About a month after this wrangling at the Council Board, SOMERSET again advised with Sir Robert COTTON on the same subject. [Sidenote: _Report of the Trial of the Earl of Somerset._ (MS. R. H.)] COTTON recommended him to have the Pardon renewed; saying to the Earl, ‘In respect you have received some disgrace in the opinion of the world, in having passed’ [_i. e._ missed] ‘that pardon which in the summer you desired, and seeing there be many precedents of larger pardons, I would have you get one after the largest precedent; that so, by that addition, you may recover your honour.’ Strangely as these closing words now sound, in relation to such a matter, they seem to embody both the feeling and the practice of the times. In another version of the proceedings at the trial of May, 1616, SOMERSET is represented as using in the course of his defence these words: ‘To Sir Robert COTTON I referred the whole drawing and despatch of the Pardon.’ And again: ‘I first sought the Pardon by the motion and persuasion of Sir Robert COTTON, who told me in what dangers great persons honoured with so many royal favours had stood, in former times.’ [Sidenote: MS. Report of Trial (R. H.)] Sir Robert’s own account of this and of many correlative matters of a still graver sort has come down to us only in garbled fragments and extracts from his examinations, such as it suited the purposes of the law-officers of the Crown to make use of, after their fashion. The original documents were as carefully suppressed, as COTTON’S appearance in person at the subsequent trial was effectually hindered. At that day it was held to be an unanswerable reason for the non-appearance of a witness,—whatever the weight of his testimony,—to allege that he was regarded by the Crown as ‘a delinquent,’ and could not, therefore, be publicly questioned upon ‘matters of State.’ There is little cause to marvel that a scrutinising reader of the _State Trials_ (in their published form) is continually in doubt whether what he reads ought to be regarded as sober history, or as wild and, it may be, venomous romance. One other incident of 1615 needs to be noticed before we proceed to the catastrophe of the Gondomar story. [Sidenote: 1615. May 24.]