1603 The old queen was dead. Bacon had served Elizabeth as the consummate politician – literally in that he had sat as Member of Parliament, first for Melcome in Dorset, then for Taunton, and also in the Shakespearean sense of turning against his benefactor the Earl of Essex when it seemed politic so to do. Now he was heavily in debt – not for the first or last time – and not so much out of royal favour as off the new king’s radar altogether.
Would a letter to Robert Cecil do the trick? Cecil had been Elizabeth’s secretary of state, and having smoothed James I into the system, was being retained in that august office. In less than a month, James would make him a baron – and two years later, first Earl of Salisbury. So Bacon wrote to Cecil on this day in 1603, bemoaning his debts and suggesting that, since knighthoods were now two a penny (the king had granted over 300 of them even before reaching London), maybe he could get one too, to soothe his humiliation.
I could without charge, by your Honour’s means, be content to have it, both because of this late disgrace, and because I have three new knights in my mess in Grey’s Inn commons, and because I have found out an alderman’s daughter, an handsome maiden, to my liking.
It worked. He got the gong and the girl (Alice Barnham), and could hold his head up once again among his lawyer friends. But better was to follow. He was soon back at court, and in such royal favour that he aroused envy in those around him. By 1613 he was attorney general, and five years later lord chancellor. Then it all unravelled. Once again he fell into debt. In 1621 a parliamentary commission found him guilty of corruption. He was fined £40,000 (over £6.5 million today) and even locked up in the Tower for a while. This time he really was out.
Not in posterity’s judgement, though. He had already worked out the theory of inductive reasoning (from the natural fact to the general rule, instead of the other way round) on which all modern science rests, publishing his thesis in Novum Organum (1620). Next came his seductive utopian romance, The New Atlantis (1627). His Essays (1597) had long offered valuable tips for bureaucratic infighters, and still survive as models of the plain style.