Buckingham either perceived that these infringements upon the liberty of the subject had been permitted to go far enough, or his native good nature prevailed over the virulence of party and the love of power; for on the nineteenth of July he came to London, visited the Earl of Northumberland in the Tower, passed two hours with the Earl of Southampton at Westminster, and with the Earl of Oxford at Sir Thomas Cockaine’s. “This was taken,” writes Mr. Chamberlain, “for a good presage, like the coming of St. Elmo after a tempest.”[[331]] Two days afterwards, the Lord Keeper Williams took the Earl of Southampton to Theobald’s where the king was. A long conference ensued; the Lord Keeper, the Marquis of Buckingham, and Southampton being the only persons admitted to the royal presence. On the following day, Southampton, was set at liberty.[[332]]
Sir Edward Coke was likewise among those who incurred the displeasure of James for freedom of speech. Imprisonment in the Tower followed his offence. The locks and doors of his chambers in the Temple were sealed up, and several securities for money taken away. Immured in prison, his family not being suffered to approach him, he had yet another trial to encounter. James, whose meanness equalled his improvidence, took this base occasion to sue Coke for an old pretended debt due from Sir Christopher Hatton to Queen Elizabeth. The reply of the Solicitor-general, Sir John Walter, when the brief of this iniquitous case was sent to him, is worthy of a nobler character of mind than that usually imputed to the English lawyer of that period. “Let my tongue,” he answered, “cleave to the roof of my mouth whenever I ope it against Sir Edward Coke;” yet the suit was rigorously prosecuted. “That spirit of fiery exhalation”[[333]] was not daunted even by this petty and malignant persecution. It was observed of him that he lost his advancement in the same way that he got it[[334]]—by his tongue. To the last, he steadily resisted the oppressions of the crown, and his character, odious as it was to his contemporaries, odious when we reflect upon him as the vituperative judge of Ralegh, and too justly censured by Bacon “for insulting misery,”[[335]] has received the respect and gratitude of posterity for its general political independence.
The fate of Bacon himself excited a still more mournful interest in good minds, than the injuries inflicted upon Coke.
It becomes necessary for the biographer of Villiers, to examine into the circumstances of an affair with which, as with every public event of the day, he was intimately connected. Bacon, in afterwards addressing James, alludes to Buckingham when he imputes his degradation to the personal views of some secret foe. “I wish that, as I am the first, so I may be the last of sacrifices in your times; and when, from private appetite, it is resolved that a creature shall be sacrificed, it is easy to pick up sticks enough from any thicket, whither he has strayed, to make a fire to offer it with.”[[336]]
In the early period of his career, Buckingham had owed much to the countenance, and more to the advice, of Bacon. The author of the Novum Organum seems to have been among the first to discern that remarkable association of personal and mental qualities in Villiers, which promised to secure him an ascendancy over James. Bacon lent the lustre of his name to shine upon the young courtier, and expected in return that aid which Buckingham, he soon perceived, would have it in his power to bestow. A mutual dependence was established; Buckingham existed on the capital of Bacon’s intellect; Bacon throve on the inferiority of the youth, conscious of his defects, and wise enough to remedy his own weakness by the strength of another.
No greater proof of confidence in a friend can be given than to seek his advice, and Villiers paid Bacon that tribute. He requested him “to instruct him how to fulfil his high station, how to serve the King, how to conciliate the people.” In consequence of this, Bacon had addressed to the Favourite a letter of advice,[[337]] “such,” observes the biographer of Bacon, “as is not usually given in courts, but of a strain equally free and friendly, calculated to make the person to whom it was addressed good and great, and equally honourable to the giver and the receiver; advice which contributed not a little to his prosperity in after life.”[[338]]
This manual of a courtier’s duty, it must be owned, was sadly at variance with the practice that followed these nobly conceived instructions on the part of him who gave them.
“You are,”—Bacon thus addressed Villiers—“as a new risen star, and the eyes of all are upon you; let not your own negligence make you fall like a meteor.” “Next to religion,” he adds elsewhere, “let your care be to promote justice. By justice and mercy is the King’s throne established.” “And as far as it may rest in you, let no arbitrary power be intended. The people of this kingdom love the laws thereof, and nothing will oblige them more than a confidence of the free enjoying of them.” “Your greatest care must be,” he adds, towards the conclusion, “that the great men of the court—for you must give me leave to be plain with you, for so is your injunction laid upon me—yourself in the first place, who are first in the eye of all men, give no just cause of scandal either by light, vain, or by oppressive carriage.”[[339]]
Notwithstanding these admirable precepts, the years during which Lord Bacon held the Great Seal, and during which Villiers ruled predominant, were, as it has been justly observed, “the darkest and most shameful in English history.”[[340]] The domestic government of James and his favourite, in weakness and want of high principle, corresponded but too mournfully with their foreign policy; with their indifference to the great struggle for the interests of liberty and of Protestantism in Germany; with their vacillating and cowardly counsels. Whilst the continental nations were venting their surprise and indignation in sallies of ridicule directed against England, the King, who had nothing to bestow in the aid of a loyal cause in which the welfare of his own child was bound up, resorted at home to the most disgraceful expedients in order to exalt his favourite. During this period, Buckingham held an absolute empire over the actions of Bacon. A system of persecution against Coke had followed the disgraceful affair of Sir John Villiers’ marriage. In an unlucky hour, Bacon interfered between Lady Hatton and her injured husband; he even descended to lend himself to the low affairs of these vulgar great, and to take part against his enemy, Coke, and with his arrogant wife. This was during the King’s absence in Scotland: as matters then stood, this proceeding on the part of the Lord Keeper militated against the marriage which Buckingham had at heart. Bacon was soon taught, therefore, to see his error. The Favourite resented his interference, and refused to be pacified. In vain did the Lord Keeper stay certain proceedings against Coke which had been instituted in the Star Chamber; in vain did he hasten to testify his submission to Buckingham. Two successive days he went to the stately apartments of the Favourite; waited meekly in an ante-chamber, seated on an old box, with the Great Seal of England at his side. At length, when he was admitted, he threw himself at the feet of Buckingham, and swore never to rise thence till he had received the pardon of the lofty personage whom he had once instructed in the art of conducting himself with dignity.[[341]]
This was not such conduct as would entitle a man to respect even from him on whom he cringed. Yet Bacon, in one of his letters addressed to Buckingham, declares him to have been the “truest and perfectest mirror of friendship that ever was in a court;” and protests that “he should count every day lost in which he should not study his well-doing in thought, or do his name honour in speech, or perform service for him indeed.”[[342]] Nor is the statement given by Weldon, of the manner in which the seals were offered to Bacon by Buckingham, credible. According to that writer, the Favourite, when he sent to proffer them to Bacon, accompanied them with an insulting message, saying, that whilst he knew him to be a man of excellent parts, he was also aware “that he was an errant knave, apt, in his prosperity, to ruin any that had raised him in his adversity;” yet from regard to his master’s service, he had obtained the seals for him; but with this assurance, that if he ever should act to him as he had done to others, he would be cast down as much below as he was now above any honour that he had expected,[[343]] alluding to the flagrant ingratitude and perfidy of Bacon to Essex. But this story, supported by no evidence, is at variance with probability; and since it rests upon the authority of one who is always inveterate against Buckingham, it may be discarded as wholly unworthy of belief.