daughter of Benedict Barnham, a merchant who had been both alderman and sheriff of London.
Meantime Sir Francis Bacon kept his application for the post of Solicitor-General well before the Court of the new King. If the indifference of his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, and the ill-will of Sir Edward Coke, his legal rival, doomed him ever to new disappointment, Cecil and Coke at least found in Bacon a persistence worthy of a better cause than office-seeking. Elizabeth Bacon, his half-sister, had made a third marriage with Sir William Periam, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Sir William Periam died in 1604, and was succeeded as Chief Baron by the Solicitor-General, Sir Thomas Fleming. Bacon hoped to get the vacant Solicitor-Generalship, but it went for a second time over his head and was given to Sir John Doderidge. A third set-back followed two years later. In 1606, Sir Edward Coke was made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. It had been the custom under Queen Elizabeth to promote the Solicitor-General to the office of Attorney-General in case of its vacancy, but it suited King James to select Sir Henry Hobart for Attorney-General to succeed Coke, thus avoiding a vacancy in the Solicitor-Generalship. A year later Sir John Doderidge was promoted out of the way, and at last, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, Sir Francis Bacon was appointed Solicitor-General. He was forty-seven years old and had been applying for the position for fourteen years.
With an assured official income and the private
