As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more prominent part in affairs, legal, criminal, constitutional, administrative, than he had yet been allowed to have.  We know that it was his great object to show how much more active and useful an Attorney he could be than either Coke or Hobart; and as far as unflagging energy and high ability could make a good public servant, he fully carried out his purpose.  In Parliament, the “addled Parliament” of 1614, in which he sat for the University of Cambridge, he did his best to reconcile what were fast becoming irreconcilable, the claims and prerogatives of an absolute king, irritable, suspicious, exacting, prodigal, with the ancient rights and liberties, growing stronger in their demands by being denied, resisted, or outwitted, of the popular element in the State.  In the trials, which are so large and disagreeable a part of the history of these years—­trials arising out of violent words provoked by the violent acts of power, one of which, Peacham’s, became famous, because in the course of it torture was resorted to, or trials which witnessed to the corruption of the high society of the day, like the astounding series of arraignments and condemnations following on the discoveries relating to Overbury’s murder, which had happened just before the Somerset marriage—­Bacon had to make the best that he could for the cruel and often unequal policy of the Court; and Bacon must take his share in the responsibility for it.  An effort on James’s part to stop duelling brought from Bacon a worthier piece of service, in the shape of an earnest and elaborate argument against it, full of good sense and good feeling, but hopelessly in advance of the time.  On the many questions which touched the prerogative, James found in his Attorney a ready and skilful advocate of his claims, who knew no limit to them but in the consideration of what was safe and prudent to assert.  He was a better and more statesmanlike counsellor, in his unceasing endeavours to reconcile James to the expediency of establishing solid and good relations with his Parliament, and in his advice as to the wise and hopeful ways of dealing with it.  Bacon had no sympathy with popular wants and claims; of popularity, of all that was called popular, he had the deepest suspicion and dislike; the opinions and the judgment of average men he despised, as a thinker, a politician, and a courtier; the “malignity of the people” he thought great.  “I do not love,” he says, “the word people.”  But he had a high idea of what was worthy of a king, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of the petty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist.  In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, his favourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law.  This was a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd of lawyers who venerated him—­men whom Bacon viewed with mingled contempt and apprehension both in the courts and in Parliament