This is the more apparent, inasmuch as, at the first acceptance of his project, Sir Robert had obtained the King’s distinct promise that no future creation of a baron should be made, until the new peer had first received the degree of baronet; unless he belonged to a family already ennobled. Hearing of a probability that the royal promise in this respect was likely to be broken, he wrote to Somerset:—‘If His Highness _will_ do it, I rather humbly beg a relinquishing in the design of the baronets, as desponding of good success.’ [Sidenote: Cotton to Somerset (undated) MS. Harl., 7002, f. 380. (B. M.)] But to James all projects for the opening of gold mines—whether at home or abroad—were much too attractive to be staved off by any puritanic scruples about pledge or promise. For him, from youth to dotage, the one thing needful was gold. The question of the baronetcies is one of the earliest which brings us in presence of the eventful political connection which subsisted between COTTON and the Earl of SOMERSET. [Sidenote: THE POLITICAL INTERCOURSE OF SIR R. COTTON WITH LORD SOMERSET. 1613–1615.] Of its first beginnings no precise testimony seems to have survived. But there is a strong presumption that when SOMERSET was led, by his fatal love for Lady ESSEX, to change his early position of antagonism to the HOWARDS for one of alliance and friendship, he came frequently into contact with Sir Robert, who had long been familiarly acquainted with the Earl of SUFFOLK—and also with his too well-known Countess—as well as with the Earl of NORTHAMPTON. The one ineffaceable stigma on SOMERSET’S memory which was brought upon him by his disgraceful marriage has barred the way to an impartial estimate of his standing as a politician. A man who was branded by his peers (though upon garbled depositions) as a murderer can scarcely, by possibility, have his pretensions to statesmanship fairly weighed in a just balance. Such testimony, it is true, as that on which SOMERSET was found guilty of the poisoning of OVERBURY would not now suffice to convict a vagrant of petty larceny. It would not indeed at this day be treated as evidence at all; it would be looked upon as a mere decoction of surmises. But the foul scandal of the marriage itself has so tainted SOMERSET’S very name that historians (almost with one consent) have condoned the baseness of his prosecutors.