Bacon’s conduct towards the Earl of Essex has already been considered. Had this been the only instance of the kind in his career, his apologists would have achieved something more than public opinion can grant them in their endeavours to explain it away. But his behaviour towards Cecil is another lurid illustration of his duplicity and ingratitude. During the last fourteen years of his life Cecil had been the friend and patron of Bacon, whose letters to him are couched in almost passionate terms of loyalty and “entire devotion.” In one epistle he declares himself “empty of matter,” but “out of the fulness of my love,” he writes to express “my continual and incessant love for you, thirsting for your return.” Cecil was his refuge and deliverer in 1598, and again in 1603, when he was arrested for debt, and Bacon was not empty of reason when he asserted in another letter, “I write to myself in regard to my love to you, you being as near to me in heart’s blood as in blood of descent.” In 1611, a short while before Cecil’s death, he wrote this last profession of his affection:-- “I do protest before God, without compliment, that if I knew in what course of life to do you best service, I would take it, and make my thoughts, which now fly to many pieces, be reduced to that centre.” In May of 1612 Cecil died. Within a week Bacon had proffered his services to the King in the place of his cousin, of whom he wrote:-- “He (Cecil) was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better; for he loved to keep the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself.” To another, he wrote that Cecil “had a good method, if his means had been upright,” and again to the King, on the same subject:-- “To have your wants, and necessities in particular, as it were hanged up in two tablets before the eyes of your Lords and Commons, to be talked of for four months together; to stir a number of projects and then blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing but the scandal of them; to pretend even carriage between your Majesty’s rights and the ease of the people, and to satisfy neither--these courses, and others the like, I hope, are gone with the deviser of them.” Less than a year before, Bacon had protested before God, “without compliment,” his desire to serve Cecil, and now he protests to God in this letter to the King, that when he noted “your zeal to deliver the Majesty of God from the vain and indign comprehension of heresy and degenerate philosophy ... _perculsit ilico animum_ that God would shortly set upon you some visible favour; and let me not live if I thought not of the taking away of that man”--the man as “near to me in heart’s blood as in the blood of descent.” [Illustration: _The Right Honble Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans, Lord High Chancellor of England._]