FEANCIS BACOX. 11 



advanoomont would likely be his own fall, and so sneers at his 

 phiU)sophy and disparages his law. Francis Bacon gives Essex 

 advice which, if he hud followed it, would have saved his head. 

 Essex appreciates it, but, where it seems likely to detract from his 

 own glory, is too headstrong to gain by it. Though petulant, he is 

 in his younger days generous to a fault, and he urges Bacon's claim 

 to place and power with such vehemence upon the Queen that she 

 Avill not gratify him. Though she loves to pot and spoil him at 

 her own sweet will, she keeps him in his place as her subject and 

 not her equal, and will not be dictated to by him, and so he goes 

 to Bacon, tells him that he has spoilt his prospects for a time, and 

 compensates him in some degree with the gift of a piece of land. 



In the next rarliament (1597) Bacon sits for Ipswich, and makes 

 the session memorable by bringing in bills to arrest the decay of 

 tillage and stem the growing discontent of the yeomen. "The 

 population lives on the soil. Mining is in its cradle. . . . Manu- 

 factures are few and scant. ... To grow corn, to herd cattle, to 

 brew ale and press cider, to shear sheep, to fell and carry wood, 

 are the main occupations of every English shire. The farms are 

 small and many ; the farmers neither rich nor poor. The breeder 

 of kine, the grower of herbs and wheat, is a yeoman born ; not too 

 proud to put hand to plough, not too pinched to keep horse and 

 pike. . . . This sturdy class is dropping the plough for the 

 weaver's shuttle and the tailor's goose ; the rage for enclosing 

 woods and commons, for impaling parks, for changing arable land 

 into pasture, for turning holdings for life into tenancies at will, 

 having driven thousands of yeomen from fields and downs which 

 their fathers tilled before the Conqueror came in. Whole districts 

 have been cleared. Where homesteads smoked and harvests waved, 

 there is now, in many parts, a broad green landscape peopled by a 

 shepherd and his dog. Where the Maypole sprung and the village- 

 green crowed with frolic, are now a sheepwalk and a park of 

 deer." [Hej) worth Dixon.) 



Bacon sees in this a danger to the crown and country, and he 

 di-afts two bills which provide that no more land shall be cleared 

 without special reason and a special licence, and that all land 

 turned into pasture since the Queen's accession, a period of forty 

 years, shall be restored to the yeomen and the plough. The 

 Commons pass the bills, the Lords, with the legal assistance of 

 Coke, oppose them ; but to no purpose. The astute lawyer, with 

 his thirty-one legal quibbles, is no match for the young barrister, 

 with his single weapon, justice, and with slight modifications the 

 bills become law. 



