Bacon had his public duty: his public duty may have compelled him to stand apart from Essex.

But it was his interest, it was no part of his public duty, which required him to accept the task of accuser of his friend, and in his friend's direst need calmly to drive home a well-directed stroke that should extinguish chances and hopes, and make his ruin certain.

No one who reads his anxious letters about preferment and the Queen's favour, about his disappointed hopes, about his straitened means and distress for money, about his difficulties with his creditors--he was twice arrested for debt--can doubt that the question was between his own prospects and his friend; and that to his own interest he sacrificed his friend and his own honour..