Bacon's known
difficulties about money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, his
easiness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, encouraged
this profuseness of giving. And Bacon let it be. He asked no questions;
he knew that he worked hard and well; he knew that it could go on
without affecting his purpose to do justice "from the greatest to the
groom." A stronger character, a keener conscience, would have faced the
question, not only whether he was not setting the most ruinous of
precedents, but whether any man could be so sure of himself as to go on
dealing justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never dared to
face the question, what James was, what Buckingham was, let himself be
spellbound by custom. He knew in the abstract that judges ought to have
nothing to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his charges to
them. Yet he went on self-complacent, secure, almost innocent, building
up a great tradition of corruption in the very heart of English justice,
till the challenge of Parliament, which began in him its terrible and
relentless, but most unequal, prosecution of justice against ministers
who had betrayed the commonwealth in serving the Crown, woke him from
his dream, and made him see, as others saw it, the guilt of a great
judge who, under whatever extenuating pretext, allowed the suspicion to
arise that he might sell justice. "In the midst of a state of as great
affliction as mortal man can endure," he wrote to the Lords of the
Parliament, in making his submission, "I shall begin with the professing
gladness in some things. The first is that hereafter the greatness of a
judge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection of guiltiness,
which is the beginning of a golden world. The next, that after this
example it is like that judges will fly from anything that is in the
likeness of corruption as from a serpent." Bacon's own judgment on
himself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and probably comes
near the truth. "Howsoever, I acknowledge the sentence just and for
reformation's sake fit," he writes to Buckingham from the Tower, where,
for form's sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he yet had
been "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes that
have been since Sir Nicolas Bacon's time." He repeated the same thing
yet more deliberately in later times. "_I was the justest judge that was
in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure in