PREFACE. - Xvii 
had endeavoured to procure the Solicitorship for his nephew, 
and, failing that, ‘the place of the Wards;’ probably, as - 
Mr. Spedding conjectures, the office of Attorney of the 
Wards. But all came to nothing, as did another suit of a 
more private nature, which Bacon contemplated if he did not 
prosecute, and in which Essex again stood his friend. It is 
not certain that he ever actually proposed for the hand of 
Lady Hatton, the young and wealthy widow of Sir William 
Hatton, and granddaughter of Burghley. From an expression 
in one of his letters to Essex it is probable that he saw no 
opportunity of urging his suit with success, and on the 7th of 
November, 1598, the lady became the wife of his determined 
enemy, Sir Edward Coke. 
It was during the autumn of 1597 that an estrangement 
took place between Bacon and Essex. Warnings on the one 
side, which were unheeded on the other, ‘bred in process of 
time,’ says Bacon in his Apology, ‘a discontinuance of private- 
ness. . . . between his Lordship and myself; so as I was 
not called nor advised with, for some year and half before his 
Lordship’s going into Ireland, as in former time.’ After the 
brilliant success of the Cadiz expedition, Bacon wrote a letter 
of advice to the Earl touching his conduct; a letter full of the 
soundest wisdom, showing the clear apprehension which the 
writer had of the weak points of Essex’s character. The 
difference between the policy he recommended and the 
course which Essex adopted cannot be more strikingly. put 
than in Bacon’s own words in his Apology: ‘I ever set this 
down, that the only course to be held with the Queen, was by 
obsequiousness and observance. . . My Lord on the other 
hand had a settled opinion that the Queen could be brought 
to nothing but by a kind of necessity and authority.’ How 
true this was no man knew better by experience than Bacon 
himself, who ever in season and out of season gave him ‘the 
counsel of a wise and then a prophetical friend.’ (Sir H. 
Wotton.) But it was all in vain. Essex’s nature was too 
impatient to follow a course which involyed so much self- 
restraint. He went his own way, and in a few brief years 
b 
