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sels; though I have done my best in them; but with a great deal of dislike of the course. In this your Majesty may be pleased to observe that the same thing is not good for your Majesty which is good for your servants; for it is good for them to drop out their services that they may be continually in use, and to stay sometimes till your Majesty be at a plunge, that their service may be the better imprinted and remembered. But it is good for your Majesty, nay necessary as the case is, that your business be set forward in many parts at once, and that you be kept from streights afar off, and not only eased a little when they press you. Neither am I so simple or unwrought in business as to think that [all] things can be executed at once, for he that thinks all things can go on at once, I should think his head were full of wind. But on the other side, he that shall consult or provide but for one thing at once shall never overcome any great difficulties. Therefore, as your Majesty was wont to say, Order is the daughter of Heaven, which consists not of one orb to stay after another, but moves at once but without confusion. So that, as I have often advised, except your Majesty do land your business in some sort, or at least anchor it, and not only cut through every wave, neither your state nor your royal heart can be at any wished rest. And better it were to cut twenty ends of Gordias' knot together, though with great difficulty at the first, than to seek to wind the ends out with an endless trouble.

How this may be done, Hoc opus, hic labor est. But without a resolution that this must be the course in one kind or another, all the rest is but entertainment of time. And this the rather, for that your Majesty may be pleased to note that whatsoever you do at once is for yourself; whatsoever you do by one and by one is for suitors: as Baronets and Creations, when they were together, the profit went to your Majesty; now they come scattered, it is but suits. So the raising of some rates of your custom or imposts, if it had been at once it mought have been your Majesty's; but coming one after another, it is but suits and bounty.

A third and last impediment (of those that go to the main) is that there is no handsome course taken to free your Majesty (who are of so royal and bountiful a nature) from importunity of suitors; I mean touching matters of benefit and reward. But your Majesty is still in a streight, that either your means or

your mind must suffer. For to grant all suits were to undo yourself, or your people. To deny all suits were to see never a contented face. To this end it is true that I did ever advise the continuing and upholding the Commission of Suits; but it having been once down and now a little up again, it is esteemed but a trick of denial and does not ease your Majesty enough. And therefore it is no way to refer to the same commissioners, either of suits or treasury, but to make sorted and distributed references, and to let every man bear part of the envy; and likewise to encourage your officers in stopping suits at the seals, and withal privately to forewarn your Learned Counsel, who upon my knowledge were wont to be more negative. But above all to make a good Lord Treasurer, whose proper duty is, in this state your Majesty is in, to stir in these cases, and to stop suits, put back pensions, check allowances, question merits, translate the suit from the suitor to your Majesty in a proportion; and in short to be a screen to your Majesty in things of this nature; such as was the Lord Burleigh for many years, since whose time the succeeding examples have been such as my last Lord Chancellor well said of them, Quæ magis nocent quam docent.

Here the manuscript unfortunately stops, though the letter does not appear to be ended, and the two remaining questions of "matter" and "order" are still untouched. Its fate was to remain under consideration till the beginning of October; by which time a new chance had offered itself.

4.

The next letter informs us of another occasional work of Bacon's which I should have been glad to see, but have not succeeded in finding. The uses to which the Star Chamber was put in the next reign, and which caused its precipitate dissolution with universal consent and applause within little more than twenty years from this time, are so associated in popular imagination with its name, that the very tradition of its proper functions and real character has been lost. The records of its proceedings, which were carefully kept, appear to have been abolished along with it; for they are nowhere to be found; and our more learned historians occupy themselves in discussions of its antiquity and origin, of the right by which it existed, the extent of the powers which it assumed, and the use which was or might have been made of them to support

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:

the usurpations of the prerogative; but the actual constitution of the Court, the rules by which it was practically governed, and the conditions under which its powers were exercised, have been so little understood or so imperfectly explained that most people now think of it as a tribunal whose decisions were at the absolute disposal of the crown. It is true indeed, as Hume observes, that "its authority was at no time circumscribed nor its method of proceeding directed, by any law or statute;" that its members consisted of persons "who, all of them, enjoyed their offices during pleasure;"2 that the trials were not by jury; and therefore that, in the hands of a king who could afford to disregard opinion, it was a very powerful instrument and might be turned to very despotic uses. But so might the Courts of Common Law be-the intervention of the Jury notwithstanding for the common-law Judges also held their offices during pleasure, and a single Judge that way disposed could turn his office to more fatal uses than the whole quorum of the Star Chamber; who could never go beyond fine and imprisonment; and who, if they were trusted (as all judges must be) with a large discretion, were at the same time restricted in the exercise of it by all the conditions which are usually found effective in preventing abuse. They were all men of high position, subject to observation, and having reputations to lose. The proceedings of the Court were public,3 formal, elaborate, and governed by precedent. No cause could be heard if less than eight were present, and in giving sentence each member had to declare his own judgment separately, with his reasons, -the lowest beginning and the rest following in order. It is clear that in ordinary times such a body could not have been a convenient instrument of an unpopular policy. A king strong enough otherwise to defy his laws and his people might possibly succeed in working it, and a weak one in difficulties might be tempted to try: but popular indignation is a powerful deterrent, and to find eight men in high place of whom as many as five could be counted on as willing to make themselves personally and publicly responsible for unpopular acts which they felt to be unjustifiable, must in ordinary times have been extremely difficult. Accordingly,

1 Hist. of Eng. vol. vi. p. 160.

2 Id. vol. v. p. 453. Almost all. But there were bishops among them, of

whom this could not be said.

On

3 I believe it is commonly supposed now to have been a secret tribunal. the 22nd of June, 1871, Mr. C. Dawson, arguing against the Ballot Bill, and observing that the best correction of bribery was public opinion, "added that the Ballot would destroy all this moral influence and introduce into the British Constitution the spirit of the Star Chamber. He would record his vote against this secret, silent and insidious system." (Daily News, 23 June, 1871.)

among the grievances complained of by the Parliaments of Elizabeth and James I. we do not find any mention of the Star Chamber; and though in the pamphlets and news-letters of the time complaints may probably be found against particular sentences, there were no symptoms as yet of a tendency to denounce the institution itself as an evil, Before the reign of Charles I., I doubt whether any man whose opinion carries weight would have condemned it.' Certainly, not many years before, two men whose opinions ought to carry very great weight spoke of it in terms which almost exclude the supposition that its value as an institution was at that time considered disputable. No two men had had more experience of the working of the Star Chamber-few had had better opportunities of watching the administration of justice generally-than Bacon and Coke. Both of them have recorded their opinion of it in books which were meant for posterity, and where they could have no motive for saying what they did not think.

"It is the most honourable Court," says Coke, writing in his old age, when he was no longer a servant of the Crown but a leader of the popular cause in the House of Commons-" (our parliament excepted) that is in the Christian world, both in respect of the judges of the Court, and of their honourable proceeding according to their just jurisdiction and the ancient and just orders of the Court. For the Judges of the same are (as you have heard) the grandees of the realm, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer, the Lord President of the King's Council, the Lord Privy Seal, all the Lords spiritual, temporal, and others of the King's most

1 Hume, in describing the practice of the Star Chamber in 1634, observes in passing that it was "no innovation," the change being in "the disposition of the people," which made them "repine more at this grievous servitude;" which they had suffered, it would seem, in the previous reign with less impatience. The remark appears to have been suggested by the discovery that one of the cases quoted in illustration belonged to the reign of James I. That case, however, (for which he refers to Lord Lansdowne the poet, as his authority) is altogether misreported and misunderstood; and as it happens to be one of which I have had occasion to give a full and correct account in my last volume, it may be worth while to add his version of it here,-that the two may be compared. It would not be easy to find a better example of a case misstated and misconstrued in every point which is material.

"Sir George Markham following a chase where the Lord Darcy's huntsman was exercising his hounds, kept closer to the dogs than was thought proper by the huntsman, who, besides other rudeness, gave him foul language, which Sir George returned with a stroke of his whip. The fellow threatened to complain to his master; the Knight replied, If his master would justify such insolence he would serve him in the same manner, or words to that effect. Sir George was cited to the Star Chamber and fined 10,000 pounds. So fine a thing was it in those days to be a lord-a very natural reflection of Lord Lansdowne's in relating this incident." Hist. of Engl. ch. lii. p. 242.

Enough remains here of the less material features of the story to identify it as the case of provocation to duel explained inVol. VI. p. 103: one of the best examples of the good uses which might be made of a tribunal like the Star Chamber; and certainly no example of the advantage of being a lord. Hume has slightly abridged Lord Landsdowne's story, which will be found in his "Vindication of Sir Richard Granville," (works, vol. ii, p. 198, Ed. 1736), but has not substantially altered it.

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honourable Privy Council, and the principal Judges of the realm, and such other Lords of Parliament as the King shall name. And they judge upon confession or deposition of witnesses: and the Court cannot sit for hearing of causes under the number of eight at the least. And it is truly said, Curia Cameræ stellatæ, si vetustatem spectemus, est antiquissima, si dignitatem, honoratissima. This Court, the right institution and ancient orders thereof being observed, doth keep all England quiet.”1

"This Court," says Bacon, writing in 1621,—“is one of the sagest and noblest institutions of this kingdom. For in the distribution of courts of ordinary justice . . . . . there was nevertheless always reserved a high and pre-eminent power to the King's Council, in causes that might in example or consequence concern the state of the commonwealth; which if they were criminal the Council used to sit in the chamber called the Star Chamber, if civil, in the white chamber, or Whitehall. And as the Chancery had the prætorian power for equity, so the Star Chamber had the censorian power for offences under the degree of capital. This Court of Star Chamber is compounded of good elements, for it consisteth of four kinds of persons-Councillors, Peers, Prelates, and Chief Judges. It discerneth also principally of four kinds of causes,-forces, frauds, crimes various of stellionate, and the inchoations or middle acts towards crimes capital or heinous, not actually committed or perpetrated." 2

This Bacon wrote in his history of Henry VII., in mentioning the act passed in the 3rd year of that reign, "giving the Court of Star Chamber authority to punish divers misdemeanours." But his opinion of it as a politic institution appears still more clearly and unmistakably in his great work De Augmentis Scientiarum (pubin 1623), where among the specimens of books which are wanted, is the beginning of a treatise on "Universal Justice, or the Fountains of Law," the object of which should be to give a general character of administrative justice according to the true idea of it, drawn not from the institutions of any particular state, but from the universal laws of human society; by which, as by a pattern, particular kingdoms and commonwealths might prove and amend their own laws. Now one of the principal features in this model (so far as it is drawn out) is the institution of prætorian and censorian courts to supply the deficiencies of the laws; that is, to deal with cases for which the laws have failed to provide: and if his ideal description of the constitution and functions of the censorian court be compared with those of the Star Chamber as it was in his time, it may well be suspected that it sate for the picture.

I may be asked indeed how it came that an institution which deserved such a character as this up to the end of James the First's 2 Works, vol. vi. p. 85.

1 Institutes, part iv. ch. 5.