It was not quite true that his “ambition was quenched.”  For the rest of Cecil’s life Cecil was the first man at James’s Court; and to the last there was one thing that Bacon would not appear to believe—­he did not choose to believe that it was Cecil who kept him back from employment and honour.  To the last he persisted in assuming that Cecil was the person who would help, if he could, a kinsman devoted to his interests and profoundly conscious of his worth.  To the last he commended his cause to Cecil in terms of unstinted affection and confiding hope.  It is difficult to judge of the sincerity of such language.  The mere customary language of compliment employed by every one at this time was of a kind which to us sounds intolerable.  It seems as if nothing that ingenuity could devise was too extravagant for an honest man to use, and for a man who respected himself to accept.  It must not, indeed, be forgotten that conventionalities, as well as insincerity, differ in their forms in different times; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and clear words, when they are the fashion, as much as in what is like mere fulsome adulation.  But words mean something, in spite of forms and fashions.  When a man of great genius writes his private letters, we wish generally to believe on the whole what he says; and there are no limits to the esteem, the honour, the confidence, which Bacon continued to the end to express towards Cecil.  Bacon appeared to trust him—­appeared, in spite of continued disappointments, to rely on his good-will and good offices.  But for one reason or another Bacon still remained in the shade.  He was left to employ his time as he would, and to work his way by himself.

He was not idle.  He prepared papers which he meant should come before the King, on the pressing subjects of the day.  The Hampton Court conference between the Bishops and the Puritan leaders was at hand, and he drew up a moderating paper on the Pacification of the Church.  The feeling against him for his conduct towards Essex had not died away, and he addressed to Lord Mountjoy that Apology concerning the Earl of Essex, so full of interest, so skilfully and forcibly written, so vivid a picture of the Queen’s ways with her servants, which has every merit except that of clearing Bacon from the charge of disloyalty to his best friend.  The various questions arising out of the relations of the two kingdoms, now united under James, were presenting themselves.  They were not of easy solution, and great mischief would follow if they were solved wrongly.  Bacon turned his attention to them.  He addressed a discourse to the King on the union of the two kingdoms, the first of a series of discussions on the subject which Bacon made peculiarly his own, and which, no doubt, first drew the King’s attention and favour to him.