sure the better; for this I humbly kiss your Grace's | Your lordship is interested in honour, in the opinion hands. But because the exchequer is thought to of all them who hear how I am dealt with ; if be somewhat barren, although I have good affiance your lordship malice me for such a cause, surely it of Mr. Chancellor, yet I hold it very essential, and was one of the justest businesses that ever was in therein I most humbly pray your Grace's favour, chancery. I will avouch it; and how deeply I was that you would be pleased by your letter to recom- tempted therein, your lordship knows best. Your mend to Mr. Chancellor the speedy issuing of the lordship may do well, in this great age of yours, to money by this warrant, as a business whereof your think of your grave, as I do of mine; and to beware Grace hath an especial care; the rather for that I of hardness of heart. And as for fair words, it is a understand from him, there be some other warrants wind, by which neither your lordship, nor any man for money to private suitors at this time on foot. else, can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man who But your Grace may be pleased to remember this will give all due respects and reverence to your difference: that the other are mere gifts ; this of great place, &c. mine is a bargain, with an advance only.

I most humbly pray your Grace likewise to present my most humble thanks to his Majesty. God

CCXCIV. TO THE KING. ever guide you by the hand. I always rest

Most GRACIOUS AND DREAD SOVEREIGN, Your faithful and more and more obliged servant,

Before I make my petition to your Majesty, I FR. ST. ALBAN.

make

my prayers to God above pectore ab imo, that Gray's-Inn, this 17th of

if I have held any thing so dear as your Majesty's November, 1624.

service, nay, your heart's ease, and your honour's, I I most humbly thank your Grace for your Grace's may be repulsed with a denial : but if that hath favour to my honest deserving servant.

been the principal with me, that God, who knoweth my heart, would move your Majesty's royal heart to take compassion of me, and to grant my desire.

I prostrate myself at your Majesty's feet, I your CCXCII. TO THE LORD ST. ALBAN.* ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age,

and three years five months old in misery. I desire MY NOBLE LORD,

not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor emThe hearty affection I have borne to your person ployment, but only, after so long a time of expiation, and service, hath made me ever ambitious to be a a complete and total remission of the sentence of the messenger of good news to you, and an eschewer of upper house, to the end that blot of ignominy may ill; this hath been the true reason why I have been be removed from me, and from my memory with thus long in answering you, not any negligence in posterity; that I die not a condemned man, but may your discreet modest servant, you sent with your be to your Majesty, as I am to God, nova creatura. letter, nor his who now returns you this answer, Your Majesty hath pardoned the like to Sir John ofttimes given me by your master and mine ; who Bennet, between whose case and mine, not being though by this may seem not to satisfy your desert partial with myself, but speaking out of the geneand expectation, yet, take the word of a friend who ral opinion, there was as much difference, I will not will never fail you, hath a tender care of you, full say as between black and white, but as between of a fresh memory of your by-past service. His black and gray, or ash-coloured :ll look therefore Majesty is but for the present, he says, able to down, dear sovereign, upon me also in pity. I yield unto the three years' advance, which if you know your Majesty's heart is inscrutable for goodplease to accept, you are not hereafter the farther ness; and my lord of Buckingham was wont to tell off from obtaining some better testimony of his fa- me you were the best natured man in the world ; vour worthier both of him and you, though it can and it is God's property, that those he hath loved, never be answerable to what my heart wishes you, as he loveth to the end. Let your Majesty's grace, in Your lordship's humble servant,

this my desire, stream down upon me, and let it be G. BUCKINGHAM.

out of the fountain and spring-head, and ex mero motu, that, living or dying, the print of the goodness of king James may be in my heart, and his praises in my mouth.

This my most humble request grantCCXCIII. TO THE LORDF TREASURER MARL- ed, may make me live a year or two happily; and

BOROUGH, EXPOSTULATING ABOUT HIS denied, will kill me quickly. But yet the last thing UNKINDNESS AND INJUSTICE.

that will die in me, will be the heart and affection of

Your Majesty's most humble and true devoted

servant, I HUMBLY entreat your lordship, and if I may use

FR. ST. ALBAN. the word, advise you to make me a better answer. July 30, 1624. * Stephens's Second Collection,

MY LORD,

CCXCV. IN ANSWER TO THE FOREGOING, CCXCVII. TIE BISHOP'S ANSWER TO THE BY KING JAMES.*

PRECEDING LETTER.||

TO OCR TRUSTY AND WELL BELOVED, THOMAS COVEN

Right HONOURABLE AND MY VERY NOBLE LORD, TRY, OUR ATTORNEY-GENERAL.

Mr. Doctor Rawley, by his modest choice, hath TRUSTY AND WELL BELOVED, WE GREET YOU WELL :

much obliged me to be careful of him, when God WHEREAS our right trusty and right well-beloved shall send any opportunity; and, if his Majesty shall cousin, the viscount of St. Alban, upon a sentence remove me from this see, before any such occasion given in the upper house of parliament full three be offered, not to change my intentions with my years since, and more, hath endured loss of his bishopric. place, imprisonment, and confinementt also for a It is true that those ancients, Cicero, Demosgreat time; which may suffice for the satisfaction of thenes, and Plinius Secundus, have preserved their justice, and example to others : We being always orations, the heads and effects of them at the least, graciously inclined to temper mercy with justice, and their epistles; and I have ever been of opinion, and calling to mind his former good services, and that those two pieces are the principal pieces of our how well and profitably he hath spent his time antiquities: those orations discovering the form of since his trouble, are pleased to remove from him administering justice, and the letters the carriage of that blot of ignominy which yet remaineth upon the affairs in those times. For our histories, or him, of incapacity and disablement; and to remit rather lives of men, borrow as much from the affecto him all penalties whatsoever inflicted by that tions and phantasies of the writers, as from the sentence. Having therefore formerly pardoned his truth itself, and are for the most of them built altofine, and released his confinement; these are to will gether upon unwritten relations and traditions. But and require you to prepare, for our signature, a letters written e re nata, and bearing a synchronism bill containing a pardon, in due form of law, of the or equality of time cum rebus gestis, have no other whole sentence : for which this shall be your suffi- fault, than that which was imputed unto Virgil, nihil cient warrant.

peccat, nisi quod nihil peccat; they speak the truth too plainly, and cast too glaring a light for that age, wherein they were, or are written.

Your lordship doth most worthily therefore in CCXCVI. THE LORD VISCOUNT ST. ALBAN preserving those two pieces, amongst the rest of TO DR. WILLIAMS. BISHOP OF LINCOLN, those matchless monuments you shall leave behind CONCERNING HIS SPEECHES, &c.Ş

you ; considering, that as one age hath not bred

your experience, so is it not fit it should be confined MY VERY GOOD LORD,

to one age, and not imparted to the times to come. I am much bound to your lordship for your For my part therein, I do embrace the honour with honourable promise to Dr. Rawley : he chooseth all thankfulness, and the trust imposed upon me rather to depend upon the same in general, than to with all religion and devotion. For these two lecpitch upon any particular ; which modesty of choice tures in natural philosophy, and the sciences woven I commend.

and involved with the same; it is a great and a noble I find that the ancients, as Cicero, Demosthenes, foundation both for the use, and the salary, and a Plinius Secundus, and others, have preserved both foot that will teach the age to come, to guess in part their orations and their epistles. In imitation of at the greatness of that Herculean mind, which gave whom I have done the like to my own; which never- them their existence. Only your lordship may be theless I will not publish while I live ; but I have advised for the seats of this foundation. The two been bold to bequeath them to your lordship, and universities are the two eyes of this land, and fittest Mr. Chancellor of the duchy. My speeches, per- to contemplate the lustre of this bounty : these two faps, you will think fit to publish: the letters, many lectures are as the two apples of these eyes. An of them, touch too much upon late matters of state, apple when it is single, is an ornament, when double to be published; yet I was willing they should not a pearl or a blemish in the eye. Your lordship be lost. I have also by my will erected two lectures may therefore inform yourself if one Sidley of Kent in perpetuity, in either university one, with an en- hath not already founded in Oxford a lecture of this dowment of 2001. per annum apiece : they to be for nature and condition. But if Oxford in this kind be natural philosophy, and the sciences thereupon an Argus, I am sure poor Cambridge is a right depending; which foundations I have required my Polyphemus ; it hath but one eye, and that not so executors to order, by the advice and direction of steadily or artificially placed; but bonum est facile your lordship, and my lord bishop of Coventry and sui diffusivum : your lordship being so full of goodLitchfield. These be my oughts now. I rest ness will quickly find an object to pour it on. That Your lordship’s most affectionate to do you service. which made me say thus much, I will say in verse,

that your lordship may remember it better;

a

m

Cabala, 270. Edit. 1663. † His sentence forbid his coming within the verge of the curt. (In consequence of this letter, my lord Bacon was saimmoned to parliament in the first year of king Charles.]

This title seems to imply that the date of this letter was after the bishop was removed from being lord keeper.

Stepheus's Second Collection, p. 189. 1 Ibid. p. 190.

Sola ruinosis stat Cantabrigia pannis,

mariages, non seulement entre les princes d'AngleAtque inopi lingua disertas invocat artes.

terre & de France, mais aussi entre les langues (puis I will conclude with this vow: * Deus, qui animum que faictes traduire mon livre de l’Advancement des istum tibi, animo isti tempus quam longissimum Sciences en Francois) j'ai bien voulu vous envoyer tribuat.' It is the most affectionate prayer of

mon livre dernièrement imprimé, que j'avois pourveu Your lordship's most humble servant,

pour vous, mais j'estois en doubte de le vous envoyer, JO, LINCOLN.

pour ce qu'il estoit escrit en Anglois. Mais à cest

heure pour la raison susdicte je le vous envoye. Buckdon, the last of

C'est un recompilement de mes Essayes morales & December, 1625.

civiles ; mais tellement enlargies & enrichies, tant de nombre que de poids, que c'est de fait un cuvre

nouveau. Je vous baise les mains, & reste CCXCVIII. TO THE QUEEN * OF BOHEMIA.

Vostre très affectioné ami, & très humble IT MAY PLEASE your MAJESTY,

serviteur. I have received your Majesty's gracious letter from Mr. Secretary Morton, who is now a saint in heaven. It was at a time when the great desolation of the plague was in the city, and when myself was CCC. TO THE EARL OF ARUNDEL AND ill of a dangerous and tedious sickness. The first SURREY: JUST BEFORE HIS DEATH, BEING time that I found any degree of health, nothing THE LAST LETTER HE EVER WROTE. came sooner to my mind, than to acknowledge your Majesty's great favour, by my most humble thanks: MY VERY GOOD LORD, and because I see your Majesty taketh delight in I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius my writings, and to say the truth, they are the best Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an exfruits I now yield, I presume to send your Majesty periment about the burning of the mount Vesuvius : a little discourse of mine, touching a war with Spain, for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two, which I writ about two years since; which the king touching the conservation and induration of bodies. your brother liked well. It is written without bitter- As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently ness or invective, as king's affairs ought to be car- well; but in the journey, between London and ried; but if I be not deceived, it hath edge enough. Highgate, I was taken with such a fit of casting, as I have yet some spirits Teft, and remnant of expe- I knew not whether it were the stone, or some surrience, which I consecrate to the king's service and feit, or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three. your Majesty's; for whom I pour out my daily But when I came to your lordship’s house, I was prayers to God, that he would give your Majesty a not able to go back, and therefore was forced to take fortune worthy your rare virtues; which, some good up my lodging here, where your house-keeper is spirit tells me, will be in the end. I do in all very careful and diligent about me; which I assure reverence kiss your Majesty's hands, ever resting myself your lordship will not only pardon towards Your Majesty's most humble and devoted servant,

him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed FR. ST. ALBAN. your lordship’s house was happy to me; and I kiss

your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure

you give me to it, &c. CCXCIX. A LETTER OF THE LORD BACON'S, I know how unfit it is for me to write to your IN FRENCII, TO THE MARQUIS FIAT, RE.

lordship with any other hand than my own; but by LATING TO HIS ESSAYS. I

my troth my fingers are so disjointed with this fit of MONSIEUR L'AMBASSADEUR MON FILS,

sickness, that I cannot steadily hold a pen. Voyant que vostre excellence faict & traite

* The princess Elizabeth, eldest daughter of king James, was married to Frederick V. elector palatine, who by accepting the crown of Bohemia was soon deprived both of that and his ancient principality. Under all her afflictions she had the happiness of being mother of many fine children, and at length of seeing her son restored to the Palatinate, and her nephew to his kingdoms. To her, who had been so much injured by Spain, my lord St. Alban presents his discourse touching a war with Spain, in acknowledgment of the favour

of her Majesty's letter, sent by her secretary Sir Albertus Morton; in which quality he had served his uncle Sir Henry Wotton, in some of his embassies: and as he was tenderly beloved by him in his life, and much lamented in his death so Sir Harry professed no less admiration of this queen, and the splendour of her virtues under the darkness of her fortunes. Stephens.

† Stephens's Second Collection, p. 188. Ibid. p. 187. Ś Sir Tobie Matthcw's Collection, p. 57,

LETTERS, SPEECHES, CHARGES, ADVICES, &c.

&

OF

FRANCIS BACON, LORD VISCOUNT ST. ALBAN,

LORD CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND;

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE YEAR 1763,

BY THOMAS BIRCH, D. D.

CHAPLAIN TO HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS AMELIA, AND SECRETARY TO

THE ROYAL SOCIETY,

TO THE HONOURABLE CHARLES YORKE,

ATTORNEY-GENERAL TO HIS MAJESTY.

SIR,

The gratitude, which I owe you for the honour and other important advantages of your friendship, hath often made me wish for an opportunity of making you some return equal, in any degree, to your merit, and my own obligations. It was, therefore, a very agreeable incident to me, when by means of your noble brother, the Lord Viscount Royston, always attentive to enlarge the fund of history, as well as to encourage and reward every attempt in favour of literature in general, there was put into my hands a volume of original papers of the great Lord Bacon. This volume was, at his lordship’s request, readily intrusted with me by his Grace the lord archbishop of Canterbury, whose zeal for the advancement of useful learning of all kinds bears a just proportion to that which he has shown in every station of the church filled by him, for the support of religion, and for what is the most perfect system of its principles, laws, and sanctions-Christianity. . From the long acquaintance with which I have been favoured by you, and the frequent conversations which we have had upon subjects foreign to the profession which you so much adorn, I well knew your high veneration for the writings of Bacon, and your thorough knowledge of the most abstruse of them. Having, therefore, with an application little less than that of decyphering, transcribed from the first draughts, and digested into order, a collection of his letters, little inferior in number, and much superior in contents, to what the world hath hitherto seen, intermixed with other papers of his of an important nature, I could not doubt, but that the publishing of them would be no less acceptable to you, than, I persuade myself, they will be to the public. For it is scarce to be imagined, but that the bringing to light, from obscurity and oblivion, the remains of so eminent a person, will be thought an acquisition not infe. rior to the discovery (if the ruins of Herculaneum should afford such a treasure) of a new set of the epistles of Cicero, whom our immortal countryman most remarkably resembled as an orator, a philosopher, a writer, a lawyer, and a statesman. The communication of them to the public appearing to me a duty to it and the memory of the author, to whom could I, separately from the consideration of all personal connexions and inducements, so justly present them, as to him, whom every circumstance of propriety, and conformity of character, in the most valuable part of it, pointed out to me for that purpose ? Similarity of genius; the same extent of knowledge in the laws of our own and other countries, enriched and adorned with all the stores of ancient and modern learning; the same eloquence at the bar and in the senate ; an equal force of writing, shown in a single work indeed, and composed at a very early age, but decisive of a grand question of law and sanction of government, the grounds of which had never before been stated with due precision ; and the most successful discharge of the same offices of king's counsel and solicitor and attorney-general.

These reasons, Sir, give your name an unquestionable right to be prefixed to these posthumous pieces. And I hope, while I am performing this act of justice, I may be excused the ambition of preserving my own name, by uniting it with those of Bacon and YORKE.

Your delicacy here restrains me from indulging myself farther in the language which truth and esteem would dictate. But I must be allowed to add a wish, in which every good man and lover of his country will join with me, that as there now remains but one step for you to complete that course of public service and glory, in which you have so closely followed your illustrious father, he, happy in the most important circumstance of human life, the characters and fortunes of his children,

- longo ordine Nati,

Clari omnes patria pariter Virtute suaque, may live to see you possessed of that high station, which himself filled for almost twenty years, with a reputation superior to all the efforts of envy or party. Nor is it less to his honour, (and may it be yours at a very distant period,) that, though he thought proper to retire from that station in the full vigour of his abilities, he still continues to exert them in a more private situation, for the general benefit of his country ; enjoying in it the noblest reward of his services, an unequalled authority, founded on the acknowledged concurrence of the greatest capacity, experience, and integrity.

I Sir,

Your most obliged and most devoted humble servant, London, June 1, 1762.

THOMAS BIRCH,

am,

PREFACE.

*

As the reader will undoubtedly have some curiosity about the history of the transmission of these papers, now presented to him at the distance of an hundred and forty years from the date of most of them, though the hand of the incomparable writer is too conspicuous in them to admit of any suspicion of their genuineness; it will be proper here to give him some information upon that subject. Dr. Thomas Tenison is known to have been the editor of the Baconiana, published at London, 1679, though he added only the initial letters of his name to the account of all the lord Bacon's works,* subjoined to that collection. He had been an intimate friend of, and fellow of the same college † with Mr. William Rawley, only son of Dr. William Rawley, chaplain to the lord chancellor Bacon, and employed by his lordship, as publisher of most of his works. Dr. Rawley dying in the 79th year of his age, June the 18th, 1667, near a year after his son; † his executor, Mr. John Rawley, put into the hands of his friend Dr. Tenison these papers of lord Bacon, which composed the Baconiana ; and probably, at the same time, presented to him all the rest of his lordship’s manuscripts, which Dr. Rawley had been possessed of, but did not think proper to make public. The reasons of his reserve appear from Dr. Tenison's account s cited above, to have been, " that he judged some papers touching matters of state to tread too near to the heels of truth, and to the times of the persons concerned : and that he thought his lordship's letters concerning his fall might be injurious to his honour, and cause the old wounds of it to bleed anew.” But this is a delicacy, which though suitable to the age in which Dr. Rawley lived, and to the relation under which he had stood to his noble patron, ought to have no force in other times and circumstances, nor ever to be too much indulged to the prejudice of the rights of historical truth.

Dr. Tenison being, soon after the publication of the Baconiana, removed from the more private station of a country living to the vicarage of St. Martin's in the Fields, Westminster, and, after the revolution, advanced to the bishopric of Lincoln, and at last to the archbishopric of Canterbury, had scarce leisure, if he had been inclined, to select more of the papers of his admired Bacon. These therefore with the rest of his manuscripts, not already deposited in the library at Lambeth, were left by him in his last will, dated the 11th of April, 1715, to his chaplain, Dr. Edmund Gibson, then rector of Lambeth, and afterwards successively bishop of Lincoln and London, and to Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Benjamin Ibbot, who had succeeded Dr. Gibson as library-keeper to his Grace. Dr. Ibbot dying || many years before bishop Gibson, the whole collection of archbishop Tenison's papers came under the disposition of that bishop, who directed his two executors, the late Dr. Bettesworth, dean of the Arches, and his eldest son, George Gibson, Esq. to deposite them, with the addition of many others of his own collecting, in the manuscript library at Lambeth: and accordingly after his lordship's death, which happened on the 6th of Sept. 1748, all these manuscripts were delivered by his said executors to archbishop Herring, on the 21st of October of that year, and placed in the library on the 23d of February following. But as they lay undigested in bundles, and in that condition were neither convenient for use, nor secure from damage, his Grace the present archbishop djrected them to be methodized and bound up in volumes with proper indexes, which was done by his * This account is dated Nov. the 30th, 1678.