By the Rev. W. P. S. 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 J ustice, 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 I am 

 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 language 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 



