When the
Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though
I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding
to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward
thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the
counsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thought
him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and that stories circulated
to his disadvantage, as if he were poisoning the Queen's ear against
Essex. But he might argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed as
Essex had been, it was the best that he could now do for him; and as
long as it was only a question of Essex's disgrace and enforced absence
from Court, Bacon could not be bound to give up the prospects of his
life--indeed, his public duty as a subordinate servant of government--on
account of his friend's inexcusable and dangerous follies. Essex did not
see it so, and in the subjoined correspondence had the advantage; but
Bacon's position, though a higher one might be imagined, where men had
been such friends as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one:
"MY LORD,--No man can better expound my doings than your Lordship,
which maketh me need to say the less.
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