The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  The year 1608 was to be one of intense literary activity for Francis. Despite his position as Solicitor-General there was little official business for him to do, and Parliament itself was not called for the whole of the year, the excuse in January having been fear of ‘the sickness’, or plague. King James could spend plenty of time at his favourite sport, hunting. He had persuaded his Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, to give him his estate Theobalds as a hunting lodge, in exchange for his own palace at Hatfield.

  Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, had one taste in common with his cousin Francis Bacon, a passion for building. The old palace, where Princess Elizabeth had learnt of her accession to the throne in 1558, would not do; it must be rebuilt. He engaged the best designers and architects, and the project, which took over five years to complete, is said to have cost more than £38,000. Just as their fathers had engaged in friendly competition in the building of Theobalds and Gorhambury some forty years previously, now Francis and Robert Cecil, on equable terms—for ill-feeling between them seems to have mellowed during recent months—exchanged advice about design.

  ‘To give directions of a plot to be made to turn the pondyard into a place of pleasure, and to speak of them to my L. of Salisbury,’ says a note in the private memoranda. And Francis writes of his plans for the grounds round about Gorhambury, ‘to be enclosed square with a brick wall, and fruit-trees plashed upon it’, but then continues with far more grandiose ideas, of walks on various levels, and ‘all the ground within this walk to be cast into a lake, with a fair rail with images gilt round about it and some low flowers specially violets and strawberries. In the middle of the lake where the house now stands to make an island of 100 broad; and in the middle thereof to build a house for freshness with an upper gallery open upon the water, a terrace about that, and a supping room open under that; a dining-room, a bed-chamber, a cabinet, and a room for music, a garden; in this ground to make one walk between trees; the galleries to cast northwards; nothing to be planted here but of choice.’

  Some of these plans were to be put into operation during the coming years, and may well have been begun during the summer of 1608—discussions about it would keep Alice and the Constables employed—but Francis had so many projects in mind at this time, which he jotted down in his memoranda, that it is a wonder he kept pace with half of them. His Advancement of Learning having made little impact in 1605, he wondered whether his arguments for the spread of knowledge would have more success if he could become head of some school or college. A note on July 26th says, ‘Laying for a place to command wits and pens. Westminster, Eton, Winchester, Trinity College, Cambridge, St. John’s in Camb, Maudlin in Oxford.’ Later there is a suggestion for founding a college for inventors, with libraries and laboratories, and allowances for students to make experiments.

  His interest in things scientific was increasing all the time, and he made a list of persons who might be of use, ‘my Lord of Northumberland’ (in the Tower of London for suspected if doubtful complicity in the Powder Treason), ‘Ralegh, and therefore Harriot’, the latter a great mathematician, intimate with Ralegh, whom he instructed in mathematics. ‘Making much of Russell that depends upon Sir David Murray’ (Thomas Russell was experimenting in separating silver from lead ore, and Sir David Murray was Keeper of the Privy Purse), ‘and by that means drawing Sir Dav. and by him and Sir Th. Chal. in time the prince.’

  Sir Thomas Challoner, old friend of brother Anthony, was now Governor to the Household of Prince Henry, whose investiture would take place in two years’ time, and it was to the future Prince of Wales that Francis looked for real encouragement in the spread of learning. His Majesty was all very well, but he mistrusted scientific experiment, especially after the Powder Treason, and these days spent much of his leisure time in hunting rather than in reading, with his new young Scottish favourite Robert Carr, who had replaced the Earl of Montgomery in his affections.

  The future Prince of Wales had a respect for tradition as well as for future experiment, and would be one of those to read another Latin work Francis was engaged upon that summer of 1608, In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, a treatise in praise of his former Sovereign. Cogitata et Visa had meanwhile been laid aside for Redargutio Philosophiarum (A Refutation of Philosophies), both of which would have been discussed with Tobie Matthew before his friend went overseas. It was in Cogitata et Visa that Francis retold the legend of Scylla, the maiden ‘whose loins were girt about with yelping hounds’ (no disrespect intended towards his young wife). The work, written in the third person—‘Francis Bacon thought thus, etc., etc.’—was a further development of his ideas and arguments.

  For instance, in the opening section: ‘The human discoveries we now enjoy should rank as quite imperfect and undeveloped. In the present state of the sciences new discoveries can be expected only after the lapse of centuries. The discoveries men have up to now achieved cannot be credited to philosophy.’

  He has one of his familiar digs at academies of learning. ‘Far the greater number of persons there are concerned primarily with lecturing and in the next place with making a living; and the lectures and other exercises are so managed that the last thing anyone would be likely to entertain is an unfamiliar thought. Anyone who allows himself freedom of enquiry or independence of judgement finds himself isolated. In the arts and sciences, as in mining for minerals, there ought everywhere to be the bustle of new works and further progress.’

  (How Francis would have been welcomed by the students in universities some three and a half centuries later!)

  He also tilted at his former target in The Masculine Birth of Time, the Greek philosophers. ‘The opinions and theories of the Greeks are like the arguments of so many stage plays, devised to give an illusion of reality, with greater or less elegance, carelessness or frigidity. They have what is proper to a stage-play, a neat roundness foreign to a narration of fact.’

  In chapter 14 something of his own personality can be glimpsed between the lines. ‘Speaking generally, the human mind is so uneven a mirror as to distort the rays which fall upon it by its angularities. It is not a smooth flat surface. Furthermore, every individual, in consequence of his education, interests, and constitution is attended by a delusive power, his own familiar demon, which mocks his mind and troubles it with unsubstantial spectres.’ Was Francis’s own ‘familiar demon’ one that led him into ‘melancholy and distaste’, and ‘inclined [him] to superstition, strangeness, clouds’ as described in his memoranda? Later in the same chapter we have another revelation. ‘Bacon [always the third person] found himself in disagreement with both the ancients and moderns. A wine-drinker and a water-drinker, says the familiar jest, cannot hold the same opinion; and while they drink an intellectual beverage… Bacon prefers a draught prepared from innumerable grapes, grapes matured and plucked in due season from selected clusters, crushed in the press, purged and clarified in the vat: a draught moreover which has been so treated as to qualify its powers of inebriating, since he is resolved to owe nothing to the heady fumes of vain imaginings.’ Surely here is an echo from the second book of his Advancement of Learning, where, in the brief chapter on poetry, he concluded, ‘But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre’.

  The remaining chapters of Cogitata et Visa concentrate on improving Man’s lot, and the benefits that inventions confer on the whole human race.

  ‘It is this glory of discovery that is the true ornament of mankind,’ he wrote, and gave illustrations in three inventions unknown to antiquity, ‘To wit, printing, gunpowder, and the nautical needle. These have changed the face and status of the world of men… The human mind and its management is ours to improve. There are no insuperable objects in the way; simply it lies in a direction untrodden by the feet of men. It may frighten us a little by its loneliness; it offers no threat. A new world beckons. The trial should be made. Not to try is a greater hazard than to fail.’

  Inspiring words to all creative men in his own day and in succeeding ages, whether scientists
, inventors, explorers or writers.

  Francis showed Cogitata et Visa to certain friends apart from Tobie Matthew, one being Sir Thomas Bodley at Oxford, who he hoped would show warm appreciation, but the reception was guarded, the great scholar seeming to have found the ideas expressed too advanced for academic approval.

  So the work remained unpublished, as did its successor Redargutio Philosophiarum, The Refutation of Philosophies, until after the writer’s death. In this latter book, as might be expected from the title, Francis repeated and developed much of what he had already said in The Masculine Birth of Time and Cogitata et Visa. This time, however, he wrote as if he were a philosopher addressing a gathering of learned men of mature age. Perhaps in fantasy he already saw himself chancellor of a university speaking before a gathering of dons.

  The opening words are in forthright style. ‘We are agreed, my sons, that you are men. This means, as I think, that you are not animals on their hind legs, but mortal gods. God, the creator of the universe and of you, gave you souls capable of understanding the world but not to be satisfied with it alone. He reserved for himself your faith, but gave the world over to your senses… He did not give you reliable and trustworthy senses in order that you might study the writings of a few men… Nay, from the moment you learn to speak you are under the necessity of drinking in and assimilating what I may be allowed to call a hotch-potch of errors. Errors sanctioned by the institutions of academies, colleges, orders, and even states themselves… I do not ask you to renounce them in a moment. I do not wish to hurry you into isolation. Use your philosophy. Adorn your conversation with its jewels. Use it when convenient. Keep one to deal with nature and the other to deal with the populace. Every man of superior understanding in contact with inferiors wears a mask…’

  Here is a revealing line from Francis Bacon in the summer of 1608, forty-seven years old, his curling brown hair greying, as were his moustache and beard, his face more lined, his frame fuller, more set, but the hazel eyes as lively as ever, the smile—when it came—something between compassion for those who heard him, and contempt. ‘Every man of superior understanding in contact with inferiors wears a mask.’ Here is the essence of the man at last, the boy who believed himself, as brother Anthony might have told him, ‘capable de tout’. Who might have founded an English Pleiades, groomed a successful leader, had the attentive ear of two monarchs, helped to frame new laws and a union of kingdoms, composed anything from the lightest of trifles to the most profound of discourses, and who now, in middle age, married to a girl just turned sixteen who was more like a daughter than a wife, had the attention of few save his closest friends; and even with these, as with his superiors in rank and status, and with his servants too, he wore a mask.

  Concealment, like the ‘worm in the bud’ in a different context, affected the many facets of his personality, and never more, perhaps, than at this period when sovereign and state made small demand upon him, and he had all the time in the world at his disposal; time to explore the many motives that drove man—including himself—to triumph or despair, which, by examining them closely, he came to recognise and understand better, and himself as well.

  ‘My time is running out, sons, and I am tempted by my love of you and of the business in hand, to take up one topic after another. I yearn for some secret of initiation which, like the coming of April or of spring, might avail to thaw and loosen your fixed and frozen minds… Shake off the chains which oppress you and be masters of yourselves… I only give you this advice, that you do not promise yourself such great things from my discoveries as not to expect better from your own. I foresee for myself a destiny like that of Alexander—now pray, do not accuse me of vanity till you have heard me out. While his memory was fresh his exploits were regarded as portents. But when admiration had cooled and men looked more closely into the matter, note the sober judgement passed upon him by the Roman historian: “All Alexander did was dare to despise shams”. Something like this later generations will say of me.’

  7

  None of his contemporaries was prepared to compare Francis Bacon with the great figures of the past; nevertheless he continued to circulate his Latin compositions amongst his friends, both at home and abroad. His memorial to Queen Elizabeth found little favour with the gossips who had sight of it. John Chamberlain, with his customary malice, mentioned it to his friend Dudley Carleton with scant respect.

  ‘I come even now,’ he wrote on December 16th 1608, ‘from reading a short discourse of Queen Elizabeth’s life, written in Latin by Sir Francis Bacon. If you have not seen nor heard of it, it is worth your enquiry; and yet methinks he doth languescere towards the end, and falls from his first pitch: neither dare I warrant that his Latin will abide test or touch.’

  Francis himself, like many writers who tend to be better pleased with those of their compositions that have not appealed to popular taste, had a regard for the brief treatise on his late sovereign that was to last him throughout his life; indeed, it was one of the few by which he hoped to be remembered. Queen Elizabeth had neither favoured nor promoted him since the day in his childhood when she called him ‘her little Lord Keeper’; yet he never could forget her, nor the fact that she had been one of the greatest monarchs the kingdom of England had ever known. Posterity would recognise this truth.

  Whether King James read the treatise, or the future Prince of Wales, remains conjecture; certainly Francis would have sent it to them. Sir George Cary, ambassador in France, received a copy, as did Tobie Matthew, who, according to the letter from Francis enclosed with it, ‘would be more willing to hear Julius Caesar commended than Queen Elizabeth’.

  The new year opened with dull, heavy weather, no frozen Thames as in 1608, and with little news for the gossips to report beyond the fact that Parliament was to be prorogued once more until November, and that the unfortunate Sir Walter Ralegh, still imprisoned in the Tower, was now obliged by the King’s order to relinquish all his estates to his Majesty’s favourite, Sir Robert Carr, not surprisingly a gentleman of the bedchamber. Ralegh pleaded most eloquently for his son’s inheritance, while his wife and children went down on their knees before the sovereign in a last attempt to move the royal heart. It was no use. King James is reported to have said, ‘I maun ha’ the land, I maun ha’ it for Robbie’, and the favourite, who already possessed rentals of £600 a year and a gold tablet set in diamonds, was further enriched.

  Francis Bacon, never a gossip, made no allusion to the rising fortunes of the Scottish favourite when he wrote to Tobie Matthew, as he was to do frequently during the coming year, for with Parliament in what appeared to be an indefinite recess, and the governing of the country secure in the hands of the Council headed by his cousin the Earl of Salisbury, who besides being Secretary of State had now the office of Lord Treasurer, there was no official business for the Solicitor-General.

  It is frustrating for later generations that Francis was not more explicit to his friend Tobie when discussing his literary compositions. In one letter about this time he writes, ‘I have sent you some copies of the Advancement, which you desired; and a little work of my recreation, which you desired not. My Instauration I reserve for our conference; it sleeps not.’ He also refers to ‘works of the Alphabet… in my opinion of less use to you where you are now, than at Paris.’ This last must have referred to his personal cipher, which seems to have aroused much controversy in later centuries. ‘The little work of his recreation’ was not the memorial to Queen Elizabeth, which Tobie had already received, nor the Latin treatise De Sapientia Veterum (The Wisdom of the Ancients) which, although it may have been started in the spring of 1609, was certainly not finished until the end of the year.

  Once again, therefore, as in 1608, Francis had almost a twelvemonth in which to devote himself to literary composition, and although he reported progress to Tobie throughout the year on his Instauratio Magna, and even sent him extracts from it, this immense work was so erudite that it could hardly be described as recreation. Nor would
the result of this vast labour in Latin be given to the world for another eleven years.

  So we are left to speculate upon how he employed his time, and speculation can be a hazardous game. The private memoranda are no help. The only manuscript of this extant—doubtless there were others that were destroyed or lost—belongs to the preceding summer of 1608, and according to his biographer Spedding it was the work of seven consecutive days, from July 25th until July 31st. There are certainly jottings upon work in hand, and a tantalising note to the effect that he had a book which ‘receiveth all remembrances touching my private of whatsoever nature and hath 2 parts, Diariu and Schedulœ. The one being a journal of whatsoever occurreth; the other kalenders or titles of things of the same nature, for better help of memory or judgement, herein I make choice of things of most present use.’ He then refers to several books, all to be sorted under different headings. That he had already begun to enlarge his original book of essays, of which there had been ten in number, dedicated to his brother Anthony, is evident from the note in the memoranda Scripta in Politicis et Moralibus; a manuscript with this title is in the British Museum. It seems likely that had he been sending any of these essays to Tobie Matthew, Francis would have mentioned them by name.

  The only entries in the memoranda referring to his personal life in that July of 1608 are estimates of his assets, property and otherwise, rents at Gorhambury, and so on. It seems certain that he was a tenant at Bath House, at this period, for the furniture there is valued at £60, with the furniture at Gray’s Inn, including his ‘books and other implements’, at £100. A somewhat touching entry comes under the heading of ‘jewels of my wife’.