as member for Melcombe, Bacon takes his seat on the same benches with the chief lights of law and government -with Hatton and Bromley, Egerton and Walsingham-as well as near those younger glories of the Court, the poets and warriors to whom secretaries of state are but as clerks, with Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Charles Blount, and hosts of others scarcely less renowned than these in love and war.

Yet from the ranks of this group he leaps like fire into fame. Burke's spring was not so high, Pitt's popularity was not so wide. At twenty-five he has won the ear of that fastidious House. Wit so radiant, thought so fresh,. and lore so prompt, have not before (and have never since) been heard within those famous walls. Yet his hold on the men of his generation is due less to an intellectual than to a moral cause. They trust him, for he represents what is best in each. The slave of Whitgift, the dupe of Brown, can each give ear to a churchman who seeks reform of the church, a lawyer eager to amend the law, a friend of the Crown pleading against feudal privileges and unpopular powers. When a colleague proposes some change in the church which would destroy it, he replies to him: "Sir, the subject we talk of is the eye of England; if there be a speck or two in the eye, we endeavour to take them off; he would be a strange oculist who would pull out the eye." Of no sect, he represents in Parliament the patriotic spirit of all the sects. Not himself a Puritan, he pleads with Hastings for reform; not a Roman Catholic, he lifts his voice against persecution for concerns of faith; not a courtier, he votes with Cecil for supplies. In one word, he is English. To sustain the Queen in her great strife with Spain, to guard the church from abuse and from destruction, are as much his objects as to break the bonds of science and lead

II. 7.

1585.

Nov.

1585. Νον.

II. 7. inquiry back from clouds to earth. When he strikes at corruptions in the State, when he resists the usurpations of the Peers, when he saps the privileges of the Crown, he speaks in the name of English progress and English strength. He fights for reform of the law, for increase of tillage, for union with the Scots, for plantations in Ulster, for discovery and defence in Virginia, for free Parliaments and for ample grants, because he sees that increase, union, freedom, and a rich executive are each and all essential to the growth and grandeur of the realm.

1586.

8. How he appears in outward grace and aspect among these courtly and martial contemporaries, the miniature by Hilyard helps us to conceive. Slight in build, rosy and round in flesh, dight in a sumptuous suit; the head well-set, erect, and framed in a thick starched fence of frill; a bloom of study and of travel on the fat, girlish face, which looks even younger than his years; the hat and feather tossed aside from the broad white brow, over which crisps and curls a mane of dark, soft hair; an English nose, firm, open, straight; mouth delicate and small-a lady's or a jester's mouth-a thousand pranks and humours, quibbles, whims, and laughters lurking in its twinkling, tremulous lines:-such is Francis Bacon at the age of twenty-four.

9. No session ever met under darker skies than that of Oct. 29. 1586. Babington's conspiracy has just exploded; fleets are arming in Cadiz bay; money and men are ready in Rome, in Naples, in Leghorn, for a crusade against the

8. Hilyard's miniature is in the possession of Adair Hawkins, Esq., of Great Marlborough Street.

9. Dom. Papers of Queen Eliz., ccxxii.; Andreæ Philopatri ad Elizabethæ Reginæ Angliæ edictum responsio; Toulmin's History of Taunton, 365.

heretics; Parsons is hounding on the Pope, Sixtus hounding on Philip; in the Tagus, at the Groyne, in the cities of Brabant and Flanders, armaments wait but a word to cross over into Kent, to seat Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, to reduce England to a fief of the Church. England flushes with heroic pride. London, Dover, Portsmouth swarm with soldiers; drums are rolling in every hamlet, yeomen mustering in the market-places of every shire. But no part of England burns with more fervent heat than the western counties, nor in these counties than the town of Taunton. Taunton is the seat of trade and manufacture-a Manchester of a milder clime; next to Bristol the richest town between the Severn and the Scilly Isles; next to London the most patriotic town between the Irish Sea and Dover Straits. In the day when everything dear to men appears to be at stake, this populous and enterprising town sends Bacon to Westminster to speak in its name and give its vote.

10. The writs having gone out while the ruffians who prated of friendship and sentiment are on trial for their crimes, the passionate patriotism of the land storms up, too strong for Burghley to breast, too strong for Elizabeth herself to ride. When the Peers and Commoners meet, a cry goes up to the throne that Mary shall be brought to trial, and, on proof of her guilt, shall be put to death. In this stern prayer the burgess for Taunton, tolerant as he is of mere opinion, joins. The Crown dares not refuse. Menaced on every side, England can give no answer to the threats of invasion save an open trial and solemn execution of the Queen of Scots.

10. State Trials, i. 1127-1162; D'Ewes, 393.

II. 9.

1586. Oct. 29.

II. 11.

1586.

Oct. 29.

11. What to do with Mary has been a dismal question for honest men since the day when she first sought refuge in Carlisle from her licentious barons and her faithless son. In her room at Chartley, guarded by the old moat, shut in with her women and her priests, she scared the Protestant imagination more than either the Kaiser in Vienna or the Pope in Rome. Her position is, indeed, most strange: to-day a prisoner, to-morrow she may become a queen. She has no need to make a party, to risk her head, in order to win her game. She has only to live: certain, as fall will follow spring, of rising one day from her bed of durance to find the necks of her enemies beneath her feet. An accident, a crime,

may give her, any hour, the crown. A stumbling jennet, an unwholesome meal, a prick of Babington's knife, a snap of Salisbury's dagg, may take away the life which alone stands between her and the English crown.

Put on trial, her complicity proved, her cousin would still spare her life. But the Burghleys, Davisons, and Pauletts are in no position to treat this profligate woman with the leonine clemency of the Queen. To Elizabeth she is, indeed, a danger and a snare; but to the Protestant gentleman who loves his religion and his country, her removal or succession is a question of life or death. She can neither break Elizabeth on the wheel nor roast her at the stake; for, unless a Spanish force should succeed in seating her on the throne, her day of evil cannot come until the Queen is safe from the revenge of King and Pope. But what prelate on the bench, what councillor at the board, what magistrate in

11. Dom. Papers of Eliz., cxciv.; D'Ewes, 393-410; Davison to Walsingham, Oct. 10, 1586, in the State Paper Office; Burghley to Davison, Nov. 24, 1586, S. P. O.

1586.

Oct. 29.

his shire, would feel his head safe should trumpets bray II. 11. the accession of Mary to the English throne? They have seen another Mary. Old men recall the day when Latimer perished. Half the citizens of London can tell how Rogers went to heaven in the Smithfield fires. All England shakes with news of the more recent massacres of Paris-massacres solemnly approved and commemorated in Rome as services to God. Men firm in their own faith, loyal to their own Queen, pretend no pity for a woman who to Helen's loveliness of person adds more than Helen's dissoluteness of mind. They see in Mary a wife who has married three husbands and is eager to marry more. They see in her the murderess of Darnley, the destroyer of the Kirk. They see in her a pretender to the English crown, in whose name Sixtus has resumed the kingdom, and Philip is preparing to lay it waste. Is such a woman to live and become their Queen?

Could Mary refrain from plots, content to bide her time, the peril of such a future would be hard to meet; but when her complicity in Babington's treason is proved in court, then Davison urges, and the House of Commons demands by petition, that for the security of life, liberty, and true religion in time to come, the prisoner of Fotheringay shall suffer the just sentence of the law.

12. The Queen holds out. A grand committee, of which Nov. 12. Bacon is a member, goes into the presence, and the lords spiritual and temporal, the knight and squire, the lawyer and goldsmith, kneeling together at her feet, demand that the national will shall be done-that the Protestant faith shall be saved. She will not hear them.

12. Nicholas, Life of Davison, 1823; D'Ewes, 394-400; Camden, Ann. 1586.