PREFACE. xvil 



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 yth 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 involved so much self- 

 restraint. He went his own way, and in a few brief years 



b 



