Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/710

 696 V. BENCH AND BAR Justice, vainly offered ten thousand pounds. Judge Nichols refused to pay for his place, and James I. always referred to him as " the judge that would give no money." The fifteen Serjeants called in 1623 each paid the King five hundred pounds. Under Cromwell, the pious Lord Chief Justice St. John had the granting of all pardons to delin- quent lawyers, which netted him forty thousand pounds ; nor did he scruple to receive bribes for places under the Pro- tector. Under James II., the young daughters of the leading citizens of Salisbury, who had strewed flowers before the rebel Monmouth, being technically guilty of high treason, obtained pardons by paying money to the Queen's maids of honor, to whom the King had given the pardons. That great and good man William Penn acted as the agent of the needy ladies in collecting the tribute. The tone of adulation used by lawyers and judges toward the sovereign is almost incredible. Rich compared Henry VIII. " for justice and prudence, to Solomon; for strength and fortitude, to Samson ; and for beauty and comeliness, to Absalom." Bacon in a learned treatise felicitates James I. (who was little better than a drooling idiot), upon the deep and broad capacity of his mind, the grasp of his memory, the quickness of his apprehension, the penetration of his judgment, his lucid method of arrangement, and his easy facility of speech. The virtuous Coke claimed that King James was divinely illuminated by the Almighty. But this was the tone of the age. To Shakespeare, Elizabeth was " a fair vestal " and " a most unspotted lily." The vices of the age are summed up in the rivalry of its two greatest lawyers. Bacon and Coke, — the latter, the most learned of lawyers, but narrow, cruel, and unscrupulous ; the other, of large insight, capacious intellect, but also little troubled by scruples. Coke, the elder of the two men, was Solicitor-General, with a large practice and ample fortune, when Bacon, with his great family advantages, tried to gain the office of Attorney-General against him. Coke stood in the line of preferment. He bitterly resented Bacon's* nickname of the
 * Huddler " — not an undeserved name for the author of