It was fortunate for Francis that his services as Learned Counsel were not required during the summer and autumn of 1603, or he might have found himself once more speaking for the Crown against such persons as Lord Cobham, Sir Walter Ralegh and others, who had been arrested on charges of desiring to overthrow the government, and even dispossess King James and place his cousin Lady Arabella Stuart upon the throne. How much truth there was in the allegations it is difficult to judge. Several Jesuits and Catholic priests were hanged, but Ralegh, despite the venomous attack upon him by Attorney-General Edward Coke, did not suffer the supreme penalty. Nor did Lord Cobham; both were imprisoned in the Tower.
Ralegh had never been a favourite with the citizens of London, but now he became a popular hero, as the ill-fated Earl of Essex had once been. It is a curious trait in the English character that a man has only to be imprisoned, no matter what the offence, for a wave of sympathy to go to him, and his accusers to feel the backlash of dislike or even hatred. Francis had known the force of this in 1601 when Essex was condemned to death. Now he may have experienced some grim satisfaction in the realisation that his rival Edward Coke bore the full burden of public animosity, even though the victim had escaped the block.
Comparisons with the earlier trial in 1601 were bound to be made, and the moment was opportune to finish his Apologia concerning the late Earl of Essex, which he had begun the previous summer, in an attempt to seek a reconciliation with the earl’s family and close friends. A letter to the Earl of Southampton on his release from the Tower had brought no result, so, Francis decided, his only recourse was to write a full account of all that had taken place between himself and Essex, and between himself and Queen Elizabeth (with the exception of certain reservations concerning his brother Anthony). When it was finished he dedicated it to Lord Mountjoy—lover of several years’ standing of Penelope Rich, Essex’s sister—who since the coronation had been Duke of Devonshire. Mountjoy’s neck had been in considerable danger at the time of the late earl’s disgrace, but his success in the campaign against the Irish rebels had spared him from the suspicion of complicity.
Printed early in 1604, the Apologia is believed to have been widely circulated. Unfortunately no record exists of what Francis’s contemporaries thought of it, more especially the members of the Essex family, though Penelope Rich, so greatly revered by Anthony Bacon, who was to marry the Duke of Devonshire the following year, must surely have read it.
The ladies of the Court were fully occupied by the new year festivities at Hampton Court, and doubtless had no time to read political pamphlets, Queen Anne being a devotee of masques and extravaganzas. The masque which was performed, by Samuel Daniel, was entitled the ‘Vision of the Twelve Goddesses’. Her Majesty herself appeared as Pallas Athene, and Lady Rich, black-eyed, golden-haired, was Venus. Lady Bedford—whom Anthony Bacon’s French page Jacques Petit had once attended—played the part of Vesta. Another of the sparkling goddesses was Elizabeth Hatton, always in demand on these occasions. If Francis was a spectator, as seems probable, perhaps he thought of eleven-year-old Alice Barnham, as the goddesses danced and turned upon the floor, with ten-year-old Prince Henry, already a favourite with the ladies, being tossed from one to the other amid applause.
But it seems that the older courtiers were not amused. There were too many Scots gentlemen in his Majesty’s entourage, with their uncouth accent, their laughter over-loud, their jests ribald, none of which did the monarch appear to think out of place. King James himself was doubtless glad to have a certain amount of relaxation before the more solemn business of a week later, when on January 14th, in an effort to reconcile the various religious factions, the lords of the Council and the bishops were summoned to appear before him at Hampton Court to discuss the future of the church in England and Ireland, and the Book of Common Prayer. The conference lasted three days, and it appears that the King made a very admirable opening speech; indeed, one of the ministers of religion, Dr. Montague, later wrote of ‘the King alone disputing with the bishops, so wisely, wittily and learnedly, with that pretty patience, as I think never man living heard the like’. It seems very probable that Francis’s paper on the Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, dedicated to his Most Excellent Majesty, had been read with more than usual care by the King. However, it was impossible to please everyone, and the upshot of the conference was that the King supported his High Church bishops, and the Puritans amongst the clergy found their demands dismissed, which boded ill for future pacification.
This discontent found vent in the first Parliament of the new reign, which King James opened on March 19th. Many questions came to the forefront, the expenses of the royal household being one of them, and the privileges and prerogatives of the monarch. Those members of Parliament who held low-church or Puritan views tended to be the most adamant in favour of reform. The King believed himself supreme, ruling by divine right. His predecessor Queen Elizabeth may have had the same belief, but more than forty years of dealing with an English Parliament had taught her when to be firm and when to relent; and whatever her own feelings she knew that the monarch must appear to acquiesce to the demands of the faithful Commons. King James lacked this experience, and consequently found himself in some difficulty, instinctively supporting the Lords when discretion should have given a more gracious hearing to the Lower House.
Francis was elected spokesman for the Commons on various committees, one of the most important issues of this first session being the question of the union between England and Scotland, how such a union should be styled, and whether the ancient name of England should lapse and the two kingdoms become Great Brittany. This last suggestion was ill-received by both the English and the Scots, and Francis needed all the tact and discretion at his command to keep tempers cool. The argument continued through April and May, reports being drafted from the Commons to the Lords, and back again from the Lords to the Commons. Finally, on June 2nd, a bill was passed appointing a commission to look into the whole question of the proposed union, and to report its findings at the end of October.
It had been an exhausting session, especially for Francis, but when Parliament was prorogued on July 7th he could turn once more to his own concerns, the concluding of his extremely obscure work entitled Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature. This in fact he left unfinished, and it was not published for another hundred and thirty years. It was Valerius Terminus, written in English and begun the preceding year, which had for preface the Latin paper already referred to, with its opening words, ‘Believing that I was born for the service of mankind…’. The work is a collection of fragments, written in the hand of one of Francis’s many scribes, with annotations and corrections in his own.
It is an interesting fact, observed by the great scholar and biographer of Francis Bacon, James Spedding, that it was about this period of his life that Francis’s handwriting underwent a remarkable change, ‘from the hurried Saxon hand full of large sweeping curves and with letters imperfectly formed and connected, which he wrote in Elizabeth’s time, to a small, neat, light and compact one, formed more upon the Italian model which was then coming into fashion.’ This would seem to suggest that not only the thought and intellectual powers but also the character and personality of Francis the man were continually in process of transformation, of development and change. Indeed, in an age when there was no specialised learning as there is today, but when all educated men were expected to have some understanding of every branch of knowledge, Francis’s infinitely complex mind far surpassed those of his contemporaries: the politician, the scholar, the philosopher, the scientist, the lawyer, the essayist, the deviser of masques and entertainments—a man with so many facets to his character must have bewildered his contemporaries, who would recognise one aspect and not another, believing the one they saw to be the whole man. Hence, perhaps, the dislike, even the fear, of those in his own day who did not understand him, and the incredulity of succeeding generations; while to counter this we have the admiration, even the adulation, of his close friends, echoed in our own time by the more extravagant claims that have been made about him.
It is fascinating to speculate what a mid-twentieth-century psychiatrist might have unravelled from a recumbent Francis on a couch: what childhood dreams of glory were kindled when he stood in the shadow of his father the Lord Keeper as he bowed before the Queen; what fires of rebellion smothered in the presence of his mother; and, despite his real love and affection for his elder brother, what unacknowledged jealousy lingered through the years for Anthony’s friendship with Montaigne, and for his especial place in the intimate Essex-Southampton circle. Francis Bacon was an enigma then, as he is now, and perhaps most especially when he penned those words which open his Valerius Terminus, ‘Believing that I was born for the service of mankind…’
This work was found in the eighteenth century amongst the papers of the Earl of Oxford, and is today in the British Museum. In his later works, Francis was to expand and develop the ideas put forward in these fragments, but his argument, then as always, was that God has given man the gift of thought, the ability to explore all knowledge providing he uses it ‘for the benefit and relief of the state and society of man; for otherwise all manner of knowledge becometh malign and serpentine, and therefore as carrying the quality of the serpent’s sting and malice it maketh the mind of man to swell; as the Scripture saith excellently: knowledge bloweth up, but charity buildeth up.’ Further on, in the same opening chapter, he writes, ‘And therefore knowledge that tendeth but to satisfaction is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure but not for fruit or generation. And knowledge that tendeth to profit or profession or glory is but as the golden ball thrown before Atalanta, which while she goeth aside and stoopeth to pick up she hindereth the race.’
In mid-August, King James was well satisfied to conclude a treaty with Spain, and the Spanish envoys were entertained to a banquet at Whitehall. The war between the two countries, which had continued intermittently for so many years, was over at last. Toasts were drunk, gifts were exchanged, and no one was better pleased at the outcome of the negotiations than Queen Anne, who had long hoped for peace. She even helped to furnish rooms at her own private residence of Somerset House for Juan de Velasco, Constable of Castile, the spokesman of the mission.
Once again there was merriment and dancing, with young Prince Henry performing in fine style. There were whispers amongst the spectators that a marriage was to be arranged between the Prince and the Infanta Anna, daughter of King Philip III of Spain. Fortunately for the blood-pressure of the Purtian members of the Court, these rumours were unfounded. The revels continued, with bears fighting greyhounds and mastiffs attacking a bull. This last was evidently designed to please the Spanish guests, and delighted all but Prince Henry, who was fond of animals; indeed, it was said that on a previous occasion, at the Tower of London, when three dogs were put in a lion’s cage and only one survived the mauling, the Prince sent for the dog to St James’s Palace where he could see to its care himself. Such solicitude for the helpless was one of the finest things in his endearing character. He would surely have been horrified if he had ever been told of the celebrations in Oslo when his Scottish father and Danish mother were married, and King James ordered four young negroes to dance naked in the snow before the royal carriage to amuse the crowd. The negroes died later of pneumonia.
Possibly, when Francis Bacon was composing his Masculine Birth of Time, addressed to a young student, and his Valerius Terminus, he had in mind the immense importance of forming the ideas and nurturing the understanding of the future Prince of Wales, the heir to the two kingdoms.
It was during the visit of the Spanish envoys in August 1604 that King James was pleased at last to grant Sir Francis, by letters patent, the office of Learned Counsel, which until then had only been a verbal agreement. At the same time he gave him a pension of £60 a year. A small sum, and not one that was likely to increase the Gorhambury coffers, but a favour nevertheless, and an encouragement to continue yet another manuscript, this time a lengthy examination of Certain Articles or Considerations Touching the Union of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland. The commissioners who had been appointed before Parliament was prorogued in July to look into this question consisted of forty-eight Englishmen and thirty-one Scots. They met at the end of October, and although the final proceedings were not concluded until early December, it was largely owing to Francis Bacon that they came to unanimous agreement in all particulars. There were no disputes, no wrangling, every deliberation was handled with tact and delicacy, and the matter of the King’s style or title, which hitherto had been a large bone of contention, was decided upon as King of Great Brittany, France and Ireland.
Here the business ended for the moment. The commissioners’ report would have to pass through Parliament eventually, but this was deferred until the following year. With the threat of a return of the plague, Parliament was prorogued for ten months on December 24th, and the member for Ipswich, his work on the union concluded, could forget political affairs.
Once again there were festivities at Court. Queen Anne’s brother Ulric, Bishop of Schwerin and Schleswig, was a visitor to England and must be entertained, and young Philip Herbert, whom the King had tapped so playfully on the cheek at the coronation, was married to Lady Susan Vere, a granddaughter of the first Lord Burghley. The King himself gave the bride away in Whitehall chapel, and inevitably celebrations followed. There was a masque which lasted for three hours, the fun waxing so fast and furious that some of the ladies not only lost their jewels but had their skirts torn for good measure. A more attractive spectacle was seen on Twelfth Night, when little Prince Charles, just five years old, was invested as Knight of the Bath, but because he walked with such difficulty—he suffered from some weakness in his joints—he was obliged to watch from the arms of the Lord Admiral while another nobleman took the oath for him.
Francis, knowing that the House of Commons would not claim his attendance until October, that his mother was safely cared for at Gorhambury, and that Alice Barnham, not yet thirteen, was playing with her sisters under the care of her mother and Lusty Packington either in Suffolk or in Worcestershire, could relax from domestic matters, and, surrounded by his books and papers and his willing pens in the comfortable lodgings in Gray’s Inn, turn once more to composition—this time a major work that he would finish, The Advancement of Learning.