Bacon’s assailants are forgotten; Bacon will be remembered with gratitude and veneration forever. He was again, in 1621, promoted in the peerage to be Viscount Saint-Albans; his patent particularly celebrating his “integrity in the administration of justice.” In this same year the Parliament assembled. The House of Commons first voted the subsidies demanded by the Crown, and next proceeded, as was usual in those times, to the redress of grievances. A committee of the House was appointed to inquire into “the abuses of Courts of Justice.” A report of this committee charged the Lord Chancellor with corruption, and specified two cases; in the first of which Aubrey, a suitor in his court, stated that he had presented the Lord Chancellor with a hundred pounds; and Egerton, another suitor in his court, with four hundred pounds in addition to a former piece of plate of the value of fifty pounds; in both cases decisions had been given against the parties whose presents had been received. (Lord Campbell asserts that in the case of Egerton both parties had made the Chancellor presents.)[16] His enemies, it is said, estimated his illicit gains at a hundred thousand pounds; a statement which, it is more than probable, is greatly exaggerated.[17] “I never had,” said Bacon in his defence, “bribe or reward in my eye or thought when I pronounced sentence or order.” This is an acknowledgment of the fact, and perhaps an aggravation of the offence. He then addressed “an humble submission” to the House, a kind of general admission, in which he invoked as a plea of excuse _vitia temporis_. How widely different from this is his own language! It is fair justice to appeal from the judge to the tribunal of the philosopher and moralist; it is appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober; unhappily it is likewise to have the engineer Hoist with his own petar. He says, in his Essay of Great Place: “For corruption: do not only bind thine own hands, or thy servant’s hands from taking, but bind the hands of suitors from offering. For integrity used doth the one; but integrity professed, and with a manifest detestation of bribery, doth the other; and avoid not only the fault, but the suspicion.”[18] He says again, in the same Essay: “Set it down to thyself, as well to create good precedents as to follow them.”