conduct, he should think it possible to accept the task. He says that he
made some remonstrance; and he says, no doubt truly, that during the
first stage of the business he used the ambiguous position in which he
was placed to soften Essex's inevitable punishment, and to bring about a
reconciliation between him and the Queen. But he was required, as the
Queen's lawyer, to set forth in public Essex's offences; and he admits
that he did so "not over tenderly." Yet all this, even if we have
misgivings about it, is intelligible. If he had declined, he could not,
perhaps, have done the service which he assures us that he tried to do
for Essex; and it is certain that he would have had to reckon with the
terrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from the throne of
Henry VIII., and who had certainly no great love for Bacon himself. She
had already shown him in a much smaller matter what was the forfeit to
be paid for any resistance to her will. All the hopes of his life must
perish; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he had won with
such unremitting toil and patient waiting would be sacrificed, and he
would henceforth live under the wrath of those who never forgave. And
whatever he did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex. His
scheming imagination and his indefatigable pen were at work. He tried
strange indirect methods; he invented a correspondence between his
brother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order to
soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the
Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though
I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding
to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward
thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the
counsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thought
him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and that stories circulated
to his disadvantage, as if he were poisoning the Queen's ear against
Essex. But he might argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed as