During the period of Bacon’s temporary disgrace, “when the King and Buckingham had set their faces against him, and all the courtiers were yelping at his heels,” the only friend who remained staunch and constant to him was Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney-General. Yelverton, whose admiration for, and loyalty towards the Lord Chancellor were unswerving, would truckle neither to the Favourite nor to the King; although the former had assured him that those who opposed him “should discern what favour he had by the power he would use.” Within a year of Bacon’s restoration to favour Yelverton came into collision with Buckingham, and the Attorney’s accidental misconstruction of the King’s verbal instructions, served as an excuse for an information to be laid against him in the Star Chamber. We have seen how Bacon could repay friendship with ingratitude, and kindness with baseness in the case of Essex and of Cecil, but, in the instance of Yelverton, even his admirers are forced to admit that his behaviour was “peculiarly cold-blooded and ungrateful.” But the “lines of his life” had made him the serf of the Favourite, and “whatever other resolutions Bacon may have broken, none can accuse him of breaking this.” When the case came on, and when “the bill was opened by the King’s Sergeant briefly, with tears in his eyes, and Mr. Attorney, standing at the Bar, amid the ordinary Counsellors, with dejected looks, weeping tears, and a brief, eloquent, and humble oration, made a submission, acknowledging his error, but denying the corruption”--the Lord Chancellor did his utmost to resist the merciful proposal of the majority to submit the Attorney’s submission to the King. The King declined to interfere, and the termination of the case was announced to Buckingham by Bacon, in the following self-satisfied and congratulatory note:--“Yesterday we made an end of Sir Henry Yelverton’s causes. I have almost killed myself with sitting almost eight hours. But I was resolved to sit it through.” He then gives the terms of the sentence, and adds: “How I stirred the Court I leave it to others to speak; but things passed to his Majesty’s great honour.” In other words, a blunt, straightforward, and honourable man, who had refused to purchase his office by bribes, or by flattery, had been condemned, on a charge of corruption (of which his judges knew him to be guiltless), to a fine of £4,000 and imprisonment during the King’s pleasure, for the offence of refusing to cringe to Buckingham. These were the things that, in Bacon’s judgment, “passed to his Majesty’s great honour.”