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Bushel's most illegal and oppressive. To save both, at this Abridg. juncture, would be impossible: and he found he

Post.

p. 2, 3.

State Tri.
Vol. I.

p. 353, etc.

must either part with the object of his inclinations, or with the oracle of his counsels. How such a prince would determine, is easy to guess. His passion prevailed over his reason: and my lord St. Albans was made the scape-goat of Buckingham. He was even obliged to abandon his defence. As he had gained universal esteem by his learning; and as his eloquence was equal to his parts, superior and commanding, the king would not hazard his appearing before the lords to plead his own cause. In the course of such an inquiry, he might have diverted the public odium from himself, by laying open the long series of bad administration to which he had been privy; the many illegal patents he had been compelled to pass; and all this came full home to Buckingham, the great object of national vengeance. The faults, too, imputed to himself, he might have extenuated so far as to procure a great mitigation of the censure that must otherwise fall upon him in its utmost rigour. All this he foresaw and felt; but the king absolutely commanded him not to be present at his trial; promising on his royal word, to screen him in the last determination; or if that could not be, to reward him afterwards with ample retribution of protection and favour. He obeyed, and was undone.

On the twelfth of March, a committee for inspecting into the abuses of the courts of justice was appointed by the commons. Some days after, Sir Robert Phillips, a gentleman eminent for public spirit and humanity, reported from thence to the house, that complaints had been brought before them, by two persons, against the lord Chancellor, for bribery and corruption. This report he made not only without bitterness, but in terms of great regard and tenderness for the accused; moving, that the business might be presented to the peers singly, and without exaggeration. At a conference, on the nineteenth, between certain members of both houses, the lords agreed to take the matter into their speedy consider

Col. Vol.

I.

ation. As soon as this affair was become the public talk, a new crowd of accusers appeared, and charged home the unhappy chancellor with other and flagrant instances of bribery; such persons especially as had courted him with presents, and afterwards received a judgment unfavourable to their expectations: animated more by that disappointment, than by the iniquity of his decisions; for it does not ap- Rushpear that any of his decrees were ever reversed, He worth's was all this while confined to his house by an indisposition, real or pretended: but if his body was in health, what must have been the condition of his mind, in this interval of suspense and anxiety? a great mind, already self-convicted, yet exquisitely sensible to good fame, which it has long enjoyed, and is upon the point of losing for ever! His reflections, whether he looked back on the past, or forward to the prospect before him, must have been terrible: as they were at the same time inflamed by peculiar circumstances of shame and confusion; that he was now, at the age of sixty-one, falling a victim to the rapine and insolence of his domestics, which he had weakly connived at, rather than to any faults of his own.

On the twenty-sixth of March, the king came to the house of peers; and, in expressions of studied popularity, owned the errors of his government, exclaimed against the patents complained of, frankly gave up to justice the lesser criminals concerned in them and all this for the sake of his favourite, whom in the end he endeavoured to screen by the poorest reasons imaginable. Indeed, no good reasons could be alledged in defence of him, who was the greatest criminal; and without whose concurrence the wretches in question could not have been guilty. The lords were not imposed upon by this speech: however, thinking it sufficient to have reduced their sovereign to the necessity of an apology, they feigned to be of his opinion. Thus, Buckingham escaped for the present; to accumulate new guilt, and to fall at last, ignobly, by a private hand: after he had been devoted, by the curses of a whole people, and more

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solemnly still by the denunciations of their repre sentatives. After a recess of three weeks, the house met again but the weight of their indignation fell singly, and therefore without mercy, on the chancellor. They were not satisfied with his letter of general confession, though delivered to them by the prince of Wales; in which he renounced all justification of himself, and sued for no other favour," but "that his penitent submission might be his sentence, " and the loss of the seals his punishment." He was obliged to put in a particular answer to every point of his accusation: which he did on the first of May, 1621; acknowledging, in the most explicit words, the corruption charged upon him in twentyeight several articles, and throwing his cause entirely on the compassion of his judges. His sentence was, "to undergo a fine of forty thousand pounds; to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king's plea"sure; to be for ever uncapable of any office, place, or employment in the commonwealth; and never "to sit again in parliament, or come within the verge "of the court." Thus he lost the great privilege of his peerage; a severity unusual, except in cases of treason and attainder.

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The last article of his charge furnishes matter for much reflection. It alledges, It alledges," that he had given way to great exactions in his servants, both in respect of private seals, and otherwise for sealing injunctions." This indulgence to his domestics, which was certainly extreme, has been generally, and I believe truly, reckoned the principal cause of those irreWilson. gularities that drew on his disgrace. Liberal in his own temper, or rather profuse beyond the condition Post. p. 2. of a man who means to preserve his integrity, he allowed his family in every kind of extravagance: and as many of his retinue were young, dissipated, giddy in the pursuit of pleasure, they squandered without measure, where they were indulged without controul*.

Bushel's

Abridg

* One day, during his trial, as he was passing through a room where several of his domestics were sitting, upon their getting up to salute him, Sit down, my masters, he cried; your rise hath been my fall.

Whether he did not discover this error till it was too late, or whether a soul like his, lost in the greatness and immensity of its own views, could not attend to that detail of little and disagreeable particulars, which yet œconomy requires; however that was, to support his ordinary train of living, he fell into corruption himself, and connived at it in his dependents. Thus we behold him, a memorable example of all that is great and exalted, of all that is little and low, in man. Such inconsistencies in our human nature cannot but alarm and terrify even those who are most confirmed in a habit of virtue.

Ed. 1691.

After a short confinement in the Tower, the king restored him to his liberty, and forgave the fine in which the parliament had amerced him. As this fine was very considerable, he managed so as to have it assigned over to some of his friends, under the notion of being his creditors: and we find Williams, Cabala, his successor in the seals, complaining heavily of p. 263. this stratagem; as if he thereby intended to defraud those persons to whom he was really in debt, who were many and in danger of being ruined by his fall. But I am inclined to hope, that he made use of this artifice with a more innocent view: namely, to procure himself a short respite from their importunities, till he could settle his private affairs, extremely perplexed by former ill management, and now by the loss of his employments rendered desperate. That I may not be obliged to mention any more an affair alike ungrateful to the reader and writer, I will observe here, that about three years after this, he petitioned king James for a total remission of his censure: " to the end that this blot of ignominy might Bacon, "be removed from him, and from his memory with Vol. V.

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Letter

CCXCIV.

posterity." What lay in the king's power, James ccxciv. readily granted, a full and entire pardon of his whole Cabala, sentence*. Posterity likewise, to which he appealed, p. 249. has seemed unwilling to remember that he ever

Accordingly he was summoned to the first parliament of king Charles.

Post. P.

3.

offended: and those who record his failings, like those who have made observations on the spots in the sun, neither pretend to diminish his real brightness in himself, nor deny his universal influence on Bushel's the world of learning. Thus he withdrew from the Abridg. glare of a public station into the shade of retirement and studious leisure; often lamenting, that ambition and false glory had so long diverted him from the noblest as well as the most useful employments of a reasonable being: mortified, no doubt, into these sentiments by a severe conviction, in his own person, of the instability and emptiness of all human grandeur.

An. 1622.

Hitherto we have followed him through the bustle and obliquity of business. We shall find him henceforth in a more pleasing, though a less conspicuous situation; freed from the servitude of a court; from an intolerable attendance there, on the vices and follies of men every way his inferiors (for in this reign no one could rise to power on more honourable terms :) in a condition now to pursue the native bent of his genius; to live to himself, and for the advantage, not of one age, or one people only, but of all mankind, and all times to come.

The first considerable work he engaged in, after his retirement, was the history of Henry the seventh; which he undertook at the desire of king James, and published in the year 1622. Whatever some writers may have insinuated of his melancholy and dejection, we find every where, in this performance, evident traces of a spirit unbroken by age, and unsubdued by misfortunes. It has been highly applauded, and as much condemned: a proof that it has more than common merit. And we may venture to affirm, that, whatever its faults are, they arise from no want of vigour in the understanding, or of warmth in the imagination of the writer. King James affected to consider his great grandfather Henry as a perfect model for the imitation of other monarchs: and as his was the reign of flattery, this quickly grew to be the prevalent and fashionable opinion at court. Though in

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