As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had kept Bacon so long in the shade kept him at a distance from the King’s ear, and from influence on his counsels.  Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King had become accustomed to confide, in his own conscious strangeness to English ways and real dislike and suspicion of them; Salisbury had an authority which no one else had, both from his relations with James at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, and as the representative of her policy and the depositary of its traditions; and if he had lived, things might not, perhaps, have been better in James’s government, but many things, probably, would have been different.  But while Salisbury was supreme, Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly busied with his official work; and the Solicitor’s place had become, as he says, a “mean thing” compared with the Attorney’s, and also an extremely laborious place—­“one of the painfullest places in the kingdom.”  Much of it was routine, but responsible and fatiguing routine.  But if he was not in Salisbury’s confidence, he was prominent in the House of Commons.  The great and pressing subject of the time was the increasing difficulties of the revenue, created partly by the inevitable changes of a growing state, but much more by the King’s incorrigible wastefulness.  It was impossible to realise completely the great dream and longing of the Stuart kings and their ministers to make the Crown independent of parliamentary supplies; but to dispense with these supplies as much as possible, and to make as much as possible of the revenue permanent, was the continued and fatal policy of the Court.  The “Great Contract”—­a scheme by which, in return for the surrender by the Crown of certain burdensome and dangerous claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were to assure a large compensating yearly income to the Crown—­was Salisbury’s favourite device during the last two years of his life.  It was not a prosperous one.  The bargain was an ill-imagined and not very decorous transaction between the King and his people.  Both parties were naturally jealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing and tacit changes of terms, prompt to resent and take offence, and not easy to pacify when they thought advantage had been taken; and Salisbury, either by his own fault, or by yielding to the King’s canny shiftiness, gave the business a more haggling and huckstering look than it need have had.  Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person in the Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully in smoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making their appearance.  Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitely to a point the King’s cherished claim to levy “impositions,” or custom duties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative—­a claim which he warned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it as legal in theory, did his best to prevent them from discussing, and to persuade them