them.  Cranfield, the representative of severe economy, insisted that the honour of the King required that the referees, whoever they were, should be called to account.  The gathering clouds shifted a little, when the sense of the House seemed to incline to giving up all retrospective action, and to a limitation for the future by statute of the questionable prerogative—­a limitation which was in fact attempted by a bill thrown out by the Lords.  But they gathered again when the Commons determined to bring the whole matter before the House of Lords.  The King wrote to warn Bacon of what was coming.  The proposed conference was staved off by management for a day or two, but it could not be averted, and the Lords showed their eagerness for it.  And two things by this time—­the beginning of March—­seemed now to have become clear, first, that under the general attack on the referees was intended a blow against Bacon; next, that the person whom he had most reason to fear was Sir Edward Coke.

The storm was growing; but Bacon was still unalarmed, though Buckingham had been frightened into throwing the blame on the referees.

“I do hear,” he writes to Buckingham (dating his letter on March 7th, “the day I received the seal"), “from divers of judgement, that to-morrow’s conference is like to pass in a calm, as to the referees.  Sir Lionel Cranfield, who hath been formerly the trumpet, said yesterday that he did now incline unto Sir John Walter’s opinion and motion not to have the referees meddled with, otherwise than to discount it from the King; and so not to look back, but to the future.  And I do hear almost all men of judgement in the House wish now that way.  I woo nobody; I do but listen, and I have doubt only of Sir Edward Coke, who I wish had some round caveat given him from the King; for your Lordship hath no great power with him.  But a word from the King mates him.”

But Coke’s opportunity had come.  The House of Commons was disposed for gentler measures.  But he was able to make it listen to his harsher counsels, and from this time his hand appears in all that was done.  The first conference was a tame and dull one.  The spokesmen had been slack in their disagreeable and perhaps dangerous duty.  But Coke and his friends took them sharply to task.  “The heart and tongue of Sir Edward Coke are true relations,” said one of his fervent supporters; “but his pains hath not reaped that harvest of praise that he hath deserved.  For the referees, they are as transcendent delinquents as any other, and sure their souls made a wilful elopement from their bodies when they made these certificates.”  A second conference was held with the Lords, and this time the charge was driven home.  The referees were named, the Chancellor at the head of them.  When Bacon rose to explain and justify his acts he was sharply stopped, and reminded that he was transgressing the orders of the House in speaking till the Committees were named to examine the matter.  What was even more important, the King had come to the House of Lords (March 10th), and frightened, perhaps, about his subsidies, told them “that he was not guilty of those grievances which are now discovered, but that he grounded his judgement upon others who have misled him.”  The referees would be attacked, people thought, if the Lower House had courage.