dicae fidei, quare dubitasti_" he writes about this
time to an anxious friend.

But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering over his head
alone. It was against him that the whole attack was directed; as soon as
it took a different shape, the complaints against the other referees,
such as the Chief-Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, though some
attempt was made to press them, were quietly dropped. What was the
secret history of these weeks we do not know. But the result of Bacon's
ruin was that Buckingham was saved. "As they speak of the Turquoise
stone in a ring," Bacon had said to Buckingham when he was made
Chancellor, "I will break into twenty pieces before you have the least
fall." Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was taken at his
word.

At length the lightning fell. During the early part of March, while
these dangerous questions were mooted about the referees, a Committee,
appointed early in the session, had also been sitting on abuses in
courts of justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had been
going on into the ways of the subordinate officers of the Court of
Chancery. Bacon had early (Feb. 17th) sent a message to the Committee
courting full inquiry, "willingly consenting that any man might speak
anything of his Court." On the 12th of March the chairman, Sir R.
Philips, reported that he had in his hands "divers petitions, many
frivolous and clamorous, many of weight and consequence." Cranfield, who
presided over the Court of Wards, had quarrelled fiercely with the
Chancery, where he said there was "neither Law, Equity, nor Conscience,"
and pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his own Court,
which was found fault with by the lawyers. Some scandalous abuses were
brought to light in the Chancery. They showed that "Bacon was at fault
in the art of government," and did not know how to keep his servants in
order. One of them, John Churchill, an infamous forger of Chancery
orders, finding things going hard with him, and "resolved," it is said,
"not to sink alone," offered his confessions of all that was going on
wrong in the Court. But on the 15th of March things took another turn.
It was no longer a matter of doubtful constitutional law; no longer a
question of slack discipline over his officers. To the astonishment, if
not of the men of his own day, at least to the unexhausted astonishment
of times following, a charge was suddenly reported from the Committee to
the C