In the year 1593 the Attorney-General’s place was vacant, and Essex, who in that year became a Privy Councillor, determined that Bacon should be Attorney-General.  Bacon’s reputation as a lawyer was overshadowed by his philosophical and literary pursuits.  He was thought young for the office, and he had not yet served in any subordinate place.  And there was another man, who was supposed to carry all English law in his head, full of rude force and endless precedents, hard of heart and voluble of tongue, who also wanted it.  An Attorney-General was one who would bring all the resources and hidden subtleties of English law to the service of the Crown, and use them with thorough-going and unflinching resolution against those whom the Crown accused of treason, sedition, or invasion of the prerogative.  It is no wonder that the Cecils, and the Queen herself, thought Coke likely to be a more useful public servant than Bacon:  it is certain what Coke himself thought about it, and what his estimate was of the man whom Essex was pushing against him.  But Essex did not take up his friend’s cause in the lukewarm fashion in which Burghley had patronised his nephew.  There was nothing that Essex pursued with greater pertinacity.  He importuned the Queen.  He risked without scruple offending her.  She apparently long shrank from directly refusing his request.  The Cecils were for Coke—­the “Huddler” as Bacon calls him, in a letter to Essex; but the appointment was delayed.  All through 1593, and until April, 1594, the struggle went on.

When Robert Cecil suggested that Essex should be content with the Solicitor’s place for Bacon, “praying him to be well advised, for if his Lordship had spoken of that it might have been of easier digestion to the Queen,” he turned round on Cecil—­

“Digest me no digesting,” said the Earl; “for the Attorneyship is that I must have for Francis Bacon; and in that I will spend my uttermost credit, friendship, and authority against whomsoever, and that whosoever went about to procure it to others, that it should cost both the mediators and the suitors the setting on before they came by it.  And this be you assured of, Sir Robert,” quoth the Earl, “for now do I fully declare myself; and for your own part, Sir Robert, I do think much and strange both of my Lord your father and you, that can have the mind to seek the preferment of a stranger before so near a kinsman; namely, considering if you weigh in a balance his parts and sufficiency in any respect with those of his competitor, excepting only four poor years of admittance, which Francis Bacon hath more than recompensed with the priority of his reading; in all other respects you shall find no comparison between them.”

But the Queen’s disgust at some very slight show of independence on Bacon’s part in Parliament, unforgiven in spite of repeated apologies, together with the influence of the Cecils and the pressure of so formidable and so useful a man as Coke, turned