ny preferment at her hands." He is said to have been kept for
some years a prisoner in Tilbury castle; and whether he ever recovered
his liberty may seem doubtful, since he died in February 1596, aged 48.

The house of commons, unacquainted as yet with its own strength,
submitted without further question to regard as law the will of an
imperious mistress, and passed with little opposition "An act to retain
her majesty's subjects in their due obedience," which vied in cruelty
with the noted Six Articles of her tyrannical father.

By this law, any person above sixteen who should refuse during a month
to attend the established worship was to be imprisoned; when, should he
further persist in his refusal during three months longer, he must
abjure the realm; but in case of his rejecting this alternative, or
returning from banishment, his offence was declared felony without
benefit of clergy.

The business of supplies was next taken into consideration, and the
commons voted two subsidies and four fifteenths; but this not appearing
to the ministry sufficient for the exigencies of the state, the peers
were induced to request a conference with the lower house for the
purpose of proposing the augmentation of the grant to four subsidies and
six fifteenths. The commons resented at first this interference with
their acknowledged privilege of originating all money bills; but dread
of the well-known consequences of offending their superiors, prevailed
at length over their indignation; and first the conference, then the
additional supply, was acceded to. Some debate, however, arose on the
time to be allowed for the payment of so heavy an imposition; and the
illustrious Francis Bacon, then member for Middlesex, enlarged upon the
distresses of the people, and the danger lest the house, by this grant,
should be establishing a precedent against themselves and their
posterity, in a speech to which his courtly kinsman sir Robert Cecil
replied with much warmth, and of which her majesty showed a resentful
remembrance on his appearing soon after as a candidate for the office of
attorney-general. His cousin sir Edward Hobby also, whose speeches in
the former parliament had been ill-received by certain great persons,
took such a part in some of the questions now at issue between the crown
and the commons, as procured him an imprisonment till the end of the
sessions, when he was at length liberated; "but not," as Anthony Bacon
wrote to his mother