"In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon he preached the gospel; when, after some revivations of the old distaste concerning York House, he most nobly opened his heart unto me; wherein I read that which augured much good towards you. After which revelation the book was again sealed up, and must in his own time only by himself be again manifested unto you. I have leave to remember some of the vision, and am not forbidden to write it. He vowed (not court like), but constantly to appear your friend so much, as if his Majesty should abandon the care of you, you should share his fortune with him. He pleased to tell me how much he had been beholden to you, how well he loved you, how unkindly he took the denial of your house (for so he will needs understand it); but the close for all this was harmonious, since he protested he would seriously begin to study your ends, now that the world should see he had no ends on you. He is in hand with the work, and therefore will by no means accept of your offer, though I can assure you the tender hath much won upon him, and mellowed his heart towards you, and your genius directed you aright when you writ that letter of denial to the Duke. The King saw it, and all the rest, which made him say unto the Marquis, you played an after-game well; and that now he had no reason to be much offended.
"I have already talked of the Revelation, and now am to speak in apocalyptical language, which I hope you will rightly comment: whereof if you make difficulty, the bearer can help you with the key of the cypher.
"My Lord Falkland by this time hath showed you London from Highgate. If York House were gone, the town were yours, and all your straitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had it. This I know; yet this you must not know from me. Bargain with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near you, and disappointing other aims (which must either shortly receive content or never), perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, though you may be indeed as innocent as before. Make the Treasurer believe that since the Marquis will by no means accept of it, and that you must part with it, you are more willing to pleasure him than anybody else, because you are given to understand my Lord Marquis so inclines; which inclination, if the Treasurer shortly send unto you about it, desire may be more clearly manifested than as yet it hath been; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you in terminis terminantibus that the Marquis desires you should gratify the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it; and so I wish too, for your good; yet would not it were absolutely passed until my Lord Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it; for then his so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the immediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and way."
It need hardly be said that when Cranfield got it, it soon passed into Buckingham's hands. "Bacon consented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return consented to give him his liberty." Yet Bacon could write to him, "low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other but yourself." "As for York House," he bids Toby Matthews to let Buckingham know, "that whether in a straight line or a compass line, I meant it for his Lordship, in the way which I thought might please him best." But liberty did not mean either money or recovered honour. All his life long he had made light of being in debt; but since his fall this was no longer a condition easy to bear. He had to beg some kind of pension of the King. He had to beg of Buckingham; "a small matter for my debts would do me more good now than double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousand by the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I may assure your Lordship. The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty shall not be lost."
It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon's mind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes was taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself. The buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, are as remarkable as his profound depression. When the end was approaching, his thoughts turned at once to other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken up and finished. At the close of his last desperate letter to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a jest, and with the prospect of two great literary undertakings—
"This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours with an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown; and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not precipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a bribe. For if your Majesty will give me peace and leisure, and God give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of England, and a better digest of your laws."
The Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, "mate" him. But the moment he was out of it, his quick and fertile mind was immediately at work in all directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, arranging all kinds of work according as events might point out the way. His projects for history, for law, for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his thoughts as his pardon and his debts; and they, we have seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the moment the storm was past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. He never allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judge him, that the future world would mistake him. "Aliquis fui inter vivos," he writes to Gondomar, "neque omnino intermoriar apud posteros." Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being restored to honour and power. He compared himself to Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position. Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," writes Chamberlain, "no manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself writes, "to have a feather in my head."
Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice; and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential employment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of the Commentarius Solutus of 1608, about points to be urged to the King at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "Your Majesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act." "Therefore," he goes on, "if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me." He insists very strongly that the King's service never miscarried in his hands, for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. "That his Majesty's business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket and cistern to that fountain—a bucket to draw forth, a cistern to preserve." He is not afraid of the apparent slight to the censure passed on him by Parliament. "For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a friend of mine said, Parliament died penitent towards me." "What the King bestows on me will be further seen than on Paul's steeple." "There be mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I ever served his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking." In the odd fashion of the time—a fashion in which no one more delighted than himself—he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument.
"I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany—Libera nos Domine; parce nobis, Domine; exaudi nos, Domine. In the first, I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not conveniently in respect of his affairs. In the second, he hath done it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise performed, in restoring to the light of his countenance."
But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public employment, he would be ready to give private counsel; and he would apply himself to any "literary province" that the King appointed. "I am like ground fresh. If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow me with anything, I hope to give him some yield." "Your Majesty hath power; I have faith. Therefore a miracle may be wrought." And he proposes, for matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as "active" works, the recompiling of laws; the disposing of wards, and generally the education of youth; the regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts; and the regulation of Trade; and for "contemplative," the continuation of the history of Henry VIII.; a general treatise de Legibus et Justitia; and the "Holy War" against the Ottomans.
When he wrote this he had already shown what his unquelled energy could accomplish. In the summer and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries and inconveniences of that time, moving about from place to place, without his books, and without free access to papers and records, he had written his History of Henry VII. The theme had, no doubt, been long in his head. But the book was the first attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own work.
"I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a man to have Leisure with Honour. That was never my fortune. For time was, I had Honour without Leisure; and now I have Leisure without Honour.... But my desire is now to have Leisure without Loitering, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life.... If King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing himself so truly described in colours that will last and be believed."