How he died, where he died, and where he was buried has remained unknown throughout the centuries until the present day. A book of pedigrees of Suffolk families states that he died in Essex House. This is unlikely. He left there in March of 1600, and there is no record of his ever having returned. In a previous chapter it has been suggested that his place of retreat might have been in Sir William Cornwallis’s house in Bishopsgate, but this has not been proved. One last asylum for the caged bird remains possible—the house belonging to Lady Walsingham, mother of the Countess of Essex, and widow of Anthony’s first employer, Sir Francis Walsingham. This house was not the old Walsingham house, known as the Papey, off Bishopsgate, but was situated in Seething Lane, close to St Olave’s Church, Hart Street. In this church the Earl’s two sons, Robert and Walter, were baptised in 1591 and 1592; therefore it was known and used by the Devereux and Walsingham families. Search in the Harleian MS. at the British Museum led to an examination of the register in St Olave’s Church. And here at last, unnoticed for centuries, the entry states: ‘May 17th, 1601, Mr Anthonye Bacon buried in the chamber within the vault.’
The fact that the entry is so brief, that Francis makes no mention of the death amongst his papers, that no will has been traced, suggests that Anthony may have been buried secretly, at night, through the good offices of Lady Walsingham or the Countess of Essex. But the reason for the secrecy must remain surmise. It is even possible he died by his own hand. During the weeks that elapsed between the Earl’s execution on February 25th and his own burial on May 17th, Anthony waited for the letter that he did not receive. All he knew was that the Earl had confessed, thus leaving a stain on his honour. Christopher Blount, Sir Charles Davers, Gilly Mericke, Henry Cuffe had all confessed and died. Crippled, helpless, the bird in the cage no longer had the will to live. He would have known, too, the part that his brother Francis had taken during the trial, the story doubtless made more damning by members of the Essex family; and if Francis had told his brother that he had been commanded to put the case for the prosecution by her Majesty herself, in return for sparing Anthony from accusation, this very fact would have brought him to despair.
On May 27th John Chamberlain, writing from London to his friend Dudley Carleton, said, ‘Anthony Bacon died not long since but so far in debt, that I think his brother is little the better by him.’ This was all the contemporary world heard of the death, then or afterwards. The administration of his estate was not granted to Francis until June 23rd 1602, over a year later. ‘On the last day but one a commission was granted to Francis Bacon, esquire, natural and legal brother of Anthony Bacon, formerly of the parish of St Olave in Hart Street in the City of London, for the good administration of the goods, rights and credits of the deceased in the person of Francis Walleys, notary public, who took oath on his behalf.’
The month of Anthony’s birth in 1558 is still unknown, but, dying in 1601, he was either forty-three or nearing his forty-third birthday. His brother Francis would live on to become Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper like their father Sir Nicholas Bacon, to live at York House and at Gorhambury, to win fame as a writer and philosopher, a fame that has endured through the centuries; and although towards the end of his career he too, like the Earl of Essex, was to fly with waxen wings and fall like Icarus, he was able to retire, after the first blow of shame and humiliation, to his private world of literature, science and philosophy. ‘For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.’ King James’s ex-Chancellor, the little ‘Lord Keeper’ who had danced attendance on Queen Elizabeth as a small boy when she visited his father’s house at Gorhambury, knew very well that he had won fame in his lifetime; as to the rest, he left it to posterity.
It was otherwise with his brother. Anthony may have stared down at the Queen from an upstairs window when she paced the long gallery and young Francis bowed before her; there is no tradition that she ever smiled upon him too. Adult, he refused to seek an audience—indeed, he made every excuse to avoid her presence. The sonnets he sent back from France have never been named. The shame of his arrest at Montauban went unrecorded, save in the French archives. The esteem of Michel de Montaigne escaped notice. The eulogies of the idle pens in Gray’s Inn and elsewhere were passed over. Even the hopes of so unlikely a person as his mother’s chaplain pastor Wyborn, who wished him ‘success in literature’, repose dustily at Lambeth Palace. Two men knew him for his worth—Henri of Navarre, later Henri IV of France, and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Also, it seems probable, the future James I of England.
What his private dreams were, his personal ambitions, we do not know. Once he returned from France they were all centred on the Earl of Essex. And in those last months, crippled not only bodily but by his debts as well, he lost faith in God and in mankind. The loose threads of his life remain untied. No more is heard of Tom Lawson, of Jacques Petit, or of those other nameless pages who acted as messengers between Essex House and Gorhambury.
We do not know who was at his bedside when he died. His mother had nine more years to live, lonely, confused, and according to a later report ‘little more than frantic in her age’. Forever without ‘children’s childer’, perhaps, in her moments of lucidity, she recalled earlier, happier days, when instead of warning her elder son that ‘strong drink breedeth strange fancies’ she bade him ‘ride not fast for yourself, and the horses being greys will quickly take hurt in this heat, one is especially very fast, which Mr Selwyn will like and use well’. No gout then, no sudden attack of the stone, but hard exercise and Ned Selwyn for companion on the road to the bachelor establishment at Redbourne. Supper to follow, some of the home-brewed ale; then the music that he loved, played upon the lute, and the virginals, sent down to the country with special care by George Jenkyll from Gray’s Inn.
Finally to bed, and whether then in Hertfordshire, or later in London, or even during his last unhappy hours after Ash Wednesday of the year 1601 until May 17th, he could turn to the bedside book of essays, not his brother’s with the dedication, but those of his friend, that Frenchman long since dead, Michel de Montaigne.
‘Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the human race ridiculous and futile, never appeared in public without a laughing mocking face. Heraclitus, having pity and compassion for this same human race, wore a continuously sad expression, his eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first, not because it is more pleasing to laugh than to cry, but because it is more scornful so to do, and it seems to me that according to our desserts, we can never be sufficiently condemned.’