creased sense of political security, and is hardly applicable to a state of affairs in which anarchy, with all its attendant miseries, would indubitably follow on the violent overthrow of the queen's right to select her ministers, even if her person continued for a time to be outwardly respected; and it is, at all events, one which Bacon studiously renounced from the very beginning of his connection with Essex. In the second place it has been alleged (Abbott, Bacon and Essex, 194—242) that Bacon sinned in charging Essex with a consistent purpose of treason which was foreign to his nature. It is no doubt true that Essex never did anything consistently, and that an analysis of cliaracter would spare his heart at the expense of his head. It does not, however, follow that Bacon went deliberately wrong. On the day of the trial he had only very recently become acquainted with the earl's very questionable proceedings in Ireland, and it was only in consonance with the weak side of his intellect to adopt a compact theory rather than one which left room for vagueness and uncertainty. As was afterwards the case in the opinion which he formed of Raleigh's guilt in the Guiana voyage, he left out of sight those tentative and shadowy intentions which had no place in his own mental constitution. At all events, whatever the character of Essex may have been, his actions were none the less dangerous to the state. A government without the protection of an armed force was liable to be overturned by a man who, like Essex, was the darling of the military class which was at that time forming, without that tie of discipline which, in standing armies, counterbalances the tendency of military men to use force rather than persuasion. The new form of danger which had succeeded to the danger from a feudal nobility lent weight to the opinion to which Bacon gave expression in his attack on Essex: 'You, my lord,' he said, 'should know that though princes give their subjects cause of discontent, though they take away the honours they have heaped upon them, though they bring them to a lower estate than they raised them from, yet ought they not to be so forgetful of their allegiance that they should enter into any undutiful act, much less upon rebellion, as you, my lord, have done.' To Bacon the maintenance of the authority of the state was a sacred work, and in the sixteenth century the authority of the queen was the equivalent of the authority of the state.
The two years which succeeded the trial of Essex were not years of great importance in Bacon's life. He drew up the official declaration of the treason of Essex, but that paper was so altered by others that it is impossible to say how much proceeded from himself.
In the parliament which met on 27 Oct. 1601 Bacon contributed to induce the house to apply to the queen by petition to redress the grievance caused by monopolies instead of proceeding in a more offensive manner by bill. In the autumn of 1602, after the defeat of the Spanish invasion of Ireland, he wrote a letter to Cecil, in which he boldly advocated, for that country, a toleration in religion, and the establishment of courts to do justice unfettered by the technicalities of English law. English and Irish were to be treated as one nation. In Ireland, however, the difficulty of maintaining order, in consequence of the inability of the English exchequer to maintain there a large military force, always stared the reformer in the face, and Bacon, like the rest of his contemporaries, had no better remedy to propose than the introduction of English settlers as a standing garrison, a plan which, when actually adopted, spoiled the whole scheme of reform.
The death of Elizabeth on 24 March 1603 opened a new prospect to Bacon, which might be turned to account if he could gain the ear of James. At first, however, his hope of usefulness was rather discouraged by the change. He was indeed continued as one of the king's learned counsel, and on 23 July was knighted at the same time as three hundred others; but neither Coke nor Cecil was likely to help him to that familiarity of access to James which he had long enjoyed at Elizabeth's court. It was probably in these days of expectancy that be wrote the 'Apology' concerning the late Earl of Essex, of which the earliest known printed copy bears the date of 1604. During the same period, besides a slight sketch of a proem to that great work on the interpretation of nature which was never quite out of his mind, he dedicated to James a paper on the mode of carrying out the union between Scotland and England which they both desired, and another on the pacification and edification of the church of England, in which he once more restated those comprehensive and tolerant principles which animated his former treatise on the same subject. James was to Bacon, at this stage of his career, very much what Essex had been before, a man powerful for carrying out Bacon's plans: but with this difference, that he was himself the head and representative of the state, and that in his case, therefore, there could never be that collision between personal and political claims to devotion which had brought about so tragic an ending to Bacon's relations with the favourite of Elizabeth. Unfortunately, though
