sure the better; for this I humbly kiss your Grace's hands. But because the exchequer is thought to be somewhat barren, although I have good affiance of Mr. Chancellor, yet I hold it very essential, and therein I most humbly pray your Grace's favour, that you would be pleased by your letter to recommend to Mr. Chancellor the speedy issuing of the money by this warrant, as a business whereof your Grace hath an especial care; the rather for that I understand from him, there be some other warrants for money to private suitors at this time on foot. But your Grace may be pleased to remember this difference that the other are mere gifts; this of 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 ever guide you by the hand. I always rest Your faithful and more and more obliged servant, FR. ST. ALBAN.

Gray's-Inn, this 17th of
November, 1624.

Your lordship is interested in honour, in the opinion of all them who hear how I am dealt with; if your lordship malice me for such a cause, surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in chancery. I will avouch it; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your lordship knows best. Your lordship may do well, in this great age of yours, to think of your grave, as I do of mine; and to beware of hardness of heart. And as for fair words, it is a wind, by which neither your lordship, nor any man else, can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man who will give all due respects and reverence to your great place, &c.

CCXCIV. TO THE KING.S

MOST GRACIOUS AND DREAD SOVEREIGN, BEFORE I make my petition to your Majesty, I make my prayers to God above pectore ab imo, that if I have held any thing so dear as your Majesty's 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.

CCXCII. TO THE LORD ST. ALBAN.*

MY NOBLE LORD,

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

MY LORD,

G. BUCKINGHAM.

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

TO OUR TRUSTY AND WEll beloved, THOMAS COVEN-
TRY, OUR ATTORNEY-GENERAL.

TRUSTY AND well beloved, we greet you WELL:
WHEREAS our right trusty and right well-beloved
cousin, the viscount of St. Alban, upon a sentence
given in the upper house of parliament full three
years since, and more, hath endured loss of his
place, imprisonment, and confinement+ also for a
great time; which may suffice for the satisfaction of
justice, and example to others: We being always
graciously inclined to temper mercy with justice,
and calling to mind his former good services, and
how well and profitably he hath spent his time
since his trouble, are pleased to remove from him
that blot of ignominy which yet remaineth upon
him, of incapacity and disablement; and to remit
to him all penalties whatsoever inflicted by that
sentence. Having therefore formerly pardoned his
fine, and released his confinement; these are to will
and require you to prepare, for our signature, a
bill containing a pardon, in due form of law, of the
whole sentence: for which this shall be your suffi-
cient warrant.

CCXCVI. THE LORD VISCOUNT ST. ALBAN
TO DR. WILLIAMS‡ BISHOP OF LINCOLN,
CONCERNING HIS SPEECHES, &c.§

MY VERY GOOD LORD,

I AM much bound to your lordship for your honourable promise to Dr. Rawley: he chooseth rather to depend upon the same in general, than to pitch upon any particular; which modesty of choice I commend.

I find that the ancients, as Cicero, Demosthenes, Plinius Secundus, and others, have preserved both their orations and their epistles. In imitation of whom I have done the like to my own; which nevertheless I will not publish while I live; but I have been bold to bequeath them to your lordship, and Mr. Chancellor of the duchy. My speeches, perhaps, you will think fit to publish the letters, many of them, touch too much upon late matters of state, to be published; yet I was willing they should not be lost. I have also by my will erected two lectures in perpetuity, in either university one, with an endowment of 200l. per annum apiece: they to be for natural philosophy, and the sciences thereupon depending; which foundations I have required my executors to order, by the advice and direction of your lordship, and my lord bishop of Coventry and Litchfield. These be my thoughts now. I rest

PRECEDING LETTER.||

RIGHT HONOURABLE AND MY VERY NOBle lord, MR. Doctor Rawley, by his modest choice, hath much obliged me to be careful of him, when God shall send any opportunity; and, if his Majesty shall remove me from this see, before any such occasion be offered, not to change my intentions with my bishopric.

It is true that those ancients, Cicero, Demosthenes, and Plinius Secundus, have preserved their orations, the heads and effects of them at the least, and their epistles; and I have ever been of opinion, that those two pieces are the principal pieces of our antiquities: those orations discovering the form of administering justice, and the letters the carriage of the affairs in those times. For our histories, or rather lives of men, borrow as much from the affections and phantasies of the writers, as from the truth itself, and are for the most of them built altogether upon unwritten relations and traditions. But letters written e re nata, and bearing a synchronism or equality of time cum rebus gestis, have no other fault, than that which was imputed unto Virgil, nihil 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 preserving those two pieces, amongst the rest of those matchless monuments you shall leave behind you; considering, that as one age hath not bred your experience, so is it not fit it should be confined to one age, and not imparted to the times to come. For my part therein, I do embrace the honour with all thankfulness, and the trust imposed upon me with all religion and devotion. For these two lectures in natural philosophy, and the sciences woven and involved with the same; it is a great and a noble foundation both for the use, and the salary, and a foot that will teach the age to come, to guess in part at the greatness of that Herculean mind, which gave them their existence. Only your lordship may be advised for the seats of this foundation. The two universities are the two eyes of this land, and fittest to contemplate the lustre of this bounty: these two lectures are as the two apples of these eyes. An apple when it is single, is an ornament, when double a pearl or a blemish in the eye. Your lordship may therefore inform yourself if one Sidley of Kent hath not already founded in Oxford a lecture of this nature and condition. But if Oxford in this kind be an Argus, I am sure poor Cambridge is a right Polyphemus; it hath but one eye, and that not so steadily or artificially placed; but bonum est facile sui diffusivum: your lordship being so full of goodness 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;

This title seems to imply that the date of this letter was
after the bishop was removed from being lord keeper.
Stephens's Second Collection, p. 189.
Ibid. p. 190.

|

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.

SIR,

TO THE HONOURABLE CHARLES YORKE,

ATTORNEY-GENERAL TO HIS MAJESTY.

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 inferior 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 am, SIR,

Your most obliged and most devoted humble servant,

London, June 1, 1762.

THOMAS BIRCH.

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 § 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 directed them to be methodized and bound up in volumes with proper indexes, which was done by his + Benet, in the university of Cambridge. The 11th of April, 1725.

*This account is dated Nov. the 30th, 1678.

Who was buried the 3d of July, 1666.

§ Page 81.