court from proceeding till the question had been referred to chancery, and its permission obtained for the parties to proceed at common law. Bacon's object was to secure for the king the support of the chancellor who, as a great political officer, was likely to decide in his favour. On 25 Jan. 1616 he pleaded on the king's behalf in what Coke himself acknowledged to be 'a famous argument.' The dispute ended in a compromise, and Bacon failed to obtain from the judges any recognition of the position which he had claimed for chancery.
Before long Coke's arrogant temper gave Bacon the advantage. Coke was indignant at the attempt to place his own court under the orders of chancery, and he replied to it by an attempt to place chancery under the orders of his own court. He instigated two rascals, who had obtained judgments in their favour in a common law court, and whose victims had subsequently obtained the protection of chancery, to prefer indictments of præmunire in the King's Bench, not only against the suitors, but against all who had taken part in the proceedings in chancery.
On the immediate point at issue Coke was baffled by the refusal of the grand jury to bring in a true bill. Bacon, however, recommended James to settle the question whether the King's Bench had a right to interfere with the equitable jurisdiction of chancery, and the law officers being consulted gave it as their opinion that it had not.
Before anything could be done to give effect to this opinion, a new dispute arose. In a case before the twelve judges in the exchequer chamber, relating to a commendam, one of the counsel argued against the king's real or supposed prerogative, after which, by James's orders. Bacon wrote to Coke on 25 April requiring him to inform the other judges that they were not to proceed till the king had spoken to them. The judges, however, went on with the case, and on the 27th they signed a letter drawn up by Coke, in which they gave reasons for refusing obedience. On 6 June they were all summoned before the king, when Coke was alone in protesting that to put off the argument would have been a delay of justice. After some further dispute the judges were asked 'whether, if, at any time, in a case depending before the judges, his majesty conceived it to concern him either in power or profit, and therefore required to consult with them, and that they should stay proceedings in the meantime, they-ought not to stay accordingly.' Eleven of the judges answered in the affirmative; Coke alone held out. On 20 June the king came into the Star Chamber and laid down the principle that it was the office of the crown to settle all questions of jurisdiction between courts. On the 20th Coke was summoned before the council, on the 30th he was suspended from his office, and on 15 Nov he was dismissed. Bacon's rise kept pace with Coke's decline. On 9 June he had become a privy councillor, on 7 March 1617 he succeeded Ellesmere with the title of lord keeper.
Bacon's mounting fortunes were thus raised by his successful struggle with Coke. As in all great political questions, the point at issue was by no means so simple as it looked. To Bacon the question was one of the relation between law and politics. The judges, as he expressed himself in one of his essays, should be 'lions, but yet lions under the throne, being circumspect that they do not check or oppose any points of sovereignty,' Coke's attempt to erect the bench into the position of an arbiter of the constitution was rightly distasteful to him, and so far as Bacon succeeded in thwarting this his success was well deserved. It was the last real success that he was ever to have. The greater the political power acquired by the king, the sooner would the question be asked whether, he deserved to exercise it. Bacon's constitutional view presupposed a king standing above all parties and all interests, and thoroughly sensitive to the deeper currents of public opinion. His character rendered him Over-trustful of persons in authority, and he was now to pay the penalty. James took so much of his policy as made for the enhancement of the royal dignity, and rejected all that made for the subordination of his own ideas those of the nation. Thus it came about that the appointment of Bacon as lord keeper was but the signal of his disastarous failure in all the higher purposes of his political life, a fact which has been too easily forgotten in the more dramatic spectacle of his fall from the appearance of political power.
The unity of Bacon's thought in science and politics may be gathered from his incomplete work entitled 'The New Atlantis,' which has hitherto been ascribed to a later period in his life, but which is twice mentioned by him in an unpublished paper (Harleian Charters, iii. D. 14), the date of which lies between the dissolution of the parliament in 1614 and Bacon's appointment as lord keeper in 1617. In the 'New Atlantis' there are two conspicuous points. On the one hand is the desire to benefit man-kind by a science founded on observation and experiment; on the other hand is the tendency to under-estimate the difficulty of the task, which leads to the belief that it
