagined it possible that it ever should become. The "Novum Organum" was put forth as the second part, or rather as a portion of the second part, of the entire scheme of this "Instauratio Magna," or Grand Restoration, which was to consist of six parts in all, the treatise "De Augmentis Scientiarum," about to be published, being to serve for the present as a substitute for the first.

Well might his friend Ben Jonson apostrophize him at this time as one

But even in this height of his greatness and splendour a sudden eclipse was close at hand. On January the 30th, 1621, three days after his great birthday celebration, a new parliament met. It was the first that had been held since the short abortive one of 1614. It had been called by Bacon's advice; he was always a friend of parliamentary government. The commons had sat only a few weeks when they appointed a select committee to inquire into abuses in the courts of justice, which speedily reported twenty-three charges of corruption, by the taking of presents or bribes from suitors, against the lord-chancellor. Bacon, who had at first repelled the charge with indignation, in the end admitted his guilt. On the 17th of March he presided in the house of lords for the last time. On the 30th of April the seals were taken from him; and on the 3rd of May he was adjudged to pay a fine of £10,000 and to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure, and declared to be incapable of ever again either sitting in parliament or holding any office or employment in the state. He was too ill to be present to hear this sentence pronounced; but on the 31st, when he had somewhat recovered, he was actually sent to the Tower, and was detained there for two days. His fine, however, was soon after remitted