And now I come to another of the _Togati_, Sir Nicholas Bacon, an
arch-piece of wit and of wisdom. He was a gentleman, and a man of law,
and of a great knowledge therein, whereby, together with his after-part
of learning and dexterity, he was promoted to be Keeper of the Great
Seal, and being of kin to the Treasurer Burleigh, and {144} also the help
of his hand to bring him to the Queen’s great favour, for he was
abundantly facetious, which took much with the Queen, when it suited with
the season, as he was well able to judge of the times; he had a very
quaint saying, and he used it often to good purpose, “that he loved the
jest well, but not the loss of his friend;” and that, though he knew that
“_verus quisque suæ fortunæ faber_,” was a true and good principle, yet
the most in number were those that numbered themselves, but I will never
forgive that man that loseth himself to be rid of his jests.
He was father to that refined wit which since hath acted a disastrous
part on the public stage, and of late sat in his father’s room as Lord
Chancellor; those that lived in his age, and from whence I have taken
this little model of him, give him a lively character, and they decipher
him to be another Solon, and the Simon of those times, such a one as
Œdipus was in dissolving of riddles; doubtless he was an able instrument,
as it was his commendation that his head was the mallet, for it was a
very great one, and therein kept a wedge, that entered all knotty pieces
that come to the table.
And now again I must fall back to smooth and plane a way to the rest that
is behind, but not from my purpose. There have been, about this time,
two rivals in the Queen’s favour, old Sir Francis Knowles, Comptroller of
the House, and Sir Henry Norris, whom she had called up at Parliament to
sit with the Peers in the higher House, as, Henry Norris of Rycot, who
had married the daughter and heir of the old Henry Williams of Tayne, a
noble person, and to whom, in her adversity, the Queen had been committed
to his safe custody, and from him had received more than ordinary
observances; now, such was the goodness of the Queen’s nature, that she
neither forgot the good turns received from the Lord Williams, neither
was she unmindful of this Lord Norris, whose father, in her father’s
time, and in the business of her brother, died in a noble cause, and in
the justification of her innocency.