The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  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 Lo
rd 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.

  4

  ‘I have taken all knowledge to be my province,’ Francis, aged thirty-one, had written to his uncle, the Lord Treasurer; and now, twelve years later, he desired to give some proof of it, not only to men of understanding but to his sovereign. The work was to consist of two parts, or books, and each would bear a dedication to the King.

  Francis felt with deep conviction that learning was not a matter for scholars only, but for all men; and his purpose was to show what wealth of interest awaited the reader whose mind was not dulled by past tradition of scholarship but was ready and alive to explore a whole new world of thought, just as his contemporaries were inspired to cross the oceans and discover the new lands that lay beyond. ‘It would be a disgrace for mankind if the expanse of the material globe, the land, the seas, the stars, were opened up and brought to light, while, in contrast to this enormous expansion, the bounds of the intellectual globe should be restricted to what was known to the ancients.’

  It was part of his thesis to show that true learning had, from the very dawn of history, been the natural part of all heroic men, of soldiers, statesmen, rulers. God, in the beginning, had created light, and this light, as Francis saw it, was not just the brightness of the sun above the earth, but the light of understanding which turned man from a brute beast into a being who could comprehend, whose garden, the world about him, comprised all things for his need. Because of the divine spark within him all that he saw, all that he touched—water lapping the shores, plants and trees that bore fruit—served to enlighten him. ‘Nothing,’ Francis believed, ‘was denied to man’s enquiry and invention,’ and in the first book, certainly begun and possibly finished by the end of 1604, he cited numerous examples, from the scriptures and history, of those men who not only led exacting and extremely active lives but had used the light with which God had graced them to further knowledge: Moses the lawgiver, ‘God’s first pen’, Solomon the king, Xenophon the Athenian, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. Soldiers and orators—Francis returns to them again and again, with Julius Caesar cited the most frequently. Earlier in the first book, when discussing leisure and how it should be spent, he quoted the Greek orator Demosthenes to his adversary Aeschines. ‘That was a man given to pleasure, and had told him that his orations did smell of the lamp. Indeed, said Demosthenes, there is a great difference between the things that you and I do by lamp-light.’ A sly dig from Francis himself, surely, at some of his own friends.

  He was at great pains to distinguish between the proven facts of history, on the one hand, and tradition, which was so often at fault; and in the first book he showed how these misconceptions had come about—mostly from learned men ‘who have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits.’ The genuine seeker after truth must be all-embracing in his thirst for knowledge, and must not hesitate, when he looks about him, to probe the depths of his own being, recognise the defects and then remedy them, so that what good qualities he may possess develop to the full. ‘It were too long to go over the particular remedies which learning doth minister to all the diseases of the mind,’ Francis observes, and a chord is struck in the memory of the ordinary reader, the phrase is somehow familiar. ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow…?’ Yes, Macbeth, said to have been acted at Court the following year, though, like Julius Caesar, it was not published until seven years after William Shakespeare’s death. ‘It were too long to go over the particular remedies which learning doth minister to all the diseases of the mind; sometimes purging the ill humours, sometimes opening the obstructions, sometimes helping digestion, sometimes increasing the appetite, sometimes healing the wounds.’

  His final paragraph is a supreme example of his wit and style, and one has an impression of him seated in his chamber at Gray’s Inn, a group of chosen law-students grouped about him, and one or two of his closer friends besides—Tobie Matthew almost certainly. As his Majesty’s Learned Counsel read aloud from the manuscript between his hands, he would now and again throw a quizzical glance from his ‘lively, hazel eye’ at his avid listeners.

  ‘I do not pretend, and I know it will be impossible for me by any pleading of mine, to reverse the judgement, either of Aesop’s cock, that preferred the barleycorn before the gem; or of Midas, that being chosen judge between Apollo president of the Muses, and Pan god of the flocks, judged for plenty; or of Paris, that judged for beauty and love against wisdom and power; or of Agrippina (let him kill his mother that he be emperor) that preferred empire with condition never so detestable; or of Ulysses (that preferred an old woman to an immortality) being a figure of those which prefer custom and habit before all excellence; or of a number of the like popular judgements. For these things continue as they have been: but so will that also continue whereupon learning hath ever relied, and which faileth not: Justificata est sapientia a filiis suis—Wisdom is justified of her children.’

  Then the folding of the manuscript with a smile, and the opening of a discussion upon it, for according to his first biographer, the chaplain Dr. Rawley, who would later enter his service, he was ‘not one that would appropriate the speech wholly to himself, or delight to outvie others, but leave the liberty to the co-assessors to take their turns. Whereupon he would draw a man on and allure him to speak upon such a subject, as wherein he was peculiarly skilful, and would delight to speak. And for himself, he condemned no man’s observations, but would light his torch at every man’s candle.’

  Whether Francis at this period of his life dined in the great hall at Gray’s Inn or with chosen companions in his own lodgings we do not know, but like his brother Anthony before him, he seems to have enjoyed good fare.

  ‘In his younger years,’ wrote Dr. Rawley, ‘he was much given to the finer and lighter sorts of meats, as of fowls, and such like; but afterwards, when he grew more judicious, he preferred the stronger meats, such as the shambles afforded, as those meats which bred the more firm and substantial juices of the body, and less dissipable; upon which he would often make his meal though he had other meats upon the table.’

  ‘Stronger meats from the shambles’ suggests a slaughterhouse running with blood, and the carcass of a great pig hanging from its hook to be cut and roasted later for Learned Counsel’s table. Small wonder that ‘once in six or seven days he took a maceration of rhubarb infused into a draught of white wine and beer mingled together for the space of half-an-hour immediately before his meal (whether dinner or supper) that it might dry the body less, which, as he said, did carry away the grosser humours of the body and did not diminish or carry away any of the spirits, as sweating doth.’ It was probably the unfortunate effects of rhubarb that had prevented Francis from calling upon the Duke of Northumberland two years previously, and the habit seems to have been continued. As to exercise, Dr. Rawley informs the reader ‘that he wo
uld ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking, or taking the air in his coach, or gentle exercise on horseback, and playing at bowls,’ but since Rawley’s own observation was of his master’s later years, possibly in 1605 relaxation was of another kind. Certainly it must not be forgotten that Ely Place, or Hatton Hall, the residence of Elizabeth Hatton, was only a short distance from Gray’s Inn, and despite her marriage to the Attorney-General Edward Coke there had never been an open rupture in the relationship between that spirited lady and her former suitor.

  So, after dining on ‘the lighter sorts of meats’ with his companions and scribes, or taking a gentle walk, Francis would return to composition, and the continuation of the second book of his Advancement of Learning, which was to be at least three times the length of the first. Even his dedication to the King was more detailed. Of especial interest to the modern reader is his suggestion that professors and lecturers at universities and other places of learning should be better paid. Also that the governors of such institutions should consult with one another more, and have more frequent visits from ‘princes or superior persons.’ Both in the dedication and in the second book itself he uses his favourite analogy of comparing the work necessary in a garden to that of the cultivation of the mind, proof of his own tremendous interest in horticulture, which was to increase with the years. He observes to the King, ‘For if you will have a tree bear more fruit than it hath used to do, it is not anything you can do to the boughs, but it is the stirring of the earth and putting new mould about the roots that must work it,’ which leads him on to explain, ‘And because founders of colleges do plant, and founders of lectures do water, it followeth well to speak of the defect which is in public lectures; namely, in the smallness and meanness of the salary or reward which in most places is assigned to them; whether they be lectures of arts, or of professions.’ He also advised that there should be ‘more intelligence mutual between the universities of Europe than now there is.’