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the Savoy, where his chief guests were the three knights, Cope, Hicks, and Beeston; and upon this conceit (as he said himself) that since he could not have my L. of Salisbury in person, which he wished, he would have him at least in his representative body.’ Alice Barnham, who thus became the wife of Francis Bacon, was no doubt the same ‘handsome maiden’ whom he mentioned three years before to his cousin Cecil. She was the daughter of Benedict Barnham, a London merchant, whose widow took for her second husband Sir John Packington, a knight of Worcestershire. Lady Bacon brought with her a fortune of 220/. a year, which was settled upon herself, with an additional 500/. a year from her husband, a fact which at once disproves Lord Campbell’s charge that the match was a mercenary one. But how much of romance or even sentiment there was in it we have no means of knowing. Bacon was now in his forty-sixth year, and his language three months later breathes not so much the tone of ecstasy as of tranquil satisfaction. ‘I thank God I have not taken a thorn out of my foot to put it into my side.’ No letter of their correspondence has been preserved, and from this time we hear nothing more of the lady which could tell us whether her influence over her husband was great or small. The gossip of fifteen years later credited her with a forward tongue, and from a sentence in Bacon’s will we learn that she had given him grievous cause of offence. She survived him many years, and married her gentleman usher.

The subject of the Union with Scotland and the Naturalisation of the Scotch was still the prominent one before the House. On the former question we have a fragment of Bacon’s speech delivered on 25th Nov., 1606. On the latter he replied to Nicholas Fuller, 17th Feb., 1606-7. He spoke against the motion for the Union of Laws on the 28th of March, and on the 17th of June he reported to the House the speeches of Salisbury and Northampton at the conference concerning the petition of the merchants upon the Spanish grievances. The reward which he had so well earned came at last. Doderidge