"Secondly, if it be true, as is reported, that any of the puisne judges did stir this business; or that they did openly revile and menace the jury for doing their conscience, as they did honestly and truly, I think that judge is worthy to leese his place. And, to be plain with your majesty, I do not think there is any thing a greater Polychreston, or ad multum utile, to your affairs, than upon a just and fit occasion to make some example against the presumption of a judge in causes that concern your majesty; whereby the whole body of those magistrates may be contained the better in awe and it may be this will light upon no unfit subject, of a person that is rude, and that no man cares for.

Thirdly, if there be no one so much in fault, (which yet I cannot affirm either way, and there must be a just ground, God forbid else,) yet I should think that the very presumption of going so far in so high a cause, deserveth to have that done which was done in this very case upon the indictment of serjeant Heale in queen Elizabeth's time; that the judges should answer it, upon their knees, before your majesty or your council, and receive a sharp admonition at which time also, my lord Wray, being then chief-justice, slipped the collar and was forborne.

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Fourthly, for the persons themselves, Glanville and Allen, which are base fellows and turbulent, I think there will be discovered and proved against them, besides the preferring of the bills, such combinations and contemptuous speeches and behaviours, as there will be good ground to call them, and perhaps

haps some of their petty counsellors at law, into the star-chamber.

"In all this which I have said, your majesty may be pleased to observe, that I do not engage you much in the main point of the jurisdiction, for which I have a great deal of reason, which I now forbear. But two things I wish to be done. The one, that your majesty take this occasion to redouble unto all your judges your ancient and true charge and rule; that you will endure no innovating in the point of jurisdiction; but will have every court impaled within their own precedents, and not to assume to them. selves new powers upon conceits and inventions of law. The other, that in these high causes that touch upon state and monarchy, your majesty give them straight charge, that upon any occasions intervenient hereafter, they do not make the vulgar party to their contestations by public handling them before they have consulted with your majesty; to whom the regiment of those things only appertaineth."

Such were the despotic courses suggested by the base spirit of Bacon to a prince sufficiently inclined of himself to lord it over the laws and liberties of England! such the arts by which he sought to strip his more conscientious rival of the hard-earned meed of a life of labor and of important public services!

On occasion of the lord-chancellor's alarming fit of illness, during which Bacon reproaches Coke for attacking his jurisdiction, he himself did not omit

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to beg his place. In his petitionary letter to the king on this subject, after stating his own pretensions to succeed to the office, he proceeds thus :"Now, I beseech your majesty, let me put you the present case truly. If you take my lord Coke, this will follow: First, your majesty shall put an overruling nature into an overruling place, which may breed an extreme. Next, you shall blunt his industries in matter of finances, which seemeth to aim at another place. And lastly, popular men are no sure mounters for your majesty's saddle. If you take my lord Hobart, you shall have a judge at the upper end of your council-board, and another at the lower end; whereby your majesty will find your prerogative pent,....If you take my lord of Canterbury, I will say no more but the chancellor's place requires a whole man. And to have both jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, in that height, is fit but for a king.

"For myself, I can only present your majesty with gloria in obsequio;' yet I dare promise that if I sit in that place, your business shall not make such short turns upon you as it doth; but when a direction is once given, it shall be pursued and performed; and your majesty shall only be troubled with the true care of a king, which is, to think what you would have done in chief, and not how for the passages.

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That "gloria in obsequio" of which Bacon here makes his boast, is expressed with peculiar energy in another letter, in which he is not ashamed to say

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to the king, "I am afraid of nothing, but that the master of the horse, your excellent servant, and I, shall fall out who shall hold your stirrop best.”

One of the projects for raising money to which James's necessities and his dread of parliaments moved him to give his sanction, was that of sir William Cockaine, who formed a company which offered a great sum for the monopoly of the exportation of dyed cloths, and for a prohibition of the exportation of undyed ones. This patent was found highly pernicious to trade and to the public interest, and on detection of certain malpractices in their mode of acting upon it some of the patentees were committed to prison. Bacon takes occasion to lament to the king, that Coke, by the severity of his speech to the offenders, had impoliticly alarmed them into "turning every stone to help themselves," adding, "But my lord Coke floweth according to his own tides, and not according to the tides of business. The thing which my lord Coke said, was good, and too little; but at this time it was too much." Meaning, probably, that it might tend to raise an odium against projectors and against the court which encouraged

them.

But it was soon after the fate of the chief-justice to fall into greater delinquency by his conduct in the business of commendams. The case was shortly this: The king had been informed, that a cause of the bishop of Lincoln's was about to be tried, relating to a commendam, in which it was to be apprehended, that the general right of his majesty to grant

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ecclesiastical livings to bishops in this form, might be brought into question. Alarmed at the bare suspicion of an attack upon any branch of his supremacy, James ordered his attorney-general to speak in support of the prerogative, and also directed the bishop of Winchester to be present at the trial, and to report to him the true state of that question, and how far it extended. The bishop, a noted courtier, brought information that serjeant Chiborne, one of the counsel, had maintained positions and made assertions "very prejudicial to the prerogative royal;" he also stated that the case was set apart to be further argued by the twelve judges on an appointed day. To prevent any untoward decision on the part of this venerable body, the king immediately commanded Bacon to write a letter to the chiefjustice, requiring that the judges should suspend all proceedings till they should have consulted with himself and learned his pleasure in the business. Coke returned for the present no other answer to the attorney-general, than that it was fit that each of the judges should receive from him a similar notice ;which was sent accordingly. On the day previously appointed, however, the judges met, to the astonishment and horror of the courtiers, and, having argued their case, agreed upon a joint letter to his majesty, inclosing that received from the attorney-general, and respectfully stating that the cause in question was one between man and man, on which they were in duty bound to deliver their opinion. They further begged to make known that their oath obliged

them,