“many faithful services” by the higher title of Lord High Chancellor of England, and by the peerage with the name of Baron of Verulam.
The new Minister of Justice lent himself with his wonted complaisance to a most outrageous act of injustice, which Macaulay stigmatizes as a “dastardly murder,” that of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, under a sentence pronounced sixteen years before; Sir Walter having been in the interval invested with the high command of Admiral of the fleet. Such an act it was the imperative duty of the first magistrate of the realm not to promote, but to resist to the full extent of his power; and the Chancellor alone could issue the warrant for the execution!
In 1620, he published what is usually considered his greatest work, his Novum Organum (New Instrument or Method), which forms the second part of the Instauratio Magna (Great Restoration of the Sciences). This work had occupied Bacon’s leisure for nearly thirty years. Such was the care he bestowed on it, that Rawley, his chaplain and biographer, states that he had seen about twelve autograph copies of it, corrected and improved until it assumed the shape in which it appeared. Previous to the publication of the Novum Organum, says the illustrious Sir John Herschel, “natural philosophy, in any legitimate and extensive sense of the word, could hardly be said to exist.”12