though he was able to go down to Gorhambury, he never in that time showed himself in the House of Lords.  Whether or not, while the Committees were busy in collecting the charges, he would have been allowed to take part, to put questions to the witnesses, or to produce his own, he never attempted to do so; and by the course he took there was no other opportunity.  To have stood his trial could hardly have increased his danger, or aggravated his punishment; and it would only have been worthy of his name and place, if not to have made a fight for his character and integrity, at least to have bravely said what he had made up his mind to admit, and what no one could have said more nobly and pathetically, in open Parliament.  But he was cowed at the fierceness of the disapprobation manifest in both Houses.  He shrunk from looking his peers and his judges in the face.  His friends obtained for him that he should not be brought to the bar, and that all should pass in writing.  But they saved his dignity at the expense of his substantial reputation.  The observation that the charges against him were not sifted by cross-examination applies equally to his answers to them.  The allegations of both sides would have come down to us in a more trustworthy shape if the case had gone on.  But to give up the struggle, and to escape by any humiliation from a regular public trial, seems to have been his only thought when he found that the King and Buckingham could not or would not save him.

But the truth is that he knew that a trial of this kind was a trial only in name.  He knew that, when a charge of this sort was brought, it was not meant to be really investigated in open court, but to be driven home by proofs carefully prepared beforehand, against which the accused had little chance.  He knew, too, that in those days to resist in earnest an accusation was apt to be taken as an insult to the court which entertained it.  And further, for the prosecutor to accept a submission and confession without pushing to the formality of a public trial, and therefore a public exposure, was a favour.  It was a favour which by his advice, as against the King’s honour, had been refused to Suffolk; it was a favour which, in a much lighter charge, had by his advice been refused to his colleague Yelverton only a few months before, when Bacon, in sentencing him, took occasion to expatiate on the heinous guilt of misprisions or mistakes in men in high places.  The humiliation was not complete without the trial, but it was for humiliation and not fair investigation that the trial was wanted.  Bacon knew that the trial would only prolong his agony, and give a further triumph to his enemies.