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, 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 be 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 presented a general confession of his guilt, which was presented by prince Charles. In his 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, inasmuch as their punishment would deter others from them. He represented his spirit broken, his mind 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 incensed, "compassion ever beating in the veins of noble blood;" not forgetting the bishops, "the servants of Him who would not bruise the broken reed, nor quench the smoking flax."
But all this creeping, to the crown, the coronet, and the mitre, did not serve him; he was required by the peers to make a separate and distinct answer to each charge. He complied fully with the demand, confessing everything; and when a deputation from the lords waited on him to know whether this was his own voluntary act—for they excused him the humiliation of appearing at the bar of the house—he replied with tears, "It is my act—my hand—my heart. Oh, my lords, spare a broken reed!" This full and explicit confession being read in the house, on the 3rd of May the commons, headed by their speaker, attended to demand judgment, which the lord chief justice, acting as speaker of the upper house, declared to this effect:—That the lord chancellor being found guilty of many acts of bribery and corruption, both by his own confession and the evidence of witnesses, he was condemned to pay a fine of forty thousand pounds, to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's pleasure, to be dismissed from all his offices, and deemed incapable of either holding office again or sitting in parliament, and to be prohibited from coming within twelve miles of the seat of parliament.
The king remitted the fine, for the best of reasons—that Bacon had nothing to pay it with; he also liberated him from the Tower after a mere pro forma imprisonment of a few days, and Bacon retired to hide his dishonour at his house at Gorhambury, near St. Albans. Nor had his fall extinguished all admiration for him as a great lawyer and philosopher. Even in the house Sir Robert Philips, Sir Edward Sackville, and others, reminded the public of the lord chancellor's wonderful genius and acquirements, and as prince Charles returned from hunting one day, he beheld "a coach accompanied by a goodly troop of horsemen," whom he found were escorting the ex-chancellor to his house at Gorhambury.
In that beautiful retreat, it was in Bacon's power to have so lived and so written, that his disgrace as a statesman would have been soon lost in the splendour of his genius and the dignified wisdom of his latter years. But unfortunately Bacon was stamped to the core with the love of worldly greatness, and the five years that he lived were rendered still more miserable and still more contemptible, by his incessant hankering after restoration to place and honour, and his persevering and cringing importunities to the king and Buckingham for these objects. To such a length did the wretched man proceed, that his letters became actually impious. He told the prince that as the king, his father, had been his creator, he had hoped that he would be his redeemer. The works which he completed after his disgrace
