My Lord Willoughby Was One Of The Queen's First Swordsmen; He Was Of
The Ancient Extract Of The Bartewes, But More Ennobled By His
Mother, Who Was Duchess Of Suffolk.
He was a great master of the
art MILITARY, and was sent general into France, and commanded the
second army of five the Queen had sent thither, in aid of the
French.
I have heard it spoken that, had he not slighted the Court,
but applied himself to the Queen, he might have enjoyed a plentiful
portion of her grace; and it was his saying, and it did him no good,
that he was none of the REPTILIA, intimating that he could not creep
on the ground, and that the Court was not his element; for, indeed,
as he was a great soldier, so he was of a suitable magnanimity, and
could not brook the obsequiousness and assiduity of the Court; and
as he was then somewhat descending from youth, happily he had an
ANIMAM REVERTENDI, or a desire to make a safe retreat.
BACON.
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
{61} 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 SUAE FORTUNAE
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 OEdipus 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 47 of 65
Words from 24749 to 25377
of 35052
