Bacon

by R. W. Church

We look in vain for any threatenings of the storm. What the men of his time thought and felt about Bacon it is not easy to ascertain. Appearances are faint and contradictory; he himself, though scornful of judges who sought to be "popular," believed that he "came in with the favour of the general;" that he "had a little popular reputation, which followeth me whether I will or no." No one for years had discharged the duties of his office with greater efficiency. Scarcely a trace remains of any suspicion, previous to the attack upon him, of the justice of his decisions; no instance was alleged that, in fact, impure motives had controlled the strength and lucidity of an intellect which loved to be true and right for the mere pleasure of being so. Nor was there anything in Bacon's political position to make him specially obnoxious above all others of the King's Council. He maintained the highest doctrines of prerogative; but they were current doctrines, both at the Council board and on the bench; and they were not discredited nor extinguished by his fall. To be on good terms with James and Buckingham meant a degree of subservience which shocks us now; but it did not shock people then, and he did not differ from his fellows in regarding it as part of his duty as a public servant of the Crown. No doubt he had enemies—some with old grudges like Southampton, who had been condemned with Essex; some like Suffolk, smarting under recent reprimands and the biting edge of Bacon's tongue; some like Coke, hating him from constitutional antipathies and the strong antagonism of professional doctrines, for a long course of rivalry and for mortifying defeats. But there is no appearance of preconcerted efforts among them to bring about his overthrow. He did not at the time seem to be identified with anything dangerous or odious. There was no doubt a good deal of dissatisfaction with Chancery—among the common lawyers, because it interfered with their business; in the public, partly from the traditions of its slowness, partly from its expensiveness, partly because, being intended for special redress of legal hardship, it was sure to disappoint one party to a suit. But Bacon thought that he had reformed Chancery. He had also done a great deal to bring some kind of order, or at least hopefulness of order, into the King's desperate finances. And he had never set himself against Parliament. On the contrary, he had always been forward to declare that the King could not do without Parliament, and that Parliament only needed to be dealt with generously, and as "became a King," to be not a danger and hindrance to the Crown but its most sincere and trustworthy support.

What was then to portend danger to Bacon when the Parliament of 1620/21 met? The House of Commons at its meeting was thoroughly loyal and respectful; it meant to be benedictum et pacificum parliamentum. Every one knew that there would be "grievances" which would not be welcome to the Court, but they did not seem likely to touch him. Every one knew that there would be questions raised about unpopular patents and oppressive monopolies, and about their legality; and it was pretty well agreed upon at Court that they should be given up as soon as complained of. But Bacon was not implicated more than the Crown lawyers before him, in what all the Crown lawyers had always defended. There was dissatisfaction about the King's extravagance and wastefulness, about his indecision in the cause of the Elector Palatine, about his supposed intrigues with Papistical and tyrannical Spain; but Bacon had nothing to do with all this except, as far as he could, to give wise counsel and warning. The person who made the King despised and hated was the splendid and insolent favourite, Buckingham. It might have been thought that the one thing to be set against much that was wrong in the State was the just and enlightened and speedy administration of equity in the Chancery.

When Parliament met, though nothing seemed to threaten mischief, it met with a sturdy purpose of bringing to account certain delinquents whose arrogance and vexations of the subjects had provoked the country, and who were supposed to shelter themselves under the countenance of Buckingham. Michell and Mompesson were rascals whose misdemeanors might well try the patience of a less spirited body than an English House of Commons. Buckingham could not protect them, and hardly tried to do so. But just as one electric current "induces" another by neighbourhood, so all this deep indignation against Buckingham's creatures created a fierce temper of suspicion about corruption all through the public service. Two Committees were early appointed by the House of Commons: one a Committee on Grievances, such as the monopolies; the other, a Committee to inquire into abuses in the Courts of Justice and receive petitions about them. In the course of the proceedings, the question arose in the House as to the authorities or "referees" who had certified to the legality of the Crown patents or grants which had been so grossly abused; and among these "referees" were the Lord Chancellor and other high officers, both legal and political.

It was the little cloud. But lookers-on like Chamberlain did not think much of it. "The referees," he wrote on Feb. 29th, "who certified the legality of the patents are glanced at, but they are chiefly above the reach of the House; they attempt so much that they will accomplish little." Coke, who was now the chief leader in Parliament, began to talk ominously of precedents, and to lay down rules about the power of the House to punish—rules which were afterwards found to have no authority for them. Cranfield, the representative of severe economy, insisted that the honour of the King required that the referees, whoever they were, should be called to account. The gathering clouds shifted a little, when the sense of the House seemed to incline to giving up all retrospective action, and to a limitation for the future by statute of the questionable prerogative—a limitation which was in fact attempted by a bill thrown out by the Lords. But they gathered again when the Commons determined to bring the whole matter before the House of Lords. The King wrote to warn Bacon of what was coming. The proposed conference was staved off by management for a day or two, but it could not be averted, and the Lords showed their eagerness for it. And two things by this time—the beginning of March—seemed now to have become clear, first, that under the general attack on the referees was intended a blow against Bacon; next, that the person whom he had most reason to fear was Sir Edward Coke.

The storm was growing; but Bacon was still unalarmed, though Buckingham had been frightened into throwing the blame on the referees.

"I do hear," he writes to Buckingham (dating his letter on March 7th, "the day I received the seal"), "from divers of judgement, that to-morrow's conference is like to pass in a calm, as to the referees. Sir Lionel Cranfield, who hath been formerly the trumpet, said yesterday that he did now incline unto Sir John Walter's opinion and motion not to have the referees meddled with, otherwise than to discount it from the King; and so not to look back, but to the future. And I do hear almost all men of judgement in the House wish now that way. I woo nobody; I do but listen, and I have doubt only of Sir Edward Coke, who I wish had some round caveat given him from the King; for your Lordship hath no great power with him. But a word from the King mates him."

But Coke's opportunity had come. The House of Commons was disposed for gentler measures. But he was able to make it listen to his harsher counsels, and from this time his hand appears in all that was done. The first conference was a tame and dull one. The spokesmen had been slack in their disagreeable and perhaps dangerous duty. But Coke and his friends took them sharply to task. "The heart and tongue of Sir Edward Coke are true relations," said one of his fervent supporters; "but his pains hath not reaped that harvest of praise that he hath deserved. For the referees, they are as transcendent delinquents as any other, and sure their souls made a wilful elopement from their bodies when they made these certificates." A second conference was held with the Lords, and this time the charge was driven home. The referees were named, the Chancellor at the head of them. When Bacon rose to explain and justify his acts he was sharply stopped, and reminded that he was transgressing the orders of the House in speaking till the Committees were named to examine the matter. What was even more important, the King had come to the House of Lords (March 10th), and frightened, perhaps, about his subsidies, told them "that he was not guilty of those grievances which are now discovered, but that he grounded his judgement upon others who have misled him." The referees would be attacked, people thought, if the Lower House had courage.

All this was serious. As things were drifting, it seemed as if Bacon might have to fight the legal question of the prerogative in the form of a criminal charge, and be called upon to answer the accusation of being the minister of a crown which legal language pronounced absolute, and of a King who interpreted legal language to the letter; and further, to meet his accusers after the King himself had disavowed what his servant had done. What passed between Bacon and the King is confused and uncertain; but after his speech the King could scarcely have thought of interfering with the inquiry. The proceedings went on; Committees were named for the several points of inquiry; and Bacon took part in these arrangements. It was a dangerous position to have to defend himself against an angry House of Commons, led and animated by Coke and Cranfield. But though the storm had rapidly thickened, the charges against the referees were not against him alone. His mistake in law, if it was a mistake, was shared by some of the first lawyers and first councillors in England. There was a battle before him, but not a hopeless one. "Modicæ fidei, quare dubitasti" he writes about this time to an anxious friend.

But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering over his head alone. It was against him that the whole attack was directed; as soon as it took a different shape, the complaints against the other referees, such as the Chief-Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, though some attempt was made to press them, were quietly dropped. What was the secret history of these weeks we do not know. But the result of Bacon's ruin was that Buckingham was saved. "As they speak of the Turquoise stone in a ring," Bacon had said to Buckingham when he was made Chancellor, "I will break into twenty pieces before you have the least fall." Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was taken at his word.

At length the lightning fell. During the early part of March, while these dangerous questions were mooted about the referees, a Committee, appointed early in the session, had also been sitting on abuses in courts of justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had been going on into the ways of the subordinate officers of the Court of Chancery. Bacon had early (Feb. 17th) sent a message to the Committee courting full inquiry, "willingly consenting that any man might speak anything of his Court." On the 12th of March the chairman, Sir R. Philips, reported that he had in his hands "divers petitions, many frivolous and clamorous, many of weight and consequence." Cranfield, who presided over the Court of Wards, had quarrelled fiercely with the Chancery, where he said there was "neither Law, Equity, nor Conscience," and pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his own Court, which was found fault with by the lawyers. Some scandalous abuses were brought to light in the Chancery. They showed that "Bacon was at fault in the art of government," and did not know how to keep his servants in order. One of them, John Churchill, an infamous forger of Chancery orders, finding things going hard with him, and "resolved," it is said, "not to sink alone," offered his confessions of all that was going on wrong in the Court. But on the 15th of March things took another turn. It was no longer a matter of doubtful constitutional law; no longer a question of slack discipline over his officers. To the astonishment, if not of the men of his own day, at least to the unexhausted astonishment of times following, a charge was suddenly reported from the Committee to the Commons against the Lord Chancellor, not of straining the prerogative, or of conniving at his servants' misdoings, but of being himself a corrupt and venal judge. Two suitors charged him with receiving bribes. Bacon was beginning to feel worried and anxious, and he wrote thus to Buckingham. At length he had begun to see the meaning of all these inquiries, and to what they were driving.