aws."

Accordingly for judicial officers he appointed such men as would
execute his unlawful schemes for the destruction of public liberty. To
such considerations was Francis Bacon mainly indebted for his
elevation from one legal rank to another, until he reached the seat of
the Lord Chancellor. A man whom Villers declared, "of excellent parts,
but withal of a base and ungrateful temper, and an arrant knave, yet a
fit instrument for the purposes of the government." He did not receive
his appointment for that vast, hard-working genius which makes his
name the ornament of many an age, but only for his sycophantic
devotion to the royal will. Sir Edward Coke was promoted rapidly
enough, whilst wholly subservient to the despotic court, but
afterwards, though a miracle of legal knowledge, not equalled yet
perhaps, he must not be appointed Lord Chancellor on account of "his
occasional fits of independence." Chief Justice Ley was one of the
right stamp, but it was thought "his subserviency might prove more
valuable by retaining him to preside over the Court of King's Bench."
"For in making the highest judicial appointments the only question
was, what would suit the arbitrary schemes of governing the
country."[5] Hobart had resisted some illegal monopolies of the
all-powerful Buckingham, and he was "unfit for promotion."

[Footnote 5: 2 Campbell, 372, 374.]

James thought the Prerogative would be strengthened by the appointment
of clergymen of the national church, perhaps the only class of men not
then getting fired with love of liberty,--and made Williams, Bishop of
Lincoln, Lord Keeper, a "man of rash and insolent, though servile
temper, and of selfish, temporizing, and trimming political conduct,"
who at that time had never acted as "a judge except at the Waldegrave
Petty Sessions in making an order of bastardy or allowing a rate for
the Parish poor," and was "as ignorant of the questions coming before
him as the door-keepers of his court." But he was subservient, and had
pleased the King by preaching the courtly doctrine that "subjects hold
their liberties and their property at the will of the Sovereign whom
they are bound in every extremity passively to obey."[6] Men like
Fleming and other creatures of the throne, sanctioning the King's
abundant claim to absolute power, were sure of judicial distinction;
while it was only the force of public opinion which gave the humblest
place of honor to such able and well-studied law