The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall Read online

  Francis knew very well that Lord Chief Justice Coke’s ‘plerophoria’ in the past had led to many extraneous matters being brought up for heated discussion and argument in the trials of great persons—his personal animosity to Sir Walter Ralegh at Winchester had been one, while (dating back to when he had held the post of Attorney-General) his vituperation of the 2nd Earl of Essex had scandalised not only those present in Westminster Hall but the ordinary people. If the Earl of Somerset was indeed guilty of being accessory to the crime of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, then the crime must be proved when his case came up for trial; the Attorney-General would do his duty as prosecutor accordingly, but he would not be a party to any vilification of the accused’s character or relationship with others which might lead to defamation of his Majesty and indeed the Crown.

  The trial, which had been appointed for hearing at the end of January or early February, was suddenly postponed by Lord Chief Justice Coke, who announced that he had received fresh evidence in a confidential dispatch from Spain which must first be sifted, and persons questioned. He hinted, at the same time, that this evidence might involve the Earl of Somerset in the graver charge of treason.

  High treason could hardly be termed a ‘digression’. The ambassador to Spain who had sent the dispatch, Sir John Digby, was sent for, and arrived post-haste in London with all particulars. It was the Attorney-General’s duty to examine the two people mentioned by the ambassador as being concerned: one, Sir Robert Cotton, had been employed by the Earl of Somerset at the Spanish court; the other, Sir William Monson, was a pensioner of Spain.

  Francis kept the King fully informed of the examinations, and of everything that was taking place relating to the forthcoming trial, but a significant change in his correspondence was that, instead of immediately contacting his Majesty, he would now first get in touch with, or write to, the new favourite who had been knighted the year before, Sir George Villiers.

  Francis had never been on close terms with Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. Nor did he correspond with him; he had approached his Majesty direct. Now all was changed. George Villiers was far easier to deal with than Somerset, and Francis knew, from long observance in such matters, that the onetime favourite, whether found guilty or not guilty of the crime imputed to him, would never again possess the power he had once had with the King. Sir George Villiers was the rising star—indeed he had already risen; he not only had the ear of the King, but was encouraged in this by the Queen, who was pleased to call him her ‘watch-dog’, and had even written little notes to him beginning ‘My kind Dog’, and wishing him all happiness. Such a likeable young man, who made himself pleasant to everyone regardless of rank, would prove a useful ally in the months to come.

  When the Lord Chancellor fell ill in February, and for a moment it was feared he might not recover, the occasion seemed opportune to thank George Villiers for having mentioned to his Majesty that if the worst should happen perhaps the Attorney-General might fill the breach:

  ‘Sir,

  ‘The message which I received from you by Mr. Shute hath bred in me such belief and confidence, as I will now wholly rely upon your excellent and happy self. When persons of greatness and quality begin speech with me of the matter, and offer me their good offices, I can but answer them civilly. But those things are but toys. I am yours surer to you than to my own life. For, as they speak of the turquoise stone in a ring, I will break into twenty pieces, before you have the least fall. God keep you ever.

  ‘Your truest servant,

  ‘Fr. Bacon.

  ‘My Lord Chancellor is prettily amended. I was with him yesterday almost half an hour. He used me with wonderful tokens of kindness. We both wept, which I do not often.’

  ‘Those things are but toys…’ A favourite expression of the Attorney-General. It was the opening line of his as yet unpublished essay Of Masques and Triumphs, which may well have been written at this time and put aside, it being a habit of authors to quote from their own compositions when the ink on the manuscript has barely dried.

  By April Francis was in constant communication with George Villiers, reporting on the examination of those held in custody, including the Earl of Somerset, who had been examined on the eighteenth of the month.

  ‘He is full of protestations, and would fain keep that quarter towards Spain clear: using but this for argument, that he had such fortunes from his Majesty, as he could not think of bettering his conditions from Spain, because as he said he was no military man… For the conclusion of your letter concerning my own comfort, I can say but the psalm of Quid retribuam? God that giveth me favour in his Majesty’s eyes will strengthen me in his Majesty’s service.

  ‘Your true and devoted servant.

  ‘To requite your postscript of excuse for scribbling, I pray you excuse that the paper is not gilt, I write from Westminster Hall, where we are not so fine.’

  A certain lightness of touch, almost of banter, perhaps, was creeping into the correspondence between the Attorney-General, now fifty-five, and young Sir George Villiers, twenty-four, who on St. George’s day, April 23rd, was made a Knight of the Garter. His Majesty came up from Theobalds to town for the feasting on the evening of this great occasion, though whether the Attorney-General was present to toast the newly dubbed knight we have no means of knowing. The gossips, of course, reported the event, amidst other burning topics of the day, but omitted to mention—either because they had not heard it or because the item was without news value—that the actor-dramatist and property-owner Mr. William Shakespeare had died on St. George’s Day at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had been living in retirement since about 1612.

  On April 28th the Attorney-General wrote at some length to the King giving his opinion that it would be best if ‘Somerset should make a clear confession of his offence, before he be produced to his trial… That confession and penitency are the footstools of mercy… That the great downfall of so great persons carrieth in itself a heavy punishment, and a kind of civil death, although their lives should not be taken. All which may satisfy honour, for sparing their lives.’

  This was not to suggest that Francis was hoping for an acquittal—far from it; but, as he told his Majesty, it should be his care ‘so to moderate the manner of charging him, as it make him not odious beyond the extent of mercy.’ (And it is interesting to note that during his term of office as Attorney-General not one man whom he prosecuted in person lost his life in consequence. Francis Bacon had many failings, but lack of compassion for the fallen was not one of them.)

  The Countess of Somerset was tried before her lord, on Friday May 24th. She had already confessed during examination, and now, pleading guilty, awaited judgement. ‘She won pity,’ noted the gossip John Chamberlain, ‘by her sober demeanour, which in my opinion was more curious and confident than was fit for a lady in such distress.’ The prisoner having pleaded guilty, there remained only for the Attorney-General to ask their lordships for judgement against her. His opening words showed his hope for clemency.

  ‘It is, as I may term it, the nobleness of an offender to confess; and therefore those meaner persons, upon whom justice passed before, confessed not; she doth. I know your Lordships cannot behold her without compassion. Many things may move you, her youth, her person, her sex, her noble family; yea, her provocations, and furies about her; but chiefly her penitency and confession. But justice is the work of this day; the mercy-seat was in the inner part of the temple; the throne is public. But since this Lady hath by her confession prevented my evidence, and your verdict, and that this day’s labour is eased; there resteth, in the legal proceeding, but for me to pray that her confession be recorded, and judgement thereupon.’

  Their Lordships gave sentence of death by hanging, but few of those present believed that it would be carried out, basing their impression ‘on Mr. Attorney’s speech’; and the countess was taken back to the Tower.

  The following day the Earl of Somerset appeared at Westminster Hall on a charge of having poisoned Sir Tho
mas Overbury, the accusation of treason having been dropped, as no evidence had come to light in the examination of other witnesses. Since his plea was not guilty, the full weight of prosecution was in the hands of the Attorney-General. ‘Far be it from us,’ he said, ‘by any strains of wit, or art, to seek to play prizes, or to blazon our names in blood, or to carry the day otherwise than upon just grounds. We shall carry the lantern of justice, which is the evidence, before your eyes upright, to be able to save it from being put out with any winds of evasions or vain defences, that is our part; and within that we shall contain ourselves; not doubting at all but that this evidence in itself will carry that force as it shall need vantages or aggravations.’

  The proceedings lasted some eight hours, many of those present avid to hear every sordid detail down to the last night of torment endured by the murdered Sir Thomas Overbury, with some wondering if the rumours of 1612 would circulate once more, that the loved Prince of Wales had also been poisoned thus, and at the instigation of the same earl who was being tried for his life today. Or, more damning still, would the Earl, when he rose to defend himself, implicate the King and perhaps blurt out the nature of their close relationship through the years?

  Those who hoped for scandal were disappointed. John Chamberlain reported to his crony Carleton, ‘When I wrote last I left the Earl of Somerset pleading for his life; but that he said for himself was so little, that he was found guilty by all his peers; which did so little appal him, that when he was asked what he could say why sentence should not be pronounced, he stood still on his innocence, and could hardly be brought to refer himself to the King’s mercy.’ And another scribe, Edward Sherburn (later to join Francis Bacon’s ‘train of attendants’), wrote, ‘His lordship’s answers were so poor and idle as many of the lords his peers shook their heads and blushed to hear such slender excuses come from him, of whom much better was expected. The only thing worth note in him was his constancy and undaunted carriage in all the time of his arraignment, which as it began so did it continue to the end, without any change or alteration.’

  And at no time during his defence did the Earl of Somerset utter one word against his Majesty. Like his countess, he was condemned to death and returned to the Tower, but to the chagrin of the London crowds, who had hoped to see a scaffold erected on Tower Hill—for the earl had never been popular—his Majesty changed the sentence to life imprisonment, and in July the countess received a full pardon.

  ‘ ’Tis different for them than what ’t would be for us,’ the crowds must have said, when they heard of the gracious living permitted to the prisoners in the Tower, furniture of crimson velvet, satin-covered chairs. Baulked of the hanging spectacle, the disgruntled Londoners were obliged to wait until one of their own kind was burnt at Smithfield for killing her husband, a joiner, by flinging a chisel into his belly—a slightly cleaner method of disposal than inserting into someone an enema of arsenic.

  And the Attorney-General? The part he had taken in the trial pleased his Majesty, who offered him the choice of being immediately sworn a member of the Council, or the assurance that when the position of Lord Chancellor should fall vacant he would receive the nomination. Francis Bacon chose the former, writing to Sir George Villiers on June 3rd, ‘The King giveth me a noble choice, and you are the man my heart ever told me you were.’

  11

  Some twenty years earlier, in October 1596, Francis Bacon had written a letter of advice to the favourite of the day, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, a very different character from George Villiers. Highly intelligent, moody, impulsive, Robert Devereux at twenty-nine epitomised the flower of English manhood during the latter part of the reign of that most astute monarch, Queen Elizabeth. Francis Bacon was only seven years his senior, a barrister with a seat in Parliament but no position in government, relying, for the advice he tendered, upon his own acute powers of observation as to how political affairs should be handled, with especial regard for the workings of her Majesty’s own mind.

  George Villiers, with only a brief experience of Court life and the inevitable intrigues and jealousies that hummed about it, had, at this stage of his career, no political ambition. He desired only to please, to fall out with nobody; and now that Somerset was in disgrace and was never likely to appear on the scene again, young Villiers found himself in the extraordinary position of being courted on all sides by all men, the established favourite of a very different monarch from the one who had boxed Robert Devereux’s ears at the first display of temper.

  He was, in fact, extremely vulnerable to anyone who might take advantage of his lack of experience, and there were plenty capable of doing just that. Francis Bacon knew that Queen Elizabeth had kept the control of affairs within her hands, and could, besides, rely on the most able of statesmen. It was otherwise with King James. He was the sovereign, yes, and very conscious of it, but he was not interested in the workings of government or the intricate nature of an English parliament, possibly because he did not fully understand the system. It was for this reason that he had allowed the Earl of Somerset and the Howard faction so much latitude in affairs of state; it was simpler to let things slide and go hunting in the country, trusting that somehow matters would be arranged and everything—including his finances—eventually be solved. Francis Bacon knew that George Villiers possessed a far more equable and malleable temperament than Somerset, and if his Majesty, bored or irritated by some state business, should say to him, as he had said to Somerset, ‘You arrange it, you do as you think fit’, the inexperienced young man would find himself the prey of dangerous, and rival, cabals, whose opposing advice might in time threaten the safety of the realm.

  It had never been an idle fantasy, during the first years of the new reign, when Francis—still without employment fitted to his genius—had indulged in dreams of becoming governor of some university, some college of learning, where young men could be moulded and trained to understand all branches of knowledge, the better to equip themselves to serve their country. In Villiers he now saw a youth, willing, indeed eager, to learn, who had risen to high place by chance, by charm; here, Francis believed, was a student whom he could mould and advise, the thirty-two years between them no impediment, rather the reverse. George Villiers would listen, just as men had listened to the speaker in Redargutio Philosophiarum. As the students in Gray’s Inn had listened, and as Tobie Matthew, still out in Italy, had listened. Tobie, in fact, had actually met and become friendly with George Villiers when the favourite was travelling on the continent. Robert Devereux had not needed instruction in political and world affairs; he knew as much about them as Francis Bacon himself. The warning to him had been to keep out of them, to remain a courtier, close to the Queen, and to avoid above all things popularity and a tendency to martial ardour. George Villiers, on the contrary, seemed likely to have political business thrust upon him by an indulgent monarch; if so, he must learn his trade.

  In August 1616 George Villiers was created Viscount Villiers, and the Attorney-General, now a member of the Council, wrote congratulating him from Gorhambury. He also took the opportunity, about this time, to send the young man a long letter of advice concerning the future. What Villiers thought of the advice is unknown. Two versions of the same letter, widely differing, were found amongst Francis Bacon’s papers and published after his death. The more concise version would seem to be the original, and one has an impression of Francis sitting in his library at Gorhambury, or perhaps in a corner of the long gallery, seeing himself as master of his old college Trinity at Cambridge, or Magdalen at Oxford, and addressing, not the heir to the throne, but the nearest thing to it, the reigning favourite.

  ‘Remember then what your true condition is. The King himself is above the reach of his people, but cannot be above their censures; and you are his shadow, if either he commit an error and is loath to avow it, but excuses it upon his Ministers, of which you are the first in the eye: or you commit the fault, or have willingly permitted it, and must suffer for it; so perhaps y
ou may be offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude…

  ‘It is true that the whole kingdom hath cast their eye upon you, as the new rising star, and no man thinks his business can prosper at Court, unless he hath you for his good Angel, or at least that you be not a Malus Genius against him. This you cannot now avoid unless you will adventure a precipice, to fall down faster than you rose. Opinion is a master wheel in these cases.’ Francis then propounded a number of rules to be observed at those times when the favourite should be importuned by suitors: that the suitor should do so in writing, and await a reply at Villiers’s convenience; that Villiers should take an hour or two to sort the petitions, and that he should not rely upon his own judgement, or that of his friends, but should take counsel of men well versed in their professions who were competent to give an opinion; that, having considered these opinions, he should then set aside certain hours during the week in which to frame his own reply.

  Francis next considered, under various headings, the subjects that were likely to emerge for consultation in the future, about which Villiers should acquaint himself and so be able to discuss them with some assurance. Religion, negotiation with foreign princes, war by sea or land, plantations and colonies, nothing was omitted. ‘Touching war, the best way to continue a secure peace, is to be prepared for a war. Security is an ill guard for a kingdom. But this kingdom, where the seas are our walls, and the ships our bulwarks, where safety and plenty, by trade, are concomitant, it were both a sin and a shame to neglect the means to attain unto these ends: let brave spirits that have fitted themselves for command, either by sea or by land, not be laid by, as persons unnecessary for the time; let arms and ammunition of all sorts be provided and stored up, as against a day of battle; let the ports and forts be fitted so, as if by the next wind we should hear of an alarum; such a known providence is the surest protection. But of all wars, let both Prince and People pray against a war in our own bowels: the King by his wisdom, justice, and moderation must foresee and stop such a storm, and if it fall must allay it, and the people by their obedience must decline it. And for a foreign war intended by an invasion to enlarge the bounds of our Empire, I have no opinion… Seeing the subjects of this kingdom believe it is not legal for them to be enforced to go beyond the seas without their own consent… But to resist an invading enemy, or to suppress rebels, the subject may and must be commanded out of the counties where they inhabit. The whole kingdom is but one entire body… Dum singuli pugnamus, omnes vincimur (while we fight alone, we are all vanquished).’