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had endeavoured to procure the Solicitorship for his nephew, and, failing that, ‘the place of the Wards;’ probably, as Mr. Spedding conjectures, the office of Attorney of the Wards. But all came to nothing, as did another suit of a more private nature, which Bacon contemplated if he did not prosecute, and in which Essex again stood his friend. It is not certain that he ever actually proposed for the hand of Lady Hatton, the young and wealthy widow of Sir William Hatton, and granddaughter of Burghley. From an expression in one of his letters to Essex it is probable that he saw no opportunity of urging his suit with success, and on the 7th of November, 1598, the lady became the wife of his determined enemy, Sir Edward Coke.

It was during the autumn of 1597 that an estrangement took place between Bacon and Essex. Warnings on the one side, which were unheeded on the other, ‘bred in process of time,’ says Bacon in his Apology, ‘a discontinuance of privateness . . . . between his Lordship and myself; so as I was not called nor advised with, for some year and half before his Lordship’s going into Ireland, as in former time.’ After the brilliant success of the Cadiz expedition, Bacon wrote a letter of advice to the Earl touching his conduct; a letter full of the soundest wisdom, showing the clear apprehension which the writer had of the weak points of Essex’s character. The difference between the policy he recommended and the course which Essex adopted cannot be more strikingly put than in Bacon’s own words in his Apology: ‘I ever set this down, that the only course to be held with the Queen, was by obsequiousness and observance . . . My Lord on the other hand had a settled opinion that the Queen could be brought to nothing but by a kind of necessity and authority.” How true this was no man knew better by experience than Bacon himself, who ever in season and out of season gave him ‘the counsel of a wise and then a prophetical friend.” (Sir H. Wotton.) But it was all in vain. Essex’s nature was too impatient to follow a course which involved so much self- restraint. He went his own way, and in a few brief years

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