the custom notorious among nearly all the higher officers of state, judicial and other, the chancellor included, of receiving, not bribes as they understood them, but unlimited fees, customary gifts,, gracious presents, and bountiful largesses, as well as the "ancient and known perquisites" of office. Many grew rich and great by sheer knavery, corrupt intrigue, and merciless plunder; and no man was quite safe in the possession of a lucrative and splendid office. All this is clearly exhibited in the history of such miscreants as Churchill, Cranfield, Williams, and the Villierses, not altogether omitting Buckingham himself. The Lord Chancellor was not merely a judge, but a high State functionary, next to royalty itself, and keeper of the King's conscience, which would not always be kept, in an age of princely magnificence, absolute prerogative, and unlimited power, and in a bottomless whirlpool of avarice, intrigue and ambition. Political rivalries, common enough in any age, were hugely grim and fierce in this reign, as witness the life-long struggle of Coke and Bacon for the ascendency in the State and over each other. Coke gained honor in being deposed from the King's Bench, and his defence of Magna Charta and his great merits in the law have made his name illustrious with posterity. Bacon, greatly his superior in knowledge, learning, genius, science and arts, if not his equal in law, and with a reputation and character far more illustrious than his, in his own time, is suddenly tumbled from the woolsack into eternal disgrace, and comes down to posterity a very by-word of infamy and meanness. But looking to the whole life and conduct of these men, and comparing the nobleness, disinterestedness, and purity of Bacon's life with the coarse ferocity, the inappeasable malignity, and the really unutterable meanness of Coke in many things, old Escalus might inquire, "Which is the wiser here? Justice, or Iniquity?" Not that all these things together can extenuate a crime, or a guilt confessed, nor that badness in others can be any excuse for baseness

in him; but that considerations like these may help to explain the fact of Bacon's fall from power, without the necessity of imputing to him the moral guilt of actual bribery and corruption, or any degree of meanness; much less a total want of moral sense, and an habitual baseness of character, as some of his biographers have ignorantly done.

Only some three years before the attack on Bacon, we find Buckingham and Coke fomenting charges of the like nature, and with the same corrupt and wicked purpose of creating a vacancy to be filled by some new minion, and putting up the same pretence of corruption in taking bribes, of money, a ring, a cabinet, a piece of plate, and the like, against the Lord Chancellor Egerton (Ellesmere), nearly breaking the old man's heart; and it might have been as successful with him as it was with Bacon, afterwards, had not the King himself come to his relief, and defeated the scheme by giving an earldom to Egerton and the Seals to Bacon. The real truth of the matter was, that the age began to discover that an ancient custom needed to be reformed, because it began to be felt as a grievance and an abuse. Old blackletter laws, fallen obsolete, practically superseded by custom almost equally ancient, and now lying more dead than asleep, were suddenly revived and put in force, and all at once what had been a lantern to the feet became a net in the path.

In like manner, long afterwards, in the reign of George I., the Lord Chancellor Macclesfield was arraigned before the House of Lords for "the sale of offices" in chancery. He had followed the custom and practice of his predecessors in office, time out of mind, and received presents from newly appointed officers as "the ancient and known perquisites of the Great Seal." Being a little avaricious, perhaps, he had carried the thing to a pretty high figure. The Masters had fallen into the practice of paying the presents out of the funds of the suitors in their hands and then

speculating in stocks to make them good again. Suddenly, the great South Sea Bubble burst, and there was a great loss. Masters and suitors were ruined; and a loud cry for reform became the rage of the day. The brunt of the storm fell on the head of the Lord Chancellor. Against the custom were paraded certain old obsolete Statutes of Richard II. and Edward VI., in unreadable law French, "several hundred years" forgotten, within the letter of which his case happened to fall, and did not happen to fall within the exception, as that of the Judges of the Law Courts did; and so Macclesfield was condemned to everlasting infamy for doing about the same thing that the Judges were doing, and had a right to do, without any thought of wrong. But it was all wrong, undoubtedly : offices never ought to have been sold at all, nor presents taken. On the trial, a witness was asked, if the Lord Chancellor Cowper, and Harcourt, had not done the same thing, in their times. "O yes," answered the witness. But, breaks in Lord Harcourt from his seat on the benches," Did I ever haggle for more?" and "Didn't they pay me out of their own money?" In modern times, a rational remedy for such evils would be found in a new Statute, giving an ample fixed salary, with utter prohibition of all fees, perquisites, and presents, any custom to the contrary notwithstanding; but in these more ancient days, it was by summary outbreak - Off with the Chancellor's head! hurl his name and reputation into the bottomless pit! and let the bursting of South Sea bubbles forever cease!

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In the reign of James I., the Lord Chancellor had no fixed salary, or a merely nominal one, and yet his income was expected to be some £15,000 a year: it came from ancient perquisites and customary fees, not regulated by other law than the custom. But to such a pitch had grown all manner of abuses, in this reign, in monopolies, patents, prerogative exactions, fees, presents, and largesses, reaching 1 16 Howell's State Trials, 1151.

all the Courts of Justice and nearly all the offices of State, that every Parliament opened with a thundering demand for reform and a redress of grievances, and was immediately prorogued and sent home because it did so, until at last reform had to come. Buckingham, the prime favorite, whose frown was fatal to all lesser dependants, did not scruple to write letters to the Lord Chancellor, urging upon him a favorable consideration of particular suitors in his court. Here was indeed danger that justice might be perverted, if the judge were really dishonest. There is no

charge that Bacon was ever swerved under this pressure ; and it is certain that he counselled in eloquent terms against a practice which he had no power to correct. And is it any matter of wonder that, yielding to the necessities of his actual condition, and unconscious of any dereliction of duty, or any falling from virtue and honor, he should adopt and continue the customs and usages of former Chancellors, or even slide into the common practices and abuses of the Court and time and throng in which he had to live and move? Birth-day presents, New Year's gifts, splendid offerings on various occasions, largesses of money, and magnificent favors, were common, and Bacon seems to have participated in these things in some small degree with the rest. Transition from the State functionary to the judge in the same person, or from the courtier to the suitor, was but a short distance to travel, and the distinction between a fee, a present, and a bribe was not well marked by any law, and more easily lost sight of than in our day. Practically, hardly any distinction existed, then. According to the researches of Mr. Dixon, the compensation of all the great officers of State, including the Chancellor, Judges, and Bishops, from the King down to the King's Sergeant, was derived from these indefinite fees, gifts, and perquisites, there being no such thing as a civil list, and such fixed salaries as there were being merely nominal.1

1 Pers. Hist. of Lord Bacon, 290.

Most of the charges against Bacon were founded upon gifts accepted as usual after the cases had been determined, as a compensation justly due in the absence of fees fixed by law, of which there were none. Some were received by his servants, or under-officers, without his personal knowledge, before the cases had been decided; and in some of these instances, the money was ordered to be returned as improper, when reported to him. In other cases, he was not actually aware that the donors had causes pending in his court. In nearly all cases, the gifts were presented through eminent counsel and persons of high standing, and in most cases, openly, and with the knowledge of all concerned; and as Coke himself admitted, as it were, in the presence of witnesses. In general, they were received by

his clerks and the officers whose business it was to collect and receive the fees and emoluments of his office. The grievance of the chief complainants was, that their cases had been decided against them, notwithstanding the gifts; nor does it appear that his judgments were at all affected by these alleged bribes. None of the cases were reversed on appeal; but appeals were not common in those days, says Lord Campbell. After a thorough scrutiny into the whole matter, Mr. Dixon comes to the conclusion, that there is no fair and just ground for supposing that Bacon "had done wrong, knowing it to be wrong," in a single instance; that "not a single fee or remembrance traced to the Chancellor can, by any fair construction, be called a bribe. Not one appears to have been given upon a promise; not one appears to have been given in secret; not one is alleged to have corrupted justice." This conclusion would almost bring the case within the precedent of the play, in which Bassanio offers the judge, after judgment pronounced, the "three thousand ducats due unto the Jew" for his "courteous pains withal":

"Ant. And stand indebted, over and above, In love and service to you evermore.