CHAPTER XII.

BACON INTERCEDING FOR ESSEX.

No letter from Bacon to Essex has been preserved written during the Irish campaign, and we have no evidence that Bacon either wrote to Essex (with the exception of one letter) or communicated with him in any way from the end of that campaign (September, 1599) to the 20th of July, 1600. But Bacon informs us in his Apology that during this long period of silence he was always on the watch for his friend "to find," he says, " the best occasion that in the weakness of my power I could either take or minister to pull him out of the fire if it had been possible." 1 There is no reason to distrust the good faith of this assertion. But the misfortune is that, whatever may have been the cause, Bacon's intercession seems to have been of a nature calculated to do Essex more harm than good.

Even while the Earl was still in Ireland, Bacon declares that he interceded for him, and he particularises one case of intercession. The Queen on one occasion, he says, " shewed a passionate distaste of my Lord's proceedings in Ireland, as if they were unfortunate, without judgment, contemptuous, and not without some private end of his own." These suspicions she expressed to him, Essex's friend, and thereby gave him an opportunity for attempting to dissipate her suspicions. Instead of doing this, Bacon urged the Queen to recall the Earl, not indeed in any dishonourable way, but on the contrary to load him with honours and to retain him honourably at Court. No doubt, in doing this, Bacon thought he was doing the best he could for his friend, "still awake," as he says, to "the grounds which I thought surest 1 Apology, p. 7.

for my Lord's good:" but in reality he was not defending Essex as Essex would have wished to be defended, and he was seriously injuring him.

Before urging the Queen to recall the Earl, it was necessary to induce her to trust at all events the Earl's loyalty, however she might mistrust his capacity. So far from doing this, Bacon urges on her something like the ominous advice given by Aristophanes to the Athenians about Alcibiades, "One must not rear a lion, or, if you do, you must humour it." "To discontent him as you do and yet to put arms and power into his hands may be a kind of temptation to make him prove cumbersome and unruly "-this was not the kind of intercession that would conciliate a Tudor sovereign, or remove the "cold malignant humour" which was gathering strength in the Queen's mind against her former favourite.

Bacon's next efforts for Essex may be stated in his own words::

"Well, the next news," after his last intercession, "was, that my Lord was come over, and that he was committed to his chamber for leaving Ireland without the Queen's licence; this was at Nonesuch, where (as my duty was) I came to his Lordship, and talked with him privately about a quarter of an hour, and he asked mine opinion of the course was taken with him. I told him, 'My Lord, Nubecula est, cito transibit; it is but a mist; but shall I tell your Lordship, it is as mists are: if it go upwards it may haps cause a shower, if downwards, it will clear up. And therefore, good my Lord, carry it so as you take away by all means all umbrages and distastes from the Queen; and specially, if I were worthy to advise you (as I have been by yourself thought, and now your question imports the continuance of that opinion), observe three points. First, make not this cessation or peace which is concluded with Tyrone, as a service wherein you glory, but as a shuffling up of a prosecution which was not very fortunate. Next, represent not to the Queen any necessity of estate, whereby, as by a coercion or wrench, she should think herself inforced to send you back into Ireland, but leave it to her. Thirdly, seek access importunè, opportunè, seriously, sportingly, every way.' my Lord was willing to hear me, but spake very few words, and shaked his head sometimes, as if he thought I was in the wrong; but sure I am he did just contrary in every one of these three points."

I remember

It

The date of this conversation is of some importance. seems to be fixed by the following letter-the only letter extant

written from Bacon to Essex from March, 1599, to July, 1600

"MY LORD,-Conceiving that your Lordship came now up in the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress, which kind of compliments are many times instar magnorum meritorum, and therefore that it would be hard for me to find you, I have committed to this poor paper the humble salutations of him that is more yours than any man's, and more yours than any man. To these salutations I add a due and joyful gratulation, confessing that your Lordship, in your last conference with me before your journey, spake not in vain, God making it good, that you trusted we should say Quis putasset? Which, as it is found true in a happy sense, so I wish you do not find another Quis putasset in the manner of taking this so great a service. But I hope it is, as he said, Nubecula est, cito transibit, and that your Lordship's wisdom and obsequious circumspection and patience will turn all to the best. So referring all to some time that I may attend you, I commit you to God's best preservation.”1

As Essex was not committed to his chamber till eleven o'clock on Friday night (the 28th), the news cannot very well have reached Bacon in London till Saturday (29th) afternoon, and Bacon would not have been able to reach Nonsuch and see Essex till late on Saturday night or early on Sunday (the 30th). By this time Essex would have been subjected to examination, and must therefore necessarily have already taken a certain attitude with reference to Irish matters before his conference with Bacon.

...

It is not surprising, therefore, that we find him at first assuming that he will speedily return to Ireland. "I promised," he says, "to return with expedition. . . . But now when they shall hear of my present state and shall see no new hopeful course taken, I fear that giddy people will run to all mischief." 2 But he certainly does not appear open to the charge of boasting over his treaty with Tyrone as a great success. On the contrary, we find him on the 3rd of October offering (most basely), if the Queen will but yield some of these grants for a time, to pick a quarrel with the rebels, and strike them a deadly blow. Again, although on October 3rd, he still speaks of his return as impending, he seems already to have taken a hint from Bacon, for he does not beg for it.

1 II. 150.

2 Carew Manuscripts : "A Relation of the Earl of Essex," &c.

By, or before, the 6th of October, he seems entirely to have conformed himself to Bacon's advice, for on that date Rowland White writes, no man goes to him, nor he desirous to see any;" and again, "it is given out that, if he would desire his liberty and go to Ireland again he should have it. But he seems resolved never to go thither again, nor to meddle with any matter of war or estate, but only to lead a private country life.”1

All this does not fall in with Bacon's account in the Apology. It is of course open to any one to assert that Essex was not sincere in this disavowal of all desire to return to Ireland and to play any part in public life. For myself I should be inclined to consider it a genuine, though transient, phase of feeling natural enough in a man so variable as Essex, who was always ready to cry vanitas vanitatum when he felt himself misappreciated. Still it must be admitted that he may have been in some degree insincere, merely playing a part and attempting to carry out the policy of dissimulation recommended to him. by Bacon, who had exhorted him to "pretend to be bookish and contemplative."2 But whether Essex was sincere or insincere is not now the point; the question is whether or not he "did just contrary" to Bacon's advice. Bacon asserts that it was so but the facts make it at least probable that it was

not so.

Equally baseless seems Bacon's statement that Essex did not seek access to the Queen with sufficient earnestness. Throughout the greater part of October, November, and December he was so seriously ill that his life was, for a part of the time, in danger; but in February, 1600, we find him writing a submissive letter to the Queen, by which he averted proceedings in the Star Chamber. In April again he addresses her in the language of fulsome flattery, and in the summer and autumn of that year we find letters upon letters of abject entreaty, but all in vain. The reason for the Earl's continued imprisonment must be looked for, not in Essex's want of will to flatter or to sue, but in the Queen's ineradicable suspicion of him, and probably in her sense of unrequited and despised affection.3

1 Sydney Papers, quoted ii. 153.

2 II. 44.

3 The Queen had probably never forgiven him the insolent act (whatever it was) which provoked her to strike him. She may also have been embittered

The autumn of 1599 was a period of distress, anxiety, and almost persecution for the friends of Essex. The Earl's illness made him all the more popular with the citizens and all the more suspected by the Queen. No one could now see the Earl without special warrant; and, until his life was declared by the physicians to be endangered by the closeness of his restraint, he was not allowed so much liberty as even to walk in the garden of the Lord Keeper's house, in which he was confined. On the 29th of November, while he was hanging between life and death, the Countess of Essex, who had recently given birth to a son, besought permission to see her husband, but in vain. On December 13, White reports "little hope of his recovery." Prayers were offered up for him in the city. A false alarm of his death set the passing bells in some of the churches tolling for him. For some months the feeling had been growing that his punishment was excessive and spiteful: and now the friends of Essex began to manifest their resentment in murmurs, libels, and even threats.

The letters of this period abound with expressions of the general dread, distrust, and resentment at the cruelty of the Court. The "enemies" who were always haunting the Earl's mind, and against whose plots Francis Bacon had so emphatically warned him, seemed to the Essexian faction at this time on the point of securing the ruin of their leader. Cuffe, in his confession, accuses them of "counterfeiting to practise his (the Earl's) hand and such like undue courses;" and a letter recently discovered in the Hatfield MSS. exhibits Essex himself, in answer to some letters produced against him from Ormond, Bowker, and others, replying that the charges were fabrications.2

Rumours were sedulously spread by the Earl's enemies that Tyrone and Essex were on friendly terms. Some of these tales were afterwards dressed up and embodied in the evidence

3

against him by some hasty expressions of his reported to her. Harrington says that on one occasion Essex reviled the Queen in the language of a madman. Ralegh said "that the expression of Essex that the Queen was cankered, and that her mind had become as crooked as her carcase, cost him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him but for that speech."-Lives of the Earls of Essex, vol. ii. 131. 1 II. 332.

2 Hatfield MSS. 80], 20. See below, p. 175, where the letter is given at full length.

3 For example a certain Thomas Lee testifies that he brought to Essex from Tyrone a message that "if the Earl of Essex would follow his plot, he would