During the next fifteen months there is little of political importance from Bacon's pen. The only exception is his 'Advice touching Sutton's Estate.' He must have felt that as long as Salisbury lived there was no chance of gaining the king's ear for his greater projects, though he succeeded in obtaining from him a promise of the attorney-generalship whenever it fell vacant. In writing to Salisbury he continued to use the language of highflown compliment; but the thorough hatred with which he regarded the lord treasurer, whose policy he despised, and to whose personal intervention he ascribed his own long exclusion from political influence, burst out after Salisbury's death on 24 May 1612 in the essay 'On Deformity,' which he now added to a new edition of his essays.
A week after Salisbury's death Bacon offered his political services to the king. 'The, great matter and most instant for the present, he wrote, 'is the consideration of a parliament for two effects: the one for the supply of your estate, the other for the better knitting of the hearts of your subjects unto your majesty, according to your infinite merit, for both which parliaments have been and are the ancient and honourable remedy. Now, because I take myself to have a little skill in that region, as one that ever affected that your majesty mought in all your causes not only prevail, but prevail with the satisfaction of the inner man; and though no man can say but I was a perfect and peremptory royalist, yet every man makes me believe that I was never one hour out of credit with the lower house, my desire is to know whether your majesty will give me leave to meditate and propound unto you some preparative remembrances touching the future parliament.' This letter was followed by another, in which Bacon directly offered to abandon the law for the council table. It was perhaps in pursuance of this idea that Bacon asked for the mastership of the wards vacant by Salisbury's death, and drew up a declaration to be made by the new master on his entry upon office. He was, however, disappointed, as the place was given to Sir George Carew, and on Carew's dying shortly afterwards it was given, not to Bacon, but to Sir Walter Cope. It is said that on this latter occasion he was so certain of success that he 'put most of his men into new cloaks.' Some jester observed 'that Sir Walter was master of the wards, and Sir Francis Bacon of the liveries.'
During the year and a half which followed Salisbury's death Bacon found employment as solicitor-general in a charge against the Countess of Shrewsbury for assisting the flight of Arabella Stuart, and in another charge against Whitelocke for what was considered to be an attack on the king's prerogative. Of far greater importance is the use which he made of James's permission to write to him on affairs of state, which might possibly pave the way to the higher political employment for which he had asked.
Of summoning parliament there was no immediate thought. It was still believed possible that a body of sub-commissioners, of whom Bacon was one, might succeed where Salisbury had failed, in procuring an adequate revenue for the crown without recurring to parliament. On 18 Sept. 1612 Bacon wrote to the king to have patience, begging him not again to have his wants and necessities in particular, as it were, hung up in two tablets before the eyes of his 'lords and commons to be talked of for four months together.' Some months later, when the scheme of supplying the king without a parliament had broken down, these words were expanded by their writer into a series of remarkable state papers, in which he indicated the relations which ought to subsist between king and parliament. In these papers there is indeed much which it is impossible to regard with complete satisfaction. There is in them too much respect for mere management, and too strong an inclination to regard the opposition to the king as in the main personal. Yet, on the whole, the ground which they take is unassailable. There is to be no more bargaining between king and subjects. The king is to show his determination to lead in the right direction, and to be content to wait till his subjects are prepared to follow. He is not to press for supply, but to wait till the commons are sufficiently impressed with his devotion to the nation to offer him all that he needs. 'In bargains,' wrote Bacon in some notes which he drew up for the king's speech to the new parliament, 'the manner is for either part chiefly to take care of the other. "Charitas non quærit quæ sua sunt." The king to take care of his subjects, and the subjects to take care of their king.' The easiest way to understand Bacon's political position is to read these papers in connection with the paper on the jurisdiction of the council of Wales, in which he advocates the maintenance of prerogative government in the interests of the humbler classes, and with the papers on the church, in which he advocates a relaxation of the restrictions on nonconformity.
To carry out this programme would have been to avert the evils of the next half-century. No one to whose mind the history of that half-century is present can agree with those numerous writers who speak of Bacon's political work as inferior to his scientific. He
