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BACON
BY
R.W. CHURCH
DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S
HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
JOHNSON Leslie Stephen.
GIBBON J.C. Morison.
SCOTT R.H. Hutton.
SHELLEY J.A. Symonds.
HUME T.H. Huxley.
GOLDSMITH William Black.
DEFOE William Minto.
BURNS J.C. Shairp.
SPENSER R.W. Church.
THACKERAY Anthony Trollope.
BURKE John Morley.
MILTON Mark Pattison.
HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr.
SOUTHEY E. Dowden.
CHAUCER A.W. Ward.
BUNYAN J.A. Froude.
COWPER Goldwin Smith.
POPE Leslie Stephen.
BYRON John Nichol.
LOCKE Thomas Fowler.
WORDSWORTH F. Myers.
DRYDEN G. Saintsbury.
LANDOR Sidney Colvin.
DE QUINCEY David Masson.
LAMB Alfred Ainger.
BENTLEY R.C. Jebb.
DICKENS A.W. Ward.
GRAY E.W. Gosse.
SWIFT Leslie Stephen.
STERNE H.D. Traill.
MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison.
FIELDING Austin Dobson.
SHERIDAN Mrs. Oliphant
ADDISON W.J. Courthope.
BACON R.W. Church.
COLERIDGE H.D. Traill.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J.A. Symonds.
KEATS Sidney Colvin.
12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.
_Other volumes in preparation._
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
_Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any
part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price._
PREFACE.
In preparing this sketch it is needless to say how deeply I am indebted
to Mr. Spedding and Mr. Ellis, the last editors of Bacon's writings, the
very able and painstaking commentators, the one on Bacon's life, the
other on his philosophy. It is impossible to overstate the affectionate
care and high intelligence and honesty with which Mr. Spedding has
brought together and arranged the materials for an estimate of Bacon's
character. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity of much of
his pleading, I find myself most reluctantly obliged to differ from him;
it seems to me to be a case where the French saying, cited by Bacon in
one of his commonplace books, holds good--"_Par trop se debattre, la
verite se perd_."[1] But this does not diminish the debt of gratitude
which all who are interested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. I
wish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have received from Mr.
Gardiner's _History of England_ and Mr. Fowler's edition of the _Novum
Organum_; and not least from M. de Remusat's work on Bacon, which seems
to me the most complete and the most just estimate both of Bacon's
character and work which has yet appeared; though even in this clear
and dispassionate survey we are reminded by some misconceptions, strange
in M. de Remusat, how what one nation takes for granted is
incomprehensible to its neighbour; and what a gap there is still, even
in matters of philosophy and literature, between the whole Continent and
ourselves--
"Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Promus_: edited by Mrs. H. Pott, p. 475.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
EARLY LIFE 1
CHAPTER II.
BACON AND ELIZABETH 26
CHAPTER III.
BACON AND JAMES I. 55
CHAPTER IV.
BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL 77
CHAPTER V.
BACON ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR 95
CHAPTER VI.
BACON'S FALL 118
CHAPTER VII.
BACON'S LAST YEARS--1621-1626 149
CHAPTER VIII.
BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 168
CHAPTER IX.
BACON AS A WRITER 198
BACON.
CHAPTER I.
EARLY LIFE.
The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to write or to read.
It is the life of a man endowed with as rare a combination of noble
gifts as ever was bestowed on a human intellect; the life of one with
whom the whole purpose of living and of every day's work was to do great
things to enlighten and elevate his race, to enrich it with new powers,
to lay up in store for all ages to come a source of blessings which
should never fail or dry up; it was the life of a man who had high
thoughts of the ends and methods of law and government, and with whom
the general and public good was regarded as the standard by which the
use of public power was to be measured; the life of a man who had
struggled hard and successfully for the material prosperity and opulence
which makes work easy and gives a man room and force for carrying out
his purposes. All his life long his first and never-sleeping passion was
the romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest of
nature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spirit
and longings and efforts of all discoverers and inventors of the arts,
as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to the
highest place and honour; and yet that place and honour were but the
fringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is difficult to
imagine a grander and more magnificent career; and his name ranks among
the few chosen examples of human achievement. And yet it was not only an
unhappy life; it was a poor life. We expect that such an overwhelming
weight of glory should be borne up by a character corresponding to it in
strength and nobleness. But that is not what we find. No one ever had a
greater idea of what he was made for, or was fired with a greater desire
to devote himself to it. He was all this. And yet being all this, seeing
deep into man's worth, his capacities, his greatness, his weakness, his
sins, he was not true to what he knew. He cringed to such a man as
Buckingham. He sold himself to the corrupt and ignominious Government of
James I. He was willing to be employed to hunt to death a friend like
Essex, guilty, deeply guilty, to the State, but to Bacon the most loving
and generous of benefactors. With his eyes open he gave himself up
without resistance to a system unworthy of him; he would not see what
was evil in it, and chose to call its evil good; and he was its first
and most signal victim.
Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But he has also been
defended by an advocate whose name alone is almost a guarantee for the
justness of the cause which he takes up, and the innocency of the client
for whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a lifetime, and all the
resources of a fine intellect and an earnest conviction, to make us
revere as well as admire Bacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fight
against the facts of his life: his words, his letters. "Men are made
up," says a keen observer, "of professions, gifts, and talents; and
also of _themselves_."[2] With all his greatness, his splendid genius,
his magnificent ideas, his enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be the
benefactor of his kind; with all the charm that made him loved by good
and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, delightful as a
companion, ready to take any trouble--there was in Bacon's "self" a deep
and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle
fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the [Greek:
areskos] of Aristotle, the [Greek: anthropareskos] of St. Paul, which is
more common than it is pleasant to think, even in good people, but which
if it becomes dominant in a character is ruinous to truth and power. He
was one of the men--there are many of them--who are unable to release
their imagination from the impression of present and immediate power,
face to face with themselves. It seems as if he carried into conduct the
leading rule of his philosophy of nature, _parendo vincitur_. In both
worlds, moral and physical, he felt himself encompassed by vast forces,
irresistible by direct opposition. Men whom he wanted to bring round to
his purposes were as strange, as refractory, as obstinate, as
impenetrable as the phenomena of the natural world. It was no use
attacking in front, and by a direct trial of strength, people like
Elizabeth or Cecil or James; he might as well think of forcing some
natural power in defiance of natural law. The first word of his teaching
about nature is that she must be won by observation of her tendencies
and demands; the same radical disposition of temper reveals itself in
his dealings with men: they, too, must be won by yielding to them, by
adapting himself to their moods and ends; by spying into the drift of
their humour, by subtly and pliantly falling in with it, by circuitous
and indirect processes, the fruit of vigilance and patient thought. He
thought to direct, while submitting apparently to be directed. But he
mistook his strength. Nature and man are different powers, and under
different laws. He chose to please man, and not to follow what his soul
must have told him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings with
men, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly in his dealings
with nature and knowledge. And the ruin of a great life was the
consequence.
Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61, three
years before Galileo. He was born at York House, in the Strand; the
house which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had been
lately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which Bacon
himself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed after his
fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in
the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden of
the Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's
first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St.
Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire.
His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord
Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the daughters
of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reforming
party, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remarkable woman,
highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies of her party, and as
would become her father's daughter and the austere and laborious family
to which she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the Greek and
Latin tongues;" she was passionately religious, according to the
uncompromising religion which the exiles had brought back with them from
Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology a
solution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a remedy for all
the evils, of mankind. This means that his boyhood from the first was
passed among the high places of the world--at one of the greatest crises
of English history--in the very centre and focus of its agitations. He
was brought up among the chiefs and leaders of the rising religion, in
the houses of the greatest and most powerful persons of the State, and
naturally, as their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who joked
with him, and called him "her young Lord Keeper." It means also that the
religious atmosphere in which he was brought up was that of the nascent
and aggressive Puritanism, which was not satisfied with the compromises
of the Elizabethan Reformation, and which saw in the moral poverty and
incapacity of many of its chiefs a proof against the great traditional
system of the Church which Elizabeth was loath to part with, and which,
in spite of all its present and inevitable shortcomings, her political
sagacity taught her to reverence and trust.
At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift at
Trinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers about
those times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For whatever
was the learning of the universities, these boys took their place with
men and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as men had, and
performing exercises and hearing lectures according to the standard of
men. Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of Scaliger and the
learned band of Leyden; at fourteen he was part of the company which
went with the ambassadors of the States-General to Henry IV.; at sixteen
he was called to the bar, he published an out-of-the-way Latin writer,
Martianus Capella, with a learned commentary, and he was the
correspondent of De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was admitted
to the Society of "Ancients" of Gray's Inn, and he went in the household
of Sir Amyas Paulet, the Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spent
two years in France, not in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, and
Poitiers. If this was precocious, there is no indication that it was
thought precocious. It only meant that clever and promising boys were
earlier associated with men in important business than is customary now.
The old and the young heads began to work together sooner. Perhaps they
felt that there was less time to spare. In spite of instances of
longevity, life was shorter for the average of busy men, for the
conditions of life were worse.
Two recollections only have been preserved of his early years. One is
that, as he told his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, late in life, he had
discovered, as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" of
Aristotle's method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is not
uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the
fashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against
Aristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men
who have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious
grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting that Bacon
himself believed that his fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun
with the first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollection
remaining of his early tendency in speculation. The other is more
trustworthy, and exhibits that inventiveness which was characteristic
of his mind. He tells us in the _De Augmentis_ that when he was in
France he occupied himself with devising an improved system of
cypher-writing--a thing of daily and indispensable use for rival
statesmen and rival intriguers. But the investigation, with its call on
the calculating and combining faculties, would also interest him, as an
example of the discovery of new powers by the human mind.
In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was called home by his
father's death. This was a great blow to his prospects. His father had
not accomplished what he had intended for him, and Francis Bacon was
left with only a younger son's "narrow portion." What was worse, he lost
one whose credit would have served him in high places. He entered on
life, not as he might have expected, independent and with court favour
on his side, but with his very livelihood to gain--a competitor at the
bottom of the ladder for patronage and countenance. This great change in
his fortunes told very unfavourably on his happiness, his usefulness,
and, it must be added, on his character. He accepted it, indeed,
manfully, and at once threw himself into the study of the law as the
profession by which he was to live. But the law, though it was the only
path open to him, was not the one which suited his genius, or his object
in life. To the last he worked hard and faithfully, but with doubtful
reputation as to his success, and certainly against the grain. And this
was not the worst. To make up for the loss of that start in life of
which his father's untimely death had deprived him, he became, for
almost the rest of his life, the most importunate and most untiring of
suitors.
In 1579 or 1580 Bacon took up his abode at Gray's Inn, which for a long
time was his home. He went through the various steps of his profession.
He began, what he never discontinued, his earnest and humble appeals to
his relative the great Lord Burghley, to employ him in the Queen's
service, or to put him in some place of independence: through Lord
Burghley's favour he seems to have been pushed on at his Inn, where, in
1586, he was a Bencher; and in 1584 he came into Parliament for Melcombe
Regis. He took some small part in Parliament; but the only record of his
speeches is contained in a surly note of Recorder Fleetwood, who writes
as an old member might do of a young one talking nonsense. He sat again
for Liverpool in the year of the Armada (1588), and his name begins to
appear in the proceedings. These early years, we know, were busy ones.
In them Bacon laid the foundation of his observations and judgments on
men and affairs; and in them the great purpose and work of his life was
conceived and shaped. But they are more obscure years than might have
been expected in the case of a man of Bacon's genius and family, and of
such eager and unconcealed desire to rise and be at work. No doubt he
was often pinched in his means; his health was weak, and he was delicate
and fastidious in his care of it. Plunged in work, he lived very much as
a recluse in his chambers, and was thought to be reserved, and what
those who disliked him called arrogant. But Bacon was
ambitious--ambitious, in the first place, of the Queen's notice and
favour. He was versatile, brilliant, courtly, besides being his father's
son; and considering how rapidly bold and brilliant men were able to
push their way and take the Queen's favour by storm, it seems strange
that Bacon should have remained fixedly in the shade. Something must
have kept him back. Burghley was not the man to neglect a useful
instrument with such good will to serve him. But all that Mr.
Spedding's industry and profound interest in the subject has brought
together throws but an uncertain light on Bacon's long disappointment.
Was it the rooted misgiving of a man of affairs like Burghley at that
passionate contempt of all existing knowledge, and that undoubting
confidence in his own power to make men know, as they never had known,
which Bacon was even now professing? Or was it something soft and
over-obsequious in character which made the uncle, who knew well what
men he wanted, disinclined to encourage and employ the nephew? Was
Francis not hard enough, not narrow enough, too full of ideas, too much
alive to the shakiness of current doctrines and arguments on religion
and policy? Was he too open to new impressions, made by objections or
rival views? Or did he show signs of wanting backbone to stand amid
difficulties and threatening prospects? Did Burghley see something in
him of the pliability which he could remember as the serviceable quality
of his own young days--which suited those days of rapid change, but not
days when change was supposed to be over, and when the qualities which
were wanted were those which resist and defy it? The only thing that is
clear is that Burghley, in spite of Bacon's continual applications,
abstained to the last from advancing his fortunes.
Whether employed by government or not, Bacon began at this time to
prepare those carefully-written papers on the public affairs of the day,
of which he has left a good many. In our day they would have been
pamphlets or magazine articles. In his they were circulated in
manuscript, and only occasionally printed. The first of any importance
is a letter of advice to the Queen, about the year 1585, on the policy
to be followed with a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholic
interest at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according to
the fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the first subject on
which Bacon exhibited his characteristic qualities, his appreciation of
facts, his balance of thought, and his power, when not personally
committed, of standing aloof from the ordinary prejudices and
assumptions of men round him, was the religious condition and prospects
of the English Church. Bacon had been brought up in a Puritan household
of the straitest sect. His mother was an earnest, severe, and intolerant
Calvinist, deep in the interests and cause of her party, bitterly
resenting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions. She was a
masterful woman, claiming to meddle with her brother-in-law's policy,
and though a most affectionate mother she was a woman of violent and
ungovernable temper. Her letters to her son Antony, whom she loved
passionately, but whom she suspected of keeping dangerous and papistical
company, show us the imperious spirit in which she claimed to interfere
with her sons; and they show also that in Francis she did not find all
the deference which she looked for. Recommending Antony to frequent "the
religious exercises of the sincerer sort," she warns him not to follow
his brother's advice or example. Antony was advised to use prayer twice
a day with his servants. "Your brother," she adds, "is too negligent
therein." She is anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not to
fall into his brother's ill-ordered habits: "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 consequent by late rising and long lying in bed,
whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly. But my
sons haste not to hearken to their mother's good counsel in time to
prevent." It seems clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother that
not only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on religious
matters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. Spedding thinks that she must
have had much influence on him; it seems more likely that he resented
her interference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which she read
into the Gospel produced in him a strong reaction. Bacon was obsequious
to the tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyranny
of opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thing
to which he was likely to submit. His mother would have wished him to
sit under Cartwright and Travers. The friend of his choice was the
Anglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, and
whom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to sign
himself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop of
whom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentiment
in Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his own
glory more than Christ's."
Certainly, in the remarkable paper on _Controversies in the Church_
(1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan. The paper is
an attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes in
judgment, in temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlike
what a Puritan would have written: it is too moderate, too tolerant, too
neutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to the
rejoinder from both sides--certainly from the Puritan--that it begs the
question by assuming the unimportance of the matters about which each
contended with so much zeal. It is the confirmation, but also the
complement, and in some ways the correction of Hooker's contemporary
view of the quarrel which was threatening the life of the English
Church, and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so fair. For
Hooker had to defend much that was indefensible: he had to defend a
great traditional system, just convulsed by a most tremendous shock--a
shock and alteration, as Bacon says, "the greatest and most dangerous
that can be in a State," in which old clews and habits and rules were
confused and all but lost; in which a frightful amount of personal
incapacity and worthlessness had, from sheer want of men, risen to the
high places of the Church; and in which force and violence, sometimes of
the most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as ordinary instruments
in the government of souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, the
folly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents--he
was too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, and
to the incredible absurdity of their arguments--to do justice to what
was only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents. But
Bacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp. He had seen the
inside of Puritanism--its best as well as its worst side. He witnesses
to the humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, the
hatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers. He had heard, and
heard with sympathy, all that could be urged against the bishops'
administration, and against a system of legal oppression in the name of
the Church. Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and where
each side had apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he saw
the deep mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience and
forbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses,
in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit. Towards
the bishops and their policy, though his language is very respectful,
for the government was implicated, he is very severe. They punish and
restrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what was
wanting; and theirs are "_injuriae potentiorum_"--"injuries come from
them that have the upperhand." But Hooker himself did not put his finger
more truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement:
on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visible
personal ambition--"these are the true successors of Diotrephes and not
my lord bishops"--on the gradual development of the Puritan theory till
it came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant as
that of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Geneva
and Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritan
teaching--its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raised
in the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture--"naked examples,
conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into all
certainty of religion"--"the word, the bread of life, they toss up and
down, they break it not;" on their undervaluing of moral worth, if it
did not speak in their phraseology--"as they censure virtuous men by the
names of _civil_ and _moral_, so do they censure men truly and godly
wise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of
_politiques_, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring of
man's brain." Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming at a tyranny
which, if they established it, would be more comprehensive, more
searching, and more cruel than that of the older systems; but he thought
it a remote and improbable danger, and that they might safely be
tolerated for the work they did in education and preaching, "because the
work of exhortation doth chiefly rest upon these men, and they have a
zeal and hate of sin." But he ends by warning them lest "that be true
which one of their adversaries said, _that they have but two small
wants--knowledge and love_." One complaint that he makes of them is a
curious instance of the changes of feeling, or at least of language, on
moral subjects. He accuses them of "having pronounced generally, and
without difference, all untruths unlawful," forgetful of the Egyptian
midwives, and Rahab, and Solomon, and even of Him "who, the more to
touch the hearts of the disciples with a holy dalliance, made as though
he would have passed Emmaus." He is thinking of their failure to apply a
principle which was characteristic of his mode of thought, that even a
statement about a virtue like veracity "hath limit as all things else
have;" but it is odd to find Bacon bringing against the Puritans the
converse of the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, brought
against the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times as
regards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristic
strength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which had
been degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a higher and
larger light, and bringing to bear on it great principles and the
results of the best human wisdom and experience, expressed in weighty
and pregnant maxims; his weakness in forgetting, as, in spite of his
philosophy, he so often did, that the grandest major premises need
well-proved and ascertained minors, and that the enunciation of a
principle is not the same thing as the application of it. Doubtless
there is truth in his closing words; but each party would have made the
comment that what he had to prove, and had not proved, was that by
following his counsel they would "love the whole world better than a
part."
"Let them not fear ... the fond calumny of _neutrality_; but let
them know that is true which is said by a wise man, _that neuters
in contentions are either better or worse than either side_. These
things have I in all sincerity and simplicity set down touching the
controversies which now trouble the Church of England; and that
without all art and insinuation, and therefore not like to be
grateful to either part. Notwithstanding, I trust what has been
said shall find a correspondence in their minds which are not
embarked in partiality, and which _love the whole letter than a
part_"
Up to this time, though Bacon had showed himself capable of taking a
broad and calm view of questions which it was the fashion among good
men, and men who were in possession of the popular ear, to treat with
narrowness and heat, there was nothing to disclose his deeper
thoughts--nothing foreshadowed the purpose which was to fill his life.
He had, indeed, at the age of twenty-five, written a "youthful"
philosophical essay, to which he gave the pompous title "_Temporis
Partus Maximus_," "the Greatest Birth of Time." But he was thirty-one
when we first find an indication of the great idea and the great
projects which were to make his name famous. This indication is
contained in an earnest appeal to Lord Burghley for some help which
should not be illusory. Its words are distinct and far-reaching, and
they are the first words from him which tell us what was in his heart.
The letter has the interest to us of the first announcement of a promise
which, to ordinary minds, must have appeared visionary and extravagant,
but which was so splendidly fulfilled; the first distant sight of that
sea of knowledge which henceforth was opened to mankind, but on which no
man, as he thought, had yet entered. It contains the famous avowal--"_I
have taken all knowledge to be my province_"--made in the confidence
born of long and silent meditations and questionings, but made in a
simple good faith which is as far as possible from vain boastfulness.
"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 a 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 vain glory, 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 of 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 nothing 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."
This letter to his unsympathetic and suspicious, but probably not
unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life; which, with
numberless changes of form, he followed to the end. That is, a
profession, steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to
provide the means of living; and beyond that, as the ultimate and real
end of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of all
possible human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make it
sure and fruitful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand it
was a continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment,
which could give credit to his name and put money in his
pocket--attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when the
occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the service
of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifest
indisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished the
chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On the
other hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment or
triumph, the one great subject lay next his heart, filling him with
fire and passion--how really to know, and to teach men to know indeed,
and to use their knowledge so as to command nature; the great hope to be
the reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than
the world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and religion, and
in the spread of civilised order in the great states of the Renaissance
time. To this he gave his best and deepest thoughts; for this he was for
ever accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping those masses
of observation and inquiry and invention and mental criticism which were
to come in as parts of the great design which he had seen in the visions
of his imagination, and of which at last he was only able to leave noble
fragments, incomplete after numberless recastings. This was not indeed
the only, but it was the predominant and governing, interest of his
life. Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office; whether
drudging at the work of the law or managing State prosecutions; whether
writing an opportune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or
inventing a "device" for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement to
Queen Elizabeth; whether fulfilling his duties as member of Parliament
or rising step by step to the highest places in the Council Board and
the State; whether in the pride of success or under the amazement of
unexpected and irreparable overthrow, while it seemed as if he was only
measuring his strength against the rival ambitions of the day, in the
same spirit and with the same object as his competitors, the true motive
of all his eagerness and all his labours was not theirs. He wanted to be
powerful, and still more to be rich; but he wanted to be so, because
without power and without money he could not follow what was to him the
only thing worth following on earth--a real knowledge of the amazing and
hitherto almost unknown world in which he had to live. Bacon, to us, at
least, at this distance, who can only judge him from partial and
imperfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man should
be. He was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers after
knowledge and truth, like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal
independence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own.
Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world.
He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very serious
intention. In the Court was his element, and there were his hopes. Often
there seems little to distinguish him from the ordinary place-hunters,
obsequious and selfish, of every age; little to distinguish him from the
servile and insincere flatterers, of whom he himself complains, who
crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to submit with
smiling face and thankful words to the insolence of her waywardness and
temper, in the hope, more often disappointed than not, of hitting her
taste on some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident by a
place of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read in his letters, is not
an agreeable one; after every allowance made for the fashions of
language and the necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere
profession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated profession of
admiration and devoted service, too much of disparagement and
insinuation against others, for a man who respected himself. He
submitted too much to the miserable conditions of rising which he found.
But, nevertheless, it must be said that it was for no mean object, for
no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he endured all this. He
strove hard to be a great man and a rich man. But it was that he might
have his hands free and strong and well furnished to carry forward the
double task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new and solid
knowledge on which his heart was set--that immense conquest of nature on
behalf of man which he believed to be possible, and of which he believed
himself to have the key.
The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. He received the
reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the Council, which did not become
vacant for twenty years. But these years of service declined and place
withheld were busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, and
what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was unknown to the
world round him, and probably not very intelligible to his few intimate
friends, such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrewes. Meanwhile he
placed his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and though they
regarded him more as a man of study than of practice and experience,
they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius found another
employment. Besides his affluence in topics, he had the liveliest fancy
and most active imagination. But that he wanted the sense of poetic
fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and play
of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentric
modern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays. No man ever had a more
imaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and most
unlikely analogies; analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpected
kind, but often also not only felicitous in application but profound and
true. His powers were early called upon for some of those sportive
compositions in which that age delighted on occasions of rejoicing or
festival. Three of his contributions to these "devices" have been
preserved--two of them composed in honour of the Queen, as "triumphs,"
offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; a
third for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices" themselves were of
the common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full of awkward allegory
and absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make modern
lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of those days; but the
"discourses" furnished by Bacon are full of fine observation and
brilliant thought and wit and happy illustration, which, fantastic as
the general conception is, raises them far above the level of such
fugitive trifles.
Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have come
down, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner of
working. While he was following out the great ideas which were to be the
basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking in fashioning
the instruments by which they were to be expressed; and in these papers
we have the records and specimens of this preparation. He was a great
collector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations,
anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrases
and apt words. He jots down at random any good and pointed remark which
comes into his thought or his memory; at another time he groups a set of
stock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject, such as
the faults of universities or the habits of lawyers. Nothing is too
minute for his notice. He brings together in great profusion mere forms,
varied turns of expression, heads and tails of clauses and paragraphs,
transitions, connections; he notes down fashions of compliment, of
excuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations; he records
neat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speaking
more adapted than others to give a special colour or direction to what
the speaker or writer has to say--all that hook-and-eye work which seems
so trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yet
is often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference between
tameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity--all the
difference, not merely to the ease and naturalness, but often to the
logical force of speech. These collections it was his way to sift and
transcribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From one of
these, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the _Promus of
Formularies and Elegancies_, Mr. Spedding has given curious extracts;
and the whole collection has been recently edited by Mrs. Henry Pott.
Thus it was that he prepared himself for what, as we read it, or as his
audience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment.
Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thought
than of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he least
minds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that a
simile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it--he
is never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduce
it again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrate
another point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive to
all analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logical
groove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest of
chance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by the
electric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol of
the thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, so
enigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up a
whole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it--how at a
certain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed to
breathe new life and shed new light, and has remained the token,
meaningless in itself, which reminds him of so much.
When we come to read his letters, his speeches, his works, we come
continually on the results and proofs of this early labour. Some of the
most memorable and familiar passages of his writings are to be traced
from the storehouses which he filled in these years of preparation. An
example of this correspondence between the note-book and the composition
is to be seen in a paper belonging to this period, written apparently to
form part of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a "Conference of
Pleasure," and entitled the _Praise of Knowledge_. It is interesting
because it is the first draught which we have from him of some of the
leading ideas and most characteristic language about the defects and the
improvement of knowledge, which were afterwards embodied in the
_Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_. The whole spirit and aim of his
great reform is summed up in the following fine passage:
"Facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to assever,
glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search,
seeking things in words, resting in a part of nature--these and the
like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match
between the mind of man and the nature of things, and in place
thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments....
Therefore, no doubt, the _sovereignty of man_ lieth hid in
knowledge; wherein many things are reserved which kings with their
treasures cannot buy nor with their force command; their spials and
intelligencers can give no news of them; their seamen and
discoverers cannot sail where they grow. Now we govern nature in
opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity; but if we could
be led by her in invention, we should command her in action."
To the same occasion as the discourse on the _Praise of Knowledge_
belongs, also, one in _Praise of the Queen_. As one is an early specimen
of his manner of writing on philosophy, so this is a specimen of what
was equally characteristic of him--his political and historical writing.
It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and adulatory as
such performances in those days were bound to be. But it is not only
flattery. It fixes with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth's
character and reign which were really subjects of admiration and homage.
Thus of her unquailing spirit at the time of the Spanish invasion--
"Lastly, see a Queen, that when her realm was to have been invaded
by an army, the preparation whereof was like the travail of an
elephant, the provisions infinite, the setting forth whereof was
the terror and wonder of Europe; it was not seen that her cheer,
her fashion, her ordinary manner was anything altered; not a cloud
of that storm did appear in that countenance wherein peace doth
ever shine; but with excellent assurance and advised security she
inspired her council, animated her nobility, redoubled the courage
of her people; still having this noble apprehension, not only that
she would communicate her fortune with them, but that it was she
that would protect them, and not they her; which she testified by
no less demonstration than her presence in camp. Therefore that
magnanimity that neither feareth greatness of alteration, nor the
vows of conspirators, nor the power of the enemy, is more than
heroical."
These papers, though he put his best workmanship into them, as he
invariably did with whatever he touched, were of an ornamental kind. But
he did more serious work. In the year 1592 a pamphlet had been published
on the Continent in Latin and English, _Responsio ad Edictum Reginae
Angliae_, with reference to the severe legislation which followed on the
Armada, making such charges against the Queen and the Government as it
was natural for the Roman Catholic party to make, and making them with
the utmost virulence and unscrupulousness. It was supposed to be written
by the ablest of the Roman pamphleteers, Father Parsons. The Government
felt it to be a dangerous indictment, and Bacon was chosen to write the
answer to it. He had additional interest in the matter, for the pamphlet
made a special and bitter attack on Burghley, as the person mainly
responsible for the Queen's policy. Bacon's reply is long and elaborate,
taking up every charge, and reviewing from his own point of view the
whole course of the struggle between the Queen and the supporters of the
Roman Catholic interest abroad and at home. It cannot be considered an
impartial review; besides that it was written to order, no man in
England could then write impartially in that quarrel; but it is not more
one-sided and uncandid than the pamphlet which it answers, and Bacon is
able to recriminate with effect, and to show gross credulity and
looseness of assertion on the part of the Roman Catholic advocate. But
religion had too much to do with the politics of both sides for either
to be able to come into the dispute with clean hands: the Roman
Catholics meant much more than toleration, and the sanguinary
punishments of the English law against priests and Jesuits were edged by
something even keener than the fear of treason. But the paper contains
some large surveys of public affairs, which probably no one at that time
could write but Bacon. Bacon never liked to waste anything good which he
had written; and much of what he had written in the panegyric in _Praise
of the Queen_ is made use of again, and transferred with little change
to the pages of the _Observations on a Libel_.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Dr. Mozley.
CHAPTER II.
BACON AND ELIZABETH.
The last decade of the century, and almost of Elizabeth's reign
(1590-1600), was an eventful one to Bacon's fortunes. In it the vision
of his great design disclosed itself more and more to his imagination
and hopes, and with more and more irresistible fascination. In it he
made his first literary venture, the first edition of his _Essays_
(1597), ten in number, the first-fruits of his early and ever watchful
observation of men and affairs. These years, too, saw his first steps in
public life, the first efforts to bring him into importance, the first
great trials and tests of his character. They saw the beginning and they
saw the end of his relations with the only friend who, at that time,
recognised his genius and his purposes, certainly the only friend who
ever pushed his claims; they saw the growth of a friendship which was to
have so tragical a close, and they saw the beginnings and causes of a
bitter personal rivalry which was to last through life, and which was to
be a potent element hereafter in Bacon's ruin. The friend was the Earl
of Essex. The competitor was the ablest, and also the most truculent and
unscrupulous of English lawyers, Edward Coke.
While Bacon, in the shade, had been laying the foundations of his
philosophy of nature, and vainly suing for legal or political
employment, another man had been steadily rising in the Queen's favour
and carrying all before him at Court--Robert Devereux, Lord Essex; and
with Essex Bacon had formed an acquaintance which had ripened into an
intimate and affectionate friendship. We commonly think of Essex as a
vain and insolent favourite, who did ill the greatest work given him to
do--the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some unexplained
reason of spite and mischief; and who, when called to account for it,
broke out into senseless and idle rebellion. This was the end. But he
was not always thus. He began life with great gifts and noble ends; he
was a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books and
things, and he turned his studies to full account. He had imagination
and love of enterprise, which gave him an insight into Bacon's ideas
such as none of Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple and
earnest religion; he sympathized most with the Puritans, because they
were serious and because they were hardly used. Those who most condemn
him acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. Bacon in after
days, when all was over between them, spoke of him as a man always
_patientissimus veri_; "the more plainly and frankly you shall deal with
my lord," he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, but
in giving him _caveats_ and admonishing him of any error which in this
action he may commit (such is his lordship's nature), the better he will
take it." "He must have seemed," says Mr. Spedding, a little too
grandly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the world." The two men,
certainly, became warmly attached. Their friendship came to be one of
the closest kind, full of mutual services, and of genuine affection on
both sides. It was not the relation of a great patron and useful
dependant; it was, what might be expected in the two men, that of
affectionate equality. Each man was equally capable of seeing what the
other was, and saw it. What Essex's feelings were towards Bacon the
results showed. Bacon, in after years, repeatedly claimed to have
devoted his whole time and labour to Essex's service. Holding him, he
says, to be "the fittest instrument to do good to the State, I applied
myself to him in a manner which I think rarely happeneth among men;
neglecting the Queen's service, mine own fortune, and, in a sort, my
vocation, I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself ... anything
that might concern his lordship's honour, fortune, or service." The
claim is far too wide. The "Queen's service" had hardly as yet come much
in Bacon's way, and he never neglected it when it did come, nor his own
fortune or vocation; his letters remain to attest his care in these
respects. But no doubt Bacon was then as ready to be of use to Essex,
the one man who seemed to understand and value him, as Essex was
desirous to be of use to Bacon.
And it seemed as if Essex would have the ability as well as the wish.
Essex was, without exception, the most brilliant man who ever appeared
at Elizabeth's Court, and it seemed as if he were going to be the most
powerful. Leicester was dead. Burghley was growing old, and indisposed
for the adventures and levity which, with all her grand power of ruling,
Elizabeth loved. She needed a favourite, and Essex was unfortunately
marked out for what she wanted. He had Leicester's fascination, without
his mean and cruel selfishness. He was as generous, as gallant, as quick
to descry all great things in art and life, as Philip Sidney, with more
vigour and fitness for active life than Sidney. He had not Raleigh's
sad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage equal to
Raleigh's, without Raleigh's cynical contempt for mercy and honour. He
had every personal advantage requisite for a time when intellect, and
ready wit, and high-tempered valour, and personal beauty, and skill in
affairs, with equal skill in amusements, were expected to go together in
the accomplished courtier. And Essex was a man not merely to be courted
and admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved. Elizabeth, with her
strange and perverse emotional constitution, loved him, if she ever
loved any one. Every one who served him loved him; and he was, as much
as any one could be in those days, a popular favourite. Under better
fortune he might have risen to a great height of character; in
Elizabeth's Court he was fated to be ruined.
For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed control received
daily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned into
impatience and restless irritability. He had a mistress who was at one
time in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as an
outrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious of
queens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was most
dangerous to mistake it. It was part of her pleasure to find in her
favourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, as
her own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or the
prudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-for
moment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of what
she had herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real greatness by
having to suit himself to this bewildering and most unwholesome and
degrading waywardness. She taught him to think himself irresistible in
opinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completely
he was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to be
exacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or brooding
sullenness. He learned to think that she must be dealt with by the same
methods which she herself employed. The effect was not produced in a
moment; it was the result of a courtiership of sixteen years. But it
ended in corrupting a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she who
cowed others must be frightened herself; that the stinging injustice
which led a proud man to expect, only to see how he would behave when
refused, deserved to be brought to reason by a counter-buffet as rough
as her own insolent caprice. He drifted into discontent, into
disaffection, into neglect of duty, into questionable schemings for the
future of a reign that must shortly end, into criminal methods of
guarding himself, of humbling his rivals and regaining influence. A
"fatal impatience," as Bacon calls it, gave his rivals an advantage
which, perhaps in self-defence, they could not fail to take; and that
career, so brilliant, so full of promise of good, ended in misery, in
dishonour, in remorse, on the scaffold of the Tower.
With this attractive and powerful person Bacon's fortunes, in the last
years of the century, became more and more knit up. Bacon was now past
thirty, Essex a few years younger. In spite of Bacon's apparent
advantage and interest at Court, in spite of abilities, which, though
his genius was not yet known, his contemporaries clearly recognised, he
was still a struggling and unsuccessful man: ambitious to rise, for no
unworthy reasons, but needy, in weak health, with careless and expensive
habits, and embarrassed with debt. He had hoped to rise by the favour of
the Queen and for the sake of his father. For some ill-explained reason
he was to the last disappointed. Though she used him "for matters of
state and revenue," she either did not like him, or did not see in him
the servant she wanted to advance. He went on to the last pressing his
uncle, Lord Burghley. He applied in the humblest terms, he made himself
useful with his pen, he got his mother to write for him; but Lord
Burghley, probably because he thought his nephew more of a man of
letters than a sound lawyer and practical public servant, did not care
to bring him forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received
polite words and friendly assurances. Cecil may have undervalued him, or
have been jealous of him, or suspected him as a friend of Essex; he
certainly gave Bacon good reason to think that his words meant nothing.
Except Essex, and perhaps his brother Antony--the most affectionate and
devoted of brothers--no one had yet recognised all that Bacon was.
Meanwhile time was passing. The vastness, the difficulties, the
attractions of that conquest of all knowledge which he dreamed of, were
becoming greater every day to his thoughts. The law, without which he
could not live, took up time and brought in little. Attendance on the
Court was expensive, yet indispensable, if he wished for place. His
mother was never very friendly, and thought him absurd and extravagant.
Debts increased and creditors grumbled. The outlook was discouraging,
when his friendship with Essex opened to him a more hopeful prospect.
In the year 1593 the Attorney-General's place was vacant, and Essex, who
in that year became a Privy Councillor, determined that Bacon should be
Attorney-General. Bacon's reputation as a lawyer was overshadowed by his
philosophical and literary pursuits. He was thought young for the
office, and he had not yet served in any subordinate place. And there
was another man, who was supposed to carry all English law in his head,
full of rude force and endless precedents, hard of heart and voluble of
tongue, who also wanted it. An Attorney-General was one who would bring
all the resources and hidden subtleties of English law to the service of
the Crown, and use them with thorough-going and unflinching resolution
against those whom the Crown accused of treason, sedition, or invasion
of the prerogative. It is no wonder that the Cecils, and the Queen
herself, thought Coke likely to be a more useful public servant than
Bacon: it is certain what Coke himself thought about it, and what his
estimate was of the man whom Essex was pushing against him. But Essex
did not take up his friend's cause in the lukewarm fashion in which
Burghley had patronised his nephew. There was nothing that Essex pursued
with greater pertinacity. He importuned the Queen. He risked without
scruple offending her. She apparently long shrank from directly refusing
his request. The Cecils were for Coke--the "_Huddler_" as Bacon calls
him, in a letter to Essex; but the appointment was delayed. All through
1593, and until April, 1594, the struggle went on.
When Robert Cecil suggested that Essex should be content with the
Solicitor's place for Bacon, "praying him to be well advised, for if his
Lordship had spoken of that it might have been of easier digestion to
the Queen," he turned round on Cecil--
"Digest me no digesting," said the Earl; "for the Attorneyship is
that I must have for Francis Bacon; and in that I will spend my
uttermost credit, friendship, and authority against whomsoever, and
that whosoever went about to procure it to others, that it should
cost both the mediators and the suitors the setting on before they
came by it. And this be you assured of, Sir Robert," quoth the
Earl, "for now do I fully declare myself; and for your own part,
Sir Robert, I do think much and strange both of my Lord your father
and you, that can have the mind to seek the preferment of a
stranger before so near a kinsman; namely, considering if you weigh
in a balance his parts and sufficiency in any respect with those
of his competitor, excepting only four poor years of admittance,
which Francis Bacon hath more than recompensed with the priority of
his reading; in all other respects you shall find no comparison
between them."
But the Queen's disgust at some very slight show of independence on
Bacon's part in Parliament, unforgiven in spite of repeated apologies,
together with the influence of the Cecils and the pressure of so
formidable and so useful a man as Coke, turned the scale against Essex.
In April, 1594, Coke was made Attorney. Coke did not forget the
pretender to law, as he would think him, who had dared so long to
dispute his claims; and Bacon was deeply wounded. "No man," he thought,
"had ever received a more exquisite disgrace," and he spoke of retiring
to Cambridge "to spend the rest of his life in his studies and
contemplations." But Essex was not discouraged. He next pressed eagerly
for the Solicitorship. Again, after much waiting, he was foiled. An
inferior man was put over Bacon's head. Bacon found that Essex, who
could do most things, for some reason could not do this. He himself,
too, had pressed his suit with the greatest importunity on the Queen, on
Burghley, on Cecil, on every one who could help him; he reminded the
Queen how many years ago it was since he first kissed her hand in her
service, and ever since had used his wits to please; but it was all in
vain. For once he lost patience. He was angry with Essex; the Queen's
anger with Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend. He was angry
with the Queen; she held his long waiting cheap; she played with him and
amused herself with delay; he would go abroad, and he "knew her
Majesty's nature, that she neither careth though the whole surname of
the Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither." He was very angry
with Robert Cecil; affecting not to believe them, he tells him stories
he has heard of his corrupt and underhand dealing. He writes almost a
farewell letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to Lord Burghley,
hoping that he would impute any offence that Bacon might have given to
the "complexion of a suitor, and a tired sea-sick suitor," and speaking
despairingly of his future success in the law. The humiliations of what
a suitor has to go through torment him: "It is my luck," he writes to
Cecil, "still to be akin to such things as I neither like in nature nor
would willingly meet with in my course, but yet cannot avoid without
show of base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious strangeness."
And to his friend Fulke Greville he thus unburdens himself:
"SIR,--I understand of your pains to have visited me, for which I
thank you. My matter is an endless question. I assure you I had
said _Requiesce anima mea_; but I now am otherwise put to my
psalter; _Nolite confidere_. I dare go no further. Her Majesty had
by set speech more than once assured me of her intention to call me
to her service, which I could not understand but of the place I had
been named to. And now whether _invidus homo hoc fecit_; or whether
my matter must be an appendix to my Lord of Essex suit; or whether
her Majesty, pretending to prove my ability, meaneth but to take
advantage of some errors which, like enough, at one time or other I
may commit; or what is it? but her Majesty is not ready to despatch
it. And what though the Master of the Rolls, and my Lord of Essex,
and yourself, and others, think my case without doubt, yet in the
meantime I have a hard condition, to stand so that whatsoever
service I do to her Majesty it shall be thought to be but
_servitium viscatum_, lime-twigs and fetches to place myself; and
so I shall have envy, not thanks. This is a course to quench all
good spirits, and to corrupt every man's nature, which will, I
fear, much hurt her Majesty's service in the end. 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 after it again, and so _in infinitum_, I am weary of it; as
also of wearying my good friends, of whom, nevertheless, I hope in
one course or other gratefully to deserve. And so, not forgetting
your business, I leave to trouble you with this idle letter; being
but _justa et moderata querimonia_; for indeed I do confess,
_primus amor_ will not easily be cast off. And thus again I commend
me to you."
After one more effort the chase was given up, at least for the moment;
for it was soon resumed. But just now Bacon felt that all the world was
against him. He would retire "out of the sunshine into the shade." One
friend only encouraged him. He did more. He helped him when Bacon most
wanted help, in his straitened and embarrassed "estate." Essex, when he
could do nothing more, gave Bacon an estate worth at least L1800.
Bacon's resolution is recorded in the following letter:
"IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP,--I pray God her Majesty's
weighing be not like the weight of a balance, _gravia deorsum levia
sursum_. But I am as far from being altered in devotion towards
her, as I am from distrust that she will be altered in opinion
towards me, when she knoweth me better. For myself, I have lost
some opinion, some time, and some means; this is my account; but
then for opinion, it is a blast that goeth and cometh; for time, it
is true it goeth and cometh not; but yet I have learned that it may
be redeemed. For means, I value that most; and the rather, _because
I am purposed not to follow the practice of the law_ (_if her
Majesty command me in any particular, I shall be ready to do her
willing service_); and my reason is only, _because it drinketh too
much time, which I have dedicated to better purposes_. But even for
that point of estate and means, I partly lean to Thales' opinion,
That a philosopher may be rich if he will. Thus your Lordship seeth
how I comfort myself; to the increase whereof I would fain please
myself to believe that to be true which my Lord Treasurer writeth;
which is, that it is more than a philosopher morally can disgest.
But without any such high conceit, I esteem it like the pulling out
of an aching tooth, which, I remember, when I was a child, and had
little philosophy, I was glad of when it was done. For your
Lordship, I do think myself more beholding to you than to any man.
And I say, I reckon myself as a _common_ (not popular but
_common_); and as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a common, so
much your Lordship shall be sure to have.--Your Lordship's to obey
your honourable commands, more settled than ever."
It may be that, as Bacon afterwards maintained, the closing sentences of
this letter implied a significant reserve of his devotion. But during
the brilliant and stormy years of Essex's career which followed, Bacon's
relations to him continued unaltered. Essex pressed Bacon's claims
whenever a chance offered. He did his best to get Bacon a rich wife--the
young widow of Sir Christopher Hatton--but in vain. Instead of Bacon she
accepted Coke, and became famous afterwards in the great family quarrel,
in which Coke and Bacon again found themselves face to face, and which
nearly ruined Bacon before the time. Bacon worked for Essex when he was
wanted, and gave the advice which a shrewd and cautious friend would
give to a man who, by his success and increasing pride and
self-confidence, was running into serious dangers, arming against
himself deadly foes, and exposing himself to the chances of fortune.
Bacon was nervous about Essex's capacity for war, a capacity which
perhaps was not proved, even by the most brilliant exploit of the time,
the capture of Cadiz, in which Essex foreshadowed the heroic but
well-calculated audacities of Nelson and Cochrane, and showed himself as
little able as they to bear the intoxication of success, and to work in
concert with envious and unfriendly associates. At the end of the year
1596, the year in which Essex had won such reputation at Cadiz, Bacon
wrote him a letter of advice and remonstrance. It is a lively picture
of the defects and dangers of Essex's behaviour as the Queen's
favourite; and it is a most characteristic and worldly-wise summary of
the ways which Bacon would have him take, to cure the one and escape the
other. Bacon had, as he says, "good reason to think that the Earl's
fortune comprehended his own." And the letter may perhaps be taken as an
indirect warning to Essex that Bacon must, at any rate, take care of his
own fortune, if the Earl persisted in dangerous courses. Bacon shows how
he is to remove the impressions, strong in the Queen's mind, of Essex's
defects; how he is, by due submissions and stratagems, to catch her
humour--
"But whether I counsel you the best, or for the best, duty bindeth
me to offer to you my wishes. I said to your Lordship last time,
_Martha, Martha, attendis ad plurima, unum sufficit_; win the
Queen: if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see no
end."
Bacon gives a series of minute directions how Essex is to disarm the
Queen's suspicions, and to neutralize the advantage which his rivals
take of them; how he is to remove "the opinion of his nature being
_opiniastre_ and not rulable;" how, avoiding the faults of Leicester and
Hatton, he is, as far as he can, to "allege them for authors and
patterns." Especially, he must give up that show of soldier-like
distinction, which the Queen so disliked, and take some quiet post at
Court. He must not alarm the Queen by seeking popularity; he must take
care of his estate; he must get rid of some of his officers; and he must
not be disquieted by other favourites.
Bacon wished, as he said afterwards, to see him "with a white staff in
his hand, as my Lord of Leicester had," an honour and ornament to the
Court in the eyes of the people and foreign ambassadors. But Essex was
not fit for the part which Bacon urged upon him, that of an obsequious
and vigilant observer of the Queen's moods and humours. As time went on,
things became more and more difficult between him and his strange
mistress; and there were never wanting men who, like Cecil and Raleigh,
for good and bad reasons, feared and hated Essex, and who had the craft
and the skill to make the most of his inexcusable errors. At last he
allowed himself, from ambition, from the spirit of contradiction, from
the blind passion for doing what he thought would show defiance to his
enemies, to be tempted into the Irish campaign of 1599. Bacon at a later
time claimed credit for having foreseen and foretold its issue. "I did
as plainly see his overthrow, chained as it were by destiny to that
journey, as it is possible for any man to ground a judgment on future
contingents." He warned Essex, so he thought in after years, of the
difficulty of the work; he warned him that he would leave the Queen in
the hands of his enemies: "It would be ill for her, ill for him, ill for
the State." "I am sure," he adds, "I never in anything in my life dealt
with him in like earnestness by speech, by writing, and by all the means
I could devise." But Bacon's memory was mistaken. We have his letters.
When Essex went to Ireland, Bacon wrote only in the language of sanguine
hope--so little did he see "overthrow chained by destiny to that
journey," that "some good spirit led his pen to presage to his Lordship
success;" he saw in the enterprise a great occasion of honour to his
friend; he gave prudent counsels, but he looked forward confidently to
Essex being as "fatal a captain to that war, as Africanus was to the war
of Carthage." Indeed, however anxious he may have been, he could not
have foreseen Essex's unaccountable and to this day unintelligible
failure. But failure was the end, from whatever cause; failure,
disgraceful and complete. Then followed wild and guilty but abortive
projects for retrieving his failure, by using his power in Ireland to
make himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and even to the Queen
herself. He intrigued with Tyrone; he intrigued with James of Scotland;
he plunged into a whirl of angry and baseless projects, which came to
nothing the moment they were discussed. How empty and idle they were was
shown by his return against orders to tell his own story at Nonsuch, and
by thus placing himself alone and undeniably in the wrong, in the power
of the hostile Council. Of course it was not to be thought of that Cecil
should not use his advantage in the game. It was too early, irritated
though the Queen was, to strike the final blow. But it is impossible not
to see, looking back over the miserable history, that Essex was treated
in a way which was certain, sooner or later, to make him, being what he
was, plunge into a fatal and irretrievable mistake. He was treated as a
cat treats a mouse; he was worried, confined, disgraced, publicly
reprimanded, brought just within verge of the charge of treason, but not
quite, just enough to discredit and alarm him, but to leave him still a
certain amount of play. He was made to see that the Queen's favour was
not quite hopeless; but that nothing but the most absolute and
unreserved humiliation could recover it. It was plain to any one who
knew Essex that this treatment would drive Essex to madness. "These same
gradations of yours"--so Bacon represents himself expostulating with the
Queen on her caprices--"are fitter to corrupt than to correct any mind
of greatness." They made Essex desperate; he became frightened for his
life, and he had reason to be so, though not in the way which he feared.
At length came the stupid and ridiculous outbreak of the 8th of
February, 1600/1601, a plot to seize the palace and raise the city
against the ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only with
their rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, "if some base and
cruel-minded persons had entered into such an action, it might have
caused much blow and combustion; but it appeared well that they were
such as knew not how to play the malefactors!" But it was sufficient to
bring Essex within the doom of treason.
Essex knew well what the stake was. He lost it, and deserved to lose it,
little as his enemies deserved to win it; for they, too, were doing what
would have cost them their heads if Elizabeth had known
it--corresponding, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about
the succession, and possibly with Spain. But they were playing
cautiously and craftily; he with bungling passion. He had been so long
accustomed to power and place, that he could not endure that rivals
should keep him out of it. They were content to have their own way,
while affecting to be the humblest of servants; he would be nothing less
than a Mayor of the Palace. He was guilty of a great public crime, as
every man is who appeals to arms for anything short of the most sacred
cause. He was bringing into England, which had settled down into
peaceable ways, an imitation of the violent methods of France and the
Guises. But the crime as well as the penalty belonged to the age, and
crimes legally said to be against the State mean morally very different
things, according to the state of society and opinion. It is an
unfairness verging on the ridiculous, when the ground is elaborately
laid for keeping up the impression that Essex was preparing a real
treason against the Queen like that of Norfolk. It was a treason of the
same sort and order as that for which Northumberland sent Somerset to
the block: the treason of being an unsuccessful rival.
Meanwhile Bacon had been getting gradually into the unofficial employ of
the Government. He had become one of the "Learned Counsel"--lawyers with
subordinate and intermittent work, used when wanted, but without patent
or salary, and not ranking with the regular law officers. The Government
had found him useful in affairs of the revenue, in framing
interrogatories for prisoners in the Tower, in drawing up reports of
plots against the Queen. He did not in this way earn enough to support
himself; but he had thus come to have some degree of access to the
Queen, which he represents as being familiar and confidential, though he
still perceived, as he says himself, that she did not like him. At the
first news of Essex's return to England, Bacon greeted him--
"MY LORD,--Conceiving that your Lordship came now up in the person
of a good servant to see your sovereign mistress, which kind of
compliments are many times _instar magnorum meritorum_, and
therefore it would be hard for me to find you, I have committed to
this poor paper the humble salutations of him _that is more yours
than any man's, and more yours than any man_. To these salutations
I add a due and joyful gratulation, confessing that your Lordship,
in your last conference with me before your journey, spake not in
vain, God making it good, That you trusted we should say _Quis
putasset_! Which as it is found true in a happy sense, so I wish
you do not find another _Quis putasset_ in the manner of taking
this so great a service. But I hope it is, as he said, _Nubecula
est, cito transibit_, and that your Lordship's wisdom and
obsequious circumspection and patience will turn all to the best.
So referring all to some time that I may attend you, I commit you
to God's best preservation."
But when Essex's conduct in Ireland had to be dealt with, Bacon's
services were called for; and from this time his relations towards Essex
were altered. Every one, no one better than the Queen herself, knew all
that he owed to Essex. It is strangely illustrative of the time, that
especially as Bacon held so subordinate a position, he should have been
required, and should have been trusted, to act against his only and most
generous benefactor. It is strange, too, that however great his loyalty
to the Queen, however much and sincerely he might condemn his friend's
conduct, he should think it possible to accept the task. He says that he
made some remonstrance; and he says, no doubt truly, that during the
first stage of the business he used the ambiguous position in which he
was placed to soften Essex's inevitable punishment, and to bring about a
reconciliation between him and the Queen. But he was required, as the
Queen's lawyer, to set forth in public Essex's offences; and he admits
that he did so "not over tenderly." Yet all this, even if we have
misgivings about it, is intelligible. If he had declined, he could not,
perhaps, have done the service which he assures us that he tried to do
for Essex; and it is certain that he would have had to reckon with the
terrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from the throne of
Henry VIII., and who had certainly no great love for Bacon himself. She
had already shown him in a much smaller matter what was the forfeit to
be paid for any resistance to her will. All the hopes of his life must
perish; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he had won with
such unremitting toil and patient waiting would be sacrificed, and he
would henceforth live under the wrath of those who never forgave. And
whatever he did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex. His
scheming imagination and his indefatigable pen were at work. He tried
strange indirect methods; he invented a correspondence between his
brother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order to
soften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When the
Queen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "though
I profess not to be a poet," he "prepared a sonnet tending and alluding
to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord." It was an awkward
thing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in the
counsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thought
him ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and that stories circulated
to his disadvantage, as if he were poisoning the Queen's ear against
Essex. But he might argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed as
Essex had been, it was the best that he could now do for him; and as
long as it was only a question of Essex's disgrace and enforced absence
from Court, Bacon could not be bound to give up the prospects of his
life--indeed, his public duty as a subordinate servant of government--on
account of his friend's inexcusable and dangerous follies. Essex did not
see it so, and in the subjoined correspondence had the advantage; but
Bacon's position, though a higher one might be imagined, where men had
been such friends as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one:
"MY LORD,--No man can better expound my doings than your Lordship,
which maketh me need to say the less. Only I humbly pray you to
believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation first of
_bonus civis_, which with us is a good and true servant to the
Queen, and next of _bonus vir_, that is an honest man. I desire
your Lordship also to think that though I confess I love some
things much better than I love your Lordship--as the Queen's
service, her quiet and contentment, her honour, her favour, the
good of my country, and the like--yet I love few persons better
than yourself, both for gratitude's sake and for your own virtues,
which cannot hurt but by accident or abuse. Of which my good
affection I was ever ready and am ready to yield testimony by any
good offices, but with such reservations as yourself cannot but
allow; for as I was ever sorry that your Lordship should fly with
waxen wings, doubting Icarus's fortune, so for the growing up of
your own feathers, specially ostrich's, or any other save of a bird
of prey, no man shall be more glad. And this is the axletree
whereupon I have turned and shall turn, which to signify to you,
though I think you are of yourself persuaded as much, is the cause
of my writing; and so I commend your Lordship to God's goodness.
From Gray's Inn, this 20th day of July, 1600.
"Your Lordship's most humbly,
"FR. BACON."
To this letter Essex returned an answer of dignified reserve, such as
Bacon might himself have dictated--
"MR. BACON,--I can neither expound nor censure your late actions,
being ignorant of all of them, save one, and having directed my
sight inward only, to examine myself. You do pray me to believe
that you only aspire to the conscience and commendation of _bonus
civis_ and _bonus vir_; and I do faithfully assure you, that while
that is your ambition (though your course be active and mine
contemplative), yet we shall both _convenire in codem tertio_ and
_convenire inter nosipsos_. Your profession of affection and offer
of good offices are welcome to me. For answer to them I will say
but this, that you have believed I have been kind to you, and you
may believe that I cannot be other, either upon humour or my own
election. I am a stranger to all poetical conceits, or else I
should say somewhat of your poetical example. But this I must say,
that I never flew with other wings than desire to merit and
confidence in my Sovereign's favour; and when one of these wings
failed me I would light nowhere but at my Sovereign's feet, though
she suffered me to be bruised with my fall. And till her Majesty,
that knows I was never bird of prey, finds it to agree with her
will and her service that my wings should be imped again, I have
committed myself to the mire. No power but my God's and my
Sovereign's can alter this resolution of
"Your retired friend,
"ESSEX."
But after Essex's mad attempt in the city a new state of things arose.
The inevitable result was a trial for high treason, a trial of which no
one could doubt the purpose and end. The examination of accomplices
revealed speeches, proposals, projects, not very intelligible to us in
the still imperfectly understood game of intrigue that was going on
among all parties at the end of Elizabeth's reign, but quite enough to
place Essex at the mercy of the Government and the offended Queen. "The
new information," says Mr. Spedding, "had been immediately communicated
to Coke and Bacon." Coke, as Attorney-General, of course conducted the
prosecution; and the next prominent person on the side of the Crown was
not the Solicitor, or any other regular law officer, but Bacon, though
holding the very subordinate place of one of the "Learned Counsel."
It does not appear that he thought it strange, that he showed any pain
or reluctance, that he sought to be excused. He took it as a matter of
course. The part assigned to Bacon in the prosecution was as important
as that of Coke; and he played it more skilfully and effectively. Trials
in those days were confused affairs, often passing into a mere wrangle
between the judges, lawyers, and lookers-on, and the prisoner at the
bar. It was so in this case. Coke is said to have blundered in his way
of presenting the evidence, and to have been led away from the point
into an altercation with Essex. Probably it really did not much matter;
but the trial was getting out of its course and inclining in favour of
the prisoner, till Bacon--Mr. Spedding thinks, out of his regular
turn--stepped forward and retrieved matters. This is Mr. Spedding's
account of what Bacon said and did:
"By this time the argument had drifted so far away from the point
that it must have been difficult for a listener to remember what it
was that the prisoners were charged with, or how much of the charge
had been proved. And Coke, who was all this time the sole speaker
on behalf of the Crown, was still following each fresh topic that
rose before him, without the sign of an intention or the intimation
of a wish to return to the main question and reform the broken
ranks of his evidence. Luckily he seems to have been now at a loss
what point to take next, and the pause gave Bacon an opportunity of
rising. It can hardly have been in pursuance of previous
arrangements; for though it was customary in those days to
distribute the evidence into parts and to assign several parts to
several counsel, there had been no appearance as yet of any part
being concluded. It is probable that the course of the trial had
upset previous arrangements and confused the parts. At any rate so
it was, however it came to pass, that when Cecil and Essex had at
last finished their expostulation and parted with charitable
prayers, each that the other might be forgiven, then (says our
reporter) Mr. Bacon entered into a speech much after this fashion:
"'In speaking of this late and horrible rebellion which hath been
in the eyes and ears of all men, I shall save myself much labour in
opening and enforcing the points thereof, insomuch as I speak not
before a country jury of ignorant men, but before a most honourable
assembly of the greatest Peers of the land, whose wisdoms conceive
far more than my tongue can utter; yet with your gracious and
honourable favours I will presume, if not for information of your
Honours, yet for the discharge of my duty, to say thus much. No man
can be ignorant, that knows matters of former ages--and all history
makes it plain--that there was never any traitor heard of that
durst directly attempt the seat of his liege prince but he always
coloured his practices with some plausible pretence. For God hath
imprinted such a majesty in the face of a prince that no private
man dare approach the person of his sovereign with a traitorous
intent. And therefore they run another side course, _oblique et a
latere_: some to reform corruptions of the State and religion; some
to reduce the ancient liberties and customs pretended to be lost
and worn out; some to remove those persons that being in high
places make themselves subject to envy; but all of them aim at the
overthrow of the State and destruction of the present rulers. And
this likewise is the use of those that work mischief of another
quality; as Cain, that first murderer, took up an excuse for his
fact, shaming to outface it with impudency, thus the Earl made his
colour the severing some great men and councillors from her
Majesty's favour, and the fear he stood in of his pretended enemies
lest they should murder him in his house. Therefore he saith he
was compelled to fly into the City for succour and assistance; not
much unlike Pisistratus, of whom it was so anciently written how he
gashed and wounded himself, and in that sort ran crying into Athens
that his life was sought and like to have been taken away; thinking
to have moved the people to have pitied him and taken his part by
such counterfeited harm and danger; whereas his aim and drift was
to take the government of the city into his hands and alter the
form thereof. With like pretences of dangers and assaults the Earl
of Essex entered the City of London and passed through the bowels
thereof, blanching rumours that he should have been murdered and
that the State was sold; whereas he had no such enemies, no such
dangers: persuading themselves that if they could prevail all would
have done well. But now _magna scelera terminantur in haeresin_; for
you, my Lord, should know that though princes give their subjects
cause of discontent, though they take away the honours they have
heaped upon them, though they bring them to a lower estate than
they raised them from, yet ought they not to be so forgetful of
their allegiance that they should enter into any undutiful act;
much less upon rebellion, as you, my Lord, have done. All
whatsoever you have or can say in answer hereof are but shadows.
And therefore methinks it were best for you to confess, not to
justify.'"
Essex was provoked by Bacon's incredulous sneer about enemies and
dangers--"I call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon," and referred to the
letters which Bacon had written in his name, and in which these
dangerous enmities were taken for granted. Bacon, in answer, repeated
what he said so often--"That he had spent more time in vain in studying
how to make the Earl a good servant to the Queen and State than he had
done in anything else." Once more Coke got the proceedings into a
tangle, and once more Bacon came forward to repair the miscarriage of
his leader.
"'I have never yet seen in any case such favour shown to any
prisoner; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by
fractions, and so silly a defence of such great and notorious
treasons. May it please your Grace, you have seen how weakly he
hath shadowed his purpose and how slenderly he hath answered the
objections against him. But, my Lord, I doubt the variety of
matters and the many digressions may minister occasion of
forgetfulness, and may have severed the judgments of the Lords; and
therefore I hold it necessary briefly to recite the Judges'
opinions.'
"That being done, he proceeded to this effect:
"'Now put the case that the Earl of Essex's intents were, as he
would have it believed, to go only as a suppliant to her Majesty.
Shall their petitions be presented by armed petitioners? This must
needs bring loss of property to the prince. Neither is it any point
of law, as my Lord of Southampton would have it believed, that
condemns them of treason. To take secret counsel, to execute it, to
run together in numbers armed with weapons--what can be the excuse?
Warned by the Lord Keeper, by a herald, and yet persist! Will any
simple man take this to be less than treason?'
"The Earl of Essex answered that if he had purposed anything
against others than those his private enemies, he would not have
stirred with so slender a company. Whereunto Mr. Bacon answered:
"'It was not the company you carried with you but the assistance
you hoped for in the City which you trusted unto. The Duke of Guise
thrust himself into the streets of Paris on the day of the
Barricades in his doublet and hose, attended only with eight
gentlemen, and found that help in the city which (thanks be to God)
you failed of here. And what followed? The King was forced to put
himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to steal away
to scape their fury. Even such was my Lord's confidence too, and
his pretence the same--an all-hail and a kiss to the City. But the
end was treason, as hath been sufficiently proved. But when he had
once delivered and engaged himself so far into that which the
shallowness of his conceit could not accomplish as he expected, the
Queen for her defence taking arms against him, he was glad to yield
himself; and thinking to colour his practices, turned his pretexts,
and alleged the occasion thereof to proceed from a private
quarrel.'
"To this" (adds the reporter) "the Earl answered little. Nor was
anything said afterwards by either of the prisoners, either in the
thrust-and-parry dialogue with Coke that followed, or when they
spoke at large to the question why judgment should not be
pronounced, which at all altered the complexion of the case. They
were both found guilty and sentence passed in the usual form."
Bacon's legal position was so subordinate a place that there must have
been a special reason for his employment. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that, on the part of the Government, Bacon was thus used for
the very reason that he had been the friend of Essex. He was not
commonly called upon in such prosecutions. He was not employed by Cecil
in the Winchester trials of Raleigh, Grey, and Cobham, three years
afterwards, nor in those connected with the Gunpowder Plot. He was
called upon now because no one could so much damage Essex; and this last
proof of his ready service was required by those whose favour, since
Essex had gone hopelessly wrong, he had been diligently seeking. And
Bacon acquiesced in the demand, apparently without surprise. No record
remains to show that he felt any difficulty in playing his part. He had
persuaded himself that his public duty, his duty as a good citizen to
the Queen and the commonwealth, demanded of him that he should obey the
call to do his best to bring a traitor to punishment.
Public duty has claims on a man as well as friendship, and in many
conceivable cases claims paramount to those of friendship. And yet
friendship, too, has claims, at least on a man's memory. Essex had been
a dear friend, if words could mean anything. He had done more than any
man had done for Bacon, generously and nobly, and Bacon had acknowledged
it in the amplest terms. Only a year before he had written, "I am as
much yours as any man's, and as much yours as any man." It is not, and
it was not, a question of Essex's guilt. It may be a question whether
the whole matter was not exaggerated as to its purpose, as it certainly
was as to its real danger and mischief. We at least know that his
rivals dabbled in intrigue and foolish speeches as well as he; that
little more than two years afterwards Raleigh and Grey and Cobham were
condemned for treason in much the same fashion as he was; that Cecil to
the end of his days--with whatever purpose--was a pensioner of Spain.
The question was not whether Essex was guilty. The question for Bacon
was, whether it was becoming in him, having been what he had been to
Essex, to take a leading part in proceedings which were to end in his
ruin and death. He was not a judge. He was not a regular law officer
like Coke. His only employment had been casual and occasional. He might,
most naturally, on the score of his old friendship, have asked to be
excused. Condemning, as he did, his friend's guilt and folly, he might
have refused to take part in a cause of blood, in which his best friend
must perish. He might honestly have given up Essex as incorrigible, and
have retired to stand apart in sorrow and silence while the inevitable
tragedy was played out. The only answer to this is, that to have
declined would have incurred the Queen's displeasure: he would have
forfeited any chance of advancement; nay, closely connected as he had
been with Essex, he might have been involved in his friend's ruin. But
inferior men have marred their fortunes by standing by their friends in
not undeserved trouble, and no one knew better than Bacon what was
worthy and noble in human action. The choice lay before him. He seems
hardly to have gone through any struggle. He persuaded himself that he
could not help himself, under the constraint of his duty to the Queen,
and he did his best to get Essex condemned.
And this was not all. The death of Essex was a shock to the popularity
of Elizabeth greater than anything that had happened in her long reign.
Bacon's name also had come into men's mouths as that of a time-server
who played fast and loose with Essex and his enemies, and who, when he
had got what he could from Essex, turned to see what he could get from
those who put him to death. A justification of the whole affair was felt
to be necessary; and Bacon was fixed upon for the distinction and the
dishonour of doing it. No one could tell the story so well, and it was
felt that he would not shrink from it. Nor did he. In cold blood he sat
down to blacken Essex, using his intimate personal knowledge of the past
to strengthen his statements against a friend who was in his grave, and
for whom none could answer but Bacon himself. It is a well-compacted and
forcible account of Essex's misdoings, on which of course the colour of
deliberate and dangerous treason was placed. Much of it, no doubt, was
true; but even of the facts, and much more of the colour, there was no
check to be had, and it is certain that it was an object to the
Government to make out the worst. It is characteristic that Bacon
records that he did not lose sight of the claims of courtesy, and
studiously spoke of "my Lord of Essex" in the draft submitted for
correction to the Queen; but she was more unceremonious, and insisted
that the "rebel" should be spoken of simply as "Essex."
After a business of this kind, fines and forfeitures flowed in
abundantly, and were "usually bestowed on deserving servants or favoured
suitors by way of reward;" and Bacon came in for his share. Out of one
of the fines he received L1200. "The Queen hath done something for me,"
he writes to a friendly creditor, "though not in the proportion I had
hoped," and he afterwards asked for something more. It was rather under
the value of Essex's gift to him in 1594. But she still refused him all
promotion. He was without an official place in the Queen's service, and
he never was allowed to have it. It is clear that the "Declaration of
the Treason of the Earl of Essex," if it justified the Government, did
not remove the odium which had fallen on Bacon. Mr. Spedding says that
he can find no signs of it. The proof of it is found in the "Apology"
which Bacon found it expedient to write after Elizabeth's death and
early in James's reign. He found that the recollection of the way in
which he had dealt with his friend hung heavy upon him; men hesitated to
trust him in spite of his now recognised ability. Accordingly, he drew
up an apology, which he addressed to Lord Mountjoy, the friend, in
reality half the accomplice, of Essex, in his wild, ill-defined plan for
putting pressure on Elizabeth. It is a clear, able, of course _ex parte_
statement of the doings of the three chief actors, two of whom could no
longer answer for themselves, or correct and contradict the third. It
represents the Queen as implacable and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly and
outrageously wilful, proud, and undutiful, Bacon himself as using every
effort and device to appease the Queen's anger and suspiciousness, and
to bring Essex to a wiser and humbler mind. The picture is indeed a
vivid one, and full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and merciless
mistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust the haughty spirit
of a once-loved but rebellious favourite, whom, though he has deeply
offended, she yet wishes to bring once more under her yoke; and of the
calm, keen-witted looker-on, watching the dangerous game, not without
personal interest, but with undisturbed presence of mind, and doing his
best to avert an irreparable and fatal breach. How far he honestly did
his best for his misguided friend we can only know from his own report;
but there is no reason to think that he did Essex ill service, though
he notices in passing an allegation that the Queen in one of her angry
fits had charged him with this. But his interest clearly was to make up
the quarrel between the Queen and Essex. Bacon would have been a greater
man with both of them if he had been able to do so. He had been too
deeply in Essex's intimacy to make his new position of mediator, with a
strong bias on the Queen's side, quite safe and easy for a man of
honourable mind; but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have acted
as he represents himself acting without forgetting what he owed to his
friend. Till the last great moment of trial there is a good deal to be
said for Bacon: a man keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strong
sense of what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his own
reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by Essex's folly. But at
length came the crisis which showed the man, and threw light on all that
had passed before, when he was picked out, out of his regular place, to
be charged with the task of bringing home the capital charge against
Essex. He does not say he hesitated. He does not say that he asked to be
excused the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister of
vengeance for those who required that Essex should die. He did his work,
we are told by his admiring biographer, better than Coke, and repaired
the blunders of the prosecution. He passes over very shortly this part
of the business: "It was laid upon me with the rest of my fellows;" yet
it is the knot and key of the whole, as far as his own character is
concerned. 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.
CHAPTER III.
BACON AND JAMES I.
Bacon's life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, of
disinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delight
and benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and
power. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposed
necessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition and
self-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction,
but at bottom because he thought he must--must be a great man, must be
rich, must live in the favour of the great, because without it his great
designs could not be accomplished. His original plan of life was
disclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with an
assured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of his
time to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, was
gradually changed: first, because he could not get such a place; and
next because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain him the
Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Essex
could do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, and
specially the career of the law. We know that he would not by preference
have chosen the law, and did not feel that his vocation lay that way;
but it was the only way open to him for mending his fortunes. And so
the two lives went on side by side, the worldly one--he would have said,
the practical one--often interfering with the life of thought and
discovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramount
in his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with
which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truest
ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a
great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and
visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers
after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great,
Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes of
the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano
Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the
Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the _New Atlantis_, the
precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the _Lincei_ at Rome.
Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have
originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence
of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel
abroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased to
think of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it--for its shows, its
prizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and
vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue or
despise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest in
the nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in
shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful
and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and
government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena;
he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to
the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a
lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond
his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become
powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the
service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating
between jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter into
the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and
affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw
all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great
persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.
In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly
persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical
speculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and most
diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we
commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and
an easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the
object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he is
obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the
humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors,
ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it
was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. He
never misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pass an
opportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him. He is
so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we
see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throws
himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the
theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author
of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of
tables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer.
If he had not been the author of the _Instauratio_, his life would not
have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and
supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who
unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment. He claimed to be, in
spite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to
public work and as capable of it as any of them. He was ready for
anything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to take
infinite trouble about it. The law, if he did not like it, was yet no
by-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom he
maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry. He felt
bitterly the disappointment of seeing men like Coke and Fleming and
Doddridge and Hobart pass before him; he could not, if he had been only
a lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to him, which
they got; only, he had besides a whole train of purposes, an inner and
supreme ambition, of which they knew noth |
