“You are,”—Bacon thus addressed Villiers—“as a new risen star, and the eyes of all are upon you; let not your own negligence make you fall like a meteor.” “Next to religion,” he adds elsewhere, “let your care be to promote justice. By justice and mercy is the King’s throne established.” “And as far as it may rest in you, let no arbitrary power be intended. The people of this kingdom love the laws thereof, and nothing will oblige them more than a confidence of the free enjoying of them.” “Your greatest care must be,” he adds, towards the conclusion, “that the great men of the court—for you must give me leave to be plain with you, for so is your injunction laid upon me—yourself in the first place, who are first in the eye of all men, give no just cause of scandal either by light, vain, or by oppressive carriage.”[339] Footnote 339: Lord Bacon’s Works, i., p. 518-19. Notwithstanding these admirable precepts, the years during which Lord Bacon held the Great Seal, and during which Villiers ruled predominant, were, as it has been justly observed, “the darkest and most shameful in English history.”[340] The domestic government of James and his favourite, in weakness and want of high principle, corresponded but too mournfully with their foreign policy; with their indifference to the great struggle for the interests of liberty and of Protestantism in Germany; with their vacillating and cowardly counsels. Whilst the continental nations were venting their surprise and indignation in sallies of ridicule directed against England, the King, who had nothing to bestow in the aid of a loyal cause in which the welfare of his own child was bound up, resorted at home to the most disgraceful expedients in order to exalt his favourite. During this period, Buckingham held an absolute empire over the actions of Bacon. A system of persecution against Coke had followed the disgraceful affair of Sir John Villiers’ marriage. In an unlucky hour, Bacon interfered between Lady Hatton and her injured husband; he even descended to lend himself to the low affairs of these vulgar great, and to take part against his enemy, Coke, and with his arrogant wife. This was during the King’s absence in Scotland: as matters then stood, this proceeding on the part of the Lord Keeper militated against the marriage which Buckingham had at heart. Bacon was soon taught, therefore, to see his error. The Favourite resented his interference, and refused to be pacified. In vain did the Lord Keeper stay certain proceedings against Coke which had been instituted in the Star Chamber; in vain did he hasten to testify his submission to Buckingham. Two successive days he went to the stately apartments of the Favourite; waited meekly in an ante-chamber, seated on an old box, with the Great Seal of England at his side. At length, when he was admitted, he threw himself at the feet of Buckingham, and swore never to rise thence till he had received the pardon of the lofty