“For my fortune, summa summarum with me is, that I may not be made altogether unprofitable to do your Majesty service or honour.  If your Majesty continue me as I am, I hope I shall be a new man, and shall reform things out of feeling, more than another can do out of example.  If I cast part of my burden, I shall be more strong and delivre to bear the rest.  And, to tell your Majesty what my thoughts run upon, I think of writing a story of England, and of recompiling of your laws into a better digest.”

The King referred him to the House; and the House now (April 19th) prepared to gather up into “one brief” the charges against the Lord Chancellor, still, however, continuing open to receive fresh complaints.

Meanwhile the chase after abuses of all kinds was growing hotter in the Commons—­abuses in patents and monopolies, which revived the complaints against referees, among whom Bacon was frequently named, and abuses in the Courts of Justice.  The attack passed by and spared the Common Law Courts, as was noticed in the course of the debates; it spared Cranfield’s Court, the Court of Wards.  But it fell heavily on the Chancery and the Ecclesiastical Courts.  “I have neither power nor will to defend Chancery,” said Sir John Bennett, the judge of the Prerogative Court; but a few weeks after his turn came, and a series of as ugly charges as could well be preferred against a judge, charges of extortion as well as bribery, were reported to the House by its Committee.  There can be no doubt of the grossness of many of these abuses, and the zeal against them was honest, though it would have shown more courage if it had flown at higher game; but the daily discussion of them helped to keep alive and inflame the general feeling against so great a “delinquent” as the Lord Chancellor was supposed to be.  And, indeed, two of the worst charges against him were made before the Commons.  One was a statement made in the House by Sir George Hastings, a member of the House, who had been the channel of Awbry’s gift, that when he had told Bacon that if questioned he must admit it, Bacon’s answer was:  “George, if you do so, I must deny it upon my honour—­upon my oath.”  The other was that he had given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Masters in Chancery for which he received L1200, and with which he said that all the judges agreed—­an assertion which all the judges denied.  Of these charges there is no contradiction.[4]

Bacon made one more appeal to the King (April 21).  He hoped that, by resigning the seal, he might be spared the sentence: 

“But now if not per omnipotentiam (as the divines speak), but per potestatem suaviter disponentem, your Majesty will graciously save me from a sentence with the good liking of the House, and that cup may pass from me; it is the utmost of my desires.

“This I move with the more belief, because I assure myself that if it be reformation