On the 3d of May, he was unanimously declared to be guilty, and he was sentenced to a fine of forty thousand pounds, to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure, to be incapable of holding any public office, and of sitting in Parliament or of coming within the verge of the court.[20] Such was the sentence pronounced on the man whom three months before the King delighted to honor for “his integrity in the administration of justice.”
The fatal verdict affected his health so materially that the judgment could not receive immediate execution; he could not be conveyed to the Tower until the 31st of May; the following day he was liberated. He repaired to the house of Sir John Vaughan, who held a situation in the prince’s household.[21] He wished to retire to his own residence at York House; but this was refused. He was ordered to proceed to his seat at Gorhambury, whence he was not to remove, and where he remained, though very reluctantly, till the ensuing spring.
The heavy fine was remitted. But as he had lived in great pomp, he had economized naught from his legitimate or ill-gotten gains. As he was now insolvent, a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year was bestowed on him; from his estate and other revenues he derived thirteen hundred pounds per annum more. On the 17th of October, his remaining penalties were remitted. It cannot but strike the reader as a most remarkable circumstance that, within eighteen months of the condemnation, all the penalties were successively remitted. Would this induce the belief that he was but the scape-goat of the court, that the condemnation was purely political? It is, we believe, to be explained ostensibly by the advanced age of Bacon, but really by the circumstance that the King’s favorite, Buckingham, was an accomplice.
Bacon discovered, alas! when it was too late, that the talent God had given him he had “misspent in things for which he was least fit;” or as Thomson has beautifully expressed it:[22]—
Hapless in his choice,
Unfit to stand the civil storm of state,
And through the smooth barbarity of courts,
With firm, but pliant virtue, forward still
To urge his course; him for the studious shade
Kind Nature form’d; deep, comprehensive, clear,