"Marriage is a matter of more worth
Than to be dealt in by attorneyship."
_Henry VI._, I., v., 5.
If Bacon flattered himself that he had extinguished Coke for good and
all, he was much mistaken. It must have alarmed him to find that Lady
Elizabeth, after constant quarrels with her husband and ceasing to
live with him, had taken his part, now that he had been dismissed from
office, that she had solicited his cause at the very Council
table,[11] and that she had quarrelled with both the King and the
Queen about the treatment of her husband, with the result that she had
been forbidden to go to Court, and had begun to live again with Coke,
taking with her her daughter, now well on in her 'teens.
There was a period of hostilities, however, early in the year 1617.
Sir Edward and Lady Elizabeth went to law about her jointure. In May
Chamberlain wrote to Carleton:--
"The Lord Coke & his lady hath great wars at the council table. I was
there on Wednesday, but by reason of the Lord Keeper's absence, there
was nothing done. What passed yesterday I know not yet: but the first
time she came accompanied with the Lord Burghley" (her eldest
brother), "& his lady, the Lord Danvers" (her maternal grandfather),
"the Lord Denny" (her brother-in-law), "Sir Thomas Howard" (her
nephew, afterwards first Earl of Berkshire) "& his lady, with I know
not how many more, & declaimed bitterly against him, and so carried
herself that divers said Burbage" [the celebrated actor of that time]
"could not have acted better. Indeed, it seems he [Sir Edward Coke]
hath carried himself very simply, to say no more, in divers matters:
and no doubt he shall be sifted thoroughly, for the King is much
incensed against him, & by his own weakness he hath lost those few
friends he had."
It is clear from this letter that, although her husband was one of the
greatest lawyers of the day, Lady Elizabeth was not at all afraid of
pitting herself against him in Court, where indeed she seems to have
proved the better pleader of the pair.
This dispute was patched up. On 4th June Chamberlain wrote: "Sir
Edward Coke & his Lady, after so much animosity and wrangling, are
lately made friends; & his curst heart hath been forced to yield more
than ever he meant; but upon this agreement he flatters himself that
she will prove a very good wife." So Coke and his "very good wife"
settled down together again. We shall see presently whether there was
to be a perpetual peace between them.
While Bacon was meditating an information against Sir Edward Coke in
the Star Chamber for malversation of office, in the hope that a heavy
fine might be imposed upon him, Coke also was plotting. He discovered
that Bacon, who had been made Lord Keeper early in the year 1617, had
had his head turned by his promotion and had become giddy on his
pinnacle of greatness; or, to use Bacon's own words, that he was
suffering acutely from an "unbridled stomach." Of this Coke determined
to take advantage.
Looking back upon his own fall, Coke considered that the final crash
had been brought about not, as Bacon had insinuated in his letter, by
offending the Almighty, but by offending Villiers, now Earl of
Buckingham, and he came to the conclusion that his best hope of
recovering his position would be to find some method of doing that
Earl a service. Now, Buckingham had an elder brother, Sir John
Villiers, who was very poor, and for whom he was anxious to pick up an
heiress. The happy thought struck Coke that, as all his wife's
property was entailed on her daughter, Frances, he might secure
Buckingham's support by selling the girl to Buckingham's brother, for
the price of Buckingham's favour and assistance. It was most fortunate
that Frances was exceedingly beautiful, and that Sir John Villiers was
unattractive and much older than she was; because this would render
the amount of patronage, due in payment by Buckingham to Coke, so much
the greater.
James I. and Buckingham had gone to Scotland. In the absence of the
King and the Court, Bacon, as Lord Keeper, was one of the greatest men
left in London, and quite the greatest in his own estimation. Misled
by this idea of his own importance, he was imprudent enough to treat
his colleague, Winwood, the Secretary of State, with as little
ceremony as if he had been a junior clerk, thereby incurring the
resentment of that very high official. Common hatred of Bacon made a
strong bond of union between Coke and Winwood, and Winwood joined
readily in the plot newly laid by Coke.
Sir John Villiers was already acquainted with Coke's pretty daughter;
and, when Coke went to him, suggested a match, and enlarged upon the
fortune to which she was sole heiress, Sir John professed to be over
head and ears in love with her, and observed that "although he would
have been well pleased to have taken her in her smoke [smock], he
should be glad, by way of curiosity, to know how much could be assured
by marriage settlement upon her and her issue."[12] With some
reluctance Sir Edward Coke then entered into particulars, and the
match was regarded as settled by both sides.
Everything having been now satisfactorily arranged, it occurred to
Coke that possibly the time had arrived for informing, first his wife,
and afterwards his daughter, of the marriage to which he had agreed.
Sir Edward had often seen his wife in a passion, and he had frequently
been a listener to torrents of abuse from her pretty lips and caustic
tongue. Although he had been notorious as the rudest member of the
Bar, he had generally come off second best in his frequent battles of
words with his beautiful helpmate. Stolid and unimpressible as he was,
he can hardly have been impervious to the effects of the verbal venom
with which she had constantly stung him. But all this had been mere
child's play in comparison with her fury on being informed that,
without so much as consulting her, her husband had definitely settled
a match for her only child with a portionless knight. A new weapon was
lying ready to her hand, and she made every possible use of it. It
consisted in the fact that, much as she and her husband had quarrelled
and lived apart, she had returned to him in the hour of his
tribulation, had fought his battles before the King and the Council,
and had even braved the royal displeasure and endured exile from the
Court, rather than desert him in his need. She bitterly reproached him
for repaying her constancy and sacrifices on his behalf by selling her
daughter without either inquiring as to the mother's wishes, or even
informing that mother of his intention.
If Lady Elizabeth was infuriated at the news of the match, her
daughter was frenzied. She detested Sir John Villiers, and she
implored her parents never again to mention the question of her
marrying him. The mother and daughter were on one side and the father
on the other; neither would yield an inch, and Hatton House, Holborn,
became the scene of violent invective and bitter weeping.
Buckingham is said to have promised Coke that, if he would bring about
the proposed marriage, he should have his offices restored to him.
Buckingham's mother, Lady Compton, also warmly supported the project.
She was what would now be called "a very managing woman." Since the
death of Buckingham's father, she had had two husbands, Sir William
Rayner and Sir Thomas Compton,[13] brother to the Earl of Northampton.
She was in high favour at Court, and she was created Countess of
Buckingham just a year later than the time with which we are now
dealing. As Buckingham favoured the match, of course the King favoured
it also; and, as has been seen, Winwood, the Secretary of State,
favoured it, simply because Bacon did not.
On the other side, among the active opponents of the match, were Bacon
the Lord Keeper, Lord and Lady Burghley, Lord Danvers, Lord Denny, Sir
Thomas and Lady Howard, and Sir Edmund and Lady Withipole.
Suddenly, to Coke's great satisfaction, Lady Elizabeth became, as he
supposed, calm and quiet. It was his habit to go to bed at nine
o'clock, and to get up very early. One night he went to bed at his
usual hour, under the impression that his wife was settling down
nicely and resigning herself to the inevitable. While he was in his
beauty-sleep, soon after ten, that excellent lady quietly left the
house with her daughter, and walked some little distance to a coach,
which she had engaged to be in waiting for them at an appointed place.
In this coach they travelled by unfrequented and circuitous roads,
until they arrived at a house near Oatlands, a place belonging to the
Earl of Argyll, but rented at that time by Lady Elizabeth's cousin,
Sir Edmund Withipole. The distance from Holborn to Oatlands, as the
crow flies, is about twenty miles; but, by the roundabout roads which
the fugitives took in order to prevent attempts to trace them, the
distance must have been considerable, and the journey, in the clumsy
coach of the period, over the rutted highways and the still worse
by-roads of those times, must have been long and wearisome. Oatlands
is close to Weybridge, to the south-west of London, in Surrey, just
over the boundary of Middlesex and about a mile to the south of the
river Thames.
In Sir Edmund Withipole's house Lady Elizabeth and her daughter lived
in the strictest seclusion, and all precautions were taken to prevent
the place of their retreat from becoming known. And great caution was
necessary, for Lady Elizabeth and Frances were almost within a dozen
miles of Stoke Pogis, their country home; so that they would have been
in danger of being recognised, if they had appeared outside the house.
But Lady Elizabeth was not idle in her voluntary imprisonment. She
conceived the idea that the best method of preventing a match which
she disliked for her daughter would be to make one of which she could
approve. Accordingly she offered Frances to young Henry de Vere,
eighteenth Earl of Oxford. Although to a lesser extent, like Sir John
Villiers, he was impecunious and on the look out for an heiress, his
father--who was distinguished for having been one of the peers
appointed to sit in judgment on Mary, Queen of Scots, for having had
command of a fleet to oppose the Armada, for his success in
tournaments, for his comedies, for his wit, and for introducing the
use of scents into England--having dissipated the large inheritance of
his family.
Undoubtedly, Lady Elizabeth was a woman of considerable resource; but,
with all her virtues, she was not over-scrupulous; for, as Lord
Campbell says,[14] to induce her daughter to believe that Oxford was
in love with her, she "showed her a forged letter, purporting to come
from that nobleman, which asseverated that he was deeply attached to
her, and that he aspired to her hand." Lady Elizabeth was apparently
of opinion that everything--and everything includes lying and
forgery--is fair in love and war.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Chamberlain, in a letter dated 22nd June, 1616.
[12] A quotation given by Lord Campbell (Vol. I., p. 297); but he does
not state his authority.
[13] Arthur Wilson, in his life of James I. (_Camden, History of
England_, Vol. II., p. 727), tells the following story about Sir T.
Compton whom he calls "a low spirited man." "One Bird, a roaring
Captain, was the more insolent against him because he found him slow &
backward." After many provocations, Bird "wrought so upon his cold
temper, that Compton sent him a challenge." On receiving it, Bird told
Compton's second that he would only accept the challenge on condition
that the duel should take place in a saw-pit, "Where he might be sure
Compton could not run away from him." When both combatants were in the
saw-pit, Bird said: "Now, Compton, thou shalt not escape me," and
brandished his sword above his head. While he was doing this, Compton
"in a moment run him through the Body; so that his Pride fell to the
ground, and there did sprawl out its last vanity."