Weeks passed, months passed, and still the Attorney-Generalship hung in the wind, and the regeneration of mankind grew dubious amid a mountain of unpaid bills.

 

Essex continued sanguine; but Bacon perceived that if the delay lasted much longer he would be ruined. He raised money wherever he could. Anthony sold an estate, and gave him the proceeds. He himself determined to sell land; but only one property was available, and that he could not dispose of without the consent of his mother. Old Lady Bacon was a terrific dowager, who lived, crumpled and puritanical, in the country. She violently disapproved of her son Francis. She disapproved; but, terrific as she was, she found it advisable not to express her sentiments directly. There was something about her son Francis which made even her think twice before she displeased him. She preferred to address herself to Anthony on such occasions, to pour out her vexation before his less disquieting gaze, and to hope that some of it would reach the proper quarter. When she was approached by the brothers about the land, her fury rose to boiling-point. She wrote a long, crabbed, outraged letter to Anthony. She was asked, she said, to consent to the selling of property in order to pay for the luxurious living of Francis and his disreputable retainers. "Surely," she wrote, "I pity your brother, yet so long as he pitieth not himself but keepeth that bloody Percy, as I told him then, yea as a coach companion and bed companion - a proud, profane, costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike and doth less bless your brother in credit and otherwise in his health - surely I am utterly discouraged.... That Jones never loved your brother indeed, but for his own credit, living upon your brother, and thankless though bragging.... It is most certain that till first Enny, a filthy wasteful knave, and his Welshmen one after another - for take one and they will still swarm ill-favouredly - did so lead him in a train, he was a towardly young gentleman, and a son of much good hope in godliness." So she fulminated. She would only release the land, she declared, on condition that she received a complete account of Francis's debts and was allowed a free hand in the payment of them. "For I will not," she concluded, "have his cormorant seducers and instruments of Satan to him committing foul sin by his countenance, to the displeasing of God and his godly fear."

 

When this was handed on to Francis, he addressed to his mother an elaborate letter of protest and conciliation. She returned it to Anthony in a rage. "I send herein your brother's letter. Construe the interpretation. I do not understand his enigmatical folded writing." Her son, she said, had been blessed with "good gifts of natural wit and understanding. But the same good God that hath given them to him will I trust and heartily pray to sanctify his heart by the right use of them, to glorify the Giver of them to his own inward comfort." Her prayer - it is the common fate of the prayers of mothers - was only ironically answered. As for the land, old Lady Bacon found herself in the end no match for her two sons; she yielded without conditions; and Francis, for the time at least, was freed from his embarrassment.

 

Meanwhile Essex did not relax his efforts with the Queen. "I cannot tell," wrote Anthony to his mother, "in what terms to acknowledge the desert of the Earl's unspeakable kindness towards us both, but namely to him now at a pinch, which by God's help shortly will appear by good effects." In several long conferences, the gist of which, when they were over, he immediately reported by letter to one or other of the brothers, Essex urged Elizabeth to make the desired appointment. But the "good effects" were slow in coming. The vacancy had occurred in the April of 1593, and now the winter was closing in, and still it was unfilled. The Queen, it was clear, was giving yet another exhibition of her delaying tactics. During the repeated discussions with Essex about the qualifications of his friend, she was in her element. She raised every kind of doubt and difficulty, to every reply she at once produced a rejoinder, she suddenly wavered and seemed on the brink of a decision, she postponed everything on some slight pretext, she flew into a temper, she was charming, she danced off. Essex, who could not believe that he would fail, grew sometimes himself more seriously angry.