INTRODUCTION
I
FRANCIS BACON
Francis Bacon was born January 22, 1561, at York House, in the Strand, London, the youngest of eight children of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Sir Nicholas Bacon, a stanch Protestant and a good lawyer, was one of that remarkable group of able men the young Queen Elizabeth gathered around her upon her accession to the throne, in 1558. Of her Lord Keeper, William Camden says, "She relied on him as the very oracle of the law."
Sir Nicholas Bacon was twice married; first, to Jane Fernely, daughter of William Fernely, of West Creting, Suffolk, who died leaving three sons and three daughters, and second, to Anne Cooke, second daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gidea Hall, Essex. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon was the mother of Anthony and Francis Bacon. Coming into the world the son of a Lord Keeper, in York House, which he was himself to occupy as Lord Keeper in after years, Francis Bacon was as truly born to commanding position in life as is a king's son. Many of his kinsmen held distinguished positions and filled them with credit to themselves and the nation. Lady Bacon was left a widow as a comparatively young woman, so that we naturally hear more of her family in the history of her famous son, than of his half-brothers and half-sisters, who were considerably older. But what has come down to us of his relations with these elder Bacons helps materially to reconstruct his environment.
The Elizabethans were great builders. The Wars of the Roses ended forever in England the necessity of building for protection from hostile neighbors, and the policy of internal peace fostered by the Tudors enabled Englishmen to accumulate wealth. Landholders under Queen Elizabeth could afford to build beautiful homes, and they liked to surround themselves with the new luxuries brought to their notice in England by the travellers, especially by the travellers in France and Italy. In domestic architecture, two of these luxuries were glass windows, which often fill up the side of a room in an Elizabethan house, and spacious gardens encircling the entire building and adorned with all sorts of devices, some original and some more or less crudely adapted from formal gardens abroad. Sir Nicholas Bacon, though not a rich man, built two houses. Redgrave, Guilford, Suffolk, where he had married his first wife, was without gardens, and so limited in size that Queen Elizabeth visiting her Lord Keeper there told him his house was too small. "No, Madam," replied Sir Nicholas, "my house is not too small for me, but your Majesty has made me too great for my house." Gorhambury, near St. Albans, was a larger house. About Gorhambury, says Edmund Lodge, in his Portrait of Sir Nicholas Bacon, he added "gardens of great extent, in the contrivance and decoration of which every feature of the bad taste of his time was abundantly lavished." Gorhambury was left to Lady Anne Bacon, and ultimately became the property and the country home of Francis Bacon.
The mansion of Redgrave was inherited by Sir Nicholas Bacon, 2d, who was doubtless hard pressed to support there his family of nine sons and three daughters. Nathaniel Bacon, second of the elder sons, is described as of Stiffkey, Norfolk. He was something of an artist. Playing upon the name and domestic habits of his stepmother, Anne Cooke Bacon, he made a portrait of her, now at Gorhambury, dressed as a cook and standing in a litter of dead game. The third elder brother, Edward Bacon, obtained from Queen Elizabeth, in 1574, a lease of Twickenham Park, on the Thames fronting the royal palace at Richmond. Francis Bacon's letters as a young man are often dated from Twickenham Park, showing that he lived from time to time at his half-brother's country seat.
In 1597, when Bacon was elected to Parliament for Ipswich, the family county town, he had as colleagues no less than six kinsmen. His brother Anthony sat for Oxford; his half-brother, Nathaniel, for Lynn; his cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, for Rochester; his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, for Herts; while Henry Neville, who represented Liskeard, was his nephew, the son of his half-sister, Elizabeth Bacon, whose second husband was Sir Henry Neville. Another connection of Bacon's in the Parliament of 1597 and his colleague in the representation for Ipswich was Michael Stanhope, grand-nephew to his mother.
Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, a remarkable woman, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, had five daughters, who received the same careful, thorough education that he gave to his sons. They all became highly educated women and all five made brilliant and happy marriages. Mildred, the eldest, became the second wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the great Lord Treasurer who guided Elizabeth's government so adroitly and so wisely. Elizabeth Cooke, the third daughter, married twice; first, Sir Thomas Hoby, ambassador to France and translator of Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), which Dr. Johnson described as "the best book that ever was written on good breeding," and, second, John, Lord Russell, son of Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford; Catherine Cooke married Sir Henry Killigrew, of that family of Killigrews of Cornwall which in the time of the Restoration produced the two dramatists, father and son, Thomas Killigrew senior and junior; Margaret Cooke married Sir Ralph Rowlett.
Anne Cooke Bacon is said to have been able to read Latin, Greek, Italian, and French, "as her native tongue." There remain two translations by her, both showing her interest in the Protestant cause. Before her marriage she translated Certayne Sermons of the ryghte famous and excellente clerk Master B. Ochine (1550?). This is a collection of sermons by the Italian Protestant preacher, Bernardino Ochino, who was a prebend of Canterbury under Archbishop Cranmer. Fourteen of the twenty translated sermons are the work of Anne Cooke. The most interesting literary work of Bacon's mother is a translation from the Latin of Bishop Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1562, entitled Apologie or aunswer in defence of the Church of England, 1562 and 1564. The second edition contains a prefatory address to Lady Bacon as the translator, by Archbishop Parker. It seems that she had submitted the MS. to him, accompanied by a letter written in Greek, and he returned it to her printed. An Elizabethan Protestant treatise says,—"The apologie of this Church was written in Latin, & translated into English by A. B. (Anne Bacon) with the comendation of M. C. (Mildred Cecil), which twaine were sisters, & wives unto Cecil and Bacon, and gave their assistance and helping hands in the plot and fortification of this newe erected synagog." Queen Elizabeth thought so highly of the Apologie that she ordered a copy of it to be chained in every parish church in England. Many of Lady Bacon's letters to her sons Anthony and Francis are extant. They are written in vigorous English interspersed with quotations from Greek and Latin writers, and the picture of family relations they reveal is highly interesting.
These details show how exceptional were the circumstances surrounding Bacon by right of birth. He was brought up in the society of the greatest personages in England and was known to the Queen as a child. Dr. William Rawley, his chaplain and first biographer, tells the story of Elizabeth's attraction towards the bright boy. The Queen "delighted much then to confer with him, and to prove him with questions; unto whom he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years, that Her Majesty would often term him, The Young Lord-Keeper. Being asked by the Queen how old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then but a boy, That he was two years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign; with which answer the Queen was much taken." This anecdote, furnishing the only glimpse of Francis Bacon as a child, is as picturesque as it is authentic.
In April, 1573, Francis and Anthony Bacon, boys of twelve and fourteen, respectively, were entered as fellow-commoners of Trinity College, Cambridge, under the care of John Whitgift, then Master of Trinity and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift's account-book tells us incidentally what was the general course of study at Trinity College in Bacon's boyhood. It shows that between April, 1573, and Christmas, 1575, he supplied the Bacon boys with the following books,—Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Xenophon, Homer's Iliad, Hermogenes, Demosthenes's Olynthiacs, Aristotle, and Plato. We do not know how these authors were studied, but it is certain that Francis Bacon left Cambridge in his sixteenth year with a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics and a love of reading. There are those who doubt whether any system of education can produce a better result than that. Bacon was "drenched" in classicism, to use one of his own telling words. In after years when he sat down in his study to marshal his thoughts on any subject he recalled as if by instinct the wisdom of the ancients. He could command as easily the judgments of the great Greek and Roman historians as the imagination of the great Greek and Roman poets. Tacitus sums up for him in immortal phrase a contemporary character, and Homer and Vergil guide his expression in the vivid imagery that embroiders and illumines his language, like old carving in wood or stone, or the rich binding of a rare and princely book.
Besides Whitgift's accounts, two anecdotes of Bacon's undergraduate days survive, both as characteristic of the future philosopher as the story of the young Lord Keeper is of the future courtier. One is a reminiscence of his own recorded in Sylva Sylvarum, (Century II. 151),—
"I remember in Trinity College in Cambridge, there was an upper chamber, which being thought weak in the roof of it, was supported by a pillar of iron of the bigness of one's arm, in the midst of the chamber; which if you had struck, it would make a little flat noise in the room where it was struck, but it would make a great bomb in the chamber beneath." Dr. Rawley relates the other story,—"Whilst he was commorant [a resident] in the University, about sixteen years of age, (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day."
This early interest in the physics of sound, a subject which always attracted Bacon, is as significant as the youthful judgment on the unfruitfulness of the philosophy of Aristotle. The judgment makes the distinction between philosophy embracing all knowledge, as the ancients understood it and as indeed it does, and science, for which Bacon's term "natural history" is now old-fashioned. With Bacon, essentially a literary man, science was to lose its moorings to letters.
At the end of three years Bacon left Cambridge, and at the age of about sixteen and a half years, was entered into the Society of the "Ancients" of Gray's Inn. Almost immediately after he had begun the study of law, an opportunity offered for him to travel and see the world. Sir Amias Paulet, who was sent to France as the Queen's ambassador, in 1576, invited Francis Bacon to go with him as a member of his household. Dr. Rawley says, "He was after awhile held fit to be entrusted with some message or advertisement to the Queen; which having performed with great approbation, he returned back into France again, with intention to continue for some years there." He remained about two years, spending most of the time in Paris, but following the French Court to Blois, Tours, and Poictiers. Henry III, of Valois, was the French King and Catharine de' Medici the queen mother. The wars and intrigues of the Holy League were going on and the events stirring which led to the assassination of Henry III. The essays, Of Revenge, Of Custom and Education, and Of Prophecies, allude to the political and social influences that surrounded the young attaché of the English ambassador. In Prophecies, "one Dr. Pena" tells the inquiring lad a story about an astrologer and "the queen mother, who was given to curious arts." Another personal allusion to his stay in France occurs in the sixth book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum where he describes a biliteral cipher he invented in the intervals of his diplomatic leisure in Paris. Writing in cipher was a curious art then widely practised, and Bacon's early interest in it reveals the natural turn of his mind for the observation of signs, that is, facts, and their recombination into new relations. Distinctly scientific is the observation of an echo at Pont-Charenton, near Paris, which the young diplomat investigated and reports in Sylva Sylvarum (Century III. 249, 251). "And thereby I did hap to find that an echo would not return S, being but a hissing and an interior sound." The description was written many years later, but the boy's experiment had remained perfectly clear and fresh. He says he heard the echo "return the voice thirteen several times," and describes it as "a tossing of the voice, as a ball, to and fro; like to reflections in looking-glasses." Further on the Sylva Sylvarum (Century X. 986) gives a biographical note concerning the event which changed the whole course of Francis Bacon's life. Writing on what he calls "the secret virtue of sympathy and antipathy," now named telepathy, Bacon says,—
"I myself remember, that being in Paris, and my father dying in London, two or three days before my father's death I had a dream, which I told to divers English gentlemen, that my father's house in the country was plastered all over with black mortar."
Sir Nicholas Bacon died February 20, 1579. Dr. Rawley's statement of the situation in which Francis Bacon was left by his father's sudden death is,— "In his absence in France his father the lord-keeper died, having collected (as I have heard of knowing persons) a considerable sum of money, which he had separated, with intention to have made a competent purchase of land for the livelihood of this his youngest son (who was only unprovided for; and though he was the youngest in years, yet he was not the lowest in his father's affection); but the said purchase being unaccomplished at his father's death, there came no greater share to him than his single part and portion of the money dividable amongst five brethren; by which means he lived in some straits and necessities in his younger years." Anthony Bacon had been established at Redburn, Herts, near St. Albans, and the manor of Gorhambury went to him as the elder son, although Lady Bacon lived there until her death. Francis Bacon's legacy was a good name and a great intellect, which had been trained and cultivated by the best education to be had at that time. Diplomacy could not be pursued as a career without means, and a month after his father's death, Bacon returned to London. He was eighteen years old, and was dependent on his own exertions both for a living and for advancement in the public service. He took lodgings in Gray's Inn and resolutely applied himself to the study of the law. Later Anthony Bacon, back from some years of travel in France, Italy, and Spain, joined him, and the brothers, with little ready money between them, set up a coach, much to their frugal mother's dismay. She sends to her sons from Gorhambury home-brewed beer, fish, strawberries in season, and game, with accompanying letters full of motherly care and admonition. A letter to Anthony, dated, "Gorhambury, April 1, 1595," begins,—
"I send between your brother and you the first flight of my dove-house; the Lord be thanked for all: ii dozen and iiii pigeons, xii to you, and xvi to your brother, because he was wont to love them better than you from a boy." Another letter to Anthony tells us what Bacon's habits as a student were, "I verily think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then musing nescio quid when he should sleep, and then, in consequence, by late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly." Gorhambury, 24 May, 1592.)
It may be that Francis Bacon burned the midnight oil, for he worked hard at his profession and he rose rapidly into notice. In 1584, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected to Parliament for Melcombe Regis; in 1586, he sat for Taunton. The "great year" '88, the year of the Armada, made him member for Liverpool and Reader at Gray's Inn. In all Bacon was elected to the House of Commons eight times and his Parliamentary career covered the thirty years between 1584 and 1614. As a member of the Lower House Bacon combined qualities very seldom found in the same person. He was a useful and able committee-man, a ready writer, and a good speaker. With rare good fortune there has come down to us the impression he made as a public speaker on his two great contemporaries, Sir Walter Ralegh and Ben Jonson. Dr. Rawley says,—"I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter Ralegh once speak of him by way of comparison (whose judgment may well be trusted), That the Earl of Salisbury [his cousin, Robert Cecil] was an excellent speaker, but no good penman; that the Earl of Northampton (the Lord Henry Howard) was an excellent penman, but no good speaker; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent in both." Ben Jonson's testimony to Bacon's eloquence is itself nobly eloquent: In Timber; or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (Dominus Verulamius), he writes,—"Yet there hapn'd, in my time, one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, (where hee could spare, or passe by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man spake more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or suffer'd lesse emptinesse, lesse idlenesse, in what hee utter'd. No member of his speech but consisted of the owne graces. His hearers could not cough, or looke aside from him, without losse. Hee commanded where hee spoke, and had his Judges angry, and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affection more in his power. The feare of every man that heard him, was, lest hee should make an end."
That Bacon was not naturally a good speaker, but studiously labored to acquire a pleasing address, is clear from a note in a paper of counsels and rules drawn up for the guidance of his own conduct, and called in his ready Latin—Custumae aptae ad Individuum, 'Fit Habits for the Individual,' that individual being Francis Bacon,—"To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of breath and voice. Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to induce and intermingle speech of good fashion."
The House of Commons was Bacon's school of life. It was there that he acquired his vast knowledge of men and affairs. He began almost at once the excellent practice of recording his experiences, summing up for himself his thoughts on the various matters of business that came before Parliament. The earliest of these state papers, with characteristic boldness, is a Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth, written at the close of 1584 or the beginning of 1585, on the difficult question of her policy towards the Roman Catholic interest. It is a remarkable paper to be produced by a young man of twenty-four. Though Protestant in tone the Letter is yet neither Puritan nor partisan in character. It is a broad, calm, judicial statement of what Bacon considered to be the position of the English Church three years before the Armada. In this paper and in another on the same subject four years later, An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1589), which is the essay Of Unity in Religion in germ, we see the future Lord Chancellor. The philosopher had already written the first sketch of his ideas on the new learning, calling it with the simple grandiloquence of youth, Temporis Partus Maximus, the 'Greatest Birth of Time.' It is certain that Bacon hoped to win advancement at Court by means of his state papers. It is equally certain that the Lord Treasurer Burghley did not appreciate the work of his nephew. He was indeed employed to prepare papers from time to time, but no preferment came. Burghley was a plain, practical man, immersed in complicated affairs of state. It is possible, as has been suggested, that he quietly opposed the advancement of Francis Bacon in order to keep the pathway open for his son, Robert Cecil, a man of moderate ability only. It may be, Machiavellian as he was, that he recognized from the first the pliability of his nephew and declined to trust him with political business. Without a doubt, Bacon's literary and philosophical aims were to him but the visions of a youthful enthusiast. After years of hope deferred, at an age which he describes as "somewhat ancient, one and thirty years," Bacon wrote the famous letter to Lord Burghley, setting forth his claims with dignity and appealing for help in the furtherance of his ambition,— "My Lord,—With as much confidence as mine own honest and faithful devotion unto your service and your honourable correspondence unto me and my poor estate can breed in a man, do I commend myself unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient: one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, I find confirmed; and I do not fear that action shall impair it, because I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are. I ever bare in mind (in some middle place that I could discharge) to serve her Majesty, not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour, nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly), but as a man born under an excellent sovereign that deserveth the dedication of all men's abilities. Besides I do not find in myself so much self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if I be able) of my friends, and namely of your Lordship; who, being the Atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the second founder of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of a good patriot, and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries: the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia. is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than a man's own; which is the thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship, perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your Lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man. And if your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty, but this I will do—I will sell the inheritance I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set down without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in judging that that will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your Lordship's good nature, in retaining no thing from you. And even so I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From my lodgings at Gray's Inn." (1592.)
This letter has often been quoted. It ought always to be quoted in a life of Francis Bacon, for it is a clear and definite outline of his plans for his own career, and it helps to explain his character. He proposed to devote himself to a life of study, he wished to make the results of that study useful to his fellow-men, and he thought that place and power would give him "the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene)." In splendid promise and splendid achievement, nothing in literary history can be compared with the statement,—"I have taken all knowledge to be my province." Keats, writing on a far more limited theme, has expressed in imperishable verse what Bacon goes on to say had become the fixed idea of his mind,—
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Lord Burghley did nothing—but preserve the letter. He probably thought it extravagant and hyperbolical. Bacon, undaunted, struggled on, keeping up his political interests, keeping up what he describes as his "ordinary course of study and meditation," and going somewhat more into Court society in the wake of his brother Anthony, who was living with him in Gray's Inn.
To this period belongs the beginning of Bacon's intimacy with the Earl of Essex, who took both brothers into his service, Anthony as his secretary and Francis as his lawyer and man of political affairs. The social character of the early association of the three young men—Essex was the youngest—is indicated by three jeux d' esprit from Francis Bacon's pen, his early masques or 'devices.' Two of these were 'triumphs' offered by the Earl of Essex to the Queen, one in November, 1592, and the other in 1595; the third was a Gray's Inn revel of 1594. Bacon furnished the 'discourses,' or texts, and the essay Of Masques and Triumphs grew out of this practical experience of the stage. It is interesting if only as showing that when Bacon turned his mind to what he calls 'toys,' they are no longer toys. What he has to say about dramatic representation accompanied by music and color exhibits a lively fancy and good taste, while the discourses display the same qualities of style as his more serious writings, thought, wit, and fresh imagery. One of the discourses of the 'device' of 1592, he shortly afterwards enlarged into an argumentative defence of the Queen's government.
The Earl of Essex was at the height of his power and influence at Court during these years when the Queen graciously permitted him to entertain her now and then with a masque. More than any other Elizabethan nobleman, Essex seemed to possess the qualities then considered necessary in the perfect courtier. He was of noble birth; he had a handsome face and manly bearing; his manners were winning; he was generous, gallant, and brave. He was also impulsive, headstrong, jealous, and imperious. But if he had not been endowed with the more serious and sober qualities of an able man, his relations to Bacon could not have been what they were. He was the first person at Court to understand and appreciate the great intellect and ready wit of Bacon. He used his influence with the Queen to urge the advancement of his political secretary. But he was soon to learn that even as the reigning favorite he was not all-powerful at Elizabeth's Court. She made a sharp distinction between business and pleasure, and the Cecils, father and son, controlled the business of her government.
In 1593, a vacancy was about to occur in the office of Attorney-General. Bacon fixed his eye on the place and Essex encouraged his candidacy. The Cecils thought him too young and inexperienced for so important a post, and proposed to promote the Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Coke. The Queen agreed with them, though she dallied with Essex, and kept both Bacon and Coke in suspense throughout the year. Finally, in April, 1594, Sir Edward Coke was named Attorney-General. Bacon was much depressed, and spoke of retiring to Cambridge to spend his life in "studies and contemplations, without looking back." Coke's advancement left the post of Solicitor-General vacant, and Essex at once renewed his importunities for the Solicitor-Generalship for his friend. It was now clear that the Queen doubted Bacon's legal capacity for either of the offices he desired. She told Essex that Bacon had "a great wit and an excellent gift of speech, and much other good learning, but that in law she rather thought he could show to the uttermost than that he was deep." Another delay of more than a year and a half followed. During this year, Bacon visited Cambridge, where, July 27, 1594, he received the honorary degree of Master of Arts. Essex, with less discretion than zeal, thought to hasten matters by acquainting the Queen with Bacon's threat of retirement. We read what followed in a letter from Bacon to his brother Anthony. Bacon was summoned to the Court, where he had an interview, not with Queen Elizabeth, but with his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil. The Queen was angry, Cecil said, that he should have presumed to hasten her decision in any way. "Then Her Majesty sweareth that if I continue in this manner she will seek all England for a solicitor rather than take me; that she never dealt so, with any one as with me; that she hath pulled me over the bar (note the words, for they cannot be her own). We parted in kindness secundum exterius." Essex never had any real political power, and by his impetuousness and lack of judgment, what Bacon called his "fatal impatience," he really injured Bacon more than he helped him. He was conscious of this himself, for he wrote to his friend,—"The Queen was not passionate against you, until she found I was passionate for you." She passed over Bacon a second time, and appointed the Recorder of London, Thomas Fleming, Solicitor-General, November 5, 1595. Bacon's letter, just quoted, shows that he attributed his failure, not to Essex, but to Sir Robert Cecil. Many years later, upon sending to the Duke of Buckingham the patent creating him a viscount, he wrote,—"In the time of the Cecils, the father and son, able men were by design and of purpose suppressed."
Bacon retired to Essex's villa at Twickenham, whence he wrote to Fulke Greville,—"I have been like a piece of stuff bespoken in the shop; and if Her Majesty will not take me, it may be the selling by parcels will be more gainful. For to be, as I told you, like a child following a bird, which when he is nearest flieth away and lighteth a little before, and then the child is after it again, and so in infinitum, I am weary of it."
Attendance upon Court was an expensive way of life, and both Anthony and Francis Bacon lived beyond their means. "I am sorry," Lady Anne Bacon wrote to Anthony, "your brother and you charge yourselves with superfluous horses. The wise will but laugh at you both; being but trouble, besides your debts, long journeys, and private persons. Earls be earls." (September 7, 1594.) Essex generously offered to relieve Bacon's financial straits. "You shall not deny to accept a piece of land which I will bestow upon you." Bacon demurred, but in the outcome he accepted an estate from Essex which he afterwards sold for £1800. His letter of acceptance is of importance in explaining his relations with Essex, because it shows that even at this time Bacon foresaw that he might have to choose between his friendship for Essex and his loyalty to the Queen's government. "My Lord," he said, "I see I must be your homager and hold land of your gift: but do you know the manner of doing homage in law? Always it is with a saving of his faith to the King and his other Lords: and therefore, my Lord (said I), I can be no more yours than I was, and it must be with the ancient savings."
In the summer of 1596, the Earl of Essex commanded the land forces in the expedition against Cadiz, the most brilliant military exploit of Elizabeth's reign. But the capture of Cadiz added nothing to Essex's reputation as a soldier. Rather it proved clearly what Elizabeth and Cecil and Bacon had all along thought, that Essex was impossible as a military leader. He was indeed brave and daring, but he was impatient of advice, he exceeded his instructions, and he was so jealous of his subordinate officers that he could not get on with any of them. His enemies at Court had not been idle during his absence from England, and when the results of the taking of Cadiz turned out to be inconsiderable, the favor of the Queen towards him began perceptibly to wane. Bacon's first extant letter of political advice is dated October 4, 1596. In it he advised Essex to give up his military ambition, to try to remove the common impression that he was opinionative, to disguise his feelings, and to "win the Queen." It was the cautious, worldly-wise admonition of a friend who knew well both the Court and the young Earl. But it was not in Essex's nature to be wary. He steadily overestimated his influence with the Queen and constantly thwarted her will. "I ever set this down," Bacon wrote later in his Apology, "that the only course to be held with the Queen, was by obsequiousness and observance. . . . . My Lord on the other hand had a settled opinion that the Queen could be brought to nothing but by a kind of necessity and authority." The breach between the friends widened during the year 1597.
Bacon meantime had been made one of the Queen's Counsel Extraordinary, as we learn from a lease of sixty acres of land in Zelwood Forest, Somerset, which was granted to him July 14, 1596. Very early in 1597, Bacon published his first book, the Essays, ten only, bound with two other works, his Meditationes Sacrae and Of the Colours of Good and Evil. The dedication is to "his deare Brother," Anthony Bacon.
The ninth Parliament of Elizabeth, which met October 24, 1597, was the one in which Bacon sat for Ipswich and had six members of his own family as colleagues. His most important speech of this session was one "against depopulation of towns and houses of husbandry, and for the maintenance of husbandry and tillage," a subject which he expanded afterwards in the essay, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.
During the summer of 1599, Essex made his disastrous campaign in Ireland. He had prevailed upon the Queen to send him to the island as Lord Lieutenant to put down the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone. Far from conquering Tyrone, between March and September he managed to lose some £300,000 and ten or twelve thousand men. Essex's enemies about the Queen, Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Walter Ralegh, and the Earl of Nottingham, had rather favored his absence from Court, and they took pains to keep Elizabeth informed of the failure of the most expensive enterprise she had ever undertaken. It was even said that Essex did not mean to do anything in Ireland, but was using his authority there to intrigue with Tyrone and with James VI of Scotland for his own aggrandizement. Elizabeth let Essex know of her dissatisfaction with the campaign, required an explanation, and forbade him to return without orders. In spite of this express command, Essex conceived the extraordinary idea of abandoning his post and hastening to England to throw himself at the feet of the Queen Elizabeth was at her palace of Nonesuch, and there, on the 28th of September, as we read in one of the Sidney Letters,— "Without stopping to change his dress, travel-stained as he was, he sought the Queen in her chamber, and found her newly-risen, with her hair about her face. He kneeled to her and kissed her hands. Elizabeth, taken by surprise, gave way to her old partiality for him, and the pleasure she always had in his company. He left her presence much pleased with her reception, and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble and storm abroad, that he had found a sweet calm at home."
The next day the Earl of Essex was ordered into the custody of the Lord Keeper Egerton, at York House. After several months' delay, Essex was brought before a special commission at York House, June 5, 1600. Bacon as one of the Queen's counsel took a minor part in the prosecution. Essex was acquitted of disloyalty, but found guilty of disobedience in neglecting his orders and deserting his command. He was sentenced to be suspended from all his offices and to be imprisoned in his own house during the Queen's pleasure. Bacon by the Queen's order drew up an account of the proceedings of the Privy Council in the case. When he read this paper to her for criticism, he had touched so lightly upon Essex's offences in one passage that Elizabeth smiled, and said "she perceived old love could not easily be forgotten." Bacon's quick wit at once turned the expression back upon her. "Whereupon I answered suddenly, that I hoped she meant that by herself."
In a short time Essex was released from sequestration, but was forbidden to come to Court. The restraint of his position, free, but still under a cloud, was peculiarly galling to a man of Essex's high spirit. Bacon counselled patience, but Bacon at this time was occupying an impossible position between an old friend whom he had just helped to prosecute and the Queen who suspected everybody in the Essex connection. Elizabeth had no intention of restoring Essex to favor, as she took occasion to show when his patent for the monopoly of sweet wines expired a few months after his dismissal from Court. He petitioned for a renewal of the lease, and received the ungracious answer,—"No, an unruly beast must be stinted of his provender."
The Earl of Essex, out of favor completely and nursing his grievances, was soon surrounded with other disaffected men who made Essex House a centre of conspiracy against the government. These gatherings were watched by the Court, and on Saturday, February 7, 1601, Essex was summoned before the Privy Council. He refused to attend. That same night there was a performance of "the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second," possibly Shakspere's tragedy, at the Globe Theatre. It developed at Essex's trial that his friends had paid the actors forty shillings to present this particular play that night, in the hope that the sight of the deposition of the king on the stage might stir up the populace. The next day, Sunday, the Earl of Essex, with some two hundred followers, made his abortive attempt to raise the city. He rode through London crying out that his life was in danger and the country sold to Spain. The Queen's forces easily quelled the rising, and within twelve hours Essex was a prisoner in the Tower, charged with high treason.
On February 19, the Earls of Essex and Southampton were arraigned together. The Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, conducted the prosecution, and Bacon appeared with him as Queen's counsel. Essex's defence was that he had taken up arms not to overturn the government, but to protect his own life. Bacon spoke twice during the trial, interposing both times to recall the court to the main issue against Essex, and to show that his defence of a private grievance was a pretext invented by him at the eleventh hour. Essex's answer to one of these speeches is a sufficient reply to those who say he spoke no word of reproach to Bacon,—
"To answer Mr. Bacon's speech at once, I say thus much; and call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon. You are then to know that Mr. Francis Bacon hath written two letters, the one of which hath been artificially framed in my name, after he had framed the other in Mr. Anthony Bacon's name to provoke me. In the latter of these two he lays down the grounds of my discontentment, and the reasons I pretend against my enemies, pleading as orderly for me as I could do myself. . . . if those reasons were then just and true, not counterfeit, how can it be that now my pretences are false and injurious? For then Mr. Bacon joined with me in mine opinion, and pointed out those to be mine enemies, and to hold me in disgrace with Her Majesty, whom he seems now to clear of such mind towards me; and, therefore, I leave the truth of what I say, and he opposeth, unto your Lordship's indifferent considerations."
Bacon did not produce the two letters, or offer to produce them, although they must have been in his possession, for in his Apology he prints them both, claiming that he manufactured the fictitious correspondence between his brother and Essex solely to bring about a reconciliation between the Earl and the Queen.
The Earls of Essex and Southampton were convicted and condemned to death, but Essex only was executed. After the execution Bacon was employed as before to write an account of Essex's offences, and did so in a paper called, A Declaration of the Practises and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Maiestie and her Kingdom, etc. (1601). For his services, Bacon received £1200, from the fine of Catesby, one of the accomplices of Essex. "The Queen hath done something for me," he wrote to a creditor, "though not in the proportion I had hoped."
Bacon's conduct towards Essex has been a fruitful subject of controversy. Some of his biographers find no fault with it, while others see writ large in the circumstance an insensibility to nice moral distinctions that led later to his downfall. The Earl of Essex had committed treason, and according to the standard of justice in that age he deserved death. It was Bacon's duty as a loyal citizen to abhor the crime. But condemnation of the crime is a very different thing from taking part in the prosecution and helping to bring an old friend to the block. That contemporary opinion did not approve of Bacon's course is clear from the testimony of Bacon himself. Even before Essex's affairs had reached their climax, he said one day to the Queen in a burst of "passion" very unusual for him, "A great many love me not, because they think I have been against my Lord of Essex; and you love me not, because you know I have been for him." And either he smarted under the censure of public opinion, or his conscience twitted him, for when both Elizabeth and Essex were dead, and there could be no answer to his statements, he wrote his Apology in Certain Imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex (1604).
If Bacon hoped to win advancement by acting as an unsworn counsel of the Queen against the Earl of Essex, he was disappointed, for there was no change in his political circumstances during the life of Queen Elizabeth. His material circumstances were improved in 1601 by the death of his brother Anthony, to whom he was probably more sincerely attached than to any other person.
With the accession of James I, Bacon's position began to mend. In August, 1604, his office as one of the learned counsel was confirmed, and for the first time a salary of £60 a year was attached to it. One of the first acts of sovereignty of James I was the conferring of knighthood on a mob of gentlemen at so many pounds a head. George Chapman and John Marston for ridiculing "my thirty-pound knights" in Eastward Hoe, were thrown into prison, in 1605, whereupon Ben Jonson valiantly walked into prison to share their punishment. Francis Bacon, writing to Sir Robert Cecil, July 3, 1603, expresses three several reasons for desiring one of those purchasable baronetcies,—
"Lastly, for this divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood, I could without charge, by your Honour's mean, be content to have it, both because of this late disgrace, and because I have three new knights in my mess in Gray's Inn's commons; and because I have found out an alderman's daughter, an handsome maiden to my liking." A second letter, a fortnight later, begged that he might receive the honor in some such manner as would confer real distinction, and "not be merely gregarious in a troop." He was duly knighted two days before the coronation, July 23, 1603, but he had to share the honor with three hundred other gentlemen. In the autumn of 1605 appeared The Two Books of Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning.
On the 11th of May, 1606, Sir Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain,—
"Sir Francis Bacon was married yesterday to his young wench in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of fine raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion."
Sir Francis Bacon's wife was Alice Barnham, daughter of Benedict Barnham, a merchant who had been both alderman and sheriff of London.
Meantime Sir Francis Bacon kept his application for the post of Solicitor-General well before the Court of the new King. If the indifference of his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, and the ill-will of Sir Edward Coke, his legal rival, doomed him ever to new disappointment, Cecil and Coke at least found in Bacon a persistence worthy of a better cause than office-seeking. Elizabeth Bacon, his half-sister, had made a third marriage with Sir William Periam, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Sir William Periam died in 1604, and was succeeded as Chief Baron by the Solicitor-General, Sir Thomas Fleming. Bacon hoped to get the vacant Solicitor-Generalship, but it went for a second time over his head and was given to Sir John Doderidge. A third set-back followed two years later. In 1606, Sir Edward Coke was made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. It had been the custom under Queen Elizabeth to promote the Solicitor-General to the office of Attorney-General in case of its vacancy, but it suited King James to select Sir Henry Hobart for Attorney-General to succeed Coke, thus avoiding a vacancy in the Solicitor-Generalship. A year later Sir John Doderidge was promoted out of the way, and at last, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, Sir Francis Bacon was appointed Solicitor-General. He was forty-seven years old and had been applying for the position for fourteen years.
With an assured official income and the private means he had acquired as his brother's heir, Bacon was for the first time relieved from pressing pecuniary anxieties. He was free to devote what leisure he could secure to those "vast contemplative ends" which in his better moments he always regarded as his real interest in life. Now, too, he reaped the rich harvest of the long years of his unpaid apprenticeship. Queen Elizabeth had thought him a theorist in the law, and had caused him to serve twice seven years roving afield in practice. The result was that when Sir Francis Bacon became Solicitor-General, he brought to the discharge of his duties such a wealth of knowledge of the law, in both theory and practice, as none of his predecessors were able to approach, and some of them had been very able lawyers. At the same time, and this fact is often not even mentioned by Francis Bacon's biographers, at the same time, through repeated disappointments, through insecure health, through anxiety, through loneliness, through calumny, this extraordinary man had kept up his studies and meditations. They were carried on as we know in hours stolen from sleep, between sessions of Parliament, during the few holidays of a busy life, and always under physical difficulties, for the essay Of Regiment of Health reflects Bacon's personal experience in managing a mind too active for the body it inhabited. Bacon came into his own late in life, but when success found him, his rise was rapid. Within ten years after obtaining the Solicitor-Generalship, he had reached the top of his profession as Lord Chancellor; within twenty years he had published the books which have made his fame "a possession forever" wherever the English language and literature shall spread.
In 1613, by the death of Sir Thomas Fleming and the promotions of Sir Edward Coke and Sir Henry Hobart, Sir Francis Bacon succeeded Hobart as Attorney-General. In 1616, he was made a Privy Councillor; nine months later, March 7, 1617, the Great Seal was delivered into his hands and he had followed his father as Lord Keeper; nine months later still, January 4, 1618, he became Lord Chancellor, and in July following was created Baron Verulam; January 27, 1621, the still higher title of Viscount St. Alban was conferred upon him.
During these years Bacon wrote much. To the year 1609 belongs the treatise De Sapientia Veterum, or Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, which he describes in the preface as a recreation from severer studies. It is a collection of thirty-one classical myths, each with a second title in English, often one word only, giving Bacon's interpretation of the myth; for example, Perseus; or War, Sphinx; or Science. The stories are remarkably well told, and should be better known than they are. In 1612, the second edition of the Essays, now enlarged from ten to thirty-eight, was published. Bacon's mother, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, died in the interval between these two works, in August, 1610. Two masques belonging to this period tell us what was happening to him of a less grave nature. The Princess Elizabeth was married to the Elector Palatine, February 4, 1613, and the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple gave a masque in honor of the event, called The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine. Francis Beaumont was the author and Sir Francis Bacon the "chief contriver." On January 6, 1614, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn presented The Masque of Flowers, in celebration of the marriage of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, with Lady Frances Howard, the divorced wife of Essex's son, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Sir Francis Bacon, the new Attorney-General, was the "chief encourager" of this masque, which is said to have cost him £2000.
All this while, during more than thirty years, the great philosophical work of Bacon's life was going on, getting itself written in sketches and treatises, under different subjects, and in separate parts, as time permitted. He had called it as a mere boy Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time.' About 1607, the title Instauratio Magna, that is, 'Great Restoration' appears. When the work finally saw the light in October, 1620, still incomplete, it bore the name Novum Organum, or 'New Organ.'
Within six months after the publication of the Novum Organum, Francis Bacon was overwhelmed in the appalling catastrophe which deprived him at one stroke of position, power, and good fame. He had been created Viscount St. Alban, January 27, 1621. On January 30 Parliament met. Five days later Sir Edward Coke, Bacon's life-long rival, moved that a committee be appointed to inquire into public grievances. Two committees were named, to investigate monopolies and to report on the administration of the courts of justice. This latter committee reported to the House of Commons, March 15, that the Lord Chancellor was guilty of corruption in office, and cited two cases of bribery as proof. Bacon fell ill, and sat in the House of Lords for the last time on March 17. He wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, he had an interview with the King, but he was only referred back to the Commons. By the middle of April the two original charges had increased to twenty-three. At first Bacon was inclined to meet the charges against him and to defend his honor, but his judgment wavered from day to day. He wrote to the King, April 20, asking for the charges in particular. The next day, April 21, it occurred to him that he might weather the "tempest that had come upon him" by a general submission, and he wrote again,—"I assure myself that if it be reformation that be sought, the very taking away the Seal, upon my general submission, will be as much an example for these four hundred years as any further severity." On the following day, April 22, he sent a letter to the Lords, entitled, The Humble Submission and Supplication of the Lord Chancellor, in which he said,—"I do ingenuously confess and acknowledge that, having understood the particulars of the charge, not formally from the House, but enough to inform my conscience and memory, I find matter sufficient and full, both to move me to desert the defence, and to move your Lordships to condemn and censure me." The Lords were puzzled by Bacon's change of front, from demanding particulars to a general confession of guilt, when as yet the charges had neither been read in full committee, nor formally laid before the accused Lord Chancellor. The Earl of Southampton, whom Bacon had assisted in condemning to death with Essex, voiced the opinion of the peers when he said,—"He is charged by the Commons with corruption; and no word of confession of any corruption in his submission. It stands with the justice and honour of this House not to proceed without the parties' particular confession; or to have the parties hear the charge, and we to hear the parties' answer."
The Lords voted to spare the Lord Chancellor the indignity of being brought to the bar to be confronted with the charges, but they sent him a "collection of corruptions," with the message that they expected "his answer to the same with all convenient expedition." Bacon replied, April 30, with a full confession. It reads in part,—
"To the Right Honorable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the High Court of Parliament Assembled.
"The Confession and Humble Submission of me, Lord Chancellor:—
"Upon advised consideration of the charge, descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence."
Nothing was left to do but to pronounce judgment. Bacon was summoned before the House of Lords May 3 to receive sentence, but he was too ill to appear. It was voted unanimously that the Lord Chancellor Bacon should pay a fine of £40,000; that he should be forever incapable of holding office, or of sitting in Parliament; that he should be imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure; and that he should not come within the verge of the Court, that is, within a range of twelve miles round the King's residence in London. By a majority of two he was allowed to retain his titles. On the 31st of May Bacon was imprisoned in the Tower, and wrote the same day to Buckingham begging for a warrant for his release. In this letter, in the same sentence in which he acknowledged "the sentence just, and for reformation sake fit," he declared that he was "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes since Sir Nicholas Bacon's time." The King ordered Bacon's release at once, as we learn from a letter of thanks to Buckingham, dated June 4. Subsequently the fine was remitted by transferring it from the King to persons named by Bacon, in trust for Bacon. The rest of the sentence stood, except that in about a year he was allowed to return to London.
It had been a rise to vast power and influence. It was a fall full of shame and ignominy. Bacon was too great a man, however, not to be great still even in disgrace. He retired to Gorhambury, and there for the remaining five years of his life he occupied himself with literary pursuits. During the first summer of his enforced retirement to private life, he composed his Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh. In 1623, he published the Latin version of the Advancement of Learning, now issued in nine books with the title De Augmentis Scientiarum. The poet George Herbert is said to have helped him with the translation. His Apophthegmes New and Old, 1624, can only be said to have been the occupation of a morning in the sense that he may have arranged the order of the stories in one morning. The last three years of Bacon's life were spent in writing his Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural History, and in editing the third and final edition of the Essays. This edition, published in March, 1625, contains the fifty-eight essays of all subsequent editions, and was entitled Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. The book was dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham. To us who have received the great inheritance of the English language, it seems very curious that Bacon should write in the dedication, nine years after the death of Shakspere,—"For I do conceive that the Latin volume of them (being in the universal language) may last as long as books last." The Latin translation of Bacon's Essays was first published in 1638 by his chaplain, Dr. William Rawley, among the Opera Moralia et Civilia, and with the title Sermones Fideles sive Interiora Rerum. It is inferred that Bacon at least supervised the Latin translation, from the fact that he left this opinion as to its value, but it is now impossible to ascertain whether he himself was the translator of the whole or of any particular part of the work. Mr. Spedding thinks that Bacon was concerned in the revision of the essay, Of Plantations, if not in its careful translation. Two essays, Of Prophecies and Of Masques and Triumphs, have no Latin translation. The absence of translations of these two essays may mean, either that Bacon was his own translator and had not time to complete the whole series before his death, or that the work of supervising translations by other persons ceased with the death of the author.
The story of the death of Francis Bacon is familiar. It was the direct result of an experiment like those he describes in his Natural History. On a cold, raw day in early spring, April 2, 1626, as he was driving out of London, it occurred to him to find out whether a fowl stuffed with snow could be kept. He stopped and bought a hen from a woman by the roadside and stuffed it with snow himself. He was taken with a chill, and, unable to go home, he sought refuge in the house of the Earl of Arundel, at Highgate. His last letter, one of apology to Lord Arundel for his involuntary intrusion, shows that he knew his condition was serious, but that he did not expect the end. He says,—"I was like to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of the mountain Vesuvius," and adds, characteristically, "as for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well." After an illness of a week only, Francis Bacon died, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, of the disease now known as bronchitis. He was buried, as he had directed in his will, beside his mother, in St. Michael's Church, St. Albans, where a monument in white marble was erected to his memory by his former secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys. An effigy on the stone represents Bacon's "full portraiture in the posture of studying." In wide-brimmed hat and long official robe, with falling ruff, Bacon is seated in an arm-chair, his head resting on his left arm. The Latin in scription underneath was written by Sir Henry Wotton. The monument portrait is figured as the frontispiece to Part I of John Nicol's Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy.
Sir Thomas Meautys had married Anne Bacon, daughter of Bacon's half-brother, Sir Nathaniel Bacon. After her husband's death, Lady Meautys became the second wife of Sir Harbottle Grimston, Speaker of the House of Commons in the year of the Restoration. She had a life interest in the manor of Gorhambury, which Sir Harbottle Grimston made his principal country seat, and of which he bought the reversion. James Walter Grimston, third Earl of Verulam, descends from Sir Harbottle Grimston, so that Sir Nicholas Bacon's manor of Gorhambury passed through his granddaughter to the present owner.
Posterity is indebted to the Grimston family for the preservation of at least two of the five contemporary representations of what Francis Bacon looked like. There is at Gorhambury a set of three colored busts in terra cotta representing Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, and their son Francis, as a boy of about twelve. The workmanship is Italian, and by the same hand, and of a high degree of artistic excellence. From the age of the boy the busts must have been made about the year 1572. The boy's bust is especially interesting, because seen beside the busts of his father and mother, it shows that Francis Bacon's likeness was to his mother. The frontispiece of Vol. XI of James Spedding's The Works of Francis Bacon is an engraving from a drawing of the bust of Bacon done in profile.
The next portrait is a miniature made by Nicholas Hilliard, in 1578, when Bacon was living in Paris in the household of Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador. Nicholas Hilliard is the artist of whom John Donne wrote in his poem, The Storm,—
"a hand or eye
By Hilliard drawn is worth a history
By a coarse painter made."
The Earl of Verulam owns a portrait of Bacon by the Dutch artist, Paul Van Somer. Mr. Spedding dates the picture 1618 or thereabout, after Bacon had been made Lord Chancellor and created Baron Verulam. Van Somer's work is more interesting for the details of the dress of the period than for character, and he gives Lord Chancellor Bacon a rather wooden and expressionless face. He is painted in his robe and wearing a hat. A second portrait at Gorhambury, without a hat, is there attributed to Van Somer. Mr. Spedding thinks it is not a Van Somer, but a copy of the other done by an inferior artist at some later period when the fashion of painting people with the head covered had gone out. The reputed Van Somer, with a very wooden face, is figured in Vol. II of John Nicol's Francis Bacon: His Life and Philosophy.
The frontispiece of Vol. I of James Spedding's edition of Bacon is an engraving after the old print of Simon Pass. This artist, whose name is variously spelled Pass, Van de Pas, or Passe, Passaeus, was one of the earliest copperplate engravers in England, having emigrated from the Netherlands to pursue his art in London. Mr. Spedding thought that he had "some reason to suspect" that Pass's engraving was made from a painting, now lost, by the Dutch artist, Cornelius Jannsen Van Ceulen. Whoever the artist, his work is much superior to that of Van Somer. He portrays a handsome man, well worthy to have developed out of the graceful youth of the Hilliard miniature and the beautiful boy of the Italian bust.Another portrait of Bacon, not mentioned by Spedding, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A process print of it illustrates the article on Francis Bacon, at page 214 of Sidney Lee's Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century. The original is a second portrait of Bacon as Lord Chancellor by Paul Van Somer. As a work of art the picture seems to have more character and it is certainly more attractive than the Van Somer at Gorhambury.
In the effort to make a fair judgment of Bacon's moral character, Bacon himself is found to be at once his best advocate and worst accuser. He was inconsistent and he wielded a ready pen. An anecdote of the time relates that Bacon retired to Gorhambury while his trouble was upon him to try to recover there his disturbed health and harassed spirits. On the journey, the story says, Prince Charles returning from a hunt "espied a coach, attended with a goodly troop of horsemen, who, it seems, were gathered together to wait upon the Chancellor to his house at Gorhambury, at the time of his declension. At which the Prince smiled: 'Well, do what we can,' said he, 'this man scorns to go out like a snuff.' " But arrived at Gorhambury, Bacon made the first draft of his will, dated 10th April, 1621, and wrote "the majestic prayer to which Addison refers as more after the manner of an archangel than of a man." Majestic also, easily overtopping the language of all but the greatest of men, is the opening sentence of the will,—
"For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."
The world has accepted Bacon's own judgment of himself,—
"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure of Parliament that was these two hundred years."
Francis Bacon was a man of his time, and it was a time of gift-giving and gift-taking. He was ostentatious and lived always beyond his means. He kept a large retinue of servants and was too busy and too careless of detail to look to them closely. All this made him an easy prey to facility, which he describes as the fourth vice of authority,—"As for facility, it is worse than bribery; for bribes come but now and then; but if importunity or idle respects lead a man, he shall never be without." Of Great Place. During the four years of Bacon's Chancellorship he made some two thousand orders and decrees a year. Not one of these judgments was reversed, even in the twenty-three cases where bribery was charged. No case of proved injustice was brought forward in all that heat of prosecution, nor has historical research discovered any such case since. Bacon did not sell injustice. But the selling of justice, even through carelessness or time-serving, is intolerable. There is no freedom, except under the supremacy of law. The reign of law cannot be maintained by corrupt judges. By his own confession, Lord Chancellor Bacon was a corrupt judge. "The pity of it."