FRANCIS BACOX. » 



education of children, " virtuously and religiously," as a more 

 efficient meims of reducing the number of Papists than persecuting 

 them, since, he says, " we find by experience that death works no 

 such effects, but that, like Hytli-a's heads, upon one cut off, seven 

 grow up, persecution being ever accounted as the badge of the 

 Church " Similar tolerance is to be extended to the Puritans, then 

 called Preachers, but here he knows that he is giving the Queen 

 unpalatable advice, and he qualifies it with the tact of a courtier : 

 " till I think that you think otherwise, I am bold to think that 

 the bishops in this dangerous time take a very evil and unadvised 

 course in driving them from their cures." 



In his twenty-fourth year, before he writes this Letter, he first 

 takes his seat in Parliament. He sat for Melcombe then, in 1586 

 for Taunton, in 1589 for Liverpool, and in 1593 for Middlesex, 

 then as now the most wealthy and independent shire in England. 

 By that year, at the age of thirty-two, he has made his mark 

 in Parliament, for he is poor, holds no official position, and does not 

 own a rood of land in the county. Merit, and merit only, has 

 gained him this proud position. In that House "wit so radiant, 

 thought so fresh, and lore so prompt, have not before (and have 

 never since) been heard," but better far than this, he is trusted 

 and admired because he pleads for measures which all in their own 

 hearts must admit are best for the State, the Church, and the Law. 

 He pleads against feudal privileges and unpopular powers ; against 

 the destruction, then threatened, of the Church, for, he says, "it is 

 the eye of England ; if there be a spec or two in the eye, we 

 endeavour to take them off ; he would be a poor oculist who would 

 pull out the eye " ; and he urges the reform and simplification of 

 the law, telling a House full of lawyers that "laws are made to 

 guard the rights of the people, not to feed the lawyers," and that 

 they should be read by all and known to all. 



Stirring times are these. The execution, in 1587, of the 

 unfortunate and misguided Mary Queen of Scots, for being acces- 

 soiy to a plot for the assassination of Elizabeth, removed the chief 

 source of danger to England from internal dissension, and the 

 defeat of the Spanish Armada in the following year dissipated 

 for the moment the fear of foreign aggression, and made England 

 " Mistress of the Seas," for the supremacy of Spain, up to that 

 time the greatest naval power in the world, was by this victory 

 broken for ever. The great question of domestic internal policy 

 was the management of the Church, and in 15-59 Bacon essays to 

 make peace between the Queen and her Parliament by drawing up 

 an ' Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of 



