Life in this world is full of pitfalls: it is dangerous to be foolish, and it is also dangerous to be intelligent; dangerous to others, and, no less, to oneself. “Il est bon, plus souvent qu’on ne pense,” said the wise and virtuous Malesherbes, “de savoir ne pas avoir de l’esprit.” But that was one of the branches of knowledge that the author of the Advancement of Learning ignored. It was impossible for Francis Bacon to imagine that any good could ever come of being simple-minded. His intellect swayed him too completely. He was fascinated by it, he could not resist it, he must follow wherever it led. Through thought, through action, on he went - an incredibly clever man. Through action even? Yes, for though the medley of human circumstance is violent and confused, assuredly one can find one’s way through it to some purpose if only one uses one’s wits. So thought the cunning artist; and smiling he sought to shape, with his subtle razor-blade, the crude vague blocks of passion and fact. But razors may be fatal in such contingencies; one’s hand may slip; one may cut one’s own throat.
The miserable end - it needs must colour our vision of the character and the life. But the end was implicit in the beginning - a necessary consequence of qualities that were innate. The same cause which made Bacon write perfect prose brought about his worldly and his spiritual ruin. It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet. His imagination, with all its magnificence, was insufficient: it could not see into the heart of things. And among the rest his own heart was hidden from him. His psychological acuteness, fatally external, never revealed to him the nature of his own desires. He never dreamt how intensely human he was. And so his tragedy was bitterly ironical, and a deep pathos invests his story. One wishes to turn away one’s gaze from the unconscious traitor, the lofty-minded sycophant, the exquisite intelligence entrapped and strangled in the web of its own weaving. “Although our persons live in the view of heaven, yet our spirits are included in the caves of our own complexions and customs, which minister unto us infinite errors and vain opinions.” So he wrote; and so, perhaps, at last, he actually realised - an old man, disgraced, shattered, alone, on Highgate hill, stuffing a dead fowl with snow.
But all this was still far distant in the busy years of the early nineties, so rich with excitements and possibilities. The issues were simplified by the disgrace and imprisonment of Raleigh, whose amorous intrigue with Elizabeth Throgmorton, one of the maids of honour, had infuriated the Queen. The field was cleared for the two opposing factions: the new party of Essex and his followers - aggressive and adventurous - and the old party of the Cecils, entrenched in the strongholds of ancient power. This was the essence of the political situation till the close of the century; but it was complicated and confused both by compromises and by bitternesses, which were peculiar to the time. The party system was still undreamt-of; and the hostile forces which would be grouped today as Government and Opposition, then found themselves side by side in a common struggle to control the executive. When, early in 1593, Essex was sworn of the Privy Council, he became the colleague of his rivals. It was for the Queen to choose her counsellors. She would listen to one and then to another; she would shift, according to her adviser, from one policy to its direct contrary; it was a system of government after her own heart. Thus it was that she could enjoy to the full the delicious sense of ruling - could decide, with the plenitude of power, between momentous eventualities - and, by that very means, could contrive to keep up an endless balance and a marvellous marking of time. Her servants, struggling with each other for influence, remained her servants still. Their profound hostility could not divert them from their duty of working together for the Queen. There was no such thing as going temporarily out of office; one was either in office or one was nothing at all. To fail might mean death; but, until that came, the dangerous enemy whose success was one’s annihilation, met one every day in the close companionship of the council table and the narrow inner circle of the court.
Very swiftly Essex, with the Bacons at his back, grew to be something more than a favourite and emerged as a minister and a statesman. The young man was taking himself seriously at last. He was never absent from the Council; and when the House of Lords was in session, he was to be seen in his place as soon as the business of the day began - at seven o’clock in the morning. But his principal activities were carried on elsewhere - in the panelled gallery and the tapestried inner chambers of Essex House - the great Gothic family residence which overlooked the river from the Strand. There it was that Anthony Bacon, his foot swathed in hot flannels, plied his indefatigable pen. There it was that a great design was planned and carried into execution. The Cecils were to be beaten on their own chosen ground. The control of foreign affairs - where Burghley had ruled supreme for more than a generation - was to be taken from them; their information was to be proved inaccurate, and the policy that was based on it confuted and reversed. Anthony had no doubt that this could be done. He had travelled for years on the continent; he had friends everywhere; he had studied the conditions of foreign states, the intricacies of foreign diplomacy, with all the energy of his acute and restless mind. If his knowledge and intelligence were supported by the position and the wealth of Essex, the combination would prove irresistible. And Essex did not hesitate; he threw himself into the scheme with all his enthusiasm. A vast correspondence began. Emissaries were sent out, at the Earl’s expense, all over Europe, and letters poured in, from Scotland, France, Holland, Italy, Spain, Bohemia, with elaborate daily reports of the sayings of princes, the movements of armies, and the whole complex development of international intrigue. Anthony Bacon sat at the centre, receiving, digesting, and exchanging news. The work grew and grew, and before long, such was the multiplicity of business, he had four young secretaries to help him, among whom were the ingenious Henry Wotton and the cynical Henry Cuffe. The Queen soon perceived that Essex knew what he was talking about, when there was a discussion on foreign affairs. She read his memoranda, she listened to his recommendations; and the Cecils found, more than once, that their carefully collected intelligence was ignored. Eventually a strange situation arose, characteristic of that double-faced age. Essex almost attained the position of an alternative Foreign Secretary. Various ambassadors - Thomas Bodley was one - came under his influence, and, while corresponding officially with Burghley, sent at the same time parallel and more confidential communications to Anthony Bacon. If the gain to the public service was doubtful, the gain to Essex was clear; and the Cecils, when they got wind of what was happening, began to realise that they must reckon seriously with the house in the Strand.
Francis Bacon’s connection with Essex was not quite so close as his brother’s. A barrister and a Member of Parliament, he had a career of his own; and he occupied his leisure with literary exercises and philosophical speculations. Yet he was in intimate contact with Essex House. The Earl was his patron, whom he held himself ready to assist in every way, whenever his help was needed - with advice, or the drafting of state papers, or the composition of some elaborate symbolic compliment, some long-drawn-out Elizabethan charade, for the entertainment of the Queen. Essex, seven years his junior, had been, from the first moment of their meeting, fascinated by the intellectual splendour of the elder man. His enthusiastic nature leapt out to welcome that scintillating wisdom and that profound wit. He saw that he was in the presence of greatness. He vowed that this astonishing being, who was devoting himself so generously to his service, should have a noble reward. The Attorney-Generalship fell vacant, and Essex immediately declared that Francis Bacon must have the post. He was young and had not yet risen far in his profession - but what of that? He deserved something even greater; the Queen might appoint whom she would, and if Essex had any influence, the right man, for once, should be given preferment.
The Attorney-Generalship was indeed a prize worth having, and to receive it from the hand of Essex would bring a peculiar satisfaction to Lord Burghley’s nephew - it would show that he might come to honour without the aid of his uncle. Francis smiled; he saw a gre
at career opening before his imagination - judgeships - high offices of state - might he not ere long be given, like his father before him, the keeping of the Great Seal of England? A peerage! - Verulam, St. Albans, Gorhambury - what resounding title should he take? “My manor of Gorhambury” - the phrase rolled on his tongue; and then his chameleon mind took on another colour; he knew that he possessed extraordinary administrative capacity; he would guide the destinies of his country, the world should know his worth. But those, after all, were but small considerations. Most could be politicians, many could be statesmen; but might there not be reserved for him alone a more magnificent fate? To use his place and his power for the dissemination of learning, for the creation of a new and mighty knowledge, for a vast beneficence, spreading in ever wider and wider circles through all humanity … these were glorious ends indeed! As for himself - and yet another tint came over his fancy - that office would be decidedly convenient. He was badly in want of cash. He was extravagant; he knew it - it could not be helped. It was impossible for him to lead the narrow life of mean economies that poverty dictated. His exuberant temperament demanded the solace of material delights. Fine clothes were a necessity - and music - and a household with a certain state. His senses were fastidious; the smell of ordinary leather was torture to him, and he put all his servants into Spanish leather boots. He spent infinite trouble in obtaining a particular kind of small beer, which was alone tolerable to his palate. His eye - a delicate, lively hazel eye - “it was like the eye of a viper,” said William Harvey - required the perpetual refreshment of beautiful things. A group of handsome young men - mere names now - a Jones, a Percy - he kept about him, half servants and half companions, and he found in their equivocal society an unexpected satisfaction. But their high living added alarmingly to the expenses of his establishment. He was already in debt, and his creditors were growing disagreeable. There could be no doubt about it; to be made Attorney-General would be a supreme piece of good fortune, from every point of view. Essex at first had little doubt that he would speedily obtain the appointment. He found the Queen in good humour; he put forward Bacon’s name, and immediately discovered that a serious obstacle stood in the way of his desire. By an unlucky chance, a few weeks previously Bacon, from his place in the House of Commons, had opposed the granting of a subsidy which had been asked for by the Crown. The tax, he declared, was too heavy, and the time allowed for the levying of it too short. The House of Lords had intervened, and attempted to draw the Commons into a conference; whereupon Bacon had pointed out the danger of allowing the Lords to have any share in a financial discussion, with the result that their motion had been dropped. Elizabeth was very angry; interference in such a question from a member of the House of Commons appeared to her to be little short of disloyalty; and she forbade Bacon to appear before her. Essex tried to soften her in vain. Bacon’s apologies, she considered, were insufficient - he had defended himself by asserting that he had done what he had merely from a sense of duty. He had, in fact, acted with a singular spirit; but it was for the last time. His speech against the subsidy had been extremely clever, but not to have made it would have been cleverer still. Never again would he be so ingenuous as to appear to be independent of the Court. The result of such plain dealing was all too obvious. The more Essex pressed his suit, the more objections the Queen raised. Bacon, she said, had had too little practice; he was a man of theory; and Edward Coke was a sounder lawyer. Weeks passed, months passed, and still the Attorney-Generalship hung in the wind, and the regeneration of mankind grew dubious amid a mountain of unpaid bills.
Essex continued sanguine; but Bacon perceived that if the delay lasted much longer he would be ruined. He raised money wherever he could. Anthony sold an estate, and gave him the proceeds. He himself determined to sell land; but only one property was available, and that he could not dispose of without the consent of his mother. Old Lady Bacon was a terrific dowager, who lived, crumpled and puritanical, in the country. She violently disapproved of her son Francis. She disapproved; but, terrific as she was, she found it advisable not to express her sentiments directly. There was something about her son Francis which made even her think twice before she displeased him. She preferred to address herself to Anthony on such occasions, to pour out her vexation before his less disquieting gaze, and to hope that some of it would reach the proper quarter. When she was approached by the brothers about the land, her fury rose to boiling-point. She wrote a long, crabbed, outraged letter to Anthony. She was asked, she said, to consent to the selling of property in order to pay for the luxurious living of Francis and his disreputable retainers. “Surely,” she wrote, “I pity your brother, yet so long as he pitieth not himself but keepeth that bloody Percy, as I told him then, yea as a coach companion and bed companion - a proud, profane, costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike and doth less bless your brother in credit and otherwise in his health - surely I am utterly discouraged…. That Jones never loved your brother indeed, but for his own credit, living upon your brother, and thankless though bragging…. It is most certain that till first Enny, a filthy wasteful knave, and his Welshmen one after another - for take one and they will still swarm ill-favouredly - did so lead him in a train, he was a towardly young gentleman, and a son of much good hope in godliness.” So she fulminated. She would only release the land, she declared, on condition that she received a complete account of Francis’s debts and was allowed a free hand in the payment of them. “For I will not,” she concluded, “have his cormorant seducers and instruments of Satan to him committing foul sin by his countenance, to the displeasing of God and his godly fear.”
When this was handed on to Francis, he addressed to his mother an elaborate letter of protest and conciliation. She returned it to Anthony in a rage. “I send herein your brother’s letter. Construe the interpretation. I do not understand his enigmatical folded writing.” Her son, she said, had been blessed with “good gifts of natural wit and understanding. But the same good God that hath given them to him will I trust and heartily pray to sanctify his heart by the right use of them, to glorify the Giver of them to his own inward comfort.” Her prayer - it is the common fate of the prayers of mothers - was only ironically answered. As for the land, old Lady Bacon found herself in the end no match for her two sons; she yielded without conditions; and Francis, for the time at least, was freed from his embarrassment.
Meanwhile Essex did not relax his efforts with the Queen. “I cannot tell,” wrote Anthony to his mother, “in what terms to acknowledge the desert of the Earl’s unspeakable kindness towards us both, but namely to him now at a pinch, which by God’s help shortly will appear by good effects.” In several long conferences, the gist of which, when they were over, he immediately reported by letter to one or other of the brothers, Essex urged Elizabeth to make the desired appointment. But the “good effects” were slow in coming. The vacancy had occurred in the April of 1593, and now the winter was closing in, and still it was unfilled. The Queen, it was clear, was giving yet another exhibition of her delaying tactics. During the repeated discussions with Essex about the qualifications of his friend, she was in her element. She raised every kind of doubt and difficulty, to every reply she at once produced a rejoinder, she suddenly wavered and seemed on the brink of a decision, she postponed everything on some slight pretext, she flew into a temper, she was charming, she danced off. Essex, who could not believe that he would fail, grew sometimes himself more seriously angry. The Queen was the more pleased. She pricked him with the pins of her raillery, and watched the tears of irritation starting to his eyes. The Attorney-Generalship and the fate of Francis Bacon had become entangled in the web of that mysterious amour. At moments flirtation gave way to passion. More than once that winter, the young man, suddenly sulky, disappeared, without a word of warning, from the Court. A blackness and a void descended upon Elizabeth; she could not conceal her agitation; and then, as suddenly, he would return, to be overwhelmed with scornful reproaches and reso
unding oaths.
ELIZABETH AND ESSEX: a tragic history Page 4