higher scene. He was returned to parliament for Melcombe-Regis in 1585; this was Elizabeth's fifth parliament; and he sat also in all the five subsequent parliaments of that reign, as well as in all those of the next that were called while he remained a commoner, having been returned successively for Taunton, for Liverpool, for Middlesex, for Ipswich, again for Ipswich and also for St. Albans, when he elected to serve for the former place, once more for the same two places, when he again elected to serve for Ipswich, and finally, to James's short second parliament which met in 1614, for Ipswich, for St. Albans, and for the university of Cambridge, when he took his seat for the university.
It is said to have been in the house of commons that he first attracted attention as a speaker; the first years of the practice of his profession may not have afforded him any considerable opportunity of coming forward in that capacity; but it may be presumed that, along with whatever he may have felt of patriotic ardour or political ambition, he was not without some consciousness also of the power that was in him, though as yet undeveloped, to sway a popular assembly by the force of eloquence, when he sought a place in the great council of the nation. He became undoubtedly one of the greatest English orators of his time, in some respects, perhaps, the greatest of any time. In addition to the evidence of some of his speeches, which have been preserved, both in parliament and at the bar, we have the testimony of those to whom he was best known, and who were the best able to judge. "No man," Ben Jonson writes of him after he was gone, in a rapture of affectionate remembrance and unbounded admiration, "No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end." On one occasion, when he was attorney-general, he himself gives the king an account of a case he had argued for the crown a few days before in the court of king's bench. He had to reply to a distinguished counsel of great learning, and who had had all the long vacation to study the case:—"Of myself," he says, "I will not, nor cannot, say anything, but that my voice served me well for two hours and a half; and that those that understood nothing could tell me that I lost not one auditor that was present in the beginning, but staid till the latter end." He had never known a fuller court. The speech, too, must have been as learned as it was eloquent. Coke, who presided, and who was no admirer either of eloquence or of Mr. Attorney-general, could not help saying that it was "a famous argument."
We first hear of Bacon taking a leading part in the business of the house in Elizabeth's eighth parliament, which met in February, 1593. He assented to the subsidy demanded by the ministers of the crown, though of unusual amount, but objected to the unprecedented shortness of the time within which it was proposed that it should be levied, and also to the vote of the commons being given only in concurrence with a previous vote of the lords. "For the custom and privilege of this house," he argued, "hath always been first to make an offer of the subsidies from hence, then to the upper house; except it were that they present a bill to this house, with desire of our consent thereto, and then to send it up again. And reason it is that we should stand upon our privilege, seeing the burthen resteth upon us as the greater number. Nor is it reason the thanks should be theirs." There can be no doubt that, in taking this popular course. Bacon was regarded by the court as breaking away from his natural connection; nor would the offence be the less felt that he carried the house along with him. The motion for a conference desired by the lords was negatived by two hundred and seventeen votes against one hundred and twenty-eight. Burghley, who appears to have been originally very well disposed, and who, so lately as in 1589, had procured for him the reversion of the valuable place of register of the star chamber, becomes now visibly either less willing or less able to befriend him. The queen herself had probably, indeed, been partially alienated from him before this by his association with certain persons, some of whom, perhaps, she altogether disliked, and others of whom, such as especially the earl of Essex, she only very partially approved of, and was at the same time extremely jealous of any one having much to do with except herself. Bacon's connection with Essex had commenced certainly by the beginning of the year 1592, possibly two or even three years earlier.
Essex's friendship was disastrous to Bacon in every way from first to last. Who, indeed, ever reaped anything but damage or ruin from the friendship or patronage of that ardent and impetuous spirit, with all his brilliant accomplishments, and captivating and even attaching qualities? When the attorney-generalship became vacant in 1593 by the promotion of Sir Thomas Egerton to the rolls, Essex first put forward his friend Bacon for that office, pressing his suit, no doubt, with his usual vehemence and want of judgment; and then, when Coke was appointed to succeed Egerton in April, 1594, he tried with equal urgency to get him made solicitor-general in room of Coke; in this second object he seems really to have had with him the favourable wishes, if not much more, of Burghley; but he failed again; her majesty was not to be moved; the place was after some time given to Sir Thomas Fleming. On this Essex presented Bacon with a piece of land, which the latter afterwards sold for £1800. There can be no doubt that this was far from an extravagant acknowledgment for the time and trouble that Bacon had for years bestowed on the earl's affairs, and no adequate compensation at all for the wise counsel by which, ever since they had known one another, he had so anxiously and patiently endeavoured to guide the course of the unhappy man, if he would only have followed it.
In 1596, again, we find Essex, when about to set out for Spain, recommending Bacon to the good offices of his friends, with a view to the mastership of the rolls on the appointment of Egerton as lord-keeper; but this attempt also came to nothing, Egerton retaining his old place along with his new one. Nor was Essex on his return from Spain more successful in a suit of another kind in which he did everything in his power to assist his friend, that for the hand of the rich widow of Sir William Hatton (a daughter of his cousin. Sir Thomas Cecil, the lord-treasurer's eldest son), whom Bacon had begun to court; she also, like the attorney-generalship, was carried off by his rival Coke, to whom, however, with all her worth, beauty, and accomplishments, as well as wealth, she proved anything but a prize.
Two previously unnoticed facts have been discovered by Mr. Dixon, Bacon's latest biographer, which show that he was by no means at this time altogether out of favour at court. In July, 1595, it appears, he received from the queen a grant of sixty acres in the forest of Zelwood in Somersetshire, at the nominal rent of £7 10s., and in November following another of the reversion of the lease of sixty acres of Twickenham park, which had been long in his family, and had formerly been a favourite residence of his own, though not till it should have first been enjoyed for a term of thirty years by another lessee. In January, 1598, Bacon made his first known appearance as an author by the publication of his "Essays," as yet, however, only ten in number. Small as it was, so remarkable a book—so weighty in the matter, so striking in the manner—containing so much of what was at once so true and so new—could not fail to attract immediately the universal attention of the reading world. Nevertheless, we find the author in September of this same year subjected to the indignity of being arrested in the street at the suit of a money-lender for a debt of £300. We have his own account of the affair in a letter written from a sponging-house in Coleman Street. It is evident that he had at this time got into considerable pecuniary difficulty and embarrassment, which, with neither patrimony nor office as yet, and little income of any kind beyond what he might make by his profession, it is not at all surprising that he should have done, with the station and figure that he had to support. However, Mr. Dixon has found that on the 27th of February in this year, 1598, he had received from the crown another valuable grant, that, namely, of the rectory and church of Cheltenham at the, no doubt, easy rent of only £75 a year.
The next remarkable passage in Bacon's history is the share he had in the prosecution of Essex for the treason which brought him to the block, his conspiracy to get up an insurrection against the government which exploded in so mad a way on the evening of Sunday the 8th of February, 1601. Bacon's conduct in this matter has been much canvassed. He took part, under a commission from the council, in the preliminary examination; he appeared and spoke as one of the counsel for the crown at the trial; and he drew up, at the command of the
