to do him hurt, in respect the French King's designs were wholly bent upon Italy. So that it may be truly said, there had been scarcely seen or known in many ages such a rare concurrence of signs and promises of a happy and flourishing reign to ensue, as were now met in this young King, called after his father's name, Henry the Eighth. PREFACE. "THE Beginning of the History of Great Britain" was first published in Rawley's Resuscitatio (1657). At what period it was composed we have no certain means of knowing. But there is a letter in the same volume described as a letter "to the King upon sending him a beginning of the history of his Majesty's times;" and we may presume that this was the paper which accompanied it. The letter is not dated. It is placed however in all the collections among those which belong to the early part of James's reign; and from a passage in another letter to the King, also un-dated but certainly written while Bacon was solicitorgeneral and apparently about the beginning of 1610, I should conjecture that it was composed a little before that time. His object in the last-mentioned letter was to obtain from the King a promise of the attorney's place, whenever it should be vacant; for "perceiving how at this time preferments of law flew about his ears, to some above him and to some below him,"1 he had begun to think that, unless he had some better 1 Alluding perhaps to the preferment of "one Bromley, an obscure lawyer," to a Barony of the Exchequer; of Sir Edward Philips to the Mastership of the Rolls, and of Sir Julius Cæsar to the reversion of that office: which was the news of January, 1609-10. See Chamberlain to Carleton; Court and Times of James I., vol. i. p. 103-4. |
