‘We sailed from Peru, where we had continued by the space of one whole year, for China and Japan, by the South Sea; taking with us victuals for twelve months; and had good winds from the east, though soft and weak, for five months’ space and more. But then the wind came about, and settled in the west for many days, so as we could make little or no way, and were sometimes in purpose to turn back. But then again there arose strong and great winds from the south, with a point east… so that finding ourselves in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world, without victual, we gave ourselves for lost men and prepared for death.’
The start of a nineteenth-century novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, telling the adventures of a barque in the Pacific? Not so. The opening of New Atlantis, the fable that Francis Bacon began in 1624 and never finished. Now read on.
‘And it came to pass that the next day about evening, we saw… as it were thick clouds, which did put us in some hope of land: knowing how that part of the South Sea was utterly unknown; and might have islands or continents, that hitherto were not come to light… And after an hour and a half’s sailing, we entered into a good haven, being the port of a fair city… but straightway we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands, as it were forbidding us to land; yet without any cries of fierceness… There made forth to us a small boat, with about eight persons in it; whereof one of them had in his hand a tip-staff of a yellow cane, tipped at both ends with blue, who came aboard our ship, without any show of distrust at all… He drew forth a little scroll of parchment… in which scroll were written in ancient Hebrew, and in ancient Greek, and in good Latin of the School, and in Spanish, these words, “Land ye not, none of you; and provide to be gone from this coast within sixteen days, except you have further time given you. Meanwhile, if you want fresh water, or victual, or help for your sick, or that your ship needeth repair, write down your wants, and you shall have that which belongeth to mercy.” This scroll was signed with a stamp of cherubins’ wings, not spread but hanging downwards, and by them a cross… About three hours after we had dispatched our answer, there came towards us a person, as it seemed, of place. He had on him a gown with wide sleeves, of a kind of water chamolet, of an excellent azure colour, far more glossy than ours; his under apparel was green; and so was his hat, being in the form of a turban, daintily made, and not so huge as the Turkish turbans; and the locks of his hair came down below the brims of it.’
After swearing they were not pirates, and had not shed blood within forty days past, and were Christians, the ship’s company were given permission to land the following day, bringing their sick. This they did, and were taken to a spacious house, built of brick of a blueish colour, known as the Stranger’s House. Here they were told they might rest for three days and were given food and drink of a more refreshing kind than any of them had tasted in Europe, and pills to hasten the recovery of the sick. When the three days had passed, the governor of the Stranger’s House came to visit them, telling them that he was by vocation a Christian priest, and seeing that his guests were also Christian he would answer their questions, for the state had given them licence to stay for six weeks in the island, which was called Bensalem.
The officers of the ship’s company, six in number, then learnt, after further discussion each day, the extraordinary history of the island. How some three thousand years before, although even then an island, it had formed part of the great continent of Atlantis, possessing ships that travelled the world over. Hence their knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Then disaster struck. A mighty flood overwhelmed the whole continent, burying its cities and drowning almost all its inhabitants, and the few who survived became, through succeeding centuries, the unlettered and near savage population of what remained of the once proud and powerful continent, namely America.
As for the island of Bensalem, it had survived intact, through the miraculous intervention of the Almighty, and the Apostle of Jesus Christ, Saint Bartholomew, thus enabling the islanders and their descendants to grow in wisdom and culture through the ages, Christian in faith and outlook, while their king and governor had been one they called Solamona, who had created an order of society that was named Salomon’s House, dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.
Isolated from the rest of the world, the islanders had thus avoided all contamination from outer sources, but certain brethren of Salomon’s House were permitted to travel in disguise, wander amongst the peoples of the world, and then return with what they had learnt of the progress of science, art, manufacture and invention, and so improve their own inventions in the island; yet by their very isolation in these unexplored waters of the Pacific ocean, and the rule of life by which they lived, safeguard their discoveries from Man’s greed and exploitation.
The visitors to Bensalem were permitted to wander about the town and its neighbourhood as they wished. ‘We took ourselves now for free men,’ says the narrator of New Atlantis, ‘and lived most joyfully… obtaining acquaintance with many of the city… at whose hands we found such humanity, and such a freedom and desire to take strangers as it were into their bosom as was enough to make us forget all that was dear to us in our own countries: and continually we met with many things right worthy of observation and relation; as indeed, if there be a mirror in the world worthy to hold men’s eyes, it is that country.’
The resemblance to a nineteenth-century novel of adventure ends, and a forerunner of twentieth-century science fiction begins when the narrator is allowed access to one of the Fathers of Salomon’s House, who imparts to him all the secrets of the work in progress.
‘Caves… sunk six hundred fathom… These caves we call the Lower Region. And we use them for all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies… and the producing also of new artificial metals… and we use them sometimes for curing of some diseases, and for prolongation of life… We have also great variety of composts, and soils, for the making of the earth fruitful.
‘We have high towers… and these place we call the Upper Region… We use these towers for the view of divers meteors; as winds, rain, snow, hail; and some of the fiery meteors also…
‘We have also a number of artificial wells… Chambers of Health… gardens where we practise all conclusions of grafting and inoculating… parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds… to try poisons and other medicines upon them… resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance…
‘We have heats in imitation of the sun’s and heavenly bodies’ heats… Instruments also which generate heat only by motion… We procure means of seeing objects afar off… and things afar off as near, making feigned distances… We have also sound-houses… and means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distance… Engine-houses, where we practise to make swifter motions than any you have… and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks… We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air; we have ships and boats for going under water, and brooking of seas…
‘We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures, and illusions; and their fallacies.
‘These are, my son, some of the riches of Salomon’s House.’
To the ordinary reader, who is neither scholar nor historian and has yet managed to read The Advancement of Learning and translations of the Latin works without difficulty, indeed with enjoyment, New Atlantis comes as a further shock of surprise and excitement, for here is something quite different again from anything that Francis Bacon had written hitherto. The nineteenth-century Robert Louis Stevenson has been mentioned, and the names of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells could be added; but these were all writers close to our own time and the author of New Atlantis preceded them by two and a half centuries.
So what were his sources, and who inspired him? Certainly the style and the opening description of the voyage are reminiscent of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, first published in 1589, with further editions in 1598, 1599 and 1600. Francis, an avid reader, would have seized upon them as a young barrister at Gray’s Inn, and undoubtedly made notes of their contents. Moreover, Richard Hakluyt, like Francis, had shares in the Virginia Company; the two men would certainly have met.
Dr. John Dee, astrologer, mathematician and alchemist, was another celebrated figure about the Elizabethean Court in those days, one of his obsessions being to discover a north-west passage to the Far East; while later in his career, in Bohemia, he became involved with the curious mystical Rosicrucian movement which spread across the whole of Germany, a ‘fraternity in learning and illumination,’ its members secret, known as the Brothers of the Rosy Cross. Their manifestos, the Fama (in German) and Confessio (in Latin), were published in 1615, and Francis Bacon would certainly have read the latter and known about the Rosicrucian fraternity. There is a striking resemblance between Salomon’s House in his New Atlantis and the Brothers of the Rosicrucian movement; and Frances Yates, author of The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, believes that Francis Bacon based his fable upon the manifestos but that he was not himself a member of the fraternity. Nor is there any proof that Francis Bacon ever belonged to any mystical or other secret society.
In New Atlantis Francis Bacon was developing into a fable for the future the dream that had obsessed him all his life. Years before, when he had helped to produce the Revels at Gray’s Inn as a young barrister in January 1595, the theme of the Gesta Grayorum had been along the same lines: the knightly Order of the Helmet suggesting many of the rules of conduct observed by the Brethren of Salomon’s House. It was not by rules of conduct, though, that his dream-world could come into being: it was by a new understanding of natural science, and we have seen how he continually developed this idea in later years, with Cogitata et Visa and The Advancement of Learning. Thence his desire, forever frustrated, to become vice-chancellor of a university, or, if not vice-chancellor, then master of a college, and finally (though this also was denied him) to be provost of Eton. Students, men of learning, must be directed to research. There must be nothing in heaven or earth, or under the earth, left unexplored. Nobody listened. Nobody cared.
Very well, then. A fable, and in English, about an island in the Pacific, with caverns and towers equipped as laboratories, and the Father of Salomon’s House a glorified image of what Francis himself might have been; no Prospero on the stage with a magician’s wand and spirits to do his bidding, but the director of an institution for research, and men of goodwill working beside him.
A fable of some thirty pages, left unfinished, put aside. To be published by chaplain Rawley a year after Francis’s death, with the preface to the reader: ‘This fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpretation of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men; under the name of Salomon’s House, or the College of Six Days’ Works. And even so far his Lordship hath proceeded, as to finish that part. Certainly the model is more vast and high than can possibly be imitated in all things; notwithstanding most things therein are within men’s power to effect. His Lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth; but foreseeing it would be a long work, his desire of collecting the Natural History diverted him, which he preferred many degrees before it…’
Disappointment may also have had its effect. It was reported in April that Sir. Henry Wotton was likely to become the new provost of Eton, and by midsummer the appointment was confirmed; no schoolboy, with ‘his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school,’ would greet Francis in College Yard to be moulded into a man of science. Instead, he must rest content with those student lawyers at Gray’s Inn, and the many other handy pens who loved him well.
And at this point, July and August of 1624, he fell ill once more, as he had done the preceding summer, and his helpers were set to work to copy down, from dictation at his bedside, some 280 apophthegms, or sayings that he had memorised during his lifetime. It was not a fatiguing occupation for a sick man who knew each of the apophthegms by heart, though it may have taxed his attendants. As might be expected from ‘the most prodigious wit’ of this side of the sea, many of the sayings betray a pungent sense of humour. He drew them from every source: classical, historical, his own time, sayings from the previous reign, some spoken by Queen Elizabeth herself, and one or two by his own father. The following happen to appeal to the present writer:
‘A great officer in France was in danger to have lost his place; but his wife, by her suit and means making, made his peace; wherein a pleasant fellow said, “That he had been crushed, but that he had saved himself upon his horns”.’
‘There was a young man in Rome, that was very like Augustus Caesar. Augustus took knowledge of it, and sent for the man, and asked him “Was your mother never at Rome?.” He answered “No, sir, but my father was”.’
‘Alexander was wont to say: “He knew he was mortal by two things; sleep and lust”.’
‘Sir. Edward Coke was wont to say, when a great man came to dinner with him, and gave him no knowledge of his coming: “Well, since you sent me no word of your coming, you shall dine with me; but if I had known of it in due time, I would have dined with you”.’
‘There was a gentleman that came to the tilt all in orange-tawney, and ran very ill. The next day he came all in green, and ran worse. There was one of the lookers-on asked another; “What’s the reason that this gentleman changeth his colours?” The other answered “Sure, because it may be reported that the gentleman in the green ran worse than the gentleman in the orange-tawney”.’
‘The counsel did make remonstrance unto Queen Elizabeth of the continual conspiracies against her life; and namely of a late one… and upon this occasion advised her that she should go less abroad to take the air, weakly accompanied, as she used. But the Queen answered: “That she had rather be dead, than put in custody”.’
James Spedding was of the opinion that Francis published his apophthegms because he owed both publisher and printer money, which may well have been the case; his debts were piling up as usual. We do not know which of the many ‘idle pens’ copied the sayings down, to chuckles from the sick bed, but possibly not the chaplain Rawley, who would have preferred the other slim volume that appeared at the same time, the Translations of Certain Psalms into English Verse, dedicated to the poet George Herbert as ‘this poor exercise of my sickness.’
One wonders what Tobie Matthew would have thought of them. No evidence of prodigious wit here, or indeed of talent. Is it possible that Francis had been turning over some of the faded effusions of his devout mother, the late Lady Bacon, and then, with judicious alterations here and there, had decided to send them off with the apophthegms for good measure?
Whatever the reason for the publication of both apophthegms and psalms, there is no doubt that Francis Bacon had been seriously ill through summer and autumn, and so had many others, adults and children alike. John Chamberlain reported in September from London that, ‘We have here but a sickly season, and yet admit of no infection. 407 this week, 150 of them children, most of the rest carried away by this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere in the country as well as here.’ He gives the names of some of those who had died, or been ill, and mentions Lord St. Alban amongst them.
Writing three months later, just before Christmas, to Dudley Carleton abroad, he mentions Francis’s apophthegms, ‘newly set out this week, but with so little allowance or applause that the world says his wit and judgement begins to draw near the lees; he hath likewise translated some few psalms into verse or rhyme which shows he grows holy towards his end: if I could meet with a fit messenger you should have them both.’
Francis himself, in his very scanty correspondence during the autumn, makes no mention of ‘spotted fever’ in a letter to the Duke of Buckingham, but speaks of ‘the raving of a hot ague,’ which sounds equally painful if not so dangerous. He was still without that formal pardon for which he craved, and it seems uncertain whether his pension had been paid. He would have learnt that summer, possibly with mixed feelings and with a certain sense of irony, that Lord Treasurer Cranfield, first Earl of Middlesex, who had succeeded him as the owner of York House, had been accused of certain offences, confined to the Tower, deprived of all his offices and heavily fined, and was now an exile in the country, just as he himself had been three years previously. Few statesmen those days could climb the winding stair without a fall.
Nevertheless, although Viscount St. Alban had no more part in the government of the country, his advice regarding a French alliance had not gone altogether unheeded, and he would have heard, with an equally ironic smile, in November of 1624, that negotiations for a marriage between the Prince of Wales and Princess Henrietta Maria, daughter of King Louis XII of France, were nearing completion. The Duke of Buckingham was expected to cross the Channel early in the new year, accompanied by a retinue of peers, and bring the princess to England.
Unfortunately, Bacon’s counsel that, before any British army should be sent abroad to help recover the Palatinate, military authorities must be consulted was apparently disregarded. Some 12,000 men, composed of Scots and English regiments, arrived in Holland to take part in a joint expedition with Count Mansfeldt, but without definite orders and under poor leadership. The British contingent was so ill-disciplined that it went on its way looting and despoiling the countryside as if, so John Chamberlain was obliged to report, ‘it had been in an enemy’s country… We hear they have mutinied already so that Count Mansfeldt durst not show himself among them.’ Later half the number were carried off by disease and privation. Apparently no attempt was made to feed the troops or to organise supplies, and the enterprise was a total failure.
It was not a happy start to the year 1625, and John Chamberlain spoke, for once, for all his fellow-countrymen when he wrote in February, ‘The time hath been, when so many English as have been sent into those parts within these six or eight months would have done somewhat, and made the world talk of them, but I know not how we that have been esteemed in that kind more than any other nations, do begin to grow by degrees less than the least, when the basest of people in matter of courage dare brave and trample upon us.’
On March 5th King James became ill, after hunting at Theobalds. Although he had suffered for some time with gout, and possibly arthritis, it was not at first realised that his condition was now serious. He lingered for some three weeks, unable to speak—perhaps the result of a stroke—and died on March 27th 1625, aged fifty-eight. His body was brought to London and lay in state at Denmark House until the funeral on May 7th, ‘the greatest indeed that ever was known in England,’ after which King James I of England and VI of Scotland was buried in the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey.
His son, who succeeded him as King Charles I, had been married by proxy to the Princess Henrietta Maria on May 1st, but was obliged to wait for his bride six weeks, when he received her at Canterbury on June 13th.
‘The Queen,’ reported Chamberlain, ‘hath brought they say such a poor pitiful sort of women that there is not one worth the looking after saving herself and the Duchess of Chevreuse, who though she be fair yet paints foully.’ The Duke of Buckingham gave a magnificent banquet in their honour at York House, but because of indisposition neither of their Majesties was present. We do not know whether Francis Bacon was well enough to attend and to partake of the sumptuous fare that was provided in his old home. A sturgeon ‘six foot long’ that had leapt into a sculler’s boat that very afternoon was served at supper.
The new King summoned his first Parliament on June 18th. His speech was short. He told the Members ‘they had drawn him into a war, and they must find means to maintain it.’ The means were not forthcoming. His father, as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ though he had never won the hearts of his subjects, might have handled the matter with more discretion and been applauded. King Charles was not so fortunate. The reign of that ill-fated monarch, destined to die upon the scaffold in 1649, had now begun. He was at this time twenty-four years old.