The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall

by Daphne Du Maurier

  The festivities continued throughout the month, and by March a sum of £50,000 had been spent. His Majesty began to lose heart, and ordered some of his son-in-law’s retinue back to the Palatinate. Bride and bridegroom were due to sail in March, but the journey was postponed, there not being seamen enough to man his Majesty’s ships. Finally, on April 14th, two months after the wedding, the Elector Palatine and his bride the Princess Elizabeth sailed from Rochester.

  His Majesty’s Solicitor-General could now turn his attention once more to legal business, to the Crown finances, and, more important still, to the necessity of recalling Parliament to deal with the matter. First, though, something must be said about his collection of essays that had appeared in December of the year before, with its dedication to his brother-in-law, which runs thus,

  ‘My last essays I dedicated to my dear brother Master Anthony Bacon, who is with God. Looking amongst my papers this vacation, I found others of the same nature; which if I myself shall not suffer to be lost, it seemeth the world will not, by the often printing of the former. Missing my brother, I found you next; in respect of bond of near alliance, and of straight friendship and society, and particularly of communication in studies. Wherein I must acknowledge myself beholding to you. For as my business found rest in my contemplations; so my contemplations ever found rest in your loving conference and judgement. So wishing you all good, I remain,

  ‘Your loving brother and friend,

  ‘Fra. Bacon.’

  Of the original ten essays—now increased to thirty-eight—one was omitted, that on Honour and Reputation. Many of them show Francis in astute and perceptive mood, though possibly they do not have the all-embracing wisdom and compassion of the last edition, published in 1625 and with the number of essays increased to fifty-eight, which contains phrases quoted and requoted through the centuries down to our own time. We have already seen something of Of Marriage and Single Life, which may have had a bearing on his own experience, its opening sentence—‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly, the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men’—suggesting that a lack of sons and daughters did not greatly concern him. Indeed, in Of Parents and Children one is inclined to suspect that fatherhood had never been one of his ambitions, or had been put aside from his thoughts after his marriage to Alice Barnham. ‘The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears; they cannot utter the one, nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter… The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit and noble works are proper to men.’

  Perhaps some of the most astute sayings are to be found in the essay Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self: ‘Wisdom for a man’s self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing: it is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house, somewhat before it fall: it is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger who digged and made room for him; it is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour… And whereas they have all their time sacrificed to themselves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune, whose wings they thought by their self-wisdom to have pinioned.’

  9

  It was now midsummer, and the commissioners who had been appointed over twelve months earlier to consider the Crown revenue presented their findings to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Julius Caesar, who drafted a full report. The Crown was in debt to the tune of £500,000, and there was an annual deficiency of £160,000. Somehow the money must be raised, but there was still no attempt by his Majesty to recall Parliament. There was still no Secretary of State at the head of affairs, and no Lord Treasurer; the Council carried on as best it could.

  Francis, who had never been a strong supporter of the great contract between King and Parliament that had come under so much discussion during the last session, made lengthy notes about this time on what he believed to be the reasons why Parliament should be recalled; he was anxious that when the Commons did eventually meet they should not go over the same old ground as they had done before, which was apt to divide members into factions, the King’s supporters versus the others. This he felt to be dangerous, both for the monarchy and for Parliament. It was not safe, he thought, to combine and make parties in the House, but that men ‘must be left to their consciences and free votes’.

  When he had completed his notes, he wrote a private letter to his Majesty, giving his opinion that many of the old grievances brought up in the last Parliament were now ‘dead and flat, and that there had been no new matter either to rub up or revive the old or to give other cause of discontent’; he thought ‘the case much amended to your Majesty’s advantage’. The opposition to the King’s business was weaker, and he advised the monarch to take a rather different line with Members in future. ‘That your Majesty do for this [next] Parliament put off the person of a merchant and contractor, and rest upon the person of a King… Until your Majesty have tuned your instrument you will have no harmony. I, for my part, think it a thing inestimable to your Majesty’s safety and service, that you once part with your Parliament with love and reverence…’

  He suggested ‘that this Parliament may be a little reduced to the more ancient form, which was to voice the Parliament to be for some other business of state, and not merely for money… that the people may have somewhat else to talk of and not wholly of the King’s estate… And therefore I could wish it were given out that there are means found in his Majesty’s estate to help himself, which I partly think is true.’

  Once again, however, the question of the Crown finances and the recalling of Parliament was postponed, and we have no record of whether his Majesty did or did not reply to the letter from his Solicitor-General. King James was preoccupied with the future of his favourite Robert Carr, Earl of Rochester, who had fallen in love with the young Countess of Essex. The King, hoping to please Rochester, now a member of the Privy Council and possessing more power with his royal master than anyone else, was anxious that a divorce should be arranged as soon as possible between the countess and her husband the Earl of Essex, so that she could marry the favourite.

  Robert, 3rd Earl of Essex, had been a boy of fourteen when he married Frances Howard, aged thirteen, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, in January of 1606, the same year that Francis Bacon had married Alice Barnham. The marriage seemed doomed to failure from the start. The earl went abroad to finish his education and did not return for three years, during which time his bride amused herself at Court—not distinguished for its moral tone under the reigning monarch. Being a scheming young woman, encouraged also by her powerful Howard kinsmen, she had caught the eye of the reigning favourite with considerable success. She based her desire for a dissolution of her marriage on the plea that it had never been consummated, owing to inability on the part of her husband.

  One of her strongest supporters was her great-uncle Lord Harry Howard, Earl of Northampton, who foresaw power for himself and the family once the divorce was arranged and his great-niece married to Rochester. An opponent of the divorce was the favourite’s own close friend and adviser Sir Thomas Overbury, who feared that if the marriage took place the country would be virtually governed by the Howards, who would become the most powerful faction in the kingdom, Rochester himself having a very limited knowledge or understanding of state affairs. The upshot was that Overbury fell out with the favourite, and was clapped into the Tower in April 1613, fell sick rather mysteriously during the summer, and died on September 14th.

  A few weeks later the marriage between the Earl of Essex and his countess was dissolved and ‘pronounced a nullity by the Bishop of Winchester’. All was apparently set fair for the countess to wed Rochester. The sequel was to prove disastrous, as we shall see.

  Francis Bacon had, fortunately for him, not become involved in the divorce proceedings. He was co
ncerned in matters more important for his own future. The Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Sir Thomas Fleming, had died in August, which meant a re-shuffle for position amongst the judges, and the possibility that the Attorney-General, Sir Henry Hobart—recovered from his illness of the year before—would be promoted and would thus leave his position vacant.

  This time a letter to the King bore fruit. ‘I have served your Majesty above a prenticehood, full seven years and more, as your solicitor, which is, I think, one of the painfullest places in your kingdom, specially as my employments have been; and God hath brought mine own years to fifty-two, which I think is older than ever any solicitor continued unpreferred…’ He also suggested that his old rival, Sir Edward Coke, should be made Chief Justice of England, and Sir Henry Hobart step into Coke’s shoes as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Coke, it seems, was furious when the re-shuffle duly took place.

  ‘This is all your doing,’ he said to Francis, after the event, ‘it is you that have made this great stir.’

  ‘Your Lordship,’ replied Francis, ‘all this while hath grown in breadth; you must needs now grow in height, or you will be a monster.’ The quip was hardly likely to improve their continued bitter relations.

  The promotions took place on October 27th, and Francis Bacon became Attorney-General the same day. Fifty-two years of age, as he had told his Majesty, and exactly nineteen and a half years ago, at thirty-three, he had seen that post he so much coveted go to Edward Coke, now Chief Justice of England. A somewhat wry satisfaction, on reflection, that he had suggested his rival’s promotion, yet gratifying, nevertheless; as for himself, he had turned the second corner of the winding stair to great place. ‘A full heart is like a full pen,’ he wrote to the sovereign; ‘it can hardly make any distinguished work… This is my hope, that God who hath moved your heart to favour me will write your service in my heart.’

  But, just as in 1607 on becoming Solicitor-General he had noted in his private memoranda ‘upon amendment of my fortune disposition to melancholy and distaste… strangeness, clouds, etc,’ so now, early in November 1613, on rising to the place of Attorney-General, he succumbed to a fit of the stone that lasted a fortnight. Hardly a propitious start to his new career, but an interesting sidelight to his personality which now, in middle age, showed a greater resemblance to his brother Anthony’s than it had done when he was younger; the same tendency to nerves, one might almost say to panic, when brought face to face with reality and his own future. Yet he gave no sign of this in the House of Commons.

  It could be that his ‘fit of the stone’ was due to quite another cause, for on November 25th John Chamberlain, writing to his crony Carleton, said, ‘The last week, a proper young fellow that served Sir Francis Bacon was arraigned at the King’s Bench for killing a Scot [in a duel]; and being found guilty of manslaughter, was burnt in the hand. The matter was eagerly pursued and brought out of the country to be tried here, for fear of partiality, and had a very sufficient and extraordinary jury. Yet all are not satisfied that they found so much, the fellow being assaulted by two, the one before and the other behind, and being dangerously hurt at least in four places.’ No names are given, but such a circumstance could only have been at best embarrassing to the new Attorney-General, and a fit of the stone may have seemed politic. Subsequently Francis, in his new capacity, wrote A Proposition for the Repressing of Singular Combats or Duels, which had the full approval of the King.

  Christmas, however, was approaching, and the wedding of the favourite Rochester, who had been created Earl of Somerset in honour of the occasion, was fixed for December 26th. It was ironic that the service took place in the private chapel at Whitehall where the bride had become Countess of Essex in 1606, and that it was conducted by the same prelate, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Sensitivity was oddly lacking, more especially in that the bride wore her hair flowing loose upon her shoulders, the traditional symbol of virginity. The only difference was that she was not this time given away by his Majesty—who, however, paid for the whole ceremony—but by her father the Earl of Suffolk.

  The traditional masques and festivities were held on the wedding night and into the new year, while the usual newsvendor, John Chamberlain, had this to say, writing on December 23rd, ‘Sir Francis Bacon prepares a masque to honour this marriage, which will stand him in above £2,000. And though he have been offered some help by the House, and especially by Mr. Solicitor, Sir Henry Yelverton [the new Solicitor-General], who would have sent him £500, yet he would not accept it, but offers them the whole charge with the honour. Marry his obligations are such, as well to his Majesty as to the great lord and to the whole house of Howards, as he can admit no partner. His house at Gorhambury has gone, some say to the Earl of Somerset, others to the Earl of Suffolk.’

  Francis had obligations to the sovereign for promoting him to the Attorney-ship, but why he should be equally obliged to the favourite, and to the house of Howard, is not clear. As to the house at Gorhambury going to anyone, this was idle rumour, typical of the gossip of the day.

  ‘But his bounty is no whit abated,’ Chamberlain continued, ‘for he feasts the whole university of Cambridge this Christmas, and hath warrants to his friends and acquaintances far and near to furnish him with venison to bestow on the colleges. He carries a great port in his train, as well as in his apparel and otherwise, and lives at a great charge, and yet he pretends he takes no fees, nor intermeddles in mercenary causes, but wholly applies himself to the King’s affairs.’

  The Masque of Flowers, presented by the young gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, was performed on Twelfth Night, and later printed with a dedication to Sir Francis Bacon, ‘the principal and in effect the only person that did both encourage and warrant the gentlemen to show their good affection towards so noble a conjunction in a time of such magnificence.’

  The fit of the stone had been overcome, and it is to be hoped that a surplus of venison did not play havoc with the digestion, necessitating rhubarb. Chamberlain’s gossip, of course, was generally tinged with malice and gross exaggeration, but it is very likely he was telling the truth when he wrote, ‘He carries a great port in his train, as well as in his apparel and otherwise’, for certainly the retinue of servants, secretaries, personal attendants, call them what you will, was rapidly increasing, and would continue to increase from this time onward.

  Presumably they were not all housed at Gorhambury, for in his new capacity as Attorney-General he would be spending more time in London, and the lodgings at Gray’s Inn would hardly accommodate them either. The elusively named ‘Bath House’, which would appear to be the residence in the Strand that became known as Arundel Palace, must surely have continued to be the headquarters of the Attorney-General at this period. The young Earl of Arundel, now twenty-seven, was a scholar and a great lover of art, frequently abroad in Italy, and being head of the Howard family he was a cousin to the new Countess of Somerset and her father the Earl of Suffolk. While he was abroad the earl left the care of his estates in the hands of his relatives, and if Francis Bacon had the tenancy of Bath House or Arundel Palace, herein would be an explanation of why John Chamberlain wrote ‘that he had obligations to the whole house of Howard’. The building was, according to Stow, ‘one of the finest and most commodious of any in London, from its great number of apartments on the same floor: but the prints lately given of it prove that the buildings, notwithstanding they covered a great extent of ground, were both low and mean: the views from the extensive gardens, up and down the river, were remarkably fine.’

  Possibly Francis Bacon, his lady, and a number of their attendants were lodged in part of the property, which, from Hollar’s engraving dated 1604, certainly seems to have been divided up into separate dwellings, and could perhaps be described as ‘low and mean’, though to the modern eye picturesque.

  All the great houses were in the Strand, with grounds descending to the river, and anyone who lived there, whether as tenant or as owner, would feel obliged to keep up a certain stand
ard or he would lose face with his neighbours. Francis himself had been born in York House, closer to Whitehall, and had never forgotten the splendour of his boyhood days when his father was Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. To live in style came naturally to him, especially after the years of borrowing from his brother and his friends as a young lawyer in Gray’s Inn. One of these very good friends, Sir Michael Hicks, was no longer available to tender helpful advice; he had died ‘of a burning ague’ four months after the Earl of Salisbury in the summer of 1612.

  So, with the Christmas and new year festivities over, combined with the celebration of the birth of their Majesties’ first grandchild and the first child of the Elector and Electress Palatine, Sir Francis Bacon, Attorney-General, could sit down and pen a letter to the sovereign jogging the royal memory that ‘time runneth’. He would before long summon Parliament, and Francis humbly prayed his Majesty once again ‘not to buy and sell this Parliament, but to perform the part of a King, and not of a merchant or contractor… If your Majesty had heard and seen the thunder of the bells and the lightning of the bonfires for your grandchild, you would say there is little cause to doubt the affections of the people of England in puris naturalibus. God preserve your Majesty.’

  Meanwhile, he must make his second speech as Attorney-General before the Star Chamber at the last sitting in Hilary Term, his first having been five days previously, on the suppression of duels. Now, on January 31st, it was not a question of persons being charged with fighting each other. The prisoner was one William Talbot, a member of the Irish Parliament, a Catholic, who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to one whom he termed a ‘heretical’ king. He had been confined in the Tower for several months in consequence, and was now to hear formal sentence pronounced against him. ‘I brought before you at the last sitting of this term the cause of duels,’ the Attorney-General told his Lordships, ‘but now this last sitting I shall bring before you a cause concerning the greatest duel which is in the Christian world, the duel and conflict between the lawful authority of sovereign kings, which is God’s ordinance for the comfort of human society, and the swelling pride and usurpation of the See of Rome… tending altogether to anarchy and confusion.’