By the Rev. W. P. &. Bingham. 95 
when the judgment went against them after they had, as they 
thought, paid for it. Complaints were made in the House of 
Commons, and a committee was appointed to investigate the matter. 
The consequence of this was that an impeachment was sent up to 
the House of Lords. Bacon could scarcely preside in the House of 
Lords during his own trial, and then it was that, at his own request, 
a commission passed the great seal reciting that, by reason of illness, 
he was unable to attend the House of Lords, and authorising Sir 
James Ley, Knight and Baronet, Chief Justice of the Queen’s 
Bench, to act as Speaker in his absence. Thus it was that the Lord 
Chief Justice, not yet a peer, came to preside in the House and sat 
upon the wool-sack when Bacon was arraigned. 
The Chancellor, conscious of guilt, deprecated the vengeance of 
his judges by a general avowal. He wrote to the King on the 25th 
of March as follows :—‘ And for the briberies and gifts wherewith 
I am charged, when the book of hearts shall be open I hope I shall 
not be found to have the two-fold fountain of a corrupt heart in a 
depraved habit of taking rewards to pervert justice, however I may 
be frail and partake of the abuses of the times; and therefore Iam 
resolved when I come to my answer not to trick up my innocency, 
as I writ to the Lords, by cavellations and voidances, but to speak 
to them the ]Janguage which my heart speaketh to me, in excusing, 
extenuating or ingenuously confessing, praying to God to give me 
the grace to see the bottom of my faults, and that no hardness of 
heart do steal upon me or any shew of more neatness of conscience 
than there is cause.” 
The Lords, not satisfied with a general acknowledgment, insisted 
on a specific confession of each one of the charges, and for this 
purpose a deputation waited on Bacon. After having acknowledged 
the truth of twenty-eight charges, he was asked if the confession 
was his own voluntary act, and he answered, “ My Lords, it is my 
act, my hand, my heart, I beseech your Lordships to be merciful 
to a broken reed.” It now became the painful duty of the Lord 
Chief Justice to’ pronounce the sentence of the peers against the 
unhappy Chancellor, who, no doubt, had been for years his friend 
and companion. He was spared the pain of doing this with Bacon 
