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  Golden Lads

  A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends

  Daphne du Maurier

  Foreword by Lisa Jardine

  Little, Brown and Company

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  Feare no more the heate o’ th’ Sun,

  Nor the furious Winters rages,

  Thou thy worldly task hast don,

  Home art gon, and tane thy wages.

  Golden Lads, and Girles all must,

  As Chimney-Sweepers come to dust.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Acknowledgements

  My grateful thanks to the Countess of Verulam for her courtesy in receiving my son and myself at Gorhambury; to Mrs King for answering my many questions about the original Tudor building; and to Monsieur Méras, chief archivist at Montauban, for entertaining us, showing us the old city, and producing the documents concerning Anthony Bacon. Above all, my immense gratitude to Joan St George Saunders and her team of assistants at Writers’ and Speakers’ Research for the work which they carried out for me over a period of eighteen months, with a special thought for the late Mrs Pugh, who took over the particularly difficult job of transcribing so many letters from Lady Bacon. Finally, I am indebted to Sheila Bush for editing my manuscript with such patience and perception.

  D. du M.

  Foreword

  On 5 November 1972, Daphne du Maurier wrote to her much younger writer friend Oriel Malet from her home in Kilmarth: ‘I am now happily settled in, I hope, for winter, surrounded by heavy-going books about Bacon, and trying to make notes. Whether or not I really get down to doing him, I don’t know.’

  A highly successful novelist, du Maurier was also an accomplished biographer—she had written a biography of her father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, in 1934, a family biography, The Du Mauriers, in 1937, and The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë in 1960. A year after publishing The Winding Stair, in 1977, she went on to write an autobiography of her early life up to her marriage—Growing Pains, or Myself When Young, as it is now published. So it was a period when she seemed very much in the mood for the genre. As she approached her seventies, du Maurier embarked upon what was to become a pair of studies of the lives of Sir Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony. Golden Lads, the first of these, tackled the joint biography of the two brothers; The Winding Stair focused closely on the life of Francis, and revealed her underlying motive for being interested in the brothers at all—one or other of them, in her view, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays.

  The problem was, du Maurier confessed to Oriel Malet, that whereas she was used to working comfortably at home with the books she could take out of the London Library, source materials for a serious scholarly book on Francis Bacon, using primary materials, were less conveniently available. ‘So much of interest about him seems to be hidden away in the British Museum or Lambeth Palace.’1

  A person of considerable means by this stage in her life, du Maurier solved the problem of the dispersed and difficult-to-access materials by hiring Mrs St George Saunders and a team of fellow independent scholars to transcribe more than three hundred letters from the collections at the British Library, Lambeth Palace Library, and in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington in the United States.

  Within weeks of her researchers beginning their work, however, du Maurier’s own curiosity was thoroughly aroused: ‘am getting more interested in Anthony than in Francis, even, he was so in with Essex, and with secret spies in France, and apparently spoke perfect French, which is always menacing.’ In fact a good deal of the research du Maurier assembled on Anthony Bacon was entirely new; no previous biographer had teased out so much concerning the often murky career of Sir Francis Bacon’s elder brother.

  Her researchers found documents disclosing that Anthony had travelled around France for twelve years, collecting intelligence for the Elizabethan administration. In late September 1973, du Maurier decided to follow the Anthony Bacon trail herself. Chauffeured by her son Christian (Kits) Browning, she drove to the South of France:

  Our tour was as follows. From Bordeaux to Agen, and went from there to Montauban… I wished in retrospect that we had stayed longer in that part, because we could have done ‘Navarre’, and all that Gascon part that Henry IV came from, and I bet it was at Pau that Anthony Bacon went, where he stayed with him. But tant pis. We went north instead, to the Loire.

  At Montauban, du Maurier’s team’s assiduous exploration of the archives turned up a Bacon family secret: records in the Archives Départementales containing a charge of sodomy made against Anthony Bacon, probably during the summer of 1586. He narrowly escaped punishment, but, as du Maurier suggests, the fear of details of the case reaching England coloured the remainder of his political life.

  In February 1975, du Maurier wrote to Malet describing the effort she was now devoting to gaining a closer understanding of the younger of her two subjects:

  All I have done these past weeks is to read through various translations from the Latin—unfinished works of Francis Bacon! Difficult to concentrate when one’s mind is not at top peak, but golly, talk about Deep Thoughts! Montaigne is easy and chatty in comparison. But apparently, F[rancis]’s Latin stuff was thought very highly of in Europe, France, Italy etc and that’s why he wrote so much in Latin, so that his Deep Thoughts could be widely read. It’s no good my trying to write about him, unless I can somehow explain his Thoughts! Scholars, of course, know—but not my sort of reader!2

  The last sentence here might suggest that du Maurier was intending to write her books on the Bacons in as racy a style, and to be as much page-turners, as her bestselling fictional works. The Bacon books were to be for ‘[her] sort of reader’. Perhaps that was indeed what she had in mind—particularly if she could have found firm evidence of either brother’s involvement in Shakespeare’s creative process. In fact, the end product of her strenuous researches, and her long poring over Bacon’s unfinished works, was a pair of remarkably conventional scholarly biographies.

  Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and Their Friends (1975) and The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (1976) remain useful volumes for anyone interested in Sir Francis Bacon and his elusive, ailing elder brother. The first takes the story to the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, ending with Anthony’s death in May 1601, and contains another original archival find by Mrs St George Saunders: the record of his burial in St Olave’s Church in Hart Street, London. The second covers Francis Bacon’s more glittering Jacobean career. It also revealed her underlying motive for being interested in the brothers at all. She was determined to stack up a compelling body of circumstantial evidence proving that either Anthony or Francis Bacon was closely involved in the writing of Shakespeare’s plays.

  It was because of this hidden agenda that the French connection of Anthony Bacon, when uncovered, had been particularly welcome, and why du Maurier now trekked down to Montauban to look at these particular records herself. Anthony, she wrote:

  stayed with Henry of Navarre before he became King, and as Love’s Labour’s Lost is all about the Court of Navarre, I get more interested than ever! Supposing brother Anthony was really the hidden Shakespeare person, and not Francis? I have got old Tudor maps of London, and am poring over them, to see what it was like in those days. Anthony lived in Bishopsgate, next to a theatre!3

  In The Winding Stair she went further and suggested that Anthony was one of the authors of ‘Shakespeare’s’ sonnets:

  It must not be forgotten that Anthony Bacon… was sending sonnets back to England from France as early as the mid-1580’s; and as a close confidant of the Essex circle, devoted to Robert Devereux, he cannot be entirely dismissed, should the authorship of [Shakespeare’s sonnets] have to be shared.4

  Throughout Golden Lads, this suggestion runs just below the surface of the text: lines from Shakespeare are woven into her text, echoing passages she has found in the archival letters. Here, though, she merely hints at possible connections. In The Winding Stair, the question is tackled head on. There she asserts:

  Anthony Bacon was living in Bishopsgate, close to the Bull Inn where plays were performed, in 1594; William Shakespeare was living in the same parish, and acting with Richard Burbage and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was on December 28th of that year that The Comedy of Errors was performed at Gray’s Inn. It is furthermore suggested that from this time forward both Anthony and Francis Bacon, and possibly others, were in collaboration with the actor-dramatist on some of the earlier plays, which were issued in quarto and printed, and that, after the Essex debacle, Anthony’s death and the start of the new reign, Francis Bacon continued this collaboration.5

  Du Maurier’s ‘Bacon wrote Shakespeare’ agenda is probably responsible for the neglect of these two serious and largely original books on the Bacon brothers. While The Winding Stair was in press, du Maurier entertained the academic establishment in the person of All Souls’ don and popular historian A. L. Rowse.
She reported to Oriel Malet that:

  A. L. Rowse came to lunch on Wednesday, and never stopped talking! Very complimentary over Golden Lads, but says he will poison me if I suggest in Winding Stair that Bacon had anything to do with the Shakespeare plays… (I didn’t dare tell him what I have said about the Shakespeare plays in Winding Stair!).6

  In public, Rowse declared how important du Maurier’s researches had been:

  She actually did make a genuine contribution to sixteenth-century English history when she discovered the [Montauban] archive. It was a very remarkable achievement deserving wider recognition. She was very anxious that I should approve of the two books. She really worked at them; she didn’t just rely on having good researchers.7

  But scholars ever since have been as embarrassed as he was by a line of argument which condemned du Maurier’s efforts to languish alongside those of other ‘potty’ Bacon scholars, most notoriously the early nineteenth-century scholar Delia Bacon.

  We ought not, however, to consign Golden Lads to oblivion on this account. It is a landmark book on a much-neglected figure (the great Verulam’s difficult elder brother), containing ground-breaking research on sixteenth-century archival materials. These revealed the extraordinary life of an Elizabethan intelligencer, who in his prime moved freely between intimacy with the great and the good at the court of Elizabeth I, the French king, Henri IV, and the renowned essayist Michel de Montaigne, in France. Here—just as du Maurier hoped—is a story pieced together out of scattered fragments of information and assiduous archival sleuthing, which remains a valuable starting point for further Bacon studies today.

  It is also, at the end of the day, vintage du Maurier—a page-turner, and a thundering good read!

  Lisa Jardine, 2006

  Part One

  1

  When Anthony Cooke became tutor to Prince Edward, the heir to the throne, in the closing years of King Henry VIII, he and his family of nine—five daughters and four sons—knew very well that life henceforward, for all of them, would no longer be the quiet, studious affair that it had been in the past, within the safe precincts of their home at Gidea Hall in Essex, the only rivalry permitted that of sister against sister, brother against brother, and who could translate the swiftest a page from Latin, Greek, Italian or Hebrew. It would be instead a process of manoeuvre, of political judgement, of precise timing, with the ability to hold the confidence of the Prince’s uncle, Lord Edward Seymour, the surest step to winning the affection of the future King himself. ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and he will be mine forever,’ the Spanish founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, is reputed to have said; and considering his new pupil, delicate, thoughtful, wise beyond his years but inclined to obstinacy, Anthony Cooke wondered which of his own five daughters was most fitted to aid him in the task of moulding the character of England’s future sovereign.

  His choice fell upon his second daughter, Ann, then in her seventeenth year. His eldest girl, Mildred, two years older, was equally brilliant at Greek and Latin; but, possibly better favoured in her personal appearance, was more likely to make an early and advantageous marriage. Instructed as she was to her finger-tips in the Protestant faith, with a healthy abhorrence of all things Catholic, Ann could hardly fail to impress upon her royal charge the absolute necessity of holding firm to all the tenets and maxims of the reformed church.

  Ann, fond though she was of her elder sister, felt a small sense of triumph that the choice had fallen upon herself. Devotion to her father was paramount; he was almost equal to God in her eyes, and the belief that she was his favourite daughter seemed to her now proven. Adhering firmly to the doctrine of predestination, she felt that the hand of the Almighty was upon her; she had been chosen from among her sisters to interpret the Holy Word to the King’s son. Proud, plump and determined, Ann Cooke set forth for Court in the wake of her father, her envious younger brothers and sisters waving farewell.

  King Henry, already a sick man, and harried by affairs of state, had no time to spare for yet another of his son’s attendants, and Ann arrived at Court to find that, although her father commanded Prince Edward’s attention for three or four hours a day, she herself was obliged to share her duties as governess with other equally scholastic ladies of her own age or even younger, amongst them the Prince’s cousins, the Ladies Seymour, whose aptitude in writing Latin verse excelled that of either Ann herself or her sister Mildred. It was a chastening experience to find them fluttering around the Prince with Latin and Greek tags upon their tongues and a cousinly air of intimacy into the bargain.

  She decided to concentrate her powers upon religious instruction, but here again there was apt to be distraction, for no sooner had she caught the young Prince’s attention with a dissertation upon Calvin, a matter very close to her heart, than she would be interrupted by the arrival of his nurse with broth, or the physician would come to examine his chest, which was said to be weak, or worse still one of his Seymour uncles would arrive with a pet dog, and the Prince, with a wan smile but a stubborn air, would announce to his governess that he had had enough of learning for the day. Ann appealed to her father for advice, but he could give her little comfort, for he was himself subordinate to the Prince’s chief tutor, the famous scholar John Cheke, who had more important matters on his mind. Not only was he involved in endless controversy with his learned contemporaries about the pronunciation of the Greek language, but he was anxious to secure the future of his widowed son-in-law William Cecil, an extremely able young man of five-and-twenty. Cheke’s daughter had died a few years previously, leaving an infant son named Thomas; and Cecil was now hovering on the fringe of Court society in the hope that his father-in-law might say a word for him in the right circles.

  Cheke intimated to Anthony Cooke that young William Cecil would go far, and only needed to marry again—preferably a young woman who combined brains with beauty—to find himself in the forefront of those jostling for place in the corridors of power. Anthony Cooke found an early opportunity of falling in with young Cecil, who did indeed seem to be exceedingly able, far-sighted and agreeable, and on the first suitable occasion presented his daughter Ann. The meeting did not go well, William Cecil, whose outlook was political rather than religious, showing little interest in Ann’s customary tirades against the odious practices of the Romanists. It was after this encounter that Anthony Cooke suggested to his daughter that her sister Mildred might care to relieve her for a few weeks in her capacity as governess at Court, while Ann herself would benefit from the fresh air of Essex. The exchange was made, and Mildred, slim, fair-haired, keen-eyed, and although sharply intelligent a better listener than her younger sister, made her debut at Court and was immediately liked by all, especially by William Cecil.

  It came as a shock, and possibly not entirely a pleasant one, when Anthony Cooke arrived at Gidea Hall to tell his family that their sister Mildred was betrothed to William Cecil. He had given the happy pair his blessing, and the marriage would take place in December. There was general rejoicing, in which of course Ann joined; nevertheless, she could not but be aware that in a certain sense Mildred had stolen a march on her. She had found herself a husband in a short space of time, which was naturally the ultimate hope of all young women, scholarly or otherwise, and not just any young man, as her father explained to them, but one of the most promising of his generation. He had no title and as yet little land, but these would come, and appointments too, and he could not have wished a better match for his eldest daughter.

  The wedding on December 25th 1546 had hardly been solemnised, the celebrations ended, when King Henry VIII fell mortally sick, and died on January 28th. Prince Edward, nine years old, was crowned in Westminster Abbey, his uncle Edward Seymour, now Duke of Somerset, became Lord Protector, and those who had won his favour during the preceding months found promotion in their turn. Anthony Cooke was made a Knight of the Bath, and later in the year he was returned as Member of Parliament for Shoreham. John Cheke became Provost of Cambridge, but the education of the young King remained in his hands. William Cecil was elected Member of Parliament for his family borough of Stamford, and the following year the Lord Protector Somerset made him his Master of Requests. His wife Mildred was not so fortunate. Her first baby died, as did subsequent infants, and a number of years passed before she produced two daughters who lived, naming them Anne and Elizabeth after her sisters.