his health is suffering from his disappointment, and writes to Anthony (5 August, 1595), with an exhortation that Francis should think less of preferment and more of religion, health, and the simple duty of keeping out of debt : "I am sorry your brother with inward secret grief injureth his health. Everybody saith he looketh thin and pale. Let him look to God and confer with Him in godly exercises of hearing and reading, and contemn to be noted to take care. I had rather ye both, with God His blessed favour, had very good health and well out of debt, than any office. Yet, though the Εαρλ showed great affection, he marred all with violent courses your brother be of good cheer." .... Let But it is all in vain. This year, like the last, is spent in writing petitionary letters to men in power; in hanging about the Court stairs in expectation of a royal summons; in currying favour with the Vice-Chamberlain, hurrying from chambers to Court, from Court to chambers, distracted between his legal work and his suit; "asserviling himself," as he himself says, " to every man's charity;" now beseeching and now reproaching the great ones whom he suspects of thwarting him; and all to fail again (1595) with no result, nor prospect of a result, except that the Queen is said to have expressed her satisfaction that Mr. Francis Bacon has begun "to frame very well." Certainly if by "frame" the Queen meant "stoop to the usages of Courts;" if what she desired to effect was the complete destruction of the stiff uncourtier-like pride which had brought upon young Francis Bacon the rebuke of his uncle-inlaw, and the substitution of a temper approaching to a supple servility, her success is apparent to anyone who contrasts Bacon's earlier language to Lord Burghley with his present language to Lord-Keeper Puckering. To the former he had written thus in 1580.:- "To your Lordship, whose recommendation, I know right well, hath been material to advance her Majesty's good opinion of me, I can be but a bounden servant. So much may I safely promise and purpose to be, seeing public and private bonds vary not, but that my service to God, her Majesty, and your Lordship draw in a line." 1 That is, "despise the thought that his anxiety should be generally remarked." In the next sentence, "the Eapd" is the Earl of Essex, written, according to Lady Ann's manner, in Greek characters. But now, after an apprenticeship of fourteen years to the manners of the Court, Bacon proffers himself as a "servant" to Puckering if only the latter will procure him the Solicitorship -without any such lofty proviso as he thought fit to append to his promises of gratitude to Burghley : But "A timorous man is every body's, and a covetous man is his own. if your Lordship consider my nature, my course, my friends, my opinion with her Majesty (if this eclipse of her favour were past) I hope you will think I am no unlikely piece of wood to shape you a true servant of." (19 April, 1594). And finally when he fails, while smarting from what he describes to Essex as an "exquisite disgrace," he can nevertheless write to the Queen that he "acknowledges the providence of God towards him that findeth it expedient for him to bear the yoke in his youth." It has indeed been pointed out by Mr. Spedding and Professor Gardiner that at least in one respect Bacon remained true to himself during the whole of this miserable business. As might have been supposed, the Queen had by no means forgiven that speech of his against the subsidies in 1593, for which she had excluded him from her presence; and in June 1595 she gave Burghley to understand her mind. But if she was waiting for a retractation or apology, none was forthcoming. In his reply to Burghley he refuses to believe that the Queen is really offended with him on these grounds. It is well known, he says, that he was the first of the independent members of the House who spoke for the subsidy; "and that which I after spake, in difference, was but on circumstances of time and manner; which methinks should be no great matter, since there is variety allowed in counsel, as a discord in music, to make it more perfect. But I may justly doubt, not so much her Majesty's impression on this particular, as her conceit otherwise of my insufficiency;" and accordingly the rest of the letter is devoted to the proof that he is "sufficient.". But This letter is described as "most creditable to Bacon." it is hard to see how, even as a place-seeker, he could have written otherwise. Was he to confess that he had been guilty of popularity-hunting, or of captious opposition, and to promise that he would not repeat the offence? Or to declare that, although he had honestly and conscientiously given counsel for the best, he would never thus give counsel again? By so doing he would for ever have disqualified himself for any position of trust, and rendered himself for ever incapable of tendering advice with any hope that it would be received. The best thing that he could do was to extenuate his opposition and to show that his suggestions were merely differences of "circumstance." In reality he had opposed the Government on principle and not merely on circumstance: "This being granted in this sort, other Princes hereafter will look for the like; so we shall put an ill precedent upon ourselves and to our posterity" 1-thus he had spoken in the House; and similarly in his letter to Burghley immediately after his speech, "It is true that from the beginning, whatsoever was above a double subsidy, I did wish might (for precedent's sake) appear to be extraordinary, and (for discontent's sake) might not have been levied upon the poorer sort;"o and he had also maintained that the payment should be extended over six years instead of three. Rather important differences, these, to be described as unimportant "circumstances" of time and manner, mere "variety" of counsel, like "discord in music" to make it more perfect! Yet with his usual inaccuracy Bacon persuades himself, and endeavours to persuade the Queen, that what is not convenient is not true. He could not, with any hope of a useful result, confess that he had been disloyal, and promise not to be disloyal again; but he could gloss the truth and adapt facts; and what he could do, he did. All this while he is plunging deeper and deeper into debt, receiving driblets of money from his brother Anthony, who alienates an estate mainly for his sake; begging his mother to consent to the alienation of a second estate; borrowing money upon his reversionary clerkship; and dunned by creditors who complain that they can get from him neither principal nor interest. The generosity of the Earl of Essex, however, alleviated these latter burdens. On the final failure of his suit (October or November, 1595), Bacon had written to his patron a letter, in which he regrets especially his loss of "means"; expresses his determination henceforth to follow philosophy and not law; but adds that, though he reckons himself " a common" -born, as he says elsewhere, "for the service of mankind"there was still at the Earl's service " as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a common." 1 Bacon's speech on the Subsidy, Spedding i. 223. 2 Ibid. 234. "TO MY LORD OF ESSEX, "It may please your good Lordship, "I pray God her Majesty's weighing be not like the weight of a balance; gravia deorsum, levia sursum. But I am as far from being altered in devotion towards her as I am from distrust that she will be altered in opinion towards me, when she knoweth me better. For myself, I have lost some opinion, some time, and some means. This is my account. But then, for opinion, it is a blast that cometh and goeth; for time, it is true it goeth and cometh not; but yet I have learned that it may be redeemed. "For means, I value that most, and the rather because I am purposed not to follow the practice of the law (if her Majesty command me in any particular I shall be ready to do her willing service), and my reason is, only because it drinketh too much time, which I have dedicated to better purpose. But even for the point of estate and means, I partly lean to Thales' opinion, that a philosopher may be rich if he will. Thus your Lordship seeth how I comfort myself; to the increase whereof I would fain please myself to believe that to be true which my Lord Treasurer writeth, which is, that it is more than a philosopher morally can digest. But without any such high conceit, I esteem it like the pulling out of an aching tooth, which I remember when I was a child and had little philosophy, I was glad of it when it was done. "For your Lordship, I do think myself more beholding to you than to any man. And I say I reckon myself as a common (not popular, but common); and as much as is lawful to be enclosed of a common so much your Lordship shall be sure to have. "Your Lordship's to obey your honourable commands, It was probably in response to this letter that Essex presented him with a piece of land worth at that time eighteen hundred pounds, or between seven and eight thousand pounds of our money.1 1 My reason for thinking that this letter (which is undated) was written before, and not after, the gift of Essex, is that in speaking of his loss of "means" he makes no allusion whatever to the Earl's munificence. It seems scarcely possible that a man writing to a patron who had given him a gift amounting to seven or Thus for a time Bacon's most pressing necessities were met and his suit for office, for the present, terminated. Much as we may regret the tone and temper in which Bacon sought for office and endured failure, we ought at least to do him so much justice as to keep constantly before our minds, even if we cannot altogether accept, his own statement of his motives. He wished, so he tells us, to make money not for its own sake, but in order to have time and means for the study of philosophy. Apparently he made little by his practice at the bar, and without "place of some reasonable countenance" he could not hope for leisure, still less for the power of employing others, or, as he expresses it in his letter to Burghley, "commandment of more wits than a man's own." Conscious of this motive, conscious also of abilities superior to those of many who distanced him at the time in the competition for office, and apparently marked by birth and brain for office of some kind, he may not unnaturally have felt a more than commonly poignant irritation at a rejection which not only overthrew his highest hopes but conveyed the impression of being intended as a mark of censure or contempt. § 7 BACON'S "DEVICES;" "MR. BACON'S DISCOURSE IN THE PRAISE OF HIS SOVEREIGN;" "PROMUS" During the period of Bacon's suit for office his pen had been almost idle. He had composed a couple of political pamphlets eight thousand pounds of our money a week or two ago, should thus talk of his loss of "means," his especial regret for this loss, and his belief that a philosopher can yet become "rich if he will," without a word of special acknowledgment for the liberal gift which had gone far to cancel the loss. But the question is certainly complicated by another consideration. The address, "It may please your good Lordship," is more stiff and formal than is usual from Bacon to Essex. In the large collection of Bacon's letters to Essex there is only one, up to this date, that has this address; and of that letter Mr. Spedding (i. 351) very justly says that "it was probably intended for the Queen to read. It is by no means improbable that this letter was intended for the same purpose: and, if so, all mention of the Earl's gift might be purposely omitted, the object being to show the Queen that Francis Bacon was as loyal to her as ever, and that his devotion to Essex was limited by higher considerations. In the Apology Bacon tells us that he accepted the gift with a verbal reservation of allegiance to the Sovereign: "I said, 'My Lord, I see I must be your homager and hold land of your gift; but do you know the manner of doing homage in law? Always it is with a saving of his faith to the King and his other Lords." Spedding, iii. 144. But the Apology cannot be depended on, as an exact account of facts, see below, pp. 58, 61. |