run he was pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely
a prisoner. Raleigh had remained to perish at
last in dishonour. Northumberland, Raleigh’s
fellow-prisoner, after fifteen years’ captivity,
was released this year. The year after Bacon’s
condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady Somerset
were released from the Tower, after a six years’
imprisonment. Southampton, the accomplice of
Essex, Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619 by Bacon
for embezzlement, sat in the House of Peers which judged
Bacon, and both of them took a prominent part in judging
him.
To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved
an irretrievable overthrow as regards public life,
and, though some parts of it were remitted and others
lightened, it plunged his private affairs into trouble
which weighed heavily on him for his few remaining
years. To his deep distress and horror he had
to go to the Tower to satisfy the terms of his sentence.
“Good my Lord,” he writes to Buckingham,
May 31, “procure my warrant for my discharge
this day. Death is so far from being unwelcome
to me, as I have called for it as far as Christian
resolution would permit any time these two months.
But to die before the time of his Majesty’s
grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst
that could be.” He was released after two
or three days, and he thanks Buckingham (June 4) for
getting him out to do him and the King faithful service—“wherein,
by the grace of God, your Lordship shall find that
my adversity hath neither spent nor pent
my spirits.” In the autumn his fine was
remitted—that is, it was assigned to persons
nominated by Bacon, who, as the Crown had the first
claim on all his goods, served as a protection against
his other creditors, who were many and some of them
clamorous—and it was followed by his pardon.
His successor, Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who
stood in great fear of Parliament, tried to stop the
pardon. The assignment of the fine, he said to
Buckingham, was a gross job—“it is
much spoken against, not for the matter (for no man
objects to that), but for the manner, which is full
of knavery, and a wicked precedent. For by this
assignment he is protected from all his creditors,
which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty’s
nor your Lordship’s meaning.” It
was an ill-natured and cowardly piece of official
pedantry to plunge deeper a drowning man; but in the
end the pardon was passed. It does not appear
whether Buckingham interfered to overrule the Lord
Keeper’s scruples. Buckingham was certainly
about this time very much out of humour with Bacon,
for a reason which, more than anything else, discloses
the deep meanness which lurked under his show of magnanimity
and pride. He had chosen this moment to ask Bacon
for York House. This meant that Bacon would never
more want it. Even Bacon was stung by such a
request to a friend in his condition, and declined
to part with it; and Buckingham accordingly was offended,
and made Bacon feel it. Indeed, there is reason
to think with Mr. Spedding that for the sealing of
his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices with
the King, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard,
Gondomar, with whom Bacon had always been on terms
of cordiality and respect, and who at this time certainly
“brought about something on his behalf, which
his other friends either had not dared to attempt
or had not been able to obtain.”
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