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CLAIMS TO BE SOLICITOR-GENERAL.

41

CHAPTER III.

THE EARL OF ESSEX.

Bacon's

1593.

Sept.

1. Six months after this brush with the Government III. 1. Bacon is a candidate for place. The Rolls are vacant, and the rise of Egerton must leave the post of Attorney void. Coke claims to succeed. Some at the bar and on the bench would prefer Bacon's rise to Coke's: each has his troop of friends; and thus, at an early stage, begins that rivalry between these famous men which is to run through every phase of their careers, and only end with their lives. Coke gains his move, as is only just. claim to the place left void by Coke, that of the SolicitorGeneral, is much more strong. Born at the bar and nursed on law, he has served to his profession an apprenticeship of fourteen years. If Philosophy has been his Rachel, Law has been his Leah. A bencher and Reader of his Inn, he enjoys a good reputation in chambers and in the courts. The best judges at the bar approve his rise. Burghley and Cecil cautiously promote his suit, and Egerton presses it with a noble friendship on all who have power to help or harm. Yet in the end Thomas Fleming gets the post, a man only known to the world for having stood in Bacon's way, and to the profession for his singular and disastrous ruling in the case of Bates.

Bacon owes this loss of place to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex out of which cruel disappointment to him

1. Chron. Jurid., 177; Lane's Reports, 22.

III. 1. springs the charge of ingratitude to a patron-treason to a

1593.

Sept.

friend.

A plain history of events will show that the connexion of Bacon with Essex is one of politics and business; that it brings no advantages to Bacon, and imposes on him no obligations; that it ceases by the Earl's own acts; that personally and politically Essex separates himself from Bacon, not Bacon from Essex; that Bacon, in his efforts to save Essex while he believes him a true man, goes the extremest lengths of chivalry; and that, in acting against him when he proves himself a rebel and a traitor, he does no more than discharge his necessary duty to his country and his Queen.

2. One of the nearest friends of Queen Elizabeth was
Catherine Carey, afterwards Lady Knollys, her cousin
in the first degree of the Boleyn blood. They were
sisters' children, and loved each other with more than
sisters' love. Catherine died young in years, and was
buried by her sovereign in Westminster Abbey with
regal pomp.
Essex is Catherine Carey's grandson; in
everything but the name he is a grandson to the child-
less Queen. This tie of blood the slanderers of her
fame forget to state. Yet Essex and the two Careys are
her only male relations on her mother's side, as James of
Scotland is her sole surviving kinsman of the royal race.
He was born into her lap and into her heart. She
loves him, too, for his father's sake; Walter, Earl of
Essex, having been a leal friend to her in those young days
when friends were few and cold. As she sears into age, it
pleases her eye to see the sons of her first stanch peers

2. Craik's Romance of the Peerage, i. 5; Council Reg., April 13, 1589, April 14, 1591, June 21, 1592.

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ELIZABETH'S LOVE FOR ESSEX.

43

1593.

around her throne. She has made Hunsdon chamberlain; III. 2. she means to make Cecil Secretary of State. She loved Sydney for his father's virtues; she endures Essex in remembrance of his father's fate. She has indeed much to bear Sept. with and forgive. More profuse than generous, more rash than brave, he tries her affection by his petulance and brawls; but she clings to the orphan boy with that clannish pride which she always felt for her mother's kin. loads him with favours. His jerks and whims, so galling to the council and the court, amuse the Queen as signs of the Boleyn blood. Her mother had them; his mother has them. That she loves him more than a lady of sixty years may love her cousin's grandchild is a monstrous lie. No woman can believe it: no man but a monk could dream it.

She

3. Yet this lie against chastity and womanhood has been repeated from generation to generation for two hundred and sixty years. It oozed from the pen of Father Parsons. It darkens the page of Lingard. Like most of the scandals against her her jealousy of the wives of Leicester, of Raleigh, of Essex even-it came from those wifeless monks, men of the confessional and the boudoir, who spent their nights in gloating with Sanchez through the material mysteries of love, and in warping the tenderness and faith of woman into the filthy philosophy of their own 'Disputationes de Sancto Matrimonii Sacramento.' Against such calumniators the Queen might appeal, like Marie Antoinette, to every woman's heart. Jealous of Lettice

3. Elizabethæ Angliæ reginæ, hæresim Calvinianam propugnantis, in catholicos sui regni edictum, quod in alios quoque reipublicæ christianæ principes contumelias continet indignissimas. Promulgatum Londini 29 Nov. 1591. Cum responsione ad singula capita: quâ non tantum sævitia et impietas tam iniqui edicti, sed mendacia quoque et fraudes ac imposturæ deteguntur et confutantur. Per D. Andream Philopatrum. 1592.

1593. Sept.

III. 3. Knollys, of Bessie Throckmorton, of Frances Sydney! Elizabeth is indeed vexed with them, but has she not cause? Has not each of these courtiers married, not only without her knowledge as their Queen, but without honesty or honour? In secret, under circumstances of shame and guilt, Leicester wedded her cousin's daughter Lettice. Would the head of any house be pleased with such a trick? Raleigh brought to shame a lady of her court, young, lovely, brave as ever bloomed on a hero's hearth; yet the daughter of a disloyal house, of one who had plotted against the Queen's crown and life. in the world approve of such an act? member of her race, a descendant of Edward the Third, married, in secret and against her will, a woman of inferior birth, without beauty, youth, or fortune, a widow, who took him on her way from the arms of a first husband into those of a third. What kinswoman would smile on such a

match?

Could any prince

Essex himself, a

Love for Essex warmer than that of an aged gentlewoman for a young and dashing kinsman would be in her sin against nature not less than sin against nature's God. The letters of Catherine's grandson to the Queen, if bright with poetry, playfulness, and compliment, are, in tone and substance, dutiful and chaste. In the Queen's letters to him there is not a line she might not have written to a grandson of her own.

4. She guards him with the fondness and with the fear of a mother. She never sends him from her side without a pang; for she knows that he will knock his head against stone walls, that he will hurry brave men to a foolish end. Proud and high though his temper is, he can

4. Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex, 2 vols., 1853, vii.-xiv.

SITUATION OF THE BROTHERS.

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1593.

Sept.

neither lead others to victory like Raleigh, nor defend his III. 4. own face from harm like Montjoy. If he sail for Cadiz with Nottingham and Raleigh to slack his fire, the Queen's work may be done, and he himself shine the bravest of the brave. If he go to Rouen alone, he scares the sleep from her pillow, and wrings the blood from her heart, by his reckless waste of her veteran troops. She pets him as a boy hopelessly brave, heroically frail; but she deems him such a fool, though a charming one, that anything he raves for must be wrong. If he fume and fret, put his head on her footstool, rush into the country, pout, and sulk, and rage, like a great spoiled child, she will not yield to his caprice. For ever asking something that he should not have, he will be Master of the Horse; he will have the Cinq Ports; he will command fleets and camps.

5. In an evil day for Bacon this petulant noble swears he shall succeed to Coke. Essex and Bacon have been drawn together, less by the magnetism of character, though the Earl has a thousand showy and alluring ways, than by their common wants. Bacon is poor and works for bread. His brother Anthony is poor and lame. In the rooms at Gray's Inn they lie sick together, racked with pain and pestered by duns. Lady Ann does her best: sending them hogsheads of March beer, with plenty of good advice and scraps of Greek; but the most she can do is little, and neither Greek nor good advice will discharge their weekly bills.

A letter from Francis to Lady Bacon gives a glimpse into these troubles-the sickness, the fraternal love, the worrying debts.

5. Lambeth MSS. 649, fol. 67, 100.

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