when they are responsible, and when they know
that they are right; and they prevail, or accept the consequences.
Bacon, knowing all that he did, thinking all that he thought, was
content to be the echo and the instrument of the cleverest, the
foolishest, the vainest, the most pitiably unmanly of English kings.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Calendar of State Papers_ (domestic), March 24, 1621.

[4] _Commons' Journals_, March 17, April 27; iii. 560, 594-6.

[5] _Commons' Journals_, iii. 578. In his copy of the _Novum Organum_,
received _ex dono auctoris_, Coke wrote the same words.

"_Auctori consilium_.
Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum:
Instaura leges justitiamque prius."

He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the _Novum
Organum_,

"It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of Fools."

CHAPTER VII.

BACON'S LAST YEARS.

[1621-1626.]

The tremendous sentences of those days, with their crushing fines, were
often worse in sound than in reality. They meant that for the moment a
man was defeated and disgraced. But it was quite understood that it did
not necessarily follow that they would be enforced in all their
severity. The fine might be remitted, the imprisonment shortened, the
ban of exclusion taken off. At another turn of events or caprice the man
himself might return to favour, and take his place in Parliament or the
Council as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man might have
powerful enemies, and the sentence might be pressed. His fine might be
assigned to some favourite; and he might be mined, even if in the long
run he was pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. Raleigh
had remained to perish at last in dishonour. Northumberland, Raleigh's
fellow-prisoner, after fifteen years' captivity, was released this year.
The year after Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady
Somerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' imprisonment.
Southampton, the accomplice of Essex, Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619
by Bacon for embezzlement, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon,
and both of them took a prominent part in judging him.

To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an irretrievable overthrow
as regards public life, and, though some parts of it were remitted and
others lightened, it plunged his private affairs into trouble which
weighed heavily on him for his few remaining years.