All this was serious.  As things were drifting, it seemed as if Bacon might have to fight the legal question of the prerogative in the form of a criminal charge, and be called upon to answer the accusation of being the minister of a crown which legal language pronounced absolute, and of a King who interpreted legal language to the letter; and further, to meet his accusers after the King himself had disavowed what his servant had done.  What passed between Bacon and the King is confused and uncertain; but after his speech the King could scarcely have thought of interfering with the inquiry.  The proceedings went on; Committees were named for the several points of inquiry; and Bacon took part in these arrangements.  It was a dangerous position to have to defend himself against an angry House of Commons, led and animated by Coke and Cranfield.  But though the storm had rapidly thickened, the charges against the referees were not against him alone.  His mistake in law, if it was a mistake, was shared by some of the first lawyers and first councillors in England.  There was a battle before him, but not a hopeless one. “Modicae fidei, quare dubitasti” he writes about this time to an anxious friend.

But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering over his head alone.  It was against him that the whole attack was directed; as soon as it took a different shape, the complaints against the other referees, such as the Chief-Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, though some attempt was made to press them, were quietly dropped.  What was the secret history of these weeks we do not know.  But the result of Bacon’s ruin was that Buckingham was saved.  “As they speak of the Turquoise stone in a ring,” Bacon had said to Buckingham when he was made Chancellor, “I will break into twenty pieces before you have the least fall.”  Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was taken at his word.

At length the lightning fell.  During the early part of March, while these dangerous questions were mooted about the referees, a Committee, appointed early in the session, had also been sitting on abuses in courts of justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had been going on into the ways of the subordinate officers of the Court of Chancery.  Bacon had early (Feb. 17th) sent a message to the Committee courting full inquiry, “willingly consenting that any man might speak anything of his Court.”  On the 12th of March the chairman, Sir R. Philips, reported that he had in his hands “divers petitions, many frivolous and clamorous, many of weight and consequence.”  Cranfield, who presided over the Court of Wards, had quarrelled fiercely with the Chancery, where he said there was “neither Law, Equity, nor Conscience,” and pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his own Court, which was found fault with by the lawyers.  Some scandalous abuses were brought to light in the Chancery.  They showed that “Bacon was at fault in the art of government,” and did not