He acquitted his former colleague of "corruption of reward;" but "in truth that makes the offence rather divers than less;" for some offences "are black, and others scarlet, some sordid, some presumptuous." He pronounced his sentence--the fine, the imprisonment; "for his place, I declare him unfit for it." "And the next day," says Mr.Spedding, "he reported to Buckingham the result of the proceeding," and takes no small credit for his own part in it.
It was thus that the Court used Bacon, and that Bacon submitted to be used.

He could have done, if he had been listened to, much nobler service.

He had from the first seen, and urged as far as he could, the paramount necessity of retrenchment in the King's profligate expenditure.

Even Buckingham had come to feel the necessity of it at last; and now that Bacon filled a seat at the Council, and that the prosecution of Suffolk and an inquiry into the abuses of the Navy had forced on those in power the urgency of economy, there was a chance of something being done to bring order into the confusion of the finances.
Retrenchment began at the King's kitchen and the tables of his servants; an effort was made, not unsuccessfully, to extend it wider, under the direction of Lionel Cranfield, a self-made man of business from the city; but with such a Court the task was an impossible one.

It was not Bacon's fault, though he sadly mismanaged his own private affairs, that the King's expenditure was not managed soberly and wisely.