1624.]

THEIR CONTENT TO LET THE PALATINATE GO. 509

For whether it were right or wrong that it should be so,-whether the Plantagenets and Tudors would have managed better or not,-the fact was undeniable that money must be found, or the war for the recovery of the Palatinate could not go on; all the money at the disposal of the Government being already spent or pledged. And the coolness with which men like Sir Robert Phelips not only laid all the fault of failure upon the Government (which was natural and according to English precedent in all times), but prepared to accept the failure itself with all its consequences and let it rest there without an effort to retrieve it (which was quite contrary to English precedent in all times), proves to me that they had ceased to care for the result: and I think it is impossible to read the account of the debates at Westminster and Oxford either in the copious notes of them recently published by the Camden Society, or with Sir John Eliot's commentary, as given by Mr. Forster from the Negotium Posterorum, without feeling that the country party had lost all auxiety for the re-conquest of the Palatinate and felt no very lively interest in the other issues of the war with Spain. They had come (I suspect) to look on it as Buckingham's war: and since his reputation depended upon its success, it may be that the leaders of the country party would have been better pleased with a defeat than a triumph. The short season of applause and adulation was over, and as Buckingham was entering upon a new lease of unbounded favour with the King, which carried with it unbounded power over the conduct of affairs, they had come to regard him as the public enemy, and were bracing themselves for another war on another field for another stake, the war of the Commons against the Crown. Bacon's long-cherished hope that a foreign quarrel in a popular cause would bring the King and the people together and make them for a while at least forget their differences, had been in this case disappointed. If the occasion had come earlier, or if the beginnings had been more fortunate, the effect might perhaps have been different: and even now some brilliant military success might have revived the popularity of the cause. But it is not probable that the reconciliation could have been permanent. For the powers retained by the Crown and the powers acquired by the Commons had in truth become incompatible with each other, and could not have kept truce under any searching difference. The Commons had become too powerful to remain as they were. Being able to paralyse the action of Government, it was necessary that they should be able to control it. The inevitable struggle was now coming to the crisis. In this war they were altogether in earnest, and would accept no disaster as a defeat: nor was the struggle destined to end until the supreme

control of affairs was in effect transferred to those who had already the supreme command of the purse; and they had learned to exercise it, not directly by Committees of the whole House, but by a standing Committee of responsible advisers of the Crown-now called the Cabinet-selected nominally by the Crown but really by themselves, responsible to them, and removable at their pleasure. An arrangement which Coke himself could not have pretended to justify by any precedent from the times of Plantagenet or Tudor; but one under which the Government can always contrive to obtain from the nation as much money as the affairs of the nation require.

I See "The English Constitution. By Walter Bagehot." p. 11-15.

CHAPTER X.

A.D. MARCH 1624-APRIL 1626.

1.

ETAT. 64-66.

Ir must have been clear to Bacon by this time that the hopes of relief which had been held out to him after his fall by the King and Buckingham, however sincere and well meant, were not to be fulfilled. Nothing had occurred since to show him less worthy of provision for a studious life. No further notice had been taken of his case in either house of Parliament. The justice of his decrees in Chancery had in no instance been successfully impugned. He had abstained from all interference in public affairs. He had pursued his private studies with unabated diligence and vigour. And though the King's Exchequer was empty of money and his hands full of work which wanted it, there can be little doubt that such moderate supply as his case needed might easily have been provided; and that if his help and advice in the great affairs then on foot had been required in return, the money would have been very profitably invested. The language used towards him was still gracious and encouraging; but nothing came of it: a fact from which he could only infer that there was no sufficiently earnest intention behind. He moderated his hopes accordingly, and limited his petition to so much advance of his pension as might enable him to pay off his debts, and so much forbearance in the exaction of his rent to the Crown as might leave him the means of living in the meantime,-favours which would not cost much;-together with a pardon of the Parliamentary sentence, which would cost nothing.

Meanwhile, as the literary services which he had offered to the King in return for the bounty which he had desired were not called for, he applied himself henceforward exclusively to his own work, in which he had lost neither faith nor zeal, though the troubles of want must have sadly interfered with its progress. Amid continual in

terruptions by creditors, whose claims could neither be repudiated nor satisfied, even the collection of Natural History, though mainly a matter of memory, was pursued at great disadvantage. In works like the second part of the Nocum Organum, which required intense and continuous attention, progress was hardly possible under such a condition. Indulgences from the Crown, therefore, sufficient to set him free from other creditors, were of real importance to him, and might be considered as part of the provision without which his business could not be carried on. And yet his pecuniary embarrassment, with all that it entailed, was not the trouble which seems to have weighed heaviest upon his mind. What touched him more deeply was the wounded name that would live behind him. He had forfeited the good opinion of his fellow-countrymen, and he extremely desired to recover it, and to have the recovery marked by some public act of absolution. He knew the nature and the depth of his own offence and the state of his own mind. He knew that he had not been a corrupt judge in the sense of one who could be induced by the offer of a reward to decide a case unjustly; but he had countenanced a practice which he could not deny to be dangerous, not only to the reputation for integrity, but to the integrity itself, of the judicial office; a practice for which the best excuse he could offer was one which might have been more easily allowed in the case of any other man than himself,-namely, that it was "the abuse of the times." It was a great fault, and deserved to be visited by a great forfeiture. This he fully felt and admitted. From the moment that he was made to see clearly what he had done, he had acknowledged it to be indefensible; from the moment that he heard the sentence he had acquiesced in it as just. But he had been labouring in the service of his country and of mankind too long, too earnestly, and too unselfishly, to believe that he had deserved to be an outcast for ever. And though in that higher Court where all are pardoned who truly repent and unfeignedly believe, he felt that his sincere penitence and unreluctant submission, joined as it had been with so strenuous an endeavour to turn his remaining days to what he believed to be the best account, had deserved and procured his pardon,— though he read in the condition of his mind and the undiminished activity of his faculties an intimation and pledge of the divine forgiveness, he still desired some human acknowledgment that his offence, if not redeemed, had at least been sufficiently punished, and that he was not to be transmitted by his own generation to the posterity whose servant he aspired to be, with a brand of infamy upon his brow,-as a man marked out for contempt. He longed to see that blot removed by the hands that put it on,-to be readmitted

1623-4.]

BACON'S ANXIETY FOR A FULL PARDON.

513

into the House of Lords; to receive a full pardon of the whole. sentence; to have his honours preserved in memory by translation after his decease. It was not much to ask; and to us it may seem at first sight a thing of too small consequence to have been much worth the seeking for we do not find that our own estimate of him depends in any degree upon the question whether the desired pardon was or was not granted. Nevertheless one generation tells another, and though we flatter ourselves that we can judge of former times better than those who lived in them, we seldom do more than hear their tale and repeat it. It is probably true that if he had come better recommended to us, we should have received him more graciously. But however that may be, the apprehension of parting from the countrymen whose good he had so much desired without a word of kindness or a mark of reconciliation, and of going down to future ages in a character so unlike the truth, was the bitterest drop in his cup; and of the two branches of the petition which now contained all he asked-that he might "live out of want, and die out of ignominy "-the last was the one which he seems to have valued most.

The two next letters refer to two patents with which he had been concerned as Chancellor; the first being a privy seal which he had refused to pass, and handed over to be dealt with by his successor after his fall: (see Bishop Williams's letter of the 7th February, 1622):1 the second, one which having passed the great seal during his Chancellorship, was about to be reported to the Commons as a grievance. It does not appear that any personal charge was to be brought against him for passing it. But it was a case in which, after the matter was settled, he had received presents from the three parties severally interested in it, and the presents so received had formed three several items in the articles of impeachment. It was the one case in which (though he was not now prepared to justify it himself) Lord Macaulay is obliged to admit that there is no ground for accusing him of corruption. An explanation of the circumstances under which the presents were received will be found in his answer to the 24th, 25th, and 26th articles of the charge: p. 259 of this volume.

Good Cousin,

TO SIR FRANCIS BARNHAM.2

Upon a little search made touching the patent of the survey 1 Above, p. 404.

2 Gibson Papers, vol. viii. f. 195. Copy. No fly-leaf. Indorsed, "A letter to Sir Francis Barnham."

VOL. VII.

2 L