From their own members they next extended their prosecutions to public officers. They had appointed a committee of inquiry into public abuses, and now summoned witnesses. The conduct of public officers, judges, and their dependents, was subjected to a severe scrutiny. They first examined into the abuses of patents, and three of these incurred particular censure: the one for the licensing of ale-houses, another for the inspection of inns and hostelries, and the third for the exclusive manufacture of gold and silver thread. Patents, to secure to inventors the fruits of their discoveries in arts and manufactures, are beneficial, stimulating to improvement and extending traffic. But these patents were of a directly contrary nature, being grants, for money or through Court favour, to individuals to monopolise some particular business; thus checking competition, and defrauding the fair trader of his legitimate profits. The inquiry laid open a scene of the most extraordinary fraud, corruption, and oppression. The three patents just mentioned were denounced as national injuries, and Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Francis Michell, a justice of the peace, his partner in them, were arrested as offenders. The culprits sought protection from the Government, Buckingham having sold them the patents and divided the profits with his half-brother, Sir Edward Villiers. The Court was in great tremor, and it was proposed to dissolve Parliament to save the patentees. But Williams, Dean of Westminster, represented this as a very imprudent measure, and another course was adopted at his recommendation. Buckingham affected a patriotic air, as if he himself had been no way concerned in it, and said if his brother had shared the emolument, let him also share the punishment. But this was safely said, for Villiers was already abroad out of the reach of Parliament; and means were not long wanting to let Mompesson escape out of the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. Michell was not so fortunate; he was secured and lodged in the Tower.
In these prosecutions Coke was extremely active, for he saw a prospect of taking a signal revenge on Bacon, who had not only supplanted him, but insulted him in his fall. Bacon was notoriously mixed up with the corruptions of the Court of Chancery; and Coke informed the Commons that it was not within their jurisdiction to punish offenders not of their own House, but that they could punish all offences against the State in co-operation with the Lords. Accordingly they invited the Upper House to take cognisance of these offences, with which they readily complied, and sentenced Mompesson and Michell to be degraded from their knighthood, fined, and imprisoned. James, who had done his best to screen the offenders, then in a fit of affected patriotism expressed his indignation at having had his credulity imposed on by these men, and by an illegal stretch of prerogative converted Mompesson's sentence into perpetual banishment. Buckingham, the guiltiest party of all, did not quite escape observation. Yelverton, the Attorney-General, who was accused of participation in these illegal practices, and who was condemned to severe fines and imprisonment for life, boldly accused Buckingham, before the House of Lords, of his master share in them. But that favourite was too strongly fortified by the royal favour, and by those who must have fallen with him, to be seriously endangered. But lesser men did not escape so well. Sir John Bennet, Judge of the Prerogative Court, was impeached, as well as Dr. Field, Bishop of Llandaff, for bribery and corruption. Bennet was charged with having granted administration of wills for money, contrary to law; but he escaped his punishment by obtaining time to prepare his defence, during which Parliament was prorogued; but he was afterwards fined twenty thousand pounds in the Star Chamber, for which, however, he obtained a pardon. Field of Llandaff had bound a suitor in Chancery to pay him over six thousand pounds, if he obtained his suit for him, through Buckingham. At the entreaty of the archbishop, however, he, too, escaped, under the pretence of being left to the dealing of the Church.
But the great offender, at whom Coke and others were directing their main efforts, was the Lord Chancellor Bacon. Bacon had managed to make his way from a moderate position to the highest honours of the State. He was not only Lord Chancellor of the kingdom, and a baron, but in January, 1621, became Viscount St. Albans. Besides this elevation, he possessed a far higher one in the fame of his philosophical works; and had he possessed as much real greatness of mind as talent, might have stood in the admiration of posterity as Milton does—poor, but glorious beyond the tinsel glory of Courts; and it might have been said of him as of the great poet—
"His soul was like a star and dwelt apart."
But Bacon, who had placed his name high on the scroll of immortality by his genius, was destined, like Lucifer, to become more notorious by his fall than by his standing. Brilliant as were his powers, superb as were his accomplishments, he had not hesitated to trail his finest qualities through the mire of Courts and corruption, in the eager quest of worldly distinction. He had risen, perhaps, more by his base flatteries, and his calumnious envy of his contemporaries, than by his abilities; and he had continued, whilst rising, to make enemies on all sides. The king and Buckingham had both conceived a deep dislike to him. James hated all men of genius with the jealousy of a pedant, and was only rendered tolerant of Bacon by his abject adulation, and his services in punishing Coke and carrying out relentlessly the fiats of prerogative. Buckingham probably never forgot what he had done in the matter of Coke's daughter. The Lords hated him for his upstart vanity and ostentation, and the Commons for his desertion of the public cause for that of the despotic king. But perhaps not all these causes together would have availed to pull him down, if Buckingham had not wanted the Great Seal for his creature Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln.
The Parliamentary Committee inquiring into the abuses of office, recommended the House of Commons to impeach the Lord Chancellor for bribery and corruption in the court over which he presided; and the Commons accordingly presented to the Upper House a Bill of Impeachment against him, consisting of two-and-twenty instances of bribery and corruption in his own person, and of allowing the same in his officers. The corruption of the Chancellor was notorious; and out of doors it was asserted that he had received in presents no less than one hundred thousand pounds in the three years of his Chancellorship. This he denied in a letter to Buckingham; but the charges brought against him by the Commons, who were prepared to support them, were so formidable that they completely struck down the guilty man. He felt that his ruin was at hand, and either feeling or feigning sickness, he took to his bed. If he had not perceived sufficient indications of his impending fate from other quarters, the conduct of the king left him in no doubt. James informed the Lords that he trusted the Chancellor might clear himself, but that if he did not, he would punish him with the utmost severity.
It must not be supposed, however, that Bacon was the first to introduce bribery into the Court of Chancery; it was an old and well-known practice, which had been both familiar to Elizabeth and sanctioned by her. But Bacon ought to have had a soul above it, whereas he had indulged in the villainous custom the more profusely because his mode of living was so extravagant and ostentatious, that he saved not a penny of his enormous gain, but was always in need.
Bacon, on the presentation of the Bill of Impeachment, on the 21st of March, prayed for time to prepare his defence, and this was granted him, the House adjourning till the 17th of April. On the 24th of that month, the humbled statesman drew up a general confession of his guilt, which was presented by Prince Charles. In this letter he threw himself on the mercy of the House and the king, and pleaded, with a strange mixture of humility and ingenuity, his very crimes as meritorious, since their punishment would deter others from them. He represented his spirit as broken, his mind as overwhelmed by his calamities; but he added that he found a certain gladness in the fact that "hereafter the greatness of a judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection to him against guiltiness; which is the beginning of a golden work—the purgation of the courts of justice. And," he added, "in these two points, God is my witness, though it be my fortune to be the anvil upon which these two effects are broken and wrought, I take no small comfort." After this edifying spectacle of exhibiting his punishment as a public benefit, he proceeded to apply that unctuous adulation to the Sovereign and to the Peers in which he was so unabashed a master. He implored mercy at the hands of the king—"a king of incomparable clemency, whose heart was inscrutable for wisdom and goodness—a prince whose like had not been seen these hundred years!" And then the Lords were equally bepraised, "compassion ever beating in the veins of noble blood;" nor were the bishops forgotten, "the servants of Him who would not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax."
INTERVIEW BETWEEN BACON AND THE DEPUTATION FROM THE LORDS. (See p. 484.)