Meanwhile Bacon had been getting gradually into the unofficial employ of the Government.  He had become one of the “Learned Counsel”—­lawyers with subordinate and intermittent work, used when wanted, but without patent or salary, and not ranking with the regular law officers.  The Government had found him useful in affairs of the revenue, in framing interrogatories for prisoners in the Tower, in drawing up reports of plots against the Queen.  He did not in this way earn enough to support himself; but he had thus come to have some degree of access to the Queen, which he represents as being familiar and confidential, though he still perceived, as he says himself, that she did not like him.  At the first news of Essex’s return to England, Bacon greeted him—­

“MY LORD,—­Conceiving that your Lordship came now up in the person of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress, which kind of compliments are many times instar magnorum meritorum, and therefore it would be hard for me to find you, I have committed to this poor paper the humble salutations of him that is more yours than any man’s, and more yours than any man.  To these salutations I add a due and joyful gratulation, confessing that your Lordship, in your last conference with me before your journey, spake not in vain, God making it good, That you trusted we should say Quis putasset!  Which as it is found true in a happy sense, so I wish you do not find another Quis putasset in the manner of taking this so great a service.  But I hope it is, as he said, Nubecula est, cito transibit, and that your Lordship’s wisdom and obsequious circumspection and patience will turn all to the best.  So referring all to some time that I may attend you, I commit you to God’s best preservation.”

But when Essex’s conduct in Ireland had to be dealt with, Bacon’s services were called for; and from this time his relations towards Essex were altered.  Every one, no one better than the Queen herself, knew all that he owed to Essex.  It is strangely illustrative of the time, that especially as Bacon held so subordinate a position, he should have been required, and should have been trusted, to act against his only and most generous benefactor.  It is strange, too, that however great his loyalty to the Queen, however much and sincerely he might condemn his friend’s conduct, he should think it possible to accept the task.  He says that he made some remonstrance; and he says, no doubt truly, that during the first stage of the business he used the ambiguous position in which he was placed to soften Essex’s inevitable punishment, and to bring about a reconciliation between him and the Queen.  But he was required, as the Queen’s lawyer, to set forth in public Essex’s offences; and he admits that he did so “not over tenderly.”  Yet all this, even if we have misgivings about it, is intelligible.  If he had declined, he could not, perhaps, have done the service which he assures us that he tried to do