The assassination of the duc de Guise, and of his brother the Cardinal of Lorraine the next day, created confusion throughout France, and when on January 5th 1589 the King’s mother Catherine de Medici also died, Henri III was free to attempt a reconciliation with Henri of Navarre. He trusted that this alliance with the Huguenots would bolster him from the ever-increasing enmity of the Holy Catholic League and the vast number of his Catholic subjects, with whom the murdered Duke had been immensely popular.
The last of the Valois and the first of the Bourbon monarchs met at Plessis-les-Tours on April 30th. Henri III of France was thirty-eight, his brother-in-law thirty-six. The King of France, no longer the painted monarch of earlier days surrounded by his mignons, was pale and troubled; he was said to be forever on his knees these days, haunted by his conscience, the Pope having refused to grant him absolution after de Guise’s murder. Henri of Navarre, only two years younger, was in the prime of manhood, still the ‘lion’ that his grandfather and namesake had predicted he would be.
Here in the park of the château at Plessis-les-Tours, where their joint ancestor Louis XI had died just over a hundred years before—that same king who, fearing death, was coaxed into smiling by the sight of four little piglets dressed in skirts dancing before him—the two Henris shook hands and made a pact to march on Paris.
‘The world is marvellously changed,’ Lord Treasurer Burghley wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury in May, ‘when we true Englishmen have cause, for our own quietness, to wish good success to a French king… At this time the French King’s party, by the true subjects of his crown, both Catholic and Protestant, doth prosper in every place.’
The Lord Treasurer’s personal life was not so happy. His beloved wife Mildred had died on April 4th. They had been married for forty-two years. She was buried at Westminster Abbey, and five days later Burghley wrote a meditation on her death. This meditation pays a moving tribute not only to her scholarship—she was renowned as the most learned woman of her day—but to her great generosity and kindness of heart. ‘She did also four times in the year secretly send to all the prisons in London, money to buy bread, cheese and drink for four hundred persons, and many times more, without knowledge from whom the same come. She did likewise sundry times in the year send shirts and smocks to the poor people both in London, and in Cheshunt. Not long before her death, she caused secretly to be bought a large quantity of wheat and rye, to be disposed amongst the poor in time of dearth.’
Mildred Burghley had undoubtedly a sweeter nature than her sister Ann Bacon, who, when her son’s friend Captain Allen visited her during that summer, gave vent to her feelings, as Allen reported to Anthony on August 17th.
When I did my duty to the Rt. Hon. Lord Treasurer he demanded the cause of your not coming home, and said you spent like a prince being but a squire, yet for your spending and not coming home, he would not condemn you before he heard you speak. He said you must hereafter find men with deeds and not with words.
Upon my arrival at Gorhambury my Lady used me courteously until such time when I began to move her for Mr Lawson and to say the truth for yourself, being so much transported with your abode there you seek her death. She is resolute to procure her Majesty’s letter for to force you to return, and when that shall be, if her Majesty give you your right dessert she should clap you in prison. She cannot abide to hear of you, nor of the other… She saith you are hated of all the chiefest on that side and curst of God in all your actions since Mr Lawson’s being with you. I am sorry to write it, considering his desserts and your love towards him, but the truth will be known at the last, and better late than never. It is in vain to look for his return. No, no, saith she, and although you should never come home, he shall be hindered from coming to you.
My Lady saith it is not in your power to sell any part of your living about Gorhambury. Mr Lawson is in great necessity, and your brother dare not help him in respect of my Lady’s displeasure. My Lady said she had rather you made the wars with the King of Navarre than to have stayed so long idle in Montauban, and with great earnestness also tears she wished that when she heard of Mr Selwyn’s imprisonment you had been fairly buried, providing you had died in the Lord. By my simple judgement she spoke it in her passion and repented immediately her words. I must confess unto you I have never seen nor never shall see a lady and an honourable woman a mother more perplexed for her son’s absence than I have that honourable dame for yours. Therefore lay your hand on your heart, look not for Mr Lawson, he hath, as a man may say, heaven and earth against him.
So Ned Selwyn, Anthony’s faithful travelling companion, had also been imprisoned. But where, and for what fault? No word of him at all in the documents at Montauban, nor in the State Papers, but the implication is that a round-up had been made of anyone connected with Anthony Bacon during his residence in France, for earlier in the year a Mr Richard Gest was examined in Chester about his travels in Spain and Portugal and his correspondence with Mr Anthony Bacon over a period of two years.
On August 1st Henri III, who had arrived at St Cloud with his own army and that of Henri of Navarre to lay siege to Paris, was stabbed to death by a mad Dominican monk, and with his dying breath told Henri of Navarre that the crown was his.
The whole of France was in uproar, torn apart by divided loyalties. Some Catholics, faithful to the King’s dying words, stood firm for the Bourbon succession, on condition that he maintained the Catholic faith throughout the kingdom. Others declared for war. The Huguenots too were at a loss. If their leader Henri of Navarre, now King of France, favoured the Catholics, how would they fare themselves? Would it not be best to disband their armies and go home? Henri, deserted by some of his friends and with half his army left, marched into Normandy, knowing in his heart and mind, despite his present setback, that one day Paris and the whole of France would be entirely his.
His sister, Princess Catherine, was still unmarried, but deeply in love with her cousin the comte de Soissons and hoping to marry him, a match of which her brother did not approve. Now that he was King of France and still actively engaged in civil war, he left her to govern his province of Béarn. Monsieur du Plessis, kept on as councillor to the new King, had been made governor of the château-fortress at Saumur, commanding a strategic position on the banks of the Loire. He was not amongst those of the King’s advisers—and they were many—who were urging him to change his faith, if not his private convictions, thereby winning the allegiance of his Catholic subjects. Among them was Marshal Matignon, governor of Bordeaux, who had befriended Anthony Bacon during his sojourn there. The King agreed that, if this matter of his religion could be settled, many other matters could be settled too, but first he must crush his enemies, and bring peace to his shattered country.
Anthony’s debts had been cancelled in July, so he was now safe from his creditors. Whether he was still being harassed in some way, or whether the continued presence of Marshal Matignon in Bordeaux appeared to afford a better asylum, is not made clear in his correspondence. Whatever the reason, some time during the year 1590 he crossed the Tarn for the last time, leaving behind him for ever the city of Montauban, which he had first entered with such anticipation, and travelled to Bordeaux. His master, Secretary of State Walsingham, had died on April 6th, and no one had been as yet appointed to succeed him. It could have been this uncertainty, and wondering to whom his secret correspondence should now be directed, that was foremost in Anthony’s mind as he rode west.
Sir Francis Walsingham had been in wretched health for some months. He had lived to see his daughter Frances, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, take for her second husband Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was by now the established favourite of Queen Elizabeth. His stepfather, the Earl of Leicester, had died in 1588, soon after the rout of the Spanish Armada, and Essex had been appointed to many of his honours and privileges. Walsingham, who had spent a lifetime in the service of his Queen, died in poverty. He had been forced to sell The Papey, his house in Bishopsgate, and move to a house in Seething Lance, and he was buried secretly in St Paul’s by night in case his creditors should come to tear open his coffin. The Queen, for all her sagacity, or perhaps because of it, expected her statesmen to pay for information about foreign affairs out of their own pockets, and Walsingham, who had recruited more agents than any other of her ministers or those of Henry VIII before her, was a victim of her closed fist. Where Walsingham had failed, smaller fry such as Anthony Bacon would hardly do better from the Privy Purse, but his disapproving uncle Burghley was, after all, still Lord Treasurer, and Anthony must continue to keep in touch with him.
Anthony was ill when he arrived in Bordeaux, and remained so for at least five months. The foot he had wrenched in Béarn four years previously had been giving him trouble for some time, and a tendency to gout, which had so irked his father the Lord Keeper, now showed signs of becoming chronic. Reliance upon pills and potions, laced with the wine of Bordeaux, played havoc with his digestion. Nevertheless, it was at this period of his life, during the years 1590 to 1592, that he formed a new friendship which was to mean a great deal to him. Through a Bordeaux poet, Pierre de Brach, he came to know the writer Michel de Montaigne, the publication of whose essays, between 1580 and 1588, had made him famous throughout France.
Montaigne was by now in his late fifties, had twice been mayor of Bordeaux, and was a close friend of Henri IV, who had stayed with him when he was still King of Navarre. He had been born and bred a Catholic, but Christianity played a small part in his philosophical thought; he was an individualist in thought and action. The theologians of the past, and the learned saints such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he discounted; it was to the Greeks and the Romans that he went for guidance: Herodotus, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca were his beside reading. His curiosity, his search for truth, were ceaseless. Both sceptic and humanist, Montaigne believed that the greatest force within man was his own will. Death had no terrors, it was man who made a terror of death. Again, man must come to know and understand himself, for without this knowledge, how could he come to understand his fellows? Violence, cruelty, torture, which figured so much in his own time, Montaigne abhorred; and in a century torn apart by religious wars he was careful to guard his liberty of judgement and his independence. For Montaigne, observation of his fellow human-beings was his primary task and his absorbing interest, and with it the discovery of the riches that dwelt within.
‘Nous sommes chacun plus riches que nous ne pensons,’ he said. ‘Sachons donc être à nous.’
This philosophy, so entirely different from, and indeed alien to, anything he had absorbed at Gorhambury at his mother’s knee or in Théodore Beza’s study in Geneva, awakened within Anthony Bacon a response that nipped firmly, for the time being at any rate, his budding self-pity and hypochondria. Here was a man approaching sixty, who did not judge, who did not condemn, to whom he could pour out all his own doubts and fears and be understood, who discussed the great literature of the past with him as with an intellectual equal, and whose ideas on friendship, when writing of his dead friend La Boétie, were summed up in a single phrase: ‘Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant “Parce que c’était lui: parce que c’était moi”.’
During the two years that Anthony remained at Bordeaux Montaigne was preparing yet a fourth edition of his essays, which he did not live to see published. They appeared posthumously, prepared by his friends Pierre de Brach and Mlle de Gournay. The last letter he ever received was from Anthony Bacon.
This, though, is to anticipate. Friendship with Montaigne did not interfere with Anthony’s more pressing business in Bordeaux. On April 8th 1591 he received a letter from a man signing himself Andrew Sandal, smuggled from the fortress in Bordeaux where political spies were imprisoned. Anthony visited the man, and discovered him to be a Scotsman and a Catholic, who, despite the fact that he had at one time been in the service of Mary Queen of Scots, had later become one of Walsingham’s secret agents and had toured both Italy and Spain, whence he had sent back information to England. His real name was Anthony Standen. On arrival in Bordeaux the preceding August he had been arrested and committed to prison, under suspicion of being an agent of the King of Spain and therefore a spy on French affairs. Aged between forty-five and fifty, intelligent, witty, and of considerable experience in the field of foreign affairs, Standen made an immediate impression upon Anthony Bacon. This man must not be allowed to languish in a Bordeaux prison; he was too valuable an agent to be lost to the English cause.
Anthony approached both the Lord Treasurer at home and Marshal de Matignon, and in October managed to obtain Standen’s release, the arrangement being that Standen should return to Spain secretly in order to discover further Spanish intelligence which he would then send, via agents in Italy, to the Lord Treasurer in London. This was the method he had used when forwarding information to Walsingham.
Anthony was well pleased with his latest stroke of diplomacy. Standen was a useful ally, with his Catholic connections in Spain and Italy, and promised to keep him as fully informed as he did the Lord Treasurer himself. Anthony’s own contacts amongst French Catholics were also increasing since he had come to Bordeaux, and he knew they would become of vital importance once Henri IV succeeded in uniting the whole of France, when Catholic as well as Protestant envoys would arrive at the Court of Queen Elizabeth to discuss pacts and treaties.
His mother was not so satisfied. Hints from certain English sources in Bordeaux alarmed her, perhaps even an ill-judged word dropped at random by her brother-in-law Burghley. Was it true, she wrote, that Anthony had manoeuvred the release of some Catholic prisoner, had given him money, and was even thinking of travelling with him to Rome, there to be converted by the Pope himself? Anthony handed the letter to Standen with a lifted eyebrow and a Gallic shrug. This, he implied, was the sort of thing that awaited him when he finally decided to return home. He would ignore the letter.
‘Write back to her,’ advised Standen. ‘I know well my Lady, your mother, is without comparison amongst her sex. But a woman is a woman, frail and variable as every wavering wind. I mind what the Queen of Scots once said to me: “Never tell a woman she is learned and wise, only that she is less foolish than the rest; for all women tend to folly”.’
Standen left Bordeaux in December and wrote to Anthony from St Jean de Luz, close to the Spanish border. ‘I stayed an afternoon in Bayonne,’ he said, ‘and lighting in a lodging where were some English, passed amongst them for a Frenchman, and great entertainment and courtesy they used to me. But when they cackled amongst themselves, it was a pastime nonpareil to hear what they said of me. I was much in their good grace, which had been the contrary, if that they had known my quality. This night I am to set my doubtful steps on Spanish soil.’
If his health had only permitted, what sights, and scenes, and adventures too, Anthony and his new friend might have known together!
Events in France, however, and in England too, were proceeding apace. In June of that year, 1591, Queen Elizabeth had sent troops to France to help Henri IV in his siege of Rouen. The Earl of Essex, much against her will, had persuaded her to give him the command, and he landed in Dieppe on August 10th. Unfortunately the siege started poorly. The Duke of Parma, ally of the King of Spain and the Holy Catholic League, entered France to relieve Rouen. King Henri IV asked for further help from England. The Queen, who had already sent some seven hundred men from the Netherlands to replace those who had been killed, flatly refused, and ordered the Earl of Essex to return home. Relations between England and France became extremely strained. The English ambassador to France had the unenviable task of explaining to Henri IV that the Queen had suggested he was exposing her troops to greater risk than his own, and that this was something she refused to accept.
Henri IV, realising that he must send an envoy to England who was not only a Protestant but skilled in diplomacy, summoned du Plessis from Saumur and entrusted him with the mission. Du Plessis left Dieppe on December 31st and arrived in London on January 4th. News travelled fast, and when Anthony Bacon heard that his one-time enemy was on his way across the Channel to discuss the current situation not only with his uncle the Lord Treasurer but with the Queen herself, he gathered his possessions together and made his farewells to Bordeaux. If—and, although it seemed unlikely, Anthony was sensitive enough to believe it possible—du Plessis should mention past events in Montauban and the ill-conduct of one of her Majesty’s subjects, that subject must be at home to defend his character.
Du Plessis was granted an audience of the Queen on January 6th. He had hoped for a favourable reception, but on entering the audience chamber the first thing the Queen did was to lose, or perhaps pretend to lose, her temper. She hurled reproaches at du Plessis’s royal master, and against the Earl of Essex for staying by his side in France, despite her express commands. He makes the King of France believe that he, Essex, governs here in England, she told du Plessis, but she would soon prove him wrong. She had every intention of calling all her troops home, she added, and then, without hearing any explanation from du Plessis, she cut short the audience and retired.
Du Plessis repaired forthwith to the Lord Treasurer and gave him a very clear and concise account of the military operations to date. This Burghley promised to transmit to the Queen, and at the second audience, on January 8th, Her Majesty appeared slightly more gracious. She was still firm, however, that the King of France should have no further aid from her, but must use those troops that were about him at present.
The following day du Plessis produced a second memoir for the attention of the Lord Treasurer. ‘Surely,’ he argued, ‘it would suit Her Majesty better if our common enemy Spain was fought on the soil of some other country than her own. If her Majesty would send but 4,000 troops into France the Duke of Parma would instantly retreat. Without such aid battles will be lost, even kingdoms may be lost, and in consequence every Christian state be placed in peril.’
Grudgingly the Queen consented to the levy of two thousand pikemen and a thousand musketeers from Kent, Sussex and the Isle of Wight. Then, exactly two hours later, she changed her mind. She told her councillors that she knew very well they had come to some private agreement with the French envoys to send more troops, and that she would prefer the Earl of Essex to be killed in action rather than give him any further aid.
Three days later, on January 12th, du Plessis having put the French case yet again, the Queen informed him that further aid was out of the question. ‘My subjects reproach me,’ she said, ‘for sending so many of them to perish uselessly. I am beset with conspiracy and menace on all sides, and this is proven by the depositions of certain prisoners. My troops have no place in which to retreat in France, should some setback strike the King. He digs no trenches, he seems to take pleasure in losing a battle, the English alone are sent into attack. The Earl of Essex is the least suitable of men to be thus employed.’
Du Plessis replied to every one of her Majesty’s reproaches, but nothing he said could move her. On January 14th he received his passports. He was delayed at Dover for three weeks by contrary winds and high seas, the same ill weather that kept Anthony Bacon confined to port on the French side of the Channel. The two vessels must have crossed, for on February 4th 1592, as du Plessis landed in Dieppe, Anthony Bacon set foot on English soil for the first time in over twelve years. Seasick, apprehensive and exhausted, he stumbled ashore, to be greeted by Thomas Lawson and Nicholas Faunt, who told him that a room had been prepared for him at Gray’s Inn by his brother Francis.