restraint of his position, free, but still under a cloud, was peculiarly galling to a man of Essex's high spirit. Bacon counselled patience, but Bacon at this time was occupying an impossible position between an old friend whom he had just helped to prosecute and the Queen who suspected everybody in the Essex connection. Elizabeth had no intention of restoring Essex to favor, as she took occasion to show when his patent for the monopoly of sweet wines expired a few months after his dismissal from Court. He petitioned for a renewal of the lease, and received the ungracious answer,"No, an unruly beast must be stinted of his provender."

The Earl of Essex, out of favor completely and nursing his grievances, was soon surrounded with other disaffected men who made Essex House a centre of conspiracy against the government. These gatherings were watched by the Court, and on Saturday, February 7, 1601, Essex was summoned before the Privy Council. He refused to attend. That same night there was a performance of "the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second," possibly Shakspere's tragedy, at the Globe Theatre. It developed at Essex's trial that his friends had paid the actors forty shillings to present this particular play that night, in the hope that the sight of the deposition of the king on the stage might stir up the populace. The next day, Sunday, the Earl of Essex, with some two hundred followers, made his abortive attempt to raise the city. He rode through London crying out that his life was in danger and

the country sold to Spain. The Queen's forces easily quelled the rising, and within twelve hours Essex was a prisoner in the Tower, charged with high treason.

On February 19, the Earls of Essex and Southampton were arraigned together. The AttorneyGeneral, Sir Edward Coke, conducted the prosecution, and Bacon appeared with him as Queen's counsel. Essex's defence was that he had taken up arms not to overturn the government, but to protect his own life. Bacon spoke twice during the trial, interposing both times to recall the court to the main issue against Essex, and to show that his defence of a private grievance was a pretext invented by him at the eleventh hour. Essex's answer to one of these speeches is a sufficient reply to those who say he spoke no word of reproach to Bacon,

"To answer Mr. Bacon's speech at once, I say thus much; and call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon. You are then to know that Mr. Francis Bacon hath written two letters, the one of which hath been artificially framed in my name, after he had framed the other in Mr. Anthony Bacon's name to provoke me. In the latter of these two he lays down the grounds of my discontentment, and the reasons I pretend against my enemies, pleading as orderly for me as I could do myself. . . . If those reasons were then just and true, not counterfeit, how can it be that now my pretences are false and injurious? For then Mr. Bacon joined with me in mine opinion, and pointed out those to be mine en

emies, and to hold me in disgrace with Her Majesty, whom he seems now to clear of such mind towards me; and, therefore, I leave the truth of what I say, and he opposeth, unto your Lordship's indifferent considerations.

Bacon did not produce the two letters, or offer to produce them, although they must have been in his possession, for in his Apology he prints them both, claiming that he manufactured the fictitious correspondence between his brother and Essex solely to bring about a reconciliation between the Earl and the Queen.

The Earls of Essex and Southampton were convicted and condemned to death, but Essex only was executed. After the execution Bacon was employed as before to write an account of Essex's offences, and did so in a paper called, A Declaration of the Practises and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Maiestie and her Kingdom, etc. (1601). For his services, Bacon received £1200, from the fine of Catesby, one of the accomplices of Essex. "The Queen hath done something for me," he wrote to a creditor, "though not in the proportion I had hoped."

Bacon's conduct towards Essex has been a fruitful subject of controversy. Some of his biographers find no fault with it, while others see writ large in the circumstance an insensibility to nice moral distinctions that led later to his downfall. The Earl of Essex had committed treason, and according to the standard of justice in that age he deserved

death. It was Bacon's duty as a loyal citizen to abhor the crime. But condemnation of the crime is a very different thing from taking part in the prosecution and helping to bring an old friend to the block. That contemporary opinion did not approve of Bacon's course is clear from the testimony of Bacon himself. Even before Essex's affairs had reached their climax, he said one day to the Queen in a burst of "passion" very unusual for him, “A great many love me not, because they think I have been against my Lord of Essex; and you love me not, because you know I have been for him." And either he smarted under the censure of public opinion, or his conscience twitted him, for when both Elizabeth and Essex were dead, and there could be no answer to his statements, he wrote his Apology in Certain Imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex (1604).

If Bacon hoped to win advancement by acting as an unsworn counsel of the Queen against the Earl of Essex, he was disappointed, for there was no change in his political circumstances during the life of Queen Elizabeth. His material circumstances were improved in 1601 by the death of his brother Anthony, to whom he was probably more sincerely attached than to any other person.

With the accession of James I, Bacon's position began to mend. In August, 1604, his office as one of the learned counsel was confirmed, and for the first time a salary of £60 a year was attached to it. One of the first acts of sovereignty of James I was the conferring of knighthood on a mob of gentlemen at

so many pounds a head. George Chapman and John Marston for ridiculing "my thirty-pound knights" in Eastward Hoe, were thrown into prison, in 1605, whereupon Ben Jonson valiantly walked into prison to share their punishment. Francis Bacon, writing to Sir Robert Cecil, July 3, 1603, expresses three several reasons for desiring one of those purchasable baronetcies,

"Lastly, for this divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood, I could without charge, by your Honour's mean, be content to have it, both because of this late disgrace, and because I have three new knights in my mess in Gray's Inn's commons; and because I have found out an alderman's daughter, an handsome maiden to my liking." A second letter, a fortnight later, begged that he might receive. the honor in some such manner as would confer real distinction, and "not be merely gregarious in a troop." He was duly knighted two days before the coronation, July 23, 1603, but he had to share the honor with three hundred other gentlemen. In the autumn of 1605 appeared The Two Books of Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning.

On the 11th of May, 1606, Sir Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain,

"Sir Francis Bacon was married yesterday to his young wench in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of fine raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion." Sir Francis Bacon's wife was Alice Barnham,