“as the fault was not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act.”  “Therefore,” he goes on, “if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me.”  He insists very strongly that the King’s service never miscarried in his hands, for he simply carried out the King’s wise counsels.  “That his Majesty’s business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket and cistern to that fountain—­a bucket to draw forth, a cistern to preserve.”  He is not afraid of the apparent slight to the censure passed on him by Parliament.  “For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a friend of mine said, Parliament died penitent towards me.”  “What the King bestows on me will be further seen than on Paul’s steeple.”  “There be mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I ever served his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking.”  In the odd fashion of the time—­a fashion in which no one more delighted than himself—­he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument.

“I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany—­Libera nos Domine; parce nobis, Domine; exaudi nos, Domine.  In the first, I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not conveniently in respect of his affairs.  In the second, he hath done it in my fine and pardon.  In the third, he hath likewise performed, in restoring to the light of his countenance.”

But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public employment, he would be ready to give private counsel; and he would apply himself to any “literary province” that the King appointed.  “I am like ground fresh.  If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow me with anything, I hope to give him some yield.”  “Your Majesty hath power; I have faith.  Therefore a miracle may be wrought.”  And he proposes, for matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as “active” works, the recompiling of laws; the disposing of wards, and generally the education of youth; the regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts; and the regulation of Trade; and for “contemplative,” the continuation of the history of Henry VIII.; a general treatise de Legibus et Justitia; and the “Holy War” against the Ottomans.