"rising to go to Court with such a company only to present my Lord of Essex his complaints" constituted treason, even though unaccompanied by any purpose of violence. Clearly, therefore, Essex and Southampton were traitors. But this was not enough for Coke and Bacon. They must be proved to be traitors as well in intention as in act, and of this the Peers did not appear as yet to be convinced to Coke's satisfaction. "Our law," said the Attorney, "judgeth the intent by the overt act." "Well," saith the Earl, "plead your law, and we will plead conscience." 1

Once more, therefore, Bacon rose to press the charge of deliberate and hypocritical treason. Ignoring the Earl's unreasonable fears, his impulsive nature, and his complete want of self-control and forethought, he again treated Essex as though the whole of his defence was a mere afterthought to excuse a treasonable plot deliberately planned and deliberately carried out. As if Essex had not committed himself past recall by summoning round him the noisy crowd in Essex House, Bacon lays stress upon the warning of the Lord Keeper, and then on the proclamation of the herald. The disregard of these, he says, if nothing else, constitutes Essex a deliberate traitor.

"I have never yet seen in any case such favour shewn to any prisoner; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by fractions, and so silly a defence of such great and notorious treasons. May it please your Grace, you have seen how weakly he hath shadowed his purpose and how slenderly he hath answered the objections against him. But my Lord, I doubt the variety of matters and the many digressions may minister occasion of forgetfulness, and may have severed the judgments of the Lords; and therefore I hold it necessary briefly to recite the Judges' opinions."

This being done, he proceeded to this effect:

"Now put the case that the Earl of Essex's intent were, as he would have it believed, to go only as a suppliant to her Majesty. Shall their petitions be presented by armed petitioners? This must needs bring loss of liberty to the prince. Neither is it any point of law, as my Lord of Southampton would have it believed, that condemns them of treason, but it is apparent in common sense. To take secret counsel, to execute it, to run together in numbers armed with weapons-what can be the excuse? Warned by the Lord Keeper, by a herald, and yet persist. Will any simple man take this to be less than treason?"

1 Spedding, ii. 229.

The Earl of Essex answered that, if he had purposed anything against others than those his private enemies, he would not have stirred with so slender a company. But Bacon crushed him with an illustration from modern history far more damaging to Essex, and likely to make him far more suspected by Elizabeth, than the previous reference to Pisistratus.

"It was not the company you carried with you, but the assistance which you hoped for in the City, which you trusted unto. The Duke of Guise thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the Barricadoes, in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight gentlemen, and found that help in the City which (thanks be to God) you failed of here. And what followed? The King was forced to put himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to steal away to scape their fury. Even such was my Lord's confidence too; and his pretence the same-an all-hail and a kiss to the City. But the end was treason, as hath been sufficiently proved. But when he had once delivered and engaged himself so far into that which the shallowness of his conceit could not accomplish as he expected, the Queen for her defence taking arms against him, he was glad to yield himself, and, thinking to colour his practices, turned his pretexts, and alleged the occasion thereof to proceed from a private quarrel."

"To this," adds the reporter," the Earl answered little :" and indeed to an assertion of this kind, not based upon any fresh evidence, but deriving all its weight from the fact that the asserter had been one of the Earl's most intimate friends and might be supposed to be best acquainted with his nature, it is hard to see what the Earl could have found to answer. Both the prisoners were found guilty, and sentence was passed in the usual form.

1 Professor Gardiner would excuse Bacon in part on the plea that his error was not so much moral as intellectual, a mistake arising from "the weak side of his intellect."

"In the second place it has been alleged (ABBOTT, Bacon and Essex, 194-242) that Bacon sinned in charging Essex with a consistent purpose of treason which was foreign to his nature. It is no doubt true that Essex never did anything deliberately, and that an analysis of character would spare his heart at the expense of his head. It does not, however, follow that Bacon went deliberately wrong. On the day of the trial he had only very recently become acquainted with the Earl's very questionable proceedings in Ireland, and it was only in consonance with the weak side af his intellect to adopt a compact theory rather than one which left room for vagueness and uncertainty.' Dict. Nat. Biog. ii. 335.

I presume that the word "proceedings" refers to one or two conversations not acted upon (see Bacon and Essex, 125-133), although the Government, by garbling the evidence, endeavoured to give the impression that they were acted on.

The answer appears to be, first, that Bacon had access to the complete ungarbled evidence, and indeed was a party to the garbling of it, so that he might have known (as we know) that no treasonable project was ever seriously enter

A few days before his execution (25 February, 1601) the composure which Essex had hitherto preserved gave way before the fear of death, or of that which follows death; and he poured forth a torrent of exaggerated accusations (some of which were afterwards proved to be groundless) against his secretary, his friends, his sister, and himself. Would your Lordship have thought this weakness and this unnaturalness in this man!" writes the Earl of Nottingham to Montjoy. But this outburst proceeded neither from " unnaturalness" nor from vindictiveness; but from one whose mind was now thrown off its balance by superstition, yielding in death, as he had always yielded in life, to the impulse of the moment. The vague general self-reproaches wrung from a man on the verge of the grave by superstitious fears ought not to be allowed to exaggerate his crime; and the verdict of history must be that Essex, though guilty of treason, was not a deliberate traitor.

On Bacon's conduct different judgments will be pronounced according as each one judges more or less severely sins proceeding not from an occasional succumbing to temptation, but from an original and natural deficiency in moral taste and in the instinct of honour. Probably in consenting to contribute to the destruction of his friend, Bacon was acting under, what must have seemed to him, considerable pressure. If he had refused the task assigned to him by the Crown, he must have given up all chance of the Queen's favour and with it all hope of promotion. Very inferior men have made as great, or greater, sacrifices; but Bacon was not the man to make such a sacrifice. He had known once what it was to be in the cloud and under the displeasure of his royal mistress, and he was unwilling to renew that experience. Debts were pressing him, and poverty' staring him in the face. Recent circumstances may have quickened his appreciation of the Queen's wisdom and judgment as well as his desire for her favour, and his feeling that Essex was a reckless, wilful, incorrigible outcast from the Court, capable now, neither of helping nor of being helped, doomed to

tained; second, that a man who, against evidence, leaps to a "compact theory that a friend is a deliberate and consistent hypocrite, rather than adopt a "vague theory that his friend may be a combination of ambition, weakness, recklessness, and a number of other qualities good and bad-has "a weak side" in his affections or emotions, as well as in his intellect.

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ultimate destruction. Bacon had a keen sense of the value of fortune, of the possibilities of a learned leisure, of the importance of his own colossal plans for the benefit of the human race; on the other hand he had a very dull sense of the claims of honour and friendship. Forced to choose between prosperity and friendship, he preferred to be prosperous even at the cost of facilitating the ruin of a friend for whom ruin, in any case, was ultimately inevitable.

As it was, he gained less than he expected. But two years more remained for Elizabeth to reign, and Bacon was not destined to receive any office from her hands. Some reward, indeed, he received in shape of money; but he naturally considered £1,200 as very insufficient price for services which no one but himself could have rendered. Excusing himself to a friendly creditor, whom he cannot at once pay, owing to the delay of the promised reward, he says, "The Queen hath done somewhat for me, though not in the perfection I hoped." 1

§ 11 THE END OF THE OLD REIGN

The detailed discussion of the first edition of the Essays (published in January, 1597), will find a fitter place in the pages devoted to Bacon's works; but it is interesting here, to note how this, the most popular of his books, sprang out of, and illustrates, his own recent experiences.2 The writer assumes that the world is full of evil, and that men cannot get on in the world without a knowledge of evil arts, an assumption thus definitely expressed in the Advancement of Learning: "We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do. For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with the columbine simplicity, except men know all the conditions of the serpent." The axiom that a man

Of the relations between Francis and Anthony Bacon during the trial of Essex we have no knowledge; but a long anonymous letter addressed (30 May, 1601) to Anthony-he died a few days before he could have received it-shows that "Anthony was interesting himself to the last-to prove his patron innocent of the worst accusations against him."-Dictionary of National Biography, Anthony Bacon."

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2 The first edition included only the Essays on Study, Discourse, Ceremonies and Respects, Followers and Friends, Suitors, Expense, Regiment of Health, Honour and Reputation, Faction, Negociating.

Adv. of Learn. II. xxi. 9.

who wishes to succeed must "know all the conditions of the serpent underlies the whole of the Essays.

But Bacon's theory is not quite consistent with his practice. His theory is that we are to know the Evil Arts, merely that we may be on our guard against them; but in practice he often puts forward some of the minor Evil Arts as though for general use. For any man who will regard life as a game of chess and human beings as the pieces, the Essays will afford useful hints for winning the game; hints that go straight to the mark and are always practicable and always suggestive of more than they actually say. There is no waste of words or sentiment. Everything is to the point and tends to practice. How terse, for example, and how practical is the Essay on Negociating, which tells you that "If you would work any man, you must either know his nature and his fashions and so lead him; or his ends, and so win him; or his weaknesses and disadvantages, and so awe him; or those that have interest in him and so govern him!" And what wisdom there is in the reason given for the advice to employ lucky people; "For that breeds confidence; and they will strive to maintain their prescription!" 2

Perhaps the passage in the Essays that contains the most feeling recognition of right and wrong is-characteristically enough, as coming from one who was smarting under the rejection of a protracted suit-to be found in the Essay on Suitors where the writer protests that in every suit there ought to be some higher consideration than mere favour: "Surely there is, in some sort, a right in every suit: either a right of equity if it be a suit of controversy, or a right of desert, if it be a suit of petition." 3 But even here he assumes that his readers will occasionally favour the wrong side and only asks them not to carry their injustice to the length of oppression or slander.

In the little volume of 1597 there is not much of the philosophic enthusiasm which breathes in some of the later Essays. The subjects are for the most part on a common-place level, and the language is correspondingly homely. We must wait till 1620 for the splendid eulogy on Truth as "the sovereign good of human nature." In the Studies of 1597 we have only

1 Essays, xlvii. 43.

2 Ib. 26.

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3 Ib. xlix. 17.