PART I

THE LIFE OF FRANCIS BACON

§1 THE COURT OF ELIZABETH1

SOMEWHERE in the correspondence of Anthony Bacon, Francis Bacon's brother, there occurs the following description of the Four Arts, without which no one could hope to succeed at Court in the later days of Queen Elizabeth :

"Cog, lie, flatter and face,

Four ways in Court to win men grace.
If thou be thrall to none of these,
Away, good Piers! Home, John Cheese!"2

Criticism in verse is generally too epigrammatic to be accurate, but certainly the doggerel just quoted will not seem very overstrained to any one who turns over Birch's Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth or the MS. of Anthony Bacon's correspondence. In the nation at large there was no lack of moral health; but the Court breathed an atmosphere of falsehood and intrigue. Intellect had free play, literature throve, the English language was in such perfection that it seemed impossible for the men and women of those days to write weakly or nervelessly; but truthfulness seemed extinct about the Queen. The old religion was dead, and the new religion had taken no hold of the royal circle. Greece and Rome were recognised as the model states, and Machiavelli as the great authority on politics.

1 The greater part of this chapter is extracted from my Bacon and Essex. Seeley and Co., 1877, pp. 1-12.

2 These verses must have been quoted by the writer, whoever he was, from Roger Ascham. (Scholemaster, Arber's edition, p. 54.)

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As for applying the principles of Christianity to politics, we, in these days, cannot be surprised that the Elizabethan politicians did not dream of doing it; but they went far beyond us in their consistent disregard for truthfulness. Essex himself, though naturally one of the bluntest of men, confesses that, in order to serve the Queen, he is forced, "like the waterman, to look one way and row another." Walsingham is recorded to have outdone the Jesuits in their own arts, and overreached them in equivocation and mental reservation. The history, now generally accepted, of the famous Casket letters, convicts the leading statesmen of England of an attempt to bring Mary Stuart to the block by forgeries. Sir Robert Cecil urges his intimate friend Carew to entrap the young Earl of Desmond into a conspiracy for the purpose of getting rid of him. To be a politician meant in those days to be an adept in suspecting and lying. "Envious and malignant dispositions," says Bacon, are the very errors of human nature, and yet they are the fittest natures to make great politiques of." To the same effect is Hamlet's pithy description of the politician"One that would circumvent God."

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Foreign policy was the principal, but by no means the only, sphere for the evil arts of the "politique." Untruthfulness, on a pettier scale, was the basis of Court life. The rival politicians of the Essex faction and the Cecil faction entirely distrusted one another. Anthony Bacon accuses Sir Robert Cecil of intercepting his letters. Bacon advises Essex to take care to flatter the Queen in face as well as in word, and to imitate the craft of the former favourite Leicester, in taking up measures (which he never intended to carry out) for the mere purpose of appearing to bend to the royal will, by dropping them in compliance with the Queen's command.

These Court shifts and tricks were reduced to a system, some of the secrets of which are to be found in Bacon's Essays. There was the art of procuring oneself to be surprised; there was the art of writing a letter in which the main point should be casually added or introduced; there was the art of being found reading a letter of which one desired to make known the contents, but not in a direct way; there was the art of laying a bait for a question; there was a whole budget of similar arts-all taken from life, all (as Bacon says in the dedication prefixed to the Essays) "of a nature whereof a man shall find much in experience, little in books." It is true that Bacon calls these arts "cunning," as distinct from "wisdom;" and he does not like them. But there was no choice for a man who elected to live at Court. What the art of oratory was in democratic Athens, that the art of lying and flattering was for a courtier in the latter part of the Elizabethan monarchy. No courtier was safe of his position without it. Truth, Bacon declares, is noble, and falsehood is base; yet "mixture of falsehood is like alloy in coin of gold and silver, which may make the metal work the better." 1 Theory on such subjects is generally purer than practice, and Bacon's theory is summed up in these words: "The best composition and temperament is to have openness in fame and opinions, secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use, and a power to feign, if there be no remedy." 2 If a courtier objected to "feigning"-"Home, John Cheese!"

For the corruption of the Court it is usual to lay the blame upon the Queen's parsimony, which drove her servants to reimburse themselves out of bribes for the losses which they could not make good out of their salaries. But it was perhaps not so much the Queen's parsimony as the increasing expense of state services, which had once been performed by voluntary efforts, but were now becoming too burdensome for the old system. Be that as it may, the effect (whether of the Queen's parsimony, or of the collapse of the old system of voluntary service) was bad in every way, both for the country and the Court. The evil fell most heavily on the military officers and ambassadors, who were forced to supplement the public supplies out of their own purses. Burghley and Cecil, who for the most part stop at home, feel little of it; but the ambassadors, Sir Henry Unton, Sir Thomas Bodley, Sir Robert Sydney, all write in the same strain, constantly complaining of their expenses, and imploring to be recalled. Essex hereafter will appear-in spite of the many estates and valuable offices which he enjoyed -overwhelmed with debt towards the end of his career.

But if the pecuniary evil fell most heavily upon those who went abroad, the moral evil fell on those who stayed at home. 1 Essays, i. 66.

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"My Lord," writes the Recorder of London to Burghley, "there is a saying, When the Court is furthest from London, then there is the best justice done in England. It is grown for a trade now in the Court to make means for reprieves. Twenty pounds for a reprieve is nothing, though it be but for ten days." In 1598, Sir Anthony Ashley thus writes to Sir Robert Cecil: “ I am advertised that Wm. Whorewood is very deeply to be touched in the treasonable matter of one Tydie, late a scrivener here in Holborn, not long since executed at Tyburn for having counterfeited her Majesty's great seal. If you, either by yourself or in some other name, will deal in this suit, it will easily pay your extraordinary expenses in the French embassy; for his yearly revenue in land and leases is 2,000 marks, besides much money. If you neglect it, the party will promote it to the great one." The "great one" is probably Cecil's rival, Essex. There is no reason to suppose that Essex would have been much more scrupulous than Cecil in "dealing" in such a suit. Egerton was one of the most upright men of the time; yet we find Essex writing to Egerton, first on behalf of one party to a suit, and then (finding that he had been unwittingly supporting an enemy of Anthony Bacon) in behalf of the opposite party. To the same Egerton we shall find Francis Bacon offering something closely approximating to a bribe, and showing how the transaction can be arranged without any one's noticing it. 1 Lady Edmondes, a lady about the Queen's person, declines 100l. as too little to save the ears and liberty of a certain Mr. Booth, who has been condemned, or is likely to be condemned, to the pillory and imprisonment. Concerning this Booth, Mr. Standen (a correspondent of Anthony Bacon's) writes that he heard Lord Keeper Puckering say to Lady Edmondes, "Do your endeavour, and you shall not find me wanting;" and Standen unquestionably lays the blame in the right place when he adds, "This ruffianry of causes groweth by the Queen's straitness to give to these women, whereby they presume thus to grange and huck causes." Anthony Bacon, taking up poor Booth's case, offers 100l., but will not come up to the lady's price, which is 200l. Even for this sum she will only save his ears, but not his fine-which has been already assigned to some servant in the royal stables. We must not be too hard on this Lady Edmondes. She was but one of a class, "these general contrivers of suits," whom Bacon justly stigmatises as "a kind of poison and infection to public proceedings." 1

Apart from the corruption and mendacity for which the Queen appears, in part at least, to be personally responsible, the system of government was radically bad, demoralising both the governor and the governed. The sort of reverence that we pay to "the British Constitution" is now, in our minds, quite distinct from the feeling of loyalty to the person of the sovereign. But to the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth the Queen was not Queen merely, but Constitution too. No minister could dare to assume responsibility for the royal actions; and yet the Queen could do no wrong, and was responsible to no one.

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The increasing years and infirmities of the sovereign increased the friction of the imperfect system and the debasement of those who were subjected to it. Gloriana in her brighter years standing up against Duessa as the champion of the truth against superstition, Britomartis in arms at the head of an armed people defying the enemies of pure religion-this was a fitting and worthy object for the homage of a court; but Gloriana senile, yet destitute of the graces of old age, Gloriana flirting and lying, Britomartis abusing her chief minister as peevish old fool," or amusing herself with making Francis Bacon "frame," or boxing Essex on the ears, or swearing at her godson Harrington, or in her final stage of melancholy with a rusty sword before her on the table hacking at the arras-who could worship such an idol as this without becoming a hypocrite or a veritable slave? To the outside world the Queen's imperfections were less visible, and they could still undebased revere in her the fearless champion of their religion and their national independence; but for the inner circle of the Court the old reverence had become unnatural, hypocritical, and incompatible with the spirit of freedom and honour.

If the Queen's aims had been invariably directed towards objects useful for the country, the mischief might have been much diminished. But it was not so. She thought of England, it is true; but she thought of the interests of England as being