Page:The Advancement of Learning (Wright, 5th ed).pdf/26

Court,’ he says with quiet irony, ‘it was given out that I was one of them that incensed the Queen against my Lord of Essex.’ To Elizabeth’s plan of having ‘somewhat published in the Star-Chamber, for the satisfaction of the world touching my Lord of Essex his restraint,’ Bacon was firmly opposed, and his opposition gave her great offence. She charged him with being absent from the Star-Chamber when the declaration was made on the 29th of November. That he was absent we have his own evidence to prove, and he pleaded indisposition as the cause. An unjust suspicion fell upon him of having given the Queen an opinion in the cause of Essex in opposition to that of the Lord Chief Justice and the Attorney-General. His life was even threatened; but he had ‘the privy coat of a good conscience,’ and felt that these falsehoods would recoil upon their authors. Essex still remained in the custody of the Lord Keeper, and for some months not a word passed between the Queen and Bacon about him. But neither of them at this time knew the depth of Essex’s guilt. They knew nothing of his first design of landing in England with two or three thousand men, to make good his position till he could gain support. They knew nothing of the treasonable intention with which Montjoy succeeded to Essex’s command in Ireland; an intention which had no less a scope than with half his army to join the King of Scots in an armed demonstration to support his right to the succession, the party headed by Essex in England working to the same end. James was too timid or too wary to listen to such a proposal, and the plot was for the time abandoned. Before it was revived Montjoy had come to his senses, and then ‘utterly rejected it as a thing which he could no way think honest.’

In the meantime Essex was released from custody and allowed to retire to his own house, still however remaining under surveillance. Towards the end of the Easter term the Queen admitted to Bacon that the former ‘proceeding in the Star-Chamber had done no good, but rather kindled factious bruits (as she termed them) than quenched them.’ She now