formidable and so useful a man as Coke, turned the scale against Essex.
In April, 1594, Coke was made Attorney. Coke did not forget the
pretender to law, as he would think him, who had dared so long to
dispute his claims; and Bacon was deeply wounded. "No man," he thought,
"had ever received a more exquisite disgrace," and he spoke of retiring
to Cambridge "to spend the rest of his life in his studies and
contemplations." But Essex was not discouraged. He next pressed eagerly
for the Solicitorship. Again, after much waiting, he was foiled. An
inferior man was put over Bacon's head. Bacon found that Essex, who
could do most things, for some reason could not do this. He himself,
too, had pressed his suit with the greatest importunity on the Queen, on
Burghley, on Cecil, on every one who could help him; he reminded the
Queen how many years ago it was since he first kissed her hand in her
service, and ever since had used his wits to please; but it was all in
vain. For once he lost patience. He was angry with Essex; the Queen's
anger with Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend. He was angry
with the Queen; she held his long waiting cheap; she played with him and
amused herself with delay; he would go abroad, and he "knew her
Majesty's nature, that she neither careth though the whole surname of
the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither." He was very angry
with Robert Cecil; affecting not to believe them, he tells him stories
he has heard of his corrupt and underhand dealing. He writes almost a
farewell letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to Lord Burghley,
hoping that he would impute any offence that Bacon might have given to
the "complexion of a suitor, and a tired sea-sick suitor," and speaking
despairingly of his future success in the law. The humiliations of what
a suitor has to go through torment him: "It is my luck," he writes to
Cecil, "still to be akin to such things as I neither like in nature nor
would willingly meet with in my course, but yet cannot avoid without
show of base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious strangeness."