What was then to portend danger to Bacon when the Parliament of 1620/21 met?  The House of Commons at its meeting was thoroughly loyal and respectful; it meant to be benedictum et pacificum parliamentum.  Every one knew that there would be “grievances” which would not be welcome to the Court, but they did not seem likely to touch him.  Every one knew that there would be questions raised about unpopular patents and oppressive monopolies, and about their legality; and it was pretty well agreed upon at Court that they should be given up as soon as complained of.  But Bacon was not implicated more than the Crown lawyers before him, in what all the Crown lawyers had always defended.  There was dissatisfaction about the King’s extravagance and wastefulness, about his indecision in the cause of the Elector Palatine, about his supposed intrigues with Papistical and tyrannical Spain; but Bacon had nothing to do with all this except, as far as he could, to give wise counsel and warning.  The person who made the King despised and hated was the splendid and insolent favourite, Buckingham.  It might have been thought that the one thing to be set against much that was wrong in the State was the just and enlightened and speedy administration of equity in the Chancery.

When Parliament met, though nothing seemed to threaten mischief, it met with a sturdy purpose of bringing to account certain delinquents whose arrogance and vexations of the subjects had provoked the country, and who were supposed to shelter themselves under the countenance of Buckingham.  Michell and Mompesson were rascals whose misdemeanors might well try the patience of a less spirited body than an English House of Commons.  Buckingham could not protect them, and hardly tried to do so.  But just as one electric current “induces” another by neighbourhood, so all this deep indignation against Buckingham’s creatures created a fierce temper of suspicion about corruption all through the public service.  Two Committees were early appointed by the House of Commons:  one a Committee on Grievances, such as the monopolies; the other, a Committee to inquire into abuses in the Courts of Justice and receive petitions about them.  In the course of the proceedings, the question arose in the House as to the authorities or “referees” who had certified to the legality of the Crown patents or grants which had been so grossly abused; and among these “referees” were the Lord Chancellor and other high officers, both legal and political.

It was the little cloud.  But lookers-on like Chamberlain did not think much of it.  “The referees,” he wrote on Feb. 29th, “who certified the legality of the patents are glanced at, but they are chiefly above the reach of the House; they attempt so much that they will accomplish little.”  Coke, who was now the chief leader in Parliament, began to talk ominously of precedents, and to lay down rules about the power of the House to punish—­rules which were afterwards found to have no authority for