know how to keep his servants in order.  One of them, John Churchill, an infamous forger of Chancery orders, finding things going hard with him, and “resolved,” it is said, “not to sink alone,” offered his confessions of all that was going on wrong in the Court.  But on the 15th of March things took another turn.  It was no longer a matter of doubtful constitutional law; no longer a question of slack discipline over his officers.  To the astonishment, if not of the men of his own day, at least to the unexhausted astonishment of times following, a charge was suddenly reported from the Committee to the Commons against the Lord Chancellor, not of straining the prerogative, or of conniving at his servants’ misdoings, but of being himself a corrupt and venal judge.  Two suitors charged him with receiving bribes.  Bacon was beginning to feel worried and anxious, and he wrote thus to Buckingham.  At length he had begun to see the meaning of all these inquiries, and to what they were driving.

“MY VERY GOOD LORD,—­Your Lordship spake of Purgatory.  I am now in it, but my mind is in a calm, for my fortune is not my felicity.  I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants.  But Job himself, or whosoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, specially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.  And if this be to be a Chancellor.  I think if the great seal lay upon Hounslow Heath nobody would take it up.  But the King and your Lordship will, I hope, put an end to these miseries one way or other.  And in troth that which I fear most is lest continual attendance and business, together with these cares, and want of time to do my weak body right this spring by diet and physic, will cast me down; and then it will be thought feigning or fainting.  But I hope in God I shall hold out.  God prosper you.”

The first charges attracted others, which were made formal matters of complaint by the House of Commons.  John Churchill, to save himself, was busy setting down cases of misdoing; and probably suitors of themselves became ready to volunteer evidence.  But of this Bacon as yet knew nothing.  He was at this time only aware that there were persons who were “hunting out complaints against him,” that the attack was changed from his law to his private character; he had found an unfavourable feeling in the House of Lords; and he knew well enough what it was to have powerful enemies in those days when a sentence was often settled before a trial.  To any one, such a state of things was as formidable as the first serious symptoms of a fever.  He was uneasy, as a man might well be on whom the House of Commons had fixed its eye, and to whom the House of Lords had shown itself unfriendly.  But he was as yet conscious of nothing fatal to his defence, and he knew that if false accusations could be lightly made they could also be exposed.