The House, desirous to finish the matter, allowed Middlesex to produce forty witnesses, twelve of whom deposed directly against him; upon this, Prince Charles sent him a message, ordering him not to appear in the royal presence again until he had cleared himself. This command was the more necessary, since, at this very moment, the mind of James had been impressed by Inojosa with a suspicion that his son and the Duke were plotting against him; an idea which the King, with weeping, imparted to his son and the Duke. “The Lord Treasurer,” Sir Dudley Carleton writes, “is suspected to be at the bottom of it.” Hitherto, James had still appeared confident of the Lord Treasurer’s innocence,[142] and in a speech to the Lords, whom he had summoned to Whitehall,[143] he advised them as to their judgment. “Such a trial,” he observed, “had no precedent before the last parliament, and then the guilty party, Lord Bacon, had confessed, now the supposed delinquent denied the charge.” James, indeed, long clung to the Lord Treasurer, and told the lords he came to “sing a psalm of mercy and justice about him;” still the trial went on, and the accused, in spite of alleged ill-health, was examined both morning and afternoon; his illness was found, however, to be feigned; and his answers were so audacious, and so manifestly perjured, that, had it not been for the intercession of the Prince, he would have been sent to the Tower. Among other speeches, Middlesex said he had been baited by two mastiffs, Crew and the Attorney General; and he reasoned, in his defence, “saucily” for five hours, but was found guilty, and sentenced to pay 50,000_l._ fine, and to lose his office; never to sit in Parliament again, nor to come within the verge of the Court. “He would,” Mr. Chamberlain writes, “have been further degraded, but that he had great, if not _gratis_, friends in the bedchamber. He may live to crush his enemies, if his brother-in-law, Brett, should get into favour and marry the Duchess of Richmond, who would do anything to be prime courtier again.”[144] Footnote 142: State Papers, clxiv., No. 12. Footnote 143: May 5th, 1624.--State Papers. Footnote 144: State Papers, clxiv., No. 86. Regarding this sentence, Lord Campbell remarks:--"The noble defendant had done various things, as head of the Treasury, which would now be considered very scandalous; but he had only imitated his predecessors, and was imitated by his successors."--A melancholy commentary on the state of public morality. It must have been galling to Lord Bacon, in his retirement, to have known that he was coupled with a man so dishonest, so specious, and so degraded as Middlesex.