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

  His contemporary, Mr. William Shakespeare of London and Stratford, actor-dramatist, was able to see three of his own plays produced that year. Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale were performed at the Globe Theatre on Bankside in the month of May, and the Court Revels inform us that The Tempest was given before the King at Whitehall on Halloween, October 31st. The dramatist’s mood had mellowed, the scholars say; dark ladies belong to the past, and the heroines of these three plays are young, artless women, Perdita, Imogen, Miranda, inspired, so some suggest, by the actor-dramatist’s daughters Susanna and Judith. Susanna would have been twenty-eight in 1611, and Judith twenty-six. Susanna was already married, with a child of three. Perhaps the inspiration may have come from quite another young woman just turned nineteen?

  Masques were all the rage in 1611, delighting the Queen, and the appearance of Juno, Ceres, and attendant nymphs in the fourth act of The Tempest has a flavour of De Sapientia Veterum about it. The shipwrecked fleet, ‘safely in harbour… in the deepe Nooke, where once thou calldst me up at midnight to fetch dewe from the still-vext Bermoothes’, so Ariel reports to Prospero, was a topical allusion to the lately wrecked ship Admiral, belonging to the Virginia Company. Possibly William Shakespeare had shares in this as well as Francis Bacon and his patron the Earl of Southampton. In any event, shipwrecks were in vogue. Gonzalo, ‘an honest old counsellor’ in the play, has a speech in Act II that scholars tell us Shakespeare must have based on a reading of the English translation of the essays of Montaigne, a copy of which, with his name upon it, is in the British Museum.

  William Shakespeare, like Francis, was obviously a botanist, his plays being full of the fragrance of wild flowers, as the avid reader knows very well. How the gardens at New Place, Stratford, which he bought in 1597 from William Underhill (stepbrother to Lady Hatton’s first husband) compared with those at Gorhambury we cannot tell, for unfortunately the property was pulled down in 1759; but being in the centre of town it could hardly have given great scope to his imagination. A modest lay-out, perhaps, and pleasant in spring, so that he could sing, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale,

  When Daffadils begin to peere,

  With heigh the Doxy over the dale…

  A visit to Gorhambury would have helped William Shakespeare with his third play of 1611, Cymbeline, King of Britain, for here in Hertfordshire lived the original of his protagonist, Cunobelinus, king of the Catuvellauni, whose tribal area covered the whole of that county. It seems the play was popular, and like The Tempest included a masque, with Jupiter descending ‘in Thunder and Lightening, sitting upon an Eagle: he throws a Thunder-bolt. The Ghostes fall on their knees.’

  However, ‘these things are but toys’, as Francis was to write towards the end of his life, in the essay on Masques and Triumphs, published in 1625, and are not for ‘serious observations’. It was unwise to dwell amongst them, just as it was not good ‘to stay too long in the theatre’.

  Public life was about to claim him once again. His cousin, the Earl of Salisbury, became seriously ill during the autumn of 1611, as did the Attorney-General Sir Henry Hobart. Francis took the opportunity of writing to his Majesty to remind him, as tactfully as possible, of a promise made some months previously: ‘I do understand by some of my good friends, to my great comfort, that your Majesty hath in mind your Majesty’s royal promise, which to me is anchora spei, touching the Attorney’s place. I hope Mr. Attorney shall do well. I thank God I wish no man’s death; nor much mine own life, more than to do your Majesty service.’ The Attorney-General recovered, but the hint might strike a chord, when occasion served. A new year’s letter to Salisbury did not touch on his cousin’s health, but mentioned that ‘though I find age and decays grow upon me, yet I may have a flash or two of spirit left to do you service’.

  The Earl of Salisbury, in fact, was a very sick man, and in February of 1612 was discovered to have an abdominal tumour. He was courageous enough to travel to Bath, hoping that the waters would help him to recover, but the effort was too much for him, and he died on May 24th, at Marlborough, on the journey home. His death was almost as great a loss to the country as his father’s had been, fourteen years before; and although in his time he possessed many enemies, had never been popular with the ordinary people, and was certainly not infallible where the Treasury was concerned, yet he had steered the ship of state with a steady hand under two monarchs of very different temperaments, and his loyalty to both had never been questioned.

  He was buried early in June at his home in Hatfield, the ceremony a simple one by his own wish, and his cousin Francis Bacon was one of the family mourners. The two men had never been intimate. The unspoken jealousy of boyhood days seems to have clung to them, perhaps unconsciously, throughout their lives, though of late this had not been so apparent. How much this jealousy had been fostered in early youth by their mothers, Mildred and Ann, who, though affectionate sisters, were rivals in scholarship, and who both had husbands in high place, is something the psychologists must decide.

  Robert Cecil was very short in stature, and was said to have one shoulder higher than the other. When his cousin Francis wrote his essay Of Deformity—one of those to be published later in the year—the gossip John Chamberlain told Dudley Carleton ‘the world takes notice that he paints out his little cousin to the life’. Perhaps. The essay is astute rather than unkind. ‘Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person that doth enduce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn; therefore, all deformed persons are extreme bold; first, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others… Still the ground is, they will, if they be of spirit, seek to free themselves from scorn: which must be either by virtue or malice; and, therefore, let it not be marvelled, if sometimes they prove excellent persons…’

  Francis wrote to the King on May 31st, as soon as he heard of his cousin’s death, though we have no means of knowing whether the letter was actually sent, and, if it was, whether a reply was ever received. ‘Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great servant. But if I should praise him in propriety, I should say that he was a fit man to keep things from growing worse but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better.’ (Something that could be said about holders of high office in later centuries.) ‘For,’ Francis continued, ‘he loved to have the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself, and to have all business still under the hammer and like clay in the hands of the potter, to mould it as he thought good…’

  Francis, in this letter, was not seeking the position of Secretary of State, which his cousin’s death had laid vacant, but rather to have the private ear of the King and advise him how to deal with the Commons. ‘My offering,’ he concludes, ‘is care and observance; and as my good old mistress was wont to call me her watch-candle, because it pleased her to say I did continually burn—and yet she suffered me to waste almost to nothing—so I must much more owe the like duty to your Majesty, by whom my fortunes have been settled and raised.’

  A later letter is more specific. In this Francis would seem to be applying to become a member of the Council. ‘If your Majesty find any aptness in me, or if you find any scarcity in others, whereby you may think it fit for your service to remove to business of state… I will be ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majesty’s royal hand shall set me.’

  As it turned out, the appointing of a new Secretary of State and Lord Treasurer was postponed. Nor was Parliament called. The Earl of Northampton, the one-time Lord Harry Howard, friend of the Earl of Essex and Anthony Bacon, was temporarily given the lead in Council affairs, possibly because he had influence with the King’s favourite, Sir Robert Carr, recently given the title of Earl of Rochester. However, Francis himself was not ignored by his Majesty, who seemed ready to listen to his advice even if he did not necessarily act upon it.

  There was, naturally,
much jockeying for the position of Secretary, the two names most frequently mentioned being Sir Henry Wotton and Sir Ralph Winwood, along with Sir Henry Neville; but, John Chamberlain told Carleton in August, as for the position of Lord Treasurer, ‘point encore, parce qu’il n’y a point de trésor’.

  Francis himself was busy with legal cases during the summer, but one of his most important duties as Solicitor-General was to arrange the levy—and this dated from long custom—to be raised for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, who was now sixteen, to Prince Frederick, Elector Palatine. The contract of marriage had been signed in May, and the Elector was expected to arrive in England in the autumn. Fortunately the princess was as popular as her brother the Prince of Wales, and as the Elector was a Protestant the people looked forward to the wedding and the festivities.

  The levy brought some £22,000 into the Exchequer, but as even more than this was spent on the wedding arrangements the national debt remained as it was—‘point de trésor’. Francis took the opportunity of writing a private letter to the King ‘upon the subject of the repair and improvement of your Majesty’s means… For it will not be wrought by any one fine extract or strong water, but by a skilful compound of a number of ingredients… And as your Majesty’s growing behind-hand hath been the work of time; so must likewise be your Majesty’s coming forth and making even.’

  A commission was appointed, with Francis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar, and the Attorney-General, Sir Henry Hobart, among its members, to look into the vexed question of the King’s finances, and Francis appears to have framed the final report. This was submitted in mid-October, by which time the Elector Palatine had arrived to greet his bride. Prince Frederick, who had landed at Gravesend, was housed at Essex House with some hundred and seventy of his attendants, a ‘train of very sober and well-fashioned gentlemen’, according to the gossips. The prospective bridegroom was most dutiful in paying immediate court to the princess, and was liked by everyone. All seemed set fair for a joyous conclusion to the betrothal when, suddenly, tragedy struck the royal family and the whole nation.

  The Prince of Wales, who had not spared himself in entertaining the guests from the Palatinate, swimming in the Thames at midnight and riding ceaselessly, fell ill of what the royal physicians diagnosed as ‘a tertian fever’, but what seems in fact to have been typhoid. He was obliged to cancel his appearance at the Lord Mayor’s show at Guildhall, and the Elector Palatine went without him. Even now, in early November, no one appeared to grasp the gravity of the disease, although the Prince of Wales grew rapidly weaker, and the inevitable ‘bloodletting’ and shaving of his head, where much of the pain lay, proved no remedy. Realisation that he was not likely to recover began to spread through the capital when it was learnt that their Majesties had not attended divine service on November 5th, the anniversary of the Powder Treason, and a day of thanksgiving, and that the Bishop of Ely had said special prayers for the heir to the throne.

  The Queen and her daughter had small faith in the royal physicians, and the princess, who with her brother had a longstanding friendship with Sir Walter Ralegh, implored the prisoner to send a cordial that he had once recommended in her own case, which had proved effective. This Ralegh did—he had his own laboratory in the Tower—but alas, it was no use. Late on Wednesday, November 4th, the Prince of Wales fell into a coma, his last words being ‘Where is my dear sister?’, after which he neither stirred nor spoke again, but died between eight and nine o’clock on Friday evening.

  When the eldest son of the monarch dies speculation inevitably follows as to whether the course of history might have been otherwise had he lived. The nearest analogy to Henry, eldest son of James I, must be Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII. Both were well-loved young men of blameless character. Whether a King Arthur, wedded to Katharine of Aragon, would have kept his kingdom Catholic must be a matter for historians to argue. The same could be said about a King Henry IX, who might, perhaps, have listened to his faithful Commons and spared his country civil war. However that may be, the death of Henry Prince of Wales was a very great loss indeed, to the dynasty and to the two kingdoms.

  Francis Bacon, whose new collection of essays had been entered at the Stationers’ Hall on October 12th, with a dedicatory letter to the Prince, had presumably not yet had it distributed for sale. The essays made their appearance in December, with the original dedication exchanged for one to his brother-in-law Sir John Constable. It must have been now, also, that he wrote a tribute in Latin to the Prince of Wales, which, as it was not discovered until 1753, may have been for private circulation only. Some extracts from the tribute shed light on the young man’s character, as Francis judged it.

  ‘He died to the great grief and regret of the whole kingdom, as being a youth who had neither offended men’s minds nor satiated them. The goodness of his disposition had awakened manifold hopes amongst numbers of all ranks, nor had he lived long enough to disappoint them. Moreover, as among the people generally he had the reputation of being firm in the cause of religion; so the wiser sort were deeply impressed with the feeling that he had been to his father as a guard and shield against the machinations of conspirators—a mischief for which our age has hardly found a remedy…

  ‘In body, he was strong and erect, of middle height, his limbs gracefully put together, his gait kinglike, his face long and somewhat lean, his habit rather full, his countenance composed, and the motion of his eyes rather sedate than powerful. His forehead bore marks of severity, his mouth had a touch of pride. And yet when one penetrated beyond those outworks, and soothed him with due attention and seasonable discourse, one found him gentle and easy to deal with; so that he seemed quite another man in conversation than his aspect promised; and altogether he was one who might easily get himself a reputation at variance with his manners.

  ‘He was fond of antiquity and arts; and a favourer of learning, though rather in the honour he paid it than the time he spent upon it. In his morals there was nothing more to be praised than that in every kind of duty he seemed to be well trained and comformable. He was a wonderfully obedient son to the King his father, very attentive also to the Queen, kind to his brother; but his sister he especially loved; whom he also resembled in countenance, as far as a man’s face can be compared to that of a very beautiful girl.

  ‘The masters and tutors of his youth also, which rarely happens, continued in great favour with him… His passions were not over vehement, and rather equable than great. For of love matters there was wonderfully little talk, considering his age; insomuch that he passed that extremely slippery time of his early manhood, in so great a fortune and in very good health, without being particularly noted for any affairs of that kind…

  ‘In understanding he was certainly strong, and did not want either curiosity or capacity. But in speech he was somewhat slow, and as it were embarrassed; and yet if you observed diligently the things he said, whether in asking questions or expressing opinions, they were ever to the point, and argued no ordinary capacity; so that his slow and seldom speaking seemed to come rather from suspense and solicitude than weakness or dullness of judgement. In the meantime he was a wonderfully patient listener… He seldom let his thoughts wander or his mind lose its power of attention… a habit which promised great wisdom in him if he had lived. Many points there were indeed in this prince’s nature which were obscure, and could not be discovered by any man’s judgement, but only by time, which was not allowed him. Those however which appeared were excellent; which is enough for fame…’

  If the Prince of Wales had lived, he would have been nineteen the following February. The state funeral took place on December 7th, and neither the King nor the Queen attended. The King was said to be unable to bear such a tragic ceremony, the Queen herself was ill, and the Princess Elizabeth was heart-broken. Prince Charles, Duke of York, was the chief mourner, with the Elector Palatine. Henry Prince of Wales was buried beside his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots in King Henry VII’s chapel in We
stminster Abbey.

  Court and national mourning was necessarily brief, not only because of the state of the Exchequer and the enforced delay of the royal wedding, but possibly also to put a stop to the inevitable rumour that the loved prince had been poisoned. Jesuits under the bed escaped the usual blame, and the more malicious whispers were that the King, jealous of his heir and to please his favourite Rochester, had given orders that a fatal dose should be administered to the patient. Fortunately few believed this.

  Preparations were made for the marriage to take place on St. Valentine’s Day, 1613, in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall, and the magnificence of the occasion succeeded in eclipsing the unhappy event of the preceding year. John Chamberlain, describing the scene, wrote that, ‘The bridegroom and bride were both in a suit of cloth of silver… and the bride was married in her hair, that hung down long, with an exceeding rich coronet on her head, which the king valued the next day at a million crowns.’ He also observed that ‘this extreme cost and riches makes us all poor’.

  Masques were staged by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn, and another the following evening by those of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, ‘whereof,’ said John Chamberlain, ‘Sir Francis Bacon was the chief contriver… They made choice to come by water from Winchester Place, in Southwark, which suited well with their device, which was the marriage of the river Thames to the Rhine; and their show by water was very gallant, by reason of infinite store of lights, very curiously set and placed, and many boats and barges, with devices of lights and lamps… which passage by water cost them better than three hundred pounds.’ Unfortunately, when the masquers landed at the Privy Stairs, there seems to have been standing room only for the spectators, and the ladies of the Court could see nothing at all. As for his Majesty, he fell asleep! The whole performance, at the earnest entreaty of Sir Francis Bacon, had to be enacted once again upon the Saturday. It was much applauded, and the masquers were all invited by the King to a supper in the marriage-room the following night.